A Concise History of Russia (Cambridge Concise Histories)

8 Russia in the Age of Revolution

On his mother’s death Paul came to the throne, the first undisputed and male inheritance in seventy years. His first act was to rebury Peter III, whom he believed to be his father, in the church of St. Peter and Paul with the other rulers of Russia from Peter onwards. His next act was to replace most of Catherine’s ministers and officials, and send a number of them into exile. Thus began the brief and often bizarre reign of Tsar Paul.

Paul’s reign began just at the moment that the French revolution, having passed through its most radical phase, began to turn outward, and the new tsar had to respond to the apparent danger from his first days on the throne. Far more conservative than his mother, he made it his priority to strengthen the power and authority of the state. He recentralized the government, reestablishing some of the colleges and reviving the Council of State. He also enlarged the Senate, and saw to it that it exercised more effective supervision of law and administration. To this end he issued an enormous number of new laws, orders, and regulations. In Paul’s mind, everything needed a regulation and his job was to compose one where it did not already exist.

Even greater than the changes in institutions were the changes in style. Paul took every opportunity to assert his personal authority in matters no matter how petty. From his youth he had spent much of his time drilling the troops under his personal control, living away from his mother in the suburban palace of Gatchina, which he turned into a military camp on the style of the Prussian army so beloved by his father. Thus his reassertion of authority began with the army. He ordered the Russian army to switch to uniforms on the Prussian model and adopt Prussian drill and training, to the intense irritation of officers and soldiers alike. The French revolutionary armies had already shown the old Prussian methods to be outmoded, but Paul did not see this in his pursuit of strict hierarchy and mindless obedience. His new orders went far beyond the military, for he required anyone, of any age or sex, who encountered any member of the imperial family on the street to dismount and kneel no matter what the weather. Officers were cashiered or even exiled for minor cases of neglect of duty, details of drill, or even just court etiquette. He prescribed the details of dress for court and other occasions and enforced them with pedantic thoroughness. To many noblemen and officers, his behavior was both insulting and bizarre, but to Paul the enforcement of regulation was part of the restoration of discipline and morality that he regarded as crucial after the laxities of Catherine’s rule and the threat of revolution from France. With these ends in mind he revoked many of the provisions of the Charter of the Nobility and reduced and downgraded the elective element in provincial government. Part of this program of counter-reform was the restoration of the old privileges of the nobles of the Baltic provinces and the Ukraine, and an attempt to reach some reconciliation with the Polish gentry. Thus Kosciuszko and other Polish prisoners of war were released, and the legal system of the formerly Polish provinces was maintained. He did not notice the contradictions.

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.

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.

The epic battle so memorably described by Tolstoy was also the bloodiest single day of combat in nineteenth-century Europe. By now Napoleon could only field some 120–135,000 troops out of the hordes he had brought with him and Kutuzov was able to put up the same. The Russians entrenched themselves behind field fortifications and let the French attack, with such resultant slaughter that some 40–50,000 men fell as casualties on each side – about 100,000 killed and wounded in one day. The French managed to capture some of the Russian fortifications and then returned to their camp. Kutuzov, whose main goal was to keep his army able to fight, decided to withdraw entirely and marched his men east toward Moscow. Napoleon, as usual, portrayed the battle as a great French victory, though in fact it ended his chances of success. He had too few troops left to control Russia if the Russians continued to resist.

Kutuzov had no intention of surrender, and neither did the population. The Muscovites began to leave the city in the tens of thousands. Napoleon waited in vain on the Sparrow Hills (where Moscow University stands today) for a Russian delegation to offer him the surrender of the city. He entered a ghost town, with no resistance but also no people to greet him or supply his army. Kutuzov in the meanwhile had marched his army through the city and turned southeast along the main road. Then, contrary to everyone’s expectations, he crossed the Moscow River and moved west. He made his camp southwest of Moscow, sitting on Napoleon’s lines of communication and blocking the way to the rich agricultural provinces to the south and the Russian center of arms manufacturing at Tula. The conqueror of Europe was trapped like a rat.

From that point on Napoleon had lost the initiative and could only stave off the inevitable. Fires started and Moscow burned to the ground while the French troops looted the empty palaces of the nobility. Henri Beyle, to be later known to world literature as Stendhal, stole books from the library of the Golitsyn mansion. The French emperor waited several weeks, hoping Alexander would surrender and trying to collect food from the countryside around Moscow. There was no surrender. Cossacks patrolled the countryside and the peasants massacred French soldiers sent to forage. Finally he did the only thing left to him, retreat. He tried to go farther south, realizing that the direct road to the west had been stripped of all provisions and nothing could come from France. Kutuzov stood in his way, blocking the road south, and Napoleon was canny enough to realize that he could not risk a major battle. Instead he turned directly west, with winter coming on, hoping to get away fast enough before his troops starved to death. He failed. The Russian army and bands of enraged local peasants followed the French all the way, picking off stragglers and further complicating the already catastrophic supply system. The winter came early and hard, and eventually the emperor of the French abandoned his army to its fate and escaped to Paris to try to start over. Only a few thousand men of his great army managed to get to the Polish border.

The defeat of Napoleon in Russia transformed European politics in a few months. His unwilling allies began to desert, Prussia first of all and then Austria, joining Russia and Britain against France. The Russian army moved west into Poland and Prussia, providing the largest allied contingent at the giant battle of Leipzig (October 1813) and the subsequent campaign in France. By 1814 Napoleon’s empire had come to an end. The hopeless attempt at its restoration the next year only ended in disaster at Waterloo.

Alexander, along with Britain, insisted that the restored French state have a constitution with some sort of legislature, rather than a return to absolute monarchy, and the two allies prevailed. Relations with Britain were not so smooth in other areas, as the Congress of Vienna showed. There were long battles about post-war boundaries for Prussia and Poland, primarily the result of British and Austrian fears that Russia was now too powerful. In the end, Russia’s ally Prussia retained large parts of Poland and received important new territories in the Rhineland. Alexander’s attitude to Poland was complicated: he wanted some sort of Polish political unit with the name Poland (no “Duchy of Warsaw”), but he wanted it under Russian influence. The result was the Kingdom of Poland, with the Russian tsar as its king – it was now part of the Russian Empire but with a constitution and its own government, similar to Finland.

The Polish settlement suggested that Alexander would continue along his previous liberal path. He soon emancipated the Estonian and Latvian serfs in the Baltic provinces, albeit without land. In 1818 he even toyed with granting Russia a constitution, considering a text written by his old friend Novosil’tsev. At the same time his private views were becoming increasingly conservative. The explanation for his new found conservatism lay not only in disillusionment with liberalism or the rightward drift of European politics but also in his religious views. Alexander fell more and more under the influence of Baroness Julie von Krüdener, a Baltic German aristocrat who had evolved a mystical pietism all her own. Krüdener had believed Napoleon to be the Antichrist and Alexander the savior of the world, and she told him so. Alexander spent more and more time reading mystical tracts and talking to Krüdener and other seers. His mystical interests had a decidedly Protestant strain to them, and the tsar even sponsored the translation and circulation of the Bible, relying largely on the English Bible Society to set up a network in Russia. He merged the ministries of education, the Orthodox synod, and the administration of non-Orthodox denominations into a single ministry under Prince Alexander Golitsyn, thus concentrating wide power over religion and culture in the hands of an imperial favorite. Golitsyn required Russian universities to teach explicitly conservative doctrines, to expunge ideas of natural law from the curriculum, and to substitute the notion that law was the expression of divine will. Similarly the scientists were to teach only ideas in accord with the Bible and revelation. The professors could do little to oppose Golitsyn, but fortunately his policies also antagonized the Orthodox Church. To the church the religion that was to be taught was a mixture of Protestant evangelicalism and mysticism, not correct Orthodoxy. It was the church and secular conservatives who eventually managed to discredit Golitsyn by 1824, but not before his and Alexander’s notions put an indelible stamp on the Russian culture of those years.

Even more powerful than Golitsyn was General A. A. Arakcheev, originally a favorite of Alexander’s father Tsar Paul. Alexander had recalled him from exile in 1803 to head Russia’s artillery, and in 1809–10 he was Minister of War. Politically very conservative, Arakcheev was an extremely competent military administrator, but with a narrow education and a powerful streak of arrogance and cruelty. In 1814 Alexander made him the head of his personal chancellery, which meant that all the ministers, generals, and courtiers had to approach the tsar through Arakcheev. He was also largely responsible for hare-brained schemes like the military-agricultural settlements. The idea was to turn some of the villages of state peasants into military units with the aim of reducing costs and encouraging discipline and better agricultural practices among the peasantry. Instead the result was discontent and rebellion among the peasants that resulted in a series of revolts, which Arakcheev suppressed with savage cruelty. There were other measures. In 1817 Alexander turned the Gendarmes, originally a military police force designed to deal only with soldiers, into a militarized police force charged with the preservation of internal order, the first such police force in Russian history. The Special Department of the Ministry of the Interior also began to look for internal dissent.

Abroad Alexander’s initial liberalism in France quickly faded as he and the Austrian chancellor Metternich became the prime movers behind the Holy Alliance. The Holy Alliance included Prussia and France as well as some lesser states in an agreement with Russia and Austria to fight the hydra of revolution wherever it appeared, such as the revolutions in Spain and southern Italy in 1822–23. French and Austrian troops suppressed these attempts at constitutional order, but for Russia the greatest challenge came when the Greeks rose in revolt against their Ottoman masters in 1821. Catherine and even Paul had encouraged Greek revolts against the Turks earlier on in expectation of Russian territorial gains in the Balkans, and now the occasion presented itself to satisfy Russian aims in the area. Alexander hesitated, even though many of the Greek leaders were politically quite conservative. Metternich finally convinced him that the Turks were the legitimate rulers of the Balkans, and that the Greeks deserved no more support than the Spanish rebels who fought against their king. The Greeks were left to fight on alone, in defiance of obvious Russian interests in weakening the Turks and supporting an Orthodox people.

The conservative turn in Alexander’s thinking came in the wake of the 1812 victory over Napoleon, but in other sectors of Russian society the same events had the opposite effect. Among the officers of the Russian army – young noblemen with European education – the great victory brought an enormous pride in their country and its people, and gave them tremendous confidence in themselves. As the army moved west in 1813–14, many of them saw Western Europe for the first time, and with an almost universal knowledge of French and German were able to observe and investigate unfamiliar phenomena in detail. They dined in Parisian cafes, read newspapers, attended lectures, and met their counterparts in French and German salons. They came prepared, for their education had familiarized them with the basis of European thought – Kant and Montesquieu, Goethe and Rousseau. They read the latest works of the French liberal leaders Germaine de Stael and Benjamin Constant, the conservatives Chateaubriand and de Maistre, and they learned about English experiments in popular education. Some followed the debates of the English parliament in the French press, and others looked at more exotic systems by studying the constitutions of the United States and the state of Pennsylvania.

After the heady years of victory and fuller acquaintance with Western European life and thought, the return home was a cold bath for many. They knew that serfdom had been a matter of debate and condemnation since the mid-eighteenth century and that Napoleon had abolished it in Poland and the Prussian reformers in their own land. Russia was now for the first time the only European country to have such an institution. Furthermore, their own tsar, as everyone knew, had insisted on a constitution for the French, and within his own empire for Poland and Finland. What about Russia?

From about 1816–17 groups of young officers began to form more or less secret literary and debating societies with the aim of continuing the intense dialogue and reading of the war years. The first was the Union of Salvation, with only some thirty members, utilizing rituals imitated from the Freemasons to keep their actions deeply secret. There were already serious political discussions at this stage, and soon there were even more. In 1818 they founded a larger secret society, the Union of Welfare, which even had a literary society associated with it, the Green Lamp. Reading poetry, writing theater reviews, and drinking parties were as much part of the movement among these young officers as politics, but by 1821–22 they began to move toward more concrete plans of action and to write constitutions for the future. By 1825 there were two centers of this activity. In St. Petersburg, where most of the guards regiments were stationed, several hundred officers formed the Northern Society, with the aim of overthrowing the monarchy and proclaiming a constitutional state. The majority, led by Nikita Murav’ev, a captain in the Guards General Staff, wanted a constitutional monarchy and a legislature elected on a property-based franchise. More radical was the poet and ex-guards officer Kondratii Ryleev, an official in the Russian-American company that administered Alaska, who moved toward republicanism. Farther south, a similar radicalism inspired Pavel Pestel’, colonel of the Viatka Infantry regiment, and other officers of the army stationed in the Ukraine close to the Ottoman frontier. Pestel’ compiled an elaborate constitution for a democratic republic along Jacobin lines. Tactically there were many disagreements as well: should the army be the basis of a revolt? How much should they tell the troops? Was it enough to just remove the tsar, or did they need to kill him? And was that right? The disagreements were never resolved because they seemed too distant. The conspirators were still actively recruiting and expected Alexander to live a long time.

The new police forces and the various repressive policies failed to detect the presence of the conspiracy until it was much too late. In the summer of 1825 the all-powerful Arakcheev was immobilized by personal disaster: his longtime housekeeper and mistress, a monster of sadism, was murdered by his serfs. The general was plunged into despair, increased by the discovery that she had been embezzling large sums of money and had convinced him that her son by one of her lovers was Arakcheev’s. In the southern army an officer of English origin named Sherwood sent in a secret report naming many of the conspirators, but it was too late.

On November 19, 1825, the tsar suddenly died at the age of only forty-seven. Alexander had been on tour of the Crimea and died at Taganrog, far from the capital or any other large city and word did not reach St. Petersburg until December. The first consequence was confusion. By the succession law of 1797, the heir to the childless Alexander should have been his younger brother Konstantin, the tsar’s viceroy in Warsaw. Unknown to virtually everyone, Konstantin had abdicated the throne in 1822 by agreement with Alexander and left papers to that effect with the Council of State. Thus the heir would be the next brother Nicholas, but Alexander had never bothered to tell him about it. Thus the news came as a shock to Nicholas, who insisted on hearing formally from Konstantin himself. While couriers raced back and forth between St. Petersburg and Warsaw, Nicholas ordered the troops quartered in the city to swear the oath of allegiance to Konstantin and refused to take the throne. Finally a definitive answer came from Warsaw, and Nicholas ordered a new oath for December 14.

The conspirators knew most of this, as they included in their ranks officers with frequent duty in the Winter Palace. They decided to forestall Nicholas and bring out the troops in revolt in the morning before the administration of the oath. The rebels assembled on the Senate Square, only a block from the Winter Palace, and demanded that the throne go to Konstantin, a tactic designed to give time for a seizure of power. Nicholas refused to budge now that he knew that he was legally the tsar, and he called in loyal troops. For most of the short December day the two bodies of soldiers faced one another in the falling snow, and several attempts to resolve the issue failed. Finally, as sunset approached in the afternoon, Nicholas gave the order to fire, and the artillery dispersed the rebels. The first attempt at revolution in Russian history was over. Nicholas now had to decide what to do with the rebels, and how to rule the country.