Russia A History

6. Pre-Reform Russia 1801–1855

DAVID L. RANSEL

The regime began the century in a reformist spirit and met the challenge of the Napoleonic invasion, but thereafter abjured far-reaching reform and, especially, the emulation of Western models. By the 1850s it faced a disaffected élite at home and, as the Crimean War demonstrated, could no longer compete militarily with the European great powers.

IF the murder of Tsar Paul in 1801 brought instant relief to the political élite of Russia, it did not have the same healthy effect on the new ruler, Alexander I, son of the murdered tsar. Alexander was himself a conspirator, for he had authorized the overthrow of his father, if not his assassination, and the new tsar initially expressed despair about the killing, feelings of incompetence about ruling, and stark fear that he too might be killed. The recent series of executions and overturns of European rulers had made royalty insecure everywhere in Europe. And Russia had its own tradition of rebellion, including at least nine violent changes of regime in the preceding 120 years. Alexander was understandably concerned not to offend powerful persons at court or in the armed forces. His fears may have deterred him from articulating any plan of political action other than a vague promise to rule in the manner of his grandmother Catherine the Great, whom most nobles remembered fondly for her readiness to protect their interests. The new ruler’s failure to establish a clear political or social programme encouraged groups within the political élite to work out their own proposals for change.

Early Efforts at Reform

The first concern of governing élites was to establish a framework of legality, by which they meant protection of the person and property of nobles. Tsar Paul had assaulted their security time and again. Beyond this, the leadership understood that Russia’s administrative and social institutions needed reform. During the eighteenth century, most Russian nobles had become Europeanized and the best educated among them regarded themselves as members of a wider European society. They could not remain unaffected by the revolutionary changes occurring in Europe and the challenge these changes presented to the dynastic and feudalist regime that they led. Opinions about how best to meet that challenge coalesced in three groups at court.

Initially the most important was the group near Alexander who had plotted and carried out the overthrow and assassination of Tsar Paul. The principal leaders were a military man Count Peter Pahlen and a civil servant Nikita Panin. They hoped to impose constitutional limitations on tsarist power and may even have obtained Alexander’s agreement to such a reform before the coup d’état. Their aim was to prevent a recurrence of the despotism that they had just ended. At first, Alexander appeared to be frightened of these men, fearful perhaps that if he did not do their bidding, they would turn on him as they had on his father. To counter their influence he summoned to St Petersburg friends from his youth in whom he had more confidence. This group of advisers became known as Alexander’s ‘young friends’ or ‘the unofficial committee’.

The young friends included men who had grown up with Alexander, or associates of these men. Unlike Alexander, all of them had spent time abroad and acquired a comparative measure of Russia’s development. They were well aware of Russia’s need for administrative and social reform if the country were to compete successfully with the Western powers. Among the young friends were Adam Czartoryski, a Polish aristocrat and later acting Minister of Foreign Affairs for Alexander, Pavel Stroganov, a mathematician who had studied in Switzerland and in France and had joined a Jacobin club in Paris, Viktor Kochubei, another well-educated member of the Russian upper class and for most of the 1790s Russian envoy to the Ottoman government, and Nikolai Novosiltsev, at 40 the oldest of the ‘young friends’, scion of a large landholding family, and a cousin of Pavel Stroganov. In contrast to the other political groupings, these men were not interested in placing restrictions on the power of the monarch but in using his supreme authority to bring Russia closer, socially and economically, to the West. This meant promoting economic development under an enterprising middle class and doing something about serfdom, which these men considered a disgrace and an anachronism. Such aims prompted worried conservatives to refer to these advisers as the ‘Jacobin gang’.

With the support of his ‘young friends’ and his increasing popularity with the public (the result of a series of decrees overturning his father’s despotic rules affecting the nobility and the armed forces) Alexander soon began to feel more secure on the throne, sufficiently so to dispatch the assassins. Within two months of the coup d’état, he forced Pahlen to retire to his estates in the Baltic region and, a few months later, ordered Panin into internal exile as well.

A third group with which the new ruler had to contend was the ‘old men’ of the Senate. The Senate was Russia’s highest administrative and judicial institution and the seat of the leading noble families. During the reign of Catherine II, senators had opposed constitutional projects and relied upon the favour of the empress and their own command of slow-acting collegial institutions to keep policy under their control and to protect their interests. In not following the constitutionalists of their own time, they sacrificed the opportunity to institutionalize the legislative process and thus lost the chance to make law something other than the mere declaration of the monarch’s will, whether expressed orally or in writing. This choice left them defenceless against Paul, who saw the leading institutions as an obstacle to Russia’s moral and social regeneration. Now the old men of the Senate at last understood the importance of constitutionalism and proposed new powers for the Senate, including rights to represent the public, propose taxes, nominate candidates for high administrative posts, co-opt new members of the Senate, and to question tsarist decrees not in conformity with established law or practice (a right of remonstrance similar to that of the French parlement). This programme of conservative constitutionalism, which aimed at limiting abuse of power by the sovereign and protecting the political and economic position of the high nobility, encountered stiff opposition from both the ‘young friends’ (who saw it as a barrier to social reforms) and the bureaucratic conservatives (who regarded it as a recipe for governmental paralysis of the kind that led to the revolution in France).

The best that the ‘old men’ of the Senate could obtain was the right to receive reports from top government departments and the right of remonstrance, both of which were announced in a decree on the reform of the Senate in September 1802. The more important, at least potentially, was the right of remonstrance; but it proved hollow: the first time the senators invoked this right, Alexander berated them for their effrontery and abruptly withdrew it. At issue was a decree about military service that violated earlier pronouncements about the nobility’s freedom from required service (first issued in 1762 and renewed in 1785). The Senate initially agreed to the decree but then impulsively decided to oppose it. The procurator general (administrative head of the Senate), though favouring a larger constitutional role for that body, disagreed with its action and urged Alexander to reject it. Alexander himself treated the whole process with contempt. One might well ask what kind of basic rights the tsar would recognize if he was willing to grant and withdraw them on a whim. As for the rest, no one seemed to be aware that an important principle of government was at stake; this episode seemed to show that Russian leaders had no understanding of what legal order was.

The rejection of the Senate’s demands was a sign that constitutional reform was not on the agenda, despite the rhetoric of the emperor and his associates. The Senate would have had to be a key institution in such a reform but, instead of gaining in stature, it quickly descended to an institution of secondary importance. Its administrative leadership was supplanted by government ministries, established in 1802 to replace Peter’s collegial boards. The Senate was left as merely the highest appellate court of the land.

If reform was to occur, it had to be limited to changes in social and economic relationships and not touch the political order. Here the role of the ‘young friends’ was important. Above all, they wanted change in Russian serfdom. The impulse was not new with them: Catherine the Great had intimated eventual abolition of the serf order in Russia thirty-five years earlier in her ‘Instruction to the Legislative Commission of 1767’. Her son Paul took the first step towards regulating relations between serfs and masters in an edict limiting corvée labour (barshchina) to three days a week (1797). Alexander and his young friends supported such reform, spoke of the need to abolish serfdom, but in the final analysis proposed small changes that did not threaten the established social order. They imposed a ban on the advertisement of serfs for sale and issued a law on Free Cultivators (1803), whereby landlords—with the approval of the emperor—could free whole villages of serfs on the basis of agreements negotiated with the peasants. But this transaction, which required the voluntary participation of the landlord and payments on the part of the peasants, resulted in fewer than 50,000 manumissions by the end of the reign—an infinitesimal percentage of the tens of millions of serfs. Somewhat greater progress was made in the Baltic provinces of Estland, Lifland, and Kurland, where local nobles agreed to regulate serf obligations and grant the peasants rights to their lands. These were steps towards what would be a full-scale emancipation of the serfs in the Baltic provinces in the years 1816–18.

An important initiative early in Alexander’s reign came in the field of higher education. Although the Russian Empire boasted universities at Moscow, Dorpat, and Vilnius, only the first of these educated predominantly Russian students (the other two served, respectively, German and Polish constituencies). To these, Alexander added three new universities (Kharkov, Kazan, and St Petersburg, the founding of the last delayed until 1819) on the basis of equality of admissions without regard to class status. It was hoped that the universities would train the public servants so badly needed by the Russian government. A continuing concern of the ruling élite throughout the first half of the nineteenth century was the inadequate supply of talented administrators and consequent frustration of government action either by an absence of qualified personnel or by corrupt practices of ill-educated and undisciplined officials. The educational institutions founded by Alexander and their expansion during subsequent reigns went far towards supplying trained people for administration.

Missing from the court and high politics of Alexander’s reign was the participation of women, a dimension of Russian politics prominent in the eighteenth century. The sole exception was imperial charity, which included the largest foundling homes in Europe, hospitals, schools, huge manufacturing operations and banking institutions—all were managed efficiently and lovingly by Paul’s wife, Empress Maria Fedorovna, until her death in the late 1820s. Except for this traditional female concern, women lost their former prominent place in government; Paul’s succession law of 1797 specifically excluded women from rulership until all male heirs from all collateral lines of the imperial family had died off. The change coincided with a shift in the mores of the society and court towards a reinforcement of the domesticity of élite women, stressing their role in early child-rearing and intimate family social life, in contrast to politics and court entertainment. Princess Ekaterina Dashkova, who served during Catherine II’s reign as director of both the Russian Academy and the Imperial Academy of Sciences, justifiably complained of the misogyny of Alexander’s court and the diminished place of women in Russian society more generally. Henceforth, the importance of women in Russian politics, apart from the symbolic roles of women in the imperial family, would be in individual acts of protest and in movements of opposition to the established order.

International Affairs

Although the reforming impulse at the Russian court did not die out after 1803, it had to give way for a time to the government’s concern with international affairs. Peter the Great’s conquests in the early eighteenth century had brought Russia into the European state system; the ensuing wars and alliances showed Russia to be an intimate partner in the balances and conflicts of the system. The country could not stand apart from the upheaval now being caused in the European state system by Napoleonic France’s wide-ranging conquests, rearrangements of national borders, and dominance of continental policy.

At first, Alexander merely put a close to the wildly fluctuating policies of his father, who had begun his reign as an enemy of France and ended it as France’s ally against England. Alexander recalled an expeditionary force his father had sent to conquer British territories in India and composed other differences with Great Britain so that the mutually beneficial trade between the two countries could resume. In 1803, when hostilities reignited between France and Great Britain, Alexander hoped to be able to act as a peacemaker and tried above all to restrain Napoleon’s expansionist policies. Relations between Russia and France took a sharp turn for the worse in 1804 when Napoleon seized the Duke of Enghien from a neighbouring neutral country and had him summarily executed for plotting the overthrow of the French government. Alexander’s protest at the execution was met with contempt from Napoleon. Soon after, Russia joined a new coalition against Napoleonic France, which led to war the following year and a major defeat of Austrian and Russian forces at Austerlitz. After further defeats in 1806, abandonment by his allies, and the opening of hostilities between Russia and the Ottoman Empire, Alexander saw no option but withdrawal from the war largely on terms dictated by Napoleon in the summer of 1807 at Tilsit, a town on the Niemen river in Poland. The famous accords signed at Tilsit had the practical effect of dividing Europe between France and Russia and also committed Russia to adhere to the continental blockade through which France hoped to undermine British commerce and finances.

Mikhail Speranskii’s Reforms

Concern about the inadequacies of the Russian political order continued. Alexander seemed to see the problem as essentially one of personnel, a shortage of honest and effective administrators. Others, however, recognized the need as well for structural changes. One of these was Mikhail Speranskii, a priest’s son, who rose from humble origins to the pinnacle of Russian government. A brilliant seminary student and teacher, he became secretary to a highly placed aristocrat, served in the Ministry of Internal Affairs early in Alexander’s reign, and by 1808 had risen to the position of State Secretary, the leading official for domestic affairs. No less than Alexander, Speranskii lamented the deficiencies of Russian officials and convinced the tsar to introduce exams for promotion to senior government ranks, a step that did not endear him to the many noble officials who had gained their positions through patronage and without the necessary educational and technical qualifications. Speranskii also proposed legal and financial reforms and achieved some success in stabilizing the currency and increasing tax revenues. His financial measures included a temporary tax on the nobility, which, again, won him no friends among that important class.

The most sweeping changes proposed by Speranskii touched political and administrative organization and included a plan for the separation of powers patterned on Montesquieu’s ideas. He proposed to divide the Senate into separate administrative and judicial hierarchies and to create a third branch of government, the legislative, with an assembly elected on a narrow franchise. The entire system was to be capped by a cabinet headed by the emperor and called the State Council. Although Speranskii undoubtedly had won the emperor’s agreement to pursue such a project, Alexander ultimately refused to approve major changes and implemented only the plan for the State Council, which was established in 1810 together with a reorganization of government ministries. By this time, the clouds of war were again gathering as Napoleon prepared the invasion of Russia. Whether or not Alexander was inclined to additional government reforms, this was not the time to launch a political experiment that could have compromised lines of authority. Moreover, Speranskii was unpopular with the nobility because of his crack-down on incompetence and support of financial policies harmful to noble interests. The nobility supplied Russia’s military leadership and officer corps, and to solidify support for the regime in the face of the impending challenge, Alexander sacrificed Speranskii’s policies and indeed Speranskii himself, whom he exiled to Siberia on trumped-up charges just before the invasion by Napoleon’s armies.

Napoleon’s Invasion

Napoleon’s Grande Armée entered Russia in June 1812. Its forces numbered nearly half a million, almost twice the strength of the Russian army. However, only half the invading army was French, the rest being composed of troops from countries conquered by Napoleon, which were less than reliable instruments for the pursuit of French aims. The size of Napoleon’s army also presented grave problems of supply, especially after the Russian generals decided to withdraw deep into the country while stripping away supplies and housing in the path of Napoleon’s advance. Napoleon had hoped to destroy the Russian army in the western borderlands or, if they chose not to fight near the border, to corner them at the first great fortress city of Smolensk, where he was certain they would make a stand. He miscalculated. The Russians mounted a spirited but brief defence of Smolensk, withdrawing after just two days and burning the city as they left. Russian generals, particularly Mikhail Kutuzov, to whom Alexander gave command after the fall of Smolensk, had learned in earlier encounters with the French that they could not expect to win a pitched battle against Napoleon’s superior leadership and disciplined troops. Their hope lay in the exhaustion of the Grande Armée as failing supplies and disease steadily reduced its numbers, morale, and fitness. Alexander courageously supported this strategy despite its unpopularity with a large segment of influential opinion and mounting, sometimes vicious, criticism of his national leadership.

The Russians could not surrender Moscow without a fight and decided to make a stand at Borodino, a village in the western reaches of Moscow province. This epochal battle proved costly for both sides, but especially so for the French, who could not replace their losses at Borodino—nearly one-third of the remaining able-bodied men. Although the Russians pulled back (to save what remained of their army) and left open the road to Moscow, Napoleon’s occupation of the ancient capital brought no resolution to the conflict. Moreover, as Napoleon reached the heights above the city’s western outskirts and waited for the ‘boyars’ to greet him in submission, he saw not a delegation of the defeated but ominous veins of smoke rising from many points in the city, signs of the fires set by retreating Muscovites that would rage for nearly a week and leave much of the capital in ruins. It was the middle of September by the time Napoleon entered Moscow, a devastated city without adequate shelter for his troops; foraging parties sent out of the town encountered fire from Russian troops, and the Russian winter was soon to close in. Alexander steadfastly refused to negotiate. The hopelessness of the French position was apparent.

A month after its arrival, the Grande Armée departed from Moscow, moving out towards the south in the hopes of retreating through a region untouched by the Russian scorched-earth policy. But Russian forces met the invaders at Maloiaroslavets and forced them back onto the path of destruction by which they had entered the country, helping to turn what might have been an orderly withdrawal into an increasingly desperate and disorganized flight. Russian partisans harried Napoleonic forces and picked off stragglers the entire way. Napoleon himself abandoned the army to its fate and made a dash for France to raise new forces. Only about 10 per cent of the original invading army was able to escape from Russia in good order. The end of the Napoleonic empire in Europe was in sight. Alexander, emotionally lifted by the great victory and inspired by a wartime religious conversion, prepared to play a leading role in creating a new order for Europe.

THE APPROACH TO BORODINO

After the War

The post-Napoleonic settlement for the European world associated with the name of the Congress of Vienna created a long period of general peace for the continent despite continuing stormy calls for democracy and national self-determination and the occasional limited conflicts they generated. The new state system, often mistakenly labelled a balance of power, was in reality a set of interlocking hegemonies exercised by Russia, Great Britain, and Austria. As long as the governments of these countries were able to maintain amicable relations, no major conflicts arose in Europe or its dependencies. Towards the end of Alexander’s reign, the principles of the system—the legitimacy of established governments and territorial integrity of existing countries—were tested by the rebellion of Greeks within the Ottoman Empire. Many Russians were sympathetic to the Greek cause. Catherine the Great had even worked out a plan in her time to resurrect Greece under the rulership of her grandson Constantine (named purposely after the last Byzantine emperor). But Alexander did not succumb to calls for Russian intervention on the side of the Greeks, and he held to the ideas of legitimacy and stability of established relations. Russia played a larger role in the Greek conflict after Alexander’s death, when a part of Greece became independent. Conflicts in this region ultimately destroyed the Congress of Vienna settlement, but during Alexander’s reign, Russia supported the conservative European regimes in resisting popular aspirations throughout the continent for greater political participation and national expression.

In Russia itself, the same conflict being played out on the European stage between dynastic (and in some cases still feudalistic) regimes and the proponents of democratic nationalism was repeated on a smaller scale. The stunning victory over Napoleonic France resolved the earlier doubts on the part of most of Russia’s leaders about the country’s administration and social system. The autocrat had held firm, the nobility had served and led the conquering army, the common people had remained loyal and even fought partisan campaigns against the invader. The victory strengthened the ruling groups’ belief in the system such that they no longer saw the necessity for fundamental reform. The mood had begun to shift in favour of the conservative voices in high politics. This mood accompanied a European-wide change in political thinking away from the rationalist, mechanistic ideas of the eighteenth century towards organic theories of society on the model enunciated by Edmund Burke, Joseph de Maistre, and Friedrich Karl von Savigny. De Maistre, a refugee from Napoleonic Europe who spent many years in Russia, was able to exert a direct personal influence on Russian statesmen.

Until recently, historians have seen the post-Napoleonic period (or final ten years) of Alexander’s reign as a single piece characterized by a sharp turn away from the reform policies of the previous era. In terms of the outcomes, this view may still be justified. Yet recent research has made a strong case for dividing the period into two five-year segments, in which the first witnessed a continuing sympathy on the part of the tsar and some of his close advisers for the reform ideas of the early reign. Alexander continued as late as 1818 to speak publicly of his wish to establish a constitutional order for Russia, and privately he was still expressing such hopes in 1820. Work on a draft constitution was apparently also in progress as late as 1820. Nor had Alexander given up on making a start towards emancipating serfs from bondage to private landlords despite opposition from most of the nobles in high government. In 1818 he instructed one of his closest aides, General Aleksei Arakcheev, to design a project for emancipation and the following year ordered his minister of finance to work out the fiscal problems associated with a possible emancipation. Finding no support for a broad project of reform in 1820, Alexander proposed at least to bar the sale of serfs separate from their families and without land. But this proposal too met near unanimous opposition from the members of the State Council.

The reform impulse died after 1820. Vigorous opposition from the nobility finally convinced the tsar of the hopelessness of attempting a change in the status of the serfs. The courts, dominated by the nobility, were even proving reluctant to enforce laws for the protection of serfs already on the books. Since ideas of constitutional order were linked in the minds of reformers with the necessity for emancipation of the serfs, opposition to serf reform doubled as opposition to constitutionalism. It seems, moreover, that Alexander had lost interest in the idea of a constitution for Russia after dealing with the increasingly refractory Polish diet (Sejm). In 1821 he told a French envoy that constitutional government may be appropriate for enlightened nations, but would be unworkable in the less educated societies of Europe. No more was heard about a constitution for Russia, and, indeed, the government now turned to repression of any voices that echoed the tsar’s earlier promises of a constitutional order.

Some reforms were implemented in the post-war period of Alexander’s reign, but they were of an entirely different kind; they represented an accommodation and adaptation to the given political and social system. The most prominent such reform was the creation of military settlements, frontier colonies for the maintenance of army units in peacetime. Since it was impossible to demobilize an army of former serfs and send them back to their estates and yet too expensive to keep them continually under arms, the government settled them on lands occupied by state peasants near the frontier and set them to producing their own maintenance through farming. The reform included some enlightened features such as subsidies to families, government-sponsored health care and birthing services, and regulation of community hygiene. Even so, the settlements were not popular with either the peasants or the soldiers on whom they were imposed. They joined the hard labour of peasant farming and a highly regimented military life in a combination so odious that it frequently sparked mutinies. Surprisingly, in view of the poor record of the settlements in saving on military expenditures and the easy target they made for opponents of the regime, this reform was the most enduring of Alexander’s reign. Military settlements lasted until the Great Reforms of the 1860s.

This period also brought conservative reform to Russian universities. Under the influence of a religious revival following the victory over Napoleon and Alexander’s own spiritual conversion during the war, the Ministry of Education was combined in a dual government department with the Directorate of Spiritual Affairs (the former Holy Synod). In 1819 a member of this institution’s governing committee, Mikhail Magnitskii, visited Kazan University and discovered to his horror that professors were teaching about the rights of citizens and the violence of warfare. Although Magnitskii could think of no better recommendation than closing down the university, Alexander decided instead to appoint him rector with powers to reform the institution. Magnitskii promptly dismissed eleven professors and shifted the curriculum towards heavy doses of religion and the classics, a direction that was subsequently followed at St Petersburg University and others.

Decembrist Rebellion

The shift to conservatism was not shared by all of Russia’s élite. Many of the young men who had fought in the campaigns against Napoleonic France returned home with a different spirit. They had liberated Europeans from French domination and brought their own country to the first rank among European nations. Proud of Russia’s leadership, they yearned to make their country the equal of Europe in other respects: to end serfdom at home and to enjoy there the kind of constitutional order that existed in France, the United States of America, and other enlightened states. In other words, they combined ideas of liberalism and constitutionalism with elements of modern, romantic nationalism. They met to discuss their hopes and dreams in private clubs, successors of the Masonic lodges to which their fathers and grandfathers had belonged.

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 replace 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 figures 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.

Even before the publication of Chaadaev’s letter, young Russians had been coming together in small groups, ‘circles’ as they were called, at regular weekly meetings to discuss literature, philosophy, and national purpose, but Chaadaev’s letter crystallized many issues and forced the young thinkers to define their stance towards Russia’s development. Some accepted the position that Russia was a European country whose social evolution lagged behind the rest of Europe and whose political institutions had been deformed by the unbridled power of autocracy. These ‘Westernizers’ saw Russia’s proper course in liberalism, constitutionalism, the rule of law, and Western enlightenment. Others adopted a nativist position that superficially resembled the government’s programme of Official Nationality. However, these thinkers, known as Slavophiles, regarded the government as an alien institution imposed by Peter the Great and responsible for breaking Russia’s natural evolution from the seventeenth-century tsardom, which the Slavophiles believed was characterized by a familial attachment of the people to their tsar, by Orthodox piety and a sense of community among the people and between the people and the ruler. Like the Westernizers, the Slavophiles were opposed to serfdom, bureaucratic supervision of social and intellectual life, and the militarism of Nicholas’s regime. In other words, the famous debate of the 1840s between the Westernizers and Slavophiles was a contest over the meaning of Russia’s past and Russia’s future. Both sides opposed the Russian present.

Our inherited narrative ends the era of more or less open discussion of these matters with a celebrated exchange in 1847 between Nikolai Gogol and the literary critic Vissarion Belinskii. In a work titled Selected Correspondence with Friends, Gogol gave a ringing endorsement to key propositions of Official Nationality advising Russians to love their ruler, accept their station in life, and spend more time in prayer. Belinskii, though unable to reply in print, responded with a letter that enjoyed wide circulation in manuscript copy. He lambasted Gogol for his obscurantism and betrayal of his own earlier writings, which had held government administrators up to ridicule and demonstrated the absurdity of serfdom. This exchange, plus the departure of Alexander Herzen (a major figure in the intellectual circles of the time) for Europe in 1847, marked the close of this period, except for a final act—the suppression of the Petrashevskii circle amidst a ferocious government crack-down provoked by the European revolutions of 1848. Although the members of this circle did little more than read forbidden writings and discuss socialist ideas, the government’s fears of sedition were so deep that twenty-one of the members of the circle received death sentences, which, however, were commuted to Siberian exile minutes before the executions were to be carried out. Among those made to suffer this death watch and personal psychological trauma was the later literary giant Fedor Dostoevsky

This story of the intellectual life of the era as a struggle between a severely repressive government and an increasingly alienated educated public, though enshrined in the literature by later revolutionaries, does not paint an accurate picture. The dissidents were a small minority. Most educated Russians took pride in the knowledge that their country was the strongest land power in the world and a respected member of the European concert of nations. They felt secure from outside threats and were enjoying a period of relative economic prosperity. Although the few dissidents and some foreign visitors lamented government supervision of intellectual life, most Russians recognized the need for censorship and were able to create and consume a rich and varied cultural life within its bounds. Over 200 new periodical publications were begun in Nicholas’s reign, and several dozen were on the market at any one time. The creative arts flourished; the Russian opera came into its own in the works of Mikhail Glinka and Alexander Dargomyzhsky the paintings of Karl Briullov, Alexander Ivanov, and Ivan Aivazovskii shifted artistic style away from classicism to romanticism, while the genre painting of Pavel Fedotov and others captured characteristic moments of Russian life. A rapid growth of scientific literature and scientific investigation was evident. Official Nationality and Slavophilism were symptoms of educated Russians’ need for a clearer sense of national identity and their place in the world; the result was plans for historical and ethnographic museums to house representations of the people and culture of Russia. This was the period of the founding of the Imperial Russian Geographic Society, which set out to map literally and figuratively the physical and cultural boundaries of the nation. Its establishment in early 1845 was followed by a major ethnographic research programme to discover the folklore, material life, and practices of the Russian and other peoples inhabiting the empire. Nicholas’s reign also saw an increasing effort by the Orthodox Church to raise the educational, religious, and moral level of the common people through a rapid growth of local schooling and printings of inexpensive editions of didactic literature. The Church likewise launched new efforts in the missionary field, including work in the Altai Mountain region, eastern Siberia, and Alaska that led to linguistic and ethnographic reports that corresponded to the work of the Geographic Society. Indeed, the Geographic Society could well stand as a symbol for an age whose leaders were intent on recording the economic, topographical, and human conditions of the empire. This process reflected Nicholas’s inductive approach to reform, the exhaustive study of conditions before acting, an impulse that helped prepare the Great Reforms of the 1860s while encouraging educated Russians to find a personal and national identity in service to the common people.

Close of the Reign

The final years of Nicholas’s reign effaced many of its most important achievements. The success with which a flexible censorship had allowed for important scientific and cultural growth while checking dissident opinion was lost in the orgy of repression that followed the news of revolution in Europe in 1848. The continuing expansion and democratization of the educational system and the opportunities for Russians to continue higher studies abroad succumbed to the same crack-down when, in the wake of the Petrashevskii circle’s arrest, Nicholas slashed university enrolments by two-thirds and ordered all Russians studying abroad to return home (unwisely, as it turned out, because the returning students brought with them detailed and accurate information about the upheavals occurring in their places of study). The progress being made on peasant reform came to a halt, as the tsar feared further social change of any kind. Even the success of the government in stabilizing the currency and promoting economic development was harmed by the expensive and futile war in the Crimea.

The outbreak of this war nullified one of Nicholas’s greatest achievements: his reversal of the constant warfare of the previous two reigns and maintenance of a long period of peace and security for his country. Armed conflict occurred during his reign, but it involved pacification of the borderlands of the Caucasus and Poland and did not threaten the security or livelihoods of most Russians. When Russian troops did venture abroad, they stayed close to their borders, for example, brief sorties into Persia and the Danubian principalities early in the reign and an expedition to Hungary in 1849 to suppress a nationalist insurgency. Even the Crimean War at the end of his reign was not a conflict Nicholas consciously sought out for the aggrandizement of Russia or himself. Indeed, he very much wished to avoid a war provoked by an assertive French government claiming rights over sacred institutions in Palestine. These demands raised questions about Russia’s protectorate over Christians in the Ottoman Empire, a position affirmed in the peace treaty of Kuchuk-Kainardji (1774) but disputed by the Turks. As the diplomatic conflict escalated in early 1853, the Russian government counted on the support of Austria (which it had rescued from dismemberment four years before) and Britain (which had recently been in conflict with France over their respective positions in the Middle East). But Nicholas badly miscalculated. Austria threatened to join the Ottomans if Russia attacked through the Balkans; Britain played a double game, urging the Ottomans to avoid war but also indicating that they could expect British support if war broke out. With Russia seemingly isolated but still making stiff demands for the right to protect Ottoman Christians, the Turks decided to resist and force an armed conflict.

For want of a better place to engage (Austria blocked an invasion of the Balkans and Russia could not challenge the allies at sea), the two sides fought the decisive battles in the Crimea and nearby port cities on Russia’s Black Sea coastline. Though a strong force on paper, the army on which Nicholas had lavished much of his attention was no match for the allies. Much of its strength had to be deployed elsewhere to protect against possible attacks on other borders, the forces sent to the Crimea were supplied by ox cart because of Russia’s late start into railway building, Russian weapons (not upgraded since earlier wars) had far shorter effective range than the enemy’s, sanitary conditions were appalling, and disease claimed far more men than did battle. The result was demoralization and defeat. In the midst of this ruin of his diplomacy, army, finances, and record of peace and security, Nicholas took ill and died of pneumonia in early February 1855.

Conclusions

During the first half of the nineteenth century, Russian government and society changed in a number of important respects. Though threatened by French power at the beginning of this era, Russians met the challenge of an invading force much superior in numbers to their own and went on to conquer and occupy Napoleonic France. For the next forty years, Europeans regarded Russia as the continent’s most formidable power. But as often happens, victory brought complacency. Russian leaders failed to recognize the need for technological development and left the country poorly prepared for the next great struggle. Russia lagged in weapons development, logistical support, education, and industry—all the things that constitute the strength of a state. It is enough to observe that on the eve of the Crimean War, when railways had already spread their tentacles through much of Western Europe, Russia was just completing its first major line between Moscow and St Petersburg. Russia’s military in the century before 1850 had defeated Prussia and France when each was at the height of its power; for nearly another century Russians would prove incapable of defeating any country but Ottoman Turkey. Japan defeated the Russians in 1904–5, Germany in 1914–18, and Poland in 1920; and even little Finland in 19 39–40 held off an immeasurably superior Soviet force for more time than anyone could have believed possible. A decisive shift in Russia’s international position had occurred in the reign of Nicholas I.

Domestic affairs proved more successful. Although the nineteenth century began with promises of constitutional government and serf emancipation, these goals were incompatible and unrealizable. Constitutional government would have turned legislative power over to the very landed élite who opposed the reform of serfdom. This élite resisted even the timid reform initiatives that the autocrats were ultimately able to enact. Substantive change in the serf order required the co-operation of the landed nobility, and this was not forthcoming until the shock of defeat in the Crimean War caused the élite to recognize the need to end agrarian bondage and move towards a modern economy capable of meeting the challenge of Western power. The government did nevertheless make important improvements that prepared the ground for the revolutionary changes of the next era. Among these improvements were the growth and differentiation of government administration, creation of a law code and regulation of legal practice, a disciplined economic policy and stable currency, and the expansion of educational opportunity.

The growth of education, so necessary for the building of economic and military strength, also brought two developments that threatened the imperial state: nationalism and the desire for political participation. Both of these impulses found powerful expression in the Decembrist rebellion of 1825. Despite the government’s attempt to co-opt the nationalist spirit through the imperialist doctrine of Official Nationality, a specific Russian nationalism continued to evolve in the writings of Chaadaev, the Slavophiles, and even the Westernizers. Soon it was joined by other nationalist programmes emerging first in Poland, Ukraine, and Finland, an impulse that by the twentieth century spread to other non-Russian peoples of the empire and destroyed the hold of a centralizing imperial ideology. The desire for political participation and its frustration by periodic government repression drove a wedge between government and some members of educated society as early as the 1820s. Thereafter the divide widened. The dissidents, though few at first and never a threat to the government in this period, exercised great symbolic force by challenging a fundamental tenet of tsarist ideology: the notion that the ruler was a good father who cared for and was at one with his children, the people of Russia. When many of the nation’s most talented sons and daughters were being repressed by the regime and half the tsar’s ‘children’, the peasant serfs, continued in bondage, the dissidents could well ask what kind of fatherly care was the ruler providing? The failure of the regime to draw many of the country’s best people into its service or to provide them with a national mission they could support augured ill for the future.