Russia under the Old regime

184

any 'conditions' being imposed on the crown stated their fears as follows: 'Who will guarantee us that in time, instead of one sovereign, we shall not have as many tyrants as there are members sitting in the Council, and that their oppressive policies will not worsen our bondage?'19 The political philosophy of the mass of dvorianstvo was not all that different from the peasantry's; both preferred unlimited autocracy to a constitutional arrangement, seeing behind the latter manipulations of private interests acting for their own benefit. And without such rank-and-file support, the political ambitions of the uppermost elite had no chance of success.

The second factor common to the three constitutional attempts was that each was an 'all or nothing' effort, centred on a coup d'etat. The patient, steady accumulation of small bits of political power was missing. The fate of constitutional change in Russia always hinged on dramatic gambles. This is not, however, how society has usually succeeded in wresting power from the state.

The government never really felt it had much to fear from the dvorian-stvo's political ambitions. It was perhaps disappointed in this estate's failure to come to its assistance in administering the realm, and willy-nilly kept on increasing the bureaucracy to replace the landed service class as the mainstay of the regime. Nicholas 1 mistrusted the upper class because of its participation in the Decembrist revolt. But he too did not fear it. The view from the top was accurately expressed in 1801 by Count Paul Stroganov, a member of Alexander I'S inner cabinet known as the Unofficial Committee. He had been in France during the Revolution and observed the reactions of the Western aristocracy when its privileges were threatened. At one of the sessions of the Committee, when worries were expressed that dvoriane might object to a certain government proposal, he spoke as follows:

Our nobility consists of numerous people who had become gentlemen solely by way of service, people who had had no education, whose only concern it is to see nothing superior to the Emperor's power. Neither law nor justice, nothing is capable of awakening in them the idea of the least resistance. This is a most ignorant estate, the most corrupt, and, as far as its esprit is concerned, the stupidest. Such is the approximate picture of the majority of our rural dvoriane. Those with a somewhat better education are, first of all few in number, and, in their majority, also permeated with a spirit which makes them utterly incapable of standing up to any government measures... A large part of the dvorianstvo which is on active service has its spirit moved by other considerations: unfortunately, it is inclined to find in the execution of state commands wholly their private advantage, and this very often lies in cheating but never in resisting. Such is an approximate picture of our nobility; one part lives in the village, sunk in the profoundest ignorance, while the other, that which serves, is permeated with a spirit in no wise dangerous. The grand