Russia under the Old regime

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large fortunes: they reached the summits of wealth at the price of complete political self-effacement.1 The underprivileged, the mass of muzhiki, also preferred absolutism to any other form of government except anarchy. That which they desired the most, namely free access to all the land not already under peasant control, they expected to obtain from the same tsar who had given personal liberty to their masters in 1762 and to them ninety-nine years later. For the impoverished dvoriane, the mass of petty traders and the overwhelming majority of peasants, constitution and parliament were a swindle which the rich and influential tried to foist on the country to enable them to seize hold of the apparatus of political power for their personal benefit. Thus, everything made for conservative rigidity.

Apart from economic and social interest groups there existed still one other source of potential resistance to absolutism, namely regional interest. The phenomenon was not unknown to Russia and it even enjoyed a certain degree of constitutional recognition. The governments of Muscovite and imperial Russia were usually in no hurry to dismantle the existing administrative apparatus of territories they had conquered; as a rule, they preferred to leave things fairly intact, at least for some time, content to transfer to Moscow or St Petersburg only the seat of power. At various periods Russia had self-governing regions over which the bureaucracy exercised only nominal control. In the reign of Alexander 1,when territorial decentralization was at its height, large segments of the empire were subject to charters which granted their inhabitants considerably more political self-expression than was enjoyed by any part of Russia proper. Under this ruler, Finland and Poland had constitutions and national diets empowered to legislate on internal matters; Courland and Livonia were administered in accord with charters, originally issued by the Swedes and confirmed by Peter 1, which made them virtually self-governing provinces; the nomads of Siberia and central Asia lived under a very liberal arrangement, almost free of external interference; and the Jews were given internal autonomy in the Pale of Settlement through their religious communal organizations called kahaly. But if one inquires more closely into the circumstances under which these exceptions to the prevailing centralism had been made, one generally discovers that the decisive factor was not the recognition of the 'right' of non-Russians to self-government but administrative prudence and shortage of personnel. The historic trend of Russian imperial evolution has been the very opposite of the British or American, tending relentlessly towards centralism and bureaucratization. As the civil service expanded, the autonomy of minority groups and their territories was curtailed under one pretext or another, until by the early 1900s there was almost nothing of it left. The Polish constitution was abrogated in 1831, and the Finnish