Russia in the Age of Reaction and Reform 1801-1881

David Saunders

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781317872566
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Storia
• Subtopic: Storia mondiale

This eagerly awaited study of Russia under Alexander I, Nicholas I and Alexander II -- the Russia of War and Peace and Anna Karenina -- brings the series near to completion. David Saunders examines Russia's failure to adapt to the era of reform and democracy ushered into the rest of Europe by the French Revolution. Why, despite so much effort, did it fail? This is a superb book, both as a portrait of an age and as a piece of sustained historical analysis.

CHAPTER ONE

The Enigmatic Tsar, his Friends and his Inheritance

WERE RUSSIA’S RULERS THEIR OWN WORST ENEMIES?

‘Every state or civil society’, wrote the Slavophile Aleksei Khomiakov towards the middle of the nineteenth century, ‘is made up of two elements: the living historical element, which embodies all the society’s vitality, and the rational or speculative element, which can achieve nothing by itself, but gradually imparts order to the fundamental or living element, sometimes pushing it aside and sometimes developing it’.¹ Not many Russian tsars would have understood abstractions of this kind, but even the intellectuals among them would have rejected the idea that the ‘rational or speculative’ part of Russian society – the government, the bureaucracy, the educated section of the community – could ‘achieve nothing by itself’. Some tsars believed that they could radically transform their realm. Some were so far divorced from reality that they expected to reproduce in the Russian Empire the administrative successes of the countries which served them as models. Others sensed the near-impossibility of solving the problems which confronted them, but felt they must act dramatically if they were to make any progress at all. Others again, disdaining the idea of improvement, attempted to stop Russian society in its tracks. None could resign himself to the thought that life went on more or less irrespective of the government’s decrees. None was prepared to have it said of him, as Sir Lewis Namier said of Metternich, that ‘He annotated the margins of the great book of human insufficiency and inertia’.² None could have accepted with equanimity Sir Donald Mackenzie Wallace’s observation, made after six years in Russia in the 1870s, that ‘In spite of the systematic and persistent efforts of the centralised bureaucracy to regulate minutely all the departments of national life, the rural Communes, which contain about five-sixths of the population, remain in many respects entirely beyond its influence, and even beyond its sphere of vision’.³ Because even the most conservative tsars took a highly interventionist view of their responsibilities, the country seemed to be constantly in the throes of ‘reaction’ or ‘reform’. The tsars’ temperamental and ideological differences only height-ened the impact of their interventionism. The number of their edicts, most of which sank like stones, kept the surface of society in constant motion. In the quest for the philosopher’s stone which would enable them to grasp and clear up the problems which faced them, the Russian Empire’s rulers tried solution after solution, launching themselves into new projects, trying to batten down the hatches, raising and dashing expectations – and turning, usually, into muddled obscurantists. The description ‘Russia in the Age of Reaction and Reform’ could be applied not just to the years between 1801 and 1881, but to almost any eighty-year period of tsarist history.

Yet the greatest of Russia’s historians, Vasilii Kliuchevskii, thought that the disjointed character of the Russian government’s nineteenth-century performance was sufficiently pronounced to be worthy of special note. In a mordant diary entry written on the day after Nicholas II promulgated the Fundamental State Laws of 1906 – yet another governmental change of tack – he deplored the authorities’ lack of constancy in the preceding hundred years and ascribed their volatility to malice aforethought. In doing so he composed an indictment of Russia’s nineteenth-century rulers which is all the more striking for having come from the pen of a moderate. ‘In the entire course of the nineteenth century,’ Kliuchevskii wrote,

from the accession to the throne of Alexander I in 1801, the Russian government engaged in purely provocative activity: it would give society just as much freedom as was necessary to evoke in it a first response, and then collar and punish the simpletons who responded incautiously. Under Alexander I the policy worked like this: by virtue of his constitutional projects Speranskii became an involuntary provocateur, bringing the Decembrists out into the open and then having the misfortune, as a member of the investigative commission, to weep at the interrogation of his cornered political disciples. Under Emperor Nicholas I governmental provocation shifted its ground. If the period of the brazen Arakcheev (which had succeeded that of the bashful, conscientious Speranskii) had been dedicated to turning a plot into an armed rebellion, Nicholas I tried, by treacherously facilitating the activities of Benckendorff, to convert social discontent into plotting. The successful consequences of experimenting with this stratagem, manifested in the case of the Poles, long paralysed the strength of Russia’s conspirators, fragmenting them into powerless circles, and the Petrashevskii affair starkly illuminated their powerlessness. Malcontents remained – Herzen, Granovskii, Belinskii – but they posed no threat, and the shameful reign of Emperor Nicholas I was successfully brought to a close by the Sevastopol’ defeat and the Peace of Paris. It was the government of Emperor Alexander II which really fostered conspiracy in Russia. All its great reforms, unforgivably delayed, were nobly conceived, speedily elaborated, and dishonestly executed (apart from the judicial and military reforms). The monarch disposed wisely, the coadjutors whom he summoned (Samarin, the Miliutin brothers) self-denyingly drew up plans, but ministers of the camarilla (Lanskoi, Tolstoi, Valuev, Timashev) employed circulars to turn plans which had been approved on high into a mockery of the people’s expectations. The tsar-reformer was threatened with playing the part of autocratic provocateur: Alexander II was going the same way as the first Alexander. With one hand he was granting reforms which excited the highest expectations in society, but with the other he was promoting and supporting agents who were dashing them. Not satisfied with tracking down illegal behaviour, and sensing a groundswell of discontent, the police sought to read men’s hearts and minds by using denunciations and official searches. By enforcing retirements, by arrests and despatch into exile, they punished the schemes and designs which were afoot and transformed themselves imperceptibly from guardians of public order into an organized governmental conspiracy against society. Count Tolstoi and Katkov created an entire system of police academy classicism with the aim of turning students into models of uniformed official thinking, morally and intellectually castrated servants of the tsar and the fatherland. These deeply considered steps gave society, especially the younger generation, excellent lessons in conspiring against the government. The inclination to conspire grew fruitfully and quickly on the soil of public embitterment which the government had cultivated. Assassination attempts grew in frequency and culminated in the affair of 1 March.⁴

Kliuchevskii continued his account beyond the murder of Alexander II, and was no doubt wondering whether the concessions granted by Nicholas II in 1905–6 would prove any more lasting than those of his predecessors. From the standpoint of April 1906 his indictment was understandable, but this book will argue that it was blinkered. When Kliuchevskii pinned the misfortunes of early-twentieth-century Russia on her nineteenth-century rulers, he took the easy way out. Initiating and drawing back from change had been features of Russian governmental behaviour long before 1801, and were to be features of it long after Kliuchevskii’s death. Nineteenth-century Russian tsars were no more interventionist, no more ‘provocative’, than their predecessors or successors. The personalities and policies of Alexander I, Nicholas I and Alexander II had less to do with the country’s problems than the size of the problems themselves.

THE CHARACTER OF ALEXANDER I

The personality of Alexander I, however, with whose accession this book opens, has engaged historians to such an extent that it seems to be the key feature of Russia’s history in the first quarter of the nineteenth century. In some presentations, Alexander does indeed look like a ‘provocateur’ in Kliuchevskii’s sense of the term. On the other hand, his genes, his upbringing, his friends, and the manner of his accession gave him good reason to appear in many guises. Christened ‘the enigmatic tsar’ by one of his biographers, ‘the sphinx of the north’ by another, a ‘paternalistic reformer’ by a third, and ‘the Russian Trajan’ by his former tutor,⁵ he justified all four titles at different points in his reign. As the grandson of Catherine the Great, ‘the only articulate ideologist to rule Russia between Ivan IV and Lenin’,⁶ and the son of Paul I, a militaristic admirer of Frederick the Great whom ‘Potsdam, Sans Souci, and Berlin pursued … like a wild dream’,⁷ he was introduced at an early age to the conflicting environments of the schoolroom and the parade ground. Born in 1777, he was taken from his parents in the 1780s and exposed by his grandmother to the ministrations of a Swiss republican, Frédéric-César de La Harpe, who attempted to instil in him the ideals of the European Enlightenment. La Harpe’s educational endeavours succeeded only up to a point, for by the time Catherine died, in November 1796, Alexander had found an antidote to the intellectual stringency of St Petersburg in the war games of his father’s nearby estate at Gatchina. In 1793 and subsequently Catherine had considered bypassing Paul and making Alexander her heir, but her grandson would have no truck with the idea. He already sensed the enormity of the tasks that would confront him when he eventually succeeded to the throne. In May 1796 he wrote to his friend Viktor Kochubei of the ‘incredible disorder’ which permeated the administration of the empire, and expressed the view that ruling the country was beyond the powers of a genius, let alone of a moderately gifted fellow like himself. He envisaged abdicating, settling on the banks of the Rhine, and leading the peaceful life of a private individual who derived his happiness from the company of friends and the study of nature.⁸ This vision captivated (or dogged) him to the end of his life, and played a part in the legend that, far from dying of typhus, he retired to Siberia and became a monk whose memory was still honoured in Tomsk in the 1930s.⁹ Alexander was a dreamer. He was lazy, suggestible and given to sudden enthusiasms. But he also had a stubborn streak. Even in his celebrated letter of May 1796 he refrained from saying precisely when he would withdraw from public life; within a year of Paul’s accession he had begun taking a more dynamic view of the way in which he would deal with the problems of the Russian Empire. Circumstances, not his kaleidoscopic character, were to be the main reason why he achieved few of the goals he set himself. He was less remarkable for changing his mind than for constantly returning to ideas of which he ought to have been disabused. He was defeated by the context in which he found himself, not by personal inadequacy.

ALEXANDER AND PAUL (1796–9)

It is usually said that Alexander was broadly loyal to Paul during the latter’s short reign, and joined in the conspiracy against him only at the end and after much soul-searching. This is the view, for example, of Alan Palmer, but Natan Eidel’man has made a powerful counter-case.¹⁰ It is true that, as heir to the throne, Alexander only once committed himself to a written indictment of his father. In a letter to La Harpe of September 1797 he reported that Paul had conceived the idea of imposing himself decisively on the state of affairs left by Catherine. Paul had started well, Alexander wrote, but had flattered to deceive. The disorder which already prevailed had merely been intensified. Soldiers wasted their time on parades, orders were issued and rescinded within a month, the regime as a whole was characterized by ‘severity without justice, too much partiality, and the maximum inexperience in the handling of business’. The heir to the throne was obliged to spend all his time on the trivia of military service and had no chance of devoting himself to study, which he claimed was his favourite pastime. ‘I have become the most unhappy of men’.¹¹

Since Alexander never again spoke so strongly of his dissatisfaction with Paul, his discontent is supposed to have been transient. It is more likely, however, that he simply stopped expressing his sentiments in letters. He may even have stopped writing because he was beginning to take action. By 1797 he had discovered some like-minded near contemporaries with whom he could speak freely, all of them outsiders in the context of Russian high politics. Kochubei, to whom Alexander wrote the much-quoted letter of 1796, was a triply peripheral figure. He spent the greater part of the 1790s as ambassador in Constantinople and complained constantly of being out of touch with affairs in St Petersburg; he belonged to a Ukrainian coterie whose members looked like parvenus to the Russians with whom they competed for office; and according to one contemporary he was antisocial, a man of ‘few words and murderous cold’.¹² Alexander had met the Pole Adam Czartoryski before the death of Catherine, and through him Pavel Stroganov and Nikolai Novosil’tsev. All of these had reasons for being discontented with their lot. Czartoryski had been brought to St Petersburg after the collapse of Poland in 1795 and focused the remainder of his long life on the cause of Polish rebirth. Stroganov had been tutored by the French revolutionary Gilbert Romme and was a radical. Captivated by the changes in France, he had to be brought back from Paris almost by force in 1791. Novosil’tsev took him in hand on that occasion, but Novosil’tsev had his own reasons for being dissatisfied. He was Stroganov’s bastard cousin, ‘brought up by his generous uncle like a poor relation’. Olga Narkiewicz describes him as ‘a man of poor education, but devouring ambition; one who felt slighted by Russian society, but yet desired to belong to it’.¹³

These young men, all of them slightly older than Alexander, had been working closely with the Grand Duke before he wrote his letter of complaint to La Harpe. Czartoryski had been almost overwhelmed by the liberalism which Alexander expressed in a three-hour private conversation at the Tauride Palace in 1796. In April of the following year, Alexander was displeased by the events which surrounded Paul’s coronation in Moscow. Quite apart from substituting one political clan for another in his affections, Paul distributed large numbers of state-owned peasants as gifts, flaunted his domination of the ecclesiastical hierarchy, and downgraded Catherine’s Charter to the Nobility by declaring that nobles were to lose their immunity from corporal punishment. Alexander asked Czartoryski to prepare a draft manifesto for use in the event of his own eventual accession. In doing so, Czartoryski spoke of the merits of freedom and justice and of Alexander’s intention, after he had made a start on reform, to divest himself of power in order that someone more worthy might take over from him. Much later, Czartoryski claimed that he was well aware of Alexander’s naivety, but it is likely that hindsight made him more perspicacious than he had been in the 1790s and that the draft manifesto which he drew up for Alexander embodied a firmer intention than he was prepared to admit. In the indictment of Paul which Alexander addressed to La Harpe, the heir to the throne spoke more precisely of the ‘revolution’ which he had in mind for his country. ‘It would be the best sort of revolution,’ he said, ‘as it would be undertaken by a legal authority which would cease to exist as soon as the constitution was finished and the nation had chosen its representatives’. Alexander had in mind change from the top down, no doubt by way of staving off the sort of change from the bottom up which had been taking place in contemporary Europe.

At the time of the coronation festivities in Moscow, Novosil’tsev produced a sort of programmatic introduction to the constitutional innovations which Alexander was considering. It has not survived, but seems to have turned on the need to educate that part of the Russian public which would one day constitute the nation’s representatives. In his letter to La Harpe, Alexander spoke of his circle’s intention to commission the translation into Russian of ‘as many useful books as possible’ – the texts which underlay contemporary developments in France. Alexander did not envisage being able to distribute many such translations on the open market, but must have contemplated circulating them in manuscript and increasing the small number of those sympathetic to his inte...