The fundamental problem of the Russian Empire was that its position as a great power was increasingly undermined by its political and economic backwardness and by its multinational composition. The Empire continued to expand territorially, acquiring in Eastern Europe alone Finland in 1809, Bessarabia in 1812 and the lion's share of repartitioned Poland in 1815, not to mention its conquests in the Caucasus and Central Asia. By the standards of the Napoleonic Wars, sheer size and population were decisive. By the standards of the Crimean War, however, size was no longer enough: Russia's industrialised western opponents were able to bring a decisive concentration of force to bear against it.
The tsars recognised there was a problem; the conundrum was how to address it. Alexander I (1801—25) made a sincere but ultimately half-hearted attempt to modernise and made constitutional concessions to newly acquired peoples. His successor Nicholas I (1825—55) abandoned any thought of wide-ranging reform as too dangerous, a policy then reversed by Alexander II (1855—81) under the impact of the Crimea. In the meantime nationality was becoming an issue, not just among non-Russians but also among ethnic Russians themselves, a development frowned upon by the autocracy wherever it emerged.
Alexander I, influenced by enlightened thinking, came to the throne an avowed lover of constitutions, even if he owed his accession to the palace coup which strangled his unstable father Paul I. The genuinely idealistic Alexander dismantled the regime of police surveillance by which the paranoid Paul had monitored his subjects, permitted nobles to travel abroad again and encouraged the importation of foreign publications. He believed that the evil of serfdom would somehow have to be abolished and, with his friend Prince Adam Czartoryski, deplored the eighteenth-century Polish Partitions. Yet constitutional rule, for Alexander, meant essentially that he should govern in accordance with law, rather than in tandem with representative institutions. Excellent reasons could always be found for postponing emancipation of the peasantry, such as the opposition of landowners. The undoubted constitutional status of not only Finland and Poland but also the Ionian Islands, during their brief experience of Russian rule, did not give their peoples the right to criticise the imperial will.
For all Alexander's good intentions he effected little constructive change. Government was made notionally more coherent by the creation in 1802 of ministries responsible for specific departments, but since this was set up alongside, rather than as a replacement for, the 'colleges' or committees of officials which had hitherto run things, the result was simply more bureaucracy; moreover, the creation of a State Council in 1810, separate from the ministries, made things even more complicated. From 1807 to 1812 Alexander's principal minister was the remarkable Mikhail Speransky, a non-noble with wide-ranging plans for introducing the rule of law, the separation of powers and even a representative assembly or Duma. Apart from the State Council, however, and the requirement, in 1809, that senior bureaucrats undergo examinations of their fitness for their jobs, not much else of Speransky's programme was implemented. Alexander's reign saw more progress in education: six universities were founded, including those of Dorpat in Livonia and Vilna in Lithuania, as well as several hundred schools, and although state funding for these latter was inadequate, it was supplemented by private donations.
Speransky fell from favour in 1812, a victim in part of Alexander's growing preoccupation with the French threat, but also of criticism from conservative opponents. The most articulate of these was the historian Nikolai Karamzin, whose 'Memorandum on Ancient and Modern Russia' (1810) forcibly argued that for the tsar to subordinate himself to the rule of law was positively dangerous, because the sheer size and complexity of the Empire required an untrammelled and undisputed authority. The tsar, Karamzin claimed, exercised this authority most effectively through the nobility, which was why it was essential that serfdom be retained as the guarantee of noble prosperity. Such arguments struck a chord with many patriotic Russians, who saw Speransky as an impractical dreamer out of touch with Russian realities, trying to impose institutional forms derived from French models.
The titanic struggle with Napoleon was quite enough to distract Alexander from internal affairs, but his decision to carry the war into Europe, shape the peace settlement at Vienna and act as one of its guarantors thereafter meant that Russia was taking on a far greater international role than hitherto. This, together with Alexander's increasingly conservative reaction against the revolutionary manifestations of liberalism and nationalism, is generally assumed to be the reason for his lack of commitment to further modernisation. Yet it remains the case that, in territories regained or newly acquired, Alexander either confirmed existing institutions and privileges, as with the Grand Duchy of Finland, or granted some form of autonomy or constitutional rule, as in Bessarabia and the 'Congress' Kingdom of Poland. The tantalising question is how far Alexander might have been prepared to extend constitutionalism to the rest of the Empire. As late as 1818—20 a draft constitution, produced for the emperor by his friend Nikolai Novosiltsev, actually proposed a federal structure, with the Empire divided into 'vice-regencies', and that guaranteed civil liberties, and regional and national assemblies. This appears to have been too radical for Alexander, but the circulation of such ideas, even in the narrow circles of the nobility, created expectations of change which were to be bitterly disappointed.
Alexander died suddenly in November 1825 and the confusion over his successor — he had designated Nicholas, the younger of his two brothers, as heir rather than the elder, Constantine, but without publicising this decision — prompted an attempted coup on Constantine's behalf by a group known ever since as the 'Decembrists'. This label obscures the decade-long build-up of frustration among some of the nobility, most of them army officers, with the slow pace of reform. The Decembrists, whose numbers never exceeded more than a few hundred, had been conspiring in a succession of secret societies since 1816, and their common goal, despite the divisions among them, was the transformation of the Russian state and society.
The Decembrists believed that serfdom should be abolished, although the moderates among them did not think this obliged the state to give the peasants any land. They differed as to whether there should be a constitutional monarchy or a republic, and whether a centralised or federal state was best. What is most interesting about the Decembrists in an East European context is, firstly, that their views were shaped largely by contact with Western Europe and, secondly, that the impetus for their initial formation was hostility to non-ethnic Russians. Thousands of Russian nobles experienced the West for themselves during the Napoleonic Wars and after, and they brought back a vivid sense of Russia's backwardness. The war itself created for probably the first time a sense of national solidarity with the peasant masses, who fought and suffered and yet whose only reward was the continuation of serfdom. And the Decembrists bridled at the number of ethnic Germans in the state bureaucracy, and the fact that non-Russians like the Poles received constitutional rights while the Russians received none. The most radical Decembrist of all, Pavel Pestel, argued for giving the Poles formal if not de facto independence, but otherwise aiming at the assimilation of all other peoples of the Empire into 'one single nation', the Russian; Pestel excepted the Jews, who he thought should be forcibly deported to the Ottoman Empire.1
Nicholas I used the Decembrist revolt as a cue, not for wide-ranging reform but for more piecemeal tinkering. For 30 years this strong-minded tsar conducted a personal war against the subversive forces of liberalism and nationalism at home and abroad. Nicholas was open to suggestions for reform, and indeed anxious to effect change, but was determined that the initiative had to come from the centre. Russia became a byword for censorship, police surveillance and an ultimately self-defeating attempt at bureaucratic control. Nationalist revolt in Poland was brutally suppressed, and in the name of monarchical solidarity Nicholas acted as the policeman of Europe, with the exception of Greece where intervention happened to coincide with Russia's strategic interests.
At the heart of Nicholas's autocracy was the vain conviction that the forces of revolution could be kept at bay through sheer bureaucratic vigilance. To this end the 'Third Section' of the imperial chancellery, which was responsible for internal security, became an all-pervasive organ of surveillance. The tsar personally censored the work of Russia's greatest poet, Alexander Pushkin, whose closeness to the Decembrists earned him a captive existence at court under the imperial eye.
Nicholas, however, was intelligent enough to perceive that his subjects had to be taught loyalty. The Polish uprising of 1830—1, coming so soon after the Decembrist revolt, was decisive in pushing Nicholas towards an early attempt at creating what was subsequently termed 'official nationality': all subjects, regardless of their ethnic identity, had to accept that they were servants of the tsarist state.2 The architect of this ideological counter-offensive was Count Sergei Uvarov, whose seminal report of December 1832 recommended that education be firmly linked to 'the quintessentially Russian protective principles of Orthodoxy, Autocracy and Nationality'.3 Only thus, reasoned Uvarov, who served as the aptly named minister for public instruction from 1833 to 1849, could the Empire be safeguarded: religious belief, obedience to the tsar and an emphasis on the Russianness of the state would counteract the vitiating influence of western liberalism and the subversion of subject peoples.
The cautiousness of Nicholas I's government ensured that Russia remained backward. The insistence on controlling everything from the centre increased the overall numbers of the state bureaucracy, but without any obvious gain in efficiency or reduction in venality. Speransky was brought back into government service and entrusted with the codification of existing laws which, when completed in 1833, at least laid the groundwork for future legal reform. Nicholas could see the value of the universities in producing trained minds for state service, but in his view this was their main purpose, and after 1848 the study of law and politics was banned and higher education restricted to those intending a career in state service. At the same time the stifling of open debate was not enough to discourage covert dissent, some of it increasingly radical, among Russia's superfluous intelligentsia. Above all, serfdom was tackled only marginally.
There is a large literature on whether Russia's continuing backwardness was due to serfdom, with the consensus now suggesting that serfdom was still sufficiently profitable for most landowners to prefer its retention and that, as in the Ottoman Empire, peasants in some areas were able to participate in enough economic activity on the side to justify the term 'proto-industrialisation'.4 The real arguments against serfdom were the moral case against treating human beings as chattels, the possibly exaggerated fear of peasant rebellion and the purely practical insight that, without emancipation, Russia was never going to achieve genuine modernisation. Serfdom may not have been the economic drag its critics said it was, but as long as it was retained the economic growth the Russian Empire was capable of could simply not be attained. Russia paid the penalty in the Crimean War.
Alexander II, succeeding his father in the middle of the war, grasped the nettle of peasant emancipation in 1861. He also learned the essential lesson of the Crimea, which was that Russia would have to modernise or perish. Even conservatives were convinced of this. A country whose troops had to march all the way to the Black Sea for want of railways, and were armed with flintlock muskets as opposed to their enemies' rifles, was clearly in urgent need of reform.
Alexander had no intention of submitting his autocratic authority to any form of popular assembly, but he recognised that a more open debate on how to reform the Empire was essential. The censorship and police surveillance were accordingly relaxed in 1856, and throughout the 1860s and 1870s considerable, though never absolute, freedom of expression prevailed. In the process, and in conjunction with the growth in a university-educated class, something like 'public opinion' in Russian society finally took shape. The sense of a civic identity was also encouraged by legal reforms, such as the introduction of public court proceedings, trial by jury and a right to legal representation.
Emancipation apart, the most striking innovation of the reign was the creation in 1864 of a system of local self-government, in the shape of provincial and district assemblies or zemstvos. These were elected indirectly from among the three main classes of landowners, townspeople and peasants, on a franchise heavily weighted in favour of property and tax; they had no executive powers as such, but were expected to advise local administrations on such issues as roads, prisons, hospitals, education and the like. Nevertheless the zemstvos were revolutionary in that they were the first genuinely representative institutions in Russia since the seventeenth century: peasants made up 42 per cent of the members of a typical zemstvo at district level, with landowners at 38 per cent and townsmen at 17.5 This contributed to a growing national consciousness. Significantly, however, zemstvos were not introduced in provinces where the majority of the population was non-Russian.
World History
