The Russian Nobility in the Age of Alexander I 9781788314862, 9781788315685, 9781788315661

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THE RUSSIAN NOBILITY IN THE AGE OF ALEXANDER I

THE RUSSIAN NOBILITY IN THE AGE OF ALEXANDER I

Patrick O’Meara

BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC Bloomsbury Publishing Plc 50 Bedford Square, London, WC1B 3DP, UK 1385 Broadway, New York, NY 10018, USA BLOOMSBURY, BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC and the Diana logo are trademarks of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc First published in Great Britain 2019 Paperback edition first published 2021 Copyright © Patrick O’Meara, 2019 Patrick O’Meara has asserted her right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as Author of this work. Cover image: Grigory Grigorievich Chernetsov, 1802–1865. Parade on the occasion of the opening of the monument to Alexander I in St. Petersburg on August 30, 1834. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc does not have any control over, or responsibility for, any third-party websites referred to or in this book. All internet addresses given in this book were correct at the time of going to press. The author and publisher regret any inconvenience caused if addresses have changed or sites have ceased to exist, but can accept no responsibility for any such changes. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress. ISBN: HB: 978-1-7883-1486-2 PB: 978-1-3501-9656-8 ePDF: 978-1-7883-1566-1 eBook: 978-1-7883-1567-8 Typeset by Newgen KnowledgeWorks Pvt. Ltd., Chennai, India To find out more about our authors and books visit www.bloomsbury.com and sign up for our newsletters.

CONTENTS Preface A Note on the Text List of Plates Map: The provinces of European Russia

ix xiii xv xvi

Part I RUSSIA’S NOBLE ESTATE (SOSLOVIE) Chapter 1 RUSSIAN SOCIETY AND NOBILITY FROM 1801 The nobility’s privileges and legal status Developments in the eighteenth century The impact of Alexander I’s accession Corporate identity and social cohesion

3 3 3 6 8

Chapter 2 DEFINITIONS OF THE NOBILITY’S STANDING Social status and state service Wealth, poverty, serfs Sources of the nobility’s social prestige

15 15 20 26

Part II EDUCATING THE RUSSIAN NOBILITY Chapter 3 PARENTAL SUPERVISION, FOREIGN TUTORS AND LANGUAGE ACQUISITION Home education and foreign tutors Career paths and social mobility Language, bilingualism and its consequences

33 34 38 42

Chapter 4 EDUCATIONAL ASPIRATION AND INSTITUTIONAL REALITY Speranskii and the 1809 education reform The nobility’s alma mater The Corps of Pages and Cadets The Noblemen’s Regiment The Tsarskoe Selo Lycée

53 53 56 58 59 60

vi

Contents

The nobility’s input: The Column-leaders’ Academy Boarding schools (pansiony) in Moscow and St Petersburg Boarding schools for girls The nobility’s educational attainment and reaction to it

64 66 68 70

Part III THE NOBILITY IN LOCAL GOVERNMENT AND ADMINISTRATION Chapter 5 THE NOBILITY AS OFFICE HOLDERS Provincial administration: Organization and structures The marshal of the nobility: The role and its functions The marshal: A Nizhnii Novgorod case study Receiving royalty The marshal’s role in the Patriotic War The provincial governor The provincial nobility: A reluctant service gentry Chapter 6 THE NOBLE ASSEMBLY IN PROVINCIAL LIFE The noble assembly: Constitution and elections The noble assembly’s agenda ‘The Government Inspector’ The noble assembly in action: Health and wealth District courts, bribery and corruption The administration of provincial cultural life

77 78 79 81 83 84 86 89

99 99 102 104 106 109 113

Part IV THE TSAR, THE NOBILITY AND REFORMING RUSSIA Chapter 7 THE ALEXANDRINE NOBILITY: POLITICS AND POWER Alexander I and his court: The throne and its service class Alexander I and Napoleon at Tilsit: Reaction in Russia Alexander I and his relationships with Russia’s leading statesmen M. M. Speranskii: Unwelcome bellwether of reform V. P. Kochubei: From devotion to indifference M. S. Vorontsov: From devotion to humiliation A. A. Arakcheev: From devotion to deference Klemens von Metternich: Friendship’s ‘five-year cycle’ Assessments of Alexander I’s leadership

123 123 128 131 131 137 138 140 143 144

Contents

Chapter 8 ALEXANDER I, THE NOBILITY AND CONSTITUTIONALISM Alexander I as a would-be constitutional monarch ‘Practical legal study’ for Russian citizens: The Naumov affair Alexander I’s constitution for Poland: The response of Russia’s nobility The ‘music of constitutions’ among Russia’s nobility Nobility views of a Russian Rechtsstaat, the rule of law and the West Assessments of Alexander I’s constitutional intentions

vii

149 150 153 155 160 165 170

Part V GOVERNMENT, NOBILITY AND THE ‘PEASANT QUESTION’ Chapter 9 APPROACHES TO SERF REFORM FROM ABOVE Alexander I and the peasant question The 1803 law: Prelude to serf emancipation? The false dawn of serf emancipation

175 175 178 182

Chapter 10 APPROACHES TO SERF REFORM FROM BELOW The nobility and emancipation: Pro et contra N. I. Turgenev and the reformers Official reaction to reformist initiatives The proposed ‘Society of Benevolent Landowners’ M. S. Vorontsov and noblemen-abolitionists N. N. Muraviev: A government official makes the case for reform V. N. Karazin: A Ukrainian landowner’s opinion Traditionalists hold the line

189 189 191 195 197 202 204 205 207

Part VI THE RADICAL NOBILITY CHALLENGES AUTOCRACY Chapter 11 GOVERNMENT AND THE NOBILITY: REFORM VERSUS CONTROL Public opinion and reformist expectations before and after 1812 The social and political impact on Russia’s nobility of Napoleon’s defeat Decembrist views of 1812’s impact on Russia’s nobility The status quo in post-war Russia: Challenged but unchanged? Censorship and ideological pressure G. M. Iatsenkov and Dukh zhurnalov versus the censor The censors’ intensified post-war vigilance Social control and the secret police: Some case files

215 215 218 224 225 227 229 231 234

viii

Contents

Chapter 12 THE SOCIAL AND POLITICAL CULTURE OF THE DECEMBRISTS The post-1812 generation: The emergent Decembrist fronde Individual paths to dissidence Defining and quantifying ‘Decembrists’ ‘Decembrists without December’

241 241 243 247 252

Chapter 13 THE DECEMBRISTS’ FAILURE TO RADICALIZE THE RUSSIAN NOBILITY Reaction to Alexander I’s death; eyewitnesses on 14 December 1825 Decembrist critiques and retrospective views of Alexander I’s reign The Decembrists’ reputation following the uprising Creating an official historical record The Decembrists and the political future of the Russian nobility

259 259 264 267 274 275

Afterword A Note on Sources Notes Appendix Bibliography Index

281 285 289 339 341 355

PREFACE The purpose of this book is to offer its readers a densely textured social and political portrait of the Russian nobility (dvorianstvo) in the age of Tsar Alexander I, who reigned from 1801 to 1825. For the Russian Empire this was a twenty-five-year era of rapidly shifting international relations, dominated by the imperial ambitions of Napoleon Bonaparte and, indeed, their aftermath. By contrast, domestic polity was remarkably hesitant, reflecting Alexander I’s characteristic vacillation in nearly all important matters of state. The nobility (the English rendering of dvorianstvo preferred in this study over ‘gentry’ or ‘aristocracy’) was, second only to the imperial court, the key elite in Russia’s pre-revolutionary social hierarchy, and it played a vitally important part in the functioning of civil society. Its history, therefore, is central to a fuller understanding of the dynamics of tsarist autocracy.1 This project is accordingly based on a wide variety of rarely cited sources, both published and unpublished, including personal collections (lichnye fondy), local government papers, memoirs, diaries and correspondence. Taken together, they allow the historian the privilege of a kaleidoscopic view of the Alexandrine nobility, both collectively and individually. Such a wealth of sources would readily facilitate a variety of approaches to a reconstruction and analysis of the historical narrative they illuminate. However, I have elected to focus particularly on the political culture of the nobility in both capitals and in the provinces, in an attempt to produce the first comprehensive work (in English or Russian) to situate Alexander I  in this crucially important context:  one of my study’s main objectives is to shed new light on the character of this famously enigmatic tsar. The accompanying analysis of Alexander’s relationship with the Russian nobility serves to plug an important gap in the literature on the political history of Russia in the first quarter of the nineteenth century.2 On Alexander’s accession in March 1801, the Russian nobility looked to their new tsar for a restoration of the 1785 Charter’s rights and privileges which had been withdrawn from the estate by his authoritarian father, Emperor Paul I, during his wayward and erratic reign. Paul’s distrust of the nobility was reflected in what John Gooding has described as ‘a reign of terror’ unleashed on the estate, which included his 1797 proclamation that serfs should work no more than three days a week for their master and take Sundays off. He also withdrew the nobility’s immunity from corporal punishment, imposed travel and foreign dress restrictions on the estate, even banning the import of luxury goods from Britain to spite the St Petersburg and Moscow nobles, and relied increasingly on the bureaucracy and the army rather than the nobility in both central and local administration. Against this, however, ignoring the provisions of the 1762 emancipation, he

x

Preface

insisted that the nobility enter state service once again. To general relief, Paul’s unpredictable rule was cut short after only four years and four months with his assassination at the age of forty-six by a group of the most trusted and highly placed members of the aristocratic elite, drawn from such leading families as the Dolgorukovs, Viazemskiis and Golitsyns.3 The reign of terror was over, and in Alexander Pushkin’s famous phrase, the ‘beautiful onset of Alexander’s days’ (Dnei Aleksandrovykh prekrasnoe nachalo) was underway, not least for the nobility. A crucial feature of the reign of Emperor Alexander I was the political struggle waged around the issue of Russia’s future:  whether or not, in tune with the European Zeitgeist, to embark on a path of fundamental political, economic and social reform. In the Russian context this envisaged primarily serf emancipation and a new constitution. Outside those court circles where such issues were more or less continuously contested, the conflict between conservatives and reformers was played out within the only social class in the empire capable of joining battle: the Russian nobility, which was itself at this time undergoing far-reaching changes. In particular, there was a growing tension between those sections of the nobility which identified with, or even actively promoted, the Europeanization of Russian politics and culture, and those who sought to preserve the home-grown national status quo. The Western influences which impacted on Russian society, both among the court elite and the nobility as a whole, particularly as a consequence of individual contact with Napoleonic Europe, make it possible to speak of a ‘European’ generation of the Russian nobility at this time. The increasing currency of the Enlightenment ideals of egalitarian justice and personal liberty, combined with the spread of Romanticism, made a cultural and ideological convergence between Russia and the West seem increasingly ineluctable. Thus, the Decembrist poet and prose writer A. A. Bestuzhev-Marlinskii observed that his was a generation which ‘spoke Russian (po-russki) while thinking European (po-evropeiski)’.4 Such tension would prefigure the Decembrist uprising in St Petersburg at the end of 1825 (in which Bestuzhev played an active part) and, more broadly, the impassioned debate on Russia’s future pathway waged between the Westernizers and Slavophiles in the decades that followed. It is within these historical and research contexts that my work is set. The book comprises an exploration of key political, social and cultural themes. It consists of six parts. Parts I and II focus on the sources of the nobility’s privileges and prestige, its legal and social status, questions of wealth and poverty, and its educational pathways. The predominantly Francophone nobility’s foreign language acquisition receives the particular attention this unusual cultural phenomenon merits. Part III is devoted to the nobility’s role in local government and provincial administration, particularly as reflected in the rich provincial archive of Nizhnii Novgorod (since the USSR’s collapse once again, along with the city itself, accessible to foreign scholars), through the elective offices of marshal of the nobility, the noble assembly and the district courts. Alexander I’s treatment of the nobility and his relationships with leading members of his government are considered in Part IV, as is the tsar’s attitude to the question of a constitution for Russia, his ‘constitutional diplomacy’ in relation to Poland, the nobility’s reaction to it and its significance for Russia. Part V presents

Preface

xi

a detailed analysis of the tentative approaches to reforming serfdom from above (the tsar and his government) and from below (the landowning nobility). It draws on key projects from both sectors by way of illustrating the variety of responses to the troubling complexity of the ‘peasant question’. The impact of the Russian nobility’s encounter with Napoleonic Europe and its growing awareness of Western political institutions are discussed in Part VI. It traces the ensuing expectations of political and social reform and the government’s attempts to contain them through intensified censorship and secret police control. Furthermore, it assesses the changing character of the ‘European’ generation of the Russian nobility, particularly as a consequence of personal experience of life in Western societies. It examines the self-aware nobleman as an individual opponent of the Russian state in the context of growing opposition to the government. It also discusses reaction among the nobility both to Alexander I’s death and to the Decembrist uprising which followed just weeks afterwards on 14 December 1825. This event, together with the subsequent revolt of the Chernigov Regiment in the south, marked a violent beginning to the reign of Nicholas I on the very day of his accession to the throne. An assessment of the longer-term consequences of the Decembrists’ rebellious challenge for the political future of the Russian nobility brings the study to its conclusion. Central to the book’s thesis is the proposition that the outcome of the allied military campaigns against the French armies across the continent, in which thousands of Russian officers and men were involved, paved the way not merely for the eventual liberation of Europe from Napoleon: it also offered Alexander I a unique opportunity to build on Russia’s unifying national victory, and his own unprecedented popularity, in order to secure the support of his traditionally riskaverse nobility for far-reaching political and social reforms.5 However, it was an opportunity which, due largely to his failure to find a pragmatic accommodation with the country’s elite estate, Alexander was to squander. In mitigation, the tsar’s failure to lead was matched only by his nobility’s evident reluctance to be led, especially towards constitutional and peasant reform. The evidence adduced will suggest that the generally low ‘political culture’ of the nobility deterred Alexander from making any real effort to forge the required alliance. Given the overwhelming conservatism of the nobility and the inveterate hesitancy of the tsar, just how realistic in early-nineteenth-century Russia was the prospect of reform? Victory gave rise to widespread expectations of change, and its necessity was apparent both to Alexander and to the more far-sighted members of his entourage – and also to the Decembrists, who ultimately got tired of waiting. Any satisfactory response to this question must revolve around the nature of the relationship between Alexander I  and the Russian nobility as the empire’s ruling class. This is, therefore, a major theme of the book. Accordingly, it draws on a wide range of contemporary sources in search of possible answers. Interested readers are referred for further historiographical details to the Note on Sources which precedes the Bibliography. ***

xii

Preface

The University of Dublin, Trinity College (TCD) and Durham University, the two research-led institutions where I  was so very fortunate to be based for my entire academic career, both supported my work with generous research travel bursaries. An equally generous British Academy research grant facilitated my visits to archives and libraries in Moscow, Nizhnii Novgorod, St Petersburg and Helsinki. A visiting fellowship to Fitzwilliam College, Cambridge, afforded me the opportunity for a term’s daily access to the University Library, thereby allowing me to bring the book’s composition closer to completion, moreover in stimulating and congenial company. As well as to institutions, I  am indebted to numerous individuals for their considerable help and advice:  chiefly to two greatly lamented and brilliant historians of the Russian Empire’s governance, Lindsey Hughes (d.2007) and Isabel de Madariaga (d.2014); to the anonymous peer reviewer whose many excellent suggestions have made this a better book; to Roger Bartlett, Rosamund Bartlett, Simon Dixon, Jennifer Keating, Paul Keenan, Elena Marasinova and Andreas Schönle, who have kindly read portions of the draft typescript and provided thoughtful feedback; to Tommy Murtagh for ensuring the accuracy of French quotations; to Irina Lukka, resourceful châtelaine of the incomparable research facility that is the ‘Slavica’ section of the National Library of Finland. Here, during many a summer, I enjoyed encouraging interaction with an international body of scholars, especially its ebullient doyen, the late Richard Stites (d.2010). Equally, the Study Group on Eighteenth-Century Russia, thanks in large part to its founder and spiritus movens, Tony Cross, has been the source of intellectual sustenance and fellowship over the many years this book has been in preparation. It is my pleasure also to salute the professional skill of my editor at I.B. Tauris in London, Joanna Godfrey. To her, and her team at Bloomsbury Academic, all credit is due for the quality this volume’s production, while any textual shortcomings are attributable to me alone. Nearer to home, in Oxfordshire’s Vale of White Horse, where much of the writing was done in rustic seclusion, I have enjoyed the loving forbearance and critical acumen of my wife, Di, whose attentive reading of the entire text led to its considerable improvement. To Di, along with all those I have had cause to mention here, because it is the least I can do, I dedicate this book in affectionate gratitude. Appleton, OX13 1 February 2018

A NOTE ON THE TEXT A note on transliteration I have used a modified form of the transliteration system set out in The Concise Oxford Dictionary of Current English, 9th edition, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995, p. 1644. In referring to Romanov family members, I have used the anglicized forms Alexander, Nicholas, Constantine, Peter, Catherine, Elizabeth and Maria, unless the given name is paired with its patronymic, for example, Konstantin Pavlovich, Elizaveta Fedorovna.

Dates Unless otherwise indicated, dates are given in Old Style (OS, Julian Calendar) which lagged twelve days behind New Style (NS, Gregorian Calendar) in nineteenthcentury Russia. For example, the Decembrist uprising in St Petersburg took place in 1825 on 14 December (OS) but on 26 December (NS).

Abbreviations and glossary Archives GARF RNB-OR TsANO Op. f. ed.khr. d. l. barshchina

obrok Sejm

Gosudarstvennyi Arkhiv Rossiiskoi Federatsii (State Archive of the Russian Federation) Rossiiskaia Natsional’naia Biblioteka  – Otdel Rukopisei (Russian National Library Manuscripts Department) Tsentral’nyi Arkhiv Nizhegorodskoi Oblasti (Central Archive of Nizhnii Novgorod Province) opis’ (inventory) fond (collection) edinitsa khraneniia (item) delo (file) list (folio); ll. listy (folios) corvée, compulsory labour worked by the peasants on their masters’ arable land. Three days a week was considered normal, but there was no government regulation of its actual extent quitrent, in money or in kind, paid by the peasants to their masters parliament (Kingdom of Poland)

xiv

ukaz vyp.

A Note on the Text

imperial decree vypusk (issue)

Cities L M M-L P SPb

Leningrad Moscow Moscow-Leningrad Petrograd St Petersburg

Publications CMRS IV PSZRI RA RBS RS RV SEER VE

Cahiers du Monde russe et soviétique Istoricheskii vestnik (Historical Herald) Polnoe sobranie zakonov rossiiskoi imperii (Complete Collection of the laws of the Russian empire) Russkii arkhiv (The Russian Archive) Russkii biograficheskii slovar’ (Russian Biographical Dictionary) Russkaia starina (Russian Antiquity) Russkii vestnik (The Russian Herald) Slavonic and East European Review Vestnik Evropy (The European Herald)

PLATES 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19

Tsar Alexander I A. A. Arakcheev A. N. Golitsyn N. M. Karamzin V. N. Karazin P. D. Kiselev V. P. Kochubei Klemens von Metternich N. N. Novosil’tsov F. V. Rostopchin M. M. Speranskii N. I. Turgenev P. A. Viazemskii M. S. Vorontsov Alexander I and Napoleon at Tilsit, by Gioacchino Serangeli Alexander I Statue, Alexander Park, Kremlin, Moscow Decembrist Uprising, Senate Square, St Petersburg, 1825, by Vasily Timm Smol’nii Institute, St Petersburg Tsarskoe Selo Lycée, St Petersburg

Plates appear after page 176. All images are in the public domain.

0

100

0

200

300

100

400

B a re n t s S e a

500 km

200

300 miles

SWEDEN White Sea

ARCHANGEL Archangel R.

Dv i

FINLAND

na

O LO N E TS

Helsinki

LIVONIA

V O LO G DA

St Petersburg URG RSB TE PE NOVGOROD ST Novgorod

PERM Vologda Viatka

Pskov

Riga

IAROSLAVL

ND

V

IT

Iaroslavl

Tver

SK

MOSCOW

Vitebsk

Moscow

SMOLENSK

VILNA

Smolensk

Minsk

Tula

ie s Dn

ter

R. Dni epe r

KURSK

Kiev

PO

KIEV DO

TAM B O V

P O LTAVA

Saratov

Kharkov

Poltava

R . Don

K H A R KO V

IA

BE

Ekaterinoslav

SSA

KHERSON

V EK ATERINOSLA

BI A

Kherson er ie p R. D n

Rostov-on-Don Sea of Azov

R.

R. Don

Taganrog

CRIMEA

URAL COSSACKS

DON COSSACKS

V

l ga

o

RA

Odessa

S A R AT O V

Voronezh

VORONEZH

L

Kishinev

Samara

SAMARA

ra l R. U

R.

Kursk

R

ND CHERNIGOV Chernigov

VOLHYNIA

K

Penza

Tambov

O R E L

Simbirsk

S

PENZA

Orel

U FA

KAZAN

RIAZAN

TULA

MINSK

Kazan

NIZHNY NOVGOROD

Riazan

BI

MOGILEV

Vladimir

M

POLA

KALUGA

Mogilev

GRODNO

Kaluga

R. V ol ga

V L A D I M I R N. Novgorod

SI

Grodno

Kostroma

TVER

PSKOV

EB

Perm

V I AT K A

V o lg a

SU WA LK I

R.

Tilsit N i eKOVNO me n EAST Kovno PRUSSIA Vilna

KOSTROMA

R.

Ba

(Borgå)

ESTONIA

KURLA

Olonets

Porvoo

Reval

a

lti

c S e

(Helsingfors)

ASTRAKHAN

Astrakhan

KUBAN Ekaterinodar

COSSACKS

STAVROPOL

Ca

Sevastopol

Stavropol

sp

S e a

n

C

A

a

S U S

Se

The provinces of European Russia

C A U

ia

B l a c k

Part I R USSIA’S N OBLE E STATE ( S OSLOVIE )

Chapter 1 R U S SIA N S O C I E T Y A N D N O B I L I T Y F R OM 1 8 0 1

This opening section, Part I, sets the historical context of the Russian nobility in the age of Alexander I and identifies a number of key themes and problems which will be explored in subsequent chapters. Specifically, it seeks to gauge the nobility’s own sense of place within the framework of Russia’s social and political life and to suggest some of the principal sources of the estate’s social prestige, with particular focus on the extent to which this depended on proximity to Alexander I’s court and the institutions of his government.

The nobility’s privileges and legal status Developments in the eighteenth century Definitions of the Russian nobility and nobleman (dvorianstvo/dvorianin) have tended to be elusive and ambiguous. A late-nineteenth-century attempt suggested the terms represented concepts ‘felt rather than recognised’, implying something select, privileged and different from the rest of the population. Etymologically the terms suggest proximity to the court (dvor) either by descent or through service to it.1 One of Peter the Great’s reforms (1722) established the Senate Office of Chief Herald (gerol’d-meister) to supervise the nobility’s education and keep its registers, to scrutinize applicants’ credentials and to recruit them to state service. Despite the efforts of the Chief Herald, however, his office was still complaining about the lack of a complete register of nobles five years into the reign of Catherine the Great (1767). It requested a precise ruling on whether the qualifications for noble status should consist of service rank, possession of an estate, or both. Even so, a century after the office’s establishment, a survey revealed that in some provinces many were accepted to the noble estate (dvorianskoe soslovie) without the slightest right to belong to it.2 Noblemen, ideally owners of both land and serfs, were accorded their legal status as the main buttress of the tsarist system by two key eighteenth-century legislative acts: Peter the Great’s 1722 Table of Ranks (Tabel’ o rangakh) and Catherine the Great’s 1785 Charter to the Nobility. The former regulated fourteen ranks in the military and civil services, and at court, up until 1917. All fourteen military and

4

The Russian Nobility in the Age of Alexander I

naval ranks and the first eight civil and court ranks brought exemption from the poll tax and the right to own serfs. Ranks in the Guards were two higher than those in the army generally; thus a Guards captain was seventh rank (chin).3 The Petrine original (and subsequent legislation under his successors) continued to recognize certain forms of precedence, such as military ranks over their civilian equivalents and for those from princely bloodlines over other nobles of equivalent rank. The impact of Peter’s groundbreaking initiative, introduced three years before his death in 1725, was to prove much greater on the lower echelons of the service class than at its apex. As Richard Pipes has shown, analysis of the composition of the top four ranks, the so-called generalitet, reveals that five years after Peter’s death, 93 per cent of its 179 members still derived from 13 of the 22 families, the Dolgorukiis, the Sheremet’evs and the Golitsyns among them, which had held similarly high office in Muscovite Russia. Otherwise, particularly between the fourteenth and tenth grades, great changes ensued. It was here that the Table of Ranks achieved a significant broadening of the social base of the service class, as well as its impressive numerical increase. This was due to the promotion of commoners to officer rank in the expanding military establishment, the conferment of rank on holders of lower administrative posts in the sixty provinces of the Russian Empire and the ennoblement of landowners in the empire’s borderlands in Ukraine, the Tatar regions on the Volga and the newly acquired Baltic provinces.4 Catherine’s 1785 Charter identified six categories of nobility which were subsequently enshrined in Nicholas I’s 1832 Consolidated Statutes. These were (1)  nobility granted by the sovereign, or ‘real nobility’, (2)  nobility achieved by reaching commissioned officer rank (rank fourteen) in military service, (3) nobility achieved by promotion to rank eight in civil service, (4)  nobility derived from membership in foreign noble families, (5)  titled (Russian) noble families and (6) ancient well-born (untitled Russian) noble families.5 Catherine’s 1785 Charter and Peter III’s 1762 manifesto, which effectively freed the nobility from the obligation of serving the state, together represent the legislative acts on which the eighteenth-century Russian nobility’s ‘Golden Age’ was founded. However, despite the 1762 act, paid state service would remain for many noblemen the main source, in some cases, the sole source of income and security. But, as Isabel de Madariaga points out, there is no obvious way of measuring precisely the psychological impact on the nobility of their new freedom: Historians have not tired of pointing out that in spite of the manifesto, the nobility continued to serve. But there is a great difference between being compelled to serve and choosing to serve. In this respect the Russian noble was at last on a par with the gentry and nobility of other countries. If his social status in Russia still depended on his chin [rank], his social status abroad depended more on title, wealth and even personality. The Russian noble was no longer ‘enserfed’ to the state.6

Catherine’s 1785 act had also created the provincial and district assemblies of the nobility as corporate estate organizations, while the 1775 provincial government

Russian Society and Nobility from 1801

5

reform act had given the nobility the right to elect from among their peers provincial police and court officials. It meant that potentially the noblemanlandowner’s authority now extended from his estate to the province beyond its boundaries, though his typical reluctance to exercise it would become problematic for Catherine and her successors well into the nineteenth century.7 Nevertheless, it was the 1785 Charter which would effectively underpin the legal position of the nobility during Alexander I’s reign. It was to be modified by only four ukazy which related mostly to the status of the marshal (predvoditel’) of the nobility.8 An important aspect of this era was the increasing Westernization (Europeanization) of Russia’s social and political structure, whereby the impact of political power on Russian life began to be played out to a significant extent under the influence of Western European patterns. The Russian historian Boris Mironov argues that this tendency, accelerated further by the increasing number of Western Europeans entering Russian service, was reflected in the transformation of the nobility into a legal estate, largely as a result of the 1785 Charter: 1) it gave legal underpinning to the nobility’s rights; 2)  these rights were hereditary and unconditional; 3)  the nobility enjoyed class (soslovnyi) organisation in the form of district and provincial noble assemblies; 4)  it acquired class consciousness and mentality; 5) the nobility had the right to selfregulation and participation in local government; 6) it had the external signs of noble membership9

There is no question that Western influences were reflected also in the continued development of the noble estate, which was turning from a service class to a noble and privileged estate, just as the feudal estate in the West had been from the outset.10 Indeed, from the outset, in the persuasive view of Michael Confino, the emergence of noble estates in the West as in Russia can be attributed to a type of reward from the ruler for service rendered to him or her. The Russian nobility was pre-eminently a service nobility (sluzhiloe dvorianstvo), with a corresponding service mentality but, as in the West, an overarching ethos of honour combined with a highly developed sense of lineage and inheritance as the typically salient features of the social elite.11 Even so, while the Petrine reforms, specifically the 1722 Table of Ranks, had vested increasing social power in the nobility, which provided the officer corps for the army, and enjoyed outright ownership of enserfed peasants, it did so at the expense of any meaningful political power. This continued to reside exclusively in the autocracy and its growing bureaucracy. Consequently, as Martin Malia has rightly noted, well into the nineteenth century, Russia ‘was almost without a developed civil society and “intermediate” public bodies between the state and service gentry, on the one hand, and the sullen peasant mass, on the other’.12 The 1722 reform also enshrined an important stratification of the nobility into ‘personal’ (lichnoe), for those who achieved only the ninth of the fourteen ranks, and ‘hereditary’ (potomstvennoe) for those who achieved the fourteenth rank and above in military service, and the eighth in civilian service. Effectively, therefore,

6

The Russian Nobility in the Age of Alexander I

the Table of Ranks can be said to have failed to eliminate the pre-eminence of the principle of birth-right and, to cite Confino, institutionalized a distinction of honor and prestige in favour of the hereditary nobility and, paradoxically, acknowledged the privileges stemming from birth and lineage that this same Table of Ranks was supposed to abolish and replace with the ‘service, fountain of all distinction’.13

The collective deference of the Russian nobility to authority was a product both of its passivity and obduracy. It was a combination which meant that, historically, deference was not always unalloyed or guaranteed, as the involvement of highly placed noblemen in the assassinations of both Peter III (1762) and Paul I (1801) so clearly demonstrated. The Table of Ranks was a generally successful attempt to create an entirely new service nobility, with the possibility open to the wider community – but excluding serfs  – of qualifying for automatic ennoblement and membership of the estate (soslovie). Crucially, it created a social hierarchy to which individual noblemen attached considerable importance since their personal status was now defined preeminently by rank (chin). In the following decades, the nobility sought to consolidate its privileged position, especially in relation to the throne and its rights of ownership of both land and peasants. It thereby achieved its ‘Golden Age’ with emancipation from obligatory service in 1762, followed by confirmation of all its rights and privileges in 1785. After 1762, however, and despite the freedom granted then from obligatory service, noblemen continued by and large to commit to careers in state service. This was no doubt partly for financial reasons, but the tendency may also be explained by the fact that by the second half of the eighteenth century the nobility had come to identify itself increasingly with the state and its needs. On the other hand, when under Catherine II the office of marshal of the nobility was established and noble assemblies set up on an electoral basis, the requirement to participate in them was seen by the nobility as yet another form of state service which many sought to avoid, despite the prestige and financial security such participation might bring. Matters did not improve in Alexander I’s reign, when the nobility had to be compelled to stand for election to their corporate organizations which were, given their collective neglect of them, increasingly staffed by professional bureaucrats. Paradoxically, however, without any official sanction from the government, noble culture was developing in a variety of new ways on country estates, city salons, in friendship circles, Masonic lodges and unofficial publications. The nobility’s own view of what form allegiance to authority might take was clearly evolving.14

The impact of Alexander I’s accession From the moment of Emperor Alexander I’s eagerly awaited and widely welcomed accession in 1801, political and social stability in Russia would depend crucially, as

Russian Society and Nobility from 1801

7

it had also throughout the eighteenth century, on the maintenance of a dependable working relationship between the ruler and the nobility. The empire’s most privileged estate had become accustomed to its guaranteed status and prerogatives vis-à-vis the throne. However, while these had been in jeopardy during the brief reign of Alexander’s father, the unpredictable Emperor Paul I, the nobility now confidently expected the new emperor to reaffirm them. As anticipated, on 2 April 1801, in one of the earliest actions of his reign, Alexander published a manifesto on the restoration of the Charter to the Nobility. It returned to the estate all those rights and privileges originally granted by Catherine but largely withheld by Paul. These included the right to hold elections for noble assemblies.15 Not only the nobles’ personal rights but also their corporate rights were restored and broadened in Alexander’s reign. For example, the nobility was once again entitled to elect from its ranks members of the estate to serve as officials in district and local courts.16 However, because Alexander I believed that privilege should be a function not merely of social status but also of personal qualities, he endorsed his grandmother’s 1785 Charter with some reservations.17 Thus, while confirming the nobles’ rights and privileges as enshrined there, Alexander nevertheless insisted that ‘it was against his will that he had revived the Charter to the Nobility because of its exclusive rights, which he had always found repugnant’, as he put it to his young friends on the Unofficial Committee on 27 July 1801.18 As it was, the weakness of the nobles and their humiliating inability to uphold the privileges which they had been granted in the Charter had already been exposed.19 Indeed, John Gooding has described the Russian nobleman of this period as ‘a mere lackey’ in comparison with his Western counterpart, who had gained absolute rights of ownership to his landholdings, and from which he derived ‘both wealth and political clout’.20 Catherine’s Charter had given the noble class some corporate organization and forms, but, as Marc Raeff correctly points out, it neither eliminated the primacy of state service nor instituted the nobility’s genuine autonomy. The security of person and property, granted by Catherine II, remained unstable towards the end of the eighteenth century, as the reign of Paul I demonstrated. A court order could deprive an individual of noble status along with all its accompanying privileges, thereby exposing him to the courts and their endemic corruption. Although Alexander I  did much to restore this security which was largely preserved throughout the first half of the nineteenth century, it nevertheless remained vulnerable, quite apart from his personal whim, to the pre-eminence of the central administrative apparatus brought about by his own institutional reforms.21 Despite the rights and privileges Russian nobles enjoyed as the empire’s privileged estate, they ultimately had no real guarantee of security of person and property. A recent commentator has pointed out that the earliest legal guarantees against arbitrary search and arrest came only with the 1864 judicial reform. Until then, both in the eighteenth century and well into the nineteenth, wealthy and politically powerful members of the aristocracy regularly suffered personal disgrace and the confiscation of estates at the whim of the autocrat.22 Some examples of the consequences of the absence of the principle of personal inviolability for

8

The Russian Nobility in the Age of Alexander I

individual noblemen at the hands of Alexander I will be considered in the next chapter. After all, as Elena Marasinova rightly suggests, ‘it is evident that without some analysis of the consequences of the ruler’s authority (vlast’) on the motivation of the individual nobleman’s personality, it is impossible to construct a complete picture of the socio-political development of Russia in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries’.23 To summarize, the main privileges enjoyed by the hereditary nobility in the age of Alexander I  were the following:  freedom from service and privileged access to military and civil service, and hence to rank; freedom from personal taxes; freedom from corporal punishment; inviolability of noble status, except following trial by peers and subject to the tsar’s confirmation; and, finally, the right to own estates (votchiny) and hence serfs.24 This latter right was crucial. During the eighteenth and on into the nineteenth centuries the property rights of the nobility increased to include not only land but also the subsoil (nedr), forests, rural and urban factories and other buildings.25 Personal nobility carried with it all the rights of hereditary nobility, except the right to own populated estates (i.e. with serfs), to membership of provincial and district noble society or to participate in noble elections, as affirmed by a law of 11 June 1814. By definition, personal status was open to all low-born civil servants and military personnel on the fourteenth grade of the Table of Ranks but could not be handed down.26

Corporate identity and social cohesion Once Peter the Great had established the service nobility, state service became and would remain indefinitely the raison d’être of the Russian nobility. In the emphatic view of one Russian commentator, not to serve was considered shameful. This was understood both by the owner of several thousand serfs and the poor, small landowning nobleman alike. Neither could envisage life without service, which became quite simply the keystone of the value system and honour code of the nobility, and was especially true in the case of the leading noble families.27 In lower echelons of the nobility decisions taken about service were based on economic circumstances and financial considerations. Many began to argue that there were other ways to render service other than through military or civil service, notably through estate management.28 The entry in the 1904 Russian Biographical Dictionary on one young nobleman refers to the mentality instilled in him at the end of the eighteenth century, which was absolutely typical: ‘His upbringing in the circle of his old noble family imbued in him from his childhood a love for his country and a sense of obligation to which he remained true for the duration of his long military service.’29 The entry in question refers to General I. V. Sabaneev (1772–1829) who was among the most outstanding Russian commanders in the Patriotic War and a favourite of Alexander I. Not unusually, Sabaneev’s outlook was seemingly uncomplicated by the doubts and ambivalent attitudes which clearly affected some of his acquaintances and

Russian Society and Nobility from 1801

9

comrades-in-arms, as the events of 14 December 1825 were to show. It is a theme to which we shall be returning later in this study.30 I. B. Pestel’, a former governor of Siberia, and who, as the father of a leading Decembrist was to be both horrified and humiliated by the arrest and subsequent execution of his son, Pavel, unswervingly shared Sabaneev’s absolute loyalty to the regime and the same sense of his own place within it. Indeed, for Ivan Borisovich the duty of service to the sovereign had the religious significance of a Christian and moral duty as well.31 Nevertheless, despite such examples and the unequivocal view of Semyon Ekshtut cited above, we shall see later in this chapter, and particularly in chapter 5, the considerable challenge to central government posed by a widespread reluctance on the part of many provincial noblemen to stand for election to the posts on which effective local administration depended. Perhaps the most significant long-term consequence of Peter’s 1722 reform was, then, a crucial influx into the ranks of the nobility of a service class which would gradually change the composition and character of an estate which had evolved over many generations. Its impact caused Russia’s national poet Alexander Pushkin to lament what he termed ‘the destruction of the nobility by ranks (unichtozhenie dvorianstva chinami)’: If the nobility can be accessed by members of other estates, as from one rank to another, and not by exclusive will of the tsar, but as a condition of service, then soon the nobility will not exist or – and this comes to the same thing -everyone will be a nobleman.

Twenty years earlier the same point had been made by Count Joseph de Maistre, the ambassador to Russia of King Victor-Emmanuel I of Sardinia, who declared on the basis of fifteen years’ observation of Alexander I’s court: ‘The nobles in the true meaning of the term as an estate are being virtually obliterated by the system of ranks.’ Pushkin took the uncompromising view that the gradual destruction of the foundations of the nobility since 1722 had led first to the ‘illegal’ accession to the throne of Catherine II and ultimately to the events of 14 December 1825.32 Nevertheless, despite Pushkin’s pessimism, it was actually from the ranks of the service nobility that there emerged in the reign of Alexander I the first signs of a ‘civil society’: it was largely noblemen, best placed by their material and social circumstances, who started to give critical attention to public issues and to discuss them in the highly fashionable Masonic lodges (at least until their closure in 1822), as well as in journals and books, literary circles (kruzhki) and salons. With this development there went a growing expectation, even an assumption, that opinions expressed by civil society in the various arenas available to it would be duly taken into account by its rulers.33 What is much harder to gauge is the degree to which emergent civil society (and the nobility as a whole) shared any sense of corporate identity and social solidarity. It is not surprising to find that opinions are divided on this issue. The Russian historian Pavel Miliukov was among those to see in the nobility’s participation in eighteenth-century palace coups its main source of an identifiable

10

The Russian Nobility in the Age of Alexander I

corporate spirit and a sense of its own power which, he claims, extended well into the nineteenth century.34 John LeDonne similarly asserts that as part of the ruling class, the nobility always had some form of corporate organization which served the dual purpose of transmitting orders from above downwards and petitions from below upwards, as well as providing the nobility with local leadership.35 The role of Catherine’s provincial government reform was important in this regard, as it provided the nobility with a forum during sessions of the provincial assemblies which facilitated intermingling and interaction across ranks, and hence the development of a sense of corporate solidarity and common interests. Others, however, question the applicability of any notion of a sense of shared corporate mentality and pride, given the inescapable context of the low cultural level of much of the provincial nobility.36 A recent study of the question cites the view of L.  V. Milov who, taking a different approach, ascribes a far stronger corporate sense among the nobilities of Western Europe to the inherent stability of its landholding tradition. In Russia, on the other hand, the fragmentation of estates which were then quickly passed from one proprietor to another and the incompatibility of the entail landholding principle (printsip maiorata) with the particular circumstances obtaining in Russia were all factors which, in his view, prevented the emergence of a Russian landowning aristocracy in the Western sense of the term.37 It is certainly the case that such corporate estate organizations as existed in Russia were generally very weak. Even well-established and functioning noble organizations affected little more than half of the hereditary nobility, while ‘personal nobles’ or life peers (lichnye dvoriane) had no corporations at all.38 Similarly, another Russian commentator ascribes the nobility’s ‘low level of estate consciousness’ and ‘political infantilism’ in Alexander I’s reign both to its dependence on state service (and the status and prestige that came with it) and also to an acute awareness of the individual’s dependence on the emperor, along with the lack of any real political capacity to challenge the aristocratic elite’s monopolistic hold on its privileged position.39 Conversely, in an article devoted to precisely this issue, S. S. Mints claims that the nobles’ sense of their corporate identity finds corroboration in numerous memoirs of the period. He cites as examples those of M.  P. Leontiev and V.  S. Khvostov. This sense of ‘class-estate corporate identity’ (splochennost’ klassasosloviia) apparently derived from the confidence of every serving nobleman in his direct participation in state governance. Mints maintains that even a cursory glance at selected memoirs of the last third of the eighteenth and first third of the nineteenth centuries yields up rich material about the extent of the nobility’s sense of its corporate ethos. At the same time, he acknowledges, they also reveal the high degree of the nobility’s trust in autocracy.40 It was, however, a trust that did not dependably translate into actual and willing service since, while the power of the noble landlord extended beyond his estates to the province as a whole, the nobles proved generally reluctant to exercise their electoral privilege. In fact, widespread evasion of elective service would become a major problem in Alexander’s reign and only served to aggravate the government’s difficulties in harnessing the nobility to the task of state administration. This

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phenomenon had also been a feature of the nobility’s behaviour in Paul’s reign. The notoriously irascible emperor had dealt with it by imposing harsh penalties on offenders. However, Alexander deemed these to be too strict and ordered instead that the noble assemblies themselves should decide on appropriate punishments. It was a well-meaning strategy but it proved almost wholly ineffective.41 In this regard General Count A. A. Zakrevskii (1783–1865), who was among Alexander’s closest adjutants during the 1813–14 campaigns and from 1823 governor-general of Finland, noted that ‘a nobleman who is comfortably off avoids elective office because it promises nothing but hard work and responsibility’. Such a claim, in N.  I. Iakovkina’s view, suggests that any corporate sense among the Russian nobility in the first half of the nineteenth century must have been poorly developed. This may no doubt be explained by the nobility’s economic position which had a considerable impact on the formation of its social psychology and which in the first half of the nineteenth century was certainly challenging. The predominant barshchina (corvée) system of serfdom, combined with the low standards of arable husbandry and poor productivity brought about a fall in income levels derived from the estates. The financial position of the nobility was further aggravated by steep tax hikes in 1810 and 1812. The result was widespread and growing impoverishment among many noblemen, large numbers of whom did little to help themselves by living way beyond their means, spending unsustainable amounts on improving their country estates and gambling away such fortunes as they may have inherited.42 The fact was that for many, service was an economic necessity as much as a social obligation. One nobleman, I. I. Meshkov, recalled first having to relocate to Penza and then returning to his home town of Saratov in search of a suitable official post, ‘because without service I could not live’. Similarly, his brother left Saratov for Astrakhan to take up a post there. As Meshkov explained, ‘it was impossible for me to manage without a position, as my wife and I had no other way of supporting ourselves apart from my salary’. In the event Meshkov succeeded, as we learn from his memoirs, in earning three times as much a year in private employment than in government service (1,500 roubles as opposed to 500) and in addition enjoyed the services of a coach and horses complete with a coachman. It all suggests he was an unusually resourceful individual.43 To many, the lure of St Petersburg proved irresistible and young noblemen left the provinces in large numbers to seek their living there. This trend, in the historian N. F. Dubrovin’s view, was bad both for the provinces and for St Petersburg since so many young nobles, barely in their teens, abandoned the studying they had only just begun to take up posts there in which they had no real interest. Once installed in the capital they, in the manner of Pushkin’s fictional hero Evgenii Onegin, quickly succumbed to all the amusements that the city had to offer and just as quickly lost any potential use they may have been to society or themselves. Among the sources adduced by Dubrovin for this account is a letter from V. N. Karazin, a favourite of Alexander I early in his reign and the main instigator of Ukraine’s first university at Khar’kov (Kharkiv). In May 1815, he wrote to N. I. Saltykov lamenting the mushrooming bureaucracy and complaining that all that

12

The Russian Nobility in the Age of Alexander I

so many ‘idle and useless people’ did was merely contribute to the rise in the cost of living in St Petersburg, Meanwhile, the city acquired the dubious reputation as the best place in Russia to obtain rank without having to do anything to earn it. ‘It can be stated without fear of contradiction that two-thirds of these officials are utterly useless’, Karazin concludes. Having attained the rank of staff officer, many returned to the provinces, some (however reluctantly) to be elected district marshals of the nobility, never again to leave their estates, where they lived out the rest of their lives in quiet contentment. Others stayed in St Petersburg and impatiently served out the time required to move up to the next rank. The fathers and sons in this category lived in ‘blissful idleness’, spending most of their time in the fashionable English Club and living off the income from their estates. Dubrovin found that the Court Department in particular had on its staff, ‘a scandalous overabundance of complete idlers’. Tsar Alexander I took a very dim view of these people, regarding them as useful only for providing some colour at court events and balls, and for this reason called them ‘floor-polishers’ (polotery).44 Alexander was not alone in his contempt for idle noblemen. A  particularly damning view of the impotence which derived from the estate’s lack of any real cohesion was expressed later in the nineteenth century by an anonymous observer: What was the essence of the nobility’s meaning and significance? . . . An absence of unanimity, a deficit of any collective consciousness of its rights and interests, and a lack of social cohesion. These are the features which mark every page of the class history of Russia.45

In these circumstances and contrary to any expectations, it seemed unlikely that Russia’s progress at this stage of her history would be driven by representatives of the nobility. A  Simbirsk nobleman who owned seven hundred souls, a founder member of the Decembrists’ Northern Society, N.  I. Turgenev, who  – until he left Russia in 1824 on extended leave from his post in the ministry of finance – was among the most independent-minded legal experts in government service, pointed to the estate’s social isolation: It is sad that the isolation of the Russian nobility makes the path to civilisation, already too slow in Russia, even more difficult. For despite everything . . . this privileged estate stands at the head of the nation, and it is mainly from it that some movement forward is to be expected.46

More recently, Marc Raeff pointed out that the nobility as a class suffered from what he calls ‘the basic Russian syndrome:  amorphous, fluid, vague and illdeveloped, weak institutions and social structures’. He concedes that the embryonic beginnings of such structures did at times appear, and some even reached early stages of development, but none ever came to full maturity and fruition. Raeff identifies several subgroups of the nobility, all of which were separated out by their dependence on the autocrat’s pleasure: the higher from the lower officials, the

Russian Society and Nobility from 1801

13

nobles by birth from those by service, the courtiers from regular officials, the estate and serf owners from those dependent on their talents and service careers, the rich from the poor, the intelligentsia from rank-and-file nobles and professionals, the privately educated from those trained in state schools. Each of these subgroups had its own pattern of relationship to authority and to law, and not one of them could create a consensus for common political (or sociocultural) action.47 Such views find support in the analysis of the Russian social historian, Boris Mironov, who notes that the nobility never experienced the communal organization of public or private life. Each nobleman always lived as an individual and bore individual responsibility for his service. All duties to the state were also fulfilled on an individual basis. The nobility never experienced collective responsibility or collective ownership of land and other property; they owned property individually and disposed of it at their own volition even before their emancipation in 1762, when land was not yet their unconditional private property. Interpersonal relations among nobles were never neighbourly or communal. The nobility of a particular district maintained regular contact with one another, and almost all knew each other personally, inasmuch as visiting each other at least once a year was considered proper. However, such local contacts did not create intimate, emotional bonds but generally remained within the bounds of polite, respectful and formal relationships.48 This pattern of behaviour may be taken as just one example of a systemic lack of cohesion which would inevitably have crucial consequences for the nobility’s capacity as a class to exert political influence of any real significance, at least until the Great Reforms of Alexander II in the 1860s and even beyond. Moreover, the rapid expansion of government institutions from the time of Alexander’s accession found the nobility as a whole inadequately trained and without the professional skills required of civil servants which, unlike them, the children of clerics and seminarians did tend to possess. The latter in turn, having entered state service, found it relatively easy to achieve the rank needed to earn them noble status. This led in consequence to the formation of a significant bureaucrat or service noble class. As a result, there was a diminution during the nineteenth century of that sense of corporate integrity which had been the mark of the eighteenth-century nobility. The wars from 1812 to 1814 would serve to fragment the noble estate still further, though it played a crucially important role in convening militia regiments across Russia. The increase in the numbers of nobles also meant a rise in the number of impoverished noble families who depended for their existence on only a small landholding and very few serfs. The huge variation in the nobility’s financial standing is discussed in the next chapter. Immersed in mysticism, state service and amusements, the nobility increasingly lost touch with its own class interests and with the provinces. The closer the nobility allied itself through state service with the government, the less it identified itself with the noble estate to which the government was in any case at best indifferent and at worst ill-disposed. In the provinces, too, there was a shift away from class interests to working for the government as the nobles who lived there became

14

The Russian Nobility in the Age of Alexander I

increasingly fragmented, having very little to do with each other, much less with matters of corporate or estate interest. Only in Moscow was there some continued sense of a shared corporate identity among the nobility seeking to protect and further its estate interests. Typically, these were older, more conservative nobles dating from Catherine’s reign, who were ill at ease with new ideas and trends which they saw as a threat to the privileges of their estate. In general during this period, the independence and the self-reliance of the nobility and its capacity to administer its own corporate affairs gradually disappeared as the estate increasingly came under the direct administration of the government.49 And so the corporate identity of the nobility weakened during Alexander’s reign as its concerns with class and estate matters were overtaken by personal ambitions of rank and state service. At the same time, the focus of the noble assemblies shifted from the protection of the estate’s class interests to an increasing preoccupation with administrative duties and functions, and the election of officials to various posts. It seems fair to conclude, therefore, that neither in terms of provenance, property, nor social status could the nobility of the nineteenth century truly be said to represent an integral corporation.50

Chapter 2 D E F I N I T IO N S O F T H E N O B I L I T Y ’ S S TA N D I N G

Social status and state service The Russian nobility traditionally set itself apart from other estates both by culture and language. To cite the caustic assessment of Nikolai Turgenev, The Russian nobility distinguishes itself from other estates not only through its numerous advantages, but also by its appearance and dress; and, apart from this, as though it were not already different enough, it – at least the higher nobility – rejects its native language and normally makes use of a foreign language even in private and family life.1

In the pages of his journal, ‘The Russian Herald’ (Russkii vestnik), which he started to publish in 1808, S. N. Glinka was already sounding a warning note about the artificial distinctiveness of the Russian nobility, seeing it as both dangerous and tragic: In the depths of the Fatherland there has emerged a society of people which differs from all the other estates by dress, morality and custom. It has constituted in Russia, as it were, a foreign zone (oblast’ inoplemennaia). And who are the members of this society? They are the majority of landowners and rich people.2

In any case, the position of the nobility began to change during the first quarter of the nineteenth century as the emergent merchant class came to greater prominence with the development of factory-based industry. Indeed, many noblemen became entrepreneurs themselves. One study notes that by the year 1813–14, nobles owned 64 per cent of mines, 78 per cent of woolen cloth factories, 60 per cent of paper mills, 66 per cent of crystal and glass works, and 80 per cent of potash works.3 A recent study shows that numerically the Russian nobility expanded enormously in the first half of the nineteenth century. At the end of the eighteenth century it numbered around 500,000 men and women. Fifty years later this figure had almost doubled:  in the European part of Russia alone there were 609,973 hereditary and 276,809 life nobles to which may be added 17,848 in Siberia and

16

The Russian Nobility in the Age of Alexander I

13,000 in the Caucasus, making a grand total of around 918,000.4 In fact, the nobility expanded more rapidly than any other social group in imperial Russia and was demographically the most dynamic estate of all. It grew 4.3 times over the 76-year period between 1782 and 1858, whereas the total population merely doubled and the peasantry even somewhat less than that. More than a third of the total figure cited above comprised Polish szlachcice, 323,000 of whom had come under Russian rule as a result of Catherine the Great’s partitions. The empire also contained Ukrainian Cossack ‘elders’, Baltic barons, Georgian princes as well as Turco-Tatar, German and other non-Russian nobles, such as the murzy of Orenburg province. The remarkable diversity of the nobility in the Russian Empire has led one authority to conclude that ‘no other nobility was so open to the inflow of aliens or so lacking in deep native roots’.5 Male nobles in the Russian Empire numbered just over 429,000 in 1816 and accounted for approximately 2 per cent of the total population, making the Russian nobility proportionally larger than the nobility in Sweden or France, though smaller than in Poland or Hungary, for example.6 This should be seen in the context of a total population figure for the Russian Empire in 1800 of 40 million, compared to 29 million in France, 20 million in the Habsburg Empire and 16 million in the British Isles. In Russia proper the 1816 census reported a total of 96,600 noble males, constituting a tiny 0.83  per cent of the total population. Even so, this represents a sizeable 56 per cent increase on the total of 54,000 cited for the 1770s, some forty years earlier. Noblemen were found in all of the thirty-seven provinces (gubernii) constituting Russia proper but were heavily concentrated in those of the two capitals and in Smolensk province, accounting in 1816 for 44.8 per cent of the total. In the same year, the average across the twenty-six provinces of central Russia was 2,317, showing an impressive 63.5 per cent increase on the figure of 1,473 nobles per province for 1782. The category of nobles-for-life (lichnye dvoriane) created by Catherine the Great’s 1785 Charter grew so fast during Alexander’s reign that by 1816 its numbers even exceeded those of the hereditary nobility, with 48,854 life nobles as against 47,746 hereditary nobles. Furthermore, life nobles were concentrated in the provinces of St Petersburg (39.2%) and Moscow (12.5%), such that more than half of them lived in the provinces of the two capitals against 8.4 per cent of the hereditary nobles.7 By 1800, about half the population of Russia was made up of serfs, owned by some 400,000 nobles whose powers were comparable to those of American slave owners or English lords of the manor.8 It has rightly been stressed that a fundamental point about the hereditary nobility throughout its history was that it was a relatively small group when one considers the governing, modernizing and civilizing role which the state expected it to play in Russian government and society.9 There was some residual disdain on the part of the hereditary nobility towards the ‘new’ post-Petrine service (life) nobles. Early in the nineteenth century, for example, at a meeting of Alexander I’s Unofficial Committee, Count P. A. Stroganov commented on the state of the Russian nobility:

Definitions of the Nobility’s Standing

17

What is our nobility? Our nobility consists of many people who have become nobles only as a result of service without having received any education, whose every thought is directed to grasping nothing beyond the power of the emperor…It is the most ignorant, the most useless estate.10

In his still useful work on life in Russia at the beginning of the nineteenth century, N.  F. Dubrovin claimed that of all the rights and prerogatives enjoyed by the nobility, the one that attracted them most (apart from their exclusive right to own serfs) was freedom from service. He identified three categories of nobleman in Alexander’s reign:  first, a large number of landowners who lived in a state of complete ignorance; second, those who were half-educated, but had no real understanding of Russia and knew the names of hardly any provincial towns; and, third, those who were well-educated but who kept to themselves, avoiding all contact with the rest of Russian society. In an echo of Count Stroganov, Dubrovin’s deeply pessimistic view expressed almost a century later leads him to conclude that in any European society the nobility would have occupied a leading place and played an important role. But unfortunately in Russia, the nobility generally consisted of ‘ineffectual, lazy shirkers’, who quarrelled among themselves and were not equipped for any serious occupation, much less to be of any use to the state.11 A corrective to this bleak assessment is provided by Marc Raeff, who finds that after 1801 social life was increasingly conducted out of the public gaze and behind closed doors, as it moved from ‘official settings’ to private associations, such as the literary salons of the ‘learned republic’, Arzamas among them, and the English clubs in St Petersburg and Moscow. These served as meeting places for those with higher intellectual ambitions where members could exchange information and share ideas about current developments in literature and the arts. Masonic lodges similarly became discreet meeting places for members of the elite, providing them with a relatively secure environment for active debate, as well as criticism of the regime’s social and ethical character.12 There was nevertheless an understanding on the part of some contemporary noblemen of the potentially important relationship between the nobility and the state. For example, D. P. Troshchinskii, marshal of the nobility in the provinces of Kiev and Poltava, who was to serve as minister of justice from 1814 to 1817, argued that it was only through state service that the nobility could hope to acquire proper political significance and ‘civil existence’. Precisely in this spirit, on his estates the nobleman acted partly as an agent of the government, raising taxes and recruits for the army, and maintaining social order. As N. M. Karamzin put it, on his estate the nobleman should be a ‘governor-general in miniature’ and a ‘hereditary chief of police’.13 After all, in Troshchinskii’s view, ‘there were only two classes in Russia: the governing and the governed, of whom the former could do everything and the latter nothing’. The historian S. A. Korf enthusiastically endorsed Troshchinskii’s pithy definition with the remark: ‘It would be impossible to describe the position of the nobility any more precisely than this!’14 According to Dominic Lieven, the Russian elites were a very specific variation on the European theme, in that their position vis-à-vis the crown was much weaker than in most of the rest of Europe.

18

The Russian Nobility in the Age of Alexander I

Lieven concludes that the absence of feudal traditions, or at least of traditions which survived into the eighteenth century, is often (and correctly) cited as one of the key weaknesses of the Russian aristocracy.15 As suggested above, the service ethic remained very important after the 1762 watershed well into the middle of the nineteenth century. Wealthy young nobles typically served some years in the army (or more rarely, the bureaucracy) before retiring into a private life of marriage and estate management.16 As LeDonne has pointed out, the trend was reinforced by Alexander’s policy of making access to the field (stroevoi) officer corps – as distinct from the supply services – exclusively the prerogative of those of noble origin: A nobleman thus served primarily in the army, where he exercised unconditional power over noble subordinates and peasant soldiers; or he served in the civilian apparatus, where he exercised a similar power over the dependent population; or remained on his estate, where his power over his serfs was nearly absolute.17

The government set up schools for the children of the nobility to enable them in their turn to serve the state more effectively than their fathers had been equipped to. This was despite the express reference in the 1762 manifesto to the nobility’s compulsory schooling, a provision which was simply never implemented. The new provision in Alexander’s reign was a recognition of the major problem posed by the shortage of adequately educated noblemen to meet the needs of government service. This seemingly intractable challenge had for some years obliged the government to turn to the seminaries from where it recruited their typically middle-class, well-educated and hard-working alumni. Among the most celebrated of these was M. M. Speranskii. It was a policy that was bound to impact on the structure of the noble estate by bringing about what the contemporary commentator and memoirist F. F. Vigel’ identified as a new and rapidly expanding bureaucrat class.18 As we have noted, Alexander I held that personal qualities should determine social standing. In his view, those who were of use to the fatherland were worth more than those who idled their lives away, and he considered that state service should be competitive. Korf cites the example of Alexander’s refusal after 1812 to agree to honour the nobility over and above the military in his victory manifesto, insisting that the military took precedence, as he remained unsympathetic towards the privileged and inert aristocracy.19 Admiral A. S. Shishkov, who was responsible for drafting the victory manifesto, has left an interesting account of this episode. He recalled that the tsar, on hearing the first draft read out to him, asked Shishkov, ‘with some severity’, why he had placed the nobility above the military. Shishkov replied that the nobility was ‘the state’s first estate’ which, after all, provided the military with its officer corps. Alexander interrupted Shishkov and angrily commanded him to reverse the order in the manifesto. Next day, Shishkov brought Alexander the duly corrected draft for signature and read it out to him again. But this time, Alexander vehemently objected to the description of the landlord-peasant relationship as ‘mutually beneficial’, calling it ‘unacceptable and

Definitions of the Nobility’s Standing

19

incorrect’. Cutting Shishkov short, the tsar angrily deleted the offending phrase under the watchful eye of the silent grand vizier, A.  A. Arakcheev. Shishkov concluded his account with the remark that Alexander’s alienation ‘from everything Russian’ was the fault of the ‘Frenchman La Harpe’ and the other young members of his entourage ‘educated by the French’.20 In Dubrovin’s view, Speranskii correctly identified the nobility’s chief shortcomings:  its inertia, ignorance and indifference to education. As the statesman famously commented, ‘I find only two estates in Russia: the slaves of the higher powers and the slaves of the landowners.’ To this Dubrovin added that what the dvoriane really feared was the loss of their privileges and advantages.21 Speranskii also correctly recognized that the provincial nobility was under the control of the governors and therefore proved incapable of regulating their own affairs with any degree of independence. He found it came down to a lack of adequate education. Although enlightened and liberal ideas made some inroads into Russian society in both capitals in the early nineteenth century, they impacted on only a minority. Most of the nobility, in Korf ’s emphatic view, especially in the provinces, continued to wallow in ignorance. Or as F. F. Vigel’ put it in his typically unsparing way, ‘Anyone who knows Russia also knows on what shaky foundations our so-called aristocracy rested.’22 However, Vigel’’s biographer, S.  Ia. Shtraikh, justifiably describes him as an ‘inveterate hater of the hereditary aristocracy’. Vigel’ had personal reasons for his frequently reiterated resentment against wealthy and well-placed members of the nobility, blaming them – Speranskii above all – for the shortcomings of his own career. Vigel’ was not alone in his contempt for the nobility. His view was shared by his erstwhile patron at the foreign affairs ministry, F.  V. Rostopchin, and  – as we shall see  – robustly expressed in a letter to the tsar.23 By way of contrast, Alexander Pushkin took every opportunity to declare his pride in his status as hereditary nobleman. He was therefore unimpressed by the famous line of verse of the Decembrist poet K. F. Ryleev, ‘I am not a poet, but a citizen’ (Ia ne poet, a grazhdanin), and equally delighted by P. A. Viazemskii’s witty parody of it, ‘I am not a poet, but a nobleman’ (Ia ne poet, a dvorianin). And in a letter to Ryleev, Pushkin wrote, ‘You are angry that I am vain about my 600-year-old nobility (N.B. My nobility is older than that).’24 In St Petersburg, noble society split into two classes: the high aristocracy and the various bureaucrat-noblemen who staffed the numerous chancelleries. As the bureaucrat class grew, the nobility lost interest in matters pertaining to their estate, and with it went the significance of its effective administration. More and more noblemen left the provinces, and local interests were neglected or abandoned altogether. But rather than contributing to progress in the capitals, noblemen collectively kicked their heels in the ministerial chancelleries. Otherwise, they passed their days aimlessly in the exacting military parades which were such a distinctive feature of everyday life in Alexander’s reign, inherited from his father’s strict regime at Gatchina. Service in the capitals completely enervated the nobility which increasingly identified itself with the mushrooming bureaucracy. Korf views the overwhelming inertia and passivity of the nobility as qualities valued

20

The Russian Nobility in the Age of Alexander I

as guarantees of social and political stability by N. M Karamzin and other leading conservatives but lamented by Speranskii and those who sought Russia’s progress.25 A contemporary British observer, Robert Pinkerton, who lived in Moscow in 1810 and 1811 in the service of the Bible Society, remarked that all classes of the nobles are too fond of the idle and corrupting pursuits, to which men of fortune and pleasure in other European countries are addicted – plays, balls, masquerades, parties of pleasure, and gambling; for they take little pleasure in useful employment; and to judge from their acts, one would believe that many of them consider life granted for no other purpose than the giving and receiving of entertainments.26

Although social and professional advancement in the service of the tsar continued to be the traditional aspiration of the Russian nobility, in the reign of Alexander I  such ambitions were pursued in the context of the rapid development of a new class of bureaucrats, itself an immediate consequence of the ministries the tsar established at the start of his reign. In their pursuit of rank, upwardly mobile noblemen were inevitably drawn into this burgeoning bureaucracy. However, all Alexander’s efforts to mobilize the nobility in order to ameliorate the administration of the provinces and to enhance their quality of life were unavailing. As in Catherine’s reign, the nobility was simply not equal to the task and failed to live up to the monarch’s hopes. Nevertheless, the bureaucracy was the only component of the nobility capable of furnishing the tsar with new forms of political institutions through which to govern. Yet it was this very bureaucracy which so easily and completely absorbed the noble estate, leading to greater centralization of the state to the detriment of the provinces.27 To cite Korf ’s view:  the nobility as a privileged estate was ultimately doomed as, driven by rank and career, it increasingly identified itself with governmental bureaucracy, thereby paving the way for its own demise during the second half of the nineteenth century.28

Wealth, poverty, serfs ‘The Russian nobility is the poorest in the whole wide world.’ So runs the stark observation in an 1803 diary entry of Etienne Dumont, who was born in Geneva in 1759 and was temporarily resident in Russia.29 Some idea of the immense disparity of wealth and social standing among members of the nobility can be gauged from the remark of Nicholas I’s minister of enlightenment from 1828 to 1833, Prince K. A. Lieven: ‘The line of our noble estate extends so indiscernibly that one end touches the steps of the throne while the other is almost lost in the peasantry.’ There were indeed cases of noblemen living at subsistence level in much the same way as their serfs. A government report of 1843 revealed that 9,287 nobles (mostly in the provinces of Smolensk, Riazan’, Simbirsk, Kaluga and Vologda) owned little land, no serfs and enjoyed a lifestyle ‘virtually indistinguishable

Definitions of the Nobility’s Standing

21

from the peasantry’.30 There was clearly little change in the position in the years leading up to the emancipation act of 1861. An analysis of the distribution of serf ownership in 1858–9 reveals that 1,400 of the empire’s wealthiest landowners, constituting 1.4 per cent of all serf-owners, held 3 million serfs, while 79,000 of the poorer ones, or 78 per cent of serf owners, held only 2 million. These figures lead Richard Pipes to conclude that ‘the vast majority of Russian dvoriane [noblemen] at any time in history lived at the bare subsistence level’.31 Yet this did not stop them continuing to enjoy noble status. The author of a recent study of Russia’s social estates rightly observes that ‘the very commonplaceness of the image of the impoverished Russian noble shows the way that nobility was not a soslovie to be exited, regardless of significant economic downward mobility’.32 The enormous variation in serf ownership among the landed gentry in Russia was not new. Figures for late-eighteenth-century Tambov province show that the four largest holdings were those of L. A. Naryshkin with 8,444 serfs; D. L. Naryshkin with 3,750; Count K. G. Razumovskii who owned 5,750; and Batashov with 2,905. Listed among their neighbours, by way of contrast, are the four smallest:  three owning two serfs, and one landowner who possessed just one.33 Etienne Dumont suggested that one reason for the impoverishment of so many Russian noblemen was that they rarely took the trouble to visit and properly manage their estates. Had they done so, he argued, they could quite easily have increased their income fivefold, even tenfold, thereby improving not only their own situation but also that of their serfs. Instead, they typically spent their summers living in one of their villages, without ever leaving it to take proper stock of the rest of their landholdings. Had foreigners been allowed to buy land in Russia, there would have been ‘nothing easier’ than to achieve a return of 18 per cent on their investment. The clear implication of Dumont’s remark is that, by and large, Russian nobles were just too feckless and lazy to bother, hence the world-beating poverty he ascribed to them.34 His view is amplified by the following observation of N. I. Turgenev, the contemporary chronicler of Russia and the Russians: The noble estate is numerous in Russia. It has some very rich families . . . but there are also many poor ones: there are noblemen living on a plot of land with two or three serf families whom they exploit as only they can . . . In some villages there are noblemen whom you cannot tell apart from peasants either by appearance or by their way of life and work who, nevertheless, without ever leaving hearth and home, carry on owning – by the right exclusive to the nobility – several souls very like themselves.35

Turgenev’s observation in turn finds ready corroboration in an 1805 diary entry made by Ivan Tolchenov, a merchant, about an unexpected encounter in Tver’ province north of the city of Ustiuzhina with some impoverished dvoriane  – ‘nobles scarcely worthy of the name’ – as related by David Ransel: A large number of smallholding nobility live in the vicinity. Some of them not only do not have an education proper to their station but they fail even to

22

The Russian Nobility in the Age of Alexander I perform service. Among them are three brothers by the name of Rozhitnyi who have seven souls between them. They run the post station and themselves ride around on coachman’s boxes wearing gray Russian kaftans and full peasant attire and, to boot, all are young.

Ransel comments, ‘The position of these nobles made quite a contrast . . . with the life [Tolchenov, a merchant] enjoyed in his [home town] Dmitrov.’36 By the second half of Alexander’s reign, and several years after the trauma of 1812, little in rural noble life seems to have changed, to judge at least from the graphic account of a chance encounter with members of the local nobility in the Odoevskii district of Tula province, given in an 1818 diary entry of eighteen-year-old A. A. Tuchkov: On the road we met one of the local landowners. He had five souls and he was on his way to check on the work of his slaves. It was beyond belief that this man was a landowner: a shirt, frockcoat, green cap with a red rim, white hose and peasant boots – such was his attire, his coat unbuttoned on his chest, carrying a stick, and with grey stubble on his chin. It was just as well that my coachman told me he was a landowner (barin) called Afanasii Stepanovich.

Tuchkov was in the area on official business, compiling a topographical and statistical report, and this encounter led him to observe: As far as the landowners themselves were concerned, I  don’t know what to compare them with. This is how they live: they get up early, go off to check their peasants’ work, beat them if it’s poor, then they drink herbal wine (travnik) and raw vodka (sivukha) from any time of day. I have seen some of them at it from early morning, others late or at midday, and everywhere it is not so much vodka (which is expensive) as herbal wine and raw vodka. Women are not excluded from this category of idle rogues and drunkards, but there are indubitably far fewer of them.

Tuchkov then lists ‘the names of all the scoundrels of the Odoevskii district’ and identifies by their initials six men and two women. His view of the continuing social and economic damage inflicted by such members of the nobility, even for a teenager, is unsurprisingly pessimistic: ‘We will never be rid of bad landowners as there are so many of them and most of them live in the direst ignorance. They love to have slaves, being slaves themselves who, far from seeking their own freedom, revel in their ability to oppress others.’37 Tuchkov’s conclusions were based on his observations of those in the sizeable category of melkopomestnye dvoriane (petty noblemen) who owned fewer than one hundred serfs and, even more typically, fewer than twenty. It was this group, as Jerome Blum notes in his classic study on Russian landlords and peasants, that was especially impoverished. Theirs was a constant struggle to make ends meet, such that they had neither the time nor the means to maintain their social status properly and could scarcely afford to leave their ‘petty rural world’,

Definitions of the Nobility’s Standing

23

even when they had the opportunity or incentive to do so. Blum cites the example of a report written in 1857 by a representative of the nobility of Riazan’. It found that 1,700 noble families, or a quarter of all the noble households of that province, were so poor that ‘together with their peasants they form one family, eat at one table and live in one hut’. He concedes that the responsibility for this state of affairs was largely their own: ‘Their stubborn maintenance of the centuries-old custom of dividing their real and personal possessions among their heirs had the inevitable result of fragmenting patrimonies with each successive generation.’ Echoing the contemporary view of Etienne Dumont, Blum judged that their ‘improvidence and profligacy’  – as typified by the disastrous habit of using hard-won loans primarily to support their preferred luxurious lifestyle – was exacerbated by their general lack of interest in finding ways of improving their agriculture operations and thereby achieving a higher return from their landholdings.38 However, the simple fact of the matter was that members of the noble estate derived their significance, wealth and social status not merely from the service they rendered to the throne (and also from their supposed superior cultural level), but crucially from their position as landowners and the number of serfs they owned. The key indicator of wealth in pre-reform Russia was not the amount of land owned but the number of serfs. In fact, from the late eighteenth century, the majority of nobles owned only small numbers of serfs: evidence from 1777 adduced by one specialist shows that 32 per cent of noble landowners possessed fewer than ten serfs and that a further 30 per cent owned between ten and thirty. Only 16 per cent of noble landowners owned more than 100 serfs, thus placing them in the middle category (srednepomestnoe) if they owned up to 500 serfs or the major category (krupnopomestnoe) if they owned more than 500. The majority, who owned fewer than 100 serfs, constituted the category of petty owners (melkopomestnoe). This pattern continued well into the nineteenth century, so that by 1858, 40 per cent of all landowners owned fewer than twenty serfs. It was only the relatively few really big landowners with more than six thousand serfs who were truly rich, and in the eighteenth and first half of the nineteenth century these amounted to no more than 150 families. A  study of Riazan’ province suggests that the petty landowning nobility in particular declined with each passing decade: in 1794 there were 7,800 properties, but sixty years later 6,300, while in 1815 there were 6,400 landowners, but only 5,200 by 1857.39 Furthermore, an ever-growing number of hereditary nobles were not serf owners at all. A striking statistic reveals that of the Russian officers who fought at Borodino in 1812, as many as 77 per cent claimed neither to own estates themselves nor to be heirs to estates.40 Less than a decade after the end of Alexander I’s reign, data pertaining to 1834 reveal that of the 106,000 nobles with fewer than 100 souls, 17,000 had no land at all.41 An indication of the financial difficulties quite typically encountered by the nobility, and the kind of life-style therefore attainable, is provided by the memoirs of S.  I. Mosolov. His military career, thanks to his father’s connection with General P. S. Saltykov in Paul’s reign, got off to an early and promising start, but he was among the many noblemen whose careers and accompanying status fell victim to Paul’s capriciousness. On Alexander’s accession, Mosolov, now

24

The Russian Nobility in the Age of Alexander I

aged 51, successfully petitioned the new tsar, offering his services and requesting restoration of his appropriate military rank (starshinstvo). He was duly awarded the pension, which he had proudly refrained from requesting, and the right to wear the army uniform provided for him for which, Mosolov claims, he later had the opportunity to thank the tsar personally. It is clear, however, that the pension was not sufficient to allow him to reside permanently in Moscow where he had a house on Malaia Dmitrovka but had to live instead in the provincial town of Bronnitsa, 25 kilometres east of Novgorod. Even so, his Moscow house provided him with a modest rental income through billeting military personnel. However, when it required inevitable repairs, Mosolov had no option but to tighten his belt still further, selling his most treasured possessions in order to raise the 900 roubles he needed. These included his dinner service, silver cups, cutlery, chandeliers and even his card table. Thereafter, with his house now restored, he spent the winter in Moscow and the summer on the country estates of various friends – four of whom he names – for anything from a week up to two and half months, calling to mind the obligatory supernumerary resident on the country estates in the tales and plays of Anton Chekhov and Ivan Turgenev.42 There were undoubtedly advantages for the nobility in upholding the tradition of service to the state as it was the source of some financial security and a regular salary. Even so, there were cases where loyal and highly placed servants of the crown fell on remarkably hard times. A poignant illustration of this is the case of the unfortunate Baron G. A. Rozenkampf, who had once been an assistant to N. N. Novosil’tsov and, earlier in Alexander’s reign, was close to two other members of the Unofficial Committee, Count P. A. Stroganov and Prince Adam Czartoryski. Having fallen from favour in the latter part of Alexander’s reign, Rozenkampf died in the reign of Nicholas I (on 16 April 1831) in such poverty that he did not even possess the 100 roubles needed for his funeral. The money was provided by the Ministry of Public Enlightenment. His widow, Baroness Rozenkampf, sold her late husband’s library and their best furniture to pay for the clergy’s post-funeral dinner. She then retired to a small apartment where, according to the conservative pan-Slav historian M. P. Pogodin, she subsequently died of starvation.43 This family tragedy would seem to bear out N. I Turgenev’s claim that ‘those who devote themselves to state service and who therefore abandon their own affairs, mostly die impoverished, burdened by debts’.44 Turgenev’s generalization belies what was in practice a more differentiated situation, in that it depended largely on the size of the patrimony:  the owners of large estates were able to combine their service roles with the proxy management of their estates by stewards (whose competence was notoriously uneven) and thereby benefit from some kind of income stream. It is the well-documented state of chronic indebtedness which is perhaps the quintessential feature of the Russian nobility’s financial landscape throughout its history, the first quarter of the nineteenth century being no exception. Even the owners of the greatest numbers of serfs on the largest estates struggled, but generally failed, to balance their books, and owed what Jerome Blum has described as ‘fantastic sums of money’. Thus, the biggest landowner of all, Count

Definitions of the Nobility’s Standing

25

N.  P. Sheremetev, owed over 2  million roubles by 1800, simply as a result of spending year on year well above his income.45 The origin of his family’s great fortune had been the dowry of 7,000 serfs on the marriage in 1743 of the count’s father, P.  B. Sheremetev, to Varvara Alekseevna, the daughter of the immensely wealthy serf owner A. M. Cherkasskii. The Sheremetevs, along with other hugely rich families such as the Shuvalovs, Razumovskiis and Vorontsovs, spent fortunes on every conceivable luxury, including tapestries, carpets, porcelain and works of art to adorn their great houses, frequently gifted to them or their ancestors by the reigning monarch. Nevertheless, consumerist acquisitiveness was not the only type of large-scale expenditure. N. P. Sheremetev’s indebtedness was aggravated by his altruistic acts of charity. In 1803, for example, in response to the philanthropic pronouncements made by Alexander I in the early years of his reign, he donated 2.5 million roubles in cash and property to good causes. These included notably his construction of a hospital near the Sukharev Tower in Moscow, on a plot of land he acquired specifically for this purpose.46 In addition, he was a generous patron of the arts, especially the theatre. However, financially, the count’s son and heir, D.  N. Sheremetev, was to fare even worse, spending 600,000 roubles more than his 2.1 million rouble income for 1822. The unsurprising result of such flawed accounting was that, by 1859, his accumulated debts amounted to a massive 6  million roubles. A  similar pattern of accumulation is evident in the case of his contemporary, Prince I. B. Iusupov, whose debts stood at almost 700,000 roubles in 1818, but had increased threefold by the time of his death in 1831.47 A major factor in this phenomenon of ruinous accrual was the apparent acceptance of indebtedness as a cultural norm. This would not have been tolerated, for example, in the states of North America to judge, at least, by the observation made in a letter to his mother of 8 February 1810 by their future president John Quincy Adams, then serving as American ambassador to St Petersburg: The tone of society among us is almost universally marked by an excess of expenses over income. The public officers all live far beyond their salaries, many of them are notorious for never paying their debts, and still more for preserving the balance by means which in our country would be deemed dishonourable, but which are here much less disreputable than economy.48

The result of such notorious indebtedness was that, by the middle of the nineteenth century, over half of noble estates were mortgaged and their owners burdened by personal debts aggravated by usurious rates of interest. This in turn meant that the nobility by and large proved unable to maintain the factories set up on their estates decades earlier, let  alone raise the capital needed to establish new ones, increasingly yielding to the better resourced merchant class. An interesting financial contrast is presented, however, in the summer of 1812 when, gripped by a wave of patriotic fervour, the nobility of Moscow province responded to Napoleon’s imminent invasion by somehow raising 3  million roubles and pledging 10 recruits for every 100 of their serfs. Thus, a recent Russian

26

The Russian Nobility in the Age of Alexander I

commentator has argued by way of correcting Soviet historiography’s typical denial of the crucial importance of the nobility’s role in 1812, ‘at the centre of events without any doubt was the nobility (with the monarch at their head), and it was they who provided the leadership throughout the country for every contingency’.49 The nobility in Moscow would be ravaged by the war’s costs, with one estimate putting the material losses of the Moscow province alone at 270 million roubles.50 Wealth and poverty, then, were the touchstones of noble status, defined primarily by rank, landholding and serf ownership. As Daniel Field wrote of the period from 1833 to 1857, ‘the unfortunates who had a few serfs or none, even though heroes of 1812 or descendants of Riurik, were effectively excluded from the noble estate’.51 The same was true equally of the Alexandrine nobility, such that the real cost of noble status was one which only very few could actually afford.

Sources of the nobility’s social prestige Historically, the nobility’s social prestige had always been a function of its relationship with the tsar and had derived, in turn, from its control over its estates and the enserfed peasants who worked and lived on them. However, as Marc Raeff has noted, once Peter the Great compelled  – rather than co-opted  – the nobility into the service of the state, the relationship as a consequence became an enforced one. This inevitably proved detrimental to the development of individual consciousness and sense of dignity, since a nobleman’s fate and career were more than ever at the mercy of the whims of the autocrat or his favourites and their hangers-on. Individual dignity and group consciousness could be achieved only by escaping the clutches of the state. And this was therefore now more likely to come about through opposition to the government.52 Most, however, were inclined to conform rather than oppose. This makes those who belonged to Alexander’s ‘loyal opposition’ so exceptional and therefore of considerable historical interest. Their story will be developed later in this study. For the majority of the Alexandrine nobility, then, social prestige and career prospects were directly proportional to individual proximity to the tsar. By way of questioning this proposition, Boris Mironov reminds us that M. M. Speranskii famously maintained that there was no difference ‘between the relationship of the serfs with their landlords and the relationship of the landlord-noblemen with the autocratic sovereign’. This point of view was subsequently given theoretical underpinning by the legal historian V.  I. Sergeevich, who claimed that the ‘patrimonial-patriarchal character of autocracy’ had not run its course even in the second half of the nineteenth century. However, Mironov disputes both these assertions, arguing that, on the contrary, the nobility at the beginning of the nineteenth century was both legally and in practice emancipated from stateenserfed dependency and enjoyed a whole range of those personal rights which defined a free man. He concedes that the Russian nobleman did not have political rights in the modern sense of the term, and Russian statehood even under Peter I had lost its patriarchal character.53

Definitions of the Nobility’s Standing

27

Even if one accepts the broad thrust of Mironov’s argument, it is nevertheless hard to deny the centrality of the tsar in the lives, fates and careers of individual noblemen well into the nineteenth century and certainly in the reigns of Alexander I and Nicholas I. In the emphatic view of another Russian historian, S. A. Ekshtut, a nobleman could receive a wealthy inheritance, make an advantageous marriage or win a substantial fortune at cards, but from the eighteenth century an essential feature of Russian noble culture was the calibration of success according to one’s proximity to the tsar. The consequent advance in one’s service career was then frequently marked by a dizzyingly fast rise up the ladder of military rank. They were interlinked: high rank opened access to the tsar, and proximity to the monarch facilitated a rapid career path.54 In practice, a successful career simply could not be made without the goodwill of the tsar, who could and did, of course, just as quickly unmake careers.55 To a certain extent this changed after the Patriotic War, as did so much else in Russia. In particular, 1812 brought about significant changes in noble society’s system of values. Ekshtut, for example, maintains that from this point service to the tsar no longer equated to service to the country, though they were not mutually exclusive. Success in life was no longer as before totally dependent on the tsar’s favour and one’s proximity to him. Real success now derived from one’s reputation among one’s peers. Genuine status and a major contribution to the fatherland could now be obtained regardless of official recognition and reward because the war produced a host of heroes who owed their standing to their own efforts rather than to influential patrons and the tsar’s favour.56 While there may indeed be some truth in this analysis, post-Napoleonic Russian noble society is nevertheless replete with instances where the tsar’s intervention in individual cases proved decisive. Thus, in 1825 Alexander I denied the historian S. N. Glinka any award for his acclaimed history of Russia and, worse still, refused him a pension on the grounds that the author ‘was not serving and had not served anywhere’. All the efforts made on Glinka’s behalf by N. M. Karamzin and others to reverse the tsar’s decision resulted only in his appointment to the Moscow censors’ committee. Here, Glinka was to suffer a number of further setbacks, including arrest for taking too liberal a line in his new role.57 Similarly, an officer’s promotion would be held back simply because it did not please the tsar to sanction it. To take just one example, Alexander ordered P. I. Pestel’’s name to be ‘crossed out’ of the already prepared order for Pestel’’s promotion to the rank of colonel as he had resolved to delay Pestel’’s command of a regiment. Only at the end of 1821 after a number of humiliating refusals would the tsar promote Pestel’ to the rank of colonel and give him command of a regiment.58 The assertion of social status is a theme common to the many memoirs that were written by noblemen during or about the Alexandrine period. For example, Mints cites the memoirs of the poet I. I. Dmitriev, who from 1810 to 1814 served as Minister of Justice. In them, by way of demonstrating that his father, who lived in the provinces between Kazan’ and Simbirsk, was a cultivated man, Dmitriev wrote that his constant companions were ‘three close friends who were intelligent and educated and had not long left the capital’.59 Similarly, M. P. Leontiev, on his

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The Russian Nobility in the Age of Alexander I

election in 1815 as police inspector (ispravnik), was admitted to a select circle: ‘My position brought me into close contact with all the nobles of our district, who were almost all men of enlightened outlook, people who could be termed high class and of the best type (bol’shogo sveta i luchshego tona).’60 Hence, the individual’s social significance was apparently defined by his proximity to ‘society’, the strength of his networking and the respect he earned from a particular circle. So, for example, Baron Rozenkampf clearly felt it was to his personal credit and worthy of noting in his memoirs that he was ‘so well circumstanced’ that he ‘was able to receive Count Stroganov, Novosil’tsov and Chartoryskii’, who were all members of Alexander’s Unofficial Committee at the beginning of his reign in 1801.61 All this in turn points to the sense of the exclusiveness of an individual’s particular position in society. By contrast, memoir literature from this period gives only meagre references to individuals’ roles as representatives of the nobility. This may simply suggest that little thought was given by their authors to the question of the nobility’s social role in general. In Mints’s view, what was important about the continuing prestige of state service was that it gave the individual nobleman the illusion of access to political power.62 An illusion it undoubtedly remained, given the political context of absolute autocracy which by definition stifled any potential influence on government policy from below. Only the narrow circle of members of the Imperial house, together with the bureaucratic and noble elites, had any chance of exerting some real influence on the tsar.63 The part played by the nobility in Russia’s ruling class is explored below in subsequent chapters, but it is at this point worth referring to the attempt made by John LeDonne to quantify the late-eighteenth-century ‘nomenklatura’. He suggests that the ruling elite numbered between just 15 and 20 people, together with a larger group including all individuals in grades 3 to 1, in the region of 200 to 250 people. To this elite group might be added the larger landowners possessing more than 100 serfs, the ruling elite in the broader sense, which in the 1770s made a political formation of some 8,500 nobles, or about 16 per cent of the 54,000 male noblemen.64 Even if the accuracy of this reconstruction is only approximate, particularly in relation to the early nineteenth century, it gives a good sense of the narrowness of the apex of the power base which members of the nobility stood any chance of occupying. At any event, there is no doubt that before 1812, and perhaps more especially afterwards, the nobility’s prestige both individually and collectively derived pre-eminently from military service. Thus, in his manifesto of 30 August 1814, awarding members of the estate a further medal to supplement the bronze medal with the St Vladimir ribbon already bestowed in 1812, Alexander described ‘his nobility’ as ‘the loyal and strong buttress of the throne, the mind and soul of the nation, courageous of old’, which had shown ‘unprecedented zeal through sacrifice not only of property but of blood and life itself ’.65 This was why, as Richard Wortman has argued, by the end of Alexander’s reign, it was above all the military parade which had become the ‘central ceremony displaying the supremacy of the emperor and the noble elite as the exemplification of the nation’.66 However, there was rather more to it than simply this. As in

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the reign of Emperor Paul, while it continued to represent a ceaseless quest for precision and perfection in regimental drill and reflex obedience to command, the parade was simultaneously a demonstration and a reminder of the mutually dependent relationship between tsar and nobility. On Sundays the so-called ‘Kaiser-parade’ (Keizer-parad) took place and would not be cancelled even in subzero temperatures and the bitterest of weathers. These showpieces were routinely attended by the entire diplomatic corps and were clearly designed to impress the ambassadors who joined the emperor’s suite.67Alexander’s much-derided ‘paradomania’ effectively symbolized the potential if not actual one-sidedness of that interdependency: the overbearing and obsessive control of the autocracy on the one hand and the flawed prestige of the compliant nobility on the other.

Part II E DUCATING THE R USSIAN NOBILITY

Chapter 3 P A R E N TA L S U P E RV I SIO N , F O R E IG N T U T O R S A N D L A N G UAG E A C QU I SI T IO N

This chapter explores the attempts made to educate the Russian nobility in Alexander I’s reign, the institutions involved, the standards attained and the social mobility generated. Throughout his reign, the tsar constantly complained of a shortage of adequately qualified and trained young noblemen to staff his administration and its rapidly expanding bureaucracy. Yet educational reform was one of the top priorities of the early years of his reign. Thus from September 1802 a network of schools and universities was established across the Russian empire under the aegis of a new national Ministry of Education set up specifically for this purpose. The first of its kind in Europe, under the leadership of P.  V. Zavadovskii and M.  N. Muraviev, it set unprecedented targets and achieved notable successes.1 How, then, can we explain the ultimate failure of a clearly articulated strategic goal of improved educational attainment, specifically with regard to the nobility, to deliver an adequate supply of suitably qualified individuals? Part of the answer to this question lies in the demonstrably lingering suspicion, both in government circles and among the nobility more widely, about the potentially harmful political and ideological impact which a well-educated, independent-minded and critically thinking young noble generation might have on the continued stability of Russian society in the uncertain era of the Napoleonic wars. This was reflected at government level in the contradictory and hesitant pattern of reform and reaction in the area of education, and also in the marked ambivalence and passivity of the nobility towards it which caused Alexander himself to despair. We now turn to an examination specifically of the early years of the upbringing and education of noble children. This generally took place at home and therefore mostly on their parents’ provincial estates. We also consider the challenges they faced in being expected to speak not only their native language but also, from an early age, to master in addition at least one other modern foreign language. This was almost invariably French, a language which for the Russian nobility at

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this time undoubtedly represented, as well as a vital means of communication generally preferred to Russian, a badge of social respectability.

Home education and foreign tutors General F. Ia. Mirkovich (1789–1866), a veteran of 1812, memoirist and historian of the period, offers a stark contrast in the cultural level of the Russian nobility as between the end of the eighteenth century and the beginning of the nineteenth. Under Catherine the Great, he wrote, Women were illiterate and their children were brought up in the care of serfs. Nobody knew anything and there were almost no books at all apart from church books and reading primers. The landowners, living on their estates, passed their time in idleness, were interested only in riding to hounds, getting drunk, and indulging their vices. Only a small circle of noblemen, close to the court and resident in the capital, had some semblance of an education acquired from their visits abroad. But in reality, education did not exist at all. However, when Alexander came to the throne there was an expansion in the facilities for educating the nobility with the establishment of gymnasia, universities and the cadet corps colleges: The nobility started to study.2

It was high time too. Even at the beginning of the nineteenth century, Russia still had no comprehensive system of secondary education to cater for all young nobles. The German historian of Russia, Theodor Schiemann, referred in his book on Alexander I’s reign to ‘that combination of high culture (Überbildung) and barbarity which was the characteristic hallmark of the nobility up to the end of the eighteenth century and well into the nineteenth’.3 Despite such negative assessments, however, there had been throughout the eighteenth century repeated government initiatives aimed at providing educational opportunities for all Russians and for the nobility in particular. Among the most important of these was Catherine the Great’s 1786 Statute of National Education which made ambitious provision for a network of secular urban primary and secondary co-educational schools across the country. In theory, these were open to children of all free classes to enter at no cost to their parents. One remarkably advanced stipulation for its time was the total ban on corporal punishment of any kind.4 However, the long-term success of this statute and of other educational reforms introduced around the same time was vitiated by the lack of adequate funding, the shortage of trained teachers and the reluctance of many nobles to send their children to national schools where they would have to mix with the lower classes. There was a marked preference instead for domestic tutoring which would last well into the nineteenth century. The chronicler of Russian life in Alexander I’s reign, N. F. Dubrovin, cites the continuing inadequacy of educational establishments in Russia as the reason why most of the nobility, or ‘mummies’ boys’ as he calls them, learned nothing and

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remained woefully illiterate. Most children of the nobility received their education at home and, although the quality of it varied enormously, it was generally inadequate. This was largely due to the widespread practice of employing tutors, especially francophones, from the West. Dubrovin was particularly forthright on this issue, claiming that the French tutors hired by the nobility to teach their children at home were poorly qualified for the role and exerted a negative impact not only on their charges but on Russian society as a whole. Yet, despite this, the nobility began to ape them as well their language and culture. Assured of a good life in Russia, the French arrived in ever greater numbers and inveigled themselves into the homes and lives of their host families, instilling in the children ‘a total indifference to everything Russian’.5 Among Dubrovin’s sources was a letter written by Privy Counsellor A.  I. Arsenev to Nicholas I  on 2 April 1826, attempting to trace the origins of the Decembrist conspiracy. Among the key factors Arsenev identified was the malign influence on Russian family life of these French interlopers who ‘foisted themselves on nobles’ homes, the males seeking to assist the husbands in their wives’ sexual gratification, while the females similarly assisted the wives in satisfying their husbands’’. In this way they ‘controlled the household, learned all its secrets, and tyrannised the children’. They remained ignorant of Russian traditions and customs themselves and ‘passed on their contempt for them to the children’. As teachers they were just like the German character Vralman in Denis Fonvizin’s play, ‘The Adolescent’ (Nedorosl’, first performed in 1782), who lets his charge, Mitrofan, behave as he pleases, and gets paid handsomely for doing so. Even though they were barely literate themselves and knew hardly any Russian, they attempted to teach the children their own language. Yet, remarkably, after several years, their parents seemed surprised on realizing that their children had learned practically nothing.6 In this connection, Schiemann wryly remarked that ‘we learn the most improbable facts’ about native French-speaking émigrés who were formerly servants, artisans, gardeners and travelling salesmen but who, overnight, suddenly proclaimed themselves teachers and educators!7 Admiral N.  S. Mordvinov was among those at court who were vehemently opposed to the employment of foreigners as tutors for the children of Russia’s nobility, regarding them as a negative, corrupting force. He argued that the practice should be banned altogether since he could not see how any foreigner, even the rare well-intentioned individual among them, could possibly instil in their young charges a proper love for their country and their native language.8 In view of the poor quality of what they offered, Etienne Dumont was surprised by the high fees commanded by home tutors of anything from 2 to 5 roubles per lesson.9 For their part, Dubrovin comments, parents were content to pay foreigners to bring up their children so that they could indulge in their own dissipated lifestyles, which typically involved them in late nights and late mornings, hence affording them very little proper contact with their children. Dubrovin’s sources suggest that the youngsters learned so little that many were packed off to boarding schools where more foreign teachers did even greater harm than the domestic tutors.

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The situation was aggravated by the Russian nobility’s disdain for pedagogues generally, and for Russian teachers in particular. They were therefore reluctant to send their children to secondary schools (gymnazii), the more so as these were open to all social classes: they found the very idea of their children sitting next to the children of clerks, people of various rank (raznochintsy), and the like, really quite intolerable.10 Thus, M.  L. Nazimov recalled mixing at his local secondary school in Nizhnii Novgorod with ‘the sons of house serfs in service to the town’s aristocracy and also lower middle class boys (meshchane)’. In view of this ‘mingling of the estates’, Nazimov tells us, well-heeled noble families kept their children out of gymnazii ‘in order to prevent them mixing with dirty folk and so to avoid the risk of their acquiring the bad habits and propensities of that kind of society’. This is why, he concludes, the nobility preferred to have their children tutored at home.11 Parents struggled to understand the potential benefit to their sons and daughters of the formal study of academic subjects which seemed to have so little practical application to their everyday lives, especially with a military career in view. This was, after all, generally the preferred prospect for (and of) their sons. Such attitudes were encapsulated in the view that ‘education was a luxury rather than a necessity’, a remark ascribed to his father by N. V. Basargin, a nobleman from Vladimir province who was a student at the Column-leaders’ Academy in 1817. It was fairly representative of the outlook of the landed gentry of his father’s generation.12 For example, a Moscow nobleman and owner of 1,000 serfs, Major-General A. A. Tuchkov had very clear ideas about what his sons should study as future army officers:  physics and chemistry certainly, but literature (and poetry in particular) he considered totally vacuous, like music, while Latin he regarded as necessary only for priests and doctors. Finally, theology and philosophy he considered ‘totally unseemly’ subjects for a military man.13 As S. S. Uvarov correctly noted at the time, the nobility ‘all still regard it [education] with distrust’.14 Sergei Mironenko finds that the overwhelming majority (81.8%) of members of the State Council in 1825 had been educated at home, with only A. A. Arakcheev and I.  I. Dibich holding military qualifications from cadet corps colleges, and M.  M. Speranskii a degree from the St Alexander Nevskii Seminary in St Petersburg.15 Home education, then, was the norm for the children of the nobility and it usually lasted until the age of fifteen, at which point a decision would be taken about further education, which might perhaps include several years spent abroad in Western Europe. But this did not end the youngsters’ dependence on their parents which would typically continue even after their marriage. Memoir literature of the period suggests that important decisions would be taken only after taking into account the views of parents who would expect, and normally receive, unconditional love, devotion and obedience from their progeny. The main reason for this prevalent culture was that until their parents’ demise, the sons (unless they had received a substantial dowry from their bride’s family) usually remained their dependants.16 Thus, after receiving his commission on passing out of the Noblemen’s Regiment in 1819, E. I. Topchiev remarked in his memoirs that he was unable to live on his ensign’s annual salary of 450 roubles, but

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needed his parents’ help to purchase the numerous and expensive components of his new uniform.17 However, this was by no means a resource available to all young officers: P. A. Tuchkov, a scion of the old Moscow noble family with a long and distinguished record of military service, who was later a senator and a member of Nicholas I’s state council, describes how after 1812 his father fell on hard times and, overwhelmed by debts, had to sell his Moscow properties, including a picture gallery, as well as his substantial estate in Tula province. It meant that, unlike Topchiev, young Tuchkov had to learn to live within his modest means and indeed ‘there were years when I had to rely solely on my service salary’.18 Typically, home education focused on Russian grammar, mathematics, one or two foreign languages and the most broad-brush survey of literature, history and geography. It provided an education far inferior to the more systematic syllabus of the gymnasium.19 Alexander Pushkin had a very definite view of its inferiority:  ‘In Russia, home education is utterly inadequate and completely lacking in morality: the child acquires no understanding of right and wrong, of human relationships or of true honour.’ It is a view shared by Etienne Dumont, whose 1803 diary entry recorded that ‘children brought up in the countryside learn coarse morals and are educated by serfs. They are beaten and spoilt by turns without any reason or basis for either’.20 Alexander Pushkin thought it a mistake not to teach young nobles about the nature of Russian autocracy and alternative political systems adopted in other countries, or about revolutionary ideas and republicanism, all of which he considered would better equip them for their future careers in government service.21 This is surely fair comment:  had the Decembrist generation been better educated about the French Revolution, its terror and its consequences, the Decembrists themselves might have thought twice about the wisdom of attempting to plunge Russia into a similar catastrophe, instead of peacefully campaigning for those social and political reforms for which there was actually increasing support in some quarters during the post-Napoleonic Arakcheevshchina years of Alexander I’s reign. For all that, only those noble children from well-off families stood any chance of receiving a rounded and basic home education, and even then only if their parents took the trouble to ensure that they did. Then as now, the role of parents in determining the course of their children’s education was decisive. As P. M. Maikov put it, quoting N. S. Mordvinov in his 1905 article on the admiral’s archive, it was the arrangements made by the parents and, above all, their own example which laid the foundations of any positive qualities in their children: the parental home was nothing less than a primary school, especially for the daughters of the household, who were less likely to receive further formal education. But even so, Mordvinov maintained, parents should expect support from ‘the autocratic government, in which the tsar’s will and his own example have such extraordinary force, [and which] is not short of the means to support the home education of its people’.22 In the Pestel’ family, for example, the parents evidently regarded the education of their children as a sacred duty in the true meaning of the word: moreover, they considered it their absolute duty to the state to see that their children were properly

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educated.23 According to S. A. Korf, however, such parents were the exception: if anyone was to blame for the fact that the younger generation of the nobility was poorly equipped to meet the challenges of the modern age, it was their parents, ‘who brought up their children in idleness, and inculcated in them the conviction that work was not something for noblemen’s hands’.24 Few nobles’ recollections of the period dwell at length or in detail on their home education, but there are one or two exceptions. In his memoirs, S. A. Tuchkov gives a comprehensive account of this aspect of the life of the noble estate. He describes how he was taught the old alphabet and the catechism without any reference to rules, which was how the majority of the middle-ranking nobility started their education. He had two teachers, a deacon and a soldier, neither of whom had any idea how to make their lessons useful or interesting. Similarly, P. A. Viazemskii complained about the quality of his tutors, who were foreigners, and also about the total absence of native Russian teachers. Tuchkov, however, did better than most: he was taught German by a Lutheran pastor, though his teacher of Russian ‘didn’t have the faintest notion of grammar or spelling’.25 The memoir of M. A. Dmitriev, a pupil at the Boarding School (pansion) for the Nobility at Moscow University, affords us an interesting glimpse of the cultural level of the provincial nobility of his childhood in the first decade of Alexander I’s reign. At home he was not taught Russian grammar as there was no one who could teach it:  nobody even knew how to write properly. As to religious instruction, learning the catechism was deemed unnecessary. There were two priests in the village but they were both illiterate and had no idea at all about ecclesiastical dogma. On a more positive note, Dmitriev’s grandfather had a sizeable library comprising works on history, travel, novels and texts by Russian writers, but there was not a single book on religion or matters spiritual. The Bible was impossible to obtain, and Dmitriev only got to see a copy when it was published by the Russian Bible Society, founded by A. N. Golitsyn in 1812, and joined by Tsar Alexander in February the following year. Dmitriev’s grandfather then purchased one for his library but never actually read it, while the Psalter he considered to be suitable only for use at funerals. However, his library did contain the works of Voltaire in three volumes, as well as a Russian translation of his stories. Dmitriev concludes his account of his home upbringing with the wry observation, ‘Just what was to be expected of an education like that?’26

Career paths and social mobility There were other parents who wisely selected more fruitful educational paths for their sons and daughters to follow, leading to advantageous social mobility. So, for example, M. S. Vorontsov (b.1782), whose father was Russia’s ambassador to the Court of St James, spent his childhood and early youth in London where he received an excellent education. The future general and Second Army chief of staff, I. V. Sabaneev (b.1772) entered Moscow University, graduating in 1791. Innately talented, Ivan Vasilievich acquired at university a solid education which

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facilitated a highly successful career, ‘the further development of which won him the reputation of an educated and knowledgeable man’.27 The four sons of the highly influential literary figure and distinguished Mason, I.  P. Turgenev, himself a graduate of Moscow University, were educated first at home, then at the Boarding School for Nobles at Moscow University. The eldest of them, Nikolai Ivanovich (b.1789), the Decembrist and political economist, went on to the university of which his father was himself director from 1796. In the Turgenevs’ house there were frequent lively discussions about current issues in politics, ethics and literature. Their social position gave them access to the drawing rooms of the aristocratic elite, including the salon of the tsar’s mistress, M.  A. Naryshkina. Their library was regarded in the early nineteenth century as one of the best private collections in Russia. Nicholas and his brother Alexander, as well as a number of their classmates at Moscow University, were sent by their father to the University of Göttingen from 1808 to 1811 to complete their formal education. The university in ‘misty Germany’ from which at much the same time Pushkin’s Vladimir Lenskii, the doomed hero of his verse-novel Evgenii Onegin, brought back ‘the fruits of learning’, and a ‘soul really Göttingenian’, stimulated the Turgenev brothers’ lifelong interest in literature and philosophy, and also, thanks to the lectures of Professor August Ludwig von Schlötzer, in Russian history. Despite the homesickness they unsurprisingly experienced there as teenagers, the boys pursued their studies abroad with commendable earnestness. Nicholas became particularly interested in economics through his reading of Adam Smith and reckoned that he left Göttingen ‘with a head far less empty than it had been before’. A few years earlier, P. I. Pestel’ and his younger brother Vladimir had been sent to his grandmother in Dresden, where they spent four years (1805–9) under the instruction of a local teacher, only for Pestel’ to complain on his return to St Petersburg about the uselessness of what they had been taught there and the dearth of ‘relevant’ coursework.28 Altogether, some three hundred students from Russia attended courses at Göttingen during Alexander I’s reign.29 However, in line with government’s increasing wariness of pernicious foreign influences from around 1818, the Committee of Ministers proposed on 20 April 1820 the recall of all Russian students from German universities but failed at this stage to secure the tsar’s approval for the move. The Russian government was not alone in its concerns about subversive influences at Germany’s leading universities. The spread of constitutionalist fervour throughout Western Europe resulted in outbreaks of revolution in Spain in January 1820, in Naples the following July and in Portugal in August. Accordingly, in November 1820, the rulers of Austria and Prussia (but not Britain and France) joined Alexander in signing the Protocol of Troppau (now Opava in the Czech Republic), the fruit of the great powers’ conference from October to December that year in Austrian Silesia. The protocol asserted the right of the allied powers to intervene in any state to suppress revolution, thereby protecting its ruler from any threat of an ‘illegal’ change in government. Alexander’s readiness to sign up to the protocol was greatly reinforced when he received news from St Petersburg

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of the Semenovskii Regiment mutiny in October during his absence in Troppau. The Troppau conference was resumed in Laibach (now the Slovenian capital, Ljubljana) in January 1821 and then in Verona from September to December 1822, where the continuing revolutionary threat to the established order in Europe was urgently assessed. Nevertheless, it was not until February 1823, with the worsening political climate, that Russian students were forbidden access to the four German universities considered the most subversive.30 In any case, relatively few Russian students acquired any of their education in a university in the West. There was, in fact, considerable variation in the educational advantages and consequent career opportunities offered to the children of the nobility. Thus, we learn from his contemporaries that Count A.  A. Zakrevskii, among Alexander’s most distinguished generals, who in 1823 was appointed governor-general of Finland, had ‘a good mind and a firm character’ but received hardly any education either at home or elsewhere and therefore had only a very poor command of Russian grammar. He apparently wrote no better than a secondyear grammar-school pupil: ‘Despite the fact that he didn’t know Russian or a single foreign language, Zakrevskii was still able to be a minister, a duty general, and the governor-general of Finland!’ as one of his amazed contemporaries observed.31 With regard to the question of moral sensibility, Major-General S. G. Volkonskii (b.1788), a member of the Decembrists’ Southern Society subsequently sentenced to twenty years’ hard labour in Siberia, remarked that in his experience very few young noble officers were at all religious, many were even declared atheists: although they indulged in dissolute lifestyles, they did at least form strong friendships which bound them both to their regiments and to each other. Dubrovin notes that many officers were perversely proud of the fact that, apart from their daily regimental orders, they read absolutely nothing at all.32 This sad boast finds an echo in N. I. Turgenev’s view that ‘military service in Russia does not require much knowledge’. He found that in the army, ‘academic institutions occupy a very insignificant place and are filled largely with foreigners’. In general, ‘no trouble is taken at all over the continuation and completion of the education of young people’ who, ‘once in the army begin to forget what little knowledge they had acquired before getting there’. This explains, Turgenev concludes, ‘the intellectual impoverishment, that lack of intelligence of the nobility which continues to this day’.33 A very different view of the education of army officer cadets at this time is taken by the British historian John Keep, who, on the contrary, attributes considerable significance to it: The studies which these officers undertook might not make for intellectual profundity, or even impart knowledge of much immediate professional relevance; but they did lead them to question and debate contemporary issues, within the limits of propriety, and to develop a new sense of their own worth as individuals. The schools created nothing less than a new class: the military intelligentsia.34

Even allowing for some exaggeration in Keep’s assessment, and despite the misgivings of Dubrovin and Turgenev, military service was without doubt the

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key to upward social mobility. As Semion Ekshtut has suggested, the numerous wars fought by Russia at this time, and especially in 1812, sharply accelerated the process of upward social mobility, enabling a rapid rise up the service ladder. He quotes the lines written by the poet-partisan, Denis Davydov (a friend of Pushkin and a cousin of the Decembrist V. L. Davydov): ‘Blessed was this age for valour! Wide was the field for ambitious hopes!’ This is borne out by the relatively young age at which senior rank could be attained. For example, the Decembrists A. F. fonder Brigen, P. I. Pestel’ and P. A. Katenin became colonels at 28, A. Z. Muraviev and I. G. Burtsova at 27, M. M. Naryshkin at 26, and A. N. Muraviev at just 23. Military service in the first quarter of the nineteenth century constituted the most important conduit for social mobility with which the civil service came nowhere close to competing.35 A graduate of the Boarding School for Nobles at Moscow University, V.  I. Safonovich, remarked in a detailed account of his school days there that the nobility entered civil service with reluctance, considering it beneath the status of their estate.36 Notable exceptions to this claim were the Turgenev brothers, who belonged to that group of influential young noblemen who made their careers in government service. Their intelligence, educational attainment and society connections ensured them rapid advancement in the civil service, so that A.  I. Turgenev, a protégé of A. N Golitsyn, was already at just thirty years of age a full (deistvitel’nyi) member of the State Council, where he was state secretary of its department of laws. Similarly, his brothers Nicholas and Sergei rapidly occupied significant senior positions which brought them too into close contact with Russia’s ruling circles. Although Nicholas, according to M.  A. Korf, held the relatively modest post of assistant state secretary in the department of state economy, he nevertheless exercised considerable influence on its work through his talented networking and as the author of a book on the theory of taxation which was, ‘for its time, quite remarkable’.37 Nevertheless, although there was a service system in place, ultimate control over it and the careers of individual noblemen undoubtedly rested with the tsar. There are numerous examples in the literature of just how dependent social mobility and career advancement were on his word. One of these, the case of Major-General A. A. Pisarev, well illustrates the point. On 13 March 1825, Pisarev wrote to Adjutant General Baron I. I. Dibich asking him to support his request to be appointed director of Moscow University ‘if possible with military rank and uniform, as in the cadet corps colleges’ or, if not, then to be accorded the rank of privy councillor in recognition of his 35-year military career. Dibich duly consulted Alexander I and then replied to Pisarev, courteously conveying the tsar’s outright rejection of his request which ‘His Highness finds unseemly’ on the grounds that ‘the government cannot accept such proposals from private individuals’ and that, moreover, appointment to the rank of privy councillor was a matter not for individual self-recommendation but one for the tsar himself to instigate.38 On the other hand, Alexander was happy enough to oblige an old friend, R. A. Koshelev, by granting his nephew, A.  I. Koshelev, on graduating from Moscow University in 1824, a position in the Moscow Archive of Foreign Affairs, to the

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apparent consternation of its director, A. F. Malinovskii. Even the beneficiary of this imperial networking described it as ‘an unusual way of securing a job’.39 In the main, however, nobles began to serve as cadets, non-commissioned officers (NCOs) or junkers, and were promoted to officer rank after a few years. The Russian officer corps was, after all, almost exclusively the preserve of the nobility, thanks to the class restrictions placed on access to it from 1796 respectively by Emperors Paul and Alexander, the latter requiring non-nobles to serve as NCOs for at least twelve years before qualifying for promotion to officer rank.40 Already in the first months of his reign, it came to Alexander’s notice that his army’s regiments were full of NCOs drawn from the nobility who were completely illiterate. He therefore directed that ‘illiterate applicants’ were henceforth to be enlisted ‘only as privates’.41 Boris Mironov identifies ‘a fairly intense intra-estate mobility’ among the nobility in the eighteenth and first half of the nineteenth century. He points out that the hereditary nobility obtained through the award of the rank of junior army officer the relatively low rank of eighth class in the civil service. In addition, the award of any order in state service opened up wide possibilities for the promotion of non-noble officials on the fourteenth to ninth ranks to the status of personal nobility, and subsequently to hereditary nobility which could be obtained almost automatically after twenty to twenty-five years of unflagging service. For middleranking noblemen-officials and for noblemen-officers there was a real prospect of promotion to the higher ranks or to the higher degrees of orders, and with it a move to the upper strata of the nobility.42 Nevertheless, effective social mobility by way of ennoblement remained a daunting challenge to those not born to the estate. What made this step more feasible from Alexander’s reign onwards was the development of a formal system of education that was to play an increasingly significant role in facilitating promotion and the acquisition of the accompanying privileges of noble status. Hence Speranskii’s attempt to link promotion to the successful completion of a civil service examination, which we discuss in the next chapter, even though the scheme’s implementation remained patchy and inconsistent well into the 1870s.43

Language, bilingualism and its consequences A mark of the educated Russian in the age of Napoleon was fluency in French. In France, as a remark made by the narrator of a recent novel suggests, this still has not been altogether forgotten:  ‘En Russie . . . au moment des campagnes napoléoniennes, l’aristocratie a dû réapprendre le russe car elle ne parlait que français.’44 This circumstance is clearly reflected in the very first lines of Leo Tolstoy’s Napoleonic Wars-era novel War and Peace which reproduce the opening conversation between Countess Anna Pavlovna Sherer, lady-in-waiting to the Dowager Empress Maria Fedorovna, and Prince Vasilii, the first guest to arrive at the soirée held in her St Petersburg salon in July 1805. Of Prince Vasilii’s command

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of French, Tolstoy’s narrator writes, ‘He spoke that refined French which our grandfathers not only spoke, but in which they thought too.’ The opening chapter of book four of the novel describes another soirée at Anna Pavlovna’s held seven years later, on 26 August 1812, ‘the very day of the battle of Borodino’. Despite the by now highly charged relationship between Russia and France, and the general fear and loathing of Napoleon, the conversation is nevertheless still conducted by patriotic Russian noblemen and women almost entirely in fluent French.45 Some memoirs do suggest a hardening of anti-French attitudes as news of Napoleon’s occupation of Moscow spread. Thus, F. F. Vigel’ writes of the reaction of noble society in the provinces – ‘at least with us in Penza’ – where a conscious show of patriotism took hold in the autumn of 1812. Notably, this included ‘the ladies’ refusal to speak French’.46 However, the Russian nobility’s collective contempt for Napoleon, particularly after 1812, did not immediately dim their enthusiasm for French, or their reliance on it. As Nicholas Riasanovsky has rightly observed, the Decembrists ten years on wrote and spoke the language as a matter of course, not least among them their leading ideologue, the German-educated P.  I. Pestel’, who was fluent in three languages. D.  I. Zavalishin, convicted as a Decembrist but whose formal membership of the Northern Society remains unclear, described the importance of French in his own upbringing and education: Mother placed no value on the Russian language or any other subjects; her entire concern was for foreign languages, especially for graceful pronunciation and manière de parler in French, and that we should be comme il faut.47

This linguistic phenomenon dated back to the accession in 1740 of Peter the Great’s daughter, Elizabeth, when French became both the language of the court and a mark of social refinement, replacing the German which Courlanders had brought to the court of Anna Ivanovna in the 1730s.48 By the end of the eighteenth century, as the historian and publisher S. N. Glinka recalled, mastery of French had become de rigueur among his contemporaries. His classmates at the Noble Land Forces Corps (Sukhoputnyi shliakhetskii korpus) – where Glinka studied for thirteen years until 1795 – were educated ‘in a completely French manner’, and he ‘so passionately loved French’ himself that he ‘ventured to assure people’ that he ‘was born in France and not in Russia’.49 Nor was this an exclusively Russian phenomenon:  the nobilities of all European countries, to cite Michael Confino, ‘had comparable education, similar cultural interests, and a common social language, in addition to a common language tout court, which most often was French’.50 Even educated Englishmen and women managed to speak it. Thus, in an encounter with British officers of the 43rd Regiment of the Line on the Rock of Gibraltar in 1824, the Russian naval officer and Decembrist, A. P. Beliaev, recalled that the toasts proposed at the official dinner by the presiding officer were made, ‘in the common European language, French’.51 In Russia’s case, as Theodor Schiemann remarks, its nobility’s increasing adoption of French from the second half of the

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eighteenth century meant that the generation of nobles growing up under this influence ‘started to lose contact with the spirit of their own people’.52A French commentator has suggested that educated society in Russia at this time largely defined and identified itself in terms of the French language. It meant that texts written in French formed an enclave which was linked partly to Russian culture but simultaneously constituted, at the heart of this culture, ‘a world apart’.53 This growing alienation was reinforced by the enormous influence exerted on some by Jesuit teachers such as the Abbé Nicole, the founder of a prestigious school in St Petersburg (see next chapter). A  recent commentator, however, suggests that Russian nobles’ penchant for French at this time was less a sign of cultural alienation than a way of demonstrating their membership of the wider community of the European elite acknowledged by Confino.54 As already noted, the study of a European language, usually French, started from an early age in many noble households, though the standard of instruction provided by native speakers varied hugely. Indeed, up until the 1820s French was the only foreign language most Russians knew, with some sources suggesting that knowledge of German, for example, was a comparative rarity. As one contemporary, the Simbirsk nobleman and writer M. A. Dmitriev recalled, ‘When I was at [Moscow] university (1813–17) practically no one knew German.’ He had himself left the Boarding School for Nobles at Moscow University having learned no German at all and with even less French than he had known on entering the school. Another of its pupils, V. I. Safonovich, claimed that ‘nobody could bear German: it was even considered humiliating for a Russian nobleman to speak the language of sausage-makers and cobblers’.55 This was in spite of the fact that so much of Russian universities’ professoriate was German or German-speaking. True, such professors lectured either in German or French, or else in Latin to (what must be supposed) was a largely uncomprehending or, in Schiemann’s tactful wording, ‘poorly prepared’, auditorium.56 It was also the case, pace the negative remarks of Dmitriev and Safonovich, that German was the first language of Russia’s Baltic nobility. The Decembrist Baron A.  E. Rozen, for example, recalled that, as a fifteen-year-old from the Estland provincial nobility, his first weeks at the First Cadet Corps in St Petersburg were hard for him because of his weak grasp of Russian.57 A. P. Beliaev, whose family came from Penza, a province in Russia’s heartland, recalled that his father spoke excellent German and was familiar with both German literature and philosophy. He had a good library of German publications which included German (and Russian) translations of English and French works.58 Moreover, at this time German was still spoken at court, or at least in the circle of Alexander I’s mother, Dowager Empress Maria Fedorovna, née Sophia Dorothea of Württemberg, a significant and influential promoter of education and patron of the arts, who was particularly interested in literature. As a court page on duty at her Pavlovsk palace, A. S. Gangeblov often heard German spoken there by, among others, the poet V. A. Zhukovskii, then tutor to the tsar’s children. He always addressed the empress in German to the extent that Gangeblov could not remember ever hearing him speak Russian. Nevertheless, the empress could

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speak ‘fluent and accurate’ Russian, albeit with a slight German accent. However, as Gangeblov observed from his privileged position as a young page, when N. M. Karamzin joined the empress’s dinner table as one of her favourite guests and entertained his hostess with his brilliant conversation, it was, ‘needless to say’, conducted in French!59 Clearly, the foreign languages taught varied from school to school. For example, M. P. Pogodin, who was a pupil at Moscow Provincial Gymnasium from 1814, remarked that he left the school with ‘a respectable knowledge of Latin and German’, whereas French he was able to access only through private lessons. His level of Latin enabled him to audit the anatomy lectures given in the medical faculty of Moscow University by the legendary Professor Loder, an old friend of Goethe. Pogodin stood in awe of the clarity and intelligibility of Loder’s highly acclaimed Latin delivery. It is worth contrasting this with the abolition of Latin teaching in many academies from the beginning of the nineteenth century in favour of more practical battle training as part of the militarization of both secondary and tertiary institutes of education generally.60 A recent source suggests that approximately 33 per cent of the Russian officer corps of the 1812 era spoke French, 25 per cent German and just 0.8 per cent English.61 An analysis of service records confirms that in 1812, the majority of Russian officers (1,061 out of 2,074, or 51%) were at least literate. At the same time many were fluent in several languages, with 30.4 per cent (630 men) able to speak French and 25.2 per cent (522 men) fluent in German. English and Italian were far less well-known languages, with respectively just 17 and 10 men speaking them.62 A rare reference to the teaching of English at this time may be found in the memoirs of A.  P. Beliaev, who studied at the Naval Cadet Corps from 1815 to 1820. He is full of praise for the ‘very kind Englishman’ who, alone among modern language teachers at the school, achieved such progress for his pupils that ‘we could even speak a little English’ which was to serve Beliaev well when his ship docked in England in 1823.63 The memoirs of A. I. Shestakov refer to his study at home of modern languages which involved him and his brother settling down after lunch most days to focus seriously on French and German, while English they treated ‘as a joke’. Also, M. A. Dmitriev recalled that while the Russian literature syllabus at the Boarding School for the Nobility at Moscow University included references to the major Italian and French writers and poets, ‘of English literature there was virtually no trace’.64 In fact, however, there is some indication in the literature that there were sections of the nobility where English was taken more seriously and that, indeed, in early-nineteenth-century Russia ‘Anglomania’ was regarded as a mark of aristocratic snobbery (aristokratizm). It was actually quite widespread among the higher strata of Russian society where it had a significant material base, in both economic and everyday terms, in the interests, tastes and customs of the Russian nobility. It meant that England became the promised land of high culture and well-ordered politics for many of the most influential, largest landowning group of the Russian nobility.65 We shall be returning to this theme in Chapter 8 . Details of the public lectures delivered by Moscow University’s professors during the academic year 1804–5, as provided in the biography of A. I. Koshelev,

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himself briefly a student there in 1821, show that French and German were the main languages of instruction. Thus, lectures on early European history, the ‘history of the English people’, arithmetic and commerce were given in German; those on natural history, chemistry and philosophy, in French. The lectures given respectively on physics and literary aesthetics by Professors Strakhov and Sokhatskii were judged the most successful, most probably because – unusually – they were delivered in Russian.66 Russian would at last be restored to the status of the first language of the court and of polite society only gradually from 1825 following the accession of Nicholas I. The remarkable and persistent dominance of French usage in Alexander I’s Russia merits our attention not least because of the implications for young noblemen of their struggling to be proficient in two (or even more) very different languages. There were also issues of national pride at stake, as well as potential access to subversive political and social ideas arriving from the West, given that a considerable body of such material was printed and available in French. This was reflected also in the holdings of St Petersburg’s Public Library. In his memoirs, A.  P. Butenev, who compiled the library’s catalogue, recorded that by the first years of Alexander’s reign it consisted of between four thousand and five thousand volumes. The majority of these were in French, with some in German and English, ‘but Russian books in this collection, which had belonged to one of the oldest and most illustrious of Russian houses, barely amounted to more than one hundred: evidence of the extent of the indifference shown at that time to the achievements of our home-grown culture’.67 As Dubrovin asserted, following Karamzin, the noble elite could speak but barely write decent Russian, largely because there were said to be ‘no teachers of Russian’, and there was a shortage of Russian books generally and of textbooks in particular.68 Even where efforts were made to teach Russian at home, the results were uneven to say the least. In his memoirs, I.  A. Raevskii clearly recalls his boyhood education, commenting that he acquired only ‘a pretty vague notion not only of Russian history but also of the Russian language’, as his teacher ‘forced us to learn his grammar textbook which we did not understand and so were unable, of course, to string two words together properly’.69 Similarly, there is evidence to suggest that when the future military governor-general of Moscow, D. V. Golitsyn, gave a speech to the Moscow noble assembly when it convened for the 1822 elections, he first wrote it out in French since he felt his Russian was not up to the task. The text was then translated for him into Russian and he learnt it almost by heart in order to achieve a reasonably fluent delivery.70 The lack of formal teaching of Russian finds an echo in the comment of Etienne Dumont that, although French was in ‘general use’ in Russia, it was extremely difficult to find competent Russian interpreters for any other European language. He cites the example of Baron Rozenkampf, the German-born constitutional lawyer in Speranskii’s office: when his young interpreter died, no one could be found to replace him.71 The celebrated surgeon, N. I. Pirogov, born in 1810, described in a diary entry how knowledge of European languages was the educational norm of his noble generation. The problem was that this effectively precluded access to education for

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other classes, and even for the poorer nobility, since there was nothing published for them in Russian, thus further reinforcing the cultural divide in Russian society. The issue was expressed in far stronger terms by A.  R. Vorontsov (1741–1805), who was Minister of Foreign Affairs from 1802 to 1804, when he remarked in 1805 that Russia was ‘the only country where the study of one’s native language is derided, and anything connected with the Fatherland is alien to the current generation’. To make matters worse, an undesirable situation which was common to both St Petersburg and Moscow was dutifully imitated on the estates of the middle nobility.72 Part of the problem was that so many of the private boarding schools (pansiony) were owned by foreigners, those for boys typically by Germans and for girls by Frenchwomen. I.  A. Raevskii’s boarding school was owned and run by Antoine de Cournand, ‘an ignoramus and a charlatan of the first rank’, where most subjects were taught through French. Indeed, Raevskii recalls that while not expressly forbidden, the use of Russian by pupils was frowned on, largely because most members of staff were unable to understand it. According to a graduate of the Boarding School for the Nobility at Moscow University, pupils there were similarly expected to converse only in French or German: indeed, they were fined for speaking to each other in Russian.73 This was the francophone ethos also of the First Cadet Corps where cadets and instructors alike were encouraged to use French ever since the language was introduced there by its director Count Friedrich Angal’t in Paul’s reign.74 It was generally the case that Russian language, literature and history were very badly taught, if they were taught at all. There were even cases of pupils leaving without being able to read or write Russian, as in the above-mentioned cases of I. A. Raevskii and D. V. Golitsyn. This prompted the minister of education to report to the tsar that foreign-owned pansiony ‘instilled in young Russians contempt for our language . . . and in the depths of Russia, a Russian is turned into a foreigner’. This observation finds an echo in an 1887 article on Pushkin’s Evgenii Onegin by V. O. Kliuchevskii, in which the historian traces the salient cultural features of the fictional character’s contemporary real-life prototypes.75 According to Kliuchevskii, Europe and its culture held a lifelong fascination for the contemporary Russian nobleman, ‘in the provincial backwaters of Tula or Penza’, such that the more he tried to seem like one of the indigenous locals, the more of a foreigner he became, appearing to the locals indeed to be a Russian-born Frenchman. Consequently, Kliuchevskii suggests, when our nobleman’s thoughts turned to his immediate circumstances, he would consider them in a foreign language, finding for the relevant Russian terminology only very approximate French equivalents. Over time, the lack of a direct linguistic identity with his surroundings led the ‘natural-born son of Russia, a reject of France’, to develop a sense of alienation and to be effectively a ‘person without a fatherland’, which is precisely how contemporaneous French inhabitants of Russia referred to him. The danger was that the inevitably ensuing confusion sown in the mind of our nobleman would cause him to lurch from downright misunderstanding of everything Russian to an invariable indifference which led ultimately to total contempt.76

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It was precisely the awareness in government circles of just such a danger that led to the law of 25 May 1811 which made the teaching of Russian compulsory in all private pansiony. Its preamble revealed the government’s concern that ‘the nobility, the buttress of the state, frequently grows up under the supervision of people preoccupied solely with their own self-interest, holding in contempt everything not foreign, possessing neither pure rules of morality nor knowledge’. Worse still, ‘following the nobility, other estates too are preparing the slow ruin of society by placing their children’s education in the hands of foreigners’. The ukaz therefore required directors of schools when appointing principals of private pansiony to assess both their moral qualities and their command of Russian (this applied equally to all teaching appointments) and, crucially, to conduct teaching of all subjects exclusively through the medium of Russian.77 N. S. Mordvinov would have liked the government to go even further by shutting down all schools in Russia owned and run by foreigners. He was concerned that the dominance of French made their presence somehow essential and obliged nobles of modest means to entrust their children’s, ‘even their daughters’’, education to ‘little known, greedy and ignorant foreigners’. He concluded that this all resulted in ‘enormous harm’.78 Mordvinov’s concern was indeed shared in government circles, as is evident not only from the May 1811 ukaz but also from a similar directive issued in January 1812. This required all foreign teachers, whether employed as domestic governors or school instructors, to provide references obtained from their Russian employers confirming their competence and abilities. Furthermore, the implementation of this requirement was to be conducted in conjunction with the Ministry of Police. As Minister of National Education Count A.  K. Razumovskii so eloquently put it in an ‘Opinion’ attached to the document, ‘It is better to erect a barrier against this evil, than to contemplate with indifference its destructive effects.’79 But for all the government’s concern about the encroachment of both French language and citizens on Russia’s education system and the laws designed to restrict it, there is little to suggest they were successful. For example, as a twelve-year old entrant to the Corps of Pages in 1813, A. S. Ganglebov recalled that his informal entrance examination consisted of reading unseen a page of French, on the basis of which he was promptly admitted to the fifth class.80 N. I.  Turgenev was among contemporary Russians who strongly urged that their native language be accorded its proper status in relation to French: While those who stand at the head of Russian society will have the right to go on studying foreign languages, they should first of all study their own native language which is just as rich and beautiful. Everyone would gain if they refused to use foreign languages for conversations and letters, and learned them purely to facilitate acquaintance with other countries, and in order to study the literature of civilized countries or to follow advances in art and science.81

Once again, N. S. Mordvinov went much further than this in calling for a total ban on the use of French at court and in wider society. Along with the language,

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in his view, should go French goods and customs, ‘of which there are so many’, since they combine to erode native Russian pride and patriotism, ‘with grievous consequences’.82 But for some observers, Russians’ grasp of French was a source of admiration. A native speaker of the language, or at least its Genevan variant, Etienne Dumont, was greatly impressed by the authenticity of Russians’ spoken French. He describes a dinner party at Count Stroganov’s attended also by the other members of Alexander I’s Unofficial Committee, Novosil’tsov, Czartoryski and Kochubei, as well as several ladies, including the young Countess Stroganova and her mother, Princess Golitsyna, who both ‘spoke French so well that they might have been in a Parisian salon’.83 The French novelist, Prosper Mérimée (1803–1870), who published two translations from Pushkin’s works, La Dame de Pique and Le Hussard, assumed that the writer must have thought in French, because his use of Russian seemed to him to be so close to French.84 P. A. Viazemskii’s recollection of the proficiency of his bilingual father, to take another example, was no doubt fairly typical. He recalled as a ten-year-old boy in 1802 an occasion when his father was telling his poorly educated sister about Napoleon (whom he greatly admired and whose portrait he even had hanging in his bedroom) and his significance on the contemporary world stage: My father, like almost all educated people of the day, mostly spoke French. But on this occasion he had to speak Russian as it was the only language my aunt understood. Zhukovskii, who was introduced to our household by Karamzin, told me that he was always surprised by the speed, ease and accuracy with which in conversation my father translated into Russian thoughts and phrases which evidently formed in his head in French.

Viazemskii concludes his account by remarking on the tolerant atmosphere which prevailed in the early years of Alexander’s reign. People thought nothing then of expressing their opinions openly, and even those who disagreed with his father’s admiration for Napoleon never reproached him for it.85 Elsewhere, in his ‘Old Note Book’, Viazemskii accounts for the ‘unfortunate custom of Russian society to speak French’ by relating this overheard justification:  ‘What’s so surprising about it? Which artist would not prefer to play on a perfectly developed instrument, albeit a foreign import, rather than on his old homemade job?’ Underlining the contrast between the authentic, sophisticated French spoken by Russian noblemen and women and the colloquial Russian otherwise available to them, Viazemskii maintained that French had been crafted over many centuries, giving it unrivalled superiority as a vehicle for both conversation and correspondence. Its irresistible attraction therefore made it the written and spoken language of choice for the noble estate in Russia. Ultimately, to speak French was both a matter of personal preference and a question of etiquette, or behaving comme il faut, and more often than not the two converged.86 It is striking that, as Michelle Marrese rightly observes, although many Russian nobles were able to read a number of European languages quite fluently, they

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nonetheless typically resorted to French as their preferred language of written communication.87 The predominance of French among the Russian upper classes was noted by other Western visitors to the country, among them Britons. One of them, Robert Johnston, remarked, ‘The language in common use among the nobles is French, and it is a notorious fact that many cannot write their own’. But he attributed this to the difficulty of Russian in which, ‘even in the characters of their alphabet there is a kind of barbarism which is truly revolting’. Another (anonymous) British writer also despaired of the Russian language, implying that its complexity led Russians to seek recourse to French. He unflatteringly described Russian ‘as the most abominable language that ever was’, with a vocabulary that was impossible to remember, as well as a pronunciation ‘so excessively difficult that I  have given it up as a lost cause’. Still another British visitor, Thomas Raikes, used a political analogy to express the same point: ‘But here am I, in the capital of Russia, talking of limited monarchy and constitutional liberty; words as unintelligible to a Russia ear, as their difficult language is to mine.’ Johnston even blamed the unwieldy Russian language for the poor state of the national literature which, ‘must ever be cramped until their language is altered’.88 As we have seen in the case of A. A. Zakrevskii, however, levels of proficiency in written and spoken language varied, whether it was French or Russian. Thus, Adam Czartoryski, a member of Alexander’s inner circle and Unofficial Committee, who was Polish, had only a poor command of Russian. According to A.  P. Butenev, who served under him as foreign minister in 1802, his staff had to get used to corresponding with Russia’s embassies abroad exclusively in French, having until then used Russian for despatches and instructions.89 There were certainly occasions where perceived inadequacy in Russian could lead to tension as, for example, when Speranskii claimed that Baron Rozenkampf did not have sufficient command of Russian for his job. It was one reason for Rozenkampf ’s dislike of Speranskii and a claim that he emphatically rejected, pointing out that he had drafted over two hundred laws for the State Council over a ten-year period. Rozenkampf ’s biographer also believed Speranskii’s assertion was baseless, arguing that if Rozenkampf really did have inadequate Russian, he would hardly have been appointed to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in St Petersburg, where he was a head of department, and would certainly not have been able to write in Russian his article, ‘Some Observations on Criminal and Civil Laws in Russia’, which was published by Karamzin in ‘The European Herald’ (Vestnik Evropy), in January 1803. However, an official who worked under Rozenkampf, N. V. Sushkov, remarked in his memoirs that the Leipzig-educated German’s Russian was poor, and he had to ask his staff to translate large chunks of the Code Napoléon, ‘which he definitely wanted to impose on us’.90 In this connection, it is also worth recalling that at the beginning of Nicholas I’s reign in 1826, some of the Decembrist prisoners in the Peter-Paul Fortress were unable to provide the written answers in Russian as their interrogators required. Dictionaries were brought in for them as the use of Russian was obligatory. In his memoirs, the Decembrist I. D. Iakushkin reproduces more than one exchange with his interrogator, V. V. Levashov, in French, suggesting that the entire conversation

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was conducted in the language. But when he was transferred from the Fortress to the transit prison at Rochensalm in Finland in August 1826, he was warned that he should under no circumstances speak French in earshot of the escort officer: the penalty for doing so was withdrawal of rations. Iakushkin ruefully contrasts this injunction with his childhood recollection of being sent to bed without supper for speaking to his sisters in Russian!91 The fact was that the use of French, and often excellent French both written and spoken, was so deeply ingrained in the upper strata of Russian society that it would take a generation or more for N.  S. Mordvinov’s longing for society’s return to exclusively Russian usage to be realized. Meanwhile, however, members of the Imperial Family were observed to react in French rather than Russian to the shock of the unfolding events in St Petersburg on 14 December 1825. Thus, at the critical moment of deciding how best to disperse the insurgents, one witness heard Nicholas address his adjutant, General Benkendorf, in French, ‘Il faudrait envoyer des troupes pour les cerner.’ But Benkendorf immediately rejoined, ‘La chose est impossible, ils sont en plus grand nombre que nous.’92 Likewise, on hearing from her apartment in the Winter Palace the shooting coming from St Isaac’s Square, the Dowager Empress Maria Fedorovna exclaimed to A. N. Golitsyn, ‘Mon prince, c’est le sang russe qui coule.’ Golitsyn recalled that his immediate retort was, ‘Madame c’est le sang gâté et pourri qui s’en va.’93 And it was on the same day, the first of his reign, that Nicholas I uttered his famously sardonic remark, again in French: ‘Voilà un joli commencement de règne’ (‘Well, here’s a fine start to my reign’). Only by the middle of the nineteenth century do we find confirmation, for example, in the memoirs of A. A. Malyshev that when Minister of State Domains P.  D. Kiselev dined with Tsar Nicholas and the Imperial Family in the Winter Palace, as he frequently did, or hosted dinner parties at home, conversation at table was conducted exclusively in Russian, as the language by then had regained its rightful place both at court and in wider society.94 It is both interesting and revealing that Malyshev thought this linguistic detail worthy of comment. *** Small though it was, then, the educated stratum of the Alexandrine nobility had its origins in the eighteenth-century ‘noble intelligentsia’, defined by the literary scholar, G. A. Gukovskii, as ‘a specific group of Russian society which defined its social purpose in terms of a cultural (and later, political) force dating from the 1750s, at the end of Elizaveta Petrovna’s reign’. Many scholars have acknowledged the numerically ‘tiny layer of educated nobles’, of ‘noblemen-philosophes’, of ‘the group of wealthy young men with highly-developed consciences and patriotic aspirations’. This ‘educated minority’, to use Pavel Miliukov’s terminology, in the estimation of some historians, nevertheless exerted an enormous moral influence not only on the rest of their peers but on society as a whole, as bearers of what Elena Marasinova has called a ‘cultural hegemony’.95 However, other commentators have argued less optimistically that educated society, represented by only a tiny minority, proved unequal to the task of promoting the cultural life of the majority, or of articulating confidence in Russia’s future.96

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The role of the noble intelligentsia in the history of Russian culture and social thought, and in the development of an understanding of such concepts as morality and honour, still demand detailed study, as S.  O. Shmidt has pointed out:  ‘For without attention to these subjects the history of the Russian nobility will remain incomplete and one-sided, as will our understanding of the place of the nobility in the history of our country.’97 It is to the story of how this eighteenth-century legacy, and its subsequent ‘cultural hegemony’, were carried forward by the educated nobility in Alexander’s reign that we shall be turning in the next chapter.

Chapter 4 E DU C AT IO NA L A SP I R AT IO N A N D I N ST I T U T IO NA L R E A L I T Y

In this chapter we consider the initiatives and key reforms aimed at both raising the educational standards of the nobility and broadening their cultural horizons. The focus is particularly on the pivotal governmental role in this process played by State Secretary M. M. Speranskii; on the attempts of the leading institutions in both capitals to improve their performance; and on the challenges academies and government alike faced in persuading the nobility of the merits of educating their children at all. A sense of the varying experiences of their alma mater gained by a generation of the Alexandrine nobility, particularly as gleaned from their memoirs, forms the core of the chapter. It concludes with an account of the conservative reaction, especially towards the end of Alexander’s reign, against the very idea of those educational policies which had been aimed particularly at the nobility and upon which his government had so optimistically embarked at its outset. Alexander Pushkin, who thought a good deal about the education of young noblemen, noted that the absence of a sound education was ‘detrimental to the Fatherland’. In what may be taken as an implicit criticism of his by now convicted Decembrist friends and acquaintances, he commented, ‘Education alone is capable of averting new insanities, and new social disasters.’1 Writing in the reign of Alexander III, the leading liberal historian A. N. Pypin retrospectively considered the quest for improved education standards to be one of the main redeeming features of Alexander I’s reign:  ‘This era, so often maligned, actually had some really attractive qualities. Among them were the increasing emphasis on education, and the first signs of a functioning civil society.’2 Against this must be weighed the contemporaneous and not untypical view of S. A. Tuchkov, admittedly no fan of Alexander I, who stated bluntly that ‘the tsar’s enthusiasm for the promotion of education ultimately turned into its oppression’.3

Speranskii and the 1809 education reform At last, on 6 August 1809, the Russian nobility’s obdurately blissful ignorance was shattered by an ukaz which was innocuously entitled ‘On the regulations for promotion in rank in the civil service, and on the academic qualifications for

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promotion to collegiate assessor and state councillor’.4 It urged the ‘noble estate’ in particular to take advantage of the opportunities available to acquire educational qualifications which hitherto, unfortunately, had not been taken up to any significant extent. It was not the first time in Russian history that the nobility had been obliged by imperial invitation to acquire educational qualifications:  in 1714 Peter the Great decreed that the children of the nobility were to study mathematics at ‘cipher’ schools and so qualify for a diploma which would enable them to obtain commissions in the tsar’s new navy, but without which they would not be allowed to marry.5 Now, almost a century later, in a move which provoked absolute horror among government officials and outright hatred for Speranskii, its effective author, the ukaz blocked officials’ promotion to the rank of collegiate assessor and state councillor, which brought with them the privilege of hereditary nobility, unless they had a certificate of education or had passed exams at university. For its part, the nobility had long considered promotion to these ranks to be a normal career expectation and a reward commensurate with their social status. As the chief proponent of this reform, Speranskii was now responding to the nobility’s modest educational attainment as well as the state’s urgent need for the adequately educated personnel required to staff Alexander’s rapidly expanding government apparatus. The intention was thus twofold:  to encourage the nobility to acquire both secondary and higher education and to make it possible for non-nobles with a university degree to enter government service, progress up the Table of Ranks and so become ennobled themselves. It would be hard to say with absolute certainty which of these two aspirations angered the nobility more. The upshot was that examinations were henceforth compulsory for middle- and high-ranking civil servants, a decision which outraged the nobility and shook even those who could normally be counted on to lend Speranskii their support. This was a task that it would subsequently fall to a historian to undertake. N. F. Dubrovin retrospectively justified the unpopular ukaz by pointing out that Russia then stood in desperate need of a better educated civil service:  for generations, the sons of aristocrats had been awarded military or court rank and had then risen easily and effortlessly up the Table of Ranks; rather than engaging with educational progress, they instead enjoyed active social lives and did no real work. Similarly, sons of the lesser nobility were assigned to various institutions, both in the capitals and the provinces, but actually did nothing. Pushkin was not alone in denigrating the ‘clueless and impressionable’ young nobles of his day.6 From 1804, the government had tried to improve the situation by setting up new secondary and higher education institutions, including four universities and numerous gymnasia. This process, and the nobles’ reaction to it, is more fully discussed later in this chapter. The hope was that the nobility would rush to take advantage of these new facilities, with fathers ensuring their sons were properly educated. But as they failed to do so in significant numbers, six years later the government would resort to compulsory measures which specifically linked promotion to educational qualifications.

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The result was that promotion was no longer possible on the basis of length of service but only of proved achievement, supported by evidence of completed courses and a positive reference from the head of the appropriate government department. The ukaz stipulated that promotion to the ranks of collegiate assessor and state councillor now required a certificate from a Russian university, confirming completion of a course and success in assessments (ob uspeshnosti ispytanii). A list of these was appended to the ukaz and it included the following:  mandatory knowledge of Russian and a foreign language; natural, criminal and Roman law; civil history and geography; basic statistics and the state economy; and mathematics and physics. To general indignation the ukaz applied equally to those who already held posts in the civil service, the nobility in particular regarding this as a major injustice.7 This is reflected in the claim of one contemporary who recalled that ‘Speranskii’s document astonished officials and all those who were unable to educate their sons in universities: learning was not yet much in fashion’.8 This much was observed by Speranskii himself, who remarked that Russian noblemen generally were not particularly ambitious about their own educational standards. Rather, they saw in Speranskii’s proposal a violation of their privileges and hated him for it. Despite establishing universities outside Moscow, setting up a special ministry to oversee them and introducing other incentives, Alexander was to be disappointed by the overall results. Nevertheless, although the 1809 ukaz proved to be a failure, it jolted the nobility out of its inertia and even made some take education more seriously.9 In order to compel them to do so, the government arranged for in-service training to be provided at university summer schools. The civil service despaired: many had never even heard of the subjects they were now required to study. The general mood was well captured in her memoirs by V. I. Bakunina: ‘How were poor noblemen who only wanted to be civil servants supposed to learn languages, Roman law, philosophy, physics, etc.? These exams meant that all posts would be occupied by seminarians like Speranskii himself.’10 Speranskii was universally blamed for raising the career threshold beyond the reach of most of his contemporaries. N. M. Karamzin spoke for the conservative majority in his attack on the offending ukaz in his 1811 Memoir on Ancient and Modern Russia: In the past, functionaries of the most enlightened states had been required to know only what was essential to their work:  the engineer  – engineering, the judge – law, and so on. But in Russia, the official presiding in the Civil Court must know Homer and Theocritus, the Senate Secretary  – the properties of oxygen and all the gasses, the Deputy Governor – Pythagorean geometry, the superintendant of a lunatic asylum – Roman law, otherwise they will end their days as Collegiate or Titular Councillors. Neither forty years of state service, nor important accomplishments exempt one from the obligation of having to learn things entirely alien to and useless for Russians.

F. F. Vigel’ recalled in his memoirs, ‘No one could believe that rigorous enforcement of this ukaz was a possibility’ and deftly provided proof of the accuracy of his

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own comment with his promotion to the rank of state councillor in 1825, without having the requisite university transcript.11 The summer school lectures provided were also considered useless because their content was deemed irrelevant and the timetable unsuitable for working civil servants. One government official wrote to Alexander that the ukaz had reduced many noblemen to despair, while one wit claimed to have lost all hope in passing exams in any subjects except ‘rankomania’ and ‘bribology’. The 6 August edict undoubtedly compelled people to take education seriously, but most of those who bore the brunt of it saw it as a humiliation for the nobility, which they blamed entirely on Speranskii, whose meteoric rise from obscurity they in any case deeply resented, and in addition accused him of class envy and even republican tendencies.12 Thus Speranskii sought to transform officialdom by establishing as a legal principle the idea that education brought service benefits (such as automatic rank), which was among the ideas for improving education provision he had first articulated during his early service as Kochubei’s department director in the Ministry of Internal Affairs.13 It was also an important component in a process which Marc Raeff has described as the ‘professionalization’ of culture in the first quarter of the nineteenth century, whereby specialization became more apparent in every area, including state service, the work that occupied most members of the elite. This process also affected education: boarding schools and new universities were established to train a potentially high-achieving nobility in the provinces. The famous Lycée at Tsarskoe Selo, originally intended to provide classmates for the tsar’s younger brothers, subsequently became a training ground for high state officials, as well as an active centre of literary and intellectual life.14 This was one of the new or reformed civil and military institutions in which unprecedented, if still limited, numbers of young noblemen would enrol during Alexander’s reign. In the following section we explore the kind of education they received there and gain some idea of their student experience as reflected in the memoirs of some of them.

The nobility’s alma mater As we have seen, the level of government officials’ education at the beginning of the century was extremely low. This was primarily because of the lack of educational institutions. From the start of his reign, Alexander I’s perception was that too many young noblemen had unacceptably low levels of literacy, so providing him with a compelling incentive for prioritizing educational reform in Russia. The aim was to establish more schools on the model of the one success story at the start of his reign, the exclusive Boarding School for Nobles at Moscow University, which by way of exception, enjoyed the approval and support of the nobility. It was described in a government document of 8 August 1802 as ‘the only one of our institutions to attract a great inflow of students while all the others are failing’.15 Among the schools modelled on it would be the Tsarskoe Selo Lycée.

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The reform process was initiated with the publication on 24 January 1803 of the ukaz: ‘Preliminary regulations of national education’, followed in 1804 by another entitled ‘Statutes of educational institutions’, which included a revised charter for Moscow University, granting it some measure of autonomy. New schools for the nobility were established in Iaroslavl’ (the Demidov school which dated from 1804 to 1805), Odessa (the Richelieu Lycée),Tula, Tambov and Khar’kov, where particular emphasis was laid on the teaching of foreign languages, thought to be the right training for noblemen seeking careers in the civil service. In 1807, Speranskii was appointed head of a commission to reorganize education in the seminaries. He was also involved the following year in the establishment of the Tsarskoe Selo Lycée, designed from 1810 to accommodate and teach fifty sons of elite noble families. Also from 1807, young noblemen were encouraged to enrol in the St Petersburg cadet corps colleges where they would immediately be assigned places, rather than join regiments directly as NCOs. The idea was that after a period of training they were to be posted to their regiments as junior officers. However, the nobility responded to this proposal as unenthusiastically as they did to educational innovation generally. One contemporary, Alexander Mirkovich (b.1792), from the nobility of Tula province who was briefly (and inconsequentially) a member of the Decembrists’ Union of Welfare, complained of the unremitting daily study that he had to endure as a Guards infantry officer (of which the two elite regiments were the Preobrazhenskii and the Semenovskii, whose commander-in-chief was the tsar). The wealthy elite headed for the cavalry regiments: the Horse Guards and the Life-Hussars. An ukaz of 24 January 1803 stipulated that within five years school attendance would be a prerequisite for entry into the civil service, but it was ineffectual. The newly established schools and universities remained undersubscribed. For example, from Etienne Dumont’s diary entry of 30 July 1803, we learn that Khar’kov University was due to open the following spring with just 12 probationer students on bursaries of 300 roubles and 40 students on maintenance scholarships of 200 roubles. The provision of scholarships prompted his acerbic comment that ‘in Russia this is essential: you have to pay students in order to have any’.16 Dumont may have had a point, but the government became increasingly convinced that those who benefitted from the state bursary system for their education should have to pay back the investment made in them by entering government service. From 1813 this principle was enshrined in law: the notion that state scholarships came with strings attached was reaffirmed ten years later by the law to this effect of 26 June 1823.17 But in any case, enrolments remained modest. On Alexander’s accession, Russia’s oldest university, founded in 1755 in Moscow, was still the country’s only university:  by 1811 it had only 215 students on its books. Karamzin described the public lectures offered there as popular events which were a credit to the university’s professoriate, well attended ‘by distinguished Moscow ladies, wellborn young men and women, priests, students . . . and people of every calling’.18 The invasion of 1812 caused the university to close until August 1813, but it was

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another five years before its buildings were reconstructed, and longer still before student numbers recovered. In his account of a stay in Moscow from 1816 to 1820 a British visitor, Robert Lyall, lamented the university’s low enrolments: ‘It is to be regretted that such an immense establishment, furnished with so many professors and teachers, should admit 40, or with the 60 lately added, a total of 100 students at the public expense.’19 A comparison of student numbers in just two European institutions at around this time reveals an instructive contrast. In Paris, the École normale supérieure was founded in 1808 with an enrolment of 300 students on the basis of a competitive examination. The University of Edinburgh’s medical faculty alone, founded in 1726, was attracting 700 students annually by the 1820s, half of whom came from outside Scotland.20 In the second capital the situation was even worse as St Petersburg’s higher education institute only acquired full university status in February 1819, with twentyfour enrolments. By 1822 its student numbers had reached forty (seventeen lawyers, six philologists, four mathematicians and thirteen auditors). Such remarkably modest figures confirm that universities were never popular with Russian high society which far preferred military academies and specialist institutes.21 A  good indication of this is to be found in the memoirs of the writer D. N. Sverbeev, who recalled how, at the age of sixteen, he enthusiastically told his uncle (who was provincial governor of Moscow) about his university experience, ‘of which, I have to admit, he had absolutely no idea, even though he was himself a Moscow resident. Scholarship and society lived apart in those days and never came together.’22

The Corps of Pages and Cadets From early in his reign, and even before he came to the throne, Alexander recognized that, in order to encourage the nobility to raise their educational standards and expectations, there would need to be a radically improved infrastructure comprising new universities and schools. True to the spirit of the time and Alexander’s own inclinations, the initial emphasis was on retooling military education as reflected in a number of directives the new tsar issued. In August 1801, Alexander ordered seventeen new military schools to be set up ‘throughout the whole Empire’, eight large ones consisting of two companies of 120 men each and nine smaller ones of one company each. Boys were to join them between the ages of seven and nine and to study for seven years. Each company was to send annually its top sixteen graduates to the cadet corps colleges in St Petersburg and a further eight ‘to the University’.23 Among several important schools which Alexander I  ordered restructured was the elite institution, His Imperial Majesty’s Corps of Pages (Pazheskii Ego Imperatorskogo Velichestva Korpus). It had originally been established in 1759 by Empress Elizabeth and in 1802 was reorganized along the lines of a military academy for 400 sons of the upper nobility destined for service at court or in the Guards’ regiments. Even so, by 1810 there were just sixty-six students in

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attendance, following a seven-year programme which consisted of five years of general education and two years of specialized instruction.24 The memoir of an alumnus of the latter, M. A. Dmitriev, provides a vivid account of his time as a pupil there, as does that of the Decembrist, A. S. Gangeblov, who joined the corps in 1813 aged twelve, and remained there for the next eight years. Dmitriev recalls the generally poor quality of teaching and the lack of proper supervision. For his part, Gangeblov similarly laments the chaotic indiscipline, including mock funerals and pillow fights. In his experience there was not one teacher capable of interesting the boys in his subject, while the dominant pedagogical methodology was tedious rote learning. In any case, with very few exceptions, ‘nobody actually studied to learn anything useful, but solely to gain an officer’s rank’.25 The two cadet corps colleges in St Petersburg offered four-year training courses for up to 1,700 young men. The Naval Cadet Corps College was attended by over seven hundred trainees.26 Also in 1801, Alexander ordered the Military College to accept literate candidates and those with at least some education, because there were so many nobles enlisted as regimental NCOs who were completely unable to read: illiterate recruits were to be assigned to the ranks, regardless of their status. Only in 1804 was a system of higher, secondary and primary education introduced with the commissioning of new universities, provincial gymnasia and district schools. The next stage was the order of 21 March 1805 establishing military academies, or ‘noble institutes’, in every province, in line with Alexander’s ‘Plan of military education’. Their graduates were also to proceed to the cadet corps colleges.27 Nevertheless, as we have seen, by 1807 there was a marked shortage of nobles entering the officer corps. Noblemen had traditionally joined the regiment closest to their homes, but they did so reluctantly for fear of immediately being sent on campaign. By way of easing the young noblemen’s transition to the harshness of military life, on 14 March 1807 Alexander ordered young nobles of sixteen and over who intended to enter military service to proceed at state expense to the Second Cadet Corps in St Petersburg rather than joining their regiments straight away as NCOs. However, by the eve of the 1812 war, the size of graduating classes remained worryingly small. One source gives a figure of 180 new officers passing out of the First Cadet Corps that year and 184 from the Second Cadet Corps. It was in this context that Alexander I blamed the continuing backwardness of Russian education on the lack of parents’ concern about the issue. This he did in response to the reproach of his naval minister Admiral P. V. Chichagov that Russia’s armed forces were too reliant on foreign personnel.28

The Noblemen’s Regiment One important remedy was the establishment of the Noblemen’s Regiment at the Second Cadet Corps. Here, sons from poorer noble families were given a two-year military training at state expense. It proved both remarkably effective and popular, producing an impressive 2,665 ensigns in its first five years. It started with an enrolment of 600, but by 1813 the numbers had risen to 1,700 and then in 1815 to

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2,400. In 1817 the Second Cadet Corps numbered 700 cadets and the First Cadet 800, plus a further 300 in the junior department. According to one calculation, the total combined output for the whole of Alexander’s reign of the Corps of Pages and First and Second Cadet Corps amounted to 4,845 officers.29 The memoir of one Noble Regiment cadet, E. I. Topchiev (1801–1862), records that in 1817 one of that year’s two graduating cohorts numbered 300 and that his own graduating class in 1819 consisted of 500 new officers. They celebrated their promotion in the St George Hall of the Winter Palace in the presence of the tsar who was ‘cheerful, several times walking along the ranks of the graduates, and gracious enough to talk with many of us’.30 Remarkably, almost half of the Russian army’s combatant officers in 1812 had received their training with the Noblemen’s Regiment. At the same time, the Cavalry Squadron of the Nobility was formed to provide junior officers for the Russian cavalry.31 When Topchiev’s personal account of his experiences as a cadet in the Noblemen’s Regiment between 1815 and 1819 was published in ‘Russian Antiquity’ (Russkaia starina) in 1880, the editor noted that it was of particular interest, being the first publication of its kind about the institution as viewed from the inside. Topchiev certainly gave a graphic description of what he endured there which, if anything, comes much closer to something out of Dickens’s Dotheboys Hall. According to Topchiev, very young and barely literate sons of the petty (melkopomestnoe) nobility, typically from the provinces of Riazan’, Kursk and Smolensk, were herded together in cramped dormitories, which were freezing in winter, five sharing two beds pushed together, undernourished on thin gruel, and suffering as a consequence from a variety of ailments, including scurvy, goitre, mange and, above all, the common cold. There was a particularly bad outbreak of mange in 1815. The worst affected were placed in quarantine, but the infection lingered on until 1817, when at last the cadets were assigned one to a bed, bed linen was changed and the dormitory floors washed more frequently. There was even a brief amelioration in the quality of the gruel dished up to the cadets. Interestingly, Topchiev ascribes these improvements to the personal intervention of the tsar himself, who could not fail to learn of the terrible conditions in the Noblemen’s Regiment after so many of the cadets had written letters of complaint to their parents:  they in turn informed their neighbours, ‘such that almost the whole of Russia knew’.32 The conditions endured by Topchiev and his classmates contrast markedly with the comfortable accommodation, including individual cubicles in the dormitory, three-course dinners and other excellent facilities available to the boarders at Tsarskoe Selo Lycée as described by I. I. Pushchin in his detailed account of them, which is in this particular respect much fuller than that of M. A. Korf, to which we now turn.33

The Tsarskoe Selo Lycée The Tsarskoe Selo Lycée was among the most privileged and exclusive schools of the day. It was projected at Speranskii’s instigation as a school for highly gifted

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boys, initially without class restriction. However, when it opened in October 1811, access was restricted to up to fifty sons of wealthy and prominent noble families. The boys boarded at the school, purpose-built in the gardens of Tsarskoe Selo close to the imperial palace and at a deliberately safe distance from the distractions of St Petersburg. Pupils were taught Russian, Latin, French and German, mathematics, history and fine arts, and were expected to form the basis of a better-educated civil service.34 It was also seen to provide an acceptable alternative to university education, which was viewed by some in government circles, V.  P. Kochubei among them, as a dangerous source of potentially subversive political notions imported from the West. This negative view of universities would become even more pronounced from 1816, with the appointment of A. N. Golitsyn as Minister of Education. He made no secret of his opinion that the rights they had been granted earlier in Alexander’s reign had been both premature and dangerous.35 In its early years, the Lycée developed a liberal ethos largely thanks to its first director, V. F. Malinovskii, whose own outlook was much like Speranskii’s. It was said, for example, to be the only school in Russia where there was no corporal punishment. This must be considered something of a breakthrough since, in the view of one social historian, from the seventeenth century until the 1860s corporal punishment was considered ‘the main means of educating’, and it was meted out to children ‘in noble families, mostly to boys, and mostly in schools’. A  similar view is expressed by the author of a brief description of the everyday life of the trainees at Russia’s oldest military academy, the First Cadet Corps, in the first half of the nineteenth century. Corporal punishment, he asserts, was an ineluctable part of the education system of the day. It was considered so normal that the cadets themselves regarded anyone who had never been flogged as hardly a proper cadet. The severe regime and strict order in the Corps was maintained thanks to a tradition encompassing a variety of punishments, ‘elevated in some cases to something of an art form’. A contemporary memoirist lists the usual punishments as ranging from kneeling in the corner, denial of breakfast and dinner, and being boxed round the ears. The most common of all, ‘of course’, was being lashed with birch rods from five strokes upwards.36 The Decembrist V. I. Shteingeil’ has left a description in his memoirs of the cruel regime of corporal punishment in the Naval Cadet Corps at the end of the eighteenth and beginning of the nineteenth century: The methods of correction consisted of total tyranny. The captains apparently boasted to each other about which of them could whip the cadets the most savagely and inhumanly. Every Saturday the lazy ones were subjected to hundreds of lashes, and in the orderly room the howls never ceased the whole day long.37

Nor were girls immune from corporal punishment. M.  K. Nikoleva’s memoirs recall how her governess named Shmal’ts (presumably a German woman, Schmalz!) specifically requested permission from her charge’s mother to achieve total obedience through corporal punishment. Permission was granted, but it was

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counterproductive:  Nikoleva testified to the pleasure she derived from defying Schmalz, so that ‘instead of eradicating disobedience, it fomented childish obstinacy’.38 Baron M. A. Korf was among the cohort of 30 boys who comprised the first intake of the Tsarskoe Selo Lycée in 1811. He left a detailed account of his time there, along with his impressions of the education it offered him, many of which are surprisingly critical. They merit our attention for the light they shed on the functioning of the elite secondary school for the Russian nobility in Alexander I’s reign.39 Korf recalled that the official opening of the first academic year at Tsarskoe Selo on 19 October 1811 took place in the presence of the tsar, the whole Imperial Family and numerous courtiers. This was to be expected as ‘Alexander I played an active part in the institution he established “to prepare young people for high state posts” ’. The professors assigned to instruct the Lycée’s pupils were the very best scholars from the pedagogical institute, whose own education had been acquired abroad. But for all the Lycée’s elitist pretensions, things went ‘extraordinarily badly’. Korf complains that they were badly taught, that their ‘moral welfare was supervised very feebly’; there were almost no staff monitors and even less discipline. These inadequacies, in his view, stemmed largely from the way the school was set up. The Lycée was established along the lines of an institute of higher education, but enrolled, as its statutes stipulated, young boys aged between ten and fourteen with the most meagre preliminary preparation. Among the main flaws Korf identifies was the hiring of professors with no teaching experience to instruct boys who had had no primary education, which was what they really needed: We needed first primary teachers, but we were immediately assigned to professors who, moreover, had themselves never taught anywhere. We should have been divided according to our age and knowledge into class groups, but instead we were all sat together and read, for example, German literature when most of us barely knew the German alphabet.

Korf was struck by the lack of any specialized training in their final years to prepare them for their future careers. What they got instead was something between secondary and tertiary level, ‘some kind of general course on just about everything’, including:  mathematics (differential and integral), astronomy, detailed church history and theology (bogoslovie), to which more time was given than to law or political science. ‘In those days’, Korf writes, ‘the Lycée was neither a university nor a gymnasium nor a primary school but some kind of chaotic mixture of all these together.’ He found the first director (from 1811 to 1814), V. F. Malinovskii, to be ‘a good man but simple and weak, in no way cut out for such a position’. After his death, his place was taken by a succession of short-term appointments. Korf had a low opinion of other members of the school staff, describing one as a ‘bigot’ (‘what the Germans call Kopfhänger’), another as ‘an utterly worthless and ineffective individual’ and a third as ‘stupid, foolish, completely uneducated and totally

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without character’, whom the students made fun of ‘openly, to his face’. His view of the instructors, the pupils’ most immediate supervisors, was even worse. He dismisses them as ‘deplorable, for the most part ignoramuses, worthless idiots or shameless bribe-takers, picked up from God knows where’. The only person in the Lycée that Korf and his classmates actually liked or respected seems to have been Monsieur de Boudrie, who – however improbably – was a brother of Jean-Paul Marat, the friend of Robespierre and Jacobin deputy to the Convention: the same Marat who was murdered in his bath in 1793, as famously depicted in the painting by his friend, Jacques-Louis David. To a modern reader of Korf ’s schoolboy memories, perhaps the most extraordinary of them is what the author himself describes as ‘one of the very worst failings of the Lycée’: for the whole six years of their course the pupils were never allowed to venture into central St Petersburg, and for their first three or four years they were not even allowed to stray beyond the walls of the Lycée itself. During rare parental visits, they had to sit with them in the common room or in the garden. Korf believes that by isolating the boys, the authorities sought ‘to preserve the fullness and purity of our morality’. However, as no real watch was kept on them, and ‘meanwhile young people varying in age and temperament, could not help but play along with their carnal desires, it all turned out thoroughly badly’. Korf goes on to hint at adolescent homosexual relationships and their dreadful consequences: On the one hand we grew up as half savages, deprived of any normal social contact, which later did not come easily to everyone in society, and on the other hand, given the impossibility of satisfying our physical urges in a natural way, there developed among us to a really terrible extent unhappy schoolboy passions, which undermined the health of many and even led some to an early grave. In a word, our Lycée upbringing both intellectually and morally was in the fullest sense, ‘une education manquée’.

Such ‘schoolboy passions’ were not the exclusive preserve of the Lycée. A remarkably similar observation was made in respect of the Mining Institute (Gornyi Korpus) by former student E. F. von Bradke who found it ‘natural in the circumstances’ that among over three hundred young men mostly aged around twenty-five, many of whom in the absence of relatives in St Petersburg were ‘doomed to spend several years confined by the same four walls and restrained by no moral influence’, there would develop ‘passionate inclinations’, leading to ‘vice which attained the most extreme proportions’.40 Moral supervision was also ‘very weak’ at the Naval Cadet Corps, according to the Decembrist D. I. Zavalishin, who was a teenaged cadet there (from 1816 to 1822). Interestingly, as he recalled in his memoirs, this gave rise to a climate which facilitated ‘an extraordinarily developed system of what is termed in English schools and universities “fagging”, that is juniors serving seniors’.41 Although Zavalishin’s memoirs are notoriously unreliable and self-serving, this observation – complete with its use of the original English term – has a ring of authenticity about it.42 In

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any case, his experiences are corroborated by the observations of A.  P. Beliaev, who was a cadet there at the same time as Zavalishin. He comments on the total lack of ‘moral education’ offered. The youngsters were confronted from their early teenage years by ‘great temptations’, presented by the ‘open field of all possible passions and vices’.43 Despite Korf ’s retrospective concerns about the lack of proper discipline, he concedes that his graduating class emerged with respectable results which were certainly incomparably better than those of any other institute. Pushkin’s name alone was enough to immortalize his class; but Pushkin apart, the 1817 graduating class produced, in Korf ’s words, ‘several excellent people in almost all walks of public life’. Among its twenty-nine members were two other poets, A. A. Delvig and V.  K. Kiukhel’beker; K.  K. Danzas, who would be Pushkin’s second in his fatal duel with Georges-Charles D’Anthès in January 1837; A.  M. Gorchakov, who pursued a brilliant diplomatic career and would serve as foreign minister (from 1856 to 1882); a future Decembrist, I.  I. Pushchin; and a future director (from 1849 to 1861) of the St Petersburg Public Library, M. A. Korf himself – all independent-minded and, within the self-deprecating limits described by Korf, well-educated individuals.44 According to him, he and his classmates emerged with only ‘a superficial idea about everything’, combined with, ‘a wealth of scintillating omniscience with which, unfortunately, it is so easy to get away with in Russia’. Korf left the Lycée just short of seventeen years of age, ‘with an excellent certificate, though only half of what it claimed for me was true, with the rank of Titular Counsellor; and I exchanged my tight-fitting Lycée uniform for a baggy frock-coat’. Like several of his classmates, Korf was to complete his education only after leaving the Lycée. In contrast to the large imperial retinue which had attended Korf ’s matriculation in 1811, his graduation on 9 June 1817 was graced by the tsar who was accompanied only by the Minister of Public Education, Prince A. N. Golitsyn.

The nobility’s input: The Column-leaders’ Academy From early on in the new reign, the nobility of many provinces responded to the tsar’s appeal for an overdue improvement in educational standards by establishing noble military schools and also bearing the associated costs. In Kiev, Smolensk, Voronezh, Tula and Tambov, to take several prime examples, the nobility delighted Alexander by establishing noble academies at their own expense. On 17 February 1805, he personally thanked the nobility of Olonets for undertaking the establishment of a boarding school for the children of indigent nobles in 1805.45 The local nobility was also involved in providing the start-up funding for the University of Khar’kov in Ukraine, a pledge which was secured in November 1804 by its founder, V. N. Karazin, the chief architect of Alexander’s first education reforms. In fact, the most frequent proposals for fundraising made by the nobility generally were linked with educational institutions. In the Khar’kov case, a total of 400,000 roubles was pledged to be raised by a levy imposed on the poll tax

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exacted from the serfs. This offer was audited by the Committee of Ministers in St Petersburg which then had to establish who had pledged what amount and whether it had been paid. The nobles’ initiative enabled the university to admit its first students in 1805. From that year too, an annual cohort of twenty-five men was admitted to a three-year course in the Higher Academy of Law. Entry was based on college or university reports and was highly competitive. Successful applicants were considered to have started their service careers, and were therefore paid an annual salary of 300 roubles.46 The memoirs of a leading conservative journalist, F. V. Bulgarin, give details of further responses to Alexander’s initiatives in education from other individuals. For example, Count I. A. Bezborodko established a grammar school (gimnaziia) at his own expense in Nezhin (Ukraine): the tsar was so pleased that he ordered it to be named after its benefactor. The ‘outstanding patriot’, P. G. Demidov, initially spent 500,000 roubles supporting schools and then in 1804 gave a further million to set up a Lycée in Iaroslavl’. The following year he opened a hall of residence for forty sons of the nobility aged from nine to thirteen, but it struggled to attract enrolments, largely because of noble parents’ preference for military academies.47 The nobility of the Kiev, Podol’sk and Volhynia provinces founded at their own expense the Kremenets Lycée and, in addition, the Kiev nobility raised 500,000 roubles for a similar objective, with a further 400,000 roubles coming from the Slobodsko-Ukrainian nobility. The Tula nobility pledged funds for a cadet corps college, and G. Nepliuiev established a military academy in the remote eastern fort town of Orenburg, on the Ural River. In 1823, as an expression of their loyalty and gratitude to the tsar, the nobility of Mogilev undertook to endow a new school for the education of the children of indigent members of the nobility. It was named the Virtembergskii House, after Prince Alexander of Württemberg, who was the governor-general of Belorussia until 1821. In addition, there were numerous smaller contributions by individual nobles who gave what they could to support their local schools with donations of cash, books and buildings.48 These various developments suggest that efforts were made right from the start of Alexander’s reign to ameliorate what was generally a bleak educational landscape. The local nobility built on such infrastructure as existed. This typically included private boarding schools for their children, the pansiony. However, they were expensive and were therefore largely the preserve of wealthier noble families. A major individual initiative meant that from 1811, future officers could attend a military school in Moscow called the Column-leaders’ Academy (uchebnoe zavedenie dlia kolonnovozhatykh). It was established as a private venture by General N. N. Muraviev at the instigation of the well-connected field marshal P. M. Volkonskii, a favourite of Alexander I and his chief of general staff. It was set up as a school for mathematics and military science but later became the base for the general staff academy. Muraviev’s school produced many future leading military and public figures.49 The future senator E. F. von Bradke was among the first cohort of forty students, some of whom – as he recalled – at the age of twenty-five were already veterans of campaigns, or had attended courses at the École Polytechnique in Paris or a German university. They nearly all came from the wealthiest and most

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distinguished families in Russia, ‘since the school, set up by a favourite of the tsar, enjoyed a great vogue..50 The academy was attended between 1816 and 1823 by no fewer than twentythree future Decembrists. Among them was N.  V. Basargin, who recalled that General Muraviev, himself the father of a Decembrist, A.  N. Muraviev, was an outstanding and unusually gifted teacher whose course on military history and tactics was the most popular with the academy’s students. Basargin’s extensive account of his time at the academy concludes with an affectionate tribute to his old director, N. N. Muraviev, ‘a good man and a useful citizen in the fullest meaning of the word!’ He was said to take great delight in hearing of the successful careers of his newly commissioned alumni and the respect they routinely earned from their commanding officers.51 It was thanks to a successful year spent at Muraviev’s school that P. A. Tuchkov (the younger brother of A. A. Tuchkov and older brother of S. A. Tuchkov, who were both also memoirists) ‘earned the right’, at just twelve years of age, to enrol at Moscow University and two years later to attain the rank of ensign of the general staff. Unsurprisingly, Tuchkov’s memoir opens laconically:  ‘My childhood was short’. His uncle, Nikolai Alekseevich, insisted that home education ‘was harmful to boys’ and was instrumental in securing both his nephews (then aged eight and eleven) places first at the Boarding School for Nobles at Moscow University, and subsequently at Muraviev’s Column-leaders’ academy. Tuchkov was happy in retrospect to credit the school with providing ‘young people with an excellent preparation for service in the General Staff ’.52 N.  I. Shenig, who taught Russian there, has left a detailed account of the school in which he records that it was closed down on the accession of Nicholas I, after which the personnel needs of the General Staff were instead met by the Military Academy.53 The outstanding reputation of Muraviev’s academy was doubtless irrevocably tarnished by its unwitting Decembrist associations. In this connection, when in January 1826 the Investigating Committee asked Southern Society member I. B. Avramov specifically about the political climate (i.e. ‘the latest political opinions about reforms’) at Muraviev’s academy when he attended it in 1818, the prisoner replied that he could recall no overtly political discussions.54 While Avramov’s flat denial fairly reflects the fact that Muraviev was far from actively advocating plans for political reform, nevertheless, in the view of one Soviet authority, highly influential in her day, ‘his interest in progressive ideas, his broad outlook and his friendly treatment of his young charges no doubt fostered the development of a liberal way of thinking among those who passed through the Column-leaders’ Academy’.55 The broader question of the political formation of the Decembrists’ generation is addressed later in this study.

Boarding schools (pansiony) in Moscow and St Petersburg The memoirs of F.  V. Bulgarin support the consensus that the Boarding School for Nobles at Moscow University was the best educational institute of the day.

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At this time the university and its associated boarding school, which was given distinguished leadership by the rector, A.  A. Prokopovich-Antonskii, not only stood at the centre of Moscow’s cultural life but also between them produced, to cite A. I. Koshelev’s biographer, most of the generation’s ‘outstanding figures in Russian literature, science and state service’.56 From V. I. Safonovich’s reminiscences of his schooldays there, we learn that he was one of 300 pupils whose parents ‘eagerly enrolled their children, and brought them [to Moscow] from all corners of Russia’. He credits Antonskii with a highly successful twenty-five-year tenure as the school’s director, and among other intriguing details of its regime recalls that those forty or so pupils who were unable to return home during the summer holidays were sent to a military-style summer camp near Moscow, until term resumed on 15 August.57 Although memoirs are generally unspecific on the issue, Safonovich’s observation suggests that the school year was very long. Children were therefore away from home for extended periods – a prospect, it seems reasonable to suppose pace Safonovich’s reference to eager enrolment, that must have deterred some families from sending them away at all. One pupil who joined Antonskii’s school in 1803 at the tender age of eight and was to spend the next eight years there, was V. F. Raevskii, the son of a noble family from Kursk province. However, his view of the pansion contrasts sharply with those of Bulgarin and Safonovich. In his memoirs, Raevskii describes the teachers ‘at Russia’s premier educational establishment’ as ‘the most mediocre people’, for the most part ‘pedants, geriatrics, and utter clowns both in appearance and character’.58 In his memoirs, M.  L. Nazimov claims that in the last years of Alexander’s reign there were very few noblemen from wealthy families studying at Moscow University. They opted instead for the university’s Boarding School for Nobles because, at least until 1822, they could on graduation qualify for the tenth rank whereas graduates from the university were appointed only to the twelfth. The advantage of this was that the former could count on attaining the kind of rank within three years which it would take others at least six years to reach, or even more, ‘depending on one’s estate’. Nazimov, himself an alumnus of Moscow University, offers a glimpse of student life in Moscow and its contrast with ‘quiet family life at one’s parents’ home’. Initially, he recalled, he felt ‘deafened’ by the ‘noisy and witty conversations on all kinds of subjects’, which included local gossip and current affairs gleaned from the press. Nazimov was impressed by the variety of the literature syllabus which, he claimed, included Pushkin’s recently published narrative poem, ‘The Prisoner of the Caucasus’ (Kavkazskii plennik, 1821), as well as Friedrich Schiller’s ‘The Robbers’ (Die Raüber, 1781), and ‘Othello’ (Schiller and Johann Heinrich Voss produced an edited translation of Shakespeare’s text in 1806). There was some good teaching too:  Professor Vasilevskii’s lectures on ‘political public law’ contained some ‘rather successful improvisation’ and ‘enthusiastic accounts of some liberal ideas which the youngsters always liked’.59 There was also good teaching to be had at the Naval Academy, according to A. P. Beliaev who enrolled there in 1815 at thirteen years of age. Although the teachers were ‘originals’, as he put it, they knew

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their material well and certainly put in the hours: four before lunch, another four after it, covering four subjects a day.60 It was the students’ ‘unseemly behaviour’, as experienced on his first day of lectures at the university, which was enough to deter the seventeen-year-old N. V. Basargin from ever returning. The young nobleman from Vladimir province had left home of his own accord, in order ‘to make something of himself ’ in Moscow. He instead applied to transfer to N.  N. Muraviev’s Column-leaders’ academy where, as we have seen, he had an altogether more positive experience.61 Another alumnus, M. P. Pogodin, a future professor of history at the university, similarly recalled that student life there ‘until the end of Alexander I’s reign was free and easy’. Among his abiding memories was the striking appearance of some of the professors who, with their coach and fours complete with liveried coachmen, ‘seemed to us [students] more like important high officials’.62 One of the most prestigious boarding schools was the St Petersburg pansion of Abbé Charles-Eugène Nicole (1758–1835), a Jesuit priest who came to the city around 1810. In 1816 he set up the Richelieu Lycée in Odessa and directed it himself from 1816.63 According to Vigel’, the enterprising abbot pitched the annual fees high at 1500 roubles in order to cater exclusively for the sons of the aristocratic elite. Thanks both to its very high fees and the patronage of Princess Iusupova, it enrolled exclusively the sons of the richest Russian aristocrats. Here, scions of the Gagarins, Tolstois, Shuvalovs, Stroganovs and Viazemskiis received an education which would mark them for life: they learned to speak French like real Frenchmen, to dance like ballet masters, to fence, to declaim, to act – ‘in short, they learned everything except for some idea of how to work’.64 Along with the sons of the above-named princes and counts, Alexander and Constantine Benkendorf, Sergei Volkonskii and Michael Orlov were among its pupils. Thus two future Decembrists and Nicholas I’s future chief-of-police were classmates at the pansion. Pushkin would have gone there too but for the fact that, in line with the Abbé’s quest for exclusiveness, his father could not afford the fees. He may not have missed much: Volkonskii later recalled that despite its reputation, the school offered in his experience only ‘a very superficial and far from comprehensive education’.65 However, because its Jesuit teachers also proselytized Roman Catholicism, and following the expulsion of the Jesuits from Moscow and St Petersburg in March 1819 (and from the rest of Russia in March 1820), the school was subsequently redesignated a military orphanage.66

Boarding schools for girls Although nobles’ daughters were more likely to be educated at home, faute de mieux, provision was made for schools which they could attend as boarders. The need for such provision was recognized in court circles. Alexander I’s mother, the dowager empress Maria Fedorovna, earned N.  I. Turgenev’s praise for championing the education of women during her son’s reign. She was especially instrumental in the work of two institutes for the daughters of the nobility in

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St Petersburg, ensuring they had the best teachers and giving them her own patronage.67 One of these was St Catherine’s School for the Daughters of the Nobility which opened its doors in 1804. Its regulations, endorsed by the dowager empress, declared that ‘the first and main objective for the establishment of this school is for the devising of ways of providing a good education among the inadequate Russian nobility’. Entry was restricted to noble girls, or ‘such as whose parents hold rank in the army of captain and above and in the civil service from the eighth class and above’, aged between ten and twelve, in good health and inoculated against smallpox. A letter dated 27 October 1804 from the school governors to the Nizhnii Novgorod Marshal of the Nobility advised those noblemen who wished to have their daughters placed in St Catherine’s school in St Petersburg to take them to the local marshal. He was required to check the applicants’ property status, lineage (on the basis of documents certifying noble status) and arrange a medical examination with a doctor, ‘to certify that the girl presented is in perfect health’.68 The other exclusive St Petersburg girls’ school was the Smol’nyi Institute, established for nobles’ daughters in 1764 by Catherine the Great. Among the other legacies of her reign for female education was the Novodevich’ie Institute for Girls of the Third Estate.69 At Smol’nyi, the pupils were immured for up to nine years, taught to speak French as a mark of their Russian nobility, and were only rarely permitted to see their parents. Parental visits were by appointment on designated days, strictly monitored and with a chaperone – either a teacher or the headmistress herself  – present throughout. Members of the provincial nobility, who lived at some distance from the capital and in relatively straightened circumstances, in any case could not afford to visit their daughters with any regularity. They would have had to take this obvious practicality into account when deciding whether or not to pack their daughters off to St Petersburg to be educated at just six or seven years of age for the Smol’nyi, or from ten to twelve years old for St Catherine’s.70 It is fair to assume that for many it must have been a major disincentive. Generally speaking, then, girls’ education was more superficial and much more frequently home-based than boys’. Only a minority of daughters would be sent away to boarding schools in the capitals or major cities. For example, M. S. Kachalov recalled that all five of his sisters were educated at home. Typically, girls were taught to read and write, to speak French and, more rarely, German. They were also taught basic musicianship and singing. Furthermore, they were expected to know how to comport themselves properly in society and to understand the difference between what was considered ‘seemly’ and ‘unseemly’.71 Despite criticism of the superficial nature of the education offered to young noblewomen, the Smol’nyi, St Catherine’s and other girls’ schools nevertheless made a significant contribution to Russian noble society by at least recognizing the importance of educating its daughters as well as its sons. *** The development from the start of Alexander’s reign of a network of schools, institutes, military academies and universities provided the youngest generation of the nobility with a variety of educational pathways which were not exclusively

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military, although this remained the fathers’ (if not the sons’) preferred option well into the nineteenth century. The main advantage of the cadet corps colleges was that they provided a lifeline to orphaned or indigent noble sons. Crucially, a cadet corps upbringing and education further facilitated an important consolidation of the nobility as the empire’s elite estate, fostering notions of honour, duty and responsibilities to tsar and fatherland. It also provided a springboard for career advancement and fast-track promotion in military and state service, with the concomitant acquisition of rank and senior positions in government. Indeed, it has been argued that to send one’s children to the corps, no matter how far from home or financially burdensome, became traditional for the nobility, who increasingly regarded it as their duty to do so: the cadet corps thus acquired a higher status for many noble families that the gymnasium or university.72

The nobility’s educational attainment and reaction to it The issue of language acquisition and proficiency, as discussed in the previous chapter was in turn closely connected with the integrity of Russia’s culture and its exposure to foreign influences. Thus, stressing the importance of Moscow’s central role in nurturing Russian values, Dubrovin wrote that at the beginning of the nineteenth century, ‘Moscow was the only place where you could give your children a Russian education, and teach them to respect their native language and love their Fatherland. Moscow was also the centre of the Russian book trade, and the cradle of Russian literature.’ A similar claim is made by A. I. Koshelev’s biographer, who describes Moscow, particularly its university and associated Boarding School for Nobles, as the centre of a specifically Russian ‘cultural movement’.73 There were signs among contemporary Russians of a backlash against an ‘un-Russian’ trend in education, such as the article ‘On education’ by N. I. Kutuzov, a member of the Decembrists’ Union of Welfare, which urged the closure of all schools with foreign staff, and their reopening as state schools. This suggestion closely accorded with the aim of the Ministry of Spiritual Affairs and Public Enlightenment, established in 1817 under A. N. Golitsyn, former Chief Procurator of the Holy Synod and a well-known mystic, which proceeded to undo much of what the education reforms earlier in the reign had achieved.74 Similarly, an anonymous article, ‘On the Harmful Spirit of Our Age’ (O vrednom dukhe nashego vremeni), written around the same time as Kutuzov’s, complained that foreigners were ‘contaminating and corrupting young Russian minds’ and that Moscow University was a conduit for the alleged ‘harmful spirit’. The writer warns against the dangers of education, ‘of reading without understanding, of expressing opinions on matters about which there is total ignorance’ and concludes that ‘there is no greater danger or evil for Russia than the spread of academies and universities’.75 Such views would have found supporters among Alexander’s entourage. For example, A. Kh. Benkendorf ’s response to signs of unrest in the military, and especially in the Guards’ regiments, was to warn the tsar in 1821 that

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officer cadets should cease ‘to attend privately taught courses, especially in the political sciences’, which may ‘inflict the most considerable damage’.76 But even more destructive views on the matter were to impact on the impressionable Alexander and the outcome of his educational reform, with dire consequences for the nobility’s future prospects. On 2 November 1823, M.  L. Magnitskii wrote to Alexander on the state of national education which was, in his judgement, ‘in dire straits’, much of it comprising ‘a conspiracy against God and Tsar’. He warned that ‘where there are constitutions there is freedom of the press and unbridled public opinion’, which together provide ‘a mouthpiece for the words of the prince of darkness’. In his letter, Magnitskii denounced the German philosopher Friedrich Schelling as ‘a systematic and profound enemy of God who demands government tolerance of universities’ intellectual freedom’ and the ‘destructive philosophy’ of Immanuel Kant from which, along with other German, English and French philosophy, Russia’s education system stood in need of a full-scale purge. He called for a plan of national education, duly regulated by the government ‘along clearly defined lines’ which should embrace all classes of the state, including both boys and ‘certainly’ girls, and  – anticipating S.  S. Uvarov’s formulation of ‘Official Nationality’ in Nicholas I’s reign  – insisted that ‘it is indisputable that the national spirit of our national education consists solely of two words: orthodoxy and autocracy’.77 Magnitskii himself proceeded to demonstrate that implementing this system, in his own words, ‘could not be simpler’, by ‘purging’ Kazan’ University, where Golitsyn had appointed him curator, and unleashing his zealous sidekick, D.  P. Runich, on St Petersburg University. Runich replaced S. S. Uvarov as its curator in 1821, just two years after it had received its charter. This all contrasted painfully with the quite recent founding of the Tsarskoe Selo Lycée (in 1811)  and the St Petersburg Public Library (in 1819) but, of course, Magnitskii and Runich were acting within the context of Arakcheev’s grip on the levers of power. It is therefore perhaps hardly surprising that the nobility continued to be hostile, or at best indifferent, to culture and learning, given that the government and its officials appeared to be as well. According to one contemporary source, little use was made by the nobility of the Public Library in the years immediately following its opening: Let me say a few words about the intellectual life of the public at that time, which totally ignored the Public Library. O.A. Przhetslovskii, describing it in the 1820s, gives a picture of its chaotic state, slothful librarians, etc., who would take three to four days to bring you what turned out to be the wrong book, and three readers at the most!78

A remarkably pessimistic and damning assessment of young nobles’ education appeared in the first months of Nicholas I’s reign, written by Count I.  O. Witt, the commander of the southern military colonies under Alexander I. In his other role as chief of the region’s secret police he sought to infiltrate the Decembrists’ southern society. As the perceived deficiencies were by implication a product and

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feature of Alexander I’s reign, the document merits our attention. Witt dismissed the education open to most of the nobility as ‘superficial’ and claimed that the majority of Russian nobles consisted of ‘poor people’, themselves uneducated and in no position to educate their children, and therefore obliged to bring them up in ignorance. These ‘half savage pupils of forest and steppe’ resided in their villages, cut off from society and were invariably despised by their wealthier neighbours. Witt describes the cadet corps as the preserve of the wealthy nobility from where, he claimed, the majority emerged without ‘displaying the slightest trace of an education’, while private boarding schools produced ‘undereducated ignoramuses’. Witt’s letter culminates with the following deeply unflattering description of the contemporary Russian nobility and its low educational attainment: With few exceptions, our nobility consists of: 1) illiterate and coarse ignoramuses, 2) undereducated cadets, 3) students who never completed or scarcely attended their courses, 4)  half Frenchmen, devoid of any knowledge, without love for their Fatherland, with hatred for the government, and with no awareness of God Himself! No wonder then that we have come to rely so much on our foreign officers, who occupy so many of the most significant positions because they understand how to apply a sound education to the requirements of their service.79

Writing at the end of the nineteenth century and citing V. N. Karazin, Dubrovin expressed essentially the same view in a fascinating but overly pessimistic assessment of the nobility in its first decades. Alexander I’s government needed able people to enter state service, ‘but there weren’t any’, Dubrovin maintains. The aristocracy and rich nobility evaded service and were in any case ‘quite ignorant’. In the provinces the situation was worse since no significance was attached to education there at all. As a result their children grew up ‘running wild’ and were no better than their house servants.80 At the start of Alexander’s reign, Karazin had been such an enthusiastic proponent of educational reform that his proposals to set up a dedicated government ministry and a university for Ukraine at Khar’kov had been accepted by an equally enthusiastic tsar. But by 1810, he was so disillusioned that he could write to a friend: Believe me, all these learned government-sponsored teachers, all these costly museums, and the luxury of access to public schools cut no ice with anyone here in Russia! Parents would rather educate their children at home or (even worse) in a boarding school, than let them run around at random in the Temple of Minerva.

Similarly, in his 1811 memoir, N.  M. Karamzin lamented the depressingly low standards of education and maintained that the millions Alexander had spent on schools and universities had achieved nothing but the depletion of state coffers. ‘In Russia there are no lovers of higher learning’, he complained and added, no doubt

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exaggerating for effect, ‘It takes the utmost effort to find in Moscow a teacher of Russian, when it is virtually impossible to find in the whole country a hundred men who know thoroughly the rules of orthography, and when we lack a decent grammar.’81 He remained convinced that the government’s educational policies posed a serious threat to the integrity of the Russian nobility. Even Count A. K. Razumovskii, who was Minister of National Education from 1810, reacted to the proposal for the Tsarskoe Selo Lycée with the comment that ‘Russians are totally unfit for the pursuit of knowledge’.82 An anonymous report to Nicholas I dating from 1826 described the noble elite as, ‘wallowing in ignorance, inactivity and luxury’.83 In the apt summation of a recent commentator:  ‘Hesitating between conflicting models of individual conduct, Russian nobles remained deeply uncertain about what it meant to live a good and honourable life.’84 The worst of it was that their low level of cultural and educational attainment severely hampered Russia’s progress. This may well be an extreme summation of the case but it does find support elsewhere in evidence that educational outcomes were indeed far from uniformly excellent. By 1811, for example, a third of the Noble Regiment’s graduates’ skill set amounted to an ability to read and write but nothing more. Another 23 per cent were accredited with the capacity to read and write and to understand arithmetic. A quarter of graduates had some knowledge of two or three subjects, 11 per cent of four or five, and only 7 per cent of between six and ten. Such data has led one commentator to lament that ‘the level of illiteracy in officers graduating from the highest military institutions was simply appalling’.85 N. I. Lorer from the Kherson provincial nobility, later an active member of the Decembrist conspiracy, at the age of fourteen spent eight ‘monotonous, dreary and sad’ months with the Noble Regiment at the Second Cadet Corps in 1812. While his memoirs vouch for the rigour of the military training and parade-ground discipline, of which Grand Duke Constantine was apparently an enthusiastic if foul-mouthed observer, ‘the young people received no education at all, and many of them could not even read’.86 In his celebrated analytical study of Russia and the Russians dating from the first half of the nineteenth century, N. I. Turgenev, looking back at the early years of Alexander’s reign and to the time of his own upbringing, marvels at the failure of the nobility to take advantage of what was effectively its exclusive privilege and perquisite: The advantages of the Russian nobility, though worthless when compared to the rights of every last man in any free country, have enormous significance when considered in the Russian context. To the numerous advantages of this estate . . . must be added the exclusive right to avail of all the education and training facilities which this country has:  high schools, gymnasia, boarding schools, Lycées, cadet corps – all these are intended exclusively for the nobility.

Further, Turgenev contrasts the flourishing new developments in education dating from the period, including the establishment of new universities and the hiring of experienced professors from Germany, in which his father had played such

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an important role, with the ‘inquisitorial atmosphere hostile to education’, which prevailed towards the end of Alexander’s reign.87 A more recent authority, Iu. M.  Lotman, accepts that scholarship was not the profession for a nobleman in Alexander’s day and recalls the words of Prostakova in Fonvizin’s 1782 five-act comedy of manners, ‘The Adolescent’ (Nedorosl’): ‘Geography is no subject for a nobleman’ (geografiia – i nauka-to ne dvorianskaia). Knowledge was not considered to be a matter for the nobility, and parents typically discouraged children who showed any interest in acquiring it. Lotman notes that there was not one hereditary nobleman among the professoriate in Russia before the beginning of the nineteenth century and that the first hereditary nobleman to pursue a university career was G.  A. Glinka. However, no other nobleman willing to follow Glinka’s example was to be found.88 Glinka became professor of Russian in Derpt (Dorpat, now Tartu) University in 1803 and was considered so exceptional that Karamzin wrote an article about him in ‘The European Herald’ (Vestnik Evropy) entitled ‘A Phenomenon’. Sadly, however, he was apparently forced to resign in 1810 because of deteriorating working relationships with his German colleagues.89 Nevertheless, it would be grotesquely unjust to conclude from all this that the Russian nobility in the age of Alexander I  continued to wallow obdurately in ignorance, despite all efforts made to enlighten their sons and daughters. After all, regardless of the continuing inadequacies of the educational system, the era produced many intelligent and capable individuals. The first two decades of the nineteenth century were marked, as is well known, by considerable cultural activity, not least by the emergence of a modern Russian literature initiated by the extraordinary inventiveness and versatility of one particularly celebrated nobleman, A.  S. Pushkin. The nobility, typically from their positions in government service, played a leading role in the circles, salons and clubs that comprised the opinion-forming ‘learned republic’ of the day. For example, P. A. Viazemskii recalled that the group of like-minded people around his father, Privy Councillor and Senator A. I. Viazemskii, included several similarly highly placed government officials from very distinguished aristocratic families, such as Prince Ia. I. Lobanov-Rostovskii, Count A. R. Vorontsov, Prince P. V. Lopukhin, Prince I. M. Dolgorukov, I. I. Dmitriev and Count N. S. Mordvinov. As Viazemskii noted, There was a portion of our higher society that was way ahead of the literature of the time. Curiosity, taste, and a need for intellectual stimulation were all very active and highly developed . . . Not only was there an absence of ignorance, but there was also an absence of indifference to the mind and its manifestations.’90

Perhaps what Viazemskii’s proud claim points to above all is the enormous disparity between the educational goals that were set and aspired to, and the standards actually attained by the intellectually widely divergent strata of the Alexandrine nobility.

Part III T HE NOBILITY IN LOCAL GOVERNMENT AND ADMINISTRATION

Chapter 5 T H E N O B I L I T Y A S O F F IC E H O L D E R S

The focus of Part III is on the role of noblemen in provincial and local government, a role which their education was intended to enable them to discharge. Some years ago, in conversation with the author in the First Reading Room of the Lenin Library (now the Russian State Library) in Moscow, the late cultural historian and founder of the ‘Tartu school’, Iurii Lotman, suggested that the term ‘provincial nobility’, although in common usage, was ultimately not a viable one. He argued that there was in fact only a single integral nobility which did not readily divide into ‘provincial’ or ‘urban’ subcategories. Rather, it was perhaps seasonal mobility which was the main defining criterion:  what was summer’s ‘provincial’ nobility became, as it were, winter’s ‘urban’ nobility. Lotman’s line of argument, with its supporting emphatic hand gestures, resonates still, and is hence recalled here by way of an introduction to this chapter. It should be acknowledged, however – pace Lotman – that there was a provincial existence and way of life enjoyed (or endured) by large sections of the nobility which was not necessarily merely seasonal. There were significant numbers of noblemen in the provinces who rarely left their estates and could certainly not afford to maintain a second (much less a first) home in either of the two capitals which they rarely, if ever, visited. Moreover, noblemen in the provinces were responsible for the year-round administration not only of their own estates  – although here they were, in many cases whether present or absent, helped by their stewards and bailiffs – but also for the institutions of local government. Here they were called upon to participate as elected officials in a variety of roles, whether in the offices of the provincial governor and marshal of the nobility, or in the noble assembly, the district courts and the local constabulary. In fact, some years after the conversation cited above, Lotman himself acknowledged the historical existence and significance of the provincial nobility, describing it as ‘a third world’ apart from Moscow and St Petersburg, and noting that ‘the convergence of town and province, while so tangible in Moscow, made practically no impact on St Petersburg life at that time’.1 It is to this ‘third world’, the rural existence and way of life of the provincial nobility that we now turn, along with a consideration of its execution of accompanying responsibilities and duties. Much of this section focuses on one representative central Russian

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province, Nizhnii Novgorod (hereafter NN), and draws on its rich archive by way of illustration.2

Provincial administration: Organization and structures In the Russian Empire, the nobility was organized on the basis of provinces, and in each province it formed a society, or association. As mentioned in Chapter 1, the origins of the provincial Noble Assembly date from Catherine the Great’s 1775 Statute for the Administration of the Gubernii (Provinces) of the Russian Empire. The sheer extent of the Russian Empire’s landmass presented a considerable challenge to central government’s ability to govern it effectively. This was particularly true as the process of expansion continued during the eighteenth and well into the nineteenth centuries, and was the prime rationale of Catherine’s 1775 local government reform. Precisely because the empress relied so heavily on the nobility to implement it, elections to administrative posts became obligatory for the noble estate, and central government expected it to be treated it as an absolute duty. To this end, Catherine established noble corporate institutions in each province (guberniia) and district (uezd).3 The 1775 statute established what would remain the basic structure of Russian local administration and the judicial system until the reforms of 1864, and the basic territorial division until the 1917 October Revolution. It also granted the assembly the unprecedented privilege of submitting collective as distinct from individual petitions to the empress.4 The 1785 Charter subsequently granted the nobility corporate status with the right of all adult male hereditary nobles to participate in their province’s noble assembly (dvorianskoe deputatskoe sobranie), thereby providing them with a forum where matters of interest to the estate as a whole might be discussed. However, this new institution of provincial administration was to have a chequered history. The novelty of noble assemblies meant that while they were initially well attended, interest in them soon tailed off, making it ever more difficult to find candidates for election to local government posts. During Paul’s reign, the powers of the assemblies were at first sharply reduced and then abolished altogether. Even after Alexander I’s restoration of the assemblies’ original structures and functions, they still struggled to gain the commitment from the nobility the tsar expected.5 The institutions of the provincial noble societies comprised the assemblies themselves, and then the offices of their leading figures: the provincial and district marshals. There were both provincial and district noble assemblies. The assembly of deputies consisted of the provincial marshal of the nobility and one noble delegate elected by secret ballot at the provincial assembly from each district for a term of three years. It was subordinate only to the Senate in St Petersburg. An ukaz of 30 April 1806 required the provincial administration to maintain regular contact with the assembly by forwarding to it all relevant reports. The marshals of the nobility were charged with the ‘moral’ oversight of nobles, exercising discipline

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as required, and the provision of references which were essential, for example, for access to posts in state service.6 District marshals were not subordinate to provincial marshals but were supposed to enjoy parity of esteem with them and in district matters to operate independently. In this respect, the role of the noble assembly in regulating the respective marshals’ relationship was significant.7 The bureaucratic organization of all Russian provinces was uniform. At its head stood the civil governor supported by the provincial administration which could amount to quite a sizeable team. It consisted typically of three counsellors, an assessor, a secretary and a provincial procurator, two tax inspectors, a provincial architect, a provincial surveyor and several clerks. In addition to the governor’s office, there was a state treasurer’s office. This was headed by the vice-governor who was in turn supported by three counsellors, several bookkeepers, an assessor and a secretary. The province’s criminal court comprised a chairman, a member of the court, two assessors and a secretary. There was also a civil court which was structured in the same way. The most influential figures in Russia’s provincial towns were the mayor and the marshal of the nobility.8

The marshal of the nobility: The role and its functions The office of marshal (predvoditel’) of the nobility, instituted by Catherine II’s Charter to the Nobility, was a constant feature of provincial Russian life from 1785 right up until the revolutionary year of 1917. The marshals have been rightly dubbed ‘the true politicians’ of provincial Russia where they generally had a loyal following among the local nobility and enjoyed good connections in Moscow and St Petersburg. Once elected, the marshal of the nobility automatically joined the provincial administration with the rank of state counsellor. However, as his responsibilities were not clearly defined, there were frequent clashes between the offices of the marshal and the governor. From the Ministry of Internal Affairs, V. P. Kochubei complained in 1814 that such misunderstandings were occurring far too frequently, while the governors protested that their prerogatives were being encroached upon by the marshals.9 The government always maintained the principle that the post of marshal was unpaid and prosecuted any deviation from it. Marshals were considered to be pillars of their communities and by virtue of their office their best representatives. This view is endorsed by Korf ’s overly optimistic claim that instances of abuse by the marshals themselves ‘were exceptionally rare’.10 Be that as it may, ministry officials in St Petersburg were alert to instances of marshals taking advantage of their privileged position to line their own pockets, and not without reason. Dubrovin shows how things could go badly wrong by the citing case of a Riazan’ nobleman, L. D. Izmailov, who was, ‘in the fullest sense, a vicious brigand’. Despite this individual’s appalling record, Izmailov managed to have himself elected marshal of the nobility for four successive terms, that is, for a total of twelve years. This he did through intimidation, bribery and vote-rigging. Izmailov stopped at nothing:  when in 1805 the provincial governor, Shishkov,

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tried to intervene by alerting the Minister of Internal Affairs (Kochubei) to the situation, Izmailov hit back with a petition to the tsar himself. Izmailov’s effrontery resulted in the removal of the governor and his own confirmation as marshal. Dubrovin gives several more examples of corrupt and unprincipled marshals, and of unscrupulous local noblemen making utterly bogus appeals to St. Petersburg which were routinely upheld, despite the lack of any hard supporting evidence.11 Such instances lend weight to Janet Hartley’s view that while the government hoped that the marshals would be representatives of the most enlightened and educated nobles, the generally low cultural and educational level of most provincial nobles meant that the reality could be very different.12 The fullest existing account of the role and functions of the marshal of the nobility remains that of S. A. Korf, the author of the 1906 work on the Russian nobility already cited and on which this section draws quite extensively. In summary, Korf points out that the judicial competence of marshals of the nobility grew with experience, even though it remained de facto rather than de jure. They acquired it in the first place as a result of the 1801 edict which granted marshals an increasingly quasi-judicial function as upholders on the government’s behalf of the interests of the noble estate. Their role in settling disputes between landlords and peasants assumed ever greater significance as Alexander I sought ways to improve the peasants’ lot vis-à-vis their owners. The tsar, along with the Committee of Ministers and the Minister of Internal Affairs, placed great hopes in the role of the marshals of the nobility as arbitrators, given that they were ‘the most enlightened representatives of society, as the best element of the provinces’. The role of both marshals and noble assemblies in local administration was especially important also in terms of setting the level of local taxes, their collection and appropriate allocation. As their decisions had a bearing on the individual nobleman’s tax liability, from 1808 noble assemblies received the right to elect their representative to defend the nobles’ interests on local taxation commissions. Marshals also had an important role to play in food provision, procurement and distribution, which in the early nineteenth century presented huge challenges in rural Russia. The government’s efforts to improve the situation before 1812 were inadequate, while after 1812 it relied increasingly on the marshals to respond to the needs of their own local populations, especially by overseeing local grain stores where management was typically chaotic. Nevertheless, it was a legal requirement that marshals kept the provincial authorities informed of the quantities of grain stored in each district. This obligation was reinforced by an edict of 1818 which required marshals to participate actively in provincial committees set up to monitor food provision, to avert famine and to ensure that landlords discharged their responsibilities towards their serfs appropriately.13 They did what they could to help alleviate the situation which was aggravated by the exigencies of Russia’s wars. However, bread shops set up with the encouragement of the government more often than not stood empty since the nobility found it took too much effort to oversee them. Korf found that the failure of the marshals and the nobility to rise adequately to this challenge was an unhappy reflection of the coarseness and ignorance which

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prevailed at the time: in his view, the nobility had not yet reached the requisite level of understanding of the overall aims and needs of the state. On the other hand, they were certainly expected to rally to tsar and flag, especially by joining and complementing the local militia units in the frequent calls to arms issued by the government, as occurred, for example, in 1806 when in November that year Russian forces under General L. L. Bennigsen had their first encounter with Napoleon’s army west of Warsaw. The marshals’ role in responding to such calls, as well as in procuring and provisioning for the army, was crucial and the government heavily relied on it. Marshals were counted on to assist governors determine the number of militiamen due from each province, and to arrange individual contributions from landlords. In return, the government increased the nobles’ privileges and also (from 1808)  increased the number of nobles entitled to vote in assembly elections by reducing the stipulated property qualification. Thus, the more Russia’s militarily commitment grew in the build-up to 1812, the greater the government’s reliance on the voluntary assistance of the nobility became, particularly through the good offices of its marshals. As a result, the government’s sense of indebtedness increased towards the noble estate, together with a commensurate strengthening in the latter’s atavistic urge to serve which had always been the fundamental feature of the Russian nobility.14 Among the marshals’ many important functions were leadership of the noble assemblies; representation to the tsar of the needs of the nobles; stewardship and allocation of the noble association’s treasury; and the compilation and verification of information on the births of nobles as well as on their conduct, lifestyle and wealth. Estate issues and matters of local government administration were both part of the remit of the provincial marshals of the nobility. The significance of their status and function in local administration was underlined by an ukaz of 4 December 1816 which defined them as second only to the governor, and his substitute in the event of his illness or absence. They would then be called upon to chair all those provincial committees of which they were, in any case, ex officio members.15

The marshal: A Nizhnii Novgorod case study The provincial archive of NN contains unpublished documents which allow us to learn more about the demands placed on marshals by central government, the nature of their relationship and how they were required to maintain contact with their St Petersburg line managers. Thus, in a letter dated 16 October 1802, V.  P. Kochubei introduces himself as the new Minister of Internal Affairs to the provincial marshal of the nobility for NN, Prince P.  S. Trubetskoi. He informs Trubetskoi that he ‘has found it necessary to make [my] first contact with the esteemed marshals of the nobility’, in order to inform them that they are ‘to be empowered to make representations about the social needs of the nobility’. Kochubei directs that ‘all social needs of whatever kind are all to be directed always to the Minister of Internal Affairs’, even

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though they may be thought to be more properly the concern of other ministries. He undertook to review and consider each case on its merits and to reach the appropriate decision. In a passage that might have come straight from the pages of one of Nikolai Gogol’’s Petersburg Tales, the letter contains precise instructions about the proper manner for the marshal to communicate with the ministry, right down to the correct form of address on the envelope, namely, ‘To the Minister of Internal Affairs from N_ place, year, date and month, from N_ Marshal of the Nobility’.16 Similarly, a letter dated just eleven days later, 27 October 1802, from Prince Trubetskoi to the Arzamas district marshal, E. A. Chemodanov, gives some insight into the relationship between provincial and district marshals, and the former’s expectations of the latter. It refers to a request Chemodanov has received from NN’s civil governor, A.  M. Runovskii, about the nobility’s ‘social needs, dues and levies’, which he has sent also to the other district marshals. Runovskii has requested Chemodanov, ‘in accordance with His Imperial Majesty’s command’, to compile the information sought in line with the template used for the last three years, and to send it under his signature to the office of the civil governor. Trubetskoi’s letter, clearly reminding Chemodanov that Runovskii is still awaiting his response, concludes as follows: Assuming on my part, my dear sir, that you have already received from His Excellency a letter with the forms enclosed, I am confident that you will spare no effort in the exact and prompt fulfilment of the will of His Imperial Majesty, and deliver to me the information required as soon as possible for my signature, and by means of such endeavour and execution, show your zeal for service – and no less your own benevolent disposition towards me. I have the honour to remain, with respect and devotion.17

The tone and register of Trubetskoi’s style, while no doubt standard for the time, represents, in my view, an interpersonal discourse based on cajolery, flattery and condescension. Moreover, it contains an unsettling hint of menace with regard to failure to complete the task promptly and precisely, on the basis that everyone is equally accountable in matters of executing the tsar’s bidding. It is evident from documents in the NN provincial archive that the marshal and his office were entrusted with a remarkably wide range of administrative responsibilities. They amount to a very comprehensive schedule which included: the recruitment of conscripts; guardianship (opeka); oversight of posting stations and horses, and of salt and grain stocks available in the local shops; the upkeep of roads and bridges; financing loans to individual noblemen; keeping the nobles’ records (rodoslovnye knigi); supervising the elections to provincial and district administrative posts; promoting and collecting subscriptions to government publications and journals; and settling disputes over landholdings and within families. Provincial marshals were also charged with making all the arrangements necessary in advance of royal visits, enrolling nobles’ children in school,

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responding to cholera outbreaks and other epidemics, collecting donations for fire victims in other provinces and with noting and receiving all edicts (ukazy) from central government and implementing them as required. These were then bound in annual volumes.18 From another source, namely a description of the famous NN trade fair by K. P. Kugushev published in 1822 in ‘Notes of the Fatherland’ (Otechestvennye zapiski), we learn that the marshal of the day, Prince G. A. Gruzinskii, took his responsibilities very seriously and displayed unusual qualities of leadership. This extended to ensuring the success of the NN fair, including its events and entertainments in which the marshal took great pride. Even when he was unable to host it himself, living as he did 100 kilometres from the venue, he would put on a magnificent ball for the attendant landowning nobility, ‘which he as always held firmly in his powerful hands’. Kugushev assures us that Gruzinskii dependably ‘continued to set the tone for successive fairs as before with brilliant balls and splendid festivities whose fame reverberated far beyond the bounds of NN province’.19 However, we get a slightly different slant from Vigel’, who asserts that ‘Prince Gruzinskii literally held court (tochno kniazhil) on his wealthy and extensive estate at Lyskov, on the banks of the Volga, just opposite the little town of Makariev’. While the trade fair was held there, he apparently made a lot of money by renting out his properties to visitors and ensuring the fair’s year-on-year expansion, so that its eventual relocation to NN, according to the famously opinionated memoirist, ‘represented the first but decisive blow to his power’.20

Receiving royalty A revealing illustration of the scale and nature of the input that would have been required from both governors and marshals in respect of just one of their assigned responsibilities concerns the arrangements for visits to the locality by members of the Imperial Family. Some of these can be reconstructed from the archive. For example, we find an edict from Alexander early in his reign received by the NN provincial office on 11 September 1802. It bears the disconcerting title: ‘On the need not to carry out (nechinenie) special preparations during travels of His Imperial Majesty or of other members of the Imperial House.’ In it, the tsar remarked that on his last journey through several provinces he noticed that, despite his specific instructions that no special preparations were to be made, in some towns and villages decorated gates had been erected, while streets had been planted with trees and illuminated. His response was to ask the governing senate, ‘once and for all’, to ensure that ‘no senior member of the local administration was to be detailed either to meet us or to see us off ’; that roads were not to be repaired expressly to prepare for visits but only when such repairs were actually scheduled; the same applied a fortiori with regard to decorating village streets and planting them ‘with rootless trees, to the pointless detriment of the forest to no obvious purpose, but merely for the sake of appearances on the occasion of a visit’; no noblemen were ‘to be detailed to greet us at staging posts’, apart from one

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court assessor or, ‘at the discretion of the Marshal of the Nobility’, just one or two members of the nobility to direct the convoy and to assist with due payment of the road tolls. The edict concluded with the order that ‘this ukaz is to be sent by the Senate for implementation in every detail and to all provincial officers, including the Marshals of the Nobility’.21 The same archive contains a letter dated 13 August 1817 from P. S. Trubetskoi to P. A. Alekseev, the Arzamas district marshal, notifying him of the passage through the locality of the tsar’s youngest brother, Grand Duke Mikhail Pavlovich. He was due to spend 20 and 21 August in NN, leaving on 22 for Kazan’ via Makariev. In anticipation of this great occasion, Trubetskoi’s letter spelt out in excited convolution and tautology a very specific instruction: In notifying you of this my dear sir, I humbly request that with all due expedition you invite the nobles of both sexes of the Arzamas district to the provincial capital, NN, on the 20th of this month to attend, and you along with them at the same time, to meet His Imperial Highness and thereby to share in common in the long-awaited and very considerable pleasure which will gladden our noble estate.22

The diary of a member of the tsar’s entourage shows that from 17 August to 22 October 1824, Alexander I made one of his extensive tours of the empire, visiting Riazan’, Tambov, Orenburg, Ufa, Cheliabinsk, Perm, Viatka and Vologda.23 One can only imagine the practical challenges faced by the provincial and district marshals as they struggled to coordinate and synchronize all the arrangements involved in receiving, appropriately accommodating and feeding the sovereign and his entourage, as well as providing for the drivers and horses, as the royal convoy progressed from one town to the next. It was surely a stressful time for all provincial officials and a test of the competence of the local administration.

The marshal’s role in the Patriotic War As Napoleon’s Grande Armée moved on Russian territory, it was the marshal who in 1812 bore the enormous responsibility of organizing recruitment to the militia for the defence of the empire. The supreme test of his abilities, therefore, would be the mobilization of the local community in support of the national war effort. Thus, for example, from the correspondence of those directly involved in raising the NN militia we learn that on 19 July 1812 the province’s marshal of the nobility, Prince Gruzinskii, wrote to the governor’s office by way of response to Alexander I’s manifesto of 6 July calling on all Russians to mobilize in urgent defence of the fatherland.24 Gruzinskii proposed that the muster point for the enlistment of all available nobles and district marshals should be at Makariev in the neighbouring Kostroma province. This was because the town, situated 184 kilometres east of Kostroma on the right bank of the Unzha River, was the location of that year’s trade fair which most of Nizhnii’s nobility was sure to be visiting. Gruzinskii

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therefore directed that all available nobles and marshals of the province should assemble there by 25 July. His proposal was confirmed in a letter to him of 23 July from A. S. Kriukov, the province’s vice-governor, who agreed on the need for ‘the most rapid arrangements possible’, and affirmed his own decision ‘to invite to the town of Makariev all district marshals and available noblemen, including district judges and county inspectors’, by the stipulated date of 25 July. In view of the danger Russia faced from ‘attack by an evident foe’, they were emphatically enjoined to ‘make all possible haste without the slightest evasion under any pretext whatsoever’. Instructions were given for the precise order of business to be followed by the marshals and nobility of NN on the appointed day. They were to assemble at the monastery’s cathedral church for a service at which they would hear read to them the imperial manifesto calling on all estates to rally to the defence of the fatherland. The main business of the day was the pledge by individual signature of specific contributions to the war effort in terms of peasants for the militia and the means for their support. There follows a list of the ten NN district marshals whose combined commitment amounted to 39,960 souls recruited on the basis of four men per hundred souls between the ages of seventeen and forty-nine, to be supported by a subsidy of 1 rouble per soul.25 In this context, it is interesting to note the contribution to Russia’s war effort made by the nobility of other Russian provinces. In 1812 Tambov nobles supplied the army with three thousand oxen and formed the Tambov infantry regiment. In addition there were individual donations made, such as the five hundred mounted troops along with three months provisions furnished by N.  P. Arkharov, or the two hundred rolls of cloth for uniforms given by another local landowner. The province’s poorer nobles gave whatever they could, including canvas, grain, horses and weaponry, while their wealthier neighbours paid a levy of 2 roubles per census soul (revizskaia dusha) as well as lump sums of up to 3,000 roubles. One Tambov landowner even made over to the war effort an entire village of 150 serfs.26 Similarly, the nobility of Smolensk province pledged twenty thousand armed troops, while the Moscow nobility provided a further eighty thousand men-at-arms together with a lump sum of 3 million roubles.27 It was, then, the marshal of the nobility who carried the responsibility for meeting the government’s demands for recruiting and equipping troops. Moreover, this was done at local expense, with the cost of uniforms to be met from the nobles’ treasury. In the case of NN, Marshal Gruzinskii was also made commander of the local armed forces, and he retained the title after the victory of 1812. So, for example, his message to the NN noble assembly of 7 April 1813 bears both his titles. However, it took years for the fruits of victory to trickle down to the provincial nobility, as we learn from a letter of 14 June 1815 from the NN district marshal, Pavel Lenivtsev, to Prince Gruzinskii. Its subject heading reads, ‘On the levy exacted from officials and personal nobles for declarations made in respect of medals, and financial arrears.’ The letter refers to the applications made to the provincial marshal ‘by many of the officials and personal nobles of this provincial capital’ for their inclusion, ‘on the basis of the eighth point of the resolution of the Committee of Ministers’, in the

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list of those due to receive medals ‘in accordance with the Most Gracious Imperial manifesto’. The medals were clearly intended as recognition of the contributions made by the district nobility to the war effort. In pursuit of his claim, the marshal encloses a list of those who ‘were obliged to participate in the contributions by way of a financial levy imposed on them of one rouble per census soul for the formation of regiments and for the provision of arms for the first and second militia’. The marshal points out that to date, ‘despite my several demands’, there still has been no response. Lenivtsev, therefore, in ‘bringing this matter to your Excellency’s attention’, now requests that he confirms receipt of the nobles’ levied contribution and adds their names to the list of those to whom medals are due. He encloses a register of sums owing for uniforms for the newly formed regiments (in souls and roubles, where 1 soul = 1 rouble).28 *** In practice, it is not surprising that marshals frequently found themselves out of their depth: their executive powers were hampered not only by the blurred lines of authority resulting from the equal reliance of the local administration on the police but even more by the lack of either the training or the qualifications equal to the appropriate execution of the administrative responsibilities entrusted to them by central government. Given their understanding and experience of the needs of both peasant and landlord, they would have been much better suited to the discharge of administrative tasks as assistants to government officials. As it was, the government increasingly depended on marshals’ participation in matters of local government which went well beyond the specific confines of the administration of the nobility. Thus, the marshals kept their position and status not so much on the basis of a demonstrably strong corporate unity of the nobility as much as by proving themselves active and indispensable assistants of the government in provincial administration. Although the marshals were indeed an indispensable conduit between landlords and government, the latter nonetheless relied on noble assemblies to make appropriate decisions themselves and in their own right as necessary.29

The provincial governor Marshals of the nobility were answerable to the province’s governor who, as the tsar’s local representative, enjoyed the power, status and – where it was earned – the respect of a viceroy. Appointed by the tsar, the governors stood at the apex of local government structure. In the view of one authoritative specialist on Alexander I’s government, S. V. Mironenko, as a group it was the provincial governors which comprised the most effective category of the bureaucratic elite in the first quarter of the nineteenth century. If the marshals were the ‘true politicians’ of provincial Russia, it was with the governors that real political power lay. They were well educated by current standards, three-quarters of them receiving tutors’ instruction at home and typically belonged to the better-off landowning class (velikopomestnye dvoriane), with more than half of them owning between two hundred and two thousand serfs.

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Governors tended to be appointed at a relatively young age, but by the time they reached forty they had climbed a significant way up the bureaucratic ladder and had already acquired a good deal of experience. In the words of their contemporaries, ‘they were more important than the minister who was their master’. Mironenko’s analysis of 37 out of 50 contemporaneous governors’ personnel files (formuliarnye spiski) shows that the average age of both civil and military governors was a relatively youthful 46.3, with just over three-quarters of them aged under 50. The youngest of them was 32-year-old P. V. Gan, the governor of Courland. The governor of Orenburg, G. V. Nelidov, was 34, and the governor of Voronezh, N. I. Krivtsov, 35. He was the brother of the Decembrist, S. I. Krivtsov.30 When he was appointed governor of Penza in 1816, M.  M. Speranskii was 44  years old and thus just below the average age calculated by Mironenko, but almost exactly average (47) on his appointment as governor of Siberia in 1819. In Penza, Speranskii ‘was famed for his fairness and goodness and successfully stamping out red tape and corruption’, according to a newspaper article by V.  Dobrokhotov marking the fiftieth anniversary of Speranskii’s death on 11 February 1889.31 Later, in Irkutsk, ‘Speranskii’s presence was a genuine treat for the local residents’, as I.  T. Kalashnikov recalled. Kalashnikov was a native of Irkutsk, a counsellor in the provincial administration of Tobolsk and a member of the committee of state stud farming (konnozavodstvo). His two volumes of memoirs are held in the manuscript department of the Russian National Library in St Petersburg and contain numerous references to the governorships of I.  B. Pestel’ and Speranskii in Siberia, and of N. I. Treskin in Irkutsk. Contrasting the regimes of Pestel’ and Speranskii, Kalashnikov cites the latter as a fine example of the positive social impact of an effective and respected governor: The [local residents] could barely comprehend that the 13-year storm had passed [a reference to the unpopular Pestel’’s tenure of the office – PO’M] and that the sun of liberation, peace and calm now illuminated their gloomy and miserable lives. They all began to breathe more freely, and without fear.

Kalashnikov adds that noble society looked forward to seeing Speranskii on Sundays when the residents of Irkutsk met in the stock exchange building and where ‘on almost every occasion the Governor-General himself made an appearance’.32 Vigel’, however, doubts that there was anyone in Penza who really appreciated either Speranskii’s great strengths or his many shortcomings. Nevertheless, he concluded with a characteristically backhanded compliment, ‘His quiet, welcoming voice and his melancholy air so disarmed the residents that they forgave him his evident neglect of their affairs.’33 The positive difference a governor could make to a province is further suggested by the appointment in 1814 of A. M. Bezobrazov as the new governor of Tambov. This ‘still young and extremely zealous’ individual soon brought great improvements to the province such that there was a general feeling that ‘gubernatorial authority was in strong and capable hands’. A  measure of his administrative energy is demonstrated when, during the fires in the province of 1815, he allowed himself

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only one or two hours sleep a night for the three weeks it took to bring them under control. The province’s nobility expressed their gratitude to Bezobrazov for his committed stewardship in office by presenting him with a large gold medal and commissioning his portrait to hang in the hall of the noble assembly.34 In stark contrast to the respective merits of Bezobrazov and Speranskii, Vigel’ claimed that word of the odious reputation as governor of I. B. Pestel’ was passed down by the residents of Siberia to their grandchildren: some people, he remarked, are cruel while meaning to be useful, ‘but this man loved evil as an element without which he could not breathe, as a fish loves water’. In comparing the fortunes of Pestel’ père et fils, Vigel’ observed that the governor ‘in any other state would have been hanged. The sentence of execution was justly passed on his son [P.I. Pestel’], though his father perhaps deserved it much more.’35 The negative reputation I.  B. Pestel’ earned for himself as governor was based on numerous allegations of bullying, venality and above all neglect, given that as far as possible he governed the remote province from the relative comfort of St Petersburg, all of 5,600 kilometres west of Irkutsk! However, markedly different to Vigel’’s damning view of Governor Pestel’ is the opinion of a recent commentator which certainly flies in the face of contemporary assessments. N. A. Sokolova argues that the flaws in the administration of Siberia most likely stemmed not so much from the abuse and despotism of the governor as from the tension between the leading merchants and the officials sent there from St Petersburg. Such tension had apparently always existed and in light of this it seems probable, in her view, I. B. Pestel’, although pejoratively nicknamed ‘the Siberian satrap’, was not actually guilty of any of the abuses of his position he was charged with. Her strongest argument is that, following his dismissal in 1822, he returned to his Smolensk estates where he lived in greatly reduced circumstances amounting to ‘near destitution’ and a debt burden of 40,000 roubles.36 His remaining ambition was to pay off all his debts before his death and this he succeeded in doing just a month before he died in May 1843.37 This suggests, as his daughter later claimed, that he had consistently refused to supplement his income by taking bribes in the manner so endemic to the Russian civil service.38 Although typically they were local landowners, governors were not permitted to participate in the deliberations of noble assemblies or in the elections to them: an 1802 ukaz expressly forbade them from interfering in their affairs. Nevertheless, during the 1812 war and after it, in the absence of any plan of action from the government, whose policies were increasingly hesitant and inconsistent, governors acquired ever greater authority over the nobility.39 The governor, after all, clearly had a vested interest in ensuring that his own protégés, or at least individuals on whose loyalty he could count, were elected to the official posts which contributed to the effective functioning of the provincial administration he presided over. Not surprisingly, therefore, instances of governors’ interference were not unusual in the first quarter of the nineteenth century, but these were understandably resented by the nobility directly concerned.40 On occasion, governors themselves were disciplined for their shortcomings. There are several references in the literature to the case of the nobility of Olonets,

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a north-western province on the Finnish border, whose administrative capital, Petrozavodsk, was some 380 kilometres from St Petersburg. According to a report filed on 28 January 1811, the nobility of the province took grave exception to Governor Martens’s manner of receiving their delegation. Dressed only in a night shirt, he remained obdurately seated while the noblemen were obliged to stand. Deeply offended, they sent a representative to St Petersburg to declare that in the face of such rudeness, they saw no point in holding elections. The governor got his comeuppance with a reprimand from the emperor himself for failing to receive the nobles’ delegation ‘with due respect’ and for doing so, moreover, ‘in indecent attire’.41 This particular incident points to an additional weakness of provincial administration, astutely recognized by S. M. Seredonin, in that the relationship of those elected by the nobility and those appointed by the government was not regulated at all. Hence, at every opportunity, governors used their authority to show the elected nobles that their subordinate position reduced them to a state of total dependence. This explains the frequent recourse on the part of elected nobles to sick notes as an excuse not to serve. Many of them preferred even to face the courts rather than submit to state service.42 Korf similarly sees the increasing authority of the governor primarily as a consequence, as well as a cause, of the nobility’s opting out of elective office in ever greater numbers. Along with his own provincial officials, the governors interfered more and more in matters pertaining to the noble assemblies and the nobles’ elective service. As a consequence, the governor’s increased authority over the local nobility saw a corresponding increase in his abuse of it, to the extent that the main role of the provincial marshal was to defend the local nobility from the arbitrary rule of the governor.43 A particular complaint, monitored by a government agent at the start of Nicholas I’s reign, related to governors’ arbitrary imposition of ‘ruinous’ taxes on the local nobility of which they made ‘totally illegal’ use.44 The issue of governors’ abuse of their power and the opportunities it offered them to line their own pockets – particularly in relation to the functioning of the law courts – will be reviewed in the next chapter. It will be readily apparent that the veniality of many governors triggered a vicious circle since the best people avoided all contact with such corrupt individuals and therefore opted out of elective office. For example, in 1817, the governor of the western province of Smolensk complained about the nobles shirking their social responsibilities under various pretexts, including illness, to the extent that there were sometimes insufficient candidates to hold elections. It meant that their places were taken by much less able people, which in turn had an adverse effect on the quality of provincial administration. This question will be addressed in the next chapter.

The provincial nobility: A reluctant service gentry In an ingenious essay on Evgenii Onegin’s real-life counterparts (quoted in Chapter 2) published in 1887, the foremost nineteenth-century chronicler of Russia,

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V. O. Kliuchevskii, made some telling observations on the mentality and outlook of the provincial nobility in the age of Alexander I.45 Because they represent such an illuminating attempt to reconstruct the mindset of the Alexandrine nobility in the provinces, they merit revisiting and may be summarized as follows. Kliuchevskii starts from the premise that Pushkin’s Onegin was no sad accident or unintentional mistake but in fact ‘had his own genealogy, his own forbears’. All of them belonged to the old Russian nobility which, from the middle of the seventeenth century, had become the main conduit and first recipients of a new type of education and upbringing arriving in Russia from the West. The nobleman’s attempt to adapt to his provincial surroundings and become assimilated into rural society generally ended in failure. Ultimately, he would withdraw to his estate in order ‘to complete the long since initiated and complex task of isolating himself from Russian reality’. Somewhere in the provincial backwaters of Tula or Penza he presented a very odd phenomenon. Everything about him, his manners, his habits, likes and dislikes, even his language, was alien and imported. His estate management responsibilities he delegated to a peasant steward or a hired German manager, and he felt no compunction whatever to engage with matters of local administration for which there were, after all, elected marshals and inspectors. And so, ensconced ‘in this comfortable wilderness’, he came to the cold and stark realization that the state of affairs in Russia was ‘assez immoral’ (fairly immoral) because ‘il n’y a presqu’aucune opinion publique’ (there is practically no public opinion) in the country. He therefore concluded that it was perfectly in order for him to ignore everything that was going on in Russia. However, it was an ignorance that led first to indifference and then turned to contempt. Our provincial nobleman’s participation in the Napoleonic Wars involved him in conversations about Russia around camp fires across Europe. From these he made two important discoveries:  first, that Russia was the only country known to him in which the most educated and leading class spurned its native language along with virtually everything else to do with the motherland; and second, that mighty forces were hidden within the Russian people which would soon wither and die for want of any kind of positive moral development. It was this realization that impelled some of his peers to seek ways of achieving progress, and others to recognize that Russia would never change, come what may. The younger generation of noblemen, young enough to have avoided involvement in the movement which culminated ‘in the catastrophe of 14 December’, experienced a loss of moral direction which found expression in one fundamental principle: it is as impossible as it is unnecessary to do anything at all. The fictional embodiment of this principle is to be found in the eponymous hero of Pushkin’s Evgenii Onegin. This is an inevitably truncated version of a much longer, more passionate and eloquent argument which Kliuchevskii develops here. The historian himself accepts that it is for others to judge whether or not he has overstated the case. It is fair to say, in our view, that while the pudding may indeed be somewhat overegged, there is more than a recognizable ingredient of truth in Kliuchevskii’s helpful, if acidulous characterization.

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Alexander I himself had first-hand experience of the qualities in his nobility so wryly perceived by Kliuchevskii. Right at the start of his reign, the tsar issued an edict which announced to the nobility that ‘the monarch’s will’ required a much greater level of commitment and far more zealous participation in elections to official positions in local administration and government. It began with the words: ‘It has come to our notice that apparently the best nobility and also citizens are avoiding elections. It clearly follows from this that the district courts and public administration are passing into unreliable hands.’ He appealed to the nobility to meet the obligations of its estate by taking a more active role in the work of local administration for their own and the general good. In an edict of 1803, the tsar reinforced his demand by declaring that noble assemblies were not to disperse until they had discharged their electoral duties properly.46 Alexander was responding to a long-standing problem. The nobility had of old regarded local service as a burden to be avoided. In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries it had adopted just the same attitude towards compulsory military service and subsequently to civil service: their descendants from the end of the eighteenth and beginning of the nineteenth centuries viewed elected service no differently. Since Catherine’s day, central government had counted on the nobility to bring organization and order to the administration of the provinces. But instead it transpired that a critical mass of noblemen shirked elective office. Speranskii was driven to distraction by the nobility’s collective indifference to the opportunities which the assemblies offered. He complained in 1818: ‘The nobles run away from elections to the Assemblies and soon it will be necessary to convoke them using gendarmes in order to compel the nobles to take advantage of their rights.’47 Dubrovin devotes considerable attention to this problem in his account of early-nineteenth-century provincial life, maintaining that the nobility did not want to be burdened by elective office, least of all as police inspectors. Apart from all the other drawbacks, which included being at the governor’s beck and call, the incumbent found himself having to take to the road with annoying frequency, travelling from place to place in a manner he considered to be beneath his dignity. One nobleman, identified by Dubrovin as P. Sumarokov, asked whether anyone would really wish to leave their home, wife and children to move to town for a salary of between 300 and 600 roubles, or equally, whether anyone with a good education and property of his own would voluntarily put up with the coarseness and contempt of the increasingly brazen authorities. This viewpoint explains why it was that many noblemen were eager to be replaced in the elective roles open to them by government clerks and would resort to a wide variety of excuses for evading appointment, among which the most popular was putative ill health. To compound the difficulties faced by central government, such evasion was becoming widespread just at a time when the number of administrative posts which provincial noblemen should have been filling was rapidly expanding in response to local population growth and to support the development of trade and commerce.48 Taking their cue from the government’s own example, the nobility tended to elect their poorest peers or war-wounded to administrative and service posts.

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For example, following the conclusion of the campaigns of 1812 and 1813, the order was given in 1816 for wounded officers to be appointed as mayors, police commanders and local government officials. Indeed, in the wake of the Napoleonic invasion, as Marc Raeff has observed, the economic position of the majority of nobles, which even in the eighteenth century had not been particularly brilliant, deteriorated still further: the poorest nobles, as well as those lacking in drive and ambition, were ‘put out to pasture’ on their remote country estates.49 In Korf ’s typically pessimistic view, the worst kind of nobleman tended to stand for elected office: small landowners (melkie dvoriane) or those without property, who then, ‘blindly subordinated themselves to the authority of the governor and his staff ’. Most wealthy and well-connected noblemen, however, gravitated towards the capitals to enjoy a better cultural and intellectual experience that they could hope to find in the Russian provinces.50 Evidently, a task had been imposed upon the nobility which was not compatible either with its mentality, level of education, or its attitude to service. The attempts made from the start of Alexander’s reign to involve nobles in elected service in significantly greater numbers were consistent with its initial liberal thrust. But, just as in Catherine’s day, the results were disappointing since elective service was of little interest to the provincial nobility. When the governor of Pskov reported in 1803 that the district marshals were rejecting the demands of the governor’s office to deal with local matters, the tsar responded that the governor should convene a meeting of the marshals of the nobility and convey to them the tsar’s ruling that until they had concluded the business of such matters their assembly would not be adjourned. The tsar’s appeals made little difference: the nobility continued to avoid elective office. In 1808 many districts in Pskov province had no elected officials and it was therefore decreed that in such instances vacant posts should be filled by clerks from the herald’s office (gerol’diia). Ten years later, similar problems were being reported from Smolensk, with elected officials seeking early retirement on health grounds. Even so, the new elections ordered failed to bring about the desired outcome.51 Nor was the problem confined to Smolensk. On the other side of the empire, in Penza, an assessor of the nobility at the district court there, I. I. Meshkov, was nominated in October 1821 as the nobility’s deputy on the body responsible for billeting troops (kvartirnaia kommissiia) in the locality. However, it turned out that this appointment did not suit Meshkov, though it is not clear whether this was because of ill health. He therefore filed a request to be relieved of it and submitted it to the governor (M. M. Speranskii), who agreed to confirm the next candidate on the list instead.52 It may well have been Penza’s very remoteness from St Petersburg that contributed to such a casual attitude to state service. As Vigel’ remarked, the distance between the two cities was less than 1500 versts, ‘actually no great distance in our immense country’, but as far as any meaningful contact with the capital went, ‘we might as well have been living in Irkutsk, so very narrow were our horizons’.53 In fact, one well-known resident of Irkutsk, I. T. Kalashnikov, was clear about the consequences of the Siberian province’s distance from St Petersburg: in the absence of both a local noble community and informed public opinion, there

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was, he claimed, no effective control over the administrative abuse and arbitrary authority which plagued local government. Kalashnikov, a counsellor in the provincial administration of Tobolsk, found that the situation was definitely aggravated by Irkutsk’s remoteness as it was assumed that no irregularities were likely to come to the attention of the central authorities, and in fact rarely did.54 All the same, provinces considerably closer to St Petersburg experienced similar attitudinal problems among their noble estates. Novgorod’s provincial nobility, for example, according to a contemporary’s observation, found ‘nothing alluring for life’ in the provincial capital and so, thanks to the convenient proximity of St Petersburg, preferred to live there.55 Further graphic reflection of the issue may be found in a despairing letter of 21 October 1825 from the governor of Tula province, N. S. Tukhachevskii, to his marshal of the nobility, D. A. Mansurov, on the eve of the elections to fill posts for the next triennium. He complains that, after almost eighteen months into his role as governor, he continues ‘to struggle against the extraordinary difficulties posed by the inertia of the local police’ whose inspectors, elected from the provincial nobility, ‘not only fail to carry out their duties properly, but in addition show very little understanding of them’. In consequence, there are delays and shortfalls in tax collection and recruitment levies, in the apprehension of criminals and in the maintenance of highways whose condition was the source of many complaints from those passing through the province. Tukhachevksii confesses that all his efforts to achieve an improved performance from such officials, ranging from reprimands to fines, have failed miserably. He attributes this largely to the poor quality of those ‘inadequate people’ who put themselves forward for election, noting that the better educated noblemen distance themselves from elected office. He therefore appeals to the marshal in the light of the imminent elections for his support in persuading ‘well-born and respected’ members of the nobility to stand for election ‘not for my own good but for theirs’. In the hope of securing their cooperation, the governor concludes with the suggested solution: that he should follow the example of Riazan’ province by offering as a financial incentive a 1,200-rouble salary for inspectors and 800 for assessors.56 Another well-documented instance of ambivalence towards service is that of S. P. Zhikharev, the celebrated diarist and well-connected man of letters. For five years he lived on his Moscow estates without occupying any post, but then from a letter of 14 July 1822 written by A. Ia. Bulgakov to his brother, it emerges that Zhikharev had sought his advice about accepting from Moscow’s governor, D. V. Golitsyn, the offer of appointment as chairman of the criminal court. Bulgakov had urged him to take this opportunity to serve alongside ‘such an excellent boss’. But Zhikharev declined the offer and returned to service only in 1823 when he took up the post of provincial procurator because, as he wrote to A. I. Turgenev, ‘I’m bored by life in the country, yet to reside in Moscow without a position seems to me to be unseemly. I have no interest in playing cards, and [the literary society] Arzamas has disbanded, so judge for yourself.’57 This was hardly a ringing affirmation of any sense of obligation to serve but rather a matter of having nothing better to do to pass the time.

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Zhikharev’s feeling that it would be ‘unseemly’ to live in idleness in Moscow finds an echo in a typical nineteenth-century view that, because of the electoral responsibilities collectively shouldered by the provincial landowning nobility, at least until the great reforms of Alexander II’s reign: Every landowning nobleman not in state service, considered it throughout his life up to a certain age his duty as a nobleman to serve the fatherland or society in one way or another, for at least one elective term. To refuse absolutely to stand for election without compelling reason was not the custom.58

It would be unsafe to accept that all noblemen were equally reluctant to serve their communities. A shining example of readiness to do so is provided by M. A. Leontiev, from the nobility of Tula province. In his memoirs he recalls how greatly he relished the prospect of serving society in the elected role of police inspector from 1815 rather than continuing to live alone in rustic seclusion. Moreover, he viewed his election as an entrance ticket ‘to the ranks of the best members of my estate, since once elected I had the pleasure of hearing from many of the cleverest and finest noblemen in our district their flattering hopes for my term of office.’ He revelled in the local nobility’s growing respect for his honesty and straightforwardness, describing himself as one ‘far removed from any kind of heavy-handedness, bribe-taking, and other such vile behaviour’. He took great pride in never using his office to take advantage of anyone, regarding bribery in particular as a ‘foul crime’. As it was, he found he could manage perfectly well on his salary and enjoyed his growing reputation in the locality as a generous and genial host. For Leontiev, it also meant working alongside an outstanding marshal, ‘the clever, honest and gentle Ivan Ivanovich Bibikov’, whom he esteemed highly as a role model worthy of emulation.59 Leontiev makes no reference here to the disparity of esteem among noblemen in their local communities which frequently complicated relationships. Thus, in relation to the qualifications of age, property and rank for participation in noble assemblies, Count N.  P. Rumiantsev, who was minister of commerce from 1802 to 1811, pointed out in 1805 the need to distinguish between the poorer nobility (melkie dvoriane) and the wealthier, propertied nobility (velikopomestnye dvoriane), because a number of the former were taking parity of esteem for granted, quitting service early and retiring to their estates. This ‘posturing of their impoverished peers’ was causing considerable resentment among the better-off who, as a consequence, were themselves leaving the provinces, thereby depriving the assemblies of their potential services.60 Korf observes in addition that elective service did not have the same upwardly mobile career path as government service, giving nobles little incentive either to participate in elections or run for elected office.61 Thus, the reasons for evading elective office had not so much to do with the composition of the assemblies, as with the conditions of service in local institutions, compared with which service in central institutions appeared much more attractive. Ambitious nobles viewed local government as a dead end, as Peter Waldron has observed, and most nobles who wanted to prosper and to advance

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their careers knew that they needed to obtain a military commission or else to find employment in a St Petersburg government department.62 Because it was beyond the powers of Alexander’s government to do anything much about it apart from implementing a few half-measures, the tsar ordered that vacancies should instead be filled by bureaucrats (chinovniki), who were not from the nobility. Hence, any fall in the significance and status attaching to elective service was effectively of the nobility’s own making. Dubrovin alleges an absence of moral principle in noble elections which were rarely free of rows, exchanges of insults and major scandals. Although there was supposedly a system of vouching for the bona fides of election candidates based on the endorsement of twelve noblemen from the district, they could not be relied on to do this honestly.63 Korf adduces the example of the nobles’ voting record in Volhynia’s provincial elections, where on one occasion only 78 out of 531 (or just short of 15%) of those on the electoral role bothered to vote. In a characteristically dismissive observation, Vigel’ recalled that in reality elections were just an excuse for noblemen to get together for some hard drinking, without giving any thought to their social or corporate responsibilities.64 There were also incidents of voting irregularities, with votes cast by bogus electors. Thus, in NN, the marshal of the nobility reported that a total of 126 votes had been cast by an electoral role of just 35 nobles. Such abuse prompted the Committee of Ministers, acting on a proposal from the governor of Tver’ province, to give noblemen twelve months to place their names on the genealogical register (rodoslovnaia kniga) in order to ensure that in future only those properly entitled to do so could participate in elections.65 It also prompted an exasperated Alexander I, who was made aware of procedural irregularities in provincial elections, to write in 1811 to the Minister of Internal Affairs, O. P. Kozodavlev, expressing his irritation and ordering procedures to be reviewed and improved. The problem was a continuing lack of adequately qualified officials able to undertake the task of drawing up new regulations for the conduct of noble elections which the ministry had already been charged with in 1809.66 There were other instances, however, where collective dereliction of duty on the part of the local nobility was for other reasons. One of these was illness, real or imagined. In 1810, the governor of Pskov reported that nobles were resorting to doctors’ sick notes as a pretext for evading elective office. Another was a sort of recalcitrant lethargy. Thus, for example, in 1813 an exasperated nobleman from Simbirsk named Bedrin reported that in Orenburg province there were members of the Tatar gentry (murzy) who considered themselves noblemen, ‘but did absolutely nothing for the Fatherland’. They opted instead to live in complete idleness. On behalf of the tsar, Arakcheev replied that the murzy were to be informed that, according to a law of Peter the Great, all nobles who declined to serve would be liable to pay poll tax. A third pretext was a sense of personal affront to their status by any failure to show due respect, such as the case of the offensive conduct of the governor of Olonets, referred to above. The anonymous late-nineteenth-century commentator cited above (Sh., see note 46) ascribed the nobility’s inactivity and passivity in Alexander’s reign to four

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invariable causes: the absenteeism of powerful nobles, the weakness of the middleranking class, the nobility’s traditional aversion to state service and contempt for service without due rank (nechinovnoi). The nobility had been created by the government first as a service, and then as a privileged landowning estate: direct participation in the noble assembly required the possession of not less than 100 souls or 3000 desiatins (3,270 hectares) of land. But its main purpose was service to the state, while the exploitation of the land was merely a means to that end. In practice, the typical undesired result was that a certain section of the nobility endeavoured to serve the state and thus neglected agriculture, while another section – comprising those noblemen living on their estates – conversely shirked the responsibility of active participation in local government service in favour of managing their landholdings. Put another way, wealthy, talented and honest noblemen evaded service, while those who were prepared to put up with all the problems that went with it stood for election. In Seredonin’s eloquent view, ‘For them anything was better than contact with factory managers, military settlers, merchants, runaways, and thieves.’67 Even so, it frequently meant that local noblemen, living on their estates, were simply unable to produce from their ranks an adequate contingent of suitable individuals needed for the local administration and courts. This is hardly surprising, if one takes as being in any way representative the caricature of the provincial nobleman portrayed in an epigram of 1809 by the St Petersburg writer A. E. Izmailov, which reads, I served just one month in the Guards And enjoyed forty years’ retirement, On my estates I trained my dogs, Hunted animals, smoked tobacco, Drank my fill, whipped my peasants, Lived merrily, and died drunk.68 Semion Ekshtut, in citing this epigram, maintains that nobody forced the nobility to serve. In his view, however, a nobleman who never served, held no rank and consequently had no right to participate in noble elections of district and provincial officials was bound to feel a constant sense of shame: no decent people would have anything to do with him; no one would want to become related – by marriage, for example – with such an individual, considering it beneath their dignity. This may be so, but everything points to the conclusion that many were prepared to take the risk of invoking such opprobrium or becoming social outcasts, rather than putting themselves forward for election to posts they had no wish whatsoever to take up. In any case, a pattern of early retirement and withdrawal from state service had become quite well established by the beginning of the nineteenth century, following the abolition of compulsory state service in 1762. This typically involved the petty nobleman, secluded on this estate, enjoying a fairly aimless, if ‘cultivated’, style of life, turning out only to cast his vote for the marshal of the nobility and the other elective posts filled by his peers in the noble assembly and the district courts.

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Otherwise, his life was measured by the exigencies of the passing seasons, family events and his own more or less successful interaction with his serfs. This changed to some extent during 1812 and the years immediately following, when Russia’s involuntary patriotic war against Napoleon required the participation of even the most reclusive provincial nobleman. As we have seen, the nobility played a significant role in offsetting the state debt by paying a means-tested levy, based on the number of serfs owned and the income derived from them according to the formula of 1 rouble per soul, to support the government’s war effort. However, the pattern of early retirement in order to enjoy a life of provincial seclusion tended to resume after Napoleon’s downfall. Even so, the poorest nobleman retained a sense of his membership of a class distinguished from all other estates in Russian society by its values, self-interest and status.69 The next chapter assesses the extent to which such an individual sense of belonging to the noble estate was reflected in its administration of local government.

Chapter 6 T H E N O B L E A S SE M B LY I N P R OV I N C IA L L I F E

The noble assembly: Constitution and elections The archive of Nizhnii Novgorod (hereafter NN) province offers a detailed picture of the structure and organization of local government offices, complete with the lists of nobles and merchants who were elected as district judges, police inspectors and assessors of the civil and criminal courts, both in NN itself and the nine surrounding districts, which included Gorbatov, Arzamas, Ardatov and Lukoianov. The typical pattern of appointments was of a judge, a police inspector and two or three assessors. Thus, in May 1801, a total of seventy-one nobles were elected in NN province, of whom thirty-seven were elected to the province’s district courts. There was in addition the ‘conscience’ (sovestnyi) court – a court of arbitration or mediation – which sat in NN at the request of the disputing parties, where the judge was normally the incumbent marshal of the nobility. He was aided by two noble and two merchant assessors, with an equal number of assessors in the civil and criminal chambers. This accounted for a further seven nobles, making a grand total of seventy-eight.1 In fact, there were some parts of the empire where it would have been almost impossible to find sufficient nominees from among the local nobility to fill the number of posts required. For example, even by the middle of the century, due to the small size of the local hereditary nobility, there were no noble associations in the provinces of Arkhangelsk, Viatka, Olonets and Perm, or in several districts of Astrakhan, Vologda and Orenburg, as well as a number of other Siberian provinces. In highlighting the uneven distribution of gentry across Russia, Boris Mironov cites the well-known jurist A.  V. Lokhvitskii, A.  I. Herzen’s contemporary and an expert in the rules and regulations of local government in the first half of the nineteenth century. Under the rubric of administrative abuse, Lokhvitskii divided the provinces of the empire into noble and bureaucratic categories – that is, those that had noble associations and those that did not. ‘In the latter’, Lokhvitskii commented, ‘the arbitrariness of officialdom encounters no obstacles:  There is no public opinion, there are no officials elected by the nobility, and there are no associations. We still have no strong and educated class other than the nobility’. Noble associations and central government alike viewed the noble assembly as the mouthpiece of public opinion. As Lokhvitskii saw it,

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The nobles to a certain degree are the legal representatives of the province, in contrast to the governor, who is the representative of the government. Therefore, where the nobility is absent, there is no society. There are only officials and a faceless mass among which even the urban estates are barely visible. Olonets, Arkhangelsk, the Siberian provinces, and many other regions are like this.2

The noble corporate institutions established by Catherine’s 1775 statute, referred to above in Chapter 5, gave shape and identity to the local nobility, and the elected provincial and district noble marshals became key figures in local government and society. It is in precisely such shape and identity that Mironov rightly discerns the emergence of a civil society, albeit weakly developed, in which certain important elements were present. So, for example, the organs of the noble association acted in accordance with written law and on the basis of the separation of powers; administrative authority belonged to the noble assembly; executive authority to the marshal of the nobility; auditing authority to the assembly of deputies; and judicial authority to the district courts and higher courts. For its part and with only rare exceptions, central government supported the noble associations, regarding them as the foundation of provincial society, and entrusting them with important responsibilities in matters of local administration on the government’s behalf. To this extent it might fairly be argued, as Mironov has, that the noble assembly was an embryonic parliament.3 At the very least, in its optimum state it was an arena where interest groups, sometimes with conflicting political views, could properly seek to pursue their objectives within the law, provided of course they did not venture into areas of debate, such as serf emancipation, over which central government sought to maintain an absolute monopoly. It did so by limiting as far as possible the sphere of competence of the noble assemblies, permitting them to discuss only matters relating to their class interests in the immediate locality. The vigilant eye of the omnipotent governors was supposed to ensure this. Over time, the noble assemblies’ competence would diminish, along with the effectiveness of their corporate administration of the noble estate, as the marshals’ authority and sphere of activity widened. The effect of this was to reduce the independence and the self-reliance of the nobility, and hence its capacity to administer its own corporate affairs, as the estate increasingly came under the direct administration of the government through the office of the marshal.4 Among the documents held in the NN archive is one dating from 1804 and entitled ‘On the familiarisation of elected officials with their duties’. It contains printed instructions from the NN provincial government (gubernskoe pravlenie) to the marshal of nobility of the Arzamas district, E. A. Chemodanov, about the obligations of newly elected nobles. They were required to report to the provincial office on the first day of the designated month. It also confirms the list of those elected for three years from 1 January 1804, starting with NN’s marshal of the nobility, Prince P.  S. Trubetskoi, followed by the names of the noble deputies elected from each of NN’s nine districts, and those of the judges and assessors elected to the criminal and civil courts.5

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Another file, of medium size in its original binding, bears the dates ‘12 August 1807–25 November 1808’ and contains the correspondence ‘of the NN city duma on the attendance of the nobility for the discharge of social positions . . . relating to . . . general city taxes, and on the election for their apportionment by the noble deputies’. The most legible of these letters is dated 22 May 1808. It is from NN’s provincial marshal of the nobility to the city’s civil governor. As well as giving us a taste of the Gogolian style in which he conveyed his report to the governor, it illustrates one important function of the marshal. Part of it reads as follows: Summary: On the appointment by the nobility of three officials to maintain the staffing level of the police. Members of the nobility resident in the provincial town of Nizhnii who attended the noble assembly and heard the proposal from Your Excellency and the Vice-Governor (discharging the function of Governor in your absence), concerning the allocation of town funds for the upkeep of the police, the night watch, street lighting, and other needs from the money collected from the citizenry, have chosen for this purpose from among their number three persons, namely:  Major-General Evdokim Fedorovich Kupreianov, Court Counsellor Frants Osipovich Massarii, and College Assessor Sergei Petrovich Skuridin. Further, it has proposed the way they are to disburse the due amount of funds needed for the upkeep of the police officers and to cover their costs, and authorised them to review the circumstances anticipated to obtain in the foreseeable future regarding the election of additional members from the merchants (kupechestvo) and lower middle classes (meshchanstvo). Considering it my duty to attach herewith a copy for Your Excellency’s consideration, I  humbly request your confirmation of it, and also that you forward it to whom it may concern for its due implementation. (Unsigned)6

Assembly meetings for the business of conducting elections were scheduled to last fifteen days, and were generally held in December or January, normally once every three years, although extraordinary meetings could be convened by the governor. The noble assembly electorate’s franchise was restricted to rank-holders aged 25 and above who were in receipt of an annual income of at least 100 roubles from their estates. Elections were notorious for frequently descending into undignified brawls which tested the patience of the central authorities. In 1809, Minister of Internal Affairs A. B. Kurakin warned that further attempts by provincial nobles to turn their assemblies into ‘a state within a state’ would be met with severe penalties to be imposed on the assembly and governor alike.7 The hereditary property-owning nobility in each province was entered into the register of noble lineage (rodoslovnaia kniga) which was maintained by the nobles’ deputy assembly and preserved in its archive. Such corporate organizations, rights and privileges did not extend to the personal (lichnoe) nobility, which was not hereditary and did not own serfs. The hereditary nobility was seen, rightly or wrongly and in any case faute de mieux, as the most dependable arm of government in the provinces.8 Or, to put it another way, as Alexander Martin has: ‘Beyond the

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capital cities, the true government of much of Russia was constituted by tens of thousands of noble landlords.’9 The assembly’s meetings were opened by the governor but, as noted in the previous chapter, he was not entitled to stay for their deliberations even if he were himself a landowner of the province. District assemblies were held three months ahead of provincial assemblies, and were chaired by the district marshal.10 There was in addition a significant social aspect to the assemblies, as Daniel Field points out, which usually culminated in a ball. It would seem that for many participants it was ceremonial occasions such as these that were among the assemblies’ most important functions.11 The records of the meetings of the NN noble deputy assembly for the year 1804 show that the first meeting was held on 29 January. The minutes contain the names of the attendees, and a summary of business signed by those present. Subsequently there were meetings in February on 1st (which was a Monday), 8th, 10th, 15th, 17th to 19th, 22nd and then every weekday until 2 March. After this there was a break until 14 March. The 1804 pattern suggests year-round weekday meetings, apart from the last week of August. The records generally do not show who was present at them, but decisions taken were usually signed by one or two deputies.12 Assembly members were held to account by their peers rather than by the central authorities: the assembly’s disciplinary powers extended to the exclusion from it of any nobleman whose reputation was deemed to have been compromised by a court appearance, or whose offences were common knowledge prior to the court’s decision.13 An individual’s absence from the assembly did not exempt him from compliance with its decisions which were usually reached by a majority twothirds vote.14 One negative aspect of entrusting the task of local government to the nobility was the risk of conflicting interests arising between them and their serfs, thereby serving to exacerbate tension between the two estates. This was particularly true of the Western borderlands and the acquired Polish provinces where the situation was aggravated by national and religious differences. In Alexander’s reign, there were frequent disturbances at noble assemblies, and in the western regions these were often political in nature. In this connection, from September 1808, the Committee of Ministers began to receive reports from regional governors of unruly behaviour and poor discipline at noble elections, of wilful absences of nobles on unauthorized trips abroad and of political unreliability on the part of certain individuals. For example, one (Polish) noblewoman was reported to have told her peasants when they requested bread: ‘Go to the Emperor, he will arrange bread for you because he is of your religion.’15

The noble assembly’s agenda The archives of the NN provincial administration alone for the twenty-five years of Alexander’s reign are listed in twelve volumes in the regional archive (TsANO, f.5) detailing 12,599 separate items. And this was only one of many NN provincial

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state offices. To give some examples, the first inventory (opis’ 1) consists of 229 pages listing 1,521 cases (dela) dealt with by the provincial administration in relation to planning permission, site plans and so on. Inventory 5 contains 135 pages of cases handled between 1801 and 1804, many of which record instances of petty crime, property disputes, horse-stealing and the establishing of ownership by landowners of named runaway serfs. Such matters are typical of all the inventories. The two hundred pages of Inventory 41 list cases for the period from 1803 to 1805, including records of assaults, bribe-taking, murder, forgery of passports and banknotes (mostly by peasants). One unusual case (delo 237) listed in Inventory 43 (October–December 1819) concerns a ban on the sale of foreign books without proper indication of their place of publication. In this connection, it is worth noting that the amount of paperwork generated by Alexander I’s bureaucracy, both in central and local government, was truly colossal. The resultant paper chase was a leitmotiv of his reign and involved nearly all literate citizens:  ministers, civil servants, clerks and copyists (many documents appear in archival files in several copies) and nobles, whether in elected administrative office or not. The explosion of water-marked folio-filling culminated with the work of the investigating committee set up to interrogate those implicated in the events of the two Decembrist uprisings in the winter of 1825–6, and to prepare the case against them for the supreme criminal court. Its activity alone gave rise to an estimated two million folios all (or mostly all) carefully filed away in archives. As will already be clear from the above summary of inventories, the assemblies were responsible for a wide range of business, of which the most important included the conduct of elections for all local officials, notably the marshal, court assessors, district judges and police inspectors; the preparation and examination of the materials and reports for the next scheduled provincial assembly; determining the application of measures proposed by the government, and considering other items of government business; presenting cases of need to the governor and, as necessary, to the tsar himself by way of a specially elected deputy; collecting funds for the estate’s needs; maintaining the provincial noble genealogical registers and official lists of elected noble officeholders; providing proof of noble status, and excluding from the ranks of the nobility those individuals deemed unworthy. This latter business item included making decisions on the placement of distrained noble estates in trust (opekunstvo):  prior to the emancipation of the serfs, the estates of landowners convicted of abusing their serfs were placed in trust with the appropriate district board. An additional function of the district board of trustees, which included the district marshal of the nobility and two to four district assessors (zasedateli), was to act as ward or guardian of orphaned minors and of aged and indigent nobles.16 One item of business frequently before the assembly concerned applications for inclusion in the local register of the nobility (rodoslovnaia kniga). These were evidently considered carefully and not always accepted. Thus the meeting of 14 April 1804 dealt with an application from one Ivan Grigorievich Sokolov. His request was rejected on the grounds that he had already been registered, with

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the tsar’s approval, in the Penza province’s rodoslovnaia kniga. But as he had no property in NN province, he failed to meet the requisite stipulation ‘in accordance with article 68 of the Charter graciously granted to the Nobility’. Sokolov and the Penza noble assembly were to be informed of this decision and the matter placed in the archive. The assembly’s decision is signed by two illegible signatures and there is no further indication of who attended this session.17 Further examples of matters dealt with by the NN noble assembly and the provincial marshal of the nobility in 1819 include a request from a named titular counsellor (Virilander) for the issuing of a certificate confirming the wish of the nobles of the Madal’sk district to elect him as a local inspector of police for the next three-year term (15 January); a request from the widow Mavrina for payment of the pension set by the nobility in 1817 at 120 roubles per annum (5 August); and a decision to set the recruitment quota from 1 November that year at two recruits per 500 souls, and to identify the associated mustering points (28 August).18

‘The Government Inspector’ As to the accountability of the noble assembly itself, despite the measure of selfregulation built into the 1785 Charter, the Ministry of Internal Affairs closely monitored the nobility’s corporate organizations both through the provincial governors and through the reports and petitions received by its agencies. Among other measures, the ministry put in place a system of on-site inspection visits (reviziia), immortalized in the 1836 play by Nikolai Gogol’, ‘The Government Inspector’ (Revizor). A  manifesto of 1815 required every district to appoint an inspection commission from district marshals of the nobility. One example of thousands of such inspections is that conducted on 16 June 1810 in NN province by Peter Obreskov. His brief report, intended for the tsar himself, gives an interesting snapshot of life there as he observed it. Obreskov found a shortage of adequately qualified administrators to fill existing vacancies, just as he had found in Kazan’. He reported a shortage also of bronze coins in circulation, which was particularly problematic on pay day. Obreskov recommended a pay increase for assessors and chairmen whose current salaries, in his view, were insufficient. He also found staffing levels inadequate: the stipulated two assessors per district were just not enough to cope with the workload. Similarly, district courts stood in urgent need of more staff to deal with mounting backlogs. Obreskov was surprised to find that, although NN was among the wealthiest provinces, there was no orphanage or school for abandoned or poor children. He therefore suggested that the local nobility might consider establishing one as a charitable act, following the example of Perm, Kazan’ and Vladimir. This report was followed by a submission to the tsar two weeks later, on 31 June 1810, of a fuller account of Obreskov’s inspection, covering a much more extensive area. It makes interesting reading with its inclusion of candid comments on the governors of Perm and Viatka, describing the latter as effective but unpopular, largely because of his office manager, Baranov. Obreskov makes

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recommendations in respect of named individual officials about extending tenure, granting promotion or transferring them to other provinces. His report sets out proposals for the improved efficiency of law courts, factory management, financial operations and working conditions. He noted that in Perm province there were very few noblemen, and that because of the inadequate salary on offer, only a small number of them had any interest in entering the civil service. He suggested that scheduled weekly committee meetings might bring about an improvement in the effectiveness of local administration. He expressed his confidence that the marshals, ‘entrusted with the particular confidence of the noble estate, will themselves ensure that assessors are selected from among the best noblemen’. His report concludes with his brief opinion on a number of named provincial governors:  Perm (Germes), Viatka (fon Bratke), Kazan’ (Mansurov), Nizhnii Novgorod (Runovskii) and Vladimir (Prince Dolgorukii – ‘who is unpopular and should be recalled to the Moscow Senate’).19 In addition to the on-the-spot inspection system, senators were appointed in every militia district where there was a governor-general to monitor the noble estate and its assemblies, and even to attend them and steer their discussions towards respectful compliance with government policy. Over time, this contributed to a decline both in the significance of the noble estate and, on the part of the landed gentry, in any interest in its corporate status. It also reinforced the tendency of the nobility to shirk elective service, against which successive governments struggled impotently and without evident success for the whole of the first half of the nineteenth century.20 The Committee of Ministers in St Petersburg was the central body which received provincial governors’ routine reports on local administration and the conduct of noble assemblies. One such report detailed disorders which had occurred at the noble assembly in Riazan’. The committee ordered the local nobility to be reprimanded for ‘bringing personalities into their discussions and for forming parties’. In Vil’no province, the marshal there made a public speech on serf emancipation which earned him a severe imperial reprimand. The committee also received frequent requests from provincial assemblies to have their delegations received in St Petersburg. These were routinely rejected on grounds of needless expense. Instead, provincial governors were told that business should be conducted as far as possible by correspondence. This was the tsar’s position too:  he guaranteed that their requests would be considered just as carefully by letter as in person. There was, at least, some consistency in this position. Thus, when in 1821 the nobility of Vladimir province asked permission to send two delegates to express their undying loyalty and gratitude to the tsar, their request was also rejected on the same grounds. But the tsar overruled the committee when it instructed the Grodno nobility to send their requests not to the emperor but direct to the appropriate ministry. Alexander insisted that everyone was entitled to petition the emperor in their own right, and that to deny this to the entire nobility of one province was unacceptable. He confirmed that petitions could either be sent to him by post or brought by a deputy.21

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Requests received by the committee which they deemed beyond their competence they referred up to the appropriate ministry. For example, the nobles of Vladimir sent a proposal requesting leave to impose a levy of 50 kopeks per soul over a two-year period in order to raise 50,000 roubles, apparently the amount needed to relieve the re-elected provincial marshal Major-General Merkulov of his debts! This dubious request was referred to the Ministry of Justice where it was rejected on the grounds that such initiatives were plainly open to abuse. The tsar, no doubt rightly suspecting that it was Merkulov himself who was behind the move, upheld the ministry’s decision.22 In fact, the most frequent proposals for fundraising instigated by the nobility were to do with establishing educational institutions, as we saw in Chapter 4. This was, after all, from the start of Alexander’s reign one of the most important functions of the local noble associations. Despite central government’s attempts to keep a watchful eye on provincial administration both by correspondence and inspection, all their efforts  – and those of Alexander too – to bring some order to the provinces and improve the quality of life there were unavailing because the nobility was simply not equal to the task. As in Catherine’s reign the nobility failed to live up to the hopes of the monarch. The Committee of Ministers eventually had to acknowledge that it was pointless to force the nobility to accept elective office, but Alexander insisted that it was their duty (noblesse oblige). As we have already noted, he liked to cite the still valid law of Peter the Great which ruled that those nobles who refused to serve could no longer count on their privileged tax exemption but would be liable to pay the poll tax. There were evidently some noblemen who sympathized with the tsar’s position. For example, Maikov, the marshal of the Iaroslavl’ nobility, raised a number of questions to which a Senate ukaz of 1809 was the response. It aimed at stricter control of the procedures enabling an elected official to resign without good reason, and an improved information flow from central government to noble assemblies with a view to achieving a more effective regulation of the nobility’s affairs.23 Nevertheless, all the government’s attempts to secure the nobles’ cooperation ended in failure. The efforts of the younger and more intelligent generation of public servants, chief among them the tsar’s young assistants and friends, to grapple with the inertia of provincial noble society came to nothing. In S. A. Korf ’s unsparing judgement, ‘it was ultimately the brute ignorance and lack of culture of Russian society which would prove to be their undoing’. Citing as evidence the many memoirs of the period, Korf concluded reasonably enough that ‘the coarseness and ignorance of the provincial nobility remained extraordinary’.24

The noble assembly in action: Health and wealth Among the wide range of local government responsibilities borne by governors, marshals and noble assemblies were matters of public and individual health and finance. Some examples of both categories will give an idea of the kind of issues which required their attention. Thus, from the NN provincial archive we

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learn of the measures taken in 1808 and 1809 to prevent the spread there of a cholera epidemic from the provinces of Saratov, Astrakhan and the Caucasus. The measures stipulated were outlined in a letter dated 27 June 1808 to NN governor A.  M. Runovskii from O.  P. Kozodavlev on behalf of the Ministry of Internal Affairs. They included a ban on goods from the infected areas and a restriction on the movement of people who could now travel only with a properly authorized warrant. Some days later, Runovskii received a letter dated 4 July 1808 from the minister of internal affairs, Prince A.  B. Kurakin, informing him of further preventative measures required, including check points at city gates (zastavy) and the enforcement of stipulated quarantine periods. Runovskii must have been gratified to receive confirmation on 10 July from the Sergachsk district court that no unauthorized persons had been permitted entry from Saratov. Equally gratifying was the letter he received a month later from Kozodavlev (dated 10 August) thanking him for his help with the task entrusted to him by the tsar as a member of the Saratov provincial quarantine commission, the body charged with containing the cholera outbreak there. But probably less welcome was the letter Runovskii received shortly afterwards from another of its members, Major Dmitriev (dated 22 August), to report that he had been unwell since 15 August and hence unable to carry out his duties on the quarantine commission.25 From the above, it is clear that the role of the civil governor and provincial marshal in coordinating the implementation of epidemic control measures was pivotal. For the due administration of health services, central government relied particularly on the marshals. Their powers of persuasion were essential in vaccination campaigns against smallpox, given the peasants’ resistance to them. Korf claims that otherwise the nobility generally was unhelpful and remained fairly indifferent to such health issues as smallpox epidemics.26 Rather, the NN archive suggests that there was greater concern on the part of individual noblemen for their own state of health. For example, one file contains a letter dated 23 April 1813 to the provincial governor, requesting the petitioner’s temporary leave from his duties as provincial marshal for health reasons. Part of it reads as follows: Because of a continuing nervous fever requiring medical treatment I am unable, until my condition improves somewhat, to carry out my duties as provincial marshal. I  must therefore temporarily hand over to the NN marshal of the nobility, P.A. Lenivtsev, with whom I have been in touch about the matter and about which I  now have the honour of informing Your Honour. Signed:  NN provincial marshal of the nobility and commander of armed forces.27

Another file dating from 1807 refers to collegiate assessor V.  P. Sudakov who was given permission to travel to Moscow for treatment for his ‘weak health and eyesight’. What is of particular interest is that he had to obtain a warrant to enable him to do so from the NN noble assembly, presumably as part of the epidemic countermeasures outlined above.28 In another instance, on 12 June 1814, permission was sought from the provincial government to release on grounds of

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illness Major Lev Palibin from the post of noble assessor at court, as ‘he suffers from headaches and is debilitated, and also on the grounds of age he is in no condition to continue his service’. The recorded decision reads, ‘the election of officials as noble assessors in the Kniaginin district court is at the discretion of the provincial marshal of the nobility’, and it bears the signature of seven deputies.29 One of the perhaps more unexpected aspects of the noble assembly’s responsibilities lay in the area of the local nobility’s financial affairs which were open both to its support and its scrutiny. In fact, many of the cases listed in the assembly journals under consideration are essentially financial in character. They concern, for example, the issuing and repayment of loans, fixing interest rates and recording income derived from individual’s estates. The NN provincial archive is replete with instances of such activity, as the following examples will demonstrate. The register of business dealt with by the NN noble deputy assembly shows that on 4 May 1810 Ensign Iakov Onuchkin was granted a loan of 900 roubles in four instalments (na chetyrem) from the noble treasury. Three years later, and now with the rank of major, Onuchkin made another successful application to the assembly for a similar loan, this time using his property as collateral (‘against the pledge of his estate’), ‘subject to interest of 54 roubles 40 kopeks, which he asks to be accepted and requests an extension of the loan period and a receipt to this effect’. The request was agreed, a ‘special decision made’ and signed by seven deputies on 7 July 1813.30 Nobles enjoyed privileged access to the noble treasury for loans for charitable purposes which were coordinated by the governor’s office as required. For example, one archived document is a notification of the receipt of money for the militia needed to provide assistance to those inhabitants of Kazan’ and Ufa who had suffered in the recent fires there. A letter to the Arzamas marshal of the nobility received on 4 May 1817 from NN’s governor notes: ‘In response to your representation of 11 April regarding donations from the nobles of the Arzamas district for the victims of the fires in the cities of Kazan’ and Ufa, I write to inform your honour that I have received 110 roubles.’31 The archive contains a slim brown bound album with its original blue heartshaped label bearing the inscription:  ‘1805. Receipt book for logging payments made from the noble treasury of loans against estates to be used as charitable support for poor nobles’. It lists nineteen small loans ranging from 400 to 5,000 roubles. For example, loan no.3 of 13 February states that ‘on the basis of philanthropic submissions received, Avdotiia Andreevna Zapolskaia secured a loan of 2,000 roubles from the nobles’ treasury against an annual interest of 20 roubles’. Similarly, on 4 May, loan no.4 records that ‘on the basis of philanthropic submissions received, Actual State Councillor Petr Sergeevich Trubetskoi [marshal of the nobility] secured a loan of 5,000 roubles from the nobles’ treasury at 50 roubles per annum’. It appears that in both these cases the interest was fixed at a modest 1 per cent.32 Even so, it appears that the inability of some nobles to service their loans led to requests for deferment of interest payment or extension of the loan period. One instance of this was the request from Actual State Counsellor and

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Chevalier Mikhail Egorovich Iur’ev to reschedule the repayment of his 1,000-rouble loan and to defer payment of interest. In this case, the assembly agreed to defer the repayment of the loan ‘against the payment of interest for which receipts will be issued by the accountant’.33 The register of business before the NN noble deputy assembly in 1823 again shows that much of it concerned nobles’ personal financial matters. It includes a request from Collegiate Councillor Babushkin lodged on 31 August to postpone the payment of his debt of 500 roubles owing to the noble treasury together with the interest due. The assembly agreed to extend the repayment term by twelve more months and to inform the treasury accountant of the interest due.34 Nobles resident in NN province were required to declare the income, received or anticipated, from their estates whether these were within the province or outside it. Thus, ‘14 February, Major Chimitsev will obtain a revenue of 4,000 roubles from his estates in NN and Tula; 25 March, Miss Sterligova of the nobility has declared the revenue from her estates in Iaroslavl’; 28 March, Collegiate Assessor Pozhidaev will obtain a revenue of 1,250 roubles from his estates in NN; 10 March, Miss Andreeva has declared revenue from her estates for 1812’, 13 and ‘14 in Moscow’. While it is unclear how routine such declarations were, they suggest the existence of a surprisingly rigorous system of accounting, accountability and recording of income derived from nobles’ estates.35 Such accountability also extended to the noble assembly itself, as is apparent from a document in the archive which refers to ‘a request for financial information from a government agency: In response to the request (15 October) from the state office for the review of accounts of the amount of interest paid from landowners’ revenue in 1818.’ The recorded action was that the state office for the review of accounts was to be informed that the assembly was preparing a memorandum accordingly.36

District courts, bribery and corruption Most of the posts which nobles were expected, and elected, to fill concerned the enforcement and administration of the law. By extension, therefore, it was the provincial nobility which was largely responsible for the day-to-day functioning of the legal system in their locality, whether as judges, court assessors or police inspectors. It thus seems legitimate for the historian of the Russian nobility to attempt an assessment of their role in this important aspect of early-nineteenthcentury Russian life. Sadly, the main accounts of the issue – for example, those of N. F. Dubrovin and S.  A. Korf, as well as contemporary testimonies  – make for unremittingly depressing reading. It is immediately apparent that the administration of justice floundered in a morass of bribery and corruption, an endemic culture which proved stubbornly resistant to all the many efforts made to achieve its eradication, and despite the fact that such venality was in any case against the laws already in place. For example, A. P. Beliaev, a Penza nobleman, typically observed,

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Everyone knew that the courts . . . dispensed rotten justice (krivosudie); bribetaking was practically the norm; cases dragged on interminably; those who paid out the most gained the most; in a word, it seemed to us that everything was going to rack and ruin despite the presence on the throne, as everyone knew, of the best and most liberal of emperors!37

The conservative historian M. P. Pogodin similarly noted in a diary entry of 15 December 1820: Our administration is in an absolutely disastrous state. The operation of the criminal courts is a mystery. The judges do whatever they want. There is hardly a case where witnesses can be relied on to give reliable evidence about the accused (or where judges can rely on jurors).38

The authoritative German historian of this period of Russian history, Theodor Schiemann, declared in his 1906 monograph that the ‘most dreadful thing about Russia’s internal affairs was the complete impotence of the judiciary’. It was, he found, hopelessly corrupt, given that judges were routinely open to bribery. The main problem was that those who offered and accepted bribes (with the exception of the clerks) were all noblemen. Moreover, it was from their ranks that administrative vacancies were filled more often than not by ‘self-seeking go-getters or incapable and unwilling individuals’, many of whom got themselves elected to vacant posts precisely in the hope of exacting bribes. Schiemann quotes from a memorandum to Nicholas I of 23 January 1827 from Count M. N. Muraviev: Where there is little education and no public opinion and where, apart from civil servants, nobody understands how to transact business, (and even those civil servants are dependent not on the law but on other civil servants), it is impossible for any other administrative system to emerge.

This gloomy assessment, in Schiemann’s view, eloquently expresses the legacy of Alexander I’s twenty-five-year rule.39 Judicial corruption in Russia, however, predated Alexander’s reign. It had been an intractable problem in the eighteenth century too, especially during Catherine II’s reign when it had attracted critical comment from such notable figures of the ‘Russian enlightenment’ as N. I. Novikov and A. N. Radishchev. S. A.  Korf ’s research on the Russian nobility, which also appeared in 1906, attributes this state of affairs primarily to the ‘remarkable ignorance’ of the majority of the nobility, ‘especially in the provinces where there was no education to speak of ’. Bribe-taking and card-playing typically counted among their main interests. Korf quotes the claim of the contemporary diarist A. I. Mikhailovskii-Danilevskii that card-playing in particular was a pursuit which nine out of every ten households indulged in, since there was virtually no other known way of passing the time. ‘As for bribe-taking’, the diarist caustically concluded, ‘the role played by this vice in Russian society is already too well-known for us to dwell on it further.’ Many of

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those elected judges and assessors by the nobility were, in Korf ’s wry judgement, ‘experienced in shifting the scales of justice in the direction of the highest bidder’. The courts were characterized by ‘a total lack of respect either for the appellant or the accused’, and they were simply too corrupt to deal with the cases of abuse of their serfs by landowners. Only the very worst cases came to the government’s attention, ‘so that one can only imagine what went on in the lives of provincial landowners unremarked and unpunished, given the government’s inability to take any effective measures’.40 Writing a few years earlier than Korf, N. F. Dubrovin, the prolific chronicler of Russian life under Alexander I, devoted considerable attention to the issue. He points out that the chaotic justice system was a legacy of Paul I’s reign. To select just one example Dubrovin gives of how things stood following Alexander’s accession, a review conducted by A. S. Stroganov in 1803 established that there were 4,845 prisoners in the jails of St Petersburg province. Remarkably enough, Stroganov found it possible to release immediately as many as 4,607 of them, which left a prison population of only 238, earning him the tsar’s gratitude for so philanthropic an achievement.41 However, such good intentions were soon swamped by endemic corruption and systemic abuse on the part of those whose job it was to uphold the administration of justice. The paralysing combination of inefficiency and venality led, according to one estimate, to a waiting-list of around 2 million cases in total by the end of Alexander I’s reign.42 The senator and leading Moscow freemason I.  V. Lopukhin described corruption in the criminal justice system as an incurable poison. For his part, Karamzin quipped that if one were to ask, ‘What goes on in Russia?’ the one-word response would be, ‘Theft!’ Graft was systemic:  a litigant would never come to court empty-handed. Even a poor man would at the very least bring a towel, a jar of honey, some gingerbread or just a loaf of bread. The church made some effort to prick the national conscience by speaking out against the evil of corruption. In a famous sermon to the nobility of Tula province in December 1804, the Venerable Ambrose, preaching against corruption in the law courts, pronounced: ‘Weak are all civil laws where there is no law of conscience and where there is no truth.’ It became widely known, was translated into French and published in Vestnik Evropy. Ambrose, clearly feeling his message bore repeating, returned to this theme in a sermon in January 1815. But it made no difference: his was a voice crying in the wilderness. In hindsight, Dubrovin suggests that a useful corrective might have been an active and vigilant public opinion, but he was struck by the fact that life in those days was marked by an absence of any idea of the common good, or of the collective judgement of society at large, and equally of any sense of shame or of responsibility before the law.43 A particular problem was the enormous power of provincial governors:  it was they who controlled the courts and decided who should have to face them. Moreover, they also had total control over all local government officials. Governors thought nothing of violating the nobles’ right of immunity from arrest (except for criminal offences), knowing that they had no means of defending themselves. Abuse was therefore rampant. Karamzin declared that the majority of them were

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people ‘either without ability or else unscrupulous plunderers’. Dubrovin also identified the provincial governors as the main culprits, standing as they did at the apex of an inherent system of corruption into which elected nobles were forced to buy. This was because they had to pay off annually the governor, his secretary and key local government officials. To be able to do this, they in turn had to take the opportunity to fleece the general public at every turn. This is why honest nobles, knowing the score, did everything they could to evade election as judges, court assessors and police inspectors.44 There were attempts to ameliorate the situation. One such was made by Moscow’s military governor-general Prince D. V. Golitsyn in a speech he gave at the 1822 noble assembly elections. He appealed to candidates for appointment to court posts to display the kind of ‘moral character’ that would earn them the ‘total confidence of their compatriots’. Even if a candidate felt he lacked the requisite expertise and experience to qualify for legal work, Golitsyn argued, this could be more than compensated for by the best qualification of all:  ‘respect born of an absolute love of justice, and a noble incentive to discharge one’s office with honour!’45 Although they constituted a minority, there were nevertheless a few outstanding individuals who wanted the best for their people, and who managed to earn their respect and gratitude. A case in point is the Decembrist poet and de facto leader of the Northern Society, K. F. Ryleev. Aged twenty-five and not yet a member of the Decembrists’ secret society in St Petersburg, on 24 January 1821 he was elected to the post of assessor at the city’s criminal court (ugolovnaia palata) by the nobility of the province’s Sofiiskii district. This was a criminal tribunal of the second instance to which the president and two assessors were elected by the nobility, with two further assessors being elected by the merchants.46 It is not clear why Ryleev was nominated for the post or to what extent he solicited the nomination. Perhaps it was because, as N. A. Bestuzhev assures us, ‘his qualities compelled his neighbours in the St Petersburg province to elect him their representative in the criminal court’.47 In any case, it gave the politically active poet an opportunity to put into practice the noble aim of serving the community in a way which happened to coincide with the avowedly philanthropic objective of the Decembrists’ Union of Welfare. Its ‘Green Book’ laid particular emphasis on the need to campaign for justice, expose abuse and accept legal appointments in order to do so. Those members of the society who actively participated in this way were called ‘monitors of justice provided by the Union’ (ot Soiuza postavlennye bliustiteli spravedlivosti).48 With his election to the St Petersburg criminal court, Ryleev had effectively joined their ranks. In this capacity, as Bestuzhev testified to the Investigating Committee, ‘he earned himself by dint of his dedication to his work at the criminal court an inalienable name for honesty and fairness’.49 A passage in his memoirs describes how an innocent man, wrongly arrested, was heard expressing his tearful gratitude to M. A. Miloradovich, the military governor of St Petersburg, for ordering his case to be heard by Ryleev. He had every confidence that he would now be vindicated because ‘Ryleev does not let innocent men perish!’50 Even

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N. I. Grech, who routinely denigrated the Decembrists in his memoirs, reserving particularly acidulous comments for Ryleev, felt obliged to admit that in the courts the poet ‘served zealously and honestly, seeking in every way to alleviate the fate of those in the dock, especially of simple, defenceless people’.51 After less than a year in post, Ryleev had ample opportunity to experience the all-pervasive corruption at first hand. He complained angrily about it in a letter of 8 August 1821 to F. V. Bulgarin. The ‘unscrupulous greed’ of officials in St Petersburg was bad enough, he wrote, but the ‘real bloodsuckers’ and ‘rabid monsters’ were to be found in the provinces. Not surprisingly, on the expiry of his term of office in the spring of 1824, Ryleev opted not to stand for re-election but instead submitted his resignation.52 It is thus easy to see how Ryleev may well have been among the few exceptions to the prevailing norm, given the general standards of the day. Dubrovin singles out another rare paragon, M. M. Speranskii, who was described many years after his fall from grace by the widow of Major-General Chemenskii in a letter to the tsar in 1823, as ‘a friend of the truth, a just grandee, a scrupulous judge and a defender of the oppressed’. Dubrovin further quotes from a letter from S. R. Vorontsov to F.  V. Rostopchin complaining of a dearth of reliable people. Indeed, Vorontsov doubted that it would be possible even in so enormous an empire to find more than two or three capable of tackling the prevailing administrative chaos, least of all in the judicial sphere. Among the problems identified by Dubrovin was that after their three years in office, nobles departed without briefing their successors. As there was no handover procedure, ongoing matters were overlooked, and even the tsar’s ukazy remained unexecuted. One consequence was that prisoners on remand languished forgotten in squalid town jails. Dubrovin’s gloomy conclusion was that taken as a whole, the provincial administration entrusted to local government agencies was itself so rotten that it was utterly incapable of defending the public from official abuse, extortion and injustice.53 The only attempt central government could make to eradicate such evils was frequent recourse to reviews of provincial government offices which, while temporarily unsettling, ultimately proved ineffective.

The administration of provincial cultural life There have been a number of indications from a variety of sources we have so far cited that the cultural landscape of provincial Russia during Alexander I’s reign was generally rather bleak. Since Catherine the Great’s time, major shifts had taken place in provincial cultural life but these were generally for the worse. Recent commentators have remarked that there was by Alexander I’s reign no longer that vibrant noble society which had once been evident in the assemblies as they met to elect their ablest members. Rather, a sterile formality gradually set in, with responsibilities increasingly handed over to bureaucrats who worked exclusively to the provincial governor.54 It hardly helped matters that the tsar himself tended to consign the provinces to increasing neglect, despite seeing them for himself on his extensive tours of various outposts of his empire.

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Reflecting on cultural life in Siberia at this time, the Irkutsk memoirist I.  T. Kalashnikov notes that there was no library in his native city, apart from the collection in the gymnasium which had been donated by Catherine II. It is interesting to learn that this included the ‘accursed encyclopaedia – the fruit of eighteenth-century philosophers’. Curiously, although further additions had been made to the gymnasium’s library over the following years, access to it was denied to Irkutsk’s residents, ‘as though the main purpose of its books was to sit rotting on the shelves’. Furthermore, there were no bookshops in the town either. However, ordering books from St Petersburg or Moscow was an expensive, troublesome and unreliable business, not helped by the indifference to remote provincial customers on the part of booksellers in the capitals. Even newspapers and journals were relatively rare and orders for them were accounted for mainly by government offices’ subscriptions to ‘Moscow News’ (Moskovskie vedomosti), since ‘to provinces in the heartland and Siberia, Moscow was somehow more familiar than St Petersburg’. Kalashnikov further informs us that of the few journals reaching Irkutsk, the two most visible were long out-of-date issues of ‘The European Herald’ (Vestnik Evropy), edited by M. T. Kachenovskii, and, ‘from its first appearance in the Patriotic War’, N. I. Grech’s ‘Son of the Fatherland’ (Syn otechestva). Because it so adroitly met the needs of the contemporary reader it attracted the most subscriptions, although even so, very few of these came from Irkutsk’s residents, ‘despite the fact that everyone was extremely hungry for news’.55 There is no doubt that the lack of disposable income among so much of the nobility inevitably impacted on the quality and style of life, especially in the provinces. Social interaction and entertainment was by and large home-based and typically family-centred. Thus, for example, Kalashnikov observed that life in the remoteness of Irkutsk was ‘exclusively family-based’. There were absolutely no venues where ‘you could kill time by playing cards or go out and spend the last few coins of your meagre salary on a drink or two’. True, the start of M. M. Speranskii’s governorship of Siberia in 1819 saw the establishment of a noble assembly club, but people gathered there only once a week. There was just one inn for the whole town though it was considered improper to enter it: the only people who did were ‘a few hopeless idlers’.56 From another resident of Irkutsk as governor of Siberia, Speranskii, we gain a rare insight into his experience of the quality of life he led there. In a letter of 17 December 1819 to the Penza provincial marshal, Major-General N. F. Kishenskii, he admitted, My life here is extremely monotonous, and if were not for the fact that I have from an early age been used to hard work and endurance, it would be boring in the extreme. But anyway, I comfort myself with the hope that by March all my business here will be concluded. Then I will only have to think about my journey back which in all probability I will begin in May.57

Among those Kalashnikov described as ‘hungry for news’ was a nobleman from Pskov who had been a major figure at Paul’s court, G. G. Kushelev (1757–1834). He

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was a favourite of the tsar and served as vice-president of the Admiralty council, but on Alexander I’s accession he was relieved of all his posts at the age of fortyfour. Nevertheless, from his estate at Krasnopolets (Pskov) he clearly retained an interest in current events, and especially Russian foreign policy. He corresponded about this with his twenty-year-old son Alexander, who held a post in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in St Petersburg. The extent to which Kushelev depended on his journal subscriptions for obtaining the news he craved is clear from a letter to his son of 16 August 1821. In it he complained that: ‘ Invalid (‘The Veteran’) has stopped writing news, so would you please send me the Konservater when you have finished with it or arrange a subscription for delivery of it to me?’ Months later, still frustrated by the inadequate flow of news, on 23 January 1822 he appealed to his son to write to him ‘more often and in greater detail’, and furthermore, ‘in a way that I can read without struggling to decipher!’ However, he clearly did receive the news of Alexander I’s death in ‘Tagan Rok’ and of the accession of ‘Emperor Konstantin Pavlovich to whom the oath of allegiance has already been sworn’. He remarked that ‘this unexpected event has shaken us terribly’, concluding with the prescient observation: ‘I think there will be many changes in consequence’.58 Interestingly, Kalashnikov’s observations about Irkutsk’s quality of life resonate with the picture we have of the efforts made by the provincial administration of NN to raise cultural standards there. Among the undertakings most frequently referred to in archival documents are the attempts made to broaden the horizons of the local nobility by encouraging them to subscribe to monthly journals. We can see that, from the early years of the reign and onwards, it was an uphill struggle. Thus, one file dating from 1804–5 bears the title ‘On attracting the nobility of the Arzamas district to subscribe to the Sankt-Peterburgskii zhurnal’. It contains a letter dated 20 November 1804 from the NN governor A.  M. Runovskii to the Arzamas marshal of the nobility E. A. Chemodanov. It informs him that he had received from Count V. P. Kochubei, Minister of Internal Affairs, a notice announcing the publication in 1805 of ‘The St Petersburg Journal’ (Sankt-Peterburgskii zhurnal). The minister, ‘considering that its content may be useful’, requests the governor’s assistance with its distribution in NN province. Runovskii therefore writes to Chemodanov, ‘humbly requesting’ him ‘to bring it to the attention of all the noble gentlemen of the Arzamas district, inviting them to subscribe to this journal’. The marshal was to send him a list of subscribers’ names, together with the subscriptions collected. Chemodanov evidently considered this task to fall within the remit of the inspector of police, Ratsevich, and so entrusted it to him. However, the latter’s efforts were almost entirely unavailing. One letter the hapless inspector received by way of response, dated 16 January 1805, from Major F. P. Veshniakov, said simply, ‘I have no desire to receive this journal’, though at least Ratsevich’s correspondent took the trouble to say so in writing. This was followed a few weeks later by a letter from Ratsevich to Chemodanov of 10 February which reported that ‘the other noble gentlemen do not wish to receive this journal’. However, finally there was some modest uptake to report, and on 22 February Runovskii wrote to the Arzamas district judge, I. P. Kislenskii, confirming the receipt of 30 roubles and 15

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kopecks representing two subscriptions to the journal from unidentified noblemen of the Arzamas district.59 This appears to be part of a well-documented local government campaign to encourage the local nobility to look beyond their village boundaries while at the same time improving their estate management skills. One file in the NN provincial archive contains a letter dated 14 December 1804 to Arzamas marshal of the nobility E. A. Chemodanov, advertising a new monthly publication. It announces, ‘for a very reasonable price’, a forthcoming monthly journal entitled ‘Study group on estate management skills’ (Krug khoziaistvennykh svedenii) to be published by the Free Economic Society, ‘which aims to extend to those interested in rural domestic management the most convenient means of acquiring the information they need’. The notice urges interested parties to subscribe to this journal and enclosed with the letter are several copies of the flyer to pass on to potential subscribers. However, the file contains four letters of rejection received by Chemodanov, one from a widow, Petrova, declaring, ‘I have no need to subscribe to the book advertised.’ If there were any positive replies, they have not come down to us.60 Another new journal was announced in an advertisement published as a supplement to ‘St Petersburg News’ (Sankt-Peterburgskie vedomosti) on 15 November 1804, a copy of which reached the office of the Arzamas marshal of the nobility. Its purpose was to fill a gap in the market: Especially for readers living far from large towns, where there are abundant text books, but who are deprived even of the possibility of obtaining sufficient information from them. Also they may not have the language skills needed for access to the excellent works by foreign writers. Topics featured include: caring for domestic birds, gardening, beekeeping, fisheries, forestry, vineyards in Southern Russia, and various economic themes.

The annual subscription was 10 roubles in St Petersburg and 12 roubles elsewhere. But once again there were no takers and the advertisement was returned by the Arzamas district police inspector to Chemodanov on 14 February 1805. He confirmed that, although ‘members of the nobility living in this town of the Arzamas district’ have been alerted to the new publication, ‘none of them wishes to subscribe to this book, as Your Excellency is hereby informed by the police who are returning this copy’.61 Apparently undeterred by the lack of enthusiasm among the provincial nobility for new instruction manuals, on 21 November 1806 the NN marshal, Prince Trubetskoi, wrote to I. P. Kislenskii in the Arzamas marshal’s office about another planned new publication, asking him to advertise it among the nobility. This was: ‘A new and complete system of practical agricultural management’, published and distributed by the Free Economic Society. The advertisement includes a detailed handwritten description of the journal. However, there is no indication here of the response to this further attempt to enlighten the local nobility.62 The nobility’s attention was drawn once again at this time to the Free Economic Society’s journal, ‘Study group on estate management skills’ (Krug khoziaistvennykh

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svedenii). As if to make its purpose clearer, it now bore the subtitle, ‘A short review of everything concerned with agriculture’. And once again the advertisement was published as a supplement to the Sankt-Peterburgskie vedomosti (7 September 1806). Perhaps in response to the slow sales hitherto, and presumably not only in NN province, it adopts a much more persuasive tone by appealing to potential readers’ sense of patriotic duty. It proclaims that the Free Economic Society can testify before the entire Fatherland that the zeal with which both provincial governors as well as numerous landowners and landlords have applied themselves to the distribution of this book, fully justifies the Fatherland’s confidence that we Russians will yield to no other people in the world in our love for the true welfare of the Fatherland which is increased and supported by nothing less than the improvement and care for proper household management.

The Free Economic Society, therefore, now declared its intention to publish ‘a complete system of practical rural household management as a monthly journal at a very reasonable price’. To this end ‘it has selected a unique essay by the renowned English author John Mills, which has been approved of, not only by all the best household managers of that country, but has also been translated into many languages, and hitherto bettered by no one’. Furthermore, by way of ‘combining profit with pleasure’, the Free Economic Society’s publication, to start on 1 January 1807, would also include ‘the account of the agricultural journeys of the renowned Arthur Young’. However, despite this ringing appeal, the correspondence on file shows that it yet again fell on deaf ears. Thus, a letter of 26 November 1806 to Chemodanov from the Arzamas district court reported that ‘the court has established that no one has expressed a desire to take this work’. Similarly, Chemodanov received a letter from the Arzamas inspector of police dated 6 November 1806 which reported that ‘it appears that none of the nobles living in the town wishes to subscribe to the aforementioned work’.63 Was an annual subscription of 12 roubles considered too expensive, or was there just no interest in the practical and relevant issues covered by the advertised publications? Either way, it is a depressing reflection of the cultural level of the nobility in just one district of just one province in the first decade of Alexander I’s reign. Thus, in view of the impression gained from our sources, it is difficult to accept the optimistic claim of one commentator that ‘one can say with confidence that the fundamental works of the French philosophes and Encyclopédistes were to be found in the private library of every nobleman’s house at that time’.64 The assertion, assuming that it corresponds even remotely with reality, in any case begs two obvious questions: how many noblemen’s houses did in fact boast private libraries stocked with French publications, and of those that did, just how many bookbuying noblemen would have actually read and understood them anyway? There is, however, some evidence to suggest that following the Patriotic War of 1812, which prompted both renewed national pride and a greater curiosity about national and international events, there was some increase in journal

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subscriptions. For example, we learn from one document (dated 30 November 1817) that the publications to be subscribed to by the NN noble deputies’ assembly for 1818 included ‘Moscow News’ (Moskovskie vedomosti), ‘The Veteran’ (Invalid) and ‘The Northern Post’ (Severnaia pochta). They were to be paid for out of funds allocated for recurrent expenditure.65 The subscription to Severnaia pochta was the result of a sustained publicity campaign by its publisher, the Ministry of Internal Affairs. The minister O.  P. Kozodavlev sent a letter on 15 October 1817 to the NN provincial marshal confirming continuation of the journal’s publication in 1818, enclosing ten copies of an advertisement for it, and urging the marshal to ‘increase the number of subscribers to this, in every way, useful newspaper’. The marshal, P. S. Trubetskoi, duly forwarded copies of the flyer on 14 November to Arzamas marshal P. A. Alekseev, and to the other nine district marshals, urging in the minister’s exact words a drive to increase subscriptions, and calling on them ‘to action by invitation the take-up of this newspaper by nobles living in your district’. District marshals in turn forwarded the message to police stations and the local courts which were, it seems, additionally expected to act as newsagents. Would-be subscribers were asked to place their order as early as possible so that the size of the print run could be determined. The newspaper’s price now stood per annum at 12 roubles in St Petersburg and 15 roubles elsewhere. The flyer claimed it to be ‘the only newspaper which publishes specifically for the dissemination of domestic news and events concerning our Fatherland, providing news on the latest developments in the arts, industry, trade, shipping etc. and on matters relating to the Imperial Family’. Moreover, ‘most of our news appears much earlier than it does in all other newspapers’.66 But, quite unexpectedly, the last reference to the newspaper in the archive is a letter of 14 February 1821, confirming that the marshal had been informed of the decision of the minister of internal affairs (communicated on 29 December 1820)  to cease the publication of Severnaia pochta with effect from that year.67 Although no reason for this is given here, the nobility’s disappointing response to annual appeals to subscribe to it cannot have helped sustain it in the longer term. *** In his 1822 memoir of his experiences in the campaigns of 1813 and 1814 as a serving Russian officer in Germany, A.  F. Raevskii expressed his astonishment at the lively interest shown by German peasants and noblemen alike in political events, in both their reading of newspapers and their conversations about them. He contrasted this with what he observed at home in Russia, ‘where people – even our wealthy noblemen – never read a newspaper and show no curiosity at all about what is happening, not only in Russia’s neighbouring countries but even in Russia itself ’.68 The noble estate’s apparent reluctance to engage with the outside world even through the printed word could have served only to increase a sense of provincial seclusion which was, after all, largely self-imposed. It certainly did little to stem the increasing aversion to elective service in the provinces which, if anything, the experience gained as serving officers abroad in the campaigns of 1813 and 1814 only served to reinforce. There were many for whom the lure of St Petersburg

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or Moscow, and the promise of some connection with cultivated society well away from provincial ignorance, proved irresistible. It certainly seemed a far more attractive prospect than serving as an elected assessor or police chief in the provinces. As a result, there was a superabundance of young noblemen in search of some useful government appointment in the two capitals, and a corresponding shortage of them in the provinces. In any case, the majority of those who returned and remained there tended to ‘rest on their estates’, rather than seeking any involvement in local government. But in the same way, many of those who settled in the capitals aspired to a life of idle luxury, even though most of them could not afford to do so, without having to exert themselves unduly, typically living well beyond their means which they rapidly frittered away.69 All in all then, it is hardly surprising that the quality of local government remained in general extremely poor. One contemporary memoirist L.  N. Engel’gardt lamented its resistance to all efforts made to improve it: Even though senators were sent to inspect the provinces, and governors there were frequently replaced, the new appointments were no better. Ethical behaviour (nravstvennost’) completely disappeared. In a word, Russia had never been in a worse state. In an attempt to eradicate abuse, the Sovereign sought to divide Russia into areas, with five provinces in each, appointing as their heads generals he knew, and several such areas were set up. But even this was of little avail, which is why they were abolished in the following reign.70

Another contemporary view of Russia’s poor administrative state noted that the nobility was ill-equipped to turn to the state’s advantage the important right they had been granted by Russia’s rulers to elect from among themselves executives of justice and monitors of the general good. They were just not up to the task of discharging the functions elective posts demanded of them: How could the unenlightened, meagre mind of the district judge come to grips with all the circumstances of a case when, summoned from his village, from the depths of profound ignorance, he was appointed interpreter of the law and defender of the oppressed? How could his coarse soul appreciate the full import of his calling when, worn down by poverty and need himself, he did not shrink from demanding payment for the slightest discharge of his function?71

The main problem underlying this state of affairs was undoubtedly the abysmal educational standards of the nobility, particularly in the provinces, as discussed in earlier chapters. This deficiency was correctly identified by M. M. Speranskii who, to his own personal and professional cost as we have seen, dared to prioritize educational reforms in the hope of urgently improving matters. In his view, it was only higher standards of education that would equip provincial noblemen with the skills needed to regulate their own affairs with any degree of independence, thereby escaping the stifling control of those governors who proved to be incompetent.72 However, his attempts to raise standards by imposing new

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educational qualifications provoked only howls of protest and outright hostility from their potential beneficiaries. In these circumstances, it is hard to disagree with Dominic Lieven’s wry comment about the provincial nobility in early-nineteenth-century Russia: Given both the political views and the low cultural level of the provincial landowners, one can at least understand why Alexander might believe that the cause of progress was best entrusted to unlimited autocratic power.73

Part IV T HE TSAR, THE NOBILITY AND REFORMING R USSIA

Chapter 7 T H E A L E X A N D R I N E N O B I L I T Y:   P O L I T IC S A N D P OW E R

The main focus of this chapter is on Alexander I’s personality and how it appears to have affected his relationship with the Russian nobility. It explores the challenges faced by individual nobles in their dealings with the emperor, especially as reflected in their memoirs. It also takes account of the experience of foreign observers, notably that of Klemens von Metternich, the Austrian chancellor. Selected case studies of prominent statesmen (Speranskii, Kochubei, Vorontsov and Arakcheev) seek to reveal the tensions underlying personal relationships, and the consequences for these individuals of Alexander’s serially flawed judgement of character. This particular characteristic of Alexander gave rise to a potentially destabilizing lack of confidence in him on the part of the nobility (and especially the court elite) and, consequently, in the emperor’s judgement and leadership. It clearly caused confusion and uncertainty about the individual nobleman’s place in relation to the tsar, his court and the political life of the country more generally. This, in turn, would have serious consequences for the prospects of Russia’s social and political development in the age of Alexander I.

Alexander I and his court: The throne and its service class Baron G. A. Rozenkampf recorded in his memoirs an unexpected encounter with the recently acceded tsar at a court summer ball in June 1803. The German-born lawyer was a leading expert in drafting legislation, and he had just been co-opted by Novosil’tsov to the staff of the Ministry of Justice. The episode he relates affords us an intriguing glimpse into the nature and dynamics of the relationship between the tsar and the noble elite. Rozenkampf ’s account of his exchange with the tsar begins inauspiciously with an imperial rebuke: ‘I have greeted you three times but you haven’t deigned to notice’, the emperor remarked. ‘Your Majesty, I didn’t dare flatter myself with the thought that your greeting was directed at me’, Rozenkampf deftly replied. Taking full advantage of the moment, he went on to explain that he would like an opportunity to brief the emperor about the work he was undertaking for Count Novosil’tsov on reforming the senate and local government. Alexander agreed to

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grant him an audience, whereupon Rozenkampf presented his wife to the tsar. After a brief exchange with her, Alexander moved on. ‘The attention the sovereign paid me did not go unnoticed by those in the ballroom’, Rozenkampf proudly recalled. Minister of Justice Prince P. V. Lopukhin immediately approached him and asked to be introduced to his wife, reminding Rozenkampf that it was he, after all, who had been the first to introduce him to the tsar. Following Lopukhin’s lead, according to a jubilant Rozenkampf, many of those present hastened to congratulate him on commanding (albeit briefly) the emperor’s personal attention. The audience he had managed to secure with the tsar duly took place days later on 22 June. Rozenkampf provides us with a detailed account of it, revealing that Alexander asked him for his views on emancipating the serfs.1 Despite this potentially career-enhancing opportunity, Rozenkampf was to claim that his own ambitions ‘were modest enough; I  didn’t remotely aspire to a ministry, but I  did want to lay the foundations in Russia of a functioning legislature which I had studied and to which I was completely devoted’.2 As one of the most educated people of his time, Alexander I well understood the need for reforms in Russia and recognized their inevitability. Perhaps this is what prompted Vigel’ to describe Alexander’s education as ‘one of Catherine’s biggest mistakes’, because it made him ‘inclined to imitate everything English’.3 However, the tsar’s awareness of the need for state reforms was for him uncomfortably combined with a realization of his nobles’ deep fear of any threat to the status quo. His repeated complaints about the lack of suitable people to carry out reforms (‘There’s no one for me to appoint’) were matched by the consistent distancing from the tsar of precisely those independent-minded noblemen who were most likely to formulate them.4 Richard Wortman has rightly observed that there were many who feared Alexander’s efforts ‘to harness the nobility in the interests of bureaucratic rationalisation’, and ‘felt their special relationship with the tsar threatened by Speranskii’s influence and reforms’. Karamzin’s 1811 Memoir on Ancient and Modern Russia and Her Political and Civil Relationships expressed precisely the nobility’s fear of losing their special relationship with the throne. Karamzin insisted that rank should depend on noble status, given that the nobility alone possessed the wealth and desire for distinction necessary to render outstanding service.5 In referring to the issue of mutual dependence of crown and nobility in the reign of Alexander I, Dominic Lieven suggests that by 1801 a significant section of the St Petersburg aristocratic elite was already beginning ‘to hanker after English-style civil and political rights’.6 Other commentators, such as Boris Mironov, maintain that the monarch’s dependence on the nobility saw a marked decline in the first half of the nineteenth century, a development which was to constitute an important new element in Russian political life. It is true that during the first years of his reign, Alexander remained by long autocratic tradition dependent on the nobility, particularly since he had come to the throne through a palace coup in which his father was assassinated by members of the estate. However, the fact that on accession he immediately contemplated both abolishing serfdom and imposing limits on his own autocratic authority does

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confirm a readiness to show some political independence. At his command several draft statutes were prepared, but not one of them was ever promulgated because the overwhelming mass of nobles opposed the proposals they contained.7 This fact in turn, of course, shows the extent to which the autocrat would continue to depend on the cooperation of the nobility for the implementation of key social and political reforms. There is no doubt that Russia’s political and social institutions at the time of Alexander’s accession were in a poor state. For example, the administration of justice was hampered by the lack of a consolidated statute book and a properly impartial court structure, while law-making and the legislature were, to put it mildly, haphazard and chaotic. Dubrovin quotes from an anonymous letter sent to Alexander following his accession containing an urgent appeal to reform Russian law. Its author was quickly identified as V.  N. Karazin, a Ukrainian nobleman in government service. In this revealing document from the archive of the Committee of the State Council, Karazin warns Alexander that the whole of Europe is watching to see how Russia would develop; and that even though the Russian people are devoted to their rulers, there is a limit to everything. Moreover, the nobility is the only estate in Russia capable of helping Alexander to bear the burden of office, ‘since all other classes of your subjects are still in a state of the most brutish ignorance’. Even so, Karazin urged, ‘the nobility needs to be motivated by your example’, and could be roused from its idleness and inertia to a passion for education and love for country if given proper incentives by rewarding genuine service and encouraging ability.8 Karazin’s intervention was timely and effective: Alexander quickly responded by setting up a legislative commission in June 1801, chaired by Count P.  V. Zavadovskii (1738–1812). However, its progress proved so slow that an impatient Alexander dismissed him in 1803. Even so, despite Alexander’s obvious dissatisfaction, Zavadovskii was appointed head of the new Ministry of Public Education  – the first of its kind in Europe  – where he proved far more successful. Meanwhile the legislative commission continued to labour until the end of Alexander’s reign without achieving its goal, just as Zavadovskii had in fact predicted at the outset. It would be left to Speranskii under Nicholas I  to undertake the codification of the laws of the Russian Empire. In the space of seven years he was to achieve what his predecessors had failed to manage over the previous one hundred and thirty. For all this time, Russia had suffered from arbitrary rule and lawlessness.9 Given this slow pace of progress, it is hardly surprising that an exasperated Alexander frequently had cause to complain about delays in his government’s administration of state business, including the leisurely work rate of the Senate. In an attempt to improve matters he proposed to the Senate that it find more efficient and effective operating procedures. However, by way of illustrating precisely the problem Alexander had raised, the Senate failed to react appropriately even to this imperial stimulus and, as before, matters under its consideration dragged on indefinitely.10 This was among several constant sources of frustration and disappointment for Alexander which was the cause of

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a palpable tension between him and the nobility, particularly the elite officials in his administration and at court. It also provides some basis for the view that Alexander had no great affection or respect for the nobility as an estate, and always reserved a somewhat negative outlook for his Russian subjects generally.11 The Decembrist I.  D. Iakushkin recalled, for instance, that ‘people were constantly hearing things Emperor Alexander had said which were clear expressions of his obvious contempt for Russians’. Iakushkin cites the example of an occasion in the Winter Palace when, ‘speaking about Russians in general, the tsar declared that every one of them was either a scoundrel (plut) or a fool (durak)’.12 Alexander was equally scathing about some of the courtiers in his entourage. In 1820 he complained to the Prussian king Frederick-William III that he was ‘surrounded by scoundrels (okruzhen negodiaami)’ and that he ‘wanted to be rid of many of them but they would only be replaced by others’. This was no doubt why he preferred to make appointments not from the grand houses of the old aristocracy, whose members were insufficiently compliant, but from the ranks of the more subservient middle-ranking or newer service nobility. He also appointed large numbers of foreigners to Russian service, causing considerable resentment among Russians themselves:  ‘To please the ruler you either have to be a foreigner or have a foreign surname’, the Decembrist A.  M. Muraviev grumbled. General A. P. Ermolov was famously said to have replied to Alexander when asked what his preferred reward for his military services would be, ‘Sire, make me a German!’ Equally well-known was Alexander’s overheard remark to the Duke of Wellington at a military review in France in 1814. When complimented by the latter on the impressive turn-out of the Russian troops, the tsar replied that he was indebted to the foreigners in his service for this.13 It is perhaps not surprising that one of the aims of the early Decembrist organization, the Union of Salvation, was to oppose the presence of foreigners in Russian service. However, one foreigner’s negative view of the Russian nobility rivals those attributed to Alexander. It is that of the celebrated intellectual hostess Germaine de Staël. Banished from Paris by Napoleon on three occasions in the first decade of the century, she travelled extensively in Central Europe and Russia. Her observation lends support to Alexander’s insistence on the need for frequent recourse to foreigners to staff his administration in the absence of competent Russians. As she wrote of the Russian nobility, At first, their eloquence creates the illusion of education and understanding but then you realise that they’re incapable of learning anything, and that it is beyond them to develop their abilities, so that they remain incapable also of taking on any tasks requiring the slightest mental exertion.

She believed that Russian noblemen were used to having unlimited sway over their peasants, and therefore wanted the tsar to retain his own powers in order to buttress theirs. For all his ‘liberal pipe-dreams’, to use Dubrovin’s phrase, this desire was unquestionably shared by Alexander too.14

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Perhaps the beginning of the flawed relationship between the tsar and Russia’s nobility can be said to date from the early years of Alexander I’s reign: specifically from the tsar’s extraordinary encounter with Napoleon at Tilsit in East Prussia in the summer of 1807. As we shall see, its outcome, to the astonishment of the court in St Petersburg and the dismay of the noble elite, was Alexander’s commitment of Russia to the support of France and her Napoleonic project. However, evidence that not all was well with relations between Alexander I  and Russia’s nobility emerges also in a collection of documents from the time, published in Leipzig in 1880. Among these is an undated letter to the tsar from one Mordvinov. Although never confirmed, this was quite possibly Admiral N. S. Mordvinov. In any case, it paints a very gloomy picture of Russia’s current state and international standing. Mordvinov tells Alexander that morale is low in the army, navy and civil service alike:  ‘That, Sire, is the awful but true description of our critical situation. The state has almost reached the highest possible peak of misfortune, but the means of putting things right are still in your hands’. Mordvinov urges Alexander to look to the nobility for support: Rely above all on the nobility, on that trusty buttress of the state, on that estate which considers its only advantage is to shed its blood for the Fatherland, to acknowledge the tsar as its guardian (pokrovitel’) and to take pride in his trust. It is in this mutual trust of the sovereign in the nobility and of the nobility in the sovereign that you will find the certain means of uniting the members of your administration, of inspiring them with the one spirit to strive and achieve the one goal.15

Mordvinov here echoes Karamzin’s sentiment as expressed in his memorandum, Memoir on ancient and modern Russia, where he quotes Montesquieu’s dictum from his De l’esprit des lois (1748): ‘Point de Monarque, point de noblesse; point de noblesse, point de Monarque’. Karamzin stresses that the role and purpose of the hereditary nobility is to provide the tsar with a dependable cohort of welleducated people to discharge those functions essential to the maintenance of the state’s order (poriadok). And while he concedes that ‘autocracy is essential for [Russia’s] happiness’, he also argues that it does not therefore follow ‘that the Sovereign, as the sole source of power, has any cause to humble the nobility which is as ancient as Russia herself ’.16 The symbiotic relationship between the tsar and the nobility is similarly underlined by Prince N. G. Viazemskii, Kaluga’s provincial marshal of the nobility. Writing after the defeat of Napoleon, and contrasting the respective experiences of the French and Russian nobilities, Viazemskii concluded, The buttress and hope of the nobility is the throne, and the defence and guarantor of the throne is the nobility. What a clear-cut political link; what strong bonds! Experience and events are more instructive than any conceptualising: in France

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the nobility perished and the country fell; in Russia it exists, and Russia won and triumphed (against Napoleon) and now flourishes!17

Viazemskii’s assertion anticipates the opinion expressed by Alexander Pushkin in his ‘Notes on the Russian nobility’ (1830) about the hereditary nature of the nobility being the best guarantee of its independence:  ‘the contrary inevitably leads to base and limp despotism’ (un despotisme lâche et mou).18

Alexander I and Napoleon at Tilsit: Reaction in Russia It was in July 1807 that the first major crisis for Alexander in his relationship with the nobility flared up. It stemmed from his misplaced confidence in two men:  Napoleon and Speranskii. This crisis would culminate in 1812 with the dismissal of the latter in March, and the temporary halting of the former’s Grande Armée at Borodino in September. To the nobility, Alexander’s dealings with them were reflected respectively in the shameful humiliation of the Treaty of Tilsit, and the real threat of wide-ranging social and political reform, both of which they deemed likely to have highly undesirable consequences for the noble estate and the Russian Empire as a whole. The two emperors’ face-to-face negotiations took place on a ‘neutral’ raft moored in the middle of the river Nieman, close to Prussia’s eastern border with Russia’s Baltic provinces. Their outcome would prove to be a watershed in the relationship between Alexander and Russia’s nobility. The first meeting took place on 25 June 1807 and was followed by almost two weeks of further frequent conversations until the emperors parted company on 9 July. It was an unusual setting for a pivotal ‘summit’ meeting which was accompanied by ‘declarations of friendship, handshakes, embraces, fantastic projects for shared conquests’, all of which amounted, in the scathing verdict of François-René Chateaubriand, France’s outstanding literary genius of the day, to nothing more than ‘the postponement of hate’.19 It was clear that by the summer of 1807 Napoleon had the upper hand. His Grande Armée had won a string of victories over Prussian and/or Russian forces at Ulm, Austerlitz, Jena, Auerstadt and Friedland, and his troops occupied Berlin and Warsaw. The superiority of Napoleon’s position was reflected in the terms to which Alexander agreed and the response to them of Russian society. The concessions wrung from the tsar by Napoleon included Russia’s agreement to join Napoleon’s 1806 Continental System against Britain, if by the following 1 December Alexander’s attempts at mediation with London had failed; to grant France possession of the Ionian Islands and much of the Dalmatian Coast; and to withdraw Russian troops from the Danubian principalities. In return, while Russia’s Polish possessions were to be recognized as Russian in perpetuity, all of Prussian and Austrian Poland was to be merged to form a single new state, the Grand Duchy of Warsaw. Once its terms became more widely known, the deal Alexander had struck with Napoleon came as a real shock both to the nobility and to Russian society more

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generally. Only recently had the denunciation of Napoleon as the great betrayer of the Christian faith, the ‘Beast of the Apocalypse’, and as an enemy of the human race been pronounced in every church in the land. It was still fresh in people’s minds.20 The widespread incredulity caused by Tilsit has clear historical parallels with the equally sudden twentieth-century U-turn represented by the RibbentropMolotov non-aggression pact which, in August 1939, brought about an equally improbable and just as ill-fated alliance between Stalin and Hitler. Ambassadors were now reporting in their despatches from St Petersburg rumours of an overthrow being prepared in Russia and other threats to the throne. The source of the unrest was directly linked to Alexander I’s appeasement of Napoleon. In a despatch of 28 September 1807 to the court of King Gustavus Adolphus IV, the Swedish ambassador Baron (later Marshal) Kurt de Stedingk described Russia’s situation as nothing short of hopeless: ‘Dissatisfaction with the emperor keeps growing and things are being said about him which make for painful listening.’ Stedingk’s despatches were highly respected in Stockholm because of his expert knowledge of St Petersburg’s diplomatic corps (he was a close friend of the Sardinian ambassador, Joseph de Maistre) and the Russian bureaucracy, and also because of the personal favour he enjoyed at the Russian court.21 Stedingk reported that calls for Alexander’s removal and replacement by his sister, Grand Duchess Elizaveta Pavlovna, were being made quite publicly. What was worse, in the ambassador’s view, the tsar was stubbornly refusing to heed the nobility’s openly expressed dissatisfaction with him, but instead blamed everything on outside forces, particularly the meddlesome British, and ‘the millions they splurge on securing allies’.22 Alexander’s reputation was dealt a severe blow by his apparent appeasement of Napoleon at Tilsit in 1807. For the Russian court the episode was nothing less than a public relations disaster. It was high on the list of the tsar’s actions about which one prominent member of his court, N. N. Novosil’tsov, a member of the Unofficial Committee, a protégé of Adam Czartoryski and a favourite of Alexander’s, complained rather too loudly for his own good. Rozenkampf recalled that Novosil’tsov was heard to express quite openly his resentment at the tsar’s failure adequately to recognize his services, to object vehemently and publically to the Tilsit treaty and Russia’s appeasement of Napoleon, to Minister of Commerce N.  P. Rumiantsev’s predilection for everything French and to the occupation of Finland. Further, Novosil’tsov railed against the disastrous economic consequences of the inevitable break with Great Britain thanks to Russia’s signing up to the Continental System. At one particular social gathering Novosil’tsov overstepped the mark and his incautious words got back to the tsar. Not surprisingly, they hastened the two men’s temporary estrangement. Novosil’tsov was removed from his post as assistant minister of justice in 1808, where he was replaced by the ascendant Speranskii. Nevertheless, he remained president of the Imperial Academy of Sciences until 1810. The plunge in the tsar’s popularity which the treaty caused led to the circulation in 1807 of a draft petition to Alexander, calling on him to show greater firmness in foreign affairs.23 It was accompanied over the next few years by a growth in

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anti-French sentiment among Russian high society which focused particularly on Napoleon himself and his ambassador to St Petersburg, General Armand de Caulaincourt. Feelings ran so high that when, in September 1809, the celebrated hostess M. A. Naryshkina put on a magnificent gala at her country house, complete with a firework display and a supper party for 200 guests, neither the French ambassador nor a single one of his compatriots was invited.24 The general dissatisfaction which was felt by all classes of Russian society after Tilsit greatly embarrassed and alarmed Alexander, whose popularity and standing were seriously, maybe even irrevocably, compromised. Although in June 1807, M.  A. Dmitriev was just eleven years old, he claims in his memoirs to remember the furore around the Tilsit agreement:  it was initially welcomed before its disadvantageous terms were more fully understood. Specifically, it was only when the price of sugar suddenly rocketed to 100 roubles per pood (16.38 kg) that both the Tilsit treaty and Napoleon as its architect were widely deplored.25 Russia’s ill-judged if brief alliance with the Continental System from 1808 to 1811 certainly dealt a severe blow to her export trade, just as Novosil’tsov had feared, forcing many companies out of business and leading to price inflation for such commodity staples as sugar, as Dmitriev recalled. Not only had Alexander’s recent attempts at domestic reform failed (albeit thanks largely to an intransigent nobility and indifferent administration), but he had now been humiliated on the international stage and the battlefield as well, leaving much of the nobility disillusioned and questioning his leadership. Vigel’ found reaction to Alexander’s humiliation by Napoleon at Tilsit much more pronounced in Moscow, where he was the object of open scorn and ridicule, than in St Petersburg where ‘everyone felt that that the humiliation suffered by the nation’s leader should inevitably be shared by the whole country’.26 Vigel’’s view of the matter may be closer to the kind of broad-brush generalization that was his hallmark than to the actual state of affairs. Nevertheless, according to another memoirist, Roksandra Edeling, who was close to the Imperial Family, ‘by 1812 the mood in St Petersburg was very tense and a popular riot was expected at any moment. The nobility noisily blamed Alexander I for all the country’s troubles and few came to his defence in their conversations about them.’27 An equally serious consequence of Tilsit was that by 1812, Russia’s finances were still poorly placed to fund adequately the defence of the country’s borders against Napoleon’s invasion that year, especially in view of the expenditure already incurred by the recent campaigns in Persia and Turkey (1806–12), as well as Sweden (1808–9), in addition to those previously fought against Napoleon’s France (1805, 1806–7). The unsurprising result of all this military engagement was a severely depleted Russian war-chest.28 Furthermore, Tilsit’s adverse impact on Russia’s economy was keenly felt also by the nobles on their estates, particularly in the central and western provinces. It precipitated the opening up of a gulf between Alexander and the nobility, and the start of the mutual distrust between them which would have such serious consequences later in his reign.

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Alexander I and his relationships with Russia’s leading statesmen A revealing indicator of the challenges facing and shaping Russia’s nobility during Alexander’s reign, and especially its ruling elite, lies in an exploration of the dynamics of its relationship with the tsar both on a class and an individual basis. The case studies selected below will bring into sharp focus the unpredictable shift in Alexander’s attitude to, and his treatment of, some of his most outstanding statesmen. It is among the many paradoxes of Alexander I’s reign that their combined talents might well have nudged him towards the reforms he himself favoured had his not been so abstruse and obstinate a personality. The one exception to Alexander’s eventual victimization of his grandees was Arakcheev to whom, if anything, the emperor increasingly deferred in the last years of his reign. Finally, although he was not a Russian nobleman but an Austrian minister, Klemens von Metternich figures here as the concluding case study because of his highly revealing assessment of Alexander’s conflicted personality and his capacity for friendship.

M. M. Speranskii: Unwelcome bellwether of reform It was Alexander’s sense of his responsibility for bringing Russia at the beginning of the nineteenth century more in line, both socially and politically, with the tenets and legacy of the eighteenth-century European Enlightenment that led him to place so much confidence in the extraordinary administrative abilities of M. M. Speranskii (1772–1839). This seminarian and son of a village priest who, despite his humble origins, rose to be appointed a Count of the Russian Empire a year before his death was to exert a powerful influence on Alexander from 1807 and especially as his unofficial prime minister and supreme administrator for almost four years from 1808. Alexander Pope’s pragmatic verse definition of good governance would doubtless have resonated with him: ‘For forms of government let fools contest, whate’er is best administer’d is best.’29 More than a year after the ill-fated Tilsit summit, at the end of September 1808, Speranskii accompanied the tsar to a meeting with Napoleon in the small central German city of Erfurt. There until mid-October, he had an opportunity to join the discussions with the French emperor and his trusted adviser, Charles-Maurice Talleyrand. Napoleon was apparently enormously impressed by the Russian administrator’s rapid and astute grasp of detail, going so far as to declare him the possessor of ‘the only brilliant mind in Russia’. Furthermore, the French emperor complimented Alexander on having so outstanding an individual on his staff, and declared he would himself be happy to cede a kingdom to have him join his own.30 Speranskii was utterly convinced of the merits of the Rechtsstaat model, in which political power was subject to a robust rule of law. For a while at least, he appeared to have convinced Alexander of this too. He was the central figure behind a whole range of innovations from 1808 until his downfall in 1812: in the empire’s financial

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affairs; ecclesiastical education; the establishment of the Tsarskoe Selo Lycée; the deeply unpopular qualification by examination for entrants to the upper echelons of the bureaucracy; the incorporation of Finland into the Russian Empire; plans for the complete overhaul of Russia’s political structure comprising institutions and legislature which envisaged a limited constitutional monarchy along Western lines; and the codification of the laws of the Russian Empire. At first, Speranskii operated with the tsar’s full support even though, with Russia’s growing difficulties both at home and abroad, his working environment – aggravated by his unpopularity at court – was never less than challenging. Apart from his hugely controversial ‘promotion through education’ scheme for the service nobility, perhaps the biggest damage to Speranskii’s reputation was caused by the tax hikes imposed at his instigation by the restructured State Council’s decrees of 2 February 1810 and 11 February 1812. They increased more than twofold the state’s take in direct and indirect taxation.31 It was an overdue attempt to shore up the failing economy which by now was demonstrably incapable of coping with a series of costly military campaigns. The economy was further dogged by a weak currency (especially the paper rouble or assignat), inflation and rising prices. In this hostile economic climate, Alexander appealed to the nobility for its support. A manifesto of 1810 declared a one-off soultax levy of 50 kopecks per capita, but Russia’s adverse trading position meant that, to general outrage, the levy would be extended indefinitely with accompanying rises in other taxes and excise duties. All these measures made the state secretary highly vulnerable to plots against him, particularly those orchestrated by the court elite. Joseph De Maistre, the Sardinian ambassador and perceptive monitor of public opinion in St Petersburg, commented that Alexander was fatally out of touch with his peoples’ lives and their problems. In their mounting frustration, the nobility turned on Speranskii who became the most hated figure of his day. By 1810 he was at the peak both of his career and his unpopularity.32 He was very much aware of the malicious rumours circulating about him and when, early in 1811, he petitioned Alexander for a reduction in his workload, he took the opportunity to list them: In the course of just one year I have variously been described as a Martinist, a champion of Freemasonry, a defender of freedom, a persecutor of slavery and have become, finally, an inveterate Illuminist. I know that most of my accusers do not believe in these absurdities themselves. But hiding their own prejudices under the cover of the public interest, they seek to adorn their personal hostility to me with some notion of my hostility to the state.33

Although close to the tsar, Speranskii was in fact isolated, with no support among the conservative circles at court, still less among the wider nobility. It was feared that his ultimate goal was the emancipation of their serfs, along with further encroachments on their status, as already foreshadowed by his reform record to date. Speranskii’s realization that Russia stood in vital need of local government reform, given that provincial administration impacted on the lives of the

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majority of the Russian people, won him little respect and very few friends. Baron Rozenkampf, for example, who as a member of the Legislative Commission might have been expected to find in Speranskii a useful collaborator, was clearly no fan of Alexander’s exceptional executive minister, and his low opinion of him was widely shared among the elite: My invitation to him to visit the Legislative Commission was met by an expression which revealed that before me stood an evil, haughty upstart, perfectly suited for this role; he considered himself borne aloft by special wings of genius, which carried him far above all the difficulties presented by the state of the legislature in Russia.34

However, before Alexander finally felt compelled to dismiss him, Speranskii had succeeded in making important changes to the administration of government in the chancelleries of St Petersburg. Vigel’ ascribes to Speranskii no less than the emergence of a new class: the bureaucracy. In an echo of this view, John LeDonne points out that one of Speranskii’s biographers unhesitatingly asserted that there was ‘no bureaucracy in Russia before Speranskii, but a political apparatus indistinguishable from the landed nobility’.35 All the highest posts  – presidents and vice presidents of colleges, provincial governors, chief procurators – together formed a small group that LeDonne has termed the ruling elite. They were recruited with very few exceptions exclusively from the hereditary nobility, or 0.5 per cent of the population. By custom and practice such posts had never been assigned to non-nobles, but as the need for able administrators grew, more and more officials were appointed.36 Vigel’ quixotically claimed that this new development occurred without arousing the envy of the nobility, ‘due to their limited horizons’. In fact, events were to show that the opposite was true. It was certainly the case that many noblemen were reluctant to take up civil service posts which they considered beneath them, or of no possible interest, especially if it meant passing an exam for the privilege of doing so. This did not mean that they were indifferent to the emergence of what Vigel’ described as ‘an entirely new estate (soslovie) . . . which grew ceaselessly – the estate of bureaucrats’.37 Many of them would eventually, like Speranskii, rise to attain noble rank and so become their peers. As it was, many of Speranskii’s initiatives infuriated the court nobility and the nobility more generally, because he failed to acknowledge the nobles’ status as a traditionally favoured class from which the empire’s ruling elite was destined to emerge. Perhaps what the nobility in turn failed to realize was that its estate, essentially a service class, was in any case no more than one of a number of components in Russian society’s rigidly hierarchical civil and military command structure. As LeDonne provocatively, but in my view correctly observes, in the nineteenth as in the eighteenth century, rather than a bureaucratic system, the Russian government ‘was instead a political order, operating without any sense of the common good, for the selfish purpose of maintaining its privileges and maximizing military power’.38 Plus ça change! Speranskii’s abiding difficulty lay in a

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seemingly intractable conundrum. The reforms he was driving were destined to be implemented in the upper echelons of the state apparatus by the very aristocratic bureaucracy which had a vested interest in stalling them, given the conservative outlook of the majority of the nobility. In Sergei Mironenko’s astute judgement, the comparative ease with which its leading figures secured the downfall of Speranskii in 1812, and the ensuing prolonged absence of this would-be reformer from the political stage in St Petersburg, was itself symptomatic of their growing dominance at court.39 In March 1812, an extraordinary open letter to Alexander appeared under the name of F.  V. Rostopchin, who was soon to be appointed governor-general of Moscow. It roundly denounced Speranskii, describing him as a French stooge who was responsible for Russia’s humiliation at Tilsit, and who routinely bribed the French envoy with gold and diamonds, bedazzled as he was by Napoleon. The letter urged Speranskii’s removal and his replacement ‘by proper Russians’. The most remarkable thing about this tirade is its closing threat: This letter is my last and if it remains ineffective, then the sons of the Fatherland will consider it imperative to move on the capital and insistently demand both the exposure of this evildoing and changes in the government.40

Rostopchin was well known for his plain speaking and made little secret of his dislike both of the tsar and of his reformist tendencies. But just how weak was Alexander’s position thought to be for the man about to be appointed governorgeneral of Moscow to issue such an insolent ultimatum to the tsar? Not surprisingly, Rostopchin subsequently denied that he had written the letter, claiming that it had been erroneously (or mischievously) attributed to him. He certainly suffered no adverse consequences for its appearance. Alexander Martin points out that the ‘real’ Rostopchin was in St Petersburg at the time of the letter’s appearance, where he was in consultation with the emperor about his imminent appointment as the military governor of Moscow. The letter’s provenance was subsequently traced by the Committee for General Safety to two mid-ranking officials.41 Nevertheless, Rostopchin made no attempt to deny his complete opposition to Speranskii and all that he stood for. And nor was he a stranger to the art of bombast: during Napoleon’s occupation of Moscow he issued a number of rousing proclamations aimed at boosting the beleaguered citizens’ morale, which were published years later. In any case, the call in the letter – Rostopchin’s or not – for Speranskii’s removal was heeded. The state secretary’s ingenuity and progress by now had proved too much for Alexander who, as Dubrovin puts it, ‘came to his senses and reverted to autocratic type by abandoning both his brilliant chief minister and his far-sighted reforms’.42 A serious blow befell the liberal ‘party’ in St Petersburg when, without warning and with apparent reluctance, Alexander dismissed his ‘right hand’ exiling him first to Nizhnii Novgorod, and thence further east, to Perm in the Urals. Speranskii’s own account of his dismissal as related to F. P. Lubianovskii, who was Speranskii’s successor as governor of Penza, describes how, after years of daily contact with Alexander, Speranskii was left in limbo for seven weeks without

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explanation. Then suddenly, on 17 March 1812, he was summoned to an audience at 8 o’clock that very evening. Alexander welcomed him calmly at first, as though nothing was amiss, and heard his report as usual. However, the mood quickly changed as he declared that he had no option but to discharge him on the grounds that, among other things, he had incited war with Napoleon, interfered in matters of diplomacy which were not his concern and intended unilaterally to change the Senate’s structure. Alexander, by now in tears, embraced him and said, ‘I have had my share of unhappiness: I lost my father. But this is something else.’43 The memoirist Varvara Bakunina expressed a widely shared hostile view, calling Alexander’s trusted favourite a ‘monster’: We must simply assume that Speranskii intended to betray the country and the Tsar to our enemy. The word is that he wanted at the same time to stir up a revolt in every corner of Russia and, having liberated the peasants, to hand them weapons to use against the nobility.

Speranskii’s fall was met with unbridled enthusiasm in court circles and beyond, and the tsar’s action undoubtedly bolstered his own position. Alexander’s own mounting doubts about his state secretary by 1812 had coincided with the unconcealed and widespread loathing of him among the nobility’s conservative majority. On the evening of 17 March, as Bakunina concluded her gleeful account of Speranskii’s disgrace, ‘a great day for the Fatherland and for all of us’, the minister was summoned to the tsar ‘who was hoping to hear a full admission of his treachery. But instead the rabid traitor strongly protested his innocence’.44 Vigel’ recalled that the news of Speranskii’s ‘unexpected dismissal and exile’, which reached him in Penza at the end of March, ‘resonated loudly throughout Russia’. The memoirist preferred to blame Speranskii rather than his own laziness for his failed administrative career. He was thus barely able to suppress his own jubilation at the misfortune that now befell Speranskii, doubting that even ‘the death of a terrible tyrant could have prompted such universal joy’.45 Assessing the scale of the public’s loathing of Speranskii, his biographer M. A. Korf commented that in their day Russians may have hated the Pole Czartoryski (acting minister of foreign affairs for Alexander) as they may later have hated the German Kankrin (minister of finance in Nicholas I’s reign), ‘but none was the object of their hatred, so bitter and open, as was their fellow Russian  – Speranskii’.46 Some were even surprised at the tsar’s leniency in not having ‘this criminal traitor’ executed. St Petersburg’s Postmaster General, K.  Ia. Bulgakov, for example, expressed his incredulity in an outraged diary entry:  ‘How could Speranskii not be subjected to an exemplary punishment and hanged! What a fiend! What a monster! What an ungrateful, base beast! You did not deserve to be called a Russian nobleman, given your persecution of them!’ One suggestion is that Speranskii was spared execution thanks only to the prompt intervention of Alexander’s confidant, Professor G. F. Parrot of Derpt University, who counselled the tsar ‘not to forget that Speranskii is hated because you raised him up too high’.47

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In the well-informed view of D.  P. Runich, who succeeded S.  S. Uvarov as director of education for the St Petersburg region (uchebnyi okrug) from 1821 to 1826, Speranskii’s downfall was engineered by a broadly based conspiracy of those opposed to the realization of Alexander I’s constitutional designs for Russia. It was led from within the Imperial Family by Alexander’s mother, Dowager Empress Maria Fedorovna, and his favourite sister, Grand Duchess Ekaterina Pavlovna, along with Count A.  O. Armfel’d, Count Rostopchin and A.  D. Balashov, the minister of police. Runich asserts that Alexander was forced to sacrifice Speranskii even though he knew him to be innocent of the charges concocted against him.48 He clearly felt obliged to do so in order to check the mounting discontent about which he was receiving worrying reports and because, with the growing threat to the security of the Russian Empire represented by Napoleon, he desperately needed the undivided loyalty and support of the nobility. Speranskii was replaced by A.  S. Shishkov, a prominent St Petersburg conservative. This was a further indication of the shift to a reactionary political mood on the eve of Napoleon’s invasion. Speranskii’s sudden disgrace even created a stir in the Boarding School for Nobles at Moscow University where M. A. Dmitriev was a pupil at the time. He noted that the prevailing view among his classmates was that Speranskii was a traitor and had gone over to Napoleon.49 One witness to Speranskii’s exile from St Petersburg on 17 March 1812 was the Decembrist A. N. Muraviev who just days later would himself leave the city, posted with his regiment to Vil’no. Muraviev had considerable sympathy for Speranskii, regarding him as ‘the embodiment of imminent reforms’. He viewed his fall as the result of ‘the malevolence and envy of ignorant courtiers and almost the entire nobility’. For Muraviev, Speranskii’s fate underlined the powerless and precarious position of reform-minded government officials under Alexander I.50 However, Alexander’s inconsistency and unpredictability is further illustrated by his recall and pardoning of Speranskii in 1816 with his appointment as governor of Penza province. Alexander’s explanation for this move in his personal rescript of 30 August that year was that, having ‘thoroughly and rigorously’ re-examined the case, four years on he could now find ‘no convincing grounds for suspicion’!51 Then, in 1819 Speranskii was appointed governor of Siberia in place of the disgraced I. B. Pestel’. Just two years later he was recalled to St Petersburg and appointed to the State Council. Although Nicholas I was to appoint him to head the Second Section of His Imperial Majesty’s Personal Chancellery, which was responsible for the codification of the laws, Speranskii never regained his former preeminence in state affairs. His previous influence over Alexander also saw a virtual collapse: the tsar received him just three times in 1823, but not once in the remaining two years of his reign.52 In an uncanny echo of the complaints made by Alexander I  about the uselessness of so many in government service, Baron M.  A. Korf, who worked with Speranskii on the ambitious 1833 codification project, recalled the latter’s frustration, suggesting that its progress was painfully slow: ‘[Speranskii] needed assistants to enable him to realise his extensive plans, but there were none in the law commission. This was not only because almost all of his officials did nothing, but also because so very few of them were capable of doing anything anyway.’53

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A file in the Manuscripts Department of the Russian National Library contains a good lithograph of Speranskii and a cutting of an article from the newspaper ‘Russian News’ (Russkie vedomosti) by D. Dobrokhotov dated 11 February, 1889, the fiftieth anniversary of Speranskii’s death. While praising him for his courage, the author of the commemorative article acknowledges that Speranskii was a divisive figure and stresses the depth of his unpopularity. Karamzin, for example, was among those who held the outstanding state secretary in utter contempt: ‘All rose up against the audacious reformer . . . The imprecations of the privileged caste attained dangerous proportions.’54 Baron Korf, however, along with most future historians, took a kinder view of Speranskii than did many of his contemporaries. In a diary entry of 12 February 1839, written the day after Speranskii’s death, Korf recorded that ‘the light of Russia’s administration has gone out’. He described the state secretary as ‘a genius in the full meaning of the word’, who ‘surpassed all our previous statesmen’, and whose ‘name is, so to speak, etched into history’.55

V. P. Kochubei: From devotion to indifference A particularly instructive and intriguing individual case study is that of Viktor Pavlovich Kochubei, a member of Alexander’s Unofficial Committee who served as minister of foreign affairs from 1801 to 1807. The Little Russian (Ukrainian) nobleman’s family came from the village of Dikan’ka, which is more famous for its associations with Nikolai Gogol’. Kochubei was unusually well educated, having spent several years during Catherine’s reign at each of the universities of Geneva, Uppsala and London. It meant that, in addition to French which he perfected in Paris in the early 1790s, he also spoke unusually good English. The wellconnected 24-year-old Kochubei was about to be posted to the Ottoman Empire as Russia’s ambassador when in the summer of 1792 he had his first meeting with the 15-year-old Alexander at Tsarskoe Selo. The troubled relationship which then developed may be traced through T. A. Bogdanovich’s commentary on Alexander I’s correspondence with Kochubei, published in 1923.56 Alexander’s immediate infatuation with Kochubei was reflected in the fourteen letters he wrote to him over the next five years which were found in Kochubei’s Dikan’ka archive. Unfortunately, to date, no trace of any replies has emerged, though something of Kochubei’s responses may be inferred from Alexander’s texts. On the latter’s side, an emotional intensity bordering on passionate adolescent love is readily apparent. Declarations of boundless and undying feelings for Kochubei punctuate the entire five-year correspondence. While Alexander shared his thoughts and feelings with his correspondent, his main focus was always on his affection for Kochubei. It was in one of these letters that Alexander confided his wish to abdicate his impending regnal responsibilities and withdraw with his wife to some idyllic spot by the Rhine. In several letters Alexander thanks Kochubei for his ‘useful advice’ which has made ‘a totally new man’ of him, both morally and physically.

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Kochubei managed to spend much of Paul’s oppressive reign at a safe distance from St Petersburg, either on his estates or else abroad. Alexander’s accession found him in Dresden from where he returned to Russia in support of his close friend to become a member of the Unofficial Committee. However, within a year, Kochubei had learned how dangerous it was to take Alexander at his word. He was to find himself inexplicably demoted from the status of Alexander’s closest and beloved confidant to a barely tolerated government minister. The surviving draft of a letter Kochubei wrote to him, but never sent, expresses his hurt and dismay at Alexander’s puzzling change of attitude towards his former friend: he begs him for the return of the trust to which he felt entitled, both as a servant of the state and ‘as one whom, in your own words, you used to love’. Even before the crisis for Alexander caused by the adverse reaction at home to the Treaty of Tilsit in 1807, Kochubei had submitted in the spring of 1806 a formal letter of resignation setting out clearly his deep misgivings about Alexander’s rule. He warned that there were loud complaints about it in both capitals which revealed, above all, a complete lack of trust in his government. But on a very personal note, Kochubei added that it was primarily Alexander’s overt lack of trust in him over the previous two years, his personal behaviour towards him, particularly his coldness and impatience, which had brought him to the point of requesting acceptance of his resignation. However, his request was refused on the grounds that, along with the recent resignation requests of two other former members of the Unofficial Committee, Novosil’tsov and Czartoryski, who were similarly disillusioned and disappointed in Alexander, Kochubei’s in addition would lead to speculation that there was some kind of party behind it (cela aurait l’air d’un parti).57 Eventually, in November 1807, Kochubei’s request was granted and he immediately left St Petersburg for Dikan’ka, and thence for Paris. However, he was prompted by the events of 1812 to return to fulfil his patriotic duty in government service. Indeed, by 1819 he had resumed his former role of minister of foreign affairs, conducting his relationship with the tsar on a strictly official basis until his final retirement from Alexander’s government in 1823. Bogdanovich concludes his account of their relationship with the succinct observation that right up until the end of their lives there remained nothing of the ardent friendship of their early years, ‘but only cold devotion on Kochubei’s side, and total indifference on Alexander’s’.58

M. S. Vorontsov: From devotion to humiliation Perhaps Alexander should have paid closer attention to the advice he received from the likes of Mordvinov and N. G. Viazemskii (cited earlier in this chapter) about the crucial importance of achieving and maintaining a harmonious relationship with the nobility. Unfortunately, his reign is replete with examples of his failure to do either, to the detriment of his own position and Russia’s. Alexander’s egregious and inexplicable misjudgement of two further individuals provides us with additional

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case studies of his treatment of members of the noble estate: M. S. Vorontsov and A. A. Arakcheev. We will consider them briefly in turn. Count (later Fieldmarshal) M. S. Vorontsov (1782–1856) was one of the most educated, competent, effective and respected statesmen not only of Alexander’s reign, but in the entire history of the Russian Empire. M. A. Davydov, a recent commentator, refers to him as ‘undoubtedly one of the most influential and significant figures among the “non-Decembrists” and “non-Arakcheevists” ’ and ‘the most consistent legal opponent of His Majesty Alexander I’. He further identifies as the leading figures of ‘His Majesty’s Opposition’ D. V. Davydov, A. P. Ermolov, P.  D. Kiselev, I.  V. Sabaneev and A.  A. Zakrevskii, all high-ranking military noblemen.59 As one of Russia’s largest serf-owners and in view of his highly successful command of the Russian army of occupation in France (from 1815 to 1818), Vorontsov had every reason to count on Alexander’s benevolence and support. However, he had the misfortune to figure in a report forwarded to the tsar in 1821 by Benkendorf about the Decembrists’ Union of Welfare. It was written by a police informant, M. K. Gribovskii, the vice-governor of Simbirsk, and also a member of the same secret society. In it, Gribovskii claimed that its members ‘placed the highest hopes’ in Count Vorontsov and his corps, morale under his command being so high.60 In fact, given that Vorontsov himself made no secret of it, the conspirators rightly supposed that he supported serf emancipation in principle. However, he never gave them any reason to believe that he would support them, convinced as he was that any decision in relation to the peasant question was the emperor’s alone. In the event, Nicholas I appointed him to the Investigating Committee set up on 15 December 1825, following the previous day’s uprising on Senate Square. Thus, although Alexander had a potentially loyal and highly competent ally in Vorontsov, he had long suspected him of liberalism and consequently held up his promotion to full general for several years. This was despite the fact that Vorontsov’s outstanding military record of leadership convinced many that his corps should not be disbanded on its return from the West, but retained as a model which other units should strive to emulate. However, the view taken at court was that Vorontsov’s regiments were so pervaded by free-thinking and independentminded ‘liberalism’ that they indeed faced disbandment on their return to Russia.61 Vorontsov’s liberal reputation was based also on his cosmopolitan background: he had been brought up and educated in London, where his father was the Russian ambassador, and his sister had married the Earl of Pembroke. It was increased further by his known support for the Lancaster Schools movement, whose apparently innocent objective was to spread literacy among soldiers who otherwise would have remained unable to read or write. Yet this was apparently another reason for Alexander’s loss of confidence in him. Some light is shed on Alexander’s attitude in a revealing letter of 27 October 1820 written by the empress’s secretary, N. M. Longinov, to the Count’s father, S. R. Vorontsov. In it, Longinov explained the tsar’s view of his son, even before receipt of Gribovskii’s compromising denunciation:

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The sovereign does not like and will never like Count Michael. No man who stands tall can ever be in his favour, especially one who is firm, brave and noble in his feelings, constant in his principles, incapable of any kowtowing to anyone, adored by his soldiers, and respected by the public.

Proof of Alexander’s unchanging view of Vorontsov and of the accuracy of Longinov’s explanation came in the autumn of 1823 when, at a major review of the Second Army, Vorontsov, a member of the emperor’s suite, was struck by the coldness shown him by Alexander, who was normally very attentive and kind. Worse was to follow just weeks later. In December, and on his name-day too, he was passed over for promotion to full general while sixteen others, who had inferior service records, were promoted. This was all the more puzzling as in the previous June, Alexander had appointed Vorontsov governor-general of New Russia, a new post which he was to hold in Odessa for an extraordinary thirty-one-year term. But months later, Vorontsov was still smarting at the imperial slight shown him in December: ‘This is a humiliation in full view of the whole army: just what have I done to deserve it?’ he wrote to General P. D. Kiselev, the Second Army’s chiefof-staff, on 6 March 1824.62 What indeed! Interestingly, in the autumn of 1825, while the tsar was in Taganrog and only weeks before his death there, Vorontsov at last had an audience with him. According to his own account as recorded by A.  Sukaladzev, in a surprisingly frank address he warned Alexander that he was ‘surrounded by unworthy and cunning people’ who were motivated purely by self-interest. He urged him to ‘take measures, [as] rumblings of discontent can be heard everywhere, [and high] taxes are upsetting all classes’. Whether he knew it or not, in confronting Alexander with such uncomfortable truths, Vorontsov was realizing a long-cherished dream of his father, S. R. Vorontsov, of just such a frank exchange with the tsar. In a letter to his old friend F. V. Rostopchin, he had written, ‘If I could spend a half-hour with the tsar I would tell him everything I think about Russia’s wretched state, whether he liked it or not.’63 Had Alexander lived long enough to take the action the younger Vorontsov urged, the Decembrist uprising may have been averted. We shall be returning to Vorontsov in Chapter 10 to consider his position on the serf question.

A. A. Arakcheev: From devotion to deference Almost as unaccountable as Alexander’s suspicious and erratic treatment of Vorontsov was his absolute reliance on A. A. Arakcheev, whose name became the dreaded watchword of the last years of the reign: Arakcheevshchina. Arakcheev rose to increasing prominence at court after the Napoleonic Wars just as Speranskii had before them, though it would be hard to imagine two more different individuals. Perhaps the only thing they had in common was their striking lack of friends, much less close ones. Pushkin famously captured the contrast between them in a remark he made to Speranskii on one of the several occasions he met him: ‘You and Arakcheev each stand at the opposite gates of this reign, like the spirits of

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virtue and evil.’64 By the 1820s Arakcheev was at the height of his powers but was generally hated. His jealously preserved proximity to the tsar was enormously resented at court. Moreover, the very success of his ruthless implementation from 1816 of Alexander’s controversial scheme to create self-sufficient military colonies to accommodate a large portion of the Russian army earned him universal hostility. As his many critics gleefully observed, the heraldic motto granted him by the tsar, bez lesti predan (devoted without flattery), was remarkably appropriate when slightly adjusted to read bes, lesti predan (a devil devoted to flattery), a clever pun that works perfectly in Russian. According to General A.  A. Zakrevskii, who during the 1813–14 campaigns had been among the adjutants-general closest to the tsar, Field Marshal Prince P.  M. Volkonskii’s loathing of Arakcheev was so strong that he referred to him only as ‘that damned snake’ and would later even blame him for the death of Emperor Alexander.65 Volkonskii was a favourite of Alexander I and served as his chief of general staff, so due allowance must be made for the long-standing rivalry between the two men. There was certainly enough in Volkonskii’s privileged position at court and his intimate terms with the tsar for Arakcheev to find thoroughly objectionable. Volkonskii was among Alexander’s closest friends and confidants, and as head of the entire military administration of the Russian Empire from 1815 to 1823 was assured always immediate access to the commander-inchief. F.  F. Vigel’ went so far as to describe Volkonskii (whose ‘sole virtue’ was apparently his ‘mulish loyalty’ (sobach’ia vernost’)) as the person closest of all to the tsar:  Volkonskii had been among the playmates selected, through family connections, for the young grand dukes Alexander and Constantine, so that from childhood the two of them became inseparable.66 A recent French biographer of Alexander concurs that Volkonskii was ‘probably the closest and most loyal friend to the tsar’.67 Even so, the overbearing influence of Arakcheev on an increasingly dependent Alexander eventually proved too much even for so long-standing and faithful a friend as Volkonskii. In April 1823 he quit his post as chief of staff and was immediately replaced by General I. I. Dibich. Volkonskii wrote from Paris, where he was staying, to his old friend A. A. Zakrevskii, then governor-general of Finland, making no secret of the fact that Arakcheev was the main reason for resigning his prestigious post: I only feel sorry for the emperor, who will one day learn of the acts of this maniac; an honest man cannot remain a witness to that, and such is the emperor’s inexplicable blindness to this man, that there is no way of opening his eyes. In the meantime he will lose many honest people.

On his return from France two years later in 1825, Volkonskii did in fact re-enter the imperial service to accompany Empress Elizabeth to Taganrog. Thus, in the event, Volkonskii was at Alexander’s bedside during his final illness and death.68 As we know, Volkonskii was far from alone in detesting Arakcheev. General Zakrevskii, at General Staff HQ in St Petersburg, himself referred to Arakcheev in

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a letter of 2 March 1820 to General P. D. Kiselev as the ‘unique state criminal’ who was single-handedly bringing about ‘the complete ruin of Russia’. And a few months after this, in October 1820, the St Petersburg literary journal Nevskii zritel’ (‘Neva Spectator’) took the risk of publishing K. F. Ryleev’s satirical ode, ‘To the Favourite’ (K vremenshchiku) which, beneath its classical façade, was a thinly veiled attack on the tsar’s chief executive. Then, in the summer of 1824, Arakcheev was unsparingly described by a young quartermaster officer and Southern Society member V.  N. Likharev as ‘the secret enemy of the Emperor and our Fatherland’.69 The memoirs of another contemporary, A. P. Butenev, a senior diplomat who specialized in RussoTurkish relations, record that Arakcheev was, ‘to tell the truth’, hated by St Petersburg society and that hatred for him continued to grow right up until his death in 1834.70 An illustration of the extent of Arakcheev’s authority, which at times apparently exceeded that of the tsar himself, is provided by an episode contained in the memoirs of D. A. Obolenskii concerning the appointment to the governorship of Tula. It bears out the claim of V. P. Kochubei that the tsar left everything, including appointments, to Arakcheev, and was even prepared to allow his own expressed will to be overruled. Obolenskii recalls that in 1823 Alexander intended to make ‘Prince O’ (Aleksandr Petrovich Obolenskii) civil governor of Tula but, ‘despite the will of the Sovereign’, the order authorizing the appointment of the prince was not at that time submitted for signature owing to the absence of Count Arakcheev. However, subsequently, a different governor (who had evidently been previously promised the post) was assigned to Tula. ‘Only at the beginning of 1825 was Prince O appointed to a governorship – but to that of Kaluga.’71 Alexander’s inaccessibility to his ministers in the last years of his reign is remarked on by A.  S. Shishkov, minister of national education from 1824 to 1828. In his memoirs he records numerous occasions when in his official capacity he would attend on the tsar at the appointed hour, only to find that the audience had been cancelled owing to Alexander’s absence.72 The discernible change in Alexander’s personality and style of rule during the last years of his reign is linked largely with Arakcheev. This is graphically captured in the memoirs of A.  V. Kochubei (1790–1878), who was a nephew of Viktor Pavlovich. The Kochubei family could hardly be considered members of the tsar’s ‘loyal opposition’, but Viktor Pavlovich’s own relationship with Alexander, as we have seen, was undoubtedly compromised by the change in the emperor noted, among others, by Arkadii Vasilievich: Unfortunately, Alexander, despite his great qualities, in the last years of his reign, thanks to Metternich, Arakcheev and Mme Krudener, underwent a total personality change and became extremely suspicious, started to fear rebellions and revolutions, and left everything he used to do himself to Arakcheev. He was deeply affected by the unpopularity of the military colonies and the dissatisfaction in the army at the lack of promotions. In foreign affairs he fell under Metternich’s spell, and government at home passed to the hands of Arakcheev so that, thanks to these two individuals and their minions, Tsar Alexander, who had been so loved by his people, was utterly transformed towards the end of his life.73

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A contemporary commentator contrasted the virtual ‘military barracks’ status to which the court was reduced under Alexander (or, effectively, Arakcheev) with the pomp and splendour of Catherine’s, and even the residual finery of Paul’s.74 On the death of his patron in remote Taganrog in November 1825, Arakcheev would discover how totally dependent on him for his exalted position he had been. From that very moment, along with Alexander I, his own absolute authority expired.

Klemens von Metternich: Friendship’s ‘five-year cycle’ Metternich’s intriguing account of his relationship with Alexander plays down the extent of his own influence on the tsar, suggesting it amounted to far less than A. V. Kochubei claimed for it. It also confirms aspects of Alexander’s personality which typically gave rise to the difficulties experienced by many in their dealings with him. It therefore repays close scrutiny.75 The two men first met in 1805 in Berlin and remained closely acquainted until Alexander’s death in 1825. Metternich’s relationship with Alexander followed a familiar trajectory: the Austrian minister observed that the tsar typically enthused about both people and ideas for a more or less fixed period of five years, after which he would become either indifferent or hostile to them. The cases of Speranskii and Kochubei, among others, would seem to bear this observation out. Metternich’s own experience was remarkably similar:  after initial warmth and empathy, with the tsar proposing that Metternich should be the Austrian ambassador to St Petersburg, Alexander took exception to him for some reason and remained cold and aloof at their subsequent encounters. But during the campaigns of 1812–14 they grew close again, spending many evenings together when they enjoyed relaxed, if sometimes heated, discussions on topics ranging from the personal issues to great matters of state and current affairs, such that Metternich felt that Alexander treated him as his equal. After the signing of the First Treaty of Paris in May 1814, Metternich accompanied Alexander and King Frederick William III of Prussia on their state visit to England as guests of the Prince Regent, the future George IV. However, matters would take a turn for the worse at the Congress of Vienna later that year, with the highly contentious proposal that the kingdom of Saxony should be ceded to Prussia, a move supported by Alexander but bitterly opposed by the Austrians. The upshot, which could not possibly have been foreseen, was that Alexander informed Emperor Francis that he considered himself insulted by Metternich’s stated position on the Saxon issue, and therefore intended to challenge him to a duel! Francis managed to persuade Alexander to agree that he should first talk to Metternich who would otherwise undoubtedly feel honour-bound to accept his challenge. In the event, Alexander confined himself to refusing Metternich’s invitation to a ball which he hosted for all the congress participants, and avoiding any further contact with him. In March 1815, however, while the congress was still in session, it fell to Metternich to inform Alexander that Napoleon had absconded

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from his exile on Elba. Alexander used the occasion to tell Metternich that he wished them to be reconciled and resume their friendship. Metternich subsequently learned from Alexander that, although their renewed friendship caused considerable resentment at the Russian court over fears that the tsar was allowing himself to be influenced unduly by the Austrian chancellor, he was determined to maintain it and hoped that Metternich would do so too. The Austrian concluded that Alexander died ‘terminally tired of life’, and ends his account of his turbulent relationship with him with the following observation: Every ruler has considerable difficulty finding sincere and selfless servants, sufficiently independent both in character and in position to rise to the role of friend, but for Alexander this was harder than for anyone else.

The only exception to the ‘five-year’ rule, in Metternich’s view, was Alexander’s unvarying ‘filial respect’ for Francis I of Austria, which bordered on a kind of ‘religious homage’, and enabled Francis to exert enormous influence on Alexander right up until the tsar’s death.76 Metternich quotes Napoleon’s declaration that for all Alexander’s undoubted charm there was ‘something elusive about him which defies definition, other than to say that in every respect one feels a lack of “a certain something” ’.77

Assessments of Alexander I’s leadership Did Alexander have legitimate grounds for fearing ‘rebellions and revolutions’ from within the ranks of the Russian nobility, as A.  V. Kochubei claimed? The secret societies behind the Decembrist uprisings of 1825 suggest that he did, and it is generally accepted that his awareness of them through the reports of police informants such as Gribovskii, combined with his suspiciousness of Freemasonry, was behind the closure of Masonic lodges and other secret or secretive organizations in 1822. In addition, there was opposition closer to home. Marc Raeff identifies various ‘centres of opposition’ to Alexander and his friends at court even before 1812. In particular, there was the circle around the widow of Paul I (Dowager Empress Maria Fedorovna), who wielded great influence through the philanthropic institutions over which she presided, and also the anti-French ‘little court’ of Alexander’s sister, Grand Duchess Ekaterina Pavlovna, whose husband, Prince George of Oldenburg, was governor-general of Tver’ from 1809 to 1812. The different ‘coteries’ at court were centres of cultural life and political intrigue which helped shape and direct the ideas and views of the cultivated elite. The war did little or nothing to put an end to political opposition:  rather, after 1815 opposition to the emperor’s policies grew as society realized that the defeat of Napoleon was not leading to political liberalization.78 The rise of Arakcheev to occupy the position of the second most important individual in the Russian Empire only served to aggravate the opposition to Alexander, as Kochubei implies,

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and to undermine the confidence of the nobility (and especially the court elite) in the tsar’s judgement. There are indications that Alexander himself lacked self-confidence. In her memoirs, Countess Edeling refers to a conversation she had with the tsar about the sacrifices the country had made in 1812, in which he revealed his own frailties in the following remark: The people deserved a leader who could lead them to victory. Unfortunately I had neither the experience nor the gifts required to do this . . . I do not have the qualities that enable me to discharge the office I hold in the way I would wish.

The countess makes a particular point of vouching for the authenticity of her record of Alexander’s exact words.79 There is a further echo of Alexander’s selfdoubts in a remarkable passage in Metternich’s memoir where Alexander tries to account to him for his recent behaviour: You do not understand why I  am not the same man I  used to be, but let me explain. The seven years that have passed between 1813 and 1820 seem to me like a century. In 1820 I  will not accomplish anything like I  managed to in 1813. It is not you who has changed but me. You have nothing to repent of, but I cannot say the same about myself.80

In much the same way, several years later in 1824, Alexander is said to have remarked despondently:  ‘Russia has had enough glory and does not need any more of it. Those who seek more are wrong. But when I think how little has been done inside the state, the thought lies on my heart like a ten-pood weight.’81 In the contemporary view of M. A. Dmitriev, Alexander’s realization that he was not equal to the task of adequately ruling (much less reforming) the Russian Empire – despite granting Poland the constitution which educated Russians envied – was the main reason for the despondency of his final years.82 Alexander’s own low estimation of his achievement as cited above seems a far cry indeed from the eulogy to him crafted by N. I. Grech, which was published ten years after the tsar’s death. It includes a description of his ‘zealous and magnanimous stewardship of the enlightenment of his measureless empire’, as ‘the most gleaming jewel in the incorruptible crown of his reign’. As for sceptics and critics, ‘those inclined against him, after the briefest of exchanges with him became his friends and champions. Nothing could resist the charm of his enchanting smile.’ The paean rises to the following bathetic crescendo: It is ten years since his demise:  Russia enjoys all earthly blessings, happiness, contentment and glory, and loves and blesses her Sovereign [Nicholas]; but the sacred memory of Alexander still calls forth heartfelt tears from the eyes of his faithful subjects, loyal to his unforgettable memory beyond the confines of the tomb.83

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It is, of course, true that Alexander had many devoted admirers among his subjects during his lifetime. They included the memoirist I. I. Meshkov, who recalled the tsar’s visit to Penza on 30 August 1824:  ‘The Sovereign always and everywhere appeared as an angel’, and he and his sons had the good fortune ‘to see him more than a dozen times’.84 Alexander was praised by a victim of the disastrous 1824 inundation of St Petersburg. In grateful recognition of the 6,000-rouble compensation he was granted by way of a letter dated 16 December 1824 from Arakcheev, the recipient enthused, ‘History has no other example of such martial and civic virtues being combined in one ruler!’ He also credited Alexander for the rapid reconstruction of the city’s infrastructure following the catastrophic floods.85 However, one wonders how many of those who, like Kochubei, Karazin, Speranskii and Vorontsov, had served Alexander with zeal and distinction only to incur his displeasure would have joined in shedding the posthumous tears for him claimed by Grech. Lieutenant General S. A. Tuchkov made it abundantly clear in his memoirs that he would most certainly have remained dry-eyed. A descendant of an old noble family with a long tradition of distinguished military service, Tuchkov berated Alexander in the pages of his memoir to such an extent that its editor, K. A. Voenskii, felt obliged in his 1908 preface to mount the following defence of the tsar: while ‘correct and unbiased in his references to contemporaries, Tuchkov becomes utterly intolerant and splenetic as soon as his narrative touches on emperor Alexander’. Voenskii berates Tuchkov in turn for dwelling solely on Alexander’s alleged faults, while completely ignoring those positive qualities claimed for him at the bar of history. Tuchkov subjected what he saw as Alexander’s flawed character to withering criticism. Even before Alexander had ascended the throne, Tuchkov claims, certain of his actions revealed ‘a spirit of limitless despotism, vengeance, rancour, distrust, promise-breaking, deceit, and a desire to punish unlawfully’. The problem was, in Tuchkov’s view, that only those who actually fell foul of him were aware of the tsar’s true nature. Most regarded him, however, as a worthy student of the famed La Harpe, in other words as a champion of the Enlightenment and the rights of man: ‘but later on they would all realise they had been mistaken’. In support of his deeply unflattering portrait of Alexander, Tuchkov gives a detailed account of the tsar’s mean and petty vendetta against an acquaintance of his, a young nobleman named Shishkin. When, in Paul’s reign, he failed to repay a small debt, he was reduced to the ranks and sentenced to forced labour in Siberian exile. All attempts made on Shishkin’s behalf to secure a pardon subsequently from Alexander were unavailing, even though the tsar had expressly amnestied his father’s victims on ascending to the throne. For Tuchkov, this was a typical example of the calculated cruelty of a ruler who seemed to derive pleasure from prolonging the misery of random subjects. Still worse, in his view, was that not only did Alexander trust no one, he did not even trust himself.86 Another disgruntled nobleman was Prince I.  M. Dolgorukii. His memoirs record similar frustration and disappointment with Alexander. As a Guards officer charged with the unusual task of supervising officers’ children selected as

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playmates for the young tsarevich, Dolgorukii became acquainted with Alexander and other members of the Imperial Family on frequent summer visits to Tsarskoe Selo. However, this privileged access brought Dolgorukii no pleasure or benefit whatsoever since his efforts went totally unrewarded. Worse, he felt slighted by the lack of any acknowledgement of his services, either at the time or after Alexander’s eventual accession. At that juncture, Dolgorukii, who was a respected if minor poet, decided on what he admitted to be a ‘strange course of action’: he resubmitted his petition for the restoration of his rank (reduced in Paul’s reign) in verse form. Its predictable rejection was accompanied by a reprimand for his insolent violation of proper procedure. However, thanks to ‘the intervention of the ministers around him [Alexander]’, Dolgorukii went on to serve as governor of Vladimir for ten years (from 1802 to 1812), and in that capacity received various promotions and decorations. But then his career came to a sudden and disastrous end with his dismissal, an investigation, the imposition of heavy fines and a public reprimand. Far from finding any fault in his own performance, Dolgorukii believed this was all a result of Alexander’s personal dislike of him for reasons he was never able to ascertain. As provincial governor, he was granted two audiences with Alexander but found him cold and aloof. Dolgorukii ends his unsparing account of his relationship with Alexander, ‘whom I could in no sense number among my benefactors’, by blaming the tsar for so ‘cruelly ruining my lot’.87 A contemporary Westerner’s view of Alexander’s wayward interpersonal skills was expressed in an interesting conjecture by a German named Götze. He was resident in St Petersburg at the time, and witnessed the Decembrist uprising on Senate Square. Listing prominent former favourites, among them Kochubei, Stroganov, Novolsil’tsov and Speranskii, Götze observed that anyone in Alexander’s orbit who in any way irritated him or aroused his suspicions was promptly discarded, with no prospect of a return to favour. Götze suggests that, to his knowledge, the only exception to this rule was A. N. Golitsyn, chief procurator of the Holy Synod from 1803 to 1817, from 1813 head of the Russian Bible Society and from 1817 until his resignation in May 1824, head of the newly created Ministry of National Education and Spiritual Affairs. Despite various vicissitudes, Golitsyn appears to have survived them to remain an unusually close friend of Alexander, as evidenced by his involvement in the Grand Duke Constantine’s secret renunciation of the throne.88 It was Golitsyn who, by his own account, introduced Alexander to the Bible, having ‘naively’ enquired of the tsar on one occasion whether he had ever read the New Testament. Alexander replied that he had never read it, but only heard select passages read out in church until his increasing deafness precluded even that access.89 This shared interest in accessing Holy Scripture may well have contributed to the unusual stability of their relationship. However, given that Golitsyn’s influence on Alexander was among those detrimental to any progress which Russia might have made under his rule, we shall be returning to the complicated interrelationship between the tsar and the Russian nobility in subsequent chapters.

Chapter 8 ALEX ANDER I, THE NOBILIT Y AND C O N ST I T U T IO NA L I SM

Russia’s hard-won victory over Napoleon’s forces as they retreated from Moscow in the autumn of 1812 has long been regarded as a watershed in Alexander’s reign, marking the divide between the ‘official liberalism’ of the tsar’s earlier domestic reforms, and the ‘constitutional diplomacy’ as the vehicle for his ambitious restructuring of post-Napoleonic Europe through the Holy Alliance. However, it is by no means clear that Alexander entirely abandoned his intentions to reform Russia after 1812: on the contrary, he was to refer specifically to the matter of a constitution in his speech to the Polish sejm in Warsaw in 1818 and commissioned N. N. Novosil’tsov to draft a constitution for Russia that same year. Crucially, and more than ever after 1812, Alexander as would-be reformer of serfdom depended on the cooperation of the land-owning nobility. This was recognized by Alexander Herzen who observed that ‘the first part of the St Petersburg period ended with the war of 1812. Hitherto public life (obshchestvennoe dvizhenie) had been led by the government, but from now on it would be led by the nobility too’.1 The tsar’s strategy, however, remained poorly defined; it was vitiated by both his vacillation and his inability (or unwillingness) to mobilize the nobility, the majority of which remained obdurately conservative. Stalemate ultimately gave way in the 1820s to reaction at court, the rise of Arakcheev and the notable despondency of the tsar. The argument of this chapter, therefore, is that, by bringing Alexander popularity unmatched either before or after it, the victory of 1812 provided the Russian ruling elite with just the impetus required to set Russia on a new course. After all, the nobility was de facto and, more importantly, felt itself to be de jure the key component of Russian absolutism’s ruling class, as John P. LeDonne has convincingly shown.2 Moreover, Alexander himself had always known that the nobility was the only estate in Russia capable of helping him bear the burden of office. However, the sources adduced below suggest that this opportunity foundered on the failure of the tsar and the nobility to achieve an effective alliance, thus rendering the outcome of 1812, in a political sense, a Pyrrhic victory. The Slavophile A.  I. Koshelev recalled how the approaching conflict with Napoleonic France had galvanized the Russian people’s support for a national cause in which they were no ‘blind implements or pawns, but conscious and animated participants’.3 These events played a decisive role in a process described

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by Iurii Lotman as ‘the reconstruction of the consciousness of the educated Russian nobleman’, as well as providing a whole generation with an experience which would lead the ‘dreamy patriots’ of the early nineteenth century onto Senate Square.4 There was a direct connection: one Soviet study identifies no fewer than ninety combatants in Russia’s wars against Napoleon as future Decembrists, while a more recent statistical study finds thirty-six of them had been serving officers in 1812.5 We now turn to the question of the authenticity of Alexander I’s stated constitutional ambitions for Russia, with a careful reconstruction of his actual performance as a constitutional reformer, specifically in relation to the Kingdom of Poland, and some consideration of the Russian nobility’s response to it. The discussion includes consideration of a case study of one resourceful individual’s promotion in St Petersburg of legal practice as a profession, in line with Enlightenment notions of universal access to justice. It examines the nobility’s varied responses to then fashionable European notions of constitutional government, their views of Alexander I as would-be constitutional monarch, on the rule of law and on the suitability for Russia of Western European models of constitutional government. The chapter concludes with an analysis of subsequent assessments of Alexander I’s constitutional intentions.

Alexander I as a would-be constitutional monarch Alexander I was the inheritor of a long tradition of Russian autocracy and, even in the changing times he lived through, he was quite clear about the responsibility he bore for maintaining it himself as reigning tsar. He was also interested in its history, as we know from Karamzin’s record of a two-hour conversation he had with Alexander in Tver’ in March 1811. For much of the time Karamzin read extracts to him from his work then in progress on the History of the Russian State, ‘after which we talked at length – about what? About autocracy!’ Karamzin admitted that he could not agree with Alexander on everything, but that he was ‘genuinely surprised by his intellect and his modest eloquence’.6 Alexander was no stranger to the idea of a monarchy limited by a constitution, or to that of a government regulated by the force of a constitution and underpinned by the rule of law (i.e. a Rechtsstaat). These were concepts he would have learned about from his Swiss republican tutor, Frédéric-César de La Harpe, and which he had discussed at the start of his reign with his young friends in the Unofficial Committee, among them the liberal Pole Adam Czartoryski. Together they debated a draft Charter to the Russian People, ascribed to the combined authorship of Speranskii and the Vorontsov brothers, Alexander and Simon. It was the first of many such constitutional projects which would intermittently excite the tsar’s attention throughout his twenty-five-year reign. The first draft of this charter set the tone for those which followed it, calling for security of person and property, freedom from arbitrary arrest (echoing the English juridical principle of habeas corpus) and an overhaul of Russia’s chaotic legal code.

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In a pattern which would become familiar, Alexander received the draft charter enthusiastically and, as early as the summer of 1801, seemed poised to secure its approval by the relevant government institution (the Permanent Council). In the event, the tsar could not bring himself to introduce it, even though paradoxically, its emphasis on law-based rule contained no threat whatsoever to his own status as absolute autocrat. It was doomed to gather dust on the very shelf where it would be joined by many such pending projects over the next two decades. Even so, Alexander’s continuing curiosity about constitutional government is reflected in his commissioning of a Russian translation of Constitution de l’Angleterre (Amsterdam, 1771)  by the Swiss political theorist, Jean-Louis de Lolme (1740– 1806), which was published in St Petersburg in 1806.7 Another indication of Alexander’s direction of travel at the start of his reign was his decision to set up a commission under Count P. V. Zavadovskii to codify the laws of the Russian Empire. As many as forty-eight officials and an annual budget of 100,000 roubles were made available to Zavadovskii, and Alexander asked him for a monthly progress report. N.  I. Novosil’tsov and Adam Czartoryski urged Zavadovskii to consult the English juridical expert Jeremy Bentham (1748–1832), the leading theorist in the philosophy of law, whose ideas were associated with the aphoristic and laudable aim of achieving ‘the greatest good for the greatest number of people’. Russian society became familiar with Bentham’s ideas through the translation of his work, which started in 1804, and in which Speranskii participated. Speranskii was also interested in writings of David Hume (1711–76) on politics and civil liberties, confirming his view that the British constitution’s strength derived primarily from long tradition and the specific moral make-up (dukhkovnyi sklad) of the British people. At this time, the legislative activity of Alexander I’s government aroused wide interest, and books on legislation became fashionable reading, and a major talking point among the educated classes.8 Etienne Dumont who, while resident in St Petersburg, translated Bentham’s works into French, reported that in 1808 as many copies of Bentham’s books were sold in the Russian capital as in London. Among Bentham’s greatest Russian admirers was Admiral N. S. Mordvinov, who was personally acquainted with Jeremy’s brother, Samuel. In 1814, Jeremy Bentham offered to assist Alexander I  with the reform and codification of the complete laws of the Russian Empire.9 However, the offer was ignored, and Zavadovskii never did complete the task assigned to him. It would fall to Speranskii to see the job through in the reign of Nicholas I, and it was at last completed in 1833. On balance, in preference to pursuing ideas of implementing a Russian constitution, Alexander was apparently more comfortable overseeing the reform and reorganization of central administration which followed in 1802. The process started with the creation of a Committee of Ministers and a retooled Senate, as ‘the supreme office of the empire, limited in its power only by the power of the emperor’.10 The nearest Alexander might have come to surrendering any of his powers was in Speranskii’s 1809 political reform project, which envisaged government based on ‘immutable laws’, and popular participation in a legislative

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assembly, the State Duma. The tsar appeared to take the matter of drafting the project very seriously, closeted with Speranskii almost daily during October and November 1809, hammering out the details of the final document. It seemed destined for imminent promulgation, primarily to allay what Speranskii described to the tsar as the ‘universal dissatisfaction’ of his Russian subjects. It is evident that constitutions, however Alexander may have understood them, were clearly on his mind.11 Earlier that same year, in March, Alexander attended and addressed in person a meeting he had convened of the Finnish Diet in the medieval town of Porvoo (Borgå), on the Gulf of Finland, fifty kilometres east of Helsinki (Helsingfors). Here he bestowed a constitution upon his new Finnish subjects, inhabitants of the territory ceded to Russia by Sweden as confirmed by the 1809 Treaty of Fredrikshamn. This included the eastern seaboard of the Baltic, as far as Finland and the Åland Islands.12 The new constitution, again, had been drawn up chiefly by Speranskii, who was now put in charge of Finnish affairs. Under its terms, Finland became a Grand Duchy with the tsar as its Grand Duke. The fact that the next Finnish Diet was not convened for another fifty-four years, in 1863, speaks volumes about Russian perceptions of the nature and extent of its constitutional concession to one part of its empire. In any event, as its grand duke, the Russian tsar remained firmly in control of Finland, whatever about the constitution he had granted it. Similarly, Speranskii’s Russian project fell short of calling for a constitutional monarchy, and as Speranskii himself would be cruelly reminded with his disgrace and exile in 1812, Alexander’s authority as emperor would remain absolute. To Speranskii, the tsar’s treatment of him can hardly have come as a surprise. It was, at the very least, consistent with his own view that, in contrast to a ‘proper monarchical state’, Russia’s system of rule was simply despotic. But what, at first sight, comes as more of a surprise was Speranskii’s dogged refusal to abandon hope in Alexander altogether. On the very day he arrived in Nizhnii Novgorod, his exile’s first staging post, he wrote to the tsar expressing his conviction that sooner or later His Imperial Majesty would revisit the fundamental principles of the 1809 constitutional project which they had both worked so hard together to produce.13 Speranskii’s confident prediction surely derived from his memory of how closely they had collaborated on the 1809 document. As T. V. Andreeva correctly points out, the composition of what was essentially a comprehensive plan for the reform of Russia’s state structure was not Speranskii’s alone.14 It could never have been drawn up without Alexander’s authorization, much less without his own political ideas and input. This in turn points to the thesis that by the autumn of 1808, following their return from their meeting with Napoleon at Erfurt, both Speranskii and Alexander were convinced of the inevitability and necessity of political reform. That both men were prompted by their shared understanding of universal human progress, and of Russia’s place in Europe’s future development, is nowhere more clearly reflected than in two manuscripts collated by Speranskii’s longserving secretary, K. G. Repinskii. The first was entitled Considérations sur l’esprit

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et la maturité d’une réforme politique en Russie and subtitled ‘A conversation between M.M. Speranskii and Alexander I’; and the second Précis de l’organisation générale de l’émpire, which bore the revealing subtitle, ‘The thoughts of Alexander I, as set down by M.M. Speranskii’. Repinskii had kept a record of his principal’s collaboration with the tsar. It was written in Russian and dated 1809 but has survived only in the French translation made after Speranskii’s fall by his personal assistant, F.  I. Zeier. The existence of this record, now preserved in the Russian National Library, which was highlighted by N. V. Minaeva in her 1982 work on Speranskii, is convincing proof of the crucial role of Alexander I as joint author with Speranskii of the constitutional plan for Russia they together envisaged.15 In July 1812, following Russia’s agreement with Spain to continue the war against Napoleon, which came with Russian recognition of the exiled King Fernando VII and the Cadiz Cortes, Alexander was presented with a copy of the 1812 Spanish constitution. The tsar ratified the treaty in October, and a French translation of the Spanish constitution appeared in St Petersburg. A  year later, a partial Russian translation of it was published in the widely read patriotic journal ‘Son of the Fatherland’.16 Alexander himself is credited with making an influential contribution, not only to the drafting of a relatively liberal constitution for France in 1814, but also to those devised for a number of German states in post-Napoleonic Europe. He also, of course, took the carefully calculated risk of granting constitutions within the Russian Empire itself: to Finland (1809), Poland (1815) and Bessarabia (1818). The latter, which comprised the territory in the Western borderlands lying between the Rivers Dniester and Pruth, was ceded to Russia by the Ottoman Empire on 16 May 1812 under the terms of the Treaty of Bucharest. Alexander was himself an inveterate commissioner of constitutional and reform projects for Russia: from the Vorontsov brothers and Speranskii early in his reign, and Novosil’tsov and even Arakcheev towards the end of it. Such was his apparently creative response to the Zeitgeist that it has caused one recent Russian commentator to describe the tsar of Russia as no less than ‘the most consistent constitutionalist among the European monarchs of his day’, revelling in his liberal role which was widely applauded by liberal society across Europe.17 On his visit to England in the summer of 1814, when he received an honorary doctorate in law from Oxford University, Alexander irritated his Tory hosts by meeting members of the Whig opposition, among them Lord Charles Graham, a noted advocate of constitutionalism. To him the tsar expressed his desire to see a ‘wellintentioned opposition’ created in Russia. He asked Lord Graham for his advice, leading the Whigs to suppose that the Russian autocrat was intending to establish a parliamentary government in Russia.18

‘Practical legal study’ for Russian citizens: The Naumov affair Meanwhile, in 1813 a court counsellor (nadvornyi sovetnik) named Ivan Naumov stirred up a hornets’ nest by seeking to establish a ‘house of practical legal study’,

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offering instruction through its journal to those who wished to assist plaintiffs in litigation. The Ministry of Justice initially declined to intervene on the assumption that the matter had to do with an educational establishment, but the powersthat-be quickly took a very serious view of Naumov’s provocative activity. The case, contained in a file in the Russian State Archive, provides us with an unusual insight into the authorities’ reaction to an unwelcome expression of interest in the promotion of legal professionalism.19 The advertisement Naumov placed in SanktPeterburgskie vedomosti, No. 95, read as follows: Subscriptions are invited for the journal of the House of Practical Legal Study for the instruction of lawyers, 1813. The requirement to know the law is imperative. It will appear in 2 parts, Part 1: 1) general concept of laws and judicial power, 2) natural law; 3) general concept of citizenship. Part 2: 1) on the role of government in Russia, 2) on the provenance of laws in Russia, 3) on the exposition of laws in Russia, 4) the history of the formation in Russia of judicial power, 5) practical legal study.

For its time, this was groundbreaking stuff indeed. Naumov followed up with a letter dated 30 December 1813 to Andrei Iakovlevich, civil governor of Archangel (Arkhangelsk), inviting him to procure subscribers to his journal in the province. It turned out that Naumov had written similar requests to other provincial governors. For example, on 17 February 1814, the civil governor of Voronezh forwarded the same letter and three copies of Naumov’s advertisement to the secret police because, as he said, he considered it his duty to submit it to their scrutiny. A few weeks later, the civil governor of Pskov, privy counsellor Prince P. I Shakhovskoi (father of the Moscow-based Decembrist F. P. Shakhovskoi) took the same step. In fact, however, Naumov had already attracted the authorities’ attention a few years earlier with two publications: ‘A practical study of law for citizens’ (1808) (Prakticheskoe pravovedenie dlia grazhdan), and ‘An outline of natural law’ (1809) (Nachertanie estestvennogo prava). Then, in 1813, came the publication of his advertisement in ‘St Petersburg News’ (Sankt-Peterburgskie vedomosti). On 3 April 1813, F. V. Rostopchin, military governor of Moscow, wrote to S. K.Viazmitinov, minister of police, describing Naumov as ‘a notorious slanderer, a drunkard, and a harmful individual’. Rostopchin believed that ‘with the permission of the sovereign emperor’, Naumov had sought to set up a school for the training of lawyers, and had ‘proved to be one of the most resolute and insolent proponents of equality’, who was ‘all the more dangerous since he can and does easily exert influence through his gift of the gab’. A few days later, Viazmitinov received a letter from Naumov himself (dated 7 April 1813), claiming that his project had the tsar’s support and that as ‘a loyal subject of His Majesty’, he intended to ‘realise the establishment of a House of Practical Legal Study for the education of lawyers [striapchestva]’. However, Naumov’s understanding of what the tsar had permitted him to do, whatever this may actually have been, was clearly mistaken. By 6 May 1813, Naumov was under official suspicion, following a report from the chief of police to

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Alexander that Naumov had written to all provincial governors about his proposed house of practical legal studies. This prompted the tsar’s order ‘not to permit this, pending a new command (do novogo poveleniia) and to keep him under strict watch’. There clearly had been an original ‘command’ from the tsar to Naumov, but the sources do not elaborate on this. Viazmitinov accordingly contacted the chief of police in St Petersburg with the laconic order: ‘I recommend the strictest watch be kept on Naumov’s activities. Report to me on what he does’. Naumov’s offence was to seek to take on litigation much like a solicitor in Great Britain acting on clients’ instructions, and to encourage others to be trained as lawyers to do so themselves. This was viewed as acting ultra vires for a private citizen in Alexander I’s Russia, even though as a court counsellor, Naumov no doubt thought he was merely trying to raise the professional standards of Russian legal practice. This was not, however, the view of the Ministry of Justice. The acting minister, State Counsellor A. U. Bolotnikov, wrote to Viazmitinov on 18 December 1813, confirming that Naumov’s activities were ‘not consistent with the general order maintained by laws for the conduct of petitioning’, and that he had ‘twice applied to the Minister of Education, asking him to give Court Counsellor Naumov the order not to go beyond the bounds assigned to him’. In the end, however, apart from the restrictions placed on his legal ambitions, Naumov does not appear to have suffered any further consequences for his potentially subversive promotion of due process and the rule of law. On the contrary, he apparently held on to his post as court counsellor: in the Russian State Historical Archive (RGIA), T. V. Andreeva came across a covering letter written by Naumov to Nicholas I in 1826 accompanying ‘papers relating to matters of state administration’ for the tsar’s attention.20 The Naumov affair reveals the personal interest taken by Alexander in the unorthodox ambitions of a minor official for the development of legal practice in Russia, and the combined efforts of several ministries at the tsar’s command to put a stop to them. While Naumov was no doubt responding in his own way to the immediate post-Napoleonic climate in Russia of long-awaited political and social reform, the government’s response to his aspirations showed that any such expectations were ultimately illusory.

Alexander I’s constitution for Poland: The response of Russia’s nobility The preliminary indication of a new order for Poland was adumbrated in Article 5 of the Treaty of Vienna of 3 May 1815. It declared the granting of a ‘special form of governance’ (osobennoe upravlenie) through a state institution of national representatives, ‘in a manner they deem most expedient and beneficial’. At this point the term ‘constitution’ did not figure, but it was used in relation to the ‘free city’ of Krakow in an appendix to the treaty, and elaborated in Article 19. A manifesto of 9 May 1815 then affirmed the union of the Grand Duchy of Warsaw (itself an outcome of the 1807 Tilsit treaty) with Russia, now to be known as the Kingdom of Poland, in order to face down the resurgent Napoleon, ostensibly in exile on Elba.21

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The 9 May manifesto prompted widely divergent reactions: most were against the union with Poland and the intended granting of a constitution, and saw this as a mistake on Emperor Alexander’s part. As a former favourite of the tsar, the Decembrist M.  F. Orlov, put it, ‘Many hoped that, having granted Poland a constitution, the emperor would in turn not forget Russia.’22 As we shall see, the Polish constitutional process would culminate with Alexander’s speech in Warsaw in March 1818. Under the terms of the manifesto of 15 November 1815 which granted the Congress Kingdom a constitution, Alexander acquired the title of king of Poland. The Russian emperor thus became for his Polish subjects a constitutional monarch, but one who retained the power to veto any of the sejm’s resolutions. This new constitution superseded the 1807 charter which had applied to the Grand Duchy of Warsaw. As V. I. Semevskii wryly observed in his 1906 article, for all the flaws of the 1807 constitutional statute, the fact remains that the Poles already had one, so it was no use Russia ‘attempting to seduce them with the charms of Russian autocracy: they had to be offered something better’.23 There was indeed some improvement: the new Polish constitution confirmed representative government in the form of the sejm, it recognized the rights of habeas corpus, religious and press freedom, restricted holders of government posts to Poles (with the exception of Grand Duke Constantine as the army’s supreme commander) and – most importantly – recognized Polish as the official language of the kingdom. To cite the irrefutable verdict of V. O. Kliuchevskii: ‘The conquered country received institutions which enjoyed greater freedom than any of those by which the conquering country was governed.’24 For many Poles, the constitution and its accompanying concessions were seen as welcome developments. Years later, in Siberia the Decembrist A.  P. Beliaev recalled meeting a Polish landowner from Minsk province, I. A. Korsak, exiled for his part in the Polish-Russian war of 1830–1. Korsak expressed his deep respect for Alexander I’s gift to Poland of a constitution and had supported the idea of PolishRussian unity on the basis of a ‘common and free constitution’, an idea which Beliaev somewhat inaccurately claimed was shared ‘by all the Decembrists’.25 Taken as a whole, developments in Poland seemed likely to prepare Russian public opinion for a constitution at home. In a note written in 1816, though probably not intended for publication, N. S. Mordvinov welcomed Poland’s constitutional progress which, he observed, Russia would do well to emulate without delay: Russia with her autocrat will long remain poor and weak, and her cultural development (prosveshchenie) will not keep pace with that of constitutional countries. Poland is a small country but with a representative monarchy may well become even more powerful than our own enslaved Russia.26

Equally interesting is the comment made by S. R. Vorontsov, Alexander I’s first ambassador to the Court of St James and a well-known Anglophile, in a letter of 8 October 1817 to Count Rostopchin:

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I’m awaiting the consequences of the court’s stay in Moscow. Shall we be seeing what great ideas will be brought there and made public? Should we not suppose that, after supporting the French constitution and introducing one in Poland, that we will be granted something incomparably superior, because there will have been time enough to weigh up and test in practice everything that has been applied to France and Poland?27

Vorontsov’s hopeful expectations uncannily anticipated by just five months Alexander’s famously sensational speech to the first session of the Polish sejm in Warsaw which he gave on 15 March 1818. In it the emperor declared his intention to grant Russia both a constitution and a representative assembly. He told the members of Poland’s parliament: You have afforded me the means to present to my fatherland something I have been preparing for it for many years now, and from which it will benefit once the fundaments of so important a matter have attained the requisite maturity.28

It would be hard to exaggerate the impact made on Russian society and noble public opinion both by the inauguration of a constitutional parliament in the empire’s western borderlands, but also by the tsar’s effective declaration of a similar arrangement intended for his empire’s heartland. Both events aroused eager expectation, deep foreboding and headshaking incredulity as rumours swirled and took on a momentum of their own in Russia’s two capitals and beyond. From exile in Penza, Speranskii wrote to his old friend A. A. Stolypin on 2 May 1818, referring to the ‘attacks of fear and despair, exacerbated by distance’, which were afflicting the local nobility, adding that ‘even though things are still quiet here, there can be no guarantee that they will stay that way’.29 Speranskii knew perfectly well that Russia was hopelessly unprepared for such major constitutional reform, whether legally, financially or ideologically. His concerns were shared by such champions of economic liberalism as N. S. Mordvinov and P. D. Kiselev who were shocked by Alexander’s rash declaration of far-reaching constitutional assurances.30 The strength of feeling in Russia against what many perceived as Polish resurgence from 1815, and the rumoured secession to the Kingdom of Poland of some Russian provinces in the Western borderlands which had been seized from Poland by Catherine the Great, led some noblemen to join patriotic secret societies aimed at protecting Russia’s territorial integrity. Some years later, the Decembrists’ dealings with representatives of Polish secret societies were similarly dogged by internecine tensions. When in 1824, the Southern Society assured their Polish counterparts that the pre-1792 RussoPolish border would be reinstated, M.  F. Orlov reacted furiously and told the chief negotiator M.  P. Bestuzhev-Riumin that their personal relationship was irretrievably compromised: ‘You have done something utterly nonsensical . . . You are no Russian. Farewell!’31 From a conservative perspective, N.  M. Karamzin remarked in a letter to the poet I. I. Dmitriev, who had been minister of justice

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from 1810 to 1814: ‘The news from Warsaw made a powerful impression on many a young mind . . . the Warsaw speech resonated in many a young heart: they sleep and dream constitutions . . . and are themselves beginning to draft them.’32 Among them were the future Decembrists N. I. Lorer, who wept for joy on hearing of it, and S. G. Volkonskii, who declared that ‘from that day forth my thoughts took a different direction’.33 For many others, however, the act of granting Poland a constitution while continuing to deny one to Russia was deemed an act of unconcealed contempt for his Russian subjects on Alexander’s part. From his command post in the Caucasus, an incredulous but prescient A. P. Ermolov wrote to A. A. Zakrevskii on 30 April 1818: ‘I do not believe that fate will go so far as to humiliate us by having the Poles as a model: it will all stop at promises of comprehensive changes.’34 But others took the tsar at his word. As N.  I. Turgenev was quick to remark, some nobles were deeply offended by the implication that their country was judged to be less ripe for freedom than Poland. Many influential people saw in Alexander’s words only humiliation for Russia.35 It was a response clearly articulated in a letter to Turgenev from P.  A. Viazemskii who was in Warsaw at the time. He was on secondment from the First Department of His Imperial Majesty’s Personal Chancellery to Novosil’tsov’s office in the Polish capital, where he was responsible for translating the Polish constitution, as well as Alexander’s speeches from the throne, from their original French into Russian. This is part of what Viazemskii wrote: The government should always respond to public opinion rather than waiting until it gets out of hand and oversteps the mark. Still, it seems the speech the tsar has given here could well be the appetizer before the prepared feast. I was standing just two steps from him as he read it out, and my eyes filled with tears of joy and despair: why talk to Poles about Russians’ hopes? Are we children who cannot be spoken to?.Is he afraid that he has spoken too soon? After all, were his words really not going to reach Russia? No matter what, the tsar was great at that moment.36

Turgenev himself clearly shared Viazemskii’s hurt Russian feelings at the notion of social reform reaching Russia via Poland. This is apparent from the comment he made in a letter of 2 April 1818 to his brother: Yesterday we received the speech delivered by the tsar in Warsaw. . .There was a lot of splendid and unexpected stuff in it which should appeal to right-minded people. . . One unpalatable thought though: pure water pumped through dirty pipes becomes undrinkable. What if freedom comes to Russia through Poland?37

What was Alexander I’s reason for giving the speech? A. V. Predtechenskii cites a letter from the tsar to R. A. Koshelev on 19 March 1818, just four days after he had given it, in which he claimed that everything he said ‘had been prompted by the Saviour’ to whom he had turned for guidance as he prepared to address ‘the whole of Europe from the eminence of my throne’.38 Like Alexander’s subjects,

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historians have variously interpreted the tsar’s true motives for his address. Some have seen it as a typical reflection of the hypocrisy of his character and politics, while for others it was a one-off act of populist demagoguery, forming no part of any political programme. Or perhaps, as Predtechenskii suggests, it represented merely a momentary deviation from an otherwise consistently conservative direction of travel, as part of a deliberate attempt to confuse or mislead public opinion, in Russia as well as in Europe, as to his liberal credentials.39 However, all these interpretations are found wanting by S.  V. Mironenko, who argues, controversially but quite convincingly, that in fact Alexander pursued throughout a consistent if ultimately quixotic political course, which aimed at nothing less than the establishment of constitutional rule and the abolition of serfdom.40 Against this, the main difficulty with Mironenko’s closely argued position for T.  V. Andreeva is precisely the question that inevitably confronts all historians of Russia’s domestic politics in the first quarter of nineteenth century:  how to discern any coherent, properly thought through, overarching strategic programme underpinning Alexander’s entire reign?41 It is surely the case that only a satisfactory resolution of this abiding conundrum would provide future historians with the proper context in which to situate Alexander’s Warsaw speech. Alexander himself, perhaps because his speech, delivered in French, really was contrived as a liberal play to the European gallery, and certainly not intended for a Russian audience, was furious that the Minister of Internal Affairs (from 1811 to 1819) O. P. Kozodavlev had allowed his Warsaw speech to be translated and printed in the official St Petersburg newspaper ‘The Northern Post’ (Severnaia pochta) and also in ‘Moscow News’ (Moskovskie vedomosti). For this incautious license, Kozodavlev earned himself an imperial reprimand. According to the Moscow Decembrist Baron V.I. Shteingeil’, the tsar complained that ‘everybody wants to interfere in political matters’. From Paris, Prince F.  V. Rostopchin (governor of Moscow from 1812 to 1814)  wrote to his old friend, Count S.  R. Vorontsov, with almost undisguised glee: ‘This will all end in the exile of dozens of prattlers (boltunov).’42 There were predictably mixed reactions to the tsar’s speech. For many noble landowners it aroused fears of the masses running away with the idea of imminent freedom. Alexander cannot have failed to notice that the overwhelming majority of landowners in the provinces were deeply perturbed by reports of his Warsaw speech, and bitterly opposed to its thrust. It was, after all, the provincial petty and middle landowning gentry, the backbone of Russia’s noble estate, who stood to lose most from constitutional reform and the serf emancipation which it would inevitably promulgate. Despite his own sceptical response to the speech, N.  I. Turgenev hoped that it at least heralded greater press freedom in Russia (letter to A.  I. Turgenev, 2 April 1818). However, just weeks later he reported (letter of 29 May) the new ban placed on the publication of any matter relating to the peasant question. By the following year, Turgenev had all but abandoned hope in any reform at all: ‘Maybe the force of circumstances will make something happen. But can even the force of circumstances be a match for the apathy of our compatriots?’ He admitted

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his despair at the prevailing mood:  ‘Russia is inexplicably long-suffering. It’s remarkable how few sentient beings there are, even among those who do think’ (letter of 26 June 1819).43 Turgenev’s pessimism was borne out by the attenuated impact of the Polish constitution. Its provisions were never fully implemented, and by February 1825 the sejm was no more than a rubber stamp, having effectively ceased to function. Thus, Alexander’s constitutional record in Poland did not bode well for Russia itself, despite the promise declared in his 1818 Warsaw speech, and the eager anticipation of a constitutional future for the whole empire this aroused among some sections of the Russian nobility. Nevertheless, the constitution which Alexander bestowed on his Polish subjects has been described by the Russian-American historian George Vernadsky as one of the most liberal constitutional documents of its time.44 Such acts of imperial largesse support the view that ‘constitutional diplomacy’ was among Alexander I’s most significant post-war policies. But it was the cause of concern in a number of European chancelleries, notably in Vienna. There, the Austrian emperor expressed to the Russian ambassador Iu. A. Golovkin his outright hostility to constitutions along with those ‘troublemakers of all kinds’ who advocated them. Meanwhile, his chancellor, Metternich, repeatedly warned the Russian government of the ever-present danger of revolution. Thus Alexander found himself under pressure from both external and internal opponents of reform to steer a conservative course.45 It must be said, however, that this undoubtedly suited him. As Frank W. Thackeray has rightly argued, Alexander never intended to diminish the autocracy’s powers, and it is inconceivable that he regarded a constitution as a means of doing so. Rather, he saw in it a means of providing the rationalized system he considered essential for reordering his empire on a modern basis, with the establishment of an orderly government based on the rule of law. Thus, his publicly declared intention before the Polish sejm in March 1818 to extend his constitutional programme in due course to Russia should be understood as an expression of his conceptualization of constitutionalism, primarily as an instrument for sweeping administrative reform, rather than a political system designed to limit and define the sovereign’s power and prerogatives.46

The ‘music of constitutions’ among Russia’s nobility Meanwhile, on 22 March 1818, S.  S. Uvarov, who was then president of the Imperial Academy of Sciences (at the relatively young age of thirty-two) as well as curator of the St Petersburg educational district, gave a speech to students and staff of St Petersburg’s Main Pedagogical Institute’s Faculty of Oriental Languages. In a (presumably unwitting) echo of Alexander’s Warsaw address a week earlier, he addressed his young audience on the subject of political freedom. It has been described by a recent commentator as a ‘significant event in the history of Russian politics and culture of the first quarter of the nineteenth century’, and prompted N.  I. Turgenev’s enthusiastic remark that

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Uvarov’s speech ‘contained much that was good and never before expressed in the Russian language’.47 Uvarov declared that, ‘following Europe’s example, we are beginning to consider concepts of liberty’.48 Interestingly, Uvarov chose to describe political freedom, ‘in the words of the foremost orator of our day, Lord Erskine’, as ‘God’s ultimate and most magnificent gift’, but one that ‘is obtained slowly’, and only with great sacrifice and losses. In support of his view, he cited the gradual and painful evolution of the English constitution. It was, he said, the duty of a prudent government to prepare the people in good time for this gift, and to hand it to them without undue delay, but only when they were ready to receive it. In his speech, Uvarov also risked touching on serf emancipation, declaring that its abolition depended directly on the successful advance of enlightened values. It was this same speech which N.  I. Grech described in his memoirs as ‘ultra-liberal’ (although he incorrectly associates it with the inauguration of St Petersburg University a year later) and for which, he quipped, Uvarov subsequently ‘sent himself to the fortress’.49 Among Uvarov’s audience that day was a leading liberal, Professor A. P. Kunitsyn of St Petersburg University, who shortly afterwards published a detailed account of the speech in ‘Son of the Fatherland’ (Syn otechestva). Kunitsyn glossed Uvarov’s speech by stressing ‘the people’s desire’ to have representatives in government who would take measures on their behalf to confront the ills besetting society. While the notion of some kind of elected parliamentary constitutional rule, ‘akin to the father of the people’, is here implied it is not explicitly stated, though in the same year (1818) Kunitsyn also published an article entitled ‘On constitutions’. His view of the shape a future Russian constitution might take, as expressed in the article, is essentially conservative, again affirming Russia’s patriarchal traditions, and emphasizing the need for their preservation. It does, however, contain an oblique criticism of the current regime by spelling out the goals an ideal government should set itself to achieve: to combat ‘the evils existing in society’ and to make ‘the laws apply equally to everybody’. What the people wish for above all, Kunitsyn suggests, is for the powers-that-be ‘to strive to expose the abuses besetting society and to put a stop to them’.50 Thus, neither Kunitsyn nor Uvarov envisaged anything more radical for Russia than the right to have local representatives in central government institutions within the existing autocratic framework. However, a very different side of Kunitsyn emerges in a negative characterization of him by E. A. Engelhardt, the director of Tsarskoe Selo Lyceé. In a letter to the poet and Decembrist V. K. Kiukhel’beker, Engelhardt cites Kunitsyn as a typical example of the huge discrepancy between word and deed, claiming that while he posed as a ‘tireless campaigner against slavery and for freedom’, he was known to be a landlord who ‘treated his serfs worse than his dogs, regularly beating them half to death’.51 Recalling the liberalizing political impact across Europe of Napoleon’s defeat, Grech declared himself to have been at that time a ‘hopeless liberal, imbued by this spirit for a while during my stay in France (in 1817)’. Not one of his peer group, he insisted, was then ‘on the side of reaction’. On the contrary, they took their lead from the tsar himself: ‘Everyone was drawn by the music of constitutions, which

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Emperor Aleksandr Pavlovich sang along to as well, having granted a constitution to the Poles’.52 Books about constitutions, legislation and political theory by Western authorities such as Jeremy Bentham, Cesare Beccaria, Jean-Louis de Lolme and Charles de Montesquieu were now being widely read even, according to the optimistic claim of V. I. Semevskii, ‘in the remotest provincial towns’. He cites the example of an unnamed country town in Voronezh province where in ‘the mid-1810s’ many of its residents owned collections of books ‘of serious content’ by these Western writers in Russian translation. In this unlikely backwater, matters of foreign and domestic politics were apparently discussed at many a social gathering. In light of this, Semevskii finds it ‘in no way surprising’ that in the early 1820s merchants at the trading centre of Gostinnyi Dvor in St Petersburg would often meet to discuss openly the absolute necessity of a constitution.53 It was widely recognized, especially after the tsar’s return to Russia, that the conflict with Napoleon had done nothing to diminish Alexander’s penchant for the West in general and for France in particular. According to F. V. Rostopchin, this penchant, which extended to a liking for all things French including the language, was shared also by large numbers of Russian noblemen, as he remarked in May 1813 in a letter to ‘The Russian Herald’ (Russkii vestnik). Furthermore, in a letter to Alexander I of 24 September, he took the bold step of declaring this an entirely negative phenomenon which only reflected badly on their class: ‘The Russian nobility, with the exception of very few individuals, is utterly stupid, gullible (legkovernoe), and entirely disposed in favour of the French.’54 It was an assertion about the quality of his nobility that the tsar was sadly only too inclined to credit. Alexander’s disposition was exploited by home-grown obscurantists to whom he gave free rein without seeming to realize that there was no common ground between the interests of Russian society and the aspirations of Austrian and Prussian reaction.55 Alexander failed to take public opinion into account, or else chose to ignore it, by reneging on his promise of a constitutional future for Russia. His apparent reluctance in the years following the victory over Napoleon to embark on constitutional and social reform for Russia was increasingly seen by more liberalminded noblemen, many of them officers in the elite Guards’ regiments, to be a betrayal both of the cause of progress and of the shared sense of purpose which had united the nobility with their sovereign in the Patriotic War.56 However, what they may not have known or ever suspected was that in fact Alexander instructed Novosil’tsov, who had worked on the Polish constitution, to draft one for Russia too. Novosil’tsov was assisted in Warsaw by a senior civil servant P. I. Deshan, until the latter’s death in 1819. Deshan was seconded from the Second Department, which oversaw the drafting of laws and other government legislative projects. His subordinate was P.  A. Viazemskii, who was responsible for producing the Russian text. He relied heavily on the terminology employed in the earlier constitutional drafts of M.  M. Speranskii. In a letter Viazemskii wrote to N. I. Turgenev in March 1819, he expressed his earnest desire to see the constitutional project he had been working on turn out to be something of real benefit to Russia: ‘I have great hopes for what I have translated’. They were shared

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by Turgenev’s brother, Sergei, who, passing through Warsaw that spring, referred to the document simply as ‘Viazemskii’s project’ and declared the constitution to be ‘the best possible in current circumstances’. In a diary entry, Turgenev recorded, ‘Yesterday, Prince Viazemskii read me some passages from the Russian constitutional project. Its main provisions are the same as the Polish one.’ Turgenev was quite right:  according to one estimate, of the 191 articles contained in the Russian draft, 122 derived from the Polish constitution.57 M. F. Orlov was similarly excited about Viazemskii’s work in Warsaw, and hoped that it would bring about representative government in Russia. Given the close friendship between Viazemskii and the two Decembrists Orlov and Turgenev, it is perhaps not surprising that the constitutional document became well known in Russian society where it exerted a considerable influence on the outlook of liberal-minded circles. Extensive use was made of its constitutional and federalist approach by the Decembrist N.  M. Muraviev as he drafted his own project for Russia’s future government adopted by the Northern Society in St Petersburg.58 Meanwhile, in the Southern Society, P. I. Pestel’ was drawing up a very different republican and centralist charter, adding to the sense that drafting constitutions representing a whole variety of political standpoints was clearly a widespread pursuit during the first two decades of Russia’s nineteenth century. The result produced by Novosil’tsov’s team in 1818 was the ‘State Charter of the Russian Empire’. Despite claims subsequently made for its liberal tenor, it was in fact rather more conservative than its 1815 Polish predecessor on which, as S. I. Turgenev noted at the time, it was modelled. In terms of representation, for example, the electorate was merely to nominate candidates, up to two-thirds of whom would then be selected by the tsar and his court. However, the various redactions of the document all contain references to political freedom, the legal rights of the individual, representative government and federalism. In respect of the latter, Novosiltsov’s project differed from Speranskii’s rigorous centralism by envisaging the division of the Russian Empire, including Finland and Polish Kingdom, into twelve groups of semi-autonomous provinces.59 It also bears clear signs of the influence of English constitutional legislation, including, for example, the act of habeas corpus, suggestive of an effort to guarantee Russian citizens both civil rights and personal legal safeguards. Despite this, Semevskii’s comparison of Novosil’tsov’s two projects led him to conclude that had it been implemented, the Russian version would have provided even fewer safeguards against arbitrary rule and, a fortiori, fewer guarantees of personal freedom than its Polish predecessor.60 Viazemskii returned to St Petersburg in the summer of 1819, when he had an audience with the tsar. In his account of it, Viazemskii recalls that Alexander expressed an enthusiastic interest in the political progress marked by the Polish constitution, observing that the measures taken by Catherine the Great at the time of Polish partitions would not now be consistent with the prevailing Zeitgeist. As to the political reforms he envisaged for Russia, despite hoping ‘without fail to bring this matter to the desired conclusion’, Alexander listed a number of problems. The first of them was the almost prohibitive cost of their implementation. In addition, there were the inevitable obstacles, complications and contradictions placed in

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their way by people whose prejudices prevented them from ever being convinced of their merits. Viazemskii left the audience with a clear understanding that the political hopes he and so many others had placed in Alexander, for all his declared intentions, were doomed to be disappointed.61 Symptomatic of this was the tsar’s speech at the opening of the second Polish sejm on 1 September 1820. This struck a very different tone from the one he had given some eighteen months earlier. Now he made no reference to his promise to grant Russia ‘legally free institutions’. Instead, he referred to the ‘spirit of evil attempting to exert once again its wretched dominion’ over the Europe of the Holy Alliance. Finally, however close Alexander may have come to making his constitutional project public, the mutiny of his beloved Semenovskii Guards regiment just weeks later, in mid-October, decisively put paid to any such intention. From 1820 then, if not before, any hope of imminent reform was dashed. The marked increase in religious emphasis after 1812 was not confined to Alexander I’s own demeanour:  rather there was a widespread mood reflected in the discernible shift to mysticism and religiosity. In Europe, too, there was an increasing connection made between Christian morality and governments’ policy choices. This found its most quintessential expression in Alexander’s brainchild, the Holy Alliance. It in turn exerted a significant influence on the development of social thought in Russia. But by the same token, the Holy Alliance also aroused European suspicions of Russia’s expansionist ambitions. This distrust prompted a growing Russian isolationism which precluded social and political reform, and prefigured the ideology of Official Nationality in Nicholas I’s reign. All in all, these circumstances provided a highly unfavourable context for the successful pursuit of political and social reform in Russia after 1812. On the contrary, an orthodox conservative reaction took hold in society which peaked in 1824. In his study of 1812, Adam Zamoyski has rightly asserted that ‘the majority of Russian society saw the events of 1812–1814 not as a spur to regeneration but as divine vindication of the existing constitution of the Russian state, which alone had been deemed worthy by the Almighty of carrying out His will in the struggle against the evil of revolutionary and Napoleonic France’.62 Even so liberal a figure as A. I. Turgenev saw in Russia’s defeat of Napoleon just such a vindication of its governance. Writing to P. A. Viazemskii in October 1812, he argued that the shock to Russia’s system the war against Napoleon had represented would actually strengthen it in quite unforeseen ways. For example, the landlordpeasant relationship (‘the indispensable basis of our current civil set-up’), far from being compromised, had actually emerged all the stronger. ‘Our political system must take on a similarly enduring character after this war, and we will be more cautious about changing it.’63 True, Turgenev’s own position would change considerably over the next decade, but his immediate, conservative reaction to Russia’s victory is a telling indication of the variety of opinions in a rapidly shifting political landscape. Thus, by the autumn of 1816, his younger brother, Sergei Ivanovich, while working on a paper entitled ‘Sur la constitution future de la Russie’, noted in a diary entry the impossibility of introducing an effective financial system for the country as long as

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serfdom persisted; and further, that serfdom in turn could not be finally abolished until a constitution had been successfully implemented.64 The last years of Alexander’s reign saw a marked fall in his personal popularity, as he found he was no longer able effectively to hide behind Arakcheev. There was a corresponding rise in the general sense of unease and unrest. Zavalishin recalled that irritation with the tsar and his government was widespread, and provided ‘the clearest indication of the extent to which the tsar in recent times has lost the respect and sympathy of the people’.65 This Zavalishin attributed ‘not to revolutionaries, but to the people closest to him’, and chiefly Arakcheev. He describes the time as one ‘rich in events arousing displeasure: the interference in the affairs of others and the suppression of freedom, the military colonies, the Bible Society etc., were all reasons for it’. Arakcheev was another. Zavalishin recounted his frequent visits to the Vasil’chikovs’ house in St Petersburg. L. V. Vasil’chikov was then the commander of the Corps of Guards, ‘so their home was always full of figures from high society and court circles’. In marked contrast to other homes of the aristocracy, ‘instead of talking exclusively about minor matters at court’, the Vasil’chikov household ‘countenanced sharp criticism of Arakcheev, and consequently of the political state of the country’. Such edgy conversations were led by their host, Larion Vasil’evich, who made no secret of his hostility towards Arakcheev. Similarly, ‘at the house of another independent character, Osterman’, where one could read ‘all the best-known foreign journals’, Zavalishin heard the predominantly military guests sound off ‘about our foreign policy which was an insult to national feeling with the reduction of Russia to the status of Metternich’s unwitting pawn’.66 In his snapshot of the state Russia had reached by 1822, L. N. Engel’gardt presents a truly bleak picture. He finds the Russian economy struggling to maintain an army of 1.2 million troops, taxes soaring, the nobility impoverished, a growing currency crisis and a slump in trade and industry; farmers were no longer able to pay the poll tax due to the collapse in the price of grain for which there was no market, a situation in any case compounded by several years’ crop failure; abuses attained enormous proportions, and the tsar ceased completely to appear in public.67

Nobility views of a Russian Rechtsstaat, the rule of law and the West The liberals’ assumption, apparently endorsed by the tsar’s albeit inconsistent lead, that constitutional government was the right next step for Russia was, unsurprisingly, not universally shared. It would be hard to contest the generally accepted view that the overwhelming majority of the nobility aligned themselves with the conservatives at court; that they were politically almost totally inert; and that they took no interest in any reforms, while the few reformers themselves had barely any discernible support at all. The history of both the 1820s and the Speranskii era which preceded it suggests that the nobility simply did not consider reforms necessary. As one recent Russian commentator has so wittily observed: ‘In reality, broadly speaking, the majority of

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the nobles not only failed to see any further than the end of their own noses, but also assumed that this was precisely where the horizon lay.’68 Corroboration of this view comes from the papers found in Alexander I’s study after his death. Among them was a long and detailed report he had received from A.  Kh. Benkendorf in 1821. It was on the political mood of the nobility and contains the following revealing comment: Except for the capital and the Baltic (ostzeiskii) provinces where the best of the nobility have been educated abroad and have little of Russia about them (malo imeet otechestvennogo), one can definitely say that within Russia itself no one even thinks about a constitution. The nobility, purely out of adherence to its own interests, will never support the slightest change. As to the lower orders there is nothing to be said: the rabble will always and everywhere remain rabble.69

Alexander Pushkin expressed one quite widely held view when he said that the only thing people really wanted was a quiet life. It is understandable that, wearied by the upheavals of war, many – including even some among the most liberally inclined section of Russian society  – contemplated further social and political upheaval with unease.70 Others were not convinced that European and North American models necessarily suited Russia. The Decembrist A.  P. Beliaev, for instance, sailed the Baltic as a naval officer in 1817, and made further voyages in 1823 and 1824, visiting England, France, Spain and Gibraltar. His experiences led him to conclude, as expressed in the memoirs he wrote towards the end of his life, that no matter how well people lived in the West, for all the ‘wonders of civilisation’ and ‘their foreign freedom’, Russia was better for being different: ‘Russian selflessness, Russian faith – this is what a Russian heart needs. The American republic, with all its unlimited freedom, does not make a real Russian happy and content.’ Nevertheless, he did recall proposing a toast to British officers of the 43rd Regiment of the Line while on a visit with his crew to Gibraltar in 1824. The Russian mariner took the opportunity to declare that ‘the British, a great people, have always enjoyed the greatest respect of Russians, especially those of the educated class; and it is their free institutions which have made them great’.71 This is a perception of Britain that we find echoed in the memoirs of F. F. Vigel’ where he observed that ‘England then stood at the peak of her power, shining with greatness and wealth’. He also noted that Count P. A. Stroganov, as a 29-year-old member of Alexander I’s Unofficial Committee, became an Anglophile after a stay in London where he saw at first hand ‘the splendid vision of freedom with which the skilful tyranny of the lords charmed the people, becoming ever more charmed himself ’, so that ‘the young Russian lord (russkii lord) raved about England ever after’. In addition, Vigel’ included in this category the elderly admiral V.  I. Chichagov (1726–1809), who was ‘also at heart an Englishman, learned to sail in England, and was married to an Englishwoman’.72 An example of one Russian nobleman’s first-hand experience of the West, and Great Britain in particular, is that of a career diplomat, Count V.  V. Levashov,

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who spent a lot of time on the road or crossing the Channel, flitting from one European capital to another. In a diary entry (made in French), Levashov refers to a dinner he enjoyed in London on 24 November/6 December 1819, ‘with the Earl of Pembroke, Colonel Stanhope, Prince Vorontsov, Smirnov’, and his son. It is of particular interest for its revelation of a liberal Russian nobleman’s view of English values. At table, ‘there was much conversation about parliamentary debates which eventually became very tedious to listen to. We talked about gayer things after dinner.’ Levashov left the dinner with Prince S. R. Vorontsov, who ‘was possessed of enough good sense to see with pleasure the equality which reigns in English society where, despite the rank to which one might be born, personal merit always comes first’. This, he found, was in marked contrast to ‘the prejudices which prevail in our own dear Russia, where people are measured only by their rank and the ribbons which decorate them’.73 According to his nineteenth-century biographer, the liberal-minded N. S. Mordvinov who, like the anglophile P.V. Chichagov, was also an admiral of the Russian fleet, similarly ‘became imbued with the spirit of English science and respect for that country’s institutions’, including the British parliamentary system, after spending three years studying in England as a young man.74 Thus not all Russians were as inward-looking and politically selfsuffi cient as Beliaev might have wished them to be. Mordvinov is an interesting case because he embodied the convergence of a generally liberal Russian outlook with Western constitutional values. This made him a convinced advocate of law-based reform and an aristocratic constitutional monarchy. He acquired a reputation as a liberal political thinker and a critic of some aspects of Alexander I’s regime, such that the Decembrists intended to appoint him a minister in their interim revolutionary government.75 Pushkin described him in a letter to Viazemskii in 1824 as ‘the embodiment of the Russian opposition’. N. I. Turgenev claimed that Mordvinov, ‘rose with noble and burning indignation against the all-powerful imperial rule’. Even so, his adulation for Mordvinov was not unalloyed, as this comment about the senator’s vision for Russia of an aristocratic upper house clearly shows: The self-opinionated stance of my critics sometimes attained absurd proportions. The best of them, the esteemed Mordvinov, did not hesitate to say that a wealthy and powerful aristocracy was imperative for Russia and that to create it the emperor should divide up state lands among the best families who should form the core of the house of peers or lords. This would be a pragmatic way of reforming the country and setting up a constitution. Such aristocratic blindness irritated me enormously.76

However, Mordvinov could also be inconsistent. For example, on one occasion he is said to have declared that the introduction of a constitution in a country such as Russia would lead first to oligarchy and then to anarchy, an opinion with which one recent commentator found himself unable to disagree.77 As a member of the Supreme Criminal Court which sentenced the Decembrist conspirators in

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July 1826, Mordvinov was alone in refusing to sign the death sentences conferred on five of them, and his spirited stand became widely known. He sent a defiant memorandum to Nicholas I, pointing out that as capital punishment had been officially abolished in Russia back in the reign of Elizabeth, it therefore remained illegal now.78 Nevertheless, interesting corroboration of the conservative Russocentric outlook of both Pushkin and Beliaev can be found in the memoir written by N. V. Sushkov. He served as an official in the Ministry of Justice and he writes mostly about his boss, D.  P. Troshchinskii, who was the minister from 1814 to 1817.79 In his memoir, Sushkov reproduces an anonymous letter which he came across in his family archive. He had no idea himself how it came to be there since its recipient, a close friend (liubeznyi drug!), was equally anonymous. Because it is a clear expression of the opinion of one provincial nobleman on Russia’s current state and the prospects for reform, containing some frank and pithy observations about his peers, it is worth commenting on in some detail. The letter in question is dated 19 September 1824, and names its writer’s base as ‘selo Kosmo-Demianskoe’. There is indeed a village of that name in the Iaroslavl’ district (oblast’), about 250 kilometres north-east of Moscow. There is some suggestion that the correspondent in question was a former diplomat. Certainly, he was clearly uncommonly well-informed for one enjoying provincial retirement. Sushkov points out that at the time the letter was written, ‘ideas about changes and improvements in many aspects of government were in the minds of all educated people and resonated in all corners of the Russian land’. The letter was a thoughtful and erudite, if occasionally eccentric, rejection of such notions, in particular the prospect of any form of constitutional government for Russia. Central to its author’s argument is the idea that constitutional reform is a centuries-long process which Russia had yet to embark upon. He contends that the recent history of France (of which he displays detailed knowledge) proves that the country still has some way to go before it is ready for constitutional government. He then cites England’s long and tortuous path towards the same goal, displaying a remarkably detailed knowledge of English history too, tracing the fate of the 1215 Magna Carta over six hundred years, in the course of which ‘rivers of innocent blood were shed’. The English example suggests, in his view, that even ‘the best laws and the most resilient statutes are useless, unless and until the seeds of enlightenment have borne beneficial fruit in the mind of the people!’ Conversely, he holds North America up as an extraordinary example of the ‘political perfection’ that can be achieved in a relatively short time span, following the achievement of full independence, and given the necessary prerequisites of aspiration and selfbelief. Do we, he asks, have anything comparable to boast about? Even the current state of Russia’s literature suggests a modest cultural level, represented recently at its best only by ‘Karamzin’s history, Turgenev’s theory of taxation, and a few pages of Batiushkov’. In making this interesting selection, and evidently failing to anticipate the phenomenal and enduring success of Pushkin, the writer asks: ‘Is there any one work which will survive the decade of its composition?’

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Although he describes himself as ‘a victim of Alexander’s rule’, he finds no fault with the tsar personally. If anything, he would blame him for weakness rather than abuse of power, and for his poor judgement of character, which had led to some unfortunate ministerial appointments:  Arakcheev, for example, is far more of a despot than Alexander. In the writer’s view, what Russia needs now is not a constitution or a George Washington, but ‘another Peter I  with all his absolute autocracy’. Sushkov’s correspondent reserves his most scathing contempt for Russia’s nobility, castigating it for its ‘monstrous self-interest’ and its lack of patriotism in 1812. All efforts to educate the estate have failed: in his four-year experience as an officer in the Noblemen’s Regiment he found that, of the 30 or 40 newly-appointed nobles joining the regiment, only one had any capacity in terms of morality and education to bring to his office . . . the rest could have remained, without any loss to society, back in their family circles of lackeys, ponies and dogs.

Moreover, instead of fantasizing about freedom and constitutional theories, why have these ‘bright sparks’ (elektricheskie golovy), which the writer concedes may include both him and his correspondent, not yet devised any practical way of reducing the nobility’s powers over their ‘actual slaves’, the enserfed peasantry, beyond the emancipation of those in the Livonian province and the (largely ineffective) ‘free agriculturalists’ law earlier in Alexander’s reign? Russia, he concludes, is nowhere near ready to embrace constitutional government, and can only hope that ‘the defining feature of the nineteenth century, the moral and civic successes of England and North America, will be carried by the beneficial passage of time to our own chilly fatherland (khladnoe otechestvo) too’. The anonymous nobleman would have been unaware that Speranskii also considered that the persistence of serfdom, the absence of an adequate legal code, of an independent judiciary and of a proper division between legislative and executive powers, as well the lack of the educational standards essential for the development of considered public opinion, all made Russia unprepared for the introduction of constitutional rule at this time. Surprisingly, perhaps, the correspondent vested considerable hope in Alexander, ‘now in his prime, both in age and strength’, as potentially the best hope for Russia’s moral, cultural and political transformation. Little did he or anyone else suspect that, just two months after this revealing letter was written, the tsar would be dead, and with him any prospect of his setting Russia on the long road to the kind of reinvention so eagerly anticipated by our anonymous correspondent, and doubtless by many more likeminded members of Russia’s noble estate. Even so, it is possible that such hopes were not entirely misplaced. Just a few weeks before he died, Alexander I told Karamzin on 28 August 1825 that he was firmly resolved to grant Russia fundamental laws, in other words, a constitution. This raises the question, as some commentators have remarked, of the validity of the reactionary label almost routinely applied to the second half of Alexander’s

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reign, given that in 1818 he had also commissioned Novosil’tsov to draft a constitution for Russia.80

Assessments of Alexander I’s constitutional intentions There is much to support the view that Alexander never genuinely intended any of the constitutional projects he received or commissioned himself to be implemented in Russia even if he had willed it, especially following the conservative resurgence generated among the nobility and at court by the defeat of Napoleon. Rather, as an autocrat conscious of the vulnerability of his avocation, he treated such draft charters as insurance policies against a sudden and catastrophic change in the political landscape, which might be brought about by some elemental and unpredicted upheaval, such as a popular revolution. A contemporary explanation for Alexander’s failure to live up to his declared constitutional aspirations for Russia is offered by A. I. Mikhailovskii-Danilevskii, who was a member of the Russian delegation at the Congress of Vienna from 1814 to 1815, and was appointed an aide-de-camp to the tsar in 1816. His observation of Alexander at close quarters led him to propose three reasons for this: first, the tsar experienced the strong resistance of his entourage, the very people on whom he would have depended for the implementation of any constitutional arrangement; second, he found himself constantly at war; and third, constitutional progress was stymied by the widespread revolutionary mood throughout Europe, which prevailed even after the reconciliation of states which occurred in 1815.81 Alexander’s difficulty was that he was neither by temperament nor by nature in any sense a liberal in the accepted meaning of that word. As occasion demanded, however, he could display total mastery of the kind of resounding liberal phrases that would leave his audience spellbound. Ultimately, he was an unreconstructed autocrat who either deliberately misconstrued, or simply failed to understand, the role of constitutional monarch as it might be applied to him. His characteristic inability to take decisive action was compounded in this instance by the nagging thought that in the Russian context serfdom’s future would inevitably be challenged by the introduction of a constitution. Crucially, this was a consideration that did not obtain in those parts of the empire where he had granted constitutions.82 He was burdened by the task of ruling over the nobility, and therefore, far from promoting the exclusive rights of the nobility, he did all he could to keep them in check.83 In Boris Mironov’s view, Alexander I’s reign is to be seen primarily in terms of the relationship between autocratic policy and societal interests. In domestic affairs, the nobility effectively forced Alexander to retreat from any plans he may have harboured for fundamental reform, including the abolition of serfdom and the establishment of a constitutional order, and to adopt a strategy of gradual reforms more in keeping with society’s willingness to accept them. Of the reforms he apparently intended, Alexander was able to introduce only those that conformed to the demands of noble society. These were the liberal reform of education and

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censorship, the creation of a State Council as an advisory legislative organ and ministerial reform. Of these it was educational, not constitutional, reforms that were the most successful, creating for the first time an organized and integrated system of higher, secondary and primary education in Russia.84 The suggestion made by N.  K. Shil’der, author of the voluminous study of Alexander I and his reign, that had Alexander lived longer he may well have led Russia along the road to fundamental reform, is disputed by A. A. Kornilov, the historian of nineteenth-century Russia. Kornilov believes that Alexander had achieved all that he could by 1825, and that in this sense his death was timely. If he had not died unexpectedly early at just forty-seven years of age, Alexander, in Kornilov’s judgement, would sooner have abdicated than initiate a new political direction.85 More recently, Sergei Mironenko has found that the available evidence – particularly the memoirs of Nicholas I – confirms that during the summer and autumn of 1819, conversations did indeed take place among members of the Imperial Family, not only about designating Nicholas rather than Constantine as heir to the throne, but also about the possibility of Alexander abdicating on the grounds of his own admission that he no longer felt equal to the enormous task of ruling.86 It is our view, however, despite the fanciful ‘Fedor Kuzmich’ legend to which Alexander’s early demise gave rise, and despite the claim of Shil’der, Mironenko and others, that the tsar had considered the possibility of abdicating in 1819, the suggestion that Alexander might have violated the honour of his own divine avocation by actually doing so is far-fetched.87 What it is fair to conclude, however, is that even if he had lived longer, given his own conflicted inclinations, everything points to the fact that Alexander would have failed to resolve the issue of a constitutional form of government for Russia. On his own admission, although a supporter of constitutional models in theory, he failed to see how Russia might successfully adopt one in practice. While attending the Congress of Laibach (from January to May 1821) he spelt out to the French ambassador and future Minister of Foreign Affairs (1828–9) Auguste, Comte de La Ferronays, the essence of his dilemma: I love constitutional institutions and believe that any reasonable individual would too. But can they be introduced indiscriminately to all peoples? They are, after all, surely not all equally ready to adopt them.88

These revealing words help us to understand why it was that, in the wholly reasonable judgement of one Russian historian of liberalism:  ‘As far as the realisation of liberal principles goes, it has to be said that in the course of his reign Alexander I achieved, if not too little, then in any case significantly less than might have been expected.’89

Part V G OVERNMENT, NOBILITY AND THE ‘PEASANT QUESTION’

Chapter 9 A P P R OAC H E S T O S E R F R E F O R M F R OM A B OV E

The main source of tension between the tsar and the Russian nobility in Alexander I’s reign – and well beyond it – was serfdom. This was by far the most significant socio-economic institution in the empire, in which the Imperial Family, the state, the Church, and the nobility as landlords and serf-owners, all had enormous vested interests. It has been rightly said by historians of this period that of all the problems confronting Russia at the beginning of the nineteenth century, none was more pressing and painful than the peasant question.1 The institution had already come under thoughtful scrutiny in the eighteenth century, notably by such critics as A.  N. Radishchev and A.  Ia. Polenov, and projects for emancipating the serfs were sketched out.2 Nevertheless, there has been relatively little historical scrutiny of the issue as it obtained during the reign of Alexander I, even though the attention paid to it then, and the debates around it, demonstrably prefigured Alexander II’s 1861 emancipation act, and suggest that the institution was indeed under constant review.3 It is the history of this conundrum, particularly as it affected the relationship between Alexander and the nobility, that we address in Part V. This chapter considers two salient aspects of the issue:  first, Alexander’s own position on peasant reform, and second, the significance of the 1803  ‘free cultivators’ law as a potential prelude to the eventual emancipation of the serfs, along with the further attempts made to alleviate their lot in the interim. Chapter 10 will analyze the sharp divisions of opinion between liberal and conservative sections of the nobility on which – given Alexander’s characteristic ambivalence and hesitancy – such attempts would ultimately founder.

Alexander I and the peasant question Sixty years after his own accession to the throne, it would at last fall to Alexander I’s nephew, Alexander II, to grasp the nettle of serf emancipation by means of the historic, though deeply flawed, Act of 1861. However, as mentioned above, the issue was already controversial well before the end of the eighteenth century, dating from some years before the publication in 1790 of a landmark in Russian fiction, ‘A Journey from St Petersburg to Moscow’. The work was a moral outcry against

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serfdom’s inhumanity articulated by the ‘repentant nobleman’ A. N. Radishchev. He called for divine retribution to avenge the routine abuse of peasants by their landlords, and dared to express sympathy for the peasants’ own acts of retaliation against their tormentors. Radishchev was not the first Russian nobleman to challenge serfdom openly:  also in Catherine the Great’s reign, several delegates to the 1767–8 legislative commission had signalled their disapproval of the system, and registered the need to alleviate its worst features. It was, then, from the ranks of the nobility that the earliest critics of serfdom emerged. Empress Catherine herself, at least before the shock of the protracted Pugachev rebellion of 1773–5, had raised the question of serfdom’s validity and long-term sustainability. However, there was an underlying and persistent assumption that any change, when it came, must not be to the nobility’s disadvantage, either financially or socially.4 This would remain the case in Alexander I’s reign too. Instances of peasant flight and further outbreaks of violence over many years following the Pugachev revolt, such as those in the provinces of Saratov, Penza and Ekaterinoslav, were to provide an additional incentive for rolling back serfdom and moving towards a system of hired labour, particularly for such large landowners and liberal noblemen as M. S. Vorontsov and P. A. Viazemskii. The former argued that it was both ‘the duty of the nobility and in its own interests to start thinking about and implementing ways of gradually freeing the peasants in Russia from slavery’.5 According to one study, the figures available for Riazan’ province show there were around forty disturbances between 1804 and 1860, while another gives as many as seventy for the period 1825–57. One of the most graphic forms of peasant revenge was the physical assault or even murder of landlords and bailiffs. Such recorded instances accounted for some forty-six victims in the province between 1801 and 1850.6 Moreover, they took place in the context of everyday irritations as landlords encountered serfs’ passive resistance to their authority, a sullen and indifferent work ethic, theft and absence without leave. Economic objections to the utter inefficacy of Russia’s traditional serf-based rural culture also added to the troubling ethical misgivings shared from the outset of the new reign by bien pensant courtiers, liberal noblemen and even Alexander I himself. N. I. Turgenev eloquently articulated such misgivings by remarking that, if in other countries slavery was almost always the result of conquest or of a feudal system, in Russia it was instituted with total deliberation. This ‘shameful measure’ was, as he put it, essentially ‘a simple means of policing’. Turgenev denounced Russia’s serfdom as ‘a barbaric, egotistical, thoughtless and rapacious policy’, which ‘yoked an entire nation with a burden which corrodes and shames it’.7 Any attempt to dismantle it, however, threw up a number of hugely challenging questions, and they were to confront not only Alexander but his successors (Nicholas I and Alexander II) too: how could the successful reform of serfdom be managed without undermining the rest of Russia’s social and political order, particularly as it affected the continuing integrity of the autocratic system embodied by the tsar, and in which the nobility, as its main stakeholders, played so crucial a role? Would it not inevitably require constitutional reform as well, with

1 Tsar Alexander I

2 A. A. Arakcheev

3 A. N. Golitsyn

4 N. M. Karamzin

5 V. N. Karazin

6 P. D. Kiselev

7 V. P. Kochubei

8 Klemens von Metternich

9 N. N. Novosil’tsov

10 F. V. Rostopchin

11 M. M. Speranskii

12 N. I. Turgenev

13 P. A. Viazemskii

14 M. S. Vorontsov

15 Alexander I and Napoleon at Tilsit, by Gioacchino Serangeli

16 Alexander I Statue, Alexander Park, Kremlin, Moscow

17 Decembrist Uprising, Senate Square, St Petersburg, 1825, by Vasily Timm

18 Smol’nyi Institute, St Petersburg

19 Tsarskoe Selo Lycée, St Petersburg

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all the unintended and unwanted consequences this would almost certainly entail? Finally, was Russia’s treasury in any position to bear the enormous costs of such a reform programme? An early indication of Alexander’s own attitude towards serfdom was his announcement, in a marked break from tradition, that making gifts of peasants to favoured members of the nobility would not be part of his coronation celebrations, and that, moreover, he did not intend to observe the practice in future either. Only five years earlier, his father had distributed 82,330 serfs to celebrate his coronation as Emperor Paul I. At the top of the beneficiaries’ list was Prince A. A. Bezborodko who was awarded 6,000 serfs from the former estates of Prince Kantemir together with 30,000 desiatins (32,700 hectares) of land in Voronezh province. Next came Fieldmarshal General Prince N. V. Repnin, who received a gift of 6,000 serfs.8 Even so, Paul’s largesse was no match for his mother’s: Catherine II gifted 100,000 serfs to her favourites in just one day, 29 December 1791, to mark the conclusion of the Turkish war by the Treaty of Jassy. Before Alexander I came to the throne, the granting of estates was done frequently with the inclusion of a specified number of souls. But he now stopped the distribution of estates populated by peasants, no doubt dashing the hopes of many expectant grandees. Instead, he decreed that only unpopulated estates were to be granted as property, while populated estates were henceforth available solely on a rental basis. The former type of distribution was practiced quite extensively during his reign. For example, in 1803 orders were given in Novorossiisk province for the distribution of unpopulated land to staff-officers who received 1,000 desiatins (1,090 hectares), and to senior officers who received 500 each. Similarly, Alexander would also ban advertisements for the sale of individual serfs and serf families, which in the eighteenth century had frequently appeared in such publications as Sankt-Peterburgskie vedomosti (‘St Petersburg News’).9 It appears that this was the only step in the direction of the reform of serfdom that Alexander was able to take at this stage, such was the strength of support for the status quo among his immediate entourage, not to mention the wider nobility. Even though at least two members of the Unofficial Committee, P.  A. Stroganov and V. P. Kochubei, agreed that the practice of selling peasants without land was utterly barbaric, they still favoured a far more cautious approach to the matter than Alexander. While Stroganov agreed with the tsar that ‘in Russia the class which above all others should be commanding the government’s attention is the peasantry’, he considered Alexander’s proposal at the start of his reign to the State Council to ban the sale of peasants without land to be clear ‘evidence of how little order reigns in the mind of the emperor’. Together with Kochubei, he believed that if the tsar continued in this vein, the only result would be ‘massive evil’. In his analysis of the problem of reform for Alexander’s government at the turn of the century, Mikhail Safonov has rightly asked:  ‘If the people closest to Alexander thought like this, people who were the best educated and most enlightened noblemen, brought up on the philosophical ideas of the Age of the Enlightenment, what was to be expected of ordinary landowners who had no knowledge of them?’10

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Nevertheless, the first, ‘liberal’ part of Alexander’s reign saw his abolitionist tendencies at their strongest. This emerges particularly from the minutes of the Unofficial Committee, which show that at least until the end of 1801 the peasant question was the main topic of discussion, with some guarded support recorded for the young tsar’s emancipationist tendencies. Their lengthy deliberations led to proposals for some tentative steps towards alleviating the peasants’ lot. So, for example, peasants and estates were to be temporarily confiscated from particularly cruel and abusive landlords and placed in state guardianship (v opeku) until the perpetrators were deemed fit to resume their stewardship of them. Meanwhile, such errant landlords were to be sent to monasteries to repent, as directed by the provincial noble assemblies. Another early outcome of the Unofficial Committee’s meetings was a cautious legislative change represented by the ukaz of 12 December 1801. This granted merchants, registered town-dwellers and state peasants the right to acquire land. M. S. Vorontsov was one landowner who would have liked to see the ukaz extended to landowners’ serfs as well.11 Equally, N. S. Mordvinov urged Alexander to do something for the landowners’ serfs, ‘who had no civil existence’. Even so, he warned, any action should be taken gradually and imperceptibly, in order to avoid antagonizing the nobility. Also in favour of change were the other members of the Unofficial Committee, V. P. Kochubei and Adam Czartoryski, who declared that ‘the rights of landowners over their peasants are so frightful that nothing should stop them from being removed’. However, for all the talk of ‘improving the position of the enserfed peasants in Russia’, the tsar’s ‘young friends’ on the Unofficial Committee did nothing for them. Not one of its putative abolitionists made a move to free his own peasants, even when it became possible to do so from 1803 under the terms of the ‘free cultivators’ programme.12 Of the many projects drawn up, the most promising, and the only one realized, was indeed the 1803 law on ‘free cultivators (or agriculturalists)’. However, as we shall see, its effects were nugatory and resulted in the emancipation of fewer than 100,000 serfs – and even this is an optimistic assessment. In the following section we will analyse its significance as the potential prelude to a programme of full emancipation.

The 1803 law: Prelude to serf emancipation? On 20 February 1803, just two years after his accession, Alexander I’s Permanent Council (nepremennyi sovet) unveiled its first legislative act specifically designed to tackle the peasant question. The decree on ‘free cultivators’ (ukaz o svobodnykh zemledel’tsakh) allowed those landowners who wished to do so to free their peasants with land in entire villages or as separate families on mutually agreed terms. Once the contracted amount had been fully paid over to the landlord, the peasant then became the legal owner of the land thus acquired. The decree’s real significance was that it effectively amounted to a declaration by the government of its intention

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to intervene in the landlord–serf relationship by ensuring that peasants were emancipated with land. It was the initiative of S. P. Rumiantsev, who proposed the measure as the first step ‘in the gradual eradication of slavery itself ’. There was no unanimity at court for this development. When it went before the State Council, according to one version, ‘it created an almighty stir’, but undeterred, Alexander sent it to the Senate for enactment anyway.13 Among those who implacably opposed the initiative was G. R. Derzhavin, the outstanding Russian poet of the eighteenth century who served as the minister of justice from 1802 to 1803. He tried in vain to persuade Alexander not to go ahead with it, on the unashamedly conservative grounds that serfdom had become so enshrined in Russian custom and practice that to tamper with it carried the real risk of catastrophic consequences. Equally, most of his contemporaries remained totally convinced that by tradition the land belonged to them inalienably. Even those who had some sympathy with the idea of emancipation balked at the thought of having to give up even a part of their landholding to make it happen. Thus, for example, N. S. Mordvinov conceded that there were many advantages for the Russian rural economy in an overall increase in the number of emancipated peasants, which he felt could be realized without detriment to any other estate. He therefore insisted that ‘the peasants will gain their freedom, while the landowners will remain total owners of their lands’.14 In assessing Rumiantsev’s motives for proposing the creation of a new peasant category, F. V. Rostopchin commented that its author ‘wanted to be reconciled with the court, but quarrelled with every member of the Russian nobility’. In Derzhavin’s caustic view, Rumiantsev ‘dreamt up the scheme in a craven attempt to please the sovereign’, who had in any case been corrupted by his tutor, La Harpe, ‘having fallen in for good with that Jacobin gang (iakobinskaia shaika) of Czartoryskis and Novosil’tsovs’.15 The elderly courtier’s strictures, which were echoed by other conservatives, including Karamzin, were not without effect: the ukaz was hedged about with restrictions, implemented with trepidation and would achieve only modest results. Nevertheless, it was to a certain extent a reflection of the appetite for reform – or, at least, an awareness of its need – in the early years of the reign, and it gave rise in Russian society to a definite concept of peasant emancipation, which for many leading figures of the day had become more or less axiomatic by the end of Alexander’s reign.16 This was essentially because the peasant question was discussed at every level from the Unofficial Committee and the State Council downwards, though not in the public press, over which the censor kept a wary eye. Thus, for example, when in 1804 a passionate indictment of serfdom appeared in print, it was promptly suppressed by the censor. This was ‘an essay on enlightenment in relation to Russia’, by I. P. Pnin, the illegitimate son of the Freemason Nikolai Repnin, whose advocacy of the social power of enlightenment and the compassion he expressed for the fate of the peasants drew a sharp rebuttal from the censor G. M. Iatsenkov. He ruled that if ‘the eradication of slavery in Russia’ was the author’s goal, then a ‘more seemly’ approach would be to submit a project to the government rather

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than risk:  ‘inflaming minds and arousing passions in the hearts of the sort of people who are our peasants’, which could only cause, ‘damaging, dark storm clouds to gather over Russia’.17 The responsibility for supervising this voluntary manumission fell to the Ministry of Internal Affairs, then headed by V. P. Kochubei, who had participated in the sessions of the Permanent Council leading to the drafting of the law. He immediately addressed a circular to provincial governors, instructing them to assure landowners that the law was in no way intended to ‘weaken the existing order between landowners and peasants’.18 Documents in the archive of Nizhnii Novgorod’s provincial noble assembly provide case studies of individual landowners’ applications for ‘free-cultivator status’ on behalf of their serfs. They reveal just how challenging it was for petitioners to take advantage of the 1803 act, and the cumbersome, time-consuming nature of the procedure involved. A request to allow serfs to be designated ‘free cultivators’ was the start of a lengthy process which required a petition to the tsar himself in order to obtain his personal permission. The first NN case study selected is a petition in respect of 138 serfs from a major’s widow (maiorsha), Elizaveta Zinovieva, dated 8 December 1808. This was duly forwarded by the marshal of the nobility, Prince G.  A. Gruzinskii, to the Minister of Internal Affairs, A. B. Kurakin. On 28 February 1809, Gruzinskii received a response from the ministry informing him that the papers he had submitted were incomplete, as he had failed to include his original report. This he was now asked to supply. But the file also contains a certificate dated 11 September 1808 signed by noble assessor Petr Bogdanov, and a second unnamed assessor, which begins, ‘At the command of His Imperial Majesty to the Nizhnii Novgorod province from the Office of the Civil Court, as her estate is under distraint due to a dispute and indebtedness to the state treasury, private bail does not apply.’ This apparently was enough to stop the application going any further. But Zinovieva did not give up. Ten years later, in July 1818, she renewed her petition to the tsar to release her serfs as ‘free cultivators’. This time, however, her request was held up on a legal technicality: she had made an agreement with her serfs that the process of completing their ‘free cultivator’ status would be completed only after her death. However, the ministry informed the marshal of the nobility in a letter of 3 January 1819 that the arrangement Zinovieva proposed did not accord with the terms of the 1803 act. A draft letter from Gruzinskii to the minister of internal affairs, dated 23 August 1819, confirms Zinovieva’s agreement to alter the conditions made with her peasants, such that they could forthwith become ‘free cultivators’ in compliance with the act. However, the file ends here, leaving it unclear whether Zinovieva’s peasants ever did achieve the ‘free cultivator’ status first requested twelve years earlier. At any rate, there is no indication that either of Zinovieva’s requests was finally granted.19 The second case from the same archive features a request dated March 1807 from M.  A. Bogorodskaia in which procedural problems also loom large. The file contains a letter of 3 March 1807 to the NN Marshal of the Nobility, Prince P.  S. Trubetskoi, from the Minister of Internal Affairs, Count Kochubei, setting

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out in detail the numerous irregularities and technical breaches contained in Bogorodskaia’s original petition. Among these was the failure, due to his illiteracy, of the village elder (starosta) to sign the agreed conditions. This oversight was in violation of article 3 of the 1803 law: ‘unless these are declared and signed in the district court they cannot be implemented’. Moreover, there is no reference in her submission to the law’s stipulation that allotments should be assigned to each free cultivator, and to have these registered with the district surveyor. Kochubei asks Trubetskoi to inform Bogorodskaia of the need to rectify these points, or to explain why the allotments could not be assigned at this stage. The letter concludes: ‘When in these respects the conditions of Mrs Bogorodskaia will be have been brought into strict accordance with the requirements of the 1803 law, my dear Sir, please forward all the necessary papers to me without delay for further action. Minister of Internal Affairs, Kochubei.’20 A ‘free-cultivator’ status request of 10 October 1808 from A. V. Obreskov, the Semenov district marshal of the nobility, also ran into procedural problems. It was returned with a schedule of ‘the apparent inadequacies under the points of law as are applicable to this matter’, detailing five lengthy technical objections, with the instruction to draft the petition to the tsar in line with ‘the template attached herewith to be presented only at designated offices’.21 A  similarly obstructive, bureaucratic response was accorded the petition submitted on 20 November 1814 by Court Counsellor E. S. Babushkin to Prince Gruzinskii, seeking permission to allow five of his peasants and their families, with all their belongings and allotments, to be designated ‘free cultivators’. On 25 November, Gruzinskii duly endorsed the request and forwarded it to the Minister of Police, D. P. Troshchinskii. Babushkin’s file ends with a certificate listing the five peasants by name, and containing the standard formula of refusal, ‘as his estate is under distraint due to a dispute and indebtedness to the state treasury, private bail does not apply’.22 Many such requests apparently failed because of ongoing unresolved disputes which the authorities used to frustrate the petitioners’ intended recourse to the 1803 act. This random sample of applications for ‘free-cultivator’ status suggests a high rate of referral or rejection. There was clearly little or no procedural guidance available to applicants. Zinovieva, for example, assumed it was acceptable for her to agree with her serfs that ‘free-cultivator’ status would be bequeathed to them in her will. But Kochubei ruled otherwise, and there was at best only a grudging response from the authorities who seemed to have no desire whatsoever to facilitate the implementation of the 1803 law. Not surprisingly, there is wide agreement among historians that the 1803 law had no real impact on the institution of serfdom, largely because, as we have seen, there was an almost total lack of political will on the part of the relevant government agencies needed to make it properly effective. Marc Raeff, for example, fairly described it as ‘a largely symbolic gesture of no real benefit to anyone’.23 Its results, as the Decembrist M. A. Fonvizin noted in his memoirs, were negligible. The cost of the mutually agreed settlement to the peasant was so high, and its terms so complicated that by 1825 only a paltry 0.5 per cent of Russia’s enserfed peasantry had been emancipated. However, figures adduced in a study of Riazan’

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province show that, exceptionally, as many as 5 per cent of the peasant population there became ‘free cultivators’, around 35,000 souls, most of them in two villages, Izhevskoe and Verkhnii Beloomut.24 Another estimate puts the actual figure at less than half of Fonvizin’s at 47,153 male serfs, of which 13,371 were freed by just one nobleman, the famously conservative Prince A. N. Golitsyn. Another study finds that the combination of bureaucratic obstacles and the indifference of most nobles meant that just 37,000 male serfs out of ten million had been freed by the end of Alexander’s reign.25 By the end of Nicholas I’s reign in 1855 only 114,000 male souls had become ‘free cultivators’. But at least, as an American commentator has recently pointed out, the 1803 law established two key principles of peasant reform:  emancipation with land, and payment for the land by emancipated serfs.26 The ultimate failure of the 1803 legislation reflected the generally cautious attitude to emancipation. It was assumed to be a distant prospect, and in the meantime there was a paramount need to avoid arousing ‘premature’ hopes and, above all, encroaching on the rights of the nobility, especially in relation to the land.27 As the examples cited above show, serf-owners who filed applications under the 1803 legislation encountered numerous obstacles and official reluctance to proceed. The need to petition the tsar personally and the direct involvement of the minister of internal affairs in, for example, the Bogorodskaia case suggest how very tight central control over the whole process was. And this is the experience of just one province. A revealing attitude towards the 1803 law on the part of one establishment figure, A. B. Kurakin, who served as minister of internal affairs from 1807 to 1811, emerges in a letter he wrote to A. D. Panchulidzev on 19 February 1822, nearly twenty years after the promulgation of the ‘free cultivators’ act. In it, Kurakin applauds the measures taken by Panchulidzev ‘to pacify these free thinkers’, as well as the other actions he had taken ‘in defence of the lawful rights of the owner’, whereby he had ‘fully justified the trust placed in him to deal with the matter’.28 Although he was referring here to one particular case, it is clear that Kurakin regarded those landowners who had the temerity to invoke the 1803 act as ‘free thinkers’, and those officials, like Panchulidzev, who frustrated their efforts as champions of the ‘lawful rights’ of landlords. And his was hardly a minority view. In view of this, it is small wonder that this particular piece of legislation was never likely to prefigure any further serious attempts towards emancipation in the reign of Alexander I. It was, nevertheless, an issue to which the tsar would return repeatedly – if with similar lack of effect – throughout the rest of his reign.

The false dawn of serf emancipation Even the cautious measures taken early in Alexander’s reign were seen by anxious members of the conservative majority of the nobility as indications that further unwelcome changes in the landlord-peasant relationship were no doubt in the pipeline. There is some suggestion of this in the memoirs of A. V. Kochubei, the nephew of Alexander’s minister of internal affairs. He describes attending a party

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in St Petersburg sometime around 1807 hosted by his uncle where other guests included the governor of Siberia, I.  B. Pestel’, at which he heard his uncle, V.  P. Kochubei, declare – to everyone’s astonishment – that the tsar was intending to abolish serfdom. When asked whether they should keep this news to themselves, Kochubei replied that, on the contrary, there was no need whatsoever since it would soon be announced officially. Accordingly, later that same evening, while dining at Count I.  A. Bezborodko’s home, A.  V. Kochubei passed on to the assembled company what his uncle had just told him about an impending emancipation manifesto. His surprise can therefore well be imagined when, a few days later, he read in Sankt-Peterburgskie vedomosti a report that ‘several malevolent persons have been spreading false rumours to the effect that the government is intending to sunder the close bond between the peasant and the nobleman. Such rumours, however, have absolutely no basis in fact.’29 In the absence of hard facts, it is hardly surprising there was wild speculation about what action Alexander might actually take. With Napoleon’s advance on Russia in the summer of 1812, there were fears that the matter might even be taken out of the tsar’s hands. Worse, in Moscow there were persistent rumours that the French invasion had been engineered deliberately between Napoleon and Alexander I  in order to overcome the Russian nobility’s resistance to serf emancipation! All opponents of serfdom were now branded enemies of the fatherland by association with Napoleon and his reputedly declared aim to deliver his conquered subjects from the slavery of serfdom. One contemporary recalled how noblemen in the western provinces were convinced that, once the French invader had reached their territory, Napoleon would declare the peasants free and incite a mass rising which would culminate in their emancipation. This scenario was perhaps not so far-fetched, given that in 1807 Napoleon had, in fact, abolished serfdom in the occupied Grand Duchy of Warsaw.30 In the view of A. A. Kornilov, an authoritative Russian historian of the period, as expressed in an article marking the centenary of the Patriotic War, the conflict’s one positive outcome was that it brought the emancipation of serfdom in Russia a step closer. Moreover, he argues, the discussions about serfdom in the wake of Napoleon’s defeat, which might otherwise never have taken place, began to shape the eventual terms of its abolition. However, the lengthy hiatus between 1812 and 1861 surely undermines the validity of this proposition. More plausible is the suggestion that it was the Decembrist uprising in 1825 which contributed significantly to the postponement of emancipation until Alexander II’s reign.31 Raised and educated as a child of the European Enlightenment, Alexander I  was himself appalled by the thought that almost half of his subjects were enserfed peasants. One view is that he never ceased to be an abolitionist for the entire duration of his reign, even after the formation of the Holy Alliance, when he began to be overwhelmed by reaction, religious mysticism, obscurantism and increasingly abject dependency on the conservative counsel of the grand vizier A. A. Arakcheev. It is a view that finds support in N. I. Turgenev’s claim that, even though he did not carry out all the reforms he promised, all his life Alexander expressed ‘a deep disgust for the exploitation of man by man’, and that therefore

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‘due justice must be done to his memory’. Turgenev recounts an episode when serfdom was being discussed ‘at Mrs N__’s’, where the tsar became so agitated about the issue that he took hold of a small icon and bowed before it, swearing that he would destroy ‘this shameful institution’. However, Turgenev continues his account, all his good intentions towards the serfs were confined to the emancipation of ‘slaves’ in the Baltic provinces of Livonia (Livland), Estonia (Estland) and Courland (Kurland). Turgenev thought these provinces were probably chosen for this groundbreaking experiment because the landowners there had mostly been educated at German universities, enjoyed much closer links with Europe and were therefore presumed to be generally more civilized than the Russian nobility.32 The pilot project to which Turgenev refers was an initiative of the second half of Alexander’s reign, launched in Estonia in 1816. However, the proposal from Estonian landowners in fact dated back to the first year of Alexander’s reign, when in 1801 measures were debated in the Landtag aimed at improving the conditions of serfdom. It is clear from G. A. Rozenkampf ’s verbatim reconstruction of the audience he had with Alexander I on 22 June 1803 (following his encounter with the tsar at a court ball, referred to in Chapter 7) that high on the new tsar’s agenda was the issue of serf emancipation and the ‘whole sphere of the legislature’, a prospect which Rozenkampf admitted finding both daunting and exciting. He attributes to Alexander the view that ‘the labour of a free man is twice as good as that of a serf ’. The tsar told him that, in his view, the only way of initiating the process of emancipation would be to launch a pilot scheme ‘in the Baltic provinces, one after the other’, where it was apparently already under active consideration to judge by a detailed proposal he had received (in German) from Landrat Friedrich von Sievers, a leading member of the Livonian Landtag. However, Rozenkampf recalled being struck at the same time by Alexander’s evasive approach and his ‘somehow obstructive rather than supportive’ way of referring to the challenges ahead.33 For all his excited anticipation of the plans which Alexander told him he had for the Baltic nobility’s serfs, Rozenkampf must have understood that the total emancipation of the peasants was highly improbable, even unthinkable, at that time. After all, Alexander’s most vociferous counsellors, such as G. R. Derzhavin and F.  V. Rostopchin, routinely held out against any such move, not only on the grounds of centuries-old custom and practice which regarded serfdom as a necessary evil, but also because they saw in it the best guarantee of discipline and order now and in the future. Moreover, the mechanism for effecting any reform, whether political, social or economic – necessarily at the tsar’s behest only – was in the hands of the bureaucracy. This in turn was led by members of the social elite who were themselves owners of very large land-holdings populated by significant numbers of peasants, and who clearly had no interest whatsoever in emancipating their serfs. Such officials would have enjoyed the support of virtually the entire noble estate in ensuring the obstruction of any potential move to do so.34 Most of the nobility shared G. R. Derzhavin’s view that the serfs were just too ignorant and unpredictable to be trusted with emancipation. Precisely the same sceptical views would be expressed in the late 1850s in the run-up to Alexander II’s

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emancipation act. Alexander I was generally sympathetic towards the serfs, and was known on occasion to take their side against their owners. Chapter 5 showed that those disputes between them that were brought to his attention he usually entrusted to the provincial marshals to settle, often as members of commissions which typically would include the governor, his deputy and the district marshal of the nobility.35 Events would show that in relation to the peasant question, as on the question of constitutional reform, Alexander was characteristically ambivalent, inconsistent, hesitant and indecisive. While both by temperament and conviction he claimed he always wanted the serfs to be freed, when right at the start of his reign he received Sievers’ proposal for the emancipation of Livonian landlords’ serfs, the would-be tsar-liberator rejected it.36 Taking its cue from him, the Committee of Ministers was equally quick to slap down noble assemblies when they overstepped the mark. The governor of Vil’no, who had allowed the discussion of serf emancipation, leading in turn to the Livonian Landtag’s audacious proposal, was told that ‘the nobility does not have the right to conduct unauthorised discussions of such important issues’.37 Eventually, the 1816 version of the pilot project envisaged the personal freedom of the Baltic nobles’ serfs. It was at last approved by Alexander and passed into law on 23 May that same year. True, there was no provision for peasants’ property rights or their ownership of the land they farmed, which in due course was to revert to the landowner. The future relationship between landowners and peasants in the province would be regulated by a mutually agreed contract over a fourteenyear transition period.38 Tentative though it was, this was the government’s first shot at social reform since the end of the Napoleonic Wars. On the basis of the same provisions as Estonia, the nobility of Courland followed suit on 25 August 1817, and of Livonia on 26 March 1819. With the exception of Courland, where there were one or two instances of peasant unrest, the implementation of the emancipation process and the introduction of the peasants’ new conditions proceeded remarkably smoothly. Following its inception in Livonia, the tsar wrote to the province’s nobility in deceptively encouraging and optimistic terms as follows: ‘I am glad that the Livonian nobility has justified my expectations. Your example is worthy of emulation. You have acted in the spirit of the age and have understood that liberal principles alone can serve as the basis of the people’s happiness.’ Shil’der remarked that Alexander’s words suggested that he retained, as A. S. Shishkov put it, his ‘unfortunate bias’ against serfdom in Russia itself. Nevertheless, at the time it seemed to many that in other parts of the empire words might finally very well give way to deeds.39 One historian, writing later in the nineteenth century, maintained that the Baltic emancipation project actually made little impression on the Russian public: ‘Only a few had any grasp of the situation there, and even fewer were in any position to judge the matter.’40 The pressure Alexander was under from conservative elements at court was certainly considerable. Among these was N.  M. Karamzin, who argued in his influential 1811  ‘Memoir on ancient and modern Russia’ that the nobility had exclusive rights to the land. Karamzin took this opportunity to spell out carefully

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all the horrors which the emancipation of the serfs would bring about. Another was V. M. Popov, the religious conservative, a founder member and future secretary of the Bible Society, who reacted with unbridled hostility to the appearance that same year of a Russian version of a pro-emancipation pamphlet by the Polish count Walerjan Strojnowski, ‘On the landowners’ compact with their peasants’. He immediately wrote to the tsar, warning him that ‘in Russia, minds had not yet matured to the point where they could grasp the desirable, but dangerous, gift of freedom’. Alexander took great exception to Popov’s patronizing tone, and dealt him a stinging imperial rebuke, witheringly rejecting his plea and reminding him that even in Catherine’s day, ‘similar ideas were not considered as dangerous as you represent them’.41 But Popov was not alone, and Alexander in any case generally acted as though he agreed with him. Also in 1811, Alexander did, however, change the law in relation to the landowner’s right to exile his serfs to Siberia. He ruled that serfs could no longer be exiled to Siberia at the landlord’s behest, but only by sentence of the court in relation to a specific offence defined in law. Similarly, laws passed in 1808 and 1809 made it illegal for landowners to sell individual serfs, or to send them to Siberia for petty offences, and obliged them henceforth to feed their serfs during food shortages. However, when on 3 March 1822, in keeping with the reactionary course the reign had been taking since the defeat of Napoleon, the State Council resolved to restore the landlords’ right to exile their serfs to Siberia ‘for bad acts’, Alexander endorsed its decision. For the first time in the twenty-one years of his reign to date this action effectively strengthened the landowners’ whip-hand over their serfs. Alexander’s support for the State Council’s resolution represented the biggest setback to the cause of serf emancipation since his accession, and has been described by some commentators as marking the apogee of serfdom in Russia.42 Yet, no matter how jealously he guarded the sensitive issue of emancipation, it is apparent from the instructions he gave about developing proposals for it that Alexander took it very seriously even during the ‘reactionary’, post-Napoleonic part of his reign. For example, S.  M. Kochubei, one of those arrested (on 18 January 1826) in connection with the Decembrists’ rising, denied any association or knowledge of their secret societies, but suggested to his interrogators that he had most likely been arrested on suspicion of involvement in the cause of serf emancipation. This was because, he claimed, in 1817 the tsar had permitted him to be shown secretly by the governor-general of St Petersburg an imperial instruction for the drafting of procedures for the emancipation of landowner’s serfs. Kochubei worked on this project for over a year, and the draft was submitted to Alexander who then ordered him to take the document to Warsaw for Novosil’tsov’s scrutiny. Hence, Kochubei explained, ‘My secret task could be interpreted differently, and has perhaps brought suspicion on me.’43 His version of events was accepted, and he was released without charge just over a month later, on 21 February. In 1818, the year of his Warsaw speech, the tsar secretly instructed Arakcheev to draw up a proposal for abolishing serfdom which, as he put it, would be ‘to the advantage of the landowners, and also prompt within them the desire to assist the

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government to abolish serfdom in Russia’. But in view of Alexander’s stipulation that the project proposed should not upset the nobility, Arakcheev confined himself to assessing the prohibitive financial implications of emancipation. Against probable expectations, his findings resulted in the surprisingly radical proposal of emancipation with land by means of a system of government credits, designed to provide the landowner with a ‘soft landing’ by enabling him to use government loans to develop his estates on a new basis. In this way, the originality of Arakcheev’s proposal actually prefigured the business model behind the 1861 act. Although in general resolutely opposed to any reform which threatened to undermine the absolute power of autocracy, Arakcheev was, paradoxically, a firm believer in the benefits that could accrue to the state from emancipating Russia’s serfs with land. His proposal was approved by the tsar and, although it was supposed to be top secret, its thrust must have become public knowledge to judge at least by this observation in the memoirs of the Decembrist S. P. Trubetskoi: ‘In 1818 a rumour spread that the tsar wanted to give freedom to all the landlords’ peasants, in accordance with the project of Count Arakcheev.’44 Needless to say, no attempt was ever made to implement it, Alexander’s approval notwithstanding. To judge by a letter dated 1 February 1819 which he received from Vasilii Zubov, a landowner in Tver’ province, the grand vizier was regarded just as much an authority on serf reform as he was on every other aspect of government policy. The letter affords us a rare glimpse of the outlook of a provincial reformist. It informed Arakcheev that the Zubovs had freed their house servants and serfs, and now requested Arakcheev’s endorsement of their move. Were the emperor minded to extend ‘in my opinion, necessary and beneficial freedom’, Zubov hoped that the measures taken would ensure a peaceful process: ‘The nobility will need to make agreements with their peasants to ensure that their “thirst for freedom” does not erupt with Pugachev-style ferocity if there is any doubt about its genuineness’. Zubov could see only benefits for Russia through emancipating the serfs, including foreign immigration, and improvements in agricultural methods and the rural economy.45 The task of drawing up a proposal for abolishing serfdom given to Arakcheev was among a number of such instructions issued by Alexander. These included his commission in 1819 to Minister of Finance Count A.  D. Gur’ev to draw up a further proposal for the emancipation of landowners’ serfs. A  leading role in this project was played by legal expert A. M. Balug’ianskii who, in October that year, was to be appointed rector of St Petersburg University. Since the university’s inception some months earlier, Balug’ianskii had been dean of the faculty of law and philosophy. He was the author of two articles outlining proposed methods of serf emancipation, and in addition tutored Grand Dukes Nicholas and Michael in natural, public and national law.46 Such activity by highly placed officials, members themselves of the serf-owning nobility, confirms the view of the Decembrist memoirist M. A. Fonvizin that while Alexander in theory very much wanted to abolish serfdom in Russia, in practice he simply could not do so. But at least, as Fonvizin concedes and as we have noted,

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Alexander did put a stop to distributing serfs as rewards, and did nothing further to increase the total number of enserfed peasants himself. It was Fonvizin’s widely shared view that, unfortunately, Alexander I  did not possess the personal resolve to brush aside the self-interested views of the ‘conservative mass’. At all events, even though Alexander was himself convinced of the need to abolish serfdom, he was not prepared to declare it publicly. On the contrary, in the interests of order and calm, he resorted to traditional assurances about the stability of serfdom in the longer term. Whatever his real views were about this crucial question – as, indeed, about so many others – he kept them to himself. Not even his young friends on the Unofficial Committee got to hear them, and while he made it abundantly clear that the matter of reform was exclusively his prerogative, ultimately he came up with no concrete programme.47 Baron G. A. Rozenkampf, who worked closely with members of the Unofficial Committee, shrewdly observed that ‘Alexander I, like Catherine II, had the gift of ferreting out the innermost thoughts of others while keeping his own resolutely to himself ’.48 As it was, the intractable conundrum of serf reform remained unresolved at the time of the tsar’s death in 1825. In the event, the conservative majority of the nobility need not have worried about Alexander I’s true intentions. Over twenty years later, Nicholas I  was still assuring them, as he did in a speech to the St Petersburg nobility on 21 March 1848, of his intention to preserve ‘the unshakable power and right of the serf-owners over their serfs’.49

Chapter 10 A P P R OAC H E S T O S E R F R E F O R M F R OM B E L OW

The nobility and emancipation: Pro et contra Fears of Napoleon’s potential conquest and long-term occupation of Russia, with the probable emancipation of her serfs, were to prove unfounded for Alexander I and the Russian nobility. The war of 1812, and the subsequent European military campaigns which won Russia newfound international respect, also provided renewed impetus to the search for solutions to the country’s unresolved political and social problems, serfdom above all. Many peasants had donned uniforms and taken up arms in defence of their motherland winning thereby the respect of their officers, noblemen all, under whom they served. There was an increased conviction at all levels that Russia could only start to make real progress once serfdom had been abolished. The 1812 war could be said to have served as a powerful catalyst also in the political polarization of the Russian nobility. This was marked particularly by the emergence of the Decembrist secret societies, whose members typically linked the abolition of serfdom with constitutional reform. However, conservative Russians took comfort from Russia’s victory, regarding it as a validation of their social and political order, and nothing less than an endorsement of the status quo. Nevertheless, there was a definite expectation of impending change among forward-thinking Russians. This was reflected above all in the number of papers produced by noblemen landowners on the peasant question, especially in the years 1816–19. The quantity and quality of such projects point to an emerging consensus among reform-minded members of government and nobility that peasant reform was as desirable as it was inevitable. It was almost as if a competition had been announced by the Free Economic Society for a prize-winning route to emancipation. Details of the extensive list may be found in the Appendix. It contains fourteen projects by, among others, A. A. Arakcheev, V. N. Karazin, P. D. Kiselev, N.  S. Mordvinov and N.  I. Turgenev. Some of the projects listed in the Appendix we shall be returning to in the course of this chapter. While they all pointed to the long-term unsustainability of serfdom, only a few of them, mostly those advanced by members of Decembrist secret societies, offered urgent, radical solutions to the problem.1

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D. A.  Gur’ev, minister of finance from 1810 to 1823, completed in 1824 his comprehensive proposals for the overhaul of the economic, legal and administrative status of state peasants (as distinct from the nobility’s serfs which were emphatically not part of Gur’ev’s terms of reference, unlike his 1819 project). They were approved by Alexander I, who had commissioned Gur’ev to undertake the project, and passed to the State Council for its consideration.2 Even M.  S. Speranskii, who was permitted to return to St Petersburg in 1821, expressed an interest in the peasant question in a document ‘on enserfed people’ drafted early in Nicholas I’s reign, which is little known to historians. The catalogue of his personal archive and that of his secretary, K. G. Repinskii, include proposals for serf emancipation which were based on the introduction of the legal principle of personal freedom.3 To this list should be added the call for serf emancipation made in the Decembrists’ covert reform manifestos, particularly those developed by N.  M. Muraviev and P. I. Pestel’, both of which envisaged the equality of all Russians before the law and guaranteed individual liberty. As a central plank of his constitutional project, Muraviev advocated the emancipation of landlords’ peasants with a plot of just over two hectares of arable land which their dependants could inherit. Far more radical was the proposal Pestel’ made to abolish serfdom, ‘the vile privilege of owning other people’, along with all other estates in Russia, including the nobility, as a prerequisite for a fundamental restructuring of Russian society. The land confiscated from its owners without redress was to be redistributed in line with a highly original scheme spelled out in his unfinished Russkaia Pravda (Russian justice).4 There is no doubt that many of Pestel’’s contemporaries, and not only members of secret societies, would have shared his rejection of serfdom as an institution which violated all known laws of humanity, morality and religion. However, almost all would have drawn the line at his call for the abolition of the nobility and the confiscation of their estates. Alexander I must have been fully aware of the interest among some sections of the nobility, including his own courtiers, in advancing the cause of serf emancipation, given the number of proposals he received on the subject, both solicited and unsolicited. In his 1862 memoir, the Decembrist S.  G. Volkonskii attributes the first open attempt to draw public opinion to the abolition of serfdom in Russia to M. F. Orlov. He presented to Alexander I an appeal for this overdue reform in 1815, which was countersigned by many of the leading officials of the time. Among them were General Prince I. V. Vasil’chikov, Count M. S. Vorontsov and Count D. N. Bludov.5 Next, on 27 August 1816, General P. D. Kiselev submitted to the tsar his project ‘On the gradual abolition of slavery in Russia’. Kiselev argued that, ‘as civil liberty is the basis of the people’s welfare’, he would himself like to see peasants gradually given the freedom, ‘of which they are unjustly deprived’, while simultaneously preserving the ‘principal rights of the nobility’, such that their heirs would be kept from ‘poverty and humiliation’. While making no suggestion about how to square this circle, Kiselev urged that reform was ‘all the more necessary given the advances in education and our political convergence with Europe, which with

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every hour intensifies the ferment of minds’. Kiselev concluded with a warning from recent history of the likely consequences of the government’s failure to act: ‘There is a need to respond with urgency to such powerful demands which will now be difficult or impossible to refuse; the blood-stained French revolution testifies to this.’6 A letter of 16 June 1818 addressed to the tsar by the military governor of Ukraine, N. G. Repnin-Volkonskii, provides some insight into a senior official’s interest in the peasant question.7 The letter’s purpose was to forward to Alexander a project drafted by a Poltava landlord, S. M. Kochubei, which had been forwarded to Repnin by Novosil’tsov for comment. Repnin took this opportunity to report on the ‘general situation of the peasants in Little Russia’. He described his duty of care ‘for the peasants’ fate’ as something he had always considered to be among his ‘most sacred responsibilities’. Unfortunately, he maintained, not all landowners were so conscientious, having ‘so neglected their peasants that the management of their estates has had to be removed from them’, while ‘others have been before the courts and jailed for tyrannical acts’. Repnin was confident that, given time, the peasants’ condition would improve, and stressed that the first essential step was to define their work obligations, as ‘the type and quantity of the work they are supposed to do on their obligated days is nowhere stated, and this gives rise to abuse, the peasant being required to work beyond his capacity to do so’. Repnin therefore requested the tsar’s permission to form a small working party to make recommendations about what constituted a reasonable peasant workload. For his part, S. M. Kochubei insisted that he was by no means the only Ukrainian landowner prepared to improve the peasants’ lot. Indeed, he envisaged that peasants might soon be allowed to become independent owners of their plots, despite being ‘generally too uneducated or too drunk to do so’. The specific measures proposed by Kochubei in Repnin’s letter had apparently been the practice on his own estates since 1811. He was anxious that the improvements in estate management he had introduced in line with government policy would not die with him. His hope was to set an example not only to his son, who would in due course inherit his estates, but also to his peers, many of whom, in his opinion, ‘feel the need for changes but are reluctant to implement them’.8 Alexander’s reaction to these memoranda is unknown, but there is little reason to doubt that they were merely added to the stack of similar proposals already shelved, where they would be joined by many others over the next few years.

N. I. Turgenev and the reformers Among the most outstanding representatives of the liberal outlook of the Alexandrine nobility’s educated elite was N.  I. Turgenev, to whom frequent reference has been made from the start of this study. He is closely identified with the problem of abolishing serfdom in Russia, which had become the focus of ideological and political struggle from the end of the eighteenth century, and would remain so into the 1860s.

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Turgenev described the issue as the main preoccupation of his life, and the one to which all his thoughts were directed:  ‘I was consumed by the afflictions of the Russian people, and by the cruelty, absurdity, and shame of serfdom’, he wrote.9 Many educated young Russians visited Germany in the first quarter of the nineteenth century, in especially large numbers as army officers in the campaigns there of 1813 and 1814. Like them, Turgenev was struck by the impact of the emancipation of the German peasantry on every aspect of life in that country.10 What he saw for himself only confirmed him in his view that Russia was obliged both morally and economically to follow a similar path without further delay. Turgenev’s book, On the Theory of Taxes, was published to great acclaim in 1818, with a second edition appearing the following year. On the strength of it Count M.  A. Miloradovich, governor-general of St Petersburg, asked Turgenev to draw up for the emperor a memorandum on serfdom. In common with the earlier projects mooted by the Unofficial Committee, Mordvinov, Novosil’tsov and others, Turgenev’s 1819 memorandum recommended a gradual process of government reform, a reduction in the burden of barshchina (corvée), a ban on the sale of individual serfs separately from their families, enhanced protection for serfs against mistreatment by their owners and their right to litigate against those who did abuse their serfs. In shelving it, along with all the other projects he had received since 1803, Alexander is said to have remarked that it was the best statement of peasant reform he had ever read.11 Turgenev became a member of the Decembrists’ Union of Welfare at the end of 1819. His immediate contribution to the development of its programme was to press for serf reform. He was struck by the absence of any reference to the issue among the good causes listed in the Union of Welfare’s draft programme. He pointed this out to leading member Colonel Prince S. P. Trubetskoi who needed little persuasion to accept its inclusion. Trubetskoi’s own position was clear enough. He had written to the pro-emancipation Tver’ landowner Vasilii Zubov, in terms which anticipated the famous remark of Alexander II in the run-up to the 1861 act, that it would be better to abolish serfdom from above rather than wait for it to be abolished from below: The landowners should be made to realise that sooner or later the peasants will be emancipated, and that it will be much better for the landowners themselves to free them, because then they will be able to settle on more favourable terms. But if the landowners are stubborn and do not voluntarily agree to emancipation, the peasants might seize their freedom from them, and then the motherland will stand on the edge of the abyss. A peasant uprising will inevitably involve horrors which defy all imagining.12

Turgenev was to claim credit for prompting the secret society to campaign for the emancipation of the serfs. He urged its members to free their own in order to demonstrate to the authorities that this was what any decent owner would want for them. On his family estate at Turgenevo in Simbirsk province, he made a point of releasing his own servants from bondage and his 700 serfs from the burden

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of barshchina. He did so despite opposition from his mother who was a firm supporter of the status quo. Instead, on his estate he instituted a system of obrok (quitrent), considering it to be a more humane and productive form of economic interdependence, as well as being closer to his cherished notions of free labour in the context of a capitalist economy. Turgenev’s outlook was an echo of the ideas of the Baltic German court tutor and academician, Heinrich Storch, as expressed in his voluminous study, Cours d’économie politique, published in St Petersburg in 1815 and with which Turgenev would have doubtless been familiar. Among them was his insistence that because ‘slaves’ lacked the incentive of personal gain, unfree labour was unproductive.13 Even so, quitrent was equally open to abuse by unscrupulous landlords. A memoirist and former serf N. N. Shipov recalls how the wife of one serf-owner in his locality was so struck by the finery worn by the peasant women who had turned up to welcome their masters home that she remarked to her husband that payment of quitrent evidently posed their serfs no difficulty whatsoever. Accordingly, to the community’s consternation, the amount of quitrent imposed on the village was promptly increased.14 Turgenev calculated that the switch to quitrent would see a marked improvement both in the peasants’ situation and the estate’s income within five years, although, as it happened, he had reckoned without two years of crop failure.15 Others, however, were slow to follow his example, arousing his indignation at their continuing reluctance to back the cause of emancipation, which he attributed by and large to a generational divide.16 In his book Russia and the Russians, Turgenev relates an encounter in one of Russia’s provinces with a nobleman who complained vociferously about the governor who had brought an action against a landowner for mistreating his serfs. The man argued that this would only encourage similar prosecutions. He went on to complain that his manager, having struck a peasant with his stick, met with this ‘insolent’ response: ‘You are still beating us, but this will have to end, because now we have to be treated in accordance with the law (po zakonu).’ ‘Those were his actual words’, the incredulous nobleman told Turgenev:  ‘in accordance with the law!’ Turgenev concluded his account, ‘Yet this nobleman (or animal, I should have said), who saw in the peasant’s appeal to the rule of law nothing less than rabble-rousing, was himself neither wicked nor dishonest.’ Turgenev reminded his readers that the law forbade any serf to complain against his master: ‘but this law is often violated with impunity since in Russia, in the words of one of our most outstanding diplomats, bad laws are enforced just as poorly as good ones, which at least serves as some kind of mitigation of them.’17 The same source affords useful insight into Turgenev’s motives for his passionate championing of serf emancipation. He observed, for example, that serf-owners were answerable to the courts only for murder. In every other respect, ‘slaves in Russia enjoy less protection from the law than animals in England, where an act of parliament renders those who mistreat them liable to punishment’. Even so, he conceded that it was not possible to generalize about Russian landlords. Although ‘on the estates of the minor nobility the horrors of serfdom make themselves fully apparent’, he was far from suggesting that all major landowners were good masters

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and all small ones bad. He recalled cases when ‘major landowners, educated people, bearing the most aristocratic names, have treated their serfs in the most outrageous way, while smaller landowners have treated them justly and humanely’. Turgenev also strongly urged the economic argument for emancipation, arguing that ‘agriculture, industry and trade cannot flourish in the shadow of slavery: they need more of the air and light of liberty. Agriculture, the main source of our national wealth, is in a pitiable state and will remain so until the land is worked by free labour.’ The same applied equally to Russia’s emergent industry: ‘As far as workshops and factories are concerned, the slavery that obtains exerts an even more harmful impact on them than on agriculture. They are even less able to flourish where there is no free labour.’18 Like Turgenev, N. S. Mordvinov was in principle against serfdom and deemed it contrary to man’s natural right to liberty. He saw in the peasant problem the main weakness of the state’s structure, particularly from an economic perspective. He maintained that forty million peasants yoked by serfdom could delay Russia’s economic development, since ‘the minds and hands of slaves are incapable of creating wealth’, of which ‘liberty, property, enlightenment, and justice are the essential sources’. Although a landowner himself, he took a cautious approach to emancipation. Broadly speaking, he favoured a transition from serf to tenant status on the basis of preserved privileges for the nobility.19 Mordvinov optimistically considered that Alexander’s government had in fact already taken the first step towards this end with the 1801 law granting serfs the right to buy land. He hailed it as a mark of true national freedom, as Russia’s great charter, ‘our Magna Carta’.20 Later in Alexander’s reign, in his 1818 memorandum entitled ‘One way of emancipating the peasants from dependency’, Mordvinov stressed the need for ‘people to be taught how to use civil freedom, not simply granted it’. He envisaged the acquisition of freedom, ‘by purchase on an age-related scale’, and the creation of settled communities of freed peasants: ‘only harm can come from wondering bands of workers (or slaves)’, he observed. Mordvinov noted that the biggest difference between Russian and English workmen (rabotniki) was that the latter were paid in cash rather than kind. He maintained that the transition from a feudal to a money-based (capitalist) economy would bring about the end of the current ‘peasant (slave) estate’. But, citing Catherine the Great’s Nakaz, he argued that this should be a gradual transition based on property rights, and ‘enshrined in law by a government acting in the interests and reflecting the wishes of the people’.21 Mordvinov insisted on the need for a constitutional framework as a prerequisite for Russia’s social transformation. His cautious advice was supported by N. N. Novosil’tsov, who warned similarly that ‘public opinion considered the tsar too inclined towards emancipating the serfs’.22 The term ‘public opinion’ here is evidently synonymous with the outlook of the serf-owning nobility. Mordvinov and Turgenev were among a number of well-placed and influential noblemen who were actively working towards serf emancipation, with a view to winning the tsar’s essential support for this objective. In an atmosphere of liberal conversation and correspondence among like-minded friends and acquaintances

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suggestive of an increasingly widespread anti-serfdom sentiment, they were encouraged by developments in the Baltic provinces. N. I. Turgenev’s diary entry of 26 January 1819 records P. A. Viazemskii telling him of the Livonian nobility’s resolution to emancipate its serfs, about which representations had been made to the tsar. ‘Some day we will be making similar representations ourselves’, Turgenev concluded. Viazemskii, strongly influenced by Turgenev, already had a long-standing interest in the peasant question. It had most probably been triggered by the topic of a thesis defended at Göttingen University in 1806, entitled ‘On the emancipation of serfs in Russia’. Its author was A.  S. Kaisarov, a close friend of A.  I. Turgenev who no doubt first brought it to Viazemskii’s attention. It is the first known academically elaborated statement in Russian social and political thought of the overdue liquidation of serfdom.23 In a letter of 6 February 1820 to A. I. Turgenev, Viazemskii referred to his own project for emancipating the serfs in central Russia, describing serfdom as a ‘monstrosity’ which deprived peasants of the liberty to which they had as much natural right as they had to ‘air, water and sunlight’. He condemned ‘slavery’ as a ‘tumour on the body of the Russian state’, which could be removed ‘only by excision’. One great benefit of doing so, he argued, was that Russia’s international profile would no longer appear to be so ‘absolutely cretinous’. In his view the abolition of serfdom would have the further advantage of eliminating the threat of a Pugachev-style peasant rebellion, since ‘slavery is the one revolutionary element (stikhiia) we have in Russia. Destroy it, and we destroy any future notion of revolution’, as he put it in a letter to A.  I. Turgenev. Interestingly, P. A. Stroganov had expressed precisely the same view in 1803 as a member of the Unofficial Committee, when he described potentially rebellious serfs as ‘the government’s only basis for fear’. Finally, Viazemskii, like N. I. Turgenev, repeated the thought that ‘if the tsar was minded to accept such a proposal from the Livonians, why would he not accept one from us too?’24

Official reaction to reformist initiatives While it is the case that Alexander sanctioned limited emancipation in Livonia by way of a pilot scheme launched early in 1819, the police archives suggest that the matter was not nearly as simple as Viazemskii and Turgenev supposed. The fact is that both local and central authorities, including the secret police and the marshals of the nobility, came down hard on any allegedly subversive behaviour on the nobility’s part. This was especially the case in relation to serf reform, even in the areas of the empire where Alexander had authorized pilot emancipation schemes, and despite the reforming thrust of the 1803 act. A file dated January–March 1818 (‘criminal case No. 93’) in the police archives is a good example of this. It is entitled ‘An investigation of an instance of a discussion by the Vil’no noble assembly of a treatise on the emancipation of the peasants from serf dependence’ and contains a Russian translation of the original Polish text of a speech made to the Vil’no noble assembly (in Livonia) at an election meeting.

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The thrust and tone of the outspoken oration may be judged from the following extract: Our Great Sovereign, having in glory and virtue emerged victorious, has now obtained for his people a level of enlightenment which in turn all peoples have attained, and which in all European states has had equal success. I boldly declare, (for who can forbid me from doing so?), that serf as citizenship category (poddanstvo) used to be general throughout almost the whole of Europe. But now, apart from Russia, it no longer exists anywhere, and should not exist at all. The autocratic sovereign could follow his own will . . . but as this concerns the nobility, which he respects, he does not wish to force us, but expects from this noble estate noble deeds. We nobles have land while the peasants, in order to feed themselves, are obliged to work it for us. Let us therefore give them their true freedom.

The speaker concluded by proposing a petition be sent to the emperor to this effect, effectively requesting that the reforms underway in Estland and Courland be extended to Livonia. In the report on the ‘extreme disorders which occurred today at the noble assembly’ made by the provincial marshal of the nobility, Count Plater-Ziberkh, to the Vil’no chief of police, the orator was identified only as ‘the Pashkov delegate’. His ‘scandalous effrontery’ compelled the marshal to close the meeting immediately. The chief of police was instructed ‘to order the chamber in which the elections took place to be locked, the key brought to me, and a guard placed at the doors’. The matter was eventually referred to the tsar by the Livonian governor-general A. M. Rimskii-Korsakov, in a detailed report, dated 28 February 1818, which completes the file.25 A further indication of the peasant question as a live issue is provided by the writer and well-known memoirist D. N. Sverbeev. He recalls as a nineteen-yearold student observing that in Russia everywhere, and particularly in St Petersburg, thanks to ‘the intellectual activity of Europe in Emperor Alexander’s reign, liberal ideas burst into bud’. Consequently, he ‘was infected with such ideas’ himself. Sverbeev describes how in 1818, one of his university friends handed him a small exercise book containing ‘his youthful dreams about emancipating the serfs’, and swore him to secrecy. Fully empathizing with them himself, he took the notebook to N. I. Grech, ‘the only journalist then available’, to ask him if he could possibly print it without attribution:  ‘In absolute horror, the publisher of Syn otechestva took one look at it and made me swear that I would never tell anyone about the existence of such dangerous notions.’26 Grech’s alarm was understandable: public expressions of opinion in relation to serf reform could have severe consequences, such was the sensitivity surrounding the issue at this time and well into the next reign. For example, a file in the police archives dating from October 1818 concerns the case of ‘the most unreliable’ retired captain Kralivnii and nobleman Kashinets. They were sentenced to exile to Orenburg province ‘for permanent residence in towns in the district’ for their incitement to insubordination among the peasants of the pro-emancipation Poltava province landowner, S. M. Kochubei. Another file, dating from May 1820,

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contains details of the decision to demote three noblemen, one of them Polish, to the ranks and incarcerate them in Shlissel’burg fortress. They were alleged, among other offences, to have presented to the tsar ‘a project for the emancipation of peasants from serfdom’.27 Further evidence of the authorities’ sensitivity to the peasant question may be found in a letter from A. N. Golitsyn to S. S. Uvarov of 24 May 1818. He complained that an imprudent censor had allowed the publication of an article in ‘The Spirit of the Journals’ (Dukh zhurnalov), which contained, ‘ideas about liberty and the slavery of peasants and many other such indecencies (neprilichnosti)’. As if this were not bad enough, a further issue of the journal (No.20) included an article which had been expressly banned from publication, but was now creating quite a stir. Golitsyn was referring to the text of a speech which had been given by N.G. Repnin-Volkonskii, military governor-general of Ukraine, at the opening of the nobles’ elections in Poltava and Chernigov on 20 January 1818. It was remarkable for the thoughts it expressed about the need for the nobility, which had done so much to ensure Russia’s victory over Napoleon, to turn now to support the tsar’s quest for a solution to the serfs’ lot. Repnin, describing the ‘bond that exists between landowners and the peasants’ as ‘the distinctive feature of the Russian people’, set out a detailed affirmation of this uniquely Russian social contract without, however, advocating serf emancipation. Although Repnin no doubt felt his remarks were in line with Alexander I’s own position on the peasant question, and would have hardly dared make them otherwise, Golitsyn was particularly incensed by the timing of the publication of the governor’s speech, coming so soon after the tsar’s ‘constitutionalist’ speech at the opening of the Warsaw sejm. Golitsyn was not alone. On 4 April 1818, the Kaluga province’s marshal of the nobility, Senator Prince N. G. Viazemskii, circulated a furious response entitled ‘A message from a Russian nobleman to Prince Repnin’. It castigated the governor for daring to question the very foundations of Russia’s autocratic system of government which, he insisted, worked to the benefit of noble landowners and their serfs alike.28 The censor (G. M.  Iatsenkov) defended his decision to publish Repnin’s offending speech on the grounds that the printed form in which the speech had reached Dukh zhurnalov led him to assume it had already received official approval. He therefore further assumed that a decision – based on section 39 of the censorship regulation – in favour of its publication was never in doubt. Eventually, however, Golitsyn’s patience with the journal’s recalcitrant editors ran out, and in December 1820 he closed Dukh zhurnalov down for its repeated publication of material – not only in relation to the peasant question – which was ‘at variance with the views and interests of the government’.29

The proposed ‘Society of Benevolent Landowners’ There was renewed speculation at this time about government intentions, prompting what N.  I. Turgenev called ‘a convulsive fit of liberalism’ typical of

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Alexander’s reign. It was no doubt sparked by news of the speech the tsar had given to the Polish sejm on 15 March 1818, the text of which Turgenev had first sight of on 1 April.30 ‘There are again both here and in Moscow renewed rumours about serf emancipation’, he wrote to his brother Sergei on 29 May 1818. Such rumours provoked considerable alarm. On 24 February 1818, E. F. Kankrin, author of the celebrated ‘Notes on the emancipation of peasants from serfdom’, wrote to Count K. V. Nessel’rode: ‘In Moscow . . . public opinion is aghast at any intention of emancipating the peasants.’31 It is clear, however, despite the dismayed reaction of ‘public opinion’, that the thoughts of significant numbers of reform-minded nobles were turning to its possibility. The memorandum on the condition of serfs in Russia which Turgenev sent to Count Miloradovich for the tsar’s attention late in 1819 pointed out that the only agency capable of ending the peasants’ slavery in Russia was the throne. Alexander was so impressed by Turgenev’s argument that he told Miloradovich he would ‘definitely do something for the peasants’. The tsar’s declaration had unintended consequences: it prompted Admiral Prince A. S. Menshikov, an aide-de-camp of the tsar, to join with M. S. Vorontsov and V. N. Karazin, the disgraced founder of Khar’kov University and a former favourite of Alexander’s, to explore ways of promoting the tsar’s resolve, to canvass opinion and form a society dedicated to improving the peasants’ lot. In the spring of 1820, Vorontsov appeared in St Petersburg, and with Karazin set about forming their proposed society for the discussion of serf emancipation. The name Karazin proposed for it was the ‘Society of Benevolent Landowners’ (Obshchestvo dobrykh pomeshchikov). A letter to him from Vorontsov of 14 April 1820 is indicative of the degree of Karazin’s involvement in the liberal nobles’ attempt to promote the emancipation of the serfs. Vorontsov here signals his support for the proposed Society of Benevolent Landowners by declaring that he would only join a society pledged to the gradual (but not too quiet or distant) emancipation of the peasants from slavery. Any other society in my view would be of no use: the Russian nobility needs to free itself from the reproach which we hear from all sides, i.e. that we are opposed to such a sacred and essential achievement.32

Viazemskii recalls in his ‘Confession’ that he was among the signatories of a submission of 5 May 1820 made to the tsar on behalf of ‘several landowners, inspired . . . by a sense of the obligations of the nobility to which they are honoured to belong’, who intend to establish a society under the aegis of the Ministry of Internal Affairs dedicated to seeking ways of improving the condition of the peasants, and of achieving their gradual emancipation from serfdom, both them and the house serfs belonging to the landowners who join this society.

The pursuit of this ‘not only just but noble cause at the current time . . . should not be initiated without the sovereign’s gracious approval’. The petition was therefore

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now being submitted ‘to the gracious scrutiny of our all-merciful sovereign, ceaselessly concerned for the welfare of his subjects’, for his approval. Viazemskii counted on the emergent society attracting over fifty members. Other signatories included Prince M.  S. Vorontsov, Prince A.  S. Menshikov, Count S.  S. Pototskii (Potocki), N. I. and A. I. Turgenev, V. N. Karazin and Prince Viazemskii himself – all of them relatively young members (in their thirties and forties) of the militaryaristocratic and intellectual elite of Russia society.33 These were the potential founder-members of V.  N. Karazin’s ‘Society of Benevolent Landowners’. It is worth noting that one historian, N. V. Minaeva, citing the Turgenevs’ Ostaf ’ev archive, attributes this initiative to Viazemskii, whereas N. I. Turgenev himself makes no mention of him in his account of it. However, Alexander I  was in no doubt about Viazemskii’s involvement. According to the latter, the tsar remarked with satisfaction to N.  M. Karamzin:  ‘You reckon that the idea of freeing the peasants has absolutely no support in Russia. But I recently received a petition which contradicts your opinion. It bears the signatures of a number of well-known individuals, including that of your relative, Prince Viazemskii.’34 True, Minaeva does list Vorontsov, Menshikov and Karazin as supporters of the move. E. L. Rudnitskaia, however, while referring to all three Turgenev brothers as ‘the main drivers behind the realisation of Viazemskii’s idea of establishing a society to prepare a project for the emancipation of the serfs’, makes no reference to Karazin at all.35 It all suggests a degree of uncertainty which continues to surround the history of this significant episode. The leading figure in the group’s dealings with the tsar appears to have been M. S. Vorontsov, while an entry in N. I. Turgenev’s diary identifies Count V. P. Kochubei as another key player. The brothers N. I. and A. I. Turgenev, as well as Viazemskii, supported the initiative of Vorontsov and Karazin, and it was in this context that the latter was received by Kochubei on 12 April, and then by Alexander himself on 21 April. Vorontsov kept the tsar informed of their progress, and at first seemed to enjoy his support. The principal advocates never made any secret of their project, and were confident that it would not run into any serious opposition. When the reformers submitted their written request to the tsar in May to allow them to form a ‘society with the aim of liberating the peasants’, to be chaired and overseen by the Minister of Internal Affairs, several highly placed individuals sounded the alarm and began, in Turgenev’s words, ‘their usual clamour against liberals and revolutionaries’. Rumours about a petition in favour of serf emancipation once again swirled around the capital, provoking a predictably negative response from the peasantowning majority around the throne. There was no meeting of minds, and it is clear that Karazin’s projected ‘Society of Benevolent Landowners’ found no wide support.36 On the contrary, it was very far from what the tsar himself had intended. On learning of the reformists’ intention, Alexander declared, ‘No such society or committee is needed here. Let all those who want one instead present individually their opinion and project to the Minister of Internal Affairs.’ He checked any further development of this unwanted initiative by dismissing his aide-de-camp

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Menshikov. Those who had expressed initial interest in the project immediately withdrew their support, not least, according to I. V. Vasil’chikov, precisely because of Karazin’s direct involvement. Adjutant General Prince Vasil’chikov, commanding officer of the Guards Corps, had been among those who initially signed up, only to withdraw on the grounds that his condition of absolute secrecy had been violated. He complained that if matters had been handled more discreetly, ‘with more caution and less noise, the happiest of outcomes might have been achieved’. His embarrassed reaction to the project’s unwelcome openness is a good indication of the fear surrounding personal involvement in such pro-reform campaigns.37 This was in turn no doubt explained by the furious rebuke Vasil’chikov received from the tsar when the petition was presented. It was signed by as many as sixtyfive of the wealthiest landowners in St Petersburg province, and requested his permission to make their peasants ‘obligated settlers’ in line with the existing law. However, Alexander’s keen sense of his exclusive ownership of the peasant question and its solution emerges strongly in his irritated response on the matter to Vasil’chikov, as recorded by Shil’der. The tsar received the deputation and, knowing what Vasil’chikov was about to say, cut him short and asked: to whom, in his view, did legislative power in Russia belong? Unhesitatingly, Vasil’chikov replied: ‘Without doubt, to your Imperial Majesty, as autocrat of the empire.’ Whereupon, with his voice raised in a fit of imperial pique, Alexander replied, ‘In that case, leave it to me to issue the laws which I consider the most suitable for my subjects.’38 Some accounts, including Shil’der’s, date this episode to 1816. However, Mironenko convincingly argues that the evidence, particularly as it relates to Vasil’chikov’s participation, points to 1820 as the more plausible date.39 After all, if Vasil’chikov really had received so withering a rebuff in 1816 as suggested, how likely was it that he would have risked involvement in a second such action four years later? A remark made by the Decembrist poet, K. F. Ryleev, during his interrogation in 1826, appears to have contributed to the confusion over dates. Ryleev had been recruited to the Decembrists’ Northern Society early in 1823. When he was asked about the origins of the secret society, Ryleev displayed a very clear recollection of its emergence coinciding with the public discussion of peasant reform ten years earlier, in which Vorontsov’s name had figured prominently. Ryleev’s reply to the Investigating Committee stated that he ‘had heard only that it had started at the same time that Count Vorontsov had made representations to the late emperor about freeing the peasants’.40 This indeed points to 1816, the year of the formation of the Decembrists’ earliest society, the Union of Salvation. Yet it is almost certain that Ryleev was referring to M. F. Orlov’s well-supported appeal to Alexander I to reform serfdom which he made in 1815, as mentioned at the start of this chapter. In any case, the letter to Karazin from Vorontsov of 14 April 1820 cited above, together with Turgenev’s despairing diary entry of 1 June 1820 cited below, serve only to clinch Mironenko’s argument. In my view, there seems little need for any further elucidation on this point. Under pressure from the highest grandees of the empire, Alexander retreated and withdrew his support for this particular reformist initiative. His own enthusiasm for tackling serf reform, evidenced by his commissioning of several dedicated

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projects, was evidently outweighed both by his fear of the loud opposition to it on the part of the nobility, and the dubious reputation of those, like Turgenev and Karazin, who were among its main protagonists. There were some who thought, like the Baltic emancipationist Timotheus von Bock, that ‘His Majesty uses the liberation of the peasants as an excuse to suppress the only class which has so far opposed the rule of tyranny’.41 Thoroughly depressed by the tsar’s rejection of the proposal for the ‘Society of Benevolent Landowners’, Turgenev noted in a diary entry of 1 June 1820 that this setback effectively spelt the end of hopes for serf reform, and that consequently his ‘hopelessness reached the utmost degree’. Opinion came down hard on those who had signed for the society, as Turgenev noted in a further entry a week later: ‘The public is roused against our names especially . . . I am convinced that the indignation against us stems from the public’s perception of us as dangerous people, as Jacobins.’42 There were indeed mutterings to the effect that it was all very well for the Turgenev brothers to promote emancipation since they had so little to lose as owners of very few serfs, while Vorontsov, who had thousands, was courting the real danger of inciting them to rebellion. Turgenev’s mood had not lightened several weeks later when his diary entry of 15 August asked rhetorically, ‘Am I really doomed to go to my grave without seeing truth and liberty in my country?’ He was deeply disappointed by the lack of sympathy shown for their emancipation initiatives by the tsar, and particularly by V.  P. Kochubei, and more generally by the very obvious fact that ‘blessed liberty’ was still rejected by the overwhelming majority of noble society. For Viazemskii, the failure of their initiative was typical of Russian life, as he wrote to Turgenev: ‘Neither the age of Catherine, with all its monstrosity, an age which promised so much, nor the year 1812 – nothing could budge us . . . Ignorance, both civil and political, again petrified all that had begun to be warmed up by feeling.’43 Despite the reformers’ ultimate failure to win the tsar’s support for their exploratory project, one commentator has rightly described ‘the concept of abolishing serfdom as outlined in their memorandum’ as ‘the high point of the liberal movement in the reign of Alexander I’.44 Turgenev eventually had to acknowledge that it was unrealistic to expect any decisive lead on the issue of serf reform, or for that matter any other issue, from Tsar Alexander I: Towards the end of Alexander’s reign public opinion revealed a far greater variety of liberal aspirations than at the beginning of it. But by then the emperor no longer had any truck with them. The people had moved on ahead while the sovereign had fallen behind.45

It would be another fourteen years after Turgenev had penned these despondent lines before emancipation eventually came, thanks largely to Alexander II’s relative success in outmanoeuvring that conservative mass of recalcitrant noblemen which was the cause of Turgenev’s despair. Unlike Vorontsov, he did live to see it, by then aged 71, and died ten years after the emancipation act’s promulgation, in October 1871.

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M. S. Vorontsov and noblemen-abolitionists Although efforts to promote serf reform, and even to initiate open discussion of the peasant question, were demonstrably not without personal danger, Turgenev clearly knew that he was not alone in his determination to do so. He cites precisely the examples of Count Vorontsov and Prince A. S. Men’shikov, ‘outstanding both in terms of their senior positions and their education’, who ‘resolved to promote the cause of emancipation and set about it seriously’. Turgenev gives an account of Vorontsov’s attempt both to free his serfs and to encourage others to do the same with the tsar’s blessing.46 In a letter to his brother Sergei, he wrote of the high hopes he had of Vorontsov, ‘who has a proper understanding and feel of things’, as ‘a pioneer (nachinshchik) of the improvement of the peasants’ lot’. A sense of Vorontsov’s own resolve is expressed in a letter to N. M. Longinov dating from 1818: ‘I am sure that it is the duty of the nobility – and also to its advantage – to start thinking and, more importantly, taking action in furtherance of the gradual freeing from slavery of the peasants in Russia.’47 However, while freely admitting to admiring Vorontsov for his many excellent qualities, the commander in the Caucasus from 1816, General A.  P. Ermolov, was among his critics: ‘The idea of freeing the peasants’, he wrote, ‘is, if I may say so, misguided (nevpopad).’ He conceded that while it may well be ‘fashionable’, he doubted that the time was yet ripe for it. Even though personally he would stand to lose nothing from serf emancipation, as he was not himself a wealthy man, he was unable to agree to it, and therefore, ‘would not be joining the ranks of the wise emancipators’ society’.48 Ermolov’s ironic reference to the ‘wise emancipators’ suggests that Karazin’s proposed society was common knowledge in his circles. A Russian historian has described Vorontsov as a ‘walking anachronism’ who ‘combined aristocratic prejudices with an impatient desire to accelerate the pace of change’.49 He was among those Russian noblemen who made no secret of his support for serf emancipation, recognizing the challenge which serfdom presented both to efficient agriculture and to the basis of Christian ethics. He considered it shameful that a Christian country like Russia should preserve the slavery of peasants. Brought up in London where his father was Russian ambassador, he had political sympathy for the British constitutionalism absent in Russia. Because he was keenly aware of the economic failings of serfdom he, like Turgenev and other members of his own family, including his grandfather, father and uncle, refused to operate barshchina on his own estates in Voronezh province’s Pavlovsk district, and foresaw a time when his own peasants (numbering several thousand) would be freed from the slavery of serfdom. His enviable reputation as a benevolent landlord finds confirmation in a letter of 1817 to him from his friend I. V. Sabaneev, who wrote, It seems to me there is no greater pleasure than to be a good master. You, my dearest friend, are the father of several thousands. Who wouldn’t be gladdened

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by this? I have to admit that I can only envy you. You do wonderful work for several thousands, while I do what I can for barely one hundred.

Also at around this time, A.  Kh. Benkendorf wrote enthusiastically to ‘his dear friend’ Vorontsov, reporting on a visit he had just made to the Vorontsov family’s Voronezh estates, where to his ‘great joy’ he had found ‘all the settlers (poseliane) happy, well-off, and sincerely devoted to their masters who, father and son alike, take good care of their wellbeing’.50 Turgenev recalled that those of the tsar’s aides-de-camp, Menshikov and Vasil’chikov among them, who had publicly associated themselves with the group around Vorontsov and Karazin, were to find themselves received coldly at court for some time afterwards.51 Nevertheless, Alexander went on to appoint Vorontsov governor-general (viceroy) of Bessarabia or ‘New Russia’ in 1823, a post he held for an extraordinary twenty-one years until 1844. As an American biographer has justly observed, ‘Normally governors-general held office for a period of about 5 years, 10 at most . . . Good fortune won him the position, but undoubted administrative genius enabled him to keep it.’52 Nicholas I then appointed him to the same position in the Caucasus until 1854. Despite his elevated official position within the imperial establishment, Vorontsov’s total opposition to serfdom was to remain unchanged. In May 1833, he wrote a letter to A.  Kh. Benkendorf, then head of the Third Section (Nicholas I’s gendarmerie and secret police), in which he was openly critical of serfdom and the government’s continued failure to deal with it. He declared ‘such a state of affairs terrible, and the shame of our century. I will say moreover, that it is a shame for a Christian country.’ Without mincing his words, Vorontsov told Benkendorf that even though Tsar Nicholas I had done much for Russia, ‘he would not be able to withstand God’s judgment if he leaves the country with 50 million souls’, without having done anything to alleviate their condition, but worse, ‘if they continue, as now, to be sold publicly, sometimes in the interests of the state treasury – men, women, and children without land, like wretched cattle’.53 That Vorontsov should volunteer to write such an excoriating view of serfdom to the most powerful man in the Russian empire after the tsar, albeit an old and close friend, speaks both of his personal courage and the depth of his antipathy to it. He did not live to see the emancipation he so longed for, but died five years before it came, at the start of the Tsar Liberator’s reign, in 1856. In conclusion, the reference to Vorontsov made by Ryleev in his depositions and mentioned above has led V. A. Udovik, the author of the 2010 article on Vorontsov and the Decembrists cited here, to make the interesting suggestion that Vorontsov’s humane and principled contribution to the improvement of his peasants’ lives proved far more fruitful than the Decembrists’ quixotic, violent and ultimately fruitless direct action of 14 December 1825.54 Udovik certainly has a point but, just as importantly, it is a telling example of the way in which Russian writing on the Decembrists has changed so radically since 1991. In Soviet historiography they were always the unassailably blameless knights in shining armour standing at the head of the nineteenth-century revolutionary movement.

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N. N. Muraviev: A government official makes the case for reform Despite Turgenev’s misgivings, the case for emancipation did not end with the concerted, though unsuccessful, initiative of the Vorontsov-Karazin group and its sixty-five signed-up landowners. What is thought to be the last position paper on the topic in Alexander’s reign was a memorandum of 30 March 1824 addressed to the tsar by state-secretary N.  N. Muraviev.55 This thoughtful and measured submission shows that highly placed officials were still actively thinking, well over twenty years into Alexander’s reign, about the problem of serf emancipation as a key to the improvement of the rural economy and estate management. Muraviev had himself been actively interested in problems of the rural economy for many years, both as a vice-governor and then a governor. In response to the tsar’s specific request about them, Muraviev here refers to the position of ‘economic’ peasants, and the potential benefits of granting them freedom, albeit without land. These were formerly church serfs until the secularization in 1764 of church lands on which there were then almost a million male serfs. Initially, they were put under the supervision of the revived Economic College for Church Property until its abolition in 1786 at which point they were numbered among the other state peasants.56 Muraviev’s memorandum proposed a way forward for this category of peasant which was based on the view that privately owned lands were potentially more productive than state lands. He argued that in order to improve state-land productivity, a new system of reward and incentive was needed to bring Russian agriculture closer to the level of other European states (which for Muraviev was the natural benchmark). The keys to achieving this, in his view, were education, the application of common sense and the development of private property (and capital) as achieved in England, Germany and France. In contrast, Russian state lands presented a shocking picture of extreme disorder and neglect. Similarly, as Muraviev had seen for himself, state forestry was underperforming and attaining profit levels which were, as a result of poor husbandry, loss and waste, up to five times less than might have been expected. His suggested remedy was to reward deserving individuals by granting them land on which economic peasants were settled, with or without forests, but without assigning to them the peasants themselves or their property. It was Muraviev’s contention that, ‘quite apart from the evident benefits to humanity and the state’, the government had no other way open to it of rewarding deserving people. Yet incentives were absolutely vital in a country like Russia. Moreover, the land should be granted in hereditary perpetuity. State peasants settled on such land would pay the new owner a rate determined by the government and in accordance with the benefits granted by the owner to the peasants. Those newly ennobled on the basis of service and rank should retain the right to own land, villages and estates. However, while this right was not to be extended to peasants, they should be free of the landowner’s authority while living on his land.

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Muraviev considered that such an arrangement would be entirely consistent with the spirit of the Charter to the Nobility: the ‘new’ nobility would be able to obtain the estates of the ‘old’ nobility, albeit with reduced rights, and crucially – without ownership of the peasants. This, as he put it, would count among ‘the simplest and stealthiest means of freeing the peasants from slavery!’ He was confident that both the ‘arbitrariness of estate managers would be thereby eliminated and that the onerous position of state (kazennye) peasants would be alleviated’.57 It was his equally optimistic view that the old nobility would soon get used to owning land without serfs: after emancipating their own peasants, they would retain ownership of the land themselves and continue to live on it. Any direct control either of estate management or the cultivation of the land would lead to a reduction in its productivity to the ultimate disadvantage of the state treasury. This was particularly true of Russia, Muraviev concluded, ‘for centuries an overwhelmingly agricultural country and rural economy’. Muraviev’s project represented a significant and reasoned contribution to the national discussion of the peasant question on which Alexander alternately and unpredictably blew hot and cold. His submission combined pragmatism with caution to such an extent that what it proposed did not actually amount to the emancipation of the peasants from the seigniorial bonds of serfdom, thereby ensuring the serfs’ continued dependency on their landlords. Relative to the terms of the future 1861 act, therefore, it was carefully conservative. Alexander’s response to his state secretary’s analysis of the economic peasants’ long-term prospects, which he had after all himself commissioned, remains a mystery.

V. N. Karazin: A Ukrainian landowner’s opinion Despite the earlier sanctions imposed on him by the authorities, Karazin continued undeterred to pursue his unsolicited and often unwanted correspondence. On 12 December 1819, he wrote to Kochubei about serious infractions of the laws relating to peasants. Kochubei requested more details, and by January 1820 had received from Karazin three further memoranda both describing the widespread and flagrant abuse of serfs, and outlining several possible responses. The outcome was a number of meetings between Karazin and Kochubei in the spring of 1820 held to discuss the issues raised and potential solutions.58 As an early biographer put it, Karazin, ‘a voice crying in the wilderness’, was by temperament irrepressible, exasperating senior courtiers and the tsar himself with his continual interventions.59 But at least on the matter of serfdom Karazin’s was far from a lone voice. There were, as we have noted, many minds focused on solutions to the peasant question at this time and he was among the leading lights of the group of serf reform proponents which was dispersed by the collapse of the ‘Society of Benevolent Landowners’ project. An account of his troubled relationship with Alexander I and the story of his eventual arrest will be taken up in Chapter 11. However, it is his central focus on the serf question

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and peasant welfare, both before and after his Shlissel’burg imprisonment in 1820, which is of particular interest here as an instance of the nobility’s reformist outlook. The fullest statement of his vision for the development of Russia’s rural economy is set out in a long letter of 30 January 1810 to I. I. Bakhtin, governor of Slobodsko-Ukraine.60 Karazin was convinced of the need to ease the bonds of serfdom, without abolishing the institution altogether, through the active participation of landowners, who were ‘as essential to the well-being of village life as monarchs are to the welfare of their subjects’.61 For Karazin, serfdom as a system was intrinsically sound, but seriously marred by chronic abuse. He argued that the state should use its existing powers to regularize the institution and end the peasants’ slavery. Ever the idealist, he considered the proper management of the peasants on their estates to be the landlords’ absolute duty of service to the state. He described the ideal landlord as the ‘small-scale governor-general’ of his own estate, defended him against specious accusations of serf abuse and, bizarrely, recommended a nationwide covert network of nobles charged with monitoring and reporting public opinion back to the authorities in St Petersburg. As a young landowner himself, Karazin had already drawn up regulations for his peasants, or ‘settlers’, as he called them. Subsequently, he published a plan for the regulation and management of the serfs on his own estates: ‘Towards the agricultural regulation of landlord estates based on quitrent’.62 Among its most important provisions was the granting to each adult male a plot of 7.5 desiatins (just over eight hectares or almost twenty acres) of arable land to be inherited in perpetuity, but which, after ten years, he would be free to sell. This was a significant recognition of the individual peasant’s right to land ownership, and it was central to his article devoted to the subject:  ‘The opinion of one Ukrainian landowner expressed after a discussion with his peers about the ukaz of 23 May [1816] and its Estland provisions’. Here Karazin attacked the emancipation – without land – of peasants in the Baltic province on the grounds that ‘the land is the property of both the people and the landowners equally’ and that ‘the landowners have only ever been the managers of the land’. His assertion of the peasants’ entitlement to own property has been fairly described as ‘the first attempt in Russian social thought to advance the question of peasants’ rights’.63 Karazin’s article achieved a wide circulation, and was well known to the Decembrists. S.  P. Trubetskoi scathingly remarked in his memoirs, which were first published three years after his death by A.  I. Herzen in 1863, that ‘the Khar’kov landowner Karazin campaigned with all his considerable eloquence against the emancipation of the peasants, and compared the condition of those lucky enough to live under his yoke with those who were freed without property of their own’.64 Conversely, as V. I. Semevskii, the great historian of the ‘peasant question’, conceded in the 1880s, while Karazin’s outlook generally could hardly be described as ‘progressive’, he was nevertheless one of the very few who realized that serfs could not be freed without land, giving his proposals ‘one massive advantage’ over those of most of his contemporaries.65

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Traditionalists hold the line Although it is apparent that there were some among the nobility who were convinced that the rural economy and Russian society stood only to benefit from an effective reform programme, it is equally clear that a substantial majority had little sympathy with the emancipationist tendency of some of the policies and pronouncements of Alexander’s government. In the absence of an unambiguous and resolute lead from the throne, rumours abounded which only increased the defensiveness of the conservative majority. Thus, a police report of 1818–19 monitored talk of serf emancipation and the expectation of some that it would ‘be announced before the end of August [1818]’ and that ‘their Majesties were leaving [for Warsaw] in order not to be here [in St Petersburg] when this important news is announced’. Others assumed that the measure would be deferred for some time, but ‘in general most are certain that it will be enacted sooner or later’.66 Most landowners resisted any suggestion of serf reform because they saw no reason to change the status quo. At the time, serfdom formed the basis of nobility’s way of life, and it would have seemed to many contemporaries that the very existence of the state was impossible without it. As the pro-emancipation Smolensk landowner and Decembrist I. D. Iakushkin wrote in his memoirs, Nearly all landowners looked on their peasants as property totally belonging to them, and at serfdom as a sacred and ancient right which could not be altered without shaking the state to its very foundations. In their view, Russia was maintained by the noble estate alone, so that with the destruction of serfdom would come the destruction of the nobility itself.

When in 1819 Iakushkin told his uncle about his own plans to free his serfs, the latter retorted that he thought his nephew had lost his mind. His neighbours in Smolensk province, aware of his intentions, similarly thought him a ‘crank’ (chudak). Even his peasants were puzzled by his proposals and, failing to grasp them, urged to him to leave things as they were, on the basis of their understanding that ‘my – vashi, a zemlia – nasha’ (we are yours, but the land is ours). However, Iakushkin’s well-intentioned efforts to free his serfs were ultimately frustrated by the St Petersburg bureaucracy on his return there in 1820.67 In the Decembrist’s retrospective view, Alexander’s stumbling block was the opposition that he encountered from the grandees in his entourage, and the wider nobility too, who warned that any change could have disastrous consequences for Russia. Writing ten years after the serfs were emancipated by Alexander II, S.  Shashkov described the ‘conservative mass’ in Alexander I’s day, which was ‘infected by mysticism, disposed to timidity, and remained strangers to logical thinking’, as ‘even more cowardly than today’s’. This deep-seated opposition to the notion of emancipation was at the very heart of the reactionary outlook of the early-nineteenth-century nobility, for whom the continued existence of serfdom was so advantageous.68 In fact, it was absolutely essential since the institution

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effectively underpinned the fragile ecology of Russia’s social structure. The 1861 emancipation act would show that in the longer term, as one historian has remarked, echoing Iakushkin, ‘once the right to hold serfs was abolished, the nobility’s days as the ruling class were numbered’.69 The nobility’s estates in the provinces provided them with both income and produce which supplemented their earnings from state service in the capitals. The sale of their serfs provided many landowners with another dependable income stream. For example, the price of male serfs at this time was between twenty and thirty roubles per soul, and of women and girls between fifteen and forty roubles, compared with the going rate for a working horse of between twenty-five and fifty roubles.70 Nor did noblemen in the provinces overly concern themselves with the needs of their serfs. In fact, any attempt on the part of ‘kind’ owners to help a particular servant or serf aroused the condemnation of other nobles. Setting up a school for serf children or providing them with medical aid were actions which neighbouring landowners regarded as downright dangerous behaviour. The number of nobles who actually lived on their estates among their peasants, with some understanding of their way of life, and with some ambition for a flourishing provincial society in their immediate vicinity, was relatively small. Moreover, many of the small-holding nobility were hardly any better educated than their serfs. As it was, the majority view prevailed with the result that Alexander’s initiatives, such as the half-hearted 1803 edict on ‘free cultivators’, and the various projects of Kiselev, Arakcheev and many others would amount to very little by the end of the reign. As has been correctly observed, it was precisely the cultural backwardness of the landowning nobility, seemingly impervious to the government’s sporadic efforts to overcome, that was primarily responsible for the durability of serfdom.71 Such backwardness was combined with a strongly patriarchal mentality among landowners which underpinned the status quo. This was typically expressed by Prince N.  G. Viazemskii, the Kaluga province marshal of the nobility, in his assertion that it was only the landowner who could have constant oversight of the peasants’ welfare, while addressing all their shortcomings, and correcting their behaviour.72 A similar view may be found in the memoirs of I. V. Lopukhin (1756–1816), an Orel nobleman, leading Moscow Freemason and a senator with long experience under Catherine II and Paul I of the criminal-justice system. This gave him a keen sense of the tensions in rural Russia generated by serfdom. He was certain that emancipating the serfs would lead only to threatening gangs of drunken and starving peasants roaming the countryside. However desirable in theory, Lopukhin found the prospect of wholesale emancipation fraught with danger: I should say that I am the first who might wish that there was not one unfree man on Russian soil, if only this could be achieved with impunity. But people need to be restrained for their own good. There is no more reliable police force for the preservation of general order than control by landowners.

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Any weakening of such control, he warned, ‘would be more dangerous than an enemy invasion’.73 Something of the same cautious attitude emerges in an interesting exchange of opinion in December 1817 between A.  N. Olenin, director of the Imperial Academy of Arts, and Arakcheev, on the vexed question of allowing talented serfs access to education.74 Arakcheev suggests that, as a favour to a particular landowner, there would probably be no harm in Olenin admitting one of his serfs to the academy, even though the director had expressed his reluctance to do so. After careful thought, Olenin referred Arakcheev to the Academy’s statute which stated in a surprisingly inclusive spirit that ‘the first intake’ would consist of ‘60 boys of any standing, excluding only those serfs who did not have their masters’ permission’. He argued that any serf studying in the Academy, even with his master’s leave, would only become accustomed to the word ‘freedom’ and ‘to ideas of personal liberty’. But then, on returning to his village, he would succumb to absolute despair on realizing that his hopes ‘of escaping from his intolerable bondage’ had been ultimately futile. At this point, Olenin continued, ‘his misery would drive him to drink, as is normal for Russian folk’. Olenin failed to see how serfs could possibly benefit from studying alongside free-born classmates and concluded that ‘the bondsman should be granted no more than that level of education and knowledge that accords with his station’. Only in this way will he be of any use, he insisted, otherwise he will be a danger to his master and to society in general. In other words, Olenin was telling Arakcheev that as director he was unable to support his own institution’s stated admissions policy, which in theory facilitated a measure of social diversity among its student body. In his Memoir on Ancient and Modern Russia, N. M. Karamzin encapsulated, in an echo of the outlook of Olenin, Viazemskii and Lopukhin, the conservative, patriarchal nature of the unchanging, corvée-based, landlord-serf relationship: The Russian nobleman gives to his peasants the land they need; he acts as their champion in civil matters, and their source of succour in times of need. Such are his obligations! In return he demands of them one half of the week’s working days. Such is his right!

There were plenty who shared this outlook. For example, even so reputed a liberal as A. I. Turgenev ventured to idealize the serfs’ view of their ‘slavery’, in a letter he wrote to V. A. Zhukovskii in 1806, as ‘a precious gift . . . never violently imposed upon them by the nobility’, and one which ‘only time and events’ would change, ‘once the Russian people had attained the degree of morality needed for a people to be free’.75 On the other hand, as historians of serfdom have pointed out, serf ownership tended to corrupt: young noblemen saw themselves as masters who themselves had no need to work, an activity they generally despised, and many of them became accustomed to a life of idleness. In the words of V. O. Kliuchevskii, ‘serfdom was especially harmful to the social position and political education of the landowning

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classes’. Moreover, it was a system that was always open to abuse, and resisted by its victims with mounting frequency. One estimate of violent incidents of peasant unrest over the sixty years from Alexander I’s accession to the emancipation of the serfs puts the figure at 1,467 recorded outbreaks. The landlord-peasant relationship at its worst was reflected in the complete disregard by the serf for his master’s property. For example, many landowners returned to their estates after 1812 to find them reduced to ruins, including their own homes: windows broken, doors smashed and furniture wrecked – not by French troops but by their own serfs.76 Such behaviour may be seen as opportunistic revenge for the cruel treatment meted out by so many landlords to their serfs over many years. The Decembrist writer A.  A. Bestuzhev commented in his testimony to the Investigating Committee that ‘the behaviour of Russian nobles [towards their serfs] was dreadful’. To give one example, the memoirist M. L. Nazimov describes witnessing through the window of his home a young man from a distinguished noble family dragging his coachman by the beard down the street, all with absolute impunity. Even noblewomen thought nothing of boxing their servants’ ears, Nazimov observed. Yet all the government’s efforts to curb such flagrant abuse through the good offices of provincial governors and marshals of the nobility proved utterly ineffective.77 What struck one memoirist, Karolina Pavlova, was the contrast between the enthusiastic reception she heard given to the news of the Greeks’ struggle for freedom from their Turkish overlords by the very same Russian noblemen who saw nothing wrong with their own serfs’ deprivation of liberty. As an illustration of the gratuitous abuse to which serfs were routinely subjected, she relates how a Moscow landowner, an unidentified senator, was honoured by a visit from Count Arakcheev. During his stay, the grand vizier happened to express his admiration for the outstanding vocal talent of his host’s pet songbird. The following day, the obsequious nobleman despatched one of his house-serfs on a 1,400-kilometre round trip to deliver the caged nightingale to Count Arakcheev in St Petersburg. Moreover, the unfortunate servant did so on foot and in atrocious conditions, because ‘this was better for the nightingale and cheaper for the senator’. Pavlova comments that at the time such incidents were not unusual.78 Similarly, in Dubrovin’s view, it was because society at that time, ‘not excluding the most educated and best sons of Russia’, found such treatment of the serfs perfectly normal and in the nature of things.79 One abusive landlord, Count Dmitriev-Mamonov, justified his harsh treatment of his serfs in a letter to the governor-general of Moscow. The count, ‘whose state of mind bordered on madness’, did so on the grounds that he considered punishment to be ‘a political entitlement, a special part of the advantages and rights of Russian noblemen, and also of their personal security in their homes and on their estates’.80 It was an attitude which was the despair of pro-emancipation noblemen. One such was A. M. Turgenev, who was born in the 1770s, served under Catherine and Paul, and in 1823 was appointed by Alexander to the governorship of Tobolsk and then Kazan’. He retired after forty-four years of state service and died in 1863, two years after Alexander II’s emancipation act. In 1887, reviewing recently published

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memoirs from the time of Alexander I’s reign, A. N. Pypin observed that those of A.  M. Turgenev ‘occupy a very prominent place in our memoir literature’. A  passionate proponent of serf emancipation, Turgenev, according to Pypin, had a ‘far from high opinion of the political sense of our nobility’. Pypin cites the following passage from his memoirs, written in 1835: The Russian nobility, wallowing of old in the mire of ignorance, devoted to idleness, drunkenness, and voluptuousness, could not or would not share its rights with the people (i.e. free the peasants from slavery), but wanted then – as it wants to this day, alas! – to preserve the vile right to be the unlimited masters of their slaves.81

The threat to the perceived ‘political entitlement’ of owning and freely punishing serfs culminated with the fears aroused among the anti-abolitionists by Alexander I’s speech to the Warsaw sejm in 1818. A speculative link was immediately made between a constitution for Russia and the abolition of serfdom, a fear that, despite the nobility’s opposition to both, one would inexorably lead to the other. This assumption is clearly reflected in a letter F. V. Rostopchin wrote to S. R. Vorontsov in 1819, referring to Alexander’s Warsaw speech on granting a constitution, by which, he acknowledged, ‘is understood the emancipation of the peasantry, which is contrary to the wishes of the nobility’. The ensuing panic gripped the Moscow nobility in particular. As Speranskii observed in a letter to his old friend A.  A. Stolypin: ‘You are doubtless well aware of the outbreak of fear and despair which has been spread amongst the inhabitants of Moscow by the Warsaw speech.’ In Speranskii’s view they were right to see in it only one possible interpretation: that Alexander really was determined to abolish serfdom in Russia. In fact, he wrote, anticipating the distrustful reception by the peasants of the 1861 act, many were convinced that the decision had already been taken, but that the landlords were concealing the tsar’s true intentions from their serfs.82 There are indeed grounds for accepting Speranskii’s interpretation. As he was about to depart for Warsaw in 1818, Alexander reportedly confided in Prince P. V. Lopukhin, a senior figure at court who chaired the State Council, his ‘fervent desire to free the peasants from their dependence on the landlords’, describing it as an objective he was determined to achieve. When Lopukhin pointed out the enormous challenges and likely resistance this would incur, Alexander told him: ‘If the noblemen oppose me, I will take my family to Warsaw and from there send an ukaz.’83 This exchange follows a familiar pattern: a dogged determination to take the matter forward which was offset by his fear of the Russian nobility’s refusal to comply. Alexander was clearly aware of the serf-owners’ antagonism towards reforming serfdom, let alone abolishing it, and that such antagonism exposed him potentially to real personal danger. This certainly helps explain his hesitancy and ultimate inaction. However, Alexander’s true intentions died with him and the peasant question was left unresolved. His successor would take a different approach. Nicholas I established as many as ten secret committees over twenty years to progress the

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emancipation of private peasants, but with the liberal revolutions in Europe in 1848, he lost the political will for reform at home. He thus effectively delayed any resolution for a further three decades, leaving it to his son and successor finally to achieve a breakthrough, thirty-six years after the first Alexander’s death. Meanwhile, the furore surrounding the tsar’s Warsaw speech proved to be the false dawn of serf emancipation in Russia, but it had other significant consequences too. The open discussion of serfdom, perhaps the most important of all issues confronting the stability of Russian society and government, abruptly ceased in the summer of 1818. It had been a live topic in the most widely read publications of the day for the past three years, among them ‘The European Herald’ (Vestnik Evropy) and ‘Son of the Fatherland’ (Syn otechestva). Now, Alexander I, unnerved by the overwhelmingly negative reaction among the Russian nobility to the promises he had made in his speech to the Polish sejm, became increasingly distrustful of the estate generally. He reacted by closing down the debate on reform and intensifying censorship. This response would result in a marked growth in the nobility’s anti-government feelings, both from the sullen conservative majority, and the exasperated liberal, reform-minded minority, and with it a potentially destabilizing polarization of public opinion.84 We shall be exploring this process in Part VI.

Part VI T HE RADICAL NOBILITY CHALLENGES AUTOCRACY

Chapter 11 G OV E R N M E N T A N D T H E N O B I L I T Y:   R E F O R M V E R SU S C O N T R O L

Public opinion and reformist expectations before and after 1812 This chapter assesses the significant shift in public opinion as articulated by members of the nobility in response to Russia’s victory over Napoleon, both on its own territory and ultimately with its allies in Europe. In both theatres of war, a signal role had been played by the thousands of noblemen who formed the officer corps of Russia’s armies. Many of them left some record of their experiences in memoirs, diary entries and letters, providing a valuable source for historians of the period.1 The chapter’s focus is on the political fallout for Russia of the nobility’s encounter with the West during the Wars of Liberation, which brought Napoleon’s European project to its end. Among many Russian noblemen there were now renewed expectations of far-reaching changes in Russia, if only to match those which were taking place in other parts of the empire. Moreover, their recent observation of social and political life in the West invited unfavourable comparisons with the situation in Russia. A  consideration of the government’s response to such expectations, typically a haphazard damage-limitation exercise of social control, censorship and the victimization of individual noblemen, forms the second half of this chapter. Despite the unpromising context of a generally poorly educated nobility, it was nevertheless precisely within its upper ranks that in early-nineteenth-century Russia a political struggle emerged between conservatives and reformists. The two key issues at stake were constitutional alternatives to autocracy, and the reform of serfdom, themes explored in Parts IV and V. These thorny questions prompted cautious debates about possible changes in Russia’s political course. However, a number of questions arise:  just how realistic both politically and economically were the prospects of constitutional reform and the emancipation of the landed nobility’s serfs at this juncture? How could any such prospects survive the reaction which would set in during the 1820s, largely as a negative response from both government and noble society alike to liberal ideas? Finally, is it possible to attribute to the autocratic establishment and its governing bureaucracy any kind of vision about its own future and Russia’s?

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T. V. Andreeva has suggested that this period of Russian political history ranks alongside the era of Alexander II’s Great Reforms in its attempts to modernize Russia: in particular, it was crucial in the formation of the nobility’s political role and its relationship with the throne. The important role in this process played by ‘public opinion’, as articulated by the various strata of the nobility, especially in relation to secret societies and government policies, clearly merits further elucidation. The nobility’s place in Russian society, whether ‘high’ or ‘low’, ‘capital’ or ‘provincial’, had acquired definitive shape in the first decade of Alexander I’s reign. Its educated elite, as the main vehicle of ‘public opinion’, would seek increasingly to establish a constructive dialogue with government in order to exert some influence on its course of ‘official liberalism’ under the headings of the national interest, the State Council, the reformed Senate, the 1809 Speranskii project and the ‘constitutional diplomacy’ following the defeat of Napoleon. Plotting government initiatives against public opinion shows how little convergence there was ultimately between the nobility and the autocracy, largely (and ironically) due to the conservatism of the former rather than the latter. As we saw in Chapter  8, this was particularly apparent in responses to Alexander’s ‘Warsaw speech’ to the Polish sejm on 15 March 1818, and the abrupt curtailment the following summer of public discussion of peasant reform which had been underway since 1815. The ensuing stand-off was to provide the context for the formation of the Decembrists’ secret societies, in conscious emulation of European models. These, too, may be seen as a further, albeit covert expression of public opinion which, at least in relation to constitutional reform, took its cue from the early days of Alexander’s reign. At that stage, the issue was given official and overt priority, culminating with Speranskii’s draft project in 1809. From this it seems clear that Alexander and Speranskii, no less than the Decembrists subsequently, were thinking of Russia’s future as a modern European nation rather than a seigniorial absolutist state.2 However, there was a noticeable shift in the tsar’s position from January 1818 when he learned of the existence of the Decembrists’ Union of Salvation, and even more so from May 1821 when he received M. K. Gribovskii’s report on its successor, the Union of Welfare. Nevertheless, up until the closure of Masonic lodges and all other secret societies in August 1822, the government and enlightened public opinion had, arguably, been working to a shared agenda of constitutional and serf reform. The clearest indication of such strategic convergence was Alexander’s 1818 ‘constitution’ speech to the Polish sejm. In fact, however, the societies were not as secret as they supposed, but were revealed to Alexander in a series of reports culminating with A.  I. Maiboroda’s incriminating letter of November 1825. Perhaps among the main reasons for Alexander’s decision not to follow up these reports was his pragmatic concern for the state’s interests. These, in his view, were best served by not drawing attention to any opposition to the regime. However, by failing to engage with the secret societies, Alexander equally failed to harness the liberal section of the nobility to the task of reform, opting instead to capitulate to conservatism and to monitor public opinion and society’s growing unrest much more closely from 1820.3

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When, well before Napoleon’s invasion of Russia, Alexander entrusted Speranskii with the task of drafting a constitutional project, there were strong indications and a widespread assumption that one would be implemented quite soon. There was certainly a perception that the country stood in need of reform. For example, on returning home from the Danube provinces in 1815, Count D.  N. Bludov, who from 1832 to 1838 would serve as Nicholas I’s minister of internal affairs, was struck by the restless public mood and the discontent he encountered everywhere. He heard complaints about the recent tax increases of 1810 and 1812, and from landowners and merchants hit by endless bankruptcies. These were attributed to the continental blockade which disrupted trade with Britain, and inflicted heavy financial losses, in particular on Russian producers of flax and hemp. All these problems were compounded by the complete collapse of the currency exchange (kurs), and the generally poor state of financial management. Bludov also found government officials railing against Speranskii’s controversial law requiring them to pass a qualifying exam for promotion to certain ranks.4 Speranskii himself was struck by the change in public mood which seemed to him to be ‘suffering from anxiety’. In his view, the only possible explanation for this was the emergence of a ‘strong but suppressed desire for a new order of things’.5 Moreover, the upper classes were exasperated both by the rapprochement with Napoleon, which was seen as a blow to Russia’s national prestige and military glory, and also by the behaviour of his wily ambassador in St Petersburg, Marquis Armand de Caulaincourt, who held the post until his replacement in 1811 by General Jacques Lauriston. Such reforms as had been attempted at the beginning of Alexander I’s reign had already incurred the dissatisfaction of the majority of the nobility. An unpublished chapter of Baron M. A. Korf ’s biography of Speranskii, found in the papers of Academician A. F. Bychkov and published in Russkaia starina in 1903, gives this summary of the main reasons for Alexander’s unpopularity on the eve of 1812: The hesitancy and lack of success of domestic measures and reforms, unsuccessful choices and appointments; unfortunate wars; the even more unfortunate Tilsit treaty; finally, the feeble foreign policy which contradicted public opinion and the general good  – all this increasingly strengthened opposition to the government and therefore, of course, principally to its leading figures.6

Commenting on these circumstances at the time, Karamzin wrote frankly in his Memoir on ancient and modern Russia (which he personally handed to the emperor in 1811): ‘Russia is full of discontented people. They are complaining in halls (palaty) and in hovels alike. They have neither confidence in nor enthusiasm for the government, and roundly condemn its aims and measures.’7 However, while Alexander’s standing undoubtedly remained compromised, the general irritation focused increasingly on Speranskii. As we saw in Chapter 7, there were a number of reasons for this: contempt for his lowly origins and resentment at his closeness to the tsar were undoubtedly high on the list. From 1810 to early in 1812 and with Alexander I’s encouragement, Speranskii worked on draft projects

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for the reform of government institutions, administrative procedures and the legislature. This activity created unease among the conservative majority at court about Speranskii’s central role. In fact, the widely known ‘Introduction to the codification of the state’s laws’ may be fairly credited to two authors: not only to Speranskii, but also to Alexander I himself. The former would never have made such radical proposals without the encouragement of the latter. Had they actually been implemented, it would have marked a decisive step towards a constitutional monarchy, and away from serf-based absolutism. The reasons given for the proposed reforms reveal the extent to which the ruling elite acknowledged their inevitability. In Speranskii’s view, the entire development of the political process in Europe represented an irresistible ‘shift away from feudal rule to republicanism’. His unambiguous conclusion was that ‘the current system of rule is no longer compatible with the condition of the social spirit of the age, and the time has come to change it and install a new order of things’. Speranskii had in mind specifically the limiting of autocracy, and the establishment in Russia of a Western-style constitutional monarchy. His project was never implemented for a variety of reasons, some still unexplained, although it is clear enough that the major obstacle to Speranskii’s vision and enormous industry was, as A. N. Pypin long ago concluded, the extreme political hesitancy of the emperor himself, which constituted ‘the weakest link in the whole enterprise and was at the same time so characteristic a feature of the age’.8

The social and political impact on Russia’s nobility of Napoleon’s defeat The challenge to the system which formed the basis of Russian rule was intensified by the war of 1812. The expulsion of Napoleon and his Grande Armée from Moscow, its ignominious and disastrous retreat from Russian soil and the ensuing victorious campaigns across Europe brought to Russians something completely new which hitherto had been accessible only by hearsay or through books. This was a first-hand experience of European political and social structures qualitatively quite different from those at home. In his memoirs, D. I. Zavalishin refers to a growing and ‘tangible’ awareness among ‘the military estate (which comprised virtually the entire nobility)’ of alternative, Western European systems of government, and ‘above all the triumph of England and its parliamentary government’, which ‘exposed the weakness of absolutism’. On campaign in Western Europe, Russians ‘now experienced at first hand . . . what they had hitherto known about, if at all, only from books or in the abstract.’9 As to the scale of such exposure, it has been estimated that up to 30,000 Russian troops and their officers were billeted in France for the period of occupation from 1814 to 1818.10 The enlightened and progressive notions of liberty which Radishchev had once written about, which critically alert noblemen such as N. I. Turgenev, P. A. Viazemskii and V.  N. Karazin actively promoted, and to which government figures, among them Speranskii, Mordvinov and Novosil’tsov, devoted so much creative energy, had

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in no time at all become the intellectual property of a whole generation of young Russian noblemen. Moreover, the same notions underpinned the very constitutional ambitions which were also apparently the stuff of Alexander I’s dreams.11 The political impact of Napoleon’s downfall would be felt all over Europe, and in Russia too, for many years to come. Most of the General Staff and Guards officers who returned from their tour of duty in Europe to St Petersburg in 1815 did so with a heightened sense of patriotism and self-esteem. Now members of the officer corps, especially the younger ones, compared what they had seen in the West with life at home. They were struck especially by the virtual slavery of the overwhelming majority of Russians, the cruel treatment by superiors of their subordinates, a general abuse of power and an all-pervasive arbitrariness. These circumstances outraged educated Russians and affronted their sense of patriotism.12 Alexander Herzen commented precisely on this shift in mood when recalling the generation which had defeated Napoleon: A big change in public opinion followed soon after the war. Guards and army officers who had bravely faced enemy fire were no longer as deferential or as compliant as before. There began to appear in society the kind of chivalrous sentiments of honour and self-esteem which were hitherto unknown to an aristocracy of plebeian provenance, raised above the people by the grace and favour of their rulers.13

The Slavophile reformer A. I. Koshelev recalled the ‘liberal talk’ from 1818 to 1822, especially among serving officers returning from France in 1815. He retained even clearer memories of the widespread criticism of Alexander I, especially for his weakness in his dealings with Metternich and Arakcheev:  ‘Almost everybody condemned without respite the actions of the government. Some feared revolution, while others fervently desired it and placed all their hopes in one happening. Dissatisfaction was strongly felt everywhere.’ In Koshelev’s view a united people ‘had saved their motherland and the Russian state from ruin and from political enslavement’, only for a significant section of the population, following their ‘triumphant victory’, to return to ‘its former enserfed slavery’. This alone was enough, he concluded, to create a new social current, at the head of which stood the nobility whose members, almost without exception, had served in the army and thus participated in great European events. In the wake of them, it was no longer possible for ‘thinking people’ to reconcile themselves with ‘coarseness, ignorance and arbitrary and oppressive rule’.14 The conservative journalist F.  V. Bulgarin found ‘to his surprise’ that in St Petersburg everyone was now interested in politics, talked extraordinarily openly, discussed constitutional forms of government suitable for Russia, ‘which was not the case when I left Russia in 1809’. So how was it, he now asked, that young people, who had never given a thought to politics, had suddenly become such demagogues? ‘I saw clearly that the presence of the Russian army in France and the allies’ proclamations against France, filled with promises to restore freedom to the people and to give them a constitution, triggered this turnabout in mentality.’15

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Bulgarin’s close friend and fellow journalist N. I. Grech similarly recalled that, at the beginning of the nineteenth century, ‘our young people were infected by liberal ideas in France’, so that politically speaking, the reign of Alexander from 1815 was ‘agitated and uneven’, and quite unlike its earlier years which had been ‘blessed and mild’. Grech claimed the widespread sense of disappointment was felt not only in Russia, but throughout Europe since the Congress of Vienna showed ‘that no one cared about the people and their rights’, apart from Alexander who, even so, stood up only for ‘the brainless Poles’.16 Grech’s casual xenophobia is a reminder of historical Russo-Polish tensions which could only aggravate Russians’ views of the Poles’ constitutional advantage. Such antipathy was entirely mutual. General S.  I. Maevskii, who served in Poland at the time, and whose wife was Polish, commented on the uninhibited display of ‘indecent’ anti-Russian feeling, especially among young Poles. In what was presumably a contemptuous reference to the Polish language, Maevskii admitted that he ‘never took this parakeet-like (popugaichistyi) people’ to his heart, despite being married to ‘the most beautiful woman in Warsaw’.17 It was in the context described above that liberal or, as Alexander I called them, ‘lawless’ ideas spread, took root and flourished throughout Europe. Grech himself contributed to the growth of public interest in politics through the pages of his journal ‘Son of the Fatherland’ (Syn otechestva), which he managed until 1839, and in which from 1815 he started to publish articles on modern history and European politics, in the style of G. M. Iatsenkov’s ‘Spirit of the journals’ (Dukh zhurnalov).18 The effect of the French experience is cited also by Dubrovin, who stressed the particular importance of young Russian officers’ discovery in Paris of Freemasonry: In 1814 with the entry of Russian troops into the French capital, many officers were accepted into Masonic lodges and made links with adherents of various secret societies . . . They were equipped with charters and books which hitherto were unknown or banned in Russia, and they left France with a different cast of mind.19

With their return to Russia there was an upsurge in the numbers of noblemen joining Masonic lodges in St Petersburg and Moscow. To be a member of a lodge was unquestionably both fashionable and socially acceptable. Their popularity may be seen as a further manifestation of public opinion. Masonic tradition maintained that Alexander I  himself was a mason. Even if this claim is an exaggeration, it remains the case that he was certainly close to a number of wellconnected masons.20 There were, apparently, other reasons for the popularity of lodges. In the view of A. I. Mikhailovskii-Danilevskii, who was himself from September 1815 a member of the first exclusively Russophone lodge, ‘Michael the Select’ (Izbrannyi Mikhail), along with F.  N. Glinka and N.  I. Grech, it was also because they provided a welcome escape from a social life dominated by card-playing and gambling. On this Mikhailovskii-Danilevskii commented: ‘There is no social life where cards do not constitute the main or, rather, the only occupation . . . If you were invited to a

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party it meant playing cards. I’d hardly have time to greet the host before a card appeared in my hand.’21 Major-General L.  N. Engel’gardt ends his own account of 1814 with a commentary which reveals the extent of even a loyal subject’s disillusionment with Alexander I. There had been an expectation, he wrote, that with peace would come an era of far-reaching reform initiated by the tsar. ‘But subsequently things got much worse and military service became ever more intolerable and onerous. Generals were expected to do what was normally the remit of junior officers.’ He draws an unfavourable contrast between the daily routine of Russian officers and their men, and the conditions they had all observed abroad. It is to this difference that he attributed a fundamental change in outlook: ‘Having spent long periods in foreign lands and seeing all the states of Europe governed by laws and constitutions . . . they were infected by the spirit of the age.’22 Similarly, as Count Rostopchin commented in a letter to A.  F. Broker of 31 May 1817, liberal aspirations were spreading everywhere, including Germany, and he thought Russia could not long remain immune from them: I’ve just spent two weeks in Stuttgart, and witnessed the dismissal of deputies there who wanted to take over the governing of the kingdom . . . It is difficult to rule (tsarstvovat’) these days: the people have discovered their power and now abuse their liberty. Amidst the general rejoicing, our young people in particular were fired by hopes of a bright future. But as there was no fuel in Russia itself to keep this flame alive, I immediately guessed that there must be foyers (hotbeds) where the flame was kept burning, and from where it would spread.23

A similar contrast was drawn by an adjutant of Alexander’s, General P. D. Kiselev, following a visit he made to East Prussia in 1818: ‘Many years will elapse before civilisation here [in Russia] will reach the level required to ensure the well-being of every stratum of society.’24 However, any sense of triumph in Russia at the country’s defeat of Napoleon gave way to disappointment with the government’s domestic and foreign policy. Ultimately, in the ‘era of lost opportunities’, only half-hearted attempts were made to limit the tsar’s powers, prompting this fitting assessment from the Sovietera historian, N. M. Druzhinin: ‘Between 1801 and 1820 the Russian autocracy attempted to create a new form of monarchy, legally limiting absolutism but in fact preserving the individual power of the tsar.’25 Nevertheless, even the feeblest efforts to achieve this goal aroused the vehement opposition of the overwhelmingly conservative majority. D.  P. Runich, the first curator from 1819 of St Petersburg University, saw in the reforms at the start of Alexander’s reign ‘the introduction of constitutional measures’ into the Russian administration. ‘The wealthy serf-owning landowners are aghast at the thought that a constitution will abolish serfdom, and that the nobility will have to defer to the plebeians. The displeasure of the upper classes was universal’, he observed.26 Their displeasure was compounded in the anti-French atmosphere that set in after

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Tilsit. The whole notion of reform, increasingly associated with the West, was now beset by fear and confusion. As Alexander Martin has aptly observed, Russian nobles – from minor provincial landowners all the way to the imperial family – were bitter, perplexed and afraid. It became common to consider that Russia was distinct from the rest of Europe, that its greatness was inseparable from the institutions of absolutism and noble privilege, and that reform ideas from the west (especially France) were inherently un-Russian and tainted by their association with the French Revolution.27

The war of 1812, however, changed Russia in every way, including the nobility in both capitals and the provinces, where their personal involvement in forming militia detachments played such a vital part in defeating the French invaders. Even Napoleon must have been amazed to hear that, within the space of ten days, 620,000 armed men were enlisted, and ready to take to the field at a moment’s notice: that all Russian nobles capable of bearing arms were ready for battle, ‘and brought with them millions in gold to the altar of the fatherland’.28 Koshelev’s memoirs recall how the approaching conflict galvanized people into direct involvement in a national cause in which they were not merely ‘blind implements or pawns, but conscious and animated participants’.29 One contemporary, D. I. Zavalishin, stated, It is beyond any doubt that efforts to reform the structures of the state and society for the amelioration of our way of life, and the enhancement of our national self-worth . . . received their strongest stimulus from the war of 1812 and the ensuing years.

Zavalishin adds that Russia’s successful repulsion of Napoleon’s invasion was due ‘only to the independent action of the people and their nobility of spirit, regardless of the government, and in some way in spite of it’.30 The significance of the impact on Russian mentalities of 1812 was acknowledged, too, by the foremost radical literary critic of the 1830s and 1840s, V. G. Belinksii. He described the period from 1812 to 1815 as ‘a great epoch’ for Russia, three years which ‘without exaggeration’ marked the greatest progress in her history than in all the years that preceded them since Peter’s reign. He credited them not only for the country’s ‘external greatness and brilliance’, but also for its ‘internal success in citizenship and education’. Belinksii saw this era as a watershed which ‘aroused national consciousness and national pride, all of which generated the emergence of openness (publichnost’) as the basis of public opinion’.31 The events of 1812 and the years that followed played a highly significant role in a process described by Iurii Lotman as ‘the reconstruction of the consciousness of the educated Russian nobleman’, as well as providing a whole generation of young Russian noblemen with an experience of life, which would lead the ‘dreamy patriots’ of the early nineteenth century onto Senate Square.32 After 1812, Russian society became increasingly polarized between advocates and opponents of political and social reform. This is apparent from a letter written

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by S. S. Uvarov to the Prussian statesman Baron Karl von Stein in November 1813, three years after his appointment at just 24 as superintendent of the St Petersburg educational district, one of only six in the whole empire. In his letter, Uvarov complains that at the Ministry of Public Education he was unable to implement government policy ‘without sacrificing my honour, my views and my wellbeing’. This was no exaggeration, his letter continues, as he registers his dismay at the sudden shift in the outlook of noble society to rampant Francophobia and reactionary obscurantism, noting that the ‘current confusion of ideas has attained the most extreme proportions: Some want education without the risks, that is, fire that does not burn, while others – the majority – tar Napoleon and Montesquieu, French armies and French books with the same brush’, a loss of perspective which he described as ‘total madness’.33 The change was also remarked on by Karamzin in a letter he wrote from Moscow in June 1813 to I. I. Dmitriev, admitting that he ‘had wept on the way’ to the old capital, and had wept again when he arrived, confronted by the dreadful devastation. ‘Moscow is no more’, he lamented. It was not only the buildings that had been burned down:  ‘The very morality of the people has changed for the worse. There is a perceptible brutalisation (ozhestochenie). You can also see a kind of audacious behaviour (derzost’) that was not there before.’34 It was from this time that intellectual activity and political enquiry intensified, but it also marked the emergence in government and court circles of those conservative elements which ultimately gained the upper hand from around 1820. They embodied the widespread mood that Russia’s great victory in the ‘Patriotic War’ (Otechestvennaia voina) had restored national pride, and vindicated the political status quo. There was pride particularly in that victory’s main architect, Tsar Alexander I, and his indispensible agency as the main source of the army’s generals and entire officer corps:  Russia’s nobility. It was a pattern that history would see repeated in the ex post facto validation of Stalin and the CPSU consequent upon the USSR’s 1945 victory in ‘the Great Patriotic War’ (Velikaia otechestvennaia voina) over Hitler’s Third Reich. However, following Russia’s victory over Napoleon, the desire for emancipation grew in opposition circles and there were increasing calls for essential changes in Russia’s socio-economic structure. Richard Wortman reminds us that the post-Tilsit alliance with Napoleon and the economic costs of belonging to the Continental System had caused widespread dissatisfaction among the nobility. When the tsar addressed the Moscow nobility in August 1816, he adopted an admonitory tone, claiming that while ‘we saved Europe as well as Russia’, the noblemen should take care not to take credit for themselves, as this was the prerogative of God alone.35 Alexander’s warning reflects his anxiety that Russia’s victory over Napoleon was prompting expectations of political reform among certain sections of the nobility. This has led to claims that he was reluctant to rekindle memories of the Patriotic War because it was associated for him with a highly undesirable check on his own freedom and authority. As Timotheus von Bock, a Livonian nobleman who had been a confidant and aide-de-camp to Alexander during the war of liberation, wrote in an outspoken memorandum he sent to the tsar on 22 March 1818: ‘Why

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is it that the emperor loathes those who served their country so well in 1812? It is because they remind him of his own dishonour.’ As we shall see below, von Bock would pay dearly for his audacity with imprisonment, insanity and eventual suicide.36

Decembrist views of 1812’s impact on Russia’s nobility The detectable shift in public opinion and the heightened expectations generated by the outcome of Russia’s victory over Napoleon were frequently captured in the testimony and memoirs of the Decembrists. In a letter to his brother, N. I. Turgenev, a founder member of the Northern Society, contrasted conditions in Russia, ‘which I wouldn’t want to see in hell’, with those seen by many Russians in Europe, and deplored the plight of the ‘Russian people in slavery and humiliation’.37 He later recalled his return to Russia at the end of 1816 where he found that the impact on the public mind of very recent events, ‘or rather the agitation they provoked’, was palpable. He attributed the vigorous spread of liberal ideas throughout Russia to the return of Russian troops, ‘mainly in places where the armed forces were concentrated, and above all in St Petersburg’. People who had been away from the city for several years were very surprised by the changes they observed on their return in the way of life, the conversations and preoccupations of the young people of this capital city. Turgenev found this was particularly true of the Guards’ officers, who seemed not to care whether they were speaking in a public place or a private salon. He found it possible to judge the state of public opinion ‘in a despotic country like Russia, where the press is muzzled by censorship’, only from circulated manuscripts (an early form of samizdat) or overheard conversations, particularly as nobody suspected they were being spied on: at that time, he claimed, the practice was insignificant and hardly known.38 The Estland nobleman Baron A.  E. Rozen, who, although not a member of a Decembrist secret organization, participated in the 14 December uprising on Senate Square, recalled that for young Russian noblemen, particularly in the Guards’ regiments, the campaigns in Germany and France ‘were tantamount to an encounter with a new, enlightened world’. The influence of what he described as ‘gentler morals and a more philanthropic view on life in general’, gave many Russian officers a new perspective on the condition of their homeland. Young men who had spent most of their lives ‘in the monotony of remote Russian provincial towns’ suddenly glimpsed ‘on the banks of the Loire and Garonne a new and better world’. This revelation led ‘the flower of the guards’ officer corps to return home, resolved to transplant France onto Russia’.39 Rozen refers to the burning of Moscow, the losses sustained by the nobility and the merchants, and the complete ruination of the peasants as sufficient grounds for the government to focus on the internal state of the country, and the improvement of all aspects of domestic politics. ‘This circumstance’, as A.  I. MikhailovskiiDanilevskii (who was not himself a Decembrist) wrote in his memoirs, ‘serves to explain why many young men of honest parents, with good intentions, excellent

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conduct and having sacrificed their lives on the field of honour, in the end became terrible criminals.’ The Decembrist M.  A. Fonvizin, whose impressive military record included appointment as adjutant to General A. P. Ermolov and conspicuous gallantry at Borodino, testified to the Investigating Committee on 2 February 1826 that two postings abroad ‘revealed to me many political ideas which I had not previously heard of ’.40 They were to impel him to active participation in the Decembrist conspiracy, for which he was subsequently exiled to Siberia until 1853, the year of his death. In January 1826, Baron V. I. Shteingeil’, another veteran of 1812 who had joined the Northern Society in 1824 and participated in the uprising on Senate Square, wrote from the Peter-Paul Fortress to Nicholas I: ‘The year 1812 united everyone in one cause: to save the country and the throne . . . The monarch returned home to general rejoicing. It seemed to everyone that an era of internal reform was imminent. But it was not to be.’ Similarly, on 24 February 1826, less than five months before his execution for assassinating Count M.  A. Miloradovich on Senate Square, P. G. Kakhovskii wrote to Nicholas I: In 1812 immeasurable efforts were needed. The people gladly sacrificed everything to save the country. The war ended well for us, the monarch came home covered in glory, and Europe fell to her knees in gratitude before him. But what concession did the people get? None!

Kakhovskii was doubtless unaware that, in marked contrast to the Russian disappointment he observed and experienced, a Spanish statesman had recommended on 5 May 1814 the erection of a monument and the striking of a medal to honour Alexander I as the liberator of Europe.41 In an undated letter to Nicholas, the Decembrist poet A. A. Bestuzhev directly linked the origin of independent thought in Russia to the defeat of Napoleon. I.  D. Iakushkin, one of the founding members of the early Decembrist secret society the Union of Salvation, referred in the opening sentence of his memoirs to the significance of 1812 as a wake-up call to Russians: ‘The war of 1812 awoke the Russian people and marks a significant period in their political existence.’ In the 1870s, M. I. Muraviev-Apostol, amnestied in 1856 after thirty years in Siberian exile for his leading role in the Southern revolt of the Chernigov regiment, famously described his generation as ‘the children of 1812’.42 On 29 January 1826, the young Muraviev-Apostol had testified that the ‘first freethinking and liberal ideas’ he had were during his stay in Paris in 1814. ‘Until then I had no idea what a constitution was’, he confessed.43

The status quo in post-war Russia: Challenged but unchanged? The experience of 1812 and its aftermath utterly changed Alexander I, now overtaken by the increasingly fashionable mysticism which predisposed him to reactionary voices in his entourage. Chief among these was A. A. Arakcheev

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whose strictness, firmness of purpose and narrowness of vision reflected the main characteristics of the changed tsar himself. It is a well-known feature of the second half of Alexander’s reign that there developed a widening gulf between supporters and opponents of liberal reform. The former were heartened by the policies of the first years of Alexander’s reign, influenced by the West and wanted to see them developed and continued. The latter, ‘inert and ignorant’, to quote S. A. Korf, were opposed to any further changes, and even to those already achieved before 1812. It was to this outlook that the government yielded, so increasing the divide and paving the way for the events of 1825. The apparent liberalism of the reign’s first years disappeared underground and manifested itself in the secret societies in which only a small minority were caught up. According to commentators such as Korf, most people were too absorbed in their own careers and personal interests to involve themselves in the active pursuit of social or political alternatives. In St Petersburg, for example, as Korf points out, the nobility on the whole became increasingly identified with government bureaucracy and state service. Nevertheless, they moved in the circles which had by far the most contact with the West, and with its values and culture. This was particularly true of those officers who had experienced life in Western countries during the War of Liberation. There they had learned something about liberty, but now found themselves increasingly alienated at home. They, like the tsar, turned increasingly to mysticism in search of alternative spiritual and cultural lifestyles. While this tendency was perhaps not unique to Russia, nowhere else did it assume quite the proportions it acquired in the everyday life of the educated stratum of Russian society.44 The quest for self-improvement and social reform took on a new urgency in the years following 1812. In 1815 General P. D. Kiselev wrote his memorandum, ‘On the gradual abolition of slavery in Russia’, giving expression to a sense of impending change in post-war Russia which was reflected in N.  I. Turgenev’s comment that ‘after everything that the Russian people had done, that the emperor had done, that had happened in Europe, the abolition of serfdom should be a relatively simple step’. Kiselev was among those who believed in the possibility of reform from above. He spent several years alongside the tsar and he had some basis for believing in his reformist intentions, since Alexander would talk quite openly to him. It was not an unusual position for the time: there were a number of Decembrists who believed that serfdom would end ‘by the will of the tsar’. However, within six months of Alexander’s Warsaw speech (March 1818), such hopes were fast fading. Kiselev needed no convincing that there was much that needed changing. Realizing this, he did everything in his power to attempt to make improvements, at least in the Second Army of which he was chief-of-staff. Nevertheless, he was averse to radical change, convinced that everything should happen gradually.45 However, the question of serf reform (as we saw in Part V) was an issue that impinged too closely on the jealously guarded interests of the nobility. There were many conservative landowners who considered the mere mention of social reform tantamount to revolution. On the other hand, there were those who, like N.  S.

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Mordvinov, while conservative on the question of serfdom were more liberal on matters of politics. Hence the widespread discussion of constitutional reform in the early post-war years as reaction set in, reflected in the pages of the periodical press, in journals such as Dukh zhurnalov and Syn otechestva. Literary societies, such as Arzamas and the Society of Amateurs of Russian Literature, were also actively engaged. A number of their members explored and spread ideas about constitutionalism, and the possible forms it might take in Russia in close association with plans for serf emancipation. Such activity peaked in 1818 as did expectations of reform from above. But the political climate was to change markedly with Alexander I’s stance at the Congress of Aix-la-Chapelle (Aachen) in the autumn of that year, where the tsar further elaborated his 1815 Holy Alliance project with the proposed creation of a league of sovereigns: they were to guarantee not only each other’s borders, but also each other’s top-down constitution-based regimes.46 Reaction, both in foreign and domestic policy, was now inexorably in the ascendancy.

Censorship and ideological pressure Symptomatic of the reactionary shift and the tightening of control from 1818 was the government decree of 1 August 1822 ordering the closure of Masonic lodges and all other secret or secretive societies. The authorities were alert to the danger of growing opposition among sections of the nobility, and tended to associate this development, for the most part erroneously, with Masonic lodges. While it is true that of the six founders in 1816 of the first Decembrist secret society, the Union of Salvation, five were members of the ‘Three Virtues’ lodge, Masonic lodges were rarely hotbeds of radicalism.47 Rather, since the last decades of the previous century they had been providing their members with premises where, in the informal surroundings of a club, they could explore the social and political questions of the day through discussion and ritualized ceremony. Nevertheless, the 1822 decree now required nobles to sign a declaration of non-membership of such closed societies and, from this time, a whole gamut of secret police organizations sprang up in the army, the Guards regiments and on the military settlements. The secret agent now became a characteristic feature of Russian society.48 An anonymous commentary, dating from somewhere between 1815 and 1820, on the threat of subversion and the need for strict censorship reflects the growing tensions in Russian society in the last decade of Alexander’s reign. Its author refers specifically to a ‘diabolical gang’ in the navy which was allegedly attempting to foment unrest among the lower ranks against the government. It identifies its ringleader as one Golovnin, and recommends placing him under the secret surveillance of government agents. Furthermore, it warns against granting permission to graduates of Moscow University to set up publishing houses like N. I. Grech’s, since ‘nothing good can come of this’. Rather, ‘it would be altogether

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better for the government to buy up all private presses or simply ban them’. It recommended that this should be done by degrees, ‘to avoid provoking vacuous conversations and conclusions’. At all events, ‘there should be a robust system of censorship, overseen by a committee of individuals worthy of the government’s trust, without whose scrutiny nothing should be published’. This is essential, in the anonymous commentator’s view, because ‘the current level of censorship is inadequate’. He concluded by insisting that ‘the correctness of this view is confirmed by actual experience’.49 There were, nevertheless, champions of free speech at this time. Among them was N. S. Mordvinov, who considered such freedom the mark of a civilized society. He was especially convinced of its need in the arena of justice which, in his view, could not exist without it. He liked to cite Catherine the Great’s dictum that to fear expressing one’s opinion brings ‘great sadness to the state’; the danger of banning ‘harmful’ books was that ‘minds would feel oppressed’; it was a policy that ‘would lead only to ignorance’ and ‘remove the desire to write’ altogether.50 Whatever views Mordvinov may have had about the clear discrepancy between the empress’s own words and actions, he presumably kept to himself. The early years of Alexander’s reign, at least up until 1812, saw a relatively liberal censorship regime administered by the Ministry of Public Education. The first censorship regulation dates from 9 June 1804, and was the work of the Unofficial Committee. It entrusted the scrutiny of publications intended for general distribution to censorship committees made up of university professors and graduates. Its terms of reference were fairly general, but it intended to ban works which were ‘against God’s law, the government, morality, and the personal honour of individual citizens’.51 Contemporaries hailed the new law as a welcome departure from Paul’s rigorous regime, while some historians have deemed it the most liberal statement of censorship policy in the history of Russian legislation. The shift towards greater control was prompted by the worsening international climate created by fear of Napoleon, when in December 1808 the censorship laws were tightened to prevent the publication of ‘articles containing political news and opinions’. In Grech’s words, censorship which had been ‘noble and tolerant’ now became ‘strict and petty’.52 This tendency was reinforced with the establishment in 1811 of a new Ministry of Police under A. D. Balashov, St Petersburg’s former chief-of-police. He effectively eclipsed Count A.  K. Razumosvkii’s Ministry of Public Education and assumed responsibility for ensuring that the public remained ‘safe from books open to harmful interpretation or otherwise likely to disturb the peace’.53 These included works of French literature, references to Napoleon, whether as ‘ally’ or ‘antichrist’, and to constitutions generally. Following Napoleon’s downfall, censorship became even stricter and more arbitrary. This was particularly so from 1817, following the appointment of A. N. Golitsyn as head of the newly formed Ministry of Spiritual Affairs and Public Education. He promptly instructed censorship committees ‘not to pass anything relating to government business, without first seeking the approval of the ministry concerned’. Moreover, they were to exercise particular vigilance in relation to texts primarily of interest to the younger generation, especially students, and to the

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slightest indication of political dissent. Such actions, to quote the author of the classic study of the ministry, ‘formed the basis of a multitude of censorships’.54 In the event, Golitsyn was to be outdone by M.  L. Magnitskii, that ‘tireless persecutor of liberals in education’, and the most ardent proponent of the new intolerance. Magnitskii declared: ‘the word of man is the transmitter of the infernal force of eighteenth-century philosophy, and the printing press is its instrument’. It was Magnitskii who proposed a highly invasive system of censorship designed largely to stave off the threat of revolution spreading from the West. Fortunately, other views prevailed. The religious conservative A.  S. Sturdza drafted an alternative censorship regulation which was considered to differ from Magnitskii’s in its ‘softness, tolerance and absence of fanaticism’. This was the contemporary view of academician M. I. Sukhomlinov, who saw the aim of censorship simply as ‘an indicator of the harm or harmlessness of a particular book, but in no wise its critic’. Neither of these two projects was adopted, however, and censorship was eventually reformed following the appointment of A.  S. Shishkov in May 1824 to replace A.  N. Golitsyn as minister of education. The regulation he drew up appeared in the following reign, on 10 June 1826.55

G. M. Iatsenkov and Dukh zhurnalov versus the censor An 1867 collection of materials for the history of Russian censorship in Alexander I’s reign gives an idea of the randomness of its application.56 A case in point is the stir caused by a new periodical, ‘Spirit of the Journals’ (Dukh zhurnalov), which started publication in 1815. Its editor was G. M. Iatsenkov, described in the title of a recent article about him as ‘a perfectly ordinary Russian individual in the service of the Emperor and enlightenment’.57 In fact, Iatsenkov was born into the Ukrainian nobility, but as a young boy was sent by his father to Moscow to become one of the first pupils at the university’s newly opened Boarding School for Nobles. He went on to spend twenty years as a lecturer in Moscow University’s philosophy faculty where his particular strengths were in classical and modern languages and literature. In 1804, Iatsenkov was appointed to the St Petersburg censorship committee and thus began a fifteen-year stint as a censor. It proved to be a role in which he enjoyed taking a characteristically laissez-faire approach, making a number of controversially liberal decisions that were subsequently reversed by his colleagues. Dukh zhurnalov was a digest of the best recent writing on political, social and economic topics in a wide range of European periodicals, now made available to Russian readers. These included the Journal des Débats, Mercure de France, Hamburgisches politisches Journal and The Edinburgh Review. It also reproduced the statutes and constitutions of other countries, including the ‘Constitution of the North American United States’, as well as the major speeches of Russian statesmen, including Alexander’s 1818  ‘constitution’ speech, and the speech (discussed in Chapter  10) touching on serf emancipation given by the Ukrainian governor Prince N. G. Repnin to the noble assemblies of Poltava and Chernigov that same

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year. Its editorial thrust has earned the journal the apt description as Russia’s first sociopolitical periodical. It is, therefore, hardly surprising that during its six-year run, Dukh zhurnalov was constantly at loggerheads with the censor, allowing editor Iatsenkov to demonstrate an unusual ability to combine simultaneously the conflicting roles of both poacher and gamekeeper. Even the advertisement announcing the journal’s launch did not go unnoticed:  it prompted a letter of 23 November 1814 from Minister of Police S. K. Viazmitinov to Minister of Education A. K. Razumovskii, expressing concern at the periodical’s intention, as stated in its prospectus, to publish articles ‘about the internal state of Russia’, including both ‘her great abilities and advantages, as well as some shortcomings and abuses’. For Viazmitinov, any such intention was ‘completely inappropriate’, given that matters of this kind are ‘the preserve of the government itself, and cannot possibly be open to the public judgment of individual persons’. He strongly urged Razumovskii to investigate, and to alert the censors to the appearance of the first number of this potentially subversive publication. Razumovskii duly wrote to S. S. Uvarov, curator of the St Petersburg educational district, who also happened to be his son-in-law, ordering him to ban the publication as necessary, to reprimand censors who displayed insufficient vigilance and to urge the censorship committee to scrutinize carefully future issues of Dukh zhurnalov. Just a few months later, on 29 April 1815, an indignant Viazmitinov complained to Razumovskii about an issue of Dukh zhurnalov. Curiously, the offending article in question was an apparently innocuous history of Catherine the Great’s attempts to reduce the price of staple goods. However, the minister of police deemed it potentially subversive, since it was ‘full of judgments which are not only utterly stupid and nonsensical, but also impermissible, audacious and likely to exert a harmful influence on public opinion’. Razumovskii replied with an assurance that the censorship committee had received a strong reprimand for allowing its publication, as well as a directive to exercise greater vigilance in future. The following July, Razumovskii was once more obliged to write to Uvarov about Dukh zhurnalov, because it had now published an essay by Jeremy Bentham, implicitly critical of the Russian government’s economic policy. The fact that Bentham’s articles were printed and marketed in Russia was no excuse, Razumovskii argued. Rather, it was the duty of Russian journalists to avoid selecting from them views potentially critical of government policy, ‘much less present them as the irrefutable truth’. He warned that henceforth censors who continued to give the green light to the ‘wrong’ publications would be subject to summary dismissal. Razumovskii’s successor, A. N. Golitsyn, also complained to Uvarov about Dukh zhurnalov. On 6 September 1816, he wrote to him deploring the appearance of ‘many political articles not in the spirit of our government’. He particularly objected to its publication of ‘Letters from America’, a series of articles which had appeared throughout the year, featuring news from America in highly sympathetic terms. In his view they contained ‘extremely unseemly observations about the government there as compared to others’. He urged Uvarov to see that the periodical changed its tune if it wished to avoid being closed down. He went on to identify by name

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one serially incompetent censor, apparently unaware of any conflict of interests, as it was none other than Iatsenkov himself! He was ‘to be avoided at all costs’, while one solidly dependable censor, Tikovskii, should be exclusively entrusted with task of monitoring Dukh zhurnalov. Despite Golitsyn’s confidence in Tikovskii, further ‘indecencies’ followed. An article in issue 48 bemoaned the difficulties of posting a letter in the capital city from its one central office which had only limited opening hours. It was followed in the third issue of 1817 by a suggestion that all police sentry-posts should be fitted with a mail box. The editor added the injudicious comment that this scheme, apart from being expensive to implement, would give rise to ‘the suspicion that written correspondence between private individuals was subject to police surveillance’. It did not help that this theme was developed in the context of an unfavourable comparison of St Petersburg’s postal system with London’s, in one of a series of articles under the rubric ‘Latest Journeys’. It was unfortunate for Iatsenkov, too, that Golitsyn’s own powers of surveillance were unrivalled. On 28 January 1817, he wrote to Uvarov once again warning him that any further encroachment made by the journal on strictly government business would result in its immediate shutdown. As we saw in the previous chapter, the continued publication of articles appearing to question government policy, especially as regards serf reform, would cause Dukh zhurnalov by the end of 1820 to suffer the eventual implementation of Golitsyn’s threat, with the publication of its final issue on 13 December. In the circumstances, the surprise is that it lasted as long as it did.

The censors’ intensified post-war vigilance The objections made by government officials to the editorial decisions of Dukh zhurnalov confirm the authorities’ reliance on censorship to ban the discussion of public affairs, such as the policies of the ruling elite, including taxation and other economic measures. From 1817 the publication of excerpts from judicial proceedings was also banned, and from 1824 – which John LeDonne calls ‘the year of the great repression’ – judicial statistics on murders and suicides were added to the censors’ index. In that year, too, government officials were forbidden to publish anything relating to the exercise of their office, and no information about the catastrophic flood in St Petersburg that November was published until a year after the event. Consistent with this clampdown, in 1825 Arakcheev successfully petitioned the tsar to have any printed reference to the military colonies banned. It all amounted to creating in Russian society, in LeDonne’s apt characterization, ‘a command structure incapable of resisting the exercise of arbitrary power’.58 An official view of the growing need for censorship is contained in a memorandum of 25 January 1816 from Minister of Police A.  D. Balashov.59 He maintained that this important control system had developed in response to the increasing number of works imported from abroad, ‘which might have a harmful influence on public opinion’. The ministry was particularly interested

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in scrutinizing books of a historical, political and even fictional (romanicheskii) character. The memorandum concludes with a number of questions about the parameters of the ministry’s censorship remit which give some sense of the minister’s own uncertainty as to what degree of openness might be deemed acceptable. This is understandable since censorship in Russia has always varied in its strictness according to the political exigencies of the day. In the 1816 memorandum under discussion, the following moot points were raised: up to what era of Russian history is any negative mention of her rulers, or of her ministers and other prominent figures permissible? The same question applies to ‘historical events’ generally. As to very recent history, should false or distorted accounts of major battles, for example, Austerlitz and Eylau, be forbidden? Should general insults directed at all Russians be permitted, especially those in French publications, where they are variously described as ‘cruel barbarians’, ‘slaves’, ‘drunkards’ and so on? Evidently, concerns about ‘fake news’ have a long history. The final question in the list asks whether ‘articles on the necessity of abolishing serfdom should be permitted as they are bound to have a strong influence on public opinion’. With respect to the last query, the fact that the minister sought specific guidance indicates that the issue of serf reform was certainly a matter of public debate by the beginning of 1816, and not only in the emergent Decembrist secret societies. F.  F. Vigel’ recalled that in the years immediately following Napoleon’s defeat, and especially after the occupation of Paris, ‘everyone spoke out boldly, even immodestly, whatever they wanted: it was the most opportune time for the spread of free-thinking’. But he noted that measures taken from 1820 onwards reflected a much stricter government stance, ‘in response to clearly audacious actions’.60 Censorship, social control and the imposition of pressure to conform are associated above all at this stage of Russian history with the name of A.  A. Arakcheev. In his memoirs, L.  N. Engel’gardt recalled that there was a marked turn for the worse following Alexander I’s return from the Congress of Troppau in December 1820, convened that October to assert the right of the Holy Alliance to intervene in support of the ruler of any state threatened by an ‘illegal’ change of government. From this point on, ‘vigilant watch was kept on authors and journals to ensure that nothing was written about constitutions or matters of government’. Engel’gardt associated this shift above all with Count Arakcheev, who now ‘took a firm grasp on power’, and whose ‘harsh and cruel nature incited the hatred of all Russians’. Among them were the hapless peasant-conscript inhabitants of the military colonies which, as Engel’gardt noted, in 1817 were set up in Novgorod, Belorussia, Voronezh and Khar’kov provinces, ‘as a result of which disturbances took place, especially in protest at the compulsory shaving off of beards; but order was restored through the use of severe measures’.61 Another contemporary, A. K. Gribbe, has described the Arakcheev years as ‘an iron age of gloom and cruelty’, beneath whose blows ‘almost the whole of Russia groaned’. For Gribbe, it was the gratuitous and arbitrary violence that was the worst feature of the Arakcheevshchina, ‘the dark days of Arakcheev’: ‘There were beatings in the army, in schools, in towns and villages, on market squares and in

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stables; there were beatings also in family circles, where it was deemed an essential method of instruction.’62 For N.  I. Turgenev, the government’s paranoia in its quest for security and social control at times attained grotesque proportions. He cites the bizarre case of a blind Englishman who, having decided to undertake a round-the-world trip and publish his description of it, visited St Petersburg, travelled across Russia and reached Siberia. There he was taken for a spy, and an order was promptly received from St Petersburg for the hapless traveller to be escorted to the border. The incident of the blind English spy was, in Turgenev’s view, evidence that ‘at that time there was no one who was above our government’s suspicion: it expelled even those who sought to spread religious propaganda in the remote regions of the Empire, seeing in them agents of European liberalism’. Turgenev was quite clear about the consequence of such pervasive control: ‘It was our political system that was to blame for making secret societies essential.’63 The fate of Karamzin’s phenomenally successful History of the Russian State offers a further example of increasing control. In 1816, General A. A. Zakrevskii halted its printing at the military press on the grounds that it had not been passed by the censor, despite it having received the personal approval of the tsar. In fact, Alexander had declared himself Karamzin’s sole censor, and allocated funds for its publication without any further interference.64 There were passages of the Imperial Historiographer’s work that contemporary readers found refreshingly candid. V. I. Shteingeil’ was pleased to note that volume 10 of the best-selling history described Ivan the Terrible’s reign with ‘all the horrors of unlimited autocracy’, and that it was now possible for ‘one of the great tsars to be openly called a tyrant’.65 We find further comment on Karamzin’s frank treatment of Ivan IV in a minute of a public meeting of the Imperial Russian Academy, held on 8 January 1820. It is attached to a letter of 26 January from I. I. Dmitriev to P. A. Viazemskii, and suggests that Karamzin had little to fear from the censor. According to the minute, the audience had ‘the ineffable pleasure of listening to several passages from the ninth volume of the History of the Russian State read by the author himself ’. His account of the gradual change in Ivan the Terrible’s character, his cruelty and oppression, was ‘met in the auditorium with profound silence, emotion and even tears’. The mood quickly changed, however, when Karamzin was presented with a gold medal to tumultuous applause, making for ‘an unprecedented and unforgettable day in the Academy’s annals’.66 A further instance of heightened vigilance dates from 1824 when, ironically, M. L. Magnitskii, the scourge of Kazan’ University, himself fell victim to it. At the end of 1823, he had sent the censorship committee anonymously a manuscript entitled ‘Some words about constitutions’, which was in fact an attack on them. However, the title was enough to deter its chairman and his patron, A. N. Golitsyn, from reading any further. Its publication was duly banned on the grounds that ‘it was deemed neither necessary nor helpful in a state with an autocratic form of government to discuss constitutions’.67 This was breathtaking double-think on Golitsyn’s part since, being among the tsar’s most intimate associates, he must have known that Alexander was still showing an active interest in them, as we

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saw in Chapter 8. Magnitskii’s own form of censorship would attain third-degree proportions when, as governor of Simbirsk, he organized book-burning events in the town square. Here, works by Voltaire and other eighteenth-century philosophes, which the governor had once read and admired himself, were consigned to flames at his instigation by local noblemen, members of the Simbirsk Bible Society which had been established as another of Magnitskii’s initiatives as governor.68

Social control and the secret police: Some case files The archives of the secret police contain the criminal files (ugolovnye dela) of those noblemen who fell foul of the authorities at this time and who, in most cases, suffered more serious consequences than the blind Englishman in the bizarre case cited by Turgenev. Some examples will give an idea of the range of activities which were deemed criminal. They include the relatively trivial case of Colonel Grabbe who, early in 1822, was accused of insubordination and, on the basis of reliable reports, ‘relayed inadmissible information, and had links with a gang of people whose motives were highly suspect’. He was ordered to proceed to Iaroslavl’ and to remain there. Another case is the two-year investigation into an allegation of insulting comments about the tsar made by a landowner, L. M. Shmarov. The unfortunate Shmarov was reported by a teacher named Vasil’ev of the Riazan’ parish school on 30 May 1816. The file was closed, however, without any apparent result, on 26 April 1818. Also dating from May 1816 is the case of Lt. Nashchokin of the Jäger Regiment of Lifeguards, exiled to Tula province for unspecified ‘indecent acts’. In this case, before any investigation had even started, the disgraced nobleman was ordered by the tsar to be discharged from his regiment and sent to his estates, ‘such that he never dares to leave them’. In one sad case dating from July 1818, a father seeks to use the social control provided by the state to discipline his own son for his ‘debauched behaviour’. Provincial secretary Nikolai Nebol’sin, the report runs, despite his father’s ‘care and gentle admonition, blindly and shamelessly indulges in all kinds of vice, intolerable either in the family or in society’. On these grounds the father asks if it might be possible for his son to be imprisoned in the fortress for six months. The outcome of this desperate petition is not recorded.69 Among the more serious of these cases is that of State Counsellor V. N. Karazin whose offence, apparently, was to write a plea for the legal rights of property to be developed and extended in line with the ‘general principles of monarchical government’, and in the interests of the ‘genuine welfare of the people’. In addition, he imprudently declared an interest in ‘supporters of the so-called rights of man in England’, among the ‘most perceptive’ of whom he cited the ‘remarkable’ John Locke, the Enlightenment’s father of liberalism, and author of the 1690 treatise on government which Karazin had read in French translation.70 Although close to Alexander early in his reign, when Karazin had played an important role in education reform and was instrumental in setting up a

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university for Ukraine in Khar’kov, their relationship had never been an easy one. Karazin was too open in expressing views on a variety of matters, including serf emancipation, which proved to be too radical for Alexander’s liking. In fact, as we saw in Chapter 10, Karazin’s view of the landlord-serf relationship was traditionally patriarchal. He was also a declared opponent of constitutions, maintaining that ‘any concept of representation arising from the people (narod) is completely against the spirit of religion, which loudly declares: “There is no power other than from God” ’.71 Despite all this, however, for his alleged response to the Semenovskii Regiment’s mutiny in March 1820 (an inflammatory leaflet was found in the barracks of the Preobrazhenskii regiment and somehow attributed to Karazin) he was placed under police surveillance, and then in November for this latest display of frankness he was arrested and sent to the grim fortress of Shlissel’burg, thirty-five kilometres to the east of the city on Lake Ladoga. Released after six months, he was banished to his estates in Khar’kov province, Ukraine, where he was ordered to remain indefinitely. Only in November 1826 was he allowed by Nicholas I to leave them, five months after interrogation by the Investigating Committee into the Decembrist affair with which Karazin himself could have had no connection.72 What was particularly poignant, even ironic, about Karazin’s fate is that at the time of his arrest he had just proclaimed in the pages of Grech’s Syn otechestva his confidence in the long-awaited emergence of freely expressed public opinion, and credited the tsar for facilitating this. His article is an account of the annual assembly of the Russian Academy, and it concludes thus: I will long remember this extraordinary day. It confirms for me that public opinion is developing in Russia, and the dark clouds (mraki) of centuries past cannot now return . . . All praise to you, great sovereign, before whose face such discussions can take place!73

Karazin’s arrest and disappearance from St Petersburg prompted some interesting comment in the correspondence at the time between P. A. Viazemskii and A. I. Turgenev. In a letter of 1 December 1820, the latter reported that Karazin had been arrested and taken off to an unknown destination, ‘apparently for some letter to the tsar’, implying that it was probably no more than he deserved. In his reply from Warsaw of 7 December, Viazemskii objected strongly to his friend’s implication, and had no hesitation in describing Karazin’s treatment as a ‘flagrant and intolerable example of arbitrary rule (samovlastitel’nost’)’. For Viazemskii, ‘any reign in which one can be punished without a trial is akin to the reign of Paul’. If Karazin were a criminal, he wrote, then he should be tried and sentenced accordingly.74 Chastened by Viazemskii’s rebuke, Turgenev responded on 21 December, explaining that he was imputing only Karazin’s ‘behaviour and character’, but that ‘as a European’ himself he was horrified by the authorities’ action in arresting him. The affair was clearly a topic of continuing conversation in St Petersburg, as Turgenev comments

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on the ‘current torment of the ignorance of Karazin’s family as to his fate’. Karazin’s wife was said to be receiving news from him every day, but without knowing where from.75 Commenting on the Karazin case in 1908, N. K. Kul’man reflected, The fate of V. N. Karazin in the reign of Alexander I is a total enigma: unusual closeness to the tsar for the first few years of his reign, then coldness, distance and alienation on Alexander’s part, culminating in persecution, arrest in 1820 and six months incarceration in Shlissel’burg fortress. Finally, exile to Khar’kov province and police surveillance. And all this is shrouded in some kind of fog which to this day no published documents can disperse.76

However, Kul’man effectively answers his own question when, later in the same article, he says of Karazin that ‘facts are facts and Karazin’s lack of caution went beyond tolerable limits’.77 The difficulty for Karazin and other independent-minded nobles in their dealings with the tsar was that they did not fully understand what constituted ‘tolerable limits’ until they had exceeded them. And by then it was too late. Karazin’s disgrace bears striking parallels with the fate of another former favourite of Alexander I, Timotheus von Bock.78 Born into a wealthy Livonian landowning family in 1787, von Bock proved himself a most effective soldier in Russia’s war against Napoleon and by 1813, aged 25, was already a highly decorated colonel of the Hussars. In 1815 he became personally acquainted with the tsar and was appointed one of his aides-de-camp. According to one source, the tsar often invited von Bock to meet him for a chat and, apparently impressed by his aide-decamp’s candour, asked him to swear always to tell him the truth.79 In March 1816, von Bock unexpectedly resigned his commission to focus on ‘domestic matters’, though his real motive was more likely his growing dissatisfaction with Russia’s political and social structures. In order to contribute somehow to their reform, he set to work on a constitutional manifesto to present to the Livonian provincial noble assembly, the Landtag. An avowed opponent of state control who deplored the absence of legal regulation (zakonnost’), he declared that the ‘eradication of these evils is my life’s purpose’.80 However, von Bock’s brief friendship with the tsar was to no avail when in 1818 he sent the acting Minister of Police S. K. Viazmitinov for onward transmission to Tsar Alexander, a sixty-page ‘memorandum’, dated 22 March. In it, with suicidal frankness, he told the emperor precisely what he thought of him, and his ‘despotic form of rule’ in general. ‘Lies and flattery have suffocated Russia:  she can only be saved by the truth’, he thundered in his covering letter. Although von Bock’s original intention had been to read his manifesto to the Livonian Landtag, it was perhaps his foolhardy sense of honour to his oath always to speak the truth to power that he took the fateful step of sending it first to Alexander. It must be deemed unlikely, given the unsparingly ad hominem attack it contained, that von Bock held out any real hope that it would facilitate a fruitful dialogue with the tsar about the constitutional and social renewal of Russia. Instead, his decision to proceed in the way he chose effectively sealed his fate.

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Predictably enough, Alexander responded just weeks later from the Crimea with an angry letter to the governor-general of the Baltic provinces (Livonia and Courland) Marquis F.  O. Paulucci. He declared that von Bock’s ‘impermissible audacity’ proved that he was dangerously mad and should therefore be incarcerated forthwith. Paulucci dutifully echoed his master’s verdict. In a letter to the tsar from Riga of 27 May, he remarked that one of von Bock’s notebooks, entitled ‘Reveries’, ‘contains proof that Mr Bock proposed to draw up a project for a constitution for the whole empire’. His report continues, ‘An ignorant man, he presumed to give as an infallible oracle his principles, comprised of contradictory phrases and tirades’, and concludes, ‘All this permeates the writings and the behaviour of Mr Bock, which gives rise to the conviction that his mind is in a state of total derangement.’81 Von Bock was promptly arrested and sent to Shlissel’burg where, immured in the prison’s notoriously harsh conditions, despite the bizarre mitigation of them by the tsar’s gift to his prisoner of a grand piano, over the next five years he became totally deranged. Perhaps, as a musician himself, Alexander recognized the solace a piano might afford the talented pianist von Bock was known to be, thereby assuaging in some way his subconscious guilt towards a fellow player.82 Despite von Bock’s insanity, no doctor was allowed access to him. Instead, orders were given for the hapless prisoner to be restrained by straitjacket as and when necessary. This may have been because Alexander wanted to maintain the strictest secrecy about his prisoner’s location, or because he could not bring himself to pardon him for his audacity. Either way it was a conscious, deliberate, calculated act of cruelty which had the most tragic consequences for von Bock. All the same, von Bock’s fate was known to many in St. Petersburg, including his close friend, the poet V. A. Zhukovskii, as well as the Turgenev brothers and Viazemskii.83 On 10 May 1827, Nicholas I  finally released von Bock into the care of his family, a few days short of his ninth anniversary in custody. Having signed an undertaking not to leave his estate at Voisiku for any reason, he was allowed to return to his home village in Livonia, where he was to remain under the supervision of the local authorities. Von Bock never fully recovered from the mental derangement and the physical deterioration brought about by his ordeal, but his devoted wife cared for him assiduously until his death in 1836 from a selfinflicted gunshot wound, suffered while he was reloading his pistol during target practice. Individually, the cruel fate of Timotheus von Bock was a personal, family tragedy and a reminder that there were boundaries which in Alexander I’s reign members of the Russian nobility crossed at their peril. It is perhaps hardly surprising, then, that his was not a unique story. Much the same fate befell G. F. Raevskii, who was arrested and sent to Shlissel’burg in 1822, aged only seventeen. He was the younger brother of the ‘first Decembrist’, V. F. Raevskii, an officer in the Second Army also arrested in 1822 for ‘unbridled free-thinking’ and spreading liberal ideas among his fellow officers.84 Grigorii’s concern for his brother was enough to make him a suspect by association. Held in solitary confinement, like von Bock, he soon lost his mind. He, too, languished in his cell until he was

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released at the same time as von Bock, in 1827, and, like him, ‘into the care of his family’.85 V. F. Raevskii blamed Arakcheev for the oppressive political climate in which his brother and many others suffered: ‘Arakcheev’s iron, blood-soaked claws made themselves felt everywhere’, he wrote of this period. ‘Service became stressful and irksome.’86 The miserable fates of Karazin, von Bock, the Raevskii brothers and many others illustrate the egregious inconsistency shown by Alexander I  in handling homegrown critics of the regime in Russia after the defeat of Napoleon. It is well known that, by contrast, he turned a blind eye to the many and detailed reports he received about the spread of the Decembrists’ secret societies and their liberal agenda from around 1818 onwards, culminating in 1825 with those of I. V. Shervud (July) and A. I. Maiboroda (November). Such reports implicated a number of his favourites, including his aide-de-camp and Second Army Chief-ofStaff General P. D. Kiselev, and they named several Guards officers well known to him personally, yet he took no action. In contrast, on the basis of similar reports, other individuals, unconnected with the secret societies, were promptly arrested on the tsar’s orders and immediately packed off to the Peter-Paul Fortress or the even grimmer fastness at Shlissel’burg. There are many well-rehearsed theories about Alexander’s inconsistency. They include the suggestion that he was haunted by the memory of his connivance at the assassination of his father, Emperor Paul; that he could not bring himself to order the wholesale arrests of those who shared his own social milieu in various court circles; or of those who were enthused by the same ideas of social and political reform which, from early in his reign and even before it, he had as a child of the Zeitgeist frequently expressed himself. Perhaps, for some reason he simply chose selectively to disregard what he was told – most notably in the case of the future Decembrists. It is most likely a mixture of all these suggestions which lies behind the inscrutable psychopathology of the ‘enthroned Sphinx’. To conclude, the individual cases cited here were by no means isolated, and together illustrate the risks run by those who chose to express political or social views which deviated from received orthodoxy. They also tell us something about Alexander’s capacity for the callous treatment of his subjects. The von Bock affair in particular remains without question a shameful episode from which Alexander I  emerges with little credit. It contrasts sharply with a widely held view of his reputed kindness and gentleness as man and ruler, epitomized, for example, in the judgement of a contemporary British observer and founder in 1813 of the Moscow Bible Society, Robert Pinkerton: It may truly be affirmed of Alexander I., that he never inflicted a wound, even upon the guilty, with the one hand, without pouring into it oil and wine with the other. He ruled the Russians with unprecedented mildness, which made many worthless characters presume on his lenity.87

However, Alexander’s cruel treatment of many nobles suggests that he regarded their impertinent expressions of alternative points of view about the future

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development of Russia’s political and social structures as potentially intolerable threats to his own exclusive status as autocrat and tsar. His harsh response to that perceived threat finds Alexander I falling far short of the ‘angelic’ status and title his immediate family was pleased to confer on him after his defeat of Napoleon, and which they were to reiterate with even greater insistence after his unexpected death in November 1825.

Chapter 12 T H E S O C IA L A N D P O L I T IC A L C U LT U R E OF THE DECEMBRISTS

This chapter analyses the changing nature of the ‘European’ generation of Russia’s nobility post 1812 and considers the self-aware nobleman as an individual pitted against the state. It unfolds in the context of the growing opposition to the government in some quarters and focuses on the social and political culture of the Decembrists. It concludes with an assessment of the scale of the support the conspirators commanded among the wider nobility.

The post-1812 generation: The emergent Decembrist fronde I ended 1824 in the happiest way possible: in the morning I would spend a couple of hours working, then I would read for a while, and in the evening I would play cards. In November, the ball season got underway so I gave several parties at my house attended by over fifty guests. I particularly like this style of life, all the more so because in it I find complete independence.1

This revealing entry in A. I. Mikhailovskii-Danilevskii’s diary underlines the selfawareness of the liberated individual as he structures his daily life in St Petersburg towards the end of Alexander’s reign. Its emphasis on personal autonomy and elective social interaction suggests a world far removed from the prescriptive conventions of the military and court circles in which Mikhailovskii-Danilevskii otherwise moved. Members of his generation found their own ways of expressing their individuality and shaping their own outlooks in the Arakcheevshchina years:  despite its best efforts the regime was unable to prevent the formation of public opinion. They did so as members of literary salons, philosophical discussion circles (kruzhki), readers of ‘thick journals’ and, especially, at least until the closure in 1822, of secret societies and Masonic lodges. The latter’s phenomenal growth, particularly during the second decade of the nineteenth century when they were tolerated by the government, did much to accustom the Russian nobility to the concept of secret societies.2 In turn, the distinction between literary salons and secret societies became increasingly blurred, as N. I. Turgenev remarked,

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Given the existing state of affairs in Russia, in the absence of any kind of openness, even the most innocuous gatherings are easily taken by impressionable people for secret societies. This is how public opinion views even purely literary groups (kruzhki) of people concerned exclusively with literature, who spend their time at closed meetings in friendly and relaxed conversation.

Turgenev himself found such literary circles generally rather frivolous. He sided with his friend, General M. F. Orlov, when he suggested to members of one group that intelligent people should not be wasting their time on such trivia as literary disputes when the state of their country clearly required their active involvement in promoting the welfare of society. Orlov urged them to put aside their childish pursuits in favour of nobler challenges.3 The drive towards self-improvement and greater educational attainment took other forms at this time. For example, Lancaster Schools of mutual instruction designed to combat illiteracy became fashionable, and large numbers of them were opened in the army, in towns and on nobles’ estates.4 Similarly, membership of the Bible Society became not only fashionable but almost compulsory. This new-found preoccupation with the study of scripture, more reminiscent of Protestantism than Russian Orthodoxy, was promoted by A. N. Golitsyn with the enthusiastic support of Alexander I himself. It seems to have provided the government with a means of channelling potentially dangerous interest in social initiatives into less threatening charitable and educational activity.5 In an essay on the Russian nobility, Marc Raeff has rightly cited this period of its history as ‘the critical period of the nobility’s inner liberation from the state, the “privatisation” of its members, and the beginnings of their alienation from the establishment’. He reminds us that it was in Alexander I’s reign that it first became possible in Russia to establish private associations dedicated to the pursuit of literature, scholarship, art and generally broad cultural enterprises. He accepts Iurii Lotman’s view that the common property of the Decembrists’ generation was not so much their various and somewhat hazy ideologies as a shared lifestyle: one which stressed the individual’s responsibility for leading a creative and useful life, committed to the service of society.6 The tension between the Decembrists’ generation and the government was given brilliant literary expression in Alexander Griboedov’s 1825 play, ‘Woe from Wit’ (Gore ot uma). In drawing the portrait of its hero, Chatskii, Griboedov pinpointed the main stumbling blocks: Chatskii rebels against accepted forms of social intercourse and the nobility’s traditionally craven subordination to state and service. Alexander Pushkin was among the first to read the play in draft, in January 1825, prompting his famously accurate prediction that half its lines would soon become Russian proverbs. Difficulties with the censorship delayed its St Petersburg première until 1831, two years after its author’s death, and six years into the new reign. The first two decades of the nineteenth century had seen the spread of enlightenment ideas of legality, representative government and the guaranteed

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rights of the individual, all of which were in marked contrast to Russia’s autocracy and serfdom. As Janet Hartley observes, by 1825 ‘the lives of Russian nobles, even the poorer and provincial ones, had undergone more change than any other group in Russian society’. This transformation comprised their occupations, education, lifestyle, cultural perceptions and even their physical appearance.7 Yet, by the last years of Alexander I’s reign, the government had aroused the discontent and opposition of a significant section of the younger nobility, even those among them who did not approve of secret societies or their methods. These were the so-called ‘Decembrists without December’ (dekabristy bez dekabria). Among them were the Turgenev brothers, Viazemskii, Griboedov and, in a sense, Pushkin himself. They were to play a significant role in shaping the cultural identity of the educated noble elites in subsequent decades, as we shall see in the last section of this chapter. Writing about the emergence of the ‘private individual’, E.  N. Marasinova asserts that the emancipation of noble culture was defined less by the development of class self-awareness as by the appearance of the independently thinking individual. It was the ‘private person’ who spearheaded the formation of public opinion and the freedom from higher control of social life. Moreover, such ‘private persons’ were to be found among the parents of the Decembrist generation. For example Major-General P. I. Ivashev, a Simbirsk nobleman and father of Southern Society member V. P. Ivashev, created at home a particular cultural quality which reflected ‘the existence of the intelligentsia’ of the Russian provincial nobility at the turn of the nineteenth century. He fostered the personal development of his wife and children, particularly their literary, artistic and musical education. He created a literary and philosophical salon in his home, providing a forum for a stimulating exchange of views. What was unusual about this for the time was that the standard authoritarian patriarchal set-up was replaced by an ambience in which the aspirations and opinions of others, women and children included, were not only tolerated but actively encouraged.8

Individual paths to dissidence An illustrative case study of the emergence of the independently thinking individual as a product of noble culture’s emancipation under Alexander I  is that of S.  G. Volkonskii (1788–1865). He was a leading member of the Southern Society who spent thirty years in Siberia until permitted to return to European Russia with his noble status restored by Alexander II’s 1856 amnesty. Born into Russia’s privileged elite, Volkonskii enjoyed all the advantages of his class, was appointed an aidede-camp to the tsar, and moved in court circles. However, persuasive peer-group pressure brought him to an elevated state of romantic patriotic fervour which soon estranged him from them. This is readily apparent from the description he gives in his 1862 memoir of the influence exerted on him in particular by M. F. Orlov in whose apartment he then lodged. This is how Volkonskii’s apologia reads:

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Living with so remarkable an individual as Mikhail Orlov, and the circle of people with whom I  had daily contact, had an enormous influence on me. They developed in me the idea of being a citizen (chuvstva grazhdanina), and I embarked on a new path of convictions and actions. From this time a new life started for me. I embarked on it with a proud sense of conviction and duty as a citizen, and with a firm resolve – come what may – to fulfil my duty solely out of love for the fatherland. My chosen path led me to the supreme criminal court, to Siberia, to forced labour, and to thirty years of life in exile.9

His awakening to the notion of a civil society which he would seek to promote was a shared reaction against ‘the vacuous life of St Petersburg’s drawing rooms, and the square-bashing of military garrison life’. Instead, he felt, his energies should be applied to the kind of civil action and involvement that would ‘bring Russia to the level of civil society which obtains in Europe in those states based not upon the power of despots but on the rights of the individual and of peoples’. When military action ceased, Volkonskii took some leave and enjoyed a ‘gap year’ travelling around Europe. While in London he was afforded access to the House of Commons by his host, General Sir Robert Wilson, who was elected member of parliament for Southwark in 1818. A leading figure of His Majesty’s opposition, Wilson had served in Russia during the Napoleonic Wars and was in Moscow during Napoleon’s brief occupation of the city in 1812.10 It was now in London that ‘the freedom of speech and assembly, and the parliamentary debates made a notable impression on the 24-year-old Russian general’.11 Well over forty years later, Volkonskii recalls the euphoria that suffused him and his co-conspirators at the prospect of what they might yet achieve: ‘My recruitment to the secret society was met with joy by the other members, and from that moment I  became a passionate member of it. I  say in all conscience that in my own eyes I fully understood that I was embarking on the noble pathway of civil action.’ Apart from the apologia quoted above, Volkonskii does not say much about his reasons for becoming a Decembrist. But in a revealing remark about his state of mind after the declaration of Poland’s constitution, Volkonskii said he had then started to wish ‘that the fatherland would move forward out of the muddy rut of its insular way of life’.12 Equally revealing is the account of his generation’s political awakening given in his memoirs by A. P. Beliaev, an officer in the Marine Guards (Gvardeiskii ekipazh) who participated in the Decembrist uprising. He recalled that numerous secret societies drew up constitutions ranging from moderate monarchist to radical republican, ‘so that in the years from 1820 to the death of Alexander I, liberalism became the property of every remotely educated individual’. Beliaev no doubt overstates the case in his nostalgic retrospection, and as the author himself of the constitution of the ‘Society of Marine Guards’ (1824), but his idiosyncratic recall quite clearly conveys a sense of the prevailing mood among his young associates in the early 1820s: ‘We all dreamed of a republic, we all imagined that golden age of national assemblies where there reigned ardent love for the fatherland, freedom limited by nothing and no-one apart from the law, and the complete welfare of the people.’ He and his peer group had in mind the examples of Greece, Rome, France

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and America, ‘where the public squares were alive with meetings of the people, of free, noble, and virtuous republicans, where before our eyes there emerged old and new Brutuses to defeat despotism’.13 In a further evocation of the political climate at this time, another memoirist, A. I. Koshelev, recalls the anti-government mood which dominated conversations in the early 1820s. ‘I will never forget one evening I spent, as a young man of 18, at my cousin’s, M.M. Naryshkin, in February or March 1825.’ Here he enjoyed the company of the Decembrists K. F. Ryleev, E. P. Obolenskii and I. I. Pushchin. Ryleev read his ‘patriotic Dumy’ and they all talked of the urgent need ‘d’en finir avec ce gouvernement’.14 The writer D. N. Sverbeev recalled that as a youngster he was ‘fairly indifferent to the great ideas then current of liberty, equality and fraternity’ but ‘liked on rare occasions to show off [his] liberal pretensions’. He describes one such occasion which nearly cost him his liberty. This was when, as a final-year student at Moscow University, he was introduced by a relative, P. A. Kikin, to the ‘old obscurantist’, Admiral Shishkov. Shishkov asked Sverbeev to tell him how many estates (sosloviia) there were in Russia. ‘I had the audacity to reply: two – despots and slaves.’ Both Shishkov and Kikin were shocked and immediately ordered the hapless Sverbeev home, threatening to have him sent to the Peter-Paul Fortress. Knowing the tsar’s reputation, Sverbeev really did fear arrest for his political incorrectness: ‘Alexander I, for all the splendid qualities of his heart, did not leave unprosecuted a single display of extreme liberalism and was in the habit of cutting off, sometimes with a lengthy prison spell or exile, those whom he considered to be opponents of his supreme power.’ In the event, Kikin implored Sverbeev not to ruin himself, and not to damage the reputation of the already compromised Moscow University. Kikin undertook to settle matters with Shishkov, who was vexed and irritated in the extreme by your audacious response. You do not realise the times we are living in and what the consequences of yesterday’s event could have been if word of it had reached the sovereign or, even worse, Arakcheev.15

Sverbeev’s account reflects the growing engagement of many of his generation with the issue of Russia’s political future in post-Napoleonic Europe. As one contemporary was later to recall, ‘Already in 1818, young people were forming secret societies in Moscow, then in St Petersburg, and in several other provinces. Some of these societies were known to the Emperor, but he derided them, and made no further enquiries. Nevertheless, the spark smouldered.’16 The mood of radical reformism which this ‘spark’ represented and which developed in the last decade of Alexander’s reign grew, as Theodor Schiemann neatly put it, ‘from a noble seed’, which ‘in any other conditions apart from those prevailing in Russia could have produced noble fruit’.17 However, due to the secretive atmosphere fostered by the tsar himself, well-intentioned and noble reformers turned into revolutionaries who saw in the overthrow of the state the only real means of improving an intolerable situation.

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In 1816 just such a group emerged around A. N. Muraviev, his cousin N. M. Muraviev, and Prince S.  P. Trubetskoi, all of whom were aged around twentyfive. Together they formed the earliest Decembrist secret society, the Union of Salvation. Among their initial grievances against Alexander I was his rumoured preference for foreigners and widely reported disdain for Russians. Other prominent members were three officers of the Semenovskii regiment: the brothers S.  I.  and M.  I. Muraviev-Apostol, and I.  D. Iakushkin. Together they proposed campaigning among Russia’s nobility to submit a petition to the tsar calling for the emancipation of the serfs. To cite Schiemann again, ‘it shows how little these young men knew Russia’.18 Nevertheless, the emergent secret societies were a significant, if supposedly covert, feature of the political landscape of the last decade of Alexander I’s reign. They marked the first attempt in Russia to realize the notion of a political party opposed to government by tsarist autocracy. This point has prompted one commentator to acknowledge the Decembrists as the ‘founding fathers of the political culture of the new Russia’.19 In October 1817 there was considerable excitement among the Guards regiments, assembled in Moscow for a special parade to mark the laying of the foundations of a church on the Sparrow Hills in celebration of Napoleon’s retreat five years earlier. The stir on that occasion was generated by numerous rumours. These were fuelled, among other sources, by a letter written from Warsaw by S. P. Trubetskoi claiming that Alexander was planning to add the former Polish provinces in Russia, Livonia and Little Russia (Ukraine) to the Kingdom of Poland. In Russia itself, the tsar’s decisions to grant the Poles a constitution and to emancipate the serfs in the Baltic provinces were regarded as nothing short of insults to national pride. The conclusion some drew was that the tsar was giving his preferred patronage to foreigners:  both his actions and rumoured intentions were widely seen as a betrayal of the fatherland, to the extent that there was even talk of ridding the country of him. It was in this climate that phrase-mongering became more extravagant and liberal posturing more ostentatious, as reflected also in poetry, prose and personal correspondence. At a deeper level there was only a modicum of resolve and genuine ability as shown in very different ways by P. I. Pestel’ and N. I. Turgenev, who undeniably had the courage of their varying convictions. However, the kind of threat against the person of Alexander I  as that expressed in 1825 by A. Z. Muraviev was not to be taken seriously as he, like most other members of secret organizations, was totally incapable of taking any drastic direct action. This was certainly the contemporary view of P.  A. Viazemskii, who considered that the alleged assassination plans amounted to nothing more than wild talk and fanciful written draft. In his opinion, there was not one conspirator who would actually have dared to execute the deed.20 His position is contradicted, however, by Kakhovskii’s murder of Miloradovich during the uprising on Senate Square, for which the assassin was hanged along with the four ringleaders of the conspiracy. A prominent witness to such extravagant phrase-mongering was General P. D. Kiselev (1788–1872), for seven years the chief of staff of the Second Army. At its Ukrainian HQ far away from St Petersburg in Tul’chin, a garrison town 250

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kilometres southwest of Kiev, Kiselev was on imprudently friendly terms with several of his younger officers. They included such members of the Decembrists’ Southern Society as P. I. Pestel’, A. P. Iushnevskii and I. G. Burtsov, ‘the flower of the officer corps of the Second Army’.21 Remarkably, a total of thirty-six officers of the Second Army under Kiselev’s command were named as members of the Decembrists’ secret societies in the list (or ‘Alphabet’) drawn up by A. D. Borovkov, secretary to the Investigating Committee.22 Kiselev effectively saved some members of the Southern Society from arrest by conniving at the destruction of the list of the conspiracy’s members found among the papers of the ‘first Decembrist’, V. F. Raevskii, following his arrest in February 1822. It is, however, a measure of his ambivalence that Kiselev also took steps to reassign some of those officers implicated in the affair.23 It suggests that while he gave no real credence to the unbridled talk among his officers, he was equally careful to protect his own position. At that time political discussions among those who had shared the same campaign experiences were not taken anything like as seriously as they would be after 14 December 1825. Kiselev’s dilemma was a divided loyalty both to the powers-that-be and to those who were planning to take action against them. Kiselev came from a cultured family of the middling nobility (srednepomestnye dvoriane) whose parents’ house was frequented by conservative and liberal nobles alike, such as N. M. Karamzin, P. A. Viazemskii and A. I. Turgenev. However, Kiselev was not quite the radical the Decembrists thought he might be when they named him as a member of the future provisional revolutionary government. In fact, he remained an adherent of enlightened absolutism, of gradual change which took due account of the interests of the nobility. All this would explain his reluctance to pursue his officers, despite the best efforts of the Second Army’s secret police (which, paradoxically, Kiselev himself was responsible for establishing!) to incriminate them and secure their arrest. Kiselev, much like Alexander I  himself, instinctively recoiled from wilder expressions of Russia’s possible political future. Yet he remained intrigued by such talk, taking little action beyond monitoring it. Ultimately, Kiselev managed to satisfy Nicholas I that he had never been a member of the Decembrists’ Southern Society and, although he avoided disgrace, he was reassigned. He was later recalled to command during the 1828–9 Turkish war and over a long and distinguished career was to serve three emperors. In the light of this particular example, and of many others relating to ‘invisible’ Decembrists, it is hard to deny the view of one Russian commentator: ‘There would never again be a time in the history of the Russian revolutionary movement when so many informal networks would link future victims, executioners, aiders and abettors.’24

Defining and quantifying ‘Decembrists’ The Decembrist conspirators, described by the liberal Moscow historian P.  N. Miliukov as the ‘critically thinking minority’, represented only a tiny fraction of

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the Russian nobility as a whole. One recent estimate reckons that the insurgents on Senate Square were drawn from no more than thirty of Russia’s noble families.25 They succeeded, nevertheless, in staging a coup d’état in the guise of a military insurgency. In this sense, their attempt went well beyond the eighteenth-century palace revolutions in which typically the noble guards’ regiments would assume the role of the Praetorian Guard in order to precipitate a change of ruler, as had happened most recently in March 1801.26 By 1825, the conspiracy’s leaders were determined to take advantage of the nobility’s privileged estate and of the unforeseen dynastic crisis to demand by force of arms a constitution and political rights, including the legal right to participate in the state’s administration as a ruling class. As George Vernadsky aptly suggested, ‘The psychology of the Decembrists was that of officers of a victorious army, who in the wake of their victory felt both entitled and obligated to participate in government (vlast’) and in support of that government.’27 Two immediate questions arise: In whose name did the instigators of the coup d’état believe they were acting? And how large was the Decembrists’ constituency? One answer to the second question, at least, was suggested by the contemporary conservative journalist, N. I. Grech, in his customary acerbic style: Officers fell into two unequal halves. The first, the liberals, consisted of educated aristocrats; they were the minority. The rest, the majority, were just time-servers [sluzhaki], simple and straightforward souls who did their duty without making any demands.

However, Grech pays more attention to what he defines as the ‘minority group’, describing it thus: The liberal aristocrats were preoccupied by European matters and intrigues, especially political ones, read the latest books, prattled about constitutions, dreamed about the welfare of the people while at the same time looking down with pride and scorn on their plebeian comrades. Amongst the latter were no few braggarts who had neither a mind of their own nor a sound education behind them, and so repeated the phrases of people with high ideals while clinging on to the hope that in time Pestel’ or Sergei Muraviev [-Apostol] would give them their due and admit them to their circle.28

A fuller picture than Grech’s caricature is drawn in an important 2004 article by the Russian historian, P.  V. Il’in. It highlights the leading role played by the liberal nobility in the history of reform in Russia during the reign of Alexander I.29 While accepting the usual historical shorthand term ‘Decembrist’ for its foremost representatives, in common with many post-Soviet historians, he questions the precise significance of the term. Another recent discussion of terminology finds that there is still no agreement about who precisely should be categorized as ‘Decembrists’, or even about the origin of the term itself, which many commentators ascribe to Alexander Herzen’s initial usage in 1842.30

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Such uncertainty echoes the Decembrists’ own. I.  D. Iakushkin stubbornly refused the descriptor ‘Decembrist’, even though he was sentenced ‘in the first category’ to hard labour for life for his part in the conspiracy from its outset as a founding member of the Union of Salvation. He insisted that it should be reserved exclusively for those who had actually participated in the uprising. M. A. Bestuzhev, who was on Senate Square on the 14th, signalled his acceptance of Iakushkin’s narrow definition in 1869, meaning that there were by then only two other ‘genuine’ Decembrists still living, A. P. Beliaev and A. E. Rozen. The obvious difficulty with Iakushkin’s purist approach is that it would exclude so many outstanding figures, notably P. I. Pestel’, the leader of the Southern Society, who was arrested the day before the uprising but subsequently executed for his key role in the conspiracy. Il’in is particularly wary of the conventional usage of the term ‘Decembrist movement’ (dvizhenie dekabristov), as is evident from his placing it in inverted commas whenever he deploys it himself. At the core of this terminological issue lies the question of the definition of ‘Decembrist’, which in turn determines the precise number of those who might be identified as such, as either ‘visible’ or ‘invisible’ Decembrists, and therefore the scope of the support for reforming Russia towards the end of Alexander’s reign. The question is not new. It was raised 20 years earlier by the present author in his 1984 biography of K. F. Ryleev, when the historiography of the Decembrists was dominated by what Il’in and other Russian revisionist historians now routinely dismiss as the ‘distortions’ of their Soviet predecessors. The relevant, and in my view still valid passage reads as follows: There is indeed a sense in which the term ‘movement’ (dvizhenie) is too formal a description to be applied to the Decembrists. In view of its variegated, heterogeneous, albeit exclusively upper-class character, it is perhaps more appropriate to speak of a phenomenon which caught up in its embrace many of the most progressive, talented, and imaginative individuals of the day.31

Il’in questions the uncritical assumption made by generations of Russian historians, including those of the Soviet era, that A. D. Borovkov’s 1827 ‘Alphabet’ (Alfavit) of the members of the Decembrist secret societies was exhaustive and therefore conclusive. He argues that, on the contrary, Borovkov’s list of those involved in the secret societies and uprisings is in fact both incomplete and imprecise, and to regard it as the most authoritative source for the extent of Decembrist membership is therefore unjustified (72–3). Furthermore, it is methodologically too arbitrary to confine membership of Decembrists secret societies to those named in the final verdict of the court: the net should surely be cast much wider through recourse to a variety of other sources, including memoirs (75–9). In doing so himself, Il’in indentifies an additional thirty-four ‘unknown’ Decembrists by association, not listed by Borovkov, and suggests that there could well be others, including a further twenty-eight involved to a greater or lesser extent in Decembrist organizations (81).

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Interestingly, as prisoners under interrogation, the Decembrists themselves named hardly any sympathizers or fellow travellers. There is little doubt, however, that there were a number of well-connected and highly placed individuals who could reasonably have been so described.32 Decembrist plans for the new government envisioned the possible inclusion among others of Kiselev, Mordvinov and Speranskii. According to V.  I. Shteingeil’, Speranskii was made aware of the conspirators’ intentions by one of their number, G. S. Baten’kov, his personal assistant. On 27 November 1825, the day the oath of loyalty was sworn to Constantine, Baten’kov implored Speranskii to help them save Russia from ‘another hundred years of slavery’. But Speranskii protested that he was in no position to do anything of the kind.33 It all led Il’in to conclude that there was still a significant sifting of sources to be undertaken in order to reconstruct ‘the history of the interaction of government with Russian society in the first quarter of the nineteenth century, the history of the nobility’s opposition in the 1810s and 1820s, the birth of the liberal idea, and the activation of the reformist political tradition in Russia’ (83). The four lacunae Il’in identified here in 2004 were filled five years later with the landmark publication, frequently cited in these pages, of T. V. Andreeva’s enormously detailed and extensive work, running to over nine hundred pages, on secret societies in the first third of the nineteenth century and their interface with government policy and public opinion.34 Il’in enlarged still further on the theme of quantifying ‘Decembrists’ in his own similarly extensive and detailed 2004 monograph. This represents the most comprehensive tally hitherto attempted of the numbers and names of those involved in, or connected with, the Decembrists’ sixteen secret societies and the military uprisings on Senate Square and in the south of the empire, in December 1825 and January 1826, respectively.35 Particularly pertinent are the book’s two appendices. The first of them (582–9) lists a total of 470 names in seven categories. They range from 141 named individuals sentenced by the supreme criminal court or by court martial, to 99 freed without punishment, 43 acquitted and 26 who died before the Investigating Committee had run its course in June 1826. Many of those Il’in lists were not included in Borovkov’s 1827  ‘Alphabet’ since this seminal document took account only of those who were tried by the Investigating Committee and sentenced by the supreme criminal court in July 1826. In his autobiography, Borovkov himself cites a total of 189 dealt with by the Investigating Committee. Of these, 121 were referred to the supreme court; 57 to ‘corrective punishments’ (ispravitel’nye nakazaniia) of up to four years in prison, to be followed by transfer from Guards regiments to the army, or from the army to some remote garrison; and 11 were released. The figure does not include a ‘very large number’ of those freed during the investigation, either by the committee or the tsar himself, nor those insurgents who were not members of any secret society and who were dealt with by military tribunals.36 Il’in calculates that no less than 204 of those arrested were in one way or another exonerated by the investigation process (574). He further concludes that a ‘fairly significant group of participants in the “Decembrist movement” ’ succeeded in evading arrest and punishment altogether (579).

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The second appendix (602–43) lists as members of the Decembrists’ sixteen secret societies a total of 716 names, many of which do appear in more than one list. They include the earliest organization, the 1814 Order of Russian Knights, with just 12 members, and the largest, the Union of Welfare (January 1818 to January 1821), with 193 associates. In March 1821, the Union of Welfare split into the Southern Society (131 members) and the Northern Society (110 members). The last secret organization to be formed, early in 1825, was the Practical Union (or Society) which numbered 11 members. Il’in’s research shows that the true extent of subscribers to the Decembrist platform, the actual number of those who consciously engaged with it, or who were in some way and to some degree sympathetic to it, exceeds by some margin the self-limiting confines of Borovkov’s ‘Alphabet’. A  telling example is given in his memoir by D. I. Zavalishin, who asserts that in Moscow even its archbishop, Filaret, knew of the existence of a ‘liberal party’ and was aware of its aims with which he broadly sympathized, as did many who were ‘considerably less curious and perceptive’ than he was. Zavalishin adds that in the Moscow circle of GovernorGeneral D. V. Golitsyn, ‘where there were many secret society members, it was all talked about quite openly’.37 In the aftermath of the failed uprisings, and the conviction and sentencing of those found guilty of participation in them, Nicholas I’s government was understandably concerned to play down the true extent of the ‘Decembrist phenomenon’. It is equally understandable that, as a loyal civil servant, Borovkov would have stuck resolutely to his brief, avoiding any risk of seeking on his own account to achieve an exhaustive inventory of the Decembrists’ associates in the wider community of the liberal nobility. At all events, it was no doubt deemed politically expedient to ignore the claim made to the Investigating Committee by A. A. Bestuzhev (Marlinskii) for the likely extent of sympathy among the Russian nobility for the Decembrists’ platform: ‘Almost one in three Russian nobles thought the same as we did, but they were just more cautious than us.’38 Bestuzhev here also provided an answer to a question apparently posed by Pushkin in the following exchange: ‘Who was on the square on 14 December? Only noblemen. How many will there be at the next outbreak? I don’t know, but many it would seem.’39 Commenting on the strength of the Southern Society, Zavalishin claims that it was ‘extraordinarily strong’ in the Second Army where even Chief-of-Staff Kiselev displayed his ambivalence by hosting discussions of Pestel’’s republican constitutional project, ‘Russian Justice’ (Russkaia pravda). With due allowance for his well-known tendency to exaggerate, Zavalishin maintains that the entire artillery section of the Third Infantry Corps was made up of members of the Society of United Slavs, a group affiliated to the Southern Society, and in some cavalry regiments ‘every officer to a man’ was a member of the latter. Yet for all this ‘enormous strength’, Zavalishin concluded in exasperation, it ultimately led nowhere because, just as in the north, ‘its leadership was politically incompetent’. In this regard, Zavalishin reserves particularly harsh criticism for Pestel’.40 The early Soviet authority on Pestel’, S. N. Chernov, found that Kiselev, while sharing many of the Decembrists’ ideas, had little confidence in their ultimate

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success. He therefore chose not to risk his career by any closer involvement with their secret society.41 In this respect, Kiselev was not alone. General A. P. Ermolov, commander in the Caucasus from 1816 to 1827, numbered among his closest friends the playwright A. S. Griboedov, who in turn had many Decembrist friends, and may well have been, as M. V. Nechkina has insisted, a member of their secret societies. Griboedov was among those rounded up for questioning in connection with the uprising, and when an equerry reached the Caucasus with a warrant for his arrest, Ermolov gave his friend the chance to destroy potentially compromising documents. The general evidently knew of the existence of the secret societies and warned at least two of their members, P.  Kh. Grabbe and M.  A. Fonvizin, that Alexander I knew about them too. Furthermore, we learn something of Ermolov’s own attitude to secret societies from a letter he wrote to A. A. Zakrevskii in the summer of 1819: ‘I have many times been invited to join a masonic lodge. I do not deny that they are entirely estimable, but as a simple man I take the view that a society with a positive goal has no need to be secret.’42 This was no doubt a view shared by many a ‘simple man’ among the nobility of the day. The government was also aware of the extent of the ‘pernicious spirit of free thinking’ among the army’s high command. While he was still Grand Duke, Nicholas was especially suspicious of Ermolov. He had serious doubts about the loyalty of the commander of the Caucasus, and then, during the tense weeks of the interregnum, he received a report – apparently based only on rumours – to the effect that Ermolov was plotting against him in his bailiwick.43 The examples of Kiselev and Ermolov give some idea of the extent of the Decembrists’ network, but also of the difficulty of defining that extent with any precision. Such uncertainty is reflected, too, in a remark in the memoirs of F. F. Vigel’, who recalled that in the days following the uprising it was thought ‘that the number of conspirators against the government far exceeded the number of rebels seized on the day of the revolt; there was talk of them being rounded up in the provinces and being brought under guard to St Petersburg. We’d never seen anything like it before.’44

‘Decembrists without December’ It is the case that not all those arrested in connection with the Decembrist-led uprising were willing participants on the day and had no idea of its leaders’ aims and intentions. A graphic reminder of this simple fact may be found in the memoirs of M. F. Kamenskaia, the daughter of Count F. P. Tolstoi, an artist and sculptor. She clearly remembered the morning of 14 December 1825 when, as an eight-year-old girl, she was accompanying her father along the streets (liniia) of Vasilievskii Island, only to learn that ‘something wrong’ was happening just across the Neva on St Isaac’s Square. Retreating to the safety of their house, from where the noise of cannon and musket fire was distinctly audible, they were soon joined there by frightened soldiers of the Finland Regiment. They had fled the scene and now sought shelter in the courtyard of Tolstoi’s house on Third Line. They now told Tolstoi that

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they had gone to the square not to rebel but to swear a loyal oath to the new tsar, Constantine. When Tolstoi explained to them that Constantine had in fact abdicated his right to succession some years before, they realized that their officers had tricked them. Tolstoi tried to persuade the soldiers to surrender to their commanders and managed to get them to leave his house. Kamenskaia notes that the soldiers’ eventual destination was uncertain, but there were rumours that they made for Golodai Island where ‘they were rounded up like hens’. Apparently, however, for the well-meaning count this was not the end of the affair. That same evening he was taken to the Peter-Paul Fortress for interrogation by Grand Duke Michael, though not in relation to the episode of the Finland Regiment’s refugees but because he had some weeks earlier entertained K.  F. Ryleev and A.  A. Bestuzhev at his house. Fortunately for Tolstoi, his plea of innocence was accepted, and any lingering suspicion dispelled totally when he was invited to act as a marshal at Alexander I’s funeral.45 A further indication of the involuntary participation of lower ranks in the uprising is the eyewitness account of the staff-quartermaster of the Life-Guard Cavalry Regiment, Baron V. R. Kaul’bars. He saw several officers of the Moscow Regiment trying to prevent their subordinates from swearing the loyal oath to Nicholas. They also turned on their commanding officer, General Baron P.  A. Frederiks, and their divisional commander, General V.  N. Shenshin, wounding them with blows from their unsheathed sabres.46 In his assessment of the extent of the Decembrist ‘phenomenon’, Marc Raeff rightly observes that an important aspect of the changed political climate after 1815 was the rise in interest in social and political questions, as reflected in discussions of specific topics in journals and reviews. Foreign books and newspapers were fairly widely available and found interested readers. It is no misnomer, then, to speak of ‘Decembrists without December’ in referring to cultivated members of civil society who, without going so far as to join secret societies, tried to contribute actively to the material progress of the nation. They included such individuals as Viazemskii, Orlov and the brothers of N.  I. Turgenev. To judge by the work of Griboedov and the biographies of Pushkin and other writers of the period, the ‘Decembrists without December’ or active dissidents must have formed a large and brilliant group.47 Raeff may well have had in view the remark made by Union of Welfare member, M. A. Fonvizin, a retired major-general and veteran of Borodino, to the effect that ‘at that time many General Staff and Guards officers studied political articles and read foreign newspapers which gave dramatic accounts of the opposition’s struggle with constitutional states, among which they wished to see Russia numbered’.48 To take a specific example, in M.  S. Vorontsov’s corps (Vorontsov was commander of the corps of occupation in France between 1815 and 1818) there served a number of progressively minded officers. Almost a third of the future participants in the anti-government secret societies emerged from it, while in France many officers joined the ‘Russian club’ in the northern city of Maubeuge organized there in 1816 by S. I. Turgenev, who was asked to write a constitution for it.49

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Raeff ’s point is taken a step further by S. A. Ekshtut, who argues that it would no doubt be a breach of historical truth as well as an oversimplification to suggest that dissatisfaction with the policies of Alexander I  and criticism of him was heard only from members of secret societies or from the so-called ‘Decembrists without December’. The situation was in fact much worse than this. By the end of Alexander I’s reign, the feeling that the country had gone down a dead end and could not continue as before was shared not only by the pillars of autocracy but even by members of the Imperial Family, as they sensed an approaching crisis and feared its inevitable consequences. Indeed, Ekshtut finds that the political mood among the elite at that point was well described by Zavalishin, who wrote, All the stories and scandalous anecdotes which undermined Alexander’s former popularity came from people who were far from belonging to the ranks of so-called liberals. But at the same time, these ‘establishment figures’, these ostensibly loyal insiders, had no idea of the impact their tales were having on the purest and sincerest young minds and hearts, and how much they were arousing their indignation and turning them to liberal aspirations and revolutionary ideas.50

It is generally agreed that among the most striking of those categorized as ‘Decembrists without December’ was the literary critic and aspiring poet, Prince P. A. Viazemskii. His spirited poems called for the emancipation of the serfs, most notably: ‘Indignation’ (1820), ‘St Petersburg’ (1824) and ‘The Russian God’ (1828). V. A. Divov, one of those arrested for his participation in the uprising on Senate Square, responded to his interrogators’ question about the influences that had led him there by citing the ‘freedom poems of Prince Viazemskii’.51 Viazemskii frequently expressed his despair at the backwardness of life in Russia, particularly the lack of freedom of expression, as for example in his letter to A. I. Turgenev of 30 January 1821: ‘There is, of course, a thinking society in Russia, but it is a society of the deaf and dumb . . . All intellectual activity happens in secret.’ He goes on to describe himself as trapped between ‘two fires’, figuratively burning in St Petersburg and Moscow, respectively, that is somewhere between the ‘stumbling blocks of a fully European or a fully Asiatic outlook’. His ‘malaise’, he concludes, ‘grows not daily but hourly, and my whole life consists only of indignation.’52 Viazemskii belonged to that echelon of the independent-minded, liberal and critical-thinking nobility whose views may well have been aligned with those of the Decembrists, but who never sought, or indeed actively avoided, membership of their secret societies. There were a number of its members with whom Viazemskii collaborated for a while, such as K. F. Ryleev and A. A. Bestuzhev, editors of the remarkably successful though short-lived literary almanac, ‘Polar Star’ (Poliarnaia zvezda), or the poet V.  K. Kiukhel’beker. However, M.  F. Orlov was the only Decembrist to figure among his closest friends. If anything, Viazemskii, who apart from a few weeks in 1812 had never served in the army himself, was quite dismissive of the young officers who comprised the largest contingent of secret society members. This is apparent from his unflattering characterization of their

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political mindset:  ‘The heads of the military youth went mad with excitement. This excitement was fuelled by the intoxicating champagne they drank at their posts in 1814.’ Viazemskii describes it as a kind of ‘infectious disease’, or ‘a French sickness’, which Russian officers brought back with them from the West: ‘These future reformers trained by day at their riding schools and by night at the ball.’ Viazemskii had a decidedly low opinion of the very notion of a secret society. By temperament he was opposed to directives and control, whether exerted by government officials or leaders of secret societies. As to the idea of being recruited to one, he wrote, ‘I have always said that no honest man should ever join a secret society. Belonging to one means the enslavement of your own free will to the secret will of its leaders: a fine preparation for freedom indeed which starts by enslaving yourself!’ His assessment of those who actually joined the secret societies was equally contemptuous and suggests that, for all his independence of mind, Viazemskii himself could hardly be classed as an ‘invisible’ Decembrist:  ‘The majority of secret societies contain a large proportion of dimwits, and otherwise a few either ambitious or ill-intentioned people.’ Nevertheless, after the arrest and conviction of the Decembrist insurgents, Viazemskii thought some of the charges brought against them highly dubious, particularly the most serious of these:  regicide. Even so, given that his name cropped up several times during the six-month trial of the conspirators, he was fortunate not to be summoned before the Investigating Committee himself. As it was, he remained a suspect individual for Nicholas I who observed, ‘The absence of his name from this affair proves only that he was cleverer and more cautious than the others.’53 Also frequently identified as typical representatives of the ‘Decembrist tendency’ are the three Turgenev brothers, Alexander, Nicholas and Sergei. Although never a member of the conspiracy, Sergei considered himself a ‘revolutionary’, but one with an unconventional perception of revolution. He was not a supporter of revolution in the ‘fateful’ meaning of the word: ‘May God preserve me from wanting this sort of revolution for Russia, that is the sudden kind that occurred in France’, he wrote, explaining that he understood revolution in Russia to mean:  ‘progressive changes for the good of all’, which should take place, ‘slowly, step by step, under the government’s direction, with the citizenry doing only what they could for it’.54 In fact, however, one of the brothers, N. I. Turgenev, was much more than a ‘Decembrist without December’, although it is true he was in Western Europe on the day of the uprising in St Petersburg. Not only was he a member of the Union of Welfare, but also a founder member of the Northern Society, and duly listed as such in Borovkov’s ‘Alphabet’.55 Although he was in self-imposed exile in London and Paris well before 1825, he was implicated in the conspiracy, tried and sentenced in absentia (he refused all orders to return to Russia to face trial) to hard labour for life. According to the writer and memoirist D. N. Sverbeev, many Decembrists were aghast at Turgenev’s apparent break with the secret society and blamed him for failing to return to Russia to share their fate. Sverbeev, however, conceded that it would have been quixotic of Turgenev to have done so.56

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Turgenev’s liberal economic views, particularly his linking of a successful economy with political liberty, brought him close to N. S. Mordvinov who, from 1816 to 1818, was head of the Department of the State Economy of the State Council. Turgenev continued to work during 1819 and 1820 on social and political issues. They included the constitutional alternative to absolutism, where the powers of the monarch would be limited by law, as in Britain, thus guaranteeing proper order in the rule of the state. This was a position shared by the Decembrists’ Northern Society.57 Turgenev’s own account of his association with the early pre-Decembrist secret society, ‘Order of Russian Knights’, and the Decembrists’ Union of Welfare, emphasizes the liberal nobility’s aim of pursuing a reform agenda which a less defensive regime would itself have doubtless wished to advance. It conveys a clear sense of the political atmosphere in which the Decembrists’ generation collectively explored questions of reform. According to Turgenev, the members of the first ‘German-style’ secret societies intended merely to promote the government’s own reformist indications, and ‘only the fear of an incorrect interpretation of their aims compelled them to act without the collaboration and knowledge of the emperor. This fact, revealing the inexperience of the first founders of the secret societies, demonstrates the sincerity and harmlessness of their intentions.’ Turgenev had in mind the German Tugendbund (‘Union of Virtue’) with which M. F. Orlov became acquainted while abroad in 1814. This was a patriotic organization which was formed at the time of Napoleon’s invasion of Prussia. Its chief aim as set out in its constitution, which clearly made a favourable impression on Orlov, was to educate the masses and stimulate patriotism. It would be highly influential in the 1818 drafting of the ‘Green Book’, the constitution of the Decembrists’ Union of Welfare which, like its German counterpart, stressed above all the need for a new moral vitality in social affairs rather than for political reform as such.58 At the end of 1819, Turgenev was visited by S. P. Trubetskoi who invited him to join the Union of Welfare and showed him its programme. This Trubetskoi ‘promoted so openly to me that it seemed there could not possibly be anything dangerous in his intentions’. Turgenev was struck by the theoretical nature of the Union of Welfare’s project from which he assumed ‘there was no intention whatever to bring about any changes in the state’. Turgenev soon noticed that many members of Union of Welfare were badly in need of political education, and he therefore proposed to lead the study of a number of texts, including Benjamin Constant’s recent ‘Commentary on Filangieri’. His circle of friends and acquaintances followed events in Europe with great attention and ‘gladly welcomed any step towards freedom’. Turgenev considered that in a country like Russia secret societies were inevitable. Only those who actually lived there, he wrote, could hope to understand the problems any new idea would encounter. It meant they could only be raised and explored in a closed circle of carefully selected individuals, for whom ‘it was a real pleasure to be able to talk openly and without fear, not only about political matters, but all sorts of other issues as well.’ He describes the meetings of the Union of Welfare in Moscow in the winter of 1820–1 to which about twenty others, including officers of the

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Second Army, were invited. ‘There were frequent meetings, and I remember them always as the happiest moments of my life. In these all too brief moments, I was in the company of people who for me were always noble, and filled with the purest aspirations and selfless devotion to their friends.’59 Turgenev’s outlook was to change drastically after the events of 14 December. This is clearly reflected in his 1826  ‘Memorandum of Self-Justification’ (Opravdatel’naia zapiska) which was appended to the first volume of his book, La Russie et les Russes, published in Paris and Brussels in 1847. Here, Turgenev distanced himself from his former co-conspirators, not only deploring the very idea of revolution but also dismissing absolutely the notion that the uprising itself had come anywhere close to being one. In his view, the report of the Investigating Committee ‘presented the whole diabolical affair in its totality, with every detail of its immeasurable viciousness and crazed bloodthirstiness’. His reaction to what had taken place and to those arrested was one of unfeigned incredulity: ‘My soul shuddered, tormented by the most awful feelings. It was then I  saw . . . that the people with whom I  used to have discussions, showed themselves to be utter scoundrels.’60 Turgenev’s horrified reaction to the events of December 1825 put him in the company of other more conservative Russian noblemen who may at one time have themselves shared the conspirators’ ideas but quickly realized how mistaken they were to have attempted to promote them by recourse to violence. This was in any case certainly the position of the majority of the Russian nobility. We will be taking account of the views of both parties in the next chapter, with an assessment of the Decembrists’ impact on noble society and politics in the aftermath of 14 December 1825.

Chapter 13 T H E D E C E M B R I ST S’ F A I LU R E T O R A D IC A L I Z E T H E R U S SIA N N O B I L I T Y

The death of Alexander I  was to present an opportunity only weeks later to the Decembrists’ Northern Society to take direct action in furtherance of its constitutional cause. It took the form of an uprising  – effectively a military mutiny – on 14 December 1825, the day of Nicholas I’s accession to the throne, and marked a precarious beginning to his reign. This would prove to be the first and only time in Russian history that an armed attempt to change the empire’s system of government would be led by a young, radicalized section of the nobility. This final chapter explores of the impact of the Decembrists’ failure on the subsequent nature of the political role of Russia’s nobility in the governance of the Russian Empire.

Reaction to Alexander I’s death; eyewitnesses on 14 December 1825 On 19 November 1825, Tsar Alexander, then only three weeks away from his forty-eighth birthday, finally succumbed to a fever which had started as a cold he had caught at the end of October on his way to Sevastopol. On 15 November he had requested the last rites which were administered by his chaplain, Father Fedotov, who spent more than an hour alone with the tsar, hearing his confession and giving him communion. The news of his death in the Black Sea town of Taganrog understandably came as a total shock to his family and subjects alike.1 It triggered two immediate consequences. The first of these was a succession crisis within the Romanov dynasty which led in turn to an interregnum lasting almost a month. It started from the moment of Alexander I’s death through the weeks of confusion caused by the widespread assumption of Constantine’s succession. The resolution seemed to have come on 27 November when Nicholas swore allegiance to his older brother, but it was delayed until finally Nicholas himself acceded to the throne on 14 December. The second consequence was the dénouement – first in St Petersburg and then near Kiev – of the nine-year-old Decembrist conspiracy. The history of all three events has been thoroughly rehearsed elsewhere and is beyond the remit of the present study.2

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Nevertheless, it is worth emphasizing that the responsibility for both these consequences lies squarely with Alexander I  himself. Although Grand Duke Constantine had made it clear back in 1819 that he intended to renounce his right to succeed, it was not until August 1823 that Alexander drew up a manifesto naming Nicholas as his heir. Had he then made this manifesto public, he would have averted the dynastic confusion following his death, and with it the window of opportunity this presented to the Decembrist conspirators. Instead he took the fateful decision to keep it a secret known only to three other people:  A. A. Arakcheev, A. N. Golitsyn and Metropolitan Filaret. Alexander then ordered the relevant documents to be lodged in a sealed envelope for safekeeping in the Uspenskii Cathedral of Moscow’s Kremlin, to be opened only after his death. Sergei Mironenko convincingly argues that Alexander acted quite deliberately because he clung stubbornly to the idea of implementing some kind of constitutional reform before the end of his reign. It may be, therefore, that he feared any public declaration of Nicholas as his heir would merely cement the continuity of the status quo, thereby ruling out any such possibility altogether. Thus, Alexander’s characteristic vacillation led to the potentially destabilizing interregnum and in turn to the uprising that would so crucially change the course of the new reign. Yet this disastrous chain of events this might so easily have been averted.3 The intention in what follows is to convey, on the basis of contemporary accounts, a sense of the catastrophe Alexander’s death seemed to represent to individual noblemen and of the confusion created in the centre of St Petersburg by the uprising on 14 December as eyewitnesses struggled to make sense of what they observed.4 To judge by the reaction of General S.  I. Maevskii to the tsar’s death, for example, he was clearly among those who had worshipped Alexander. Stationed with his regiment on one of Russia’s military colonies, he received the news from a letter handed to him by an equerry. He recalled opening the black-bordered envelope: ‘Alas! I read that it was true: the best of mortal men, the sovereign who had adorned our age and illuminated it with his virtues, was no longer with us.’ According to his account, he was not alone in his grief: ‘Within ten minutes, the howls of the people and the sound of sobbing resounded throughout the town and the barracks. I thought I would not survive this misfortune.’5 The Slavophile emancipationist, A.  I. Koshelev, was in Moscow when he learned of Alexander’s death and the ensuing dynastic chaos. There, the rumours from St Petersburg generated mounting excitement, leading many to believe that ‘Russia was about to have her own great 1789’. He recalled the oath was sworn to Constantine in Moscow at the beginning of December and that ‘for a whole ten days’ laws were issued and petitions submitted in his name.6 Even a member of a prominent liberal family, A. I. Turgenev, recorded in a diary entry of 6 December while in Paris, his intensely emotional reaction on reading of Alexander’s death in Les Débats: ‘Russia! Your best hope is gone! I forget about his politics – I remember and love the man.’ Turgenev gives way to an outpouring of grief fully in keeping with the age of Romanticism: ‘I discovered deep down within me a tenderness for the sovereign which I did not know while he lived. Now that he is consigned to

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eternity, I am not his judge but his tender friend.’ He insisted that Alexander should be acknowledged for his attempt to emancipate the serfs in the Baltic provinces ‘even though he has left 14 million still in slavery’. The following day, thoughts of Russia’s fate brought to Turgenev’s mind an apt couplet from the second canto of Byron’s Childe-Harold (1812), which he wrote in his diary: Greece! Change thy lords, thy state is still the same! Thy glorious day is over, but not thine years of shame. (LXXVI)7

On 16 December, P. S. Demenkov, a retired colonel of the Preobrazhenskii Guards, wrote an eyewitness account of what he had witnessed in St Petersburg two days earlier. He describes his memoir as an account only of what it befell to me to see as an eyewitness, and to hear with my own ears over a four-hour period on that memorable day, 14 December 1825, and moreover in the most alarming and dangerous space of all: between the Winter Palace and the Senate building. But, with all thanks to Providence, the criminals’ destructive attempt ended in failure.8

Of particular interest here is Demenkov’s admiration for the calmness and courage he observed Nicholas I to display, quickly earning him high approval among the nobility: Those minutes which the tsar spent on the square at the gates of the Winter Palace in the first hours of his reign and in the face of evident danger, revealed in him a fearlessness and firmness of character which that day saved Russia . . . It is definitely the case that but for the young emperor’s selflessness, 14 December 1825 might well have ended in extreme ruination not only for St Petersburg but for the whole of Russia as well.

Later that evening Demenkov joined some of his friends for dinner, ‘over which, of course, the only topic of conversation was the unusual events which could have ended in no little damage to the state had the young emperor not shown the presence of mind, courage and resolve which so aroused the justifiable admiration of society’. According to E. P. Karnovich, on the morning of 14 December, a German resident named Götze left his house near Stone Bridge (Kamennyi most) and was startled by unusual sounds of commotion coming from the direction of St Isaac’s (Senate) Square. He followed troops of the Moscow Regiment across the bridge, together with a large excited crowd, and managed to ask one of the soldiers what was going on. From the man’s reply he learned that they had sworn loyalty to Constantine but that Nicholas, ‘who had imprisoned Constantine, wanted the throne for himself ’. Götze immediately realized that the soldiers ‘had been hoodwinked by arrant nonsense’ and was struck by the absence of their officers. He then made his way through the crowd to Admiralty Boulevard where he encountered N. M.

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Karamzin ‘in an overcoat, court dress and warm boots’, along with a number of foreign diplomats, including the British and French ambassadors and the Dutch chargé d’affaires, all clearly known to Götze at least by sight. They were evidently on their way to the Winter Palace for the service to mark Nicholas’s inauguration as emperor. Götze next heard what he later learned was the fatal shot fired by P. G. Kakhovskii at Governor-General Miloradovich. Götze reckoned there were between 1,500 and 2,000 mutineers on the square, ‘standing by the Senate building, but taking no decisive action’.9 It seemed to another eyewitness, Baron Kaul’bars, staff-quartermaster of the Life-Guard Cavalry Regiment, that the crowds which had gathered to watch the unfolding events on Senate Square, despite the fact that by 2 pm it was already around −8°C, ‘evidently supported the insurgents’. Kaul’bars counted fifty-six bodies including at least five workmen who had been among the onlookers. He put the total number of fatalities at between seventy and eighty.10 M. A.  Miloradovich, St Petersburg’s governor-general, was the uprising’s highest-ranking fatality and ‘the day’s most illustrious victim’. Prince N. S. Golitsyn recalls that Miloradovich, like everybody else, was taken completely unawares by the events of that day which, from early morning to late afternoon caused: ‘quite unimaginable chaos and disorder’. Nicholas ordered the governor-general to proceed immediately to Senate Square with a detachment drawn from the Cavalry Guards to restore order there. But because Miloradovich found the troops still saddling their horses, and their officers not present to hurry them along (they were in the Winter Palace with their commander), after only a few minutes he lost patience. This was why he went out on to Senate Square to confront the rebels, escorted solely by his adjutant, A. P. Bashutskii, only to fall victim to Kakhovskii’s fatal gunshot. A witness of the assassination, the Decembrist A. P. Beliaev, described Miloradovich in a note written on the fifty-fifth anniversary of the uprising (1880) as ‘the hero and the pride of Russia’, who ignored the pleas of the rebel officers to return to the safety of the Winter Palace. Beliaev believes Kakhovskii shot him because he was convinced that so commanding a figure would have brought the uprising to an even speedier conclusion.11 State Secretary V. R. Marchenko recalled that 14 December was a Monday, the usual day for a general meeting of the State Council. That morning it was due to meet at nine o’clock to swear the loyal oath to Nicholas. Marchenko was among the last to talk to Count Miloradovich, finding him ‘splendidly dressed and cheerful as always’. The governor-general told Marchenko that, ironically as it turned out, he had just reported to the emperor on the smoothness of his accession: across the city many had already sworn the loyal oath, filling the churches to capacity. Among the most interesting of Marchenko’s observations was that, as events unfolded on Senate Square, one of the only two men to remain in the Winter Palace was Count Arakcheev, ‘possibly, as was perhaps uncharitably alleged at the time, out of cowardice’. The grand vizier apparently presented a sorry sight that day, as ‘not one single soul stopped to exchange a word with him’.12 Marchenko neglects to point out, however, that Arakcheev’s evident misery was compounded by the cruel loss of his mistress, Anastasia Minkina, who had been murdered by servants three months earlier, on 22 September. She was the mother of his only

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son, and her death devasted Arakcheev. Despite the tsar’s sympathetic efforts to comfort him in the weeks that followed, his grief left him prostrate and unable to return to work, effectively leaving the administration of the empire in the last months of 1825 almost totally neglected.13 Marchenko later learned that Nicholas realized, after talking to some of those arrested, that many had been involuntary participants, and so released 102 of them prior to trial by the Investigating Comittee. News of this clemency spread quickly among the men’s circles of family and friends, greatly boosting Nicholas’s popularity. Clearly no admirer either of Arakcheev or of his aide, P. A. Kleinmikhel, Marchenko concluded that the Russian nobility ‘was spared who knows what misfortune had the Investigating Commission fallen into [their] hands’.14 Marchenko was not alone in witnessing the sudden collapse of Arakcheev along with his hitherto boundless authority. Prince A. M. Gorchakov, known as the last Russian chancellor, and who would serve as Foreign Minister from 1856 to 1882 under three tsars (Nicholas I, Alexander II and Alexander III), recalled that at first he was unfazed by the crowds he encountered in the centre of St Petersburg on 14 December since he had become so accustomed to noisy gatherings on London’s squares during his years of diplomatic service there. The events of that day marked the end of the regime of Alexander I as is clear from this graphic glimpse of its chief official, A. A. Arakcheev. Gorchakov saw Alexander’s hated grand vizier seated in the corner of a room in the chambers of Empress Aleksandra Fedorovna:  ‘The expression on his face that day was especially gloomy and grim; no one approached him, no one paid him any attention. Evidently, everyone thought that the former favourite had lost all significance.’15 A compelling view of events from inside the Winter Palace is provided by Baron M. A. Korf: With the rank of kamerjunker I saw from close up the awful day which dawned then on St Petersburg and Russia, but whose events were so quickly and fortunately extinguished by the energy of the young tsar. Being present at court I spent the whole of 14 December 1825 from midday to 8 o’clock in the evening inside the palace. I  myself saw and shared the general confusion and horror . . . I  was present in the court chapel at that solemn moment when, with the insurgency contained, in the presence of the whole court, the tsar and tsarina fell on their knees and humbly before Almighty God remained there for the duration of the entire thanksgiving service!16

Meanwhile, in Moscow, Senator A.  Ia. Bulgakov recalled that there was general surprise there when, before the manifesto of accession had been received, the Moscow nobility was invited to the Kremlin’s Uspenskii Cathedral to swear the loyal oath to Constantine at 11 am on 18 December 1825. There was confusion over the succession when Constantine was rumoured to have abdicated in favour of Nicholas, and Bulgakov observed some reluctance even among Moscow’s elite to take a new oath to Nicholas without first seeing Constantine (who was absent in Warsaw) do so himself. The chief of police, M. A. Obreskov, who was Bulgakov’s

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brother-in-law, reported that there was considerable disquiet in St Petersburg too, where the ‘[Winter] palace had been turned into a tavern (shinok) with all the comings and goings taking place there’. Bulgakov’s account confirms the view that the new tsar showed remarkable sang-froid in face of the insurgents who remained unconvinced by his explanation of the reason for his accession to the throne which Constantine had refused: ‘What was I to do?’, Nicholas was heard to tell them, ‘The throne of Russia cannot be left empty: I am bound to occupy it!’ The incoming tsar was uncertain about how best to diffuse the situation and turned to his generals, Duke Eugen of Württemberg and I.  V. Vasil’chikov for advice, asking them how his late brother would have handled the matter.17 Count E. F. Komarovskii was among Nicholas I’s retinue on 14 December and left a record of his activity on the day as a loyal eyewitness of the chaotic mutiny on Senate Square. Komarovskii noted that the rebel troops included several companies of the Moscow Regiment, practically the entire Life-Guards Regiment, apart from the first company and those on guard duty, and the entire Marine Guard (gvardeiskii ekipazh). Komarovskii reckoned around seven hundred were arrested, and Nicholas ordered him to have them escorted to the Peter-Paul Fortress.18 Thus ended the hastily planned and poorly executed insurrection which, crucially, lacked decisive leadership in the absence of its nominated commander, Colonel Prince S. P. Trubetskoi. It may have made no difference since, in the end, it seems clear that the rebel officers’ loyalties were hopelessly divided between the cause of assassinating, and the duty of serving their new emperor.19 In any case, with it went the hopes of a radicalized minority of the nobility to bring about the replacement of autocracy with a constitutional form of government. There now began the arrests and a six-month investigation process which culminated in the execution of five leading conspirators, and the reassertion of the Romanovs’ autocratic authority in Russia for a further ninety-one years.

Decembrist critiques and retrospective views of Alexander I’s reign Following Nicholas I’s coronation in August 1826, A. D. Borovkov, who had been the Investigating Committee’s secretary, drew up for the new tsar a sixteen-point digest of Decembrist views on the ‘internal condition of the state in the reign of Emperor Alexander’. It was based largely on the testimony of four very different individuals: G. S. Baten’kov, V. I. Shteingeil’, A. A. Bestuzhev and G. A. Peretts.20 It shows that the Decembrists’ field of vision, far from being narrowly confined to the form of Russia’s future governance, was remarkably broad. It comprised a comprehensive and highly perceptive overview of the country’s besetting social, political and economic ills, and the challenges that lay ahead for any agency charged with tackling them. A  brief summary of its main points provides historians with a high definition snapshot of the reality of life in Russia under Alexander I: it makes depressing reading. In the digest’s introduction, the testimony selected recalls the great promise held out by Alexander’s accession and date ‘the beginning of free thought in Russia’

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from the failure of Napoleon’s ill-fated invasion of the country. As a result, not only did the people become aware of their own strength but also of life beyond the empire’s borders: ‘Servicemen from generals to soldiers returned to the fatherland talking only about how much better things were in foreign parts.’ Alexander’s public statement about extending constitutional rule from Warsaw to St Petersburg, and ‘the efforts made by several generals to emancipate their peasants’, were hopeful signs. But a marked change of atmosphere ensued as, ‘surrounded by a legion of spies’, people were much more careful about what they said and to whom. Ironically, it was the government that over twenty-five years ‘nourished, as with a mother’s milk, young Russians with notions of free-thinking’. But inconsistent and contradictory lawmaking favoured the strong and created hardship for the weak, while the complicated and sclerotic legal system wore litigants down as cases dragged on endlessly and inconclusively. During Alexander’s entire reign, the review continues, almost nothing was done to improve provincial administration. Over this period, government effectively disintegrated, lost its integrity and became a ‘disordered mess’. Alexander realized what was happening but found no one he could depend on to rectify matters. Most civil servants lived on the breadline and so depended on bribes to feed their families. The tax regime was open to monumental abuse by local authorities, where there was no proper audit: ‘It only took the governor to go on the make for the whole province to be saddled with a huge burden of sacrifice.’ The measures taken to pursue those who were in arrears with their payment of taxes and other dues (nedoimki) frequently led to financial ruin as peasants were forced to sell their cattle, horses and even their houses. Turning to the economy and infrastructure, the digest asserted that Russia’s roads were in a chronic state of disrepair because local officials took bribes from peasants desperate to be excused from the roadwork gangs. The fact that nearly all commerce flowed to the capital, ‘located on the empire’s outer edge’, the location of most state institutions, meant that remote provinces, lacking any waterway connection to St Petersburg, quickly despaired and declined. Local merchants just did not know whom they should be dealing with or where to send their produce. Furthermore, state monopolies stifled the development of private enterprise and trade. Among the worst of these was the state sale of alcohol: this particular monopoly, coming on top of outstanding sums owed to credit companies, reduced many a noble family to total ruin. Similarly, the monopoly on salt saw prohibitive price hikes year on year. Economic difficulties were merely aggravated by the relaxation of tariffs in 1819, when foreign goods poured into Russia, consequently bankrupting many merchants. Trade suffered, many factories closed and shortages of many items ensued. True, in 1823 tariffs were re-imposed, but the damage by then already done proved irreversible, adding further to the already widespread mistrust of the government. Great hardship was caused also by the establishment of the unpopular military settlements, without any apparent thought being given to the obvious alternative: a reduction in the length of service to twelve years. This measure might have given peasants and nobles alike a real chance of enjoying a proper family life. However,

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given landlords’ reprehensible treatment of their peasants, this was in any case unlikely. In particular, the lesser (melkopomestnoe) nobility was ‘the curse of Russia, mercilessly tormenting their poor peasants’. The life nobles (lichnye dvoriane) are here compared to the Polish słachta: ‘Increasing rapidly in number, without any estates to manage, they consider any kind of work or craft to be beneath them and, having nothing to lose, live by various wiles.’ Borovkov’s summary of the Decembrists’ analysis of Russia’s woes concludes with their appeal from their prison cells in the Peter-Paul Fortress to ‘the currently reigning emperor’ to reform the legislature and, ‘in a word, to correct all the innumerable disorders and abuses’. In particular, they call for support for the nobility, ‘which has fallen into total ruin, due to its accumulated debts to credit companies’. In fact, it was the nobility which would have gained most from a successful outcome of the conspiracy. Had N.  M. Muraviev’s constitutional project been implemented, all power would have passed to the nobility, while P.  I. Pestel’’s Russian Justice envisaged the empowerment of all former nobles, together with the abolition of all estates. It is arguable that Pestel’s project was the more democratic of the two, since it did not propose any property requirements for voting rights. However, in any election, the overwhelming number of representatives sent to the new assembly would inevitably be former nobles, since no other social group in Russian society could offer any serious competition. At this time, after all, 75 per cent of nobles were literate, as compared to only 20 per cent of townspeople and just 8 per cent of peasants.21 Other sources indicate that Alexander’s regime grew increasingly unpopular during what were to be its final years. A.  I. Mikhailovskii-Danilevskii recorded in an 1824 diary entry that Ukrainians never missed a chance to complain about Alexander I’s rule, comparing it unfavourably with Catherine the Great’s. This trend was apparently encouraged by the former minister of justice, D. P. Troshchinksii, ‘who was then around 80 years old and was regarded as a kind of oracular figure’. Ukrainian landowners, however, ‘did not know Alexander’s nobility of soul, the man who had subdued Paris and commanded Europe’. It was for this reason that Mikhailovskii-Danilevskii claimed he never once visited Troshchinskii, despite numerous invitations, given that he was in Ukraine not as a private individual but as commander of Alexander’s troops. ‘It was therefore impossible for me to listen in silence to any denigration (khuleniia) of the Sovereign, whom I adored.’ Moreover, Troshchinskii’s house was reputed to serve ‘as a focal point for liberals in Ukraine’. There, for example, was to be found ‘in almost permanent residence’ one of the Muraviev-Apostols, subsequently exiled to Siberian forced labour, and M.P. Bestuzhev-Riumin, ‘who ended his life on the scaffold’.22 In any case, the growing discontent did not focus solely on the tsar. Among the comments police agent Fok reported to Benkendorf was this damning judgment of the damage done by Arakcheev: Of course it was not the late emperor, but Count Arakcheev who caused all the mess through his arbitrary rule, and especially through his measureless vanity and his desire to appear omniscient . . . It is also a well-known fact that in all

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important matters, it was Arakcheev’s view which prevailed, with the tsar’s approval, while the interventions of almost all the other members of the [State] Council were ignored.23

Borovkov presented his digest to Nicholas I on 6 February 1826. He confirmed that the tsar afterwards kept it in his study and that copies of it were sent to Grand Duke Constantine in Warsaw, and to V.  P. Kochubei as chairman of the State Council. Constantine was later to tell Borovkov that the tsar frequently consulted this ‘intriguing compilation’, finding it a very helpful reference point, and complimented him on ‘setting things out so well and so clearly’. It certainly provides us with a graphic picture of the political and economic problems that so troubled the Decembrists and much of the ‘European’ generation of the Russian nobility. Further, it constitutes an unusual and compelling grass-roots view of the legacy of Alexander I’s twenty-five-year reign, as well as a schedule of the critical issues which the new tsar was now being encouraged to add to his government’s agenda for action.

The Decembrists’ reputation following the uprising Alexander I’s unexpected death and the ensuing interregnum marked an equally unexpected turning point in the history of the Russian Empire in general but above all, perhaps, in the history of the Russian nobility. It provided the Decembrist conspirators with the catalyst they needed to take action: the urgent reaction of Northern Society member I. I. Pushchin in a letter of 12 December was typical enough: ‘It is a great opportunity and if we don’t take it we will rightly be regarded as utter scoundrels.’24 Without such an opportunity the secret societies would in all probability have petered out for lack of any consensus about the way ahead, or they would have been rounded up at the start of the new reign on Nicholas’s orders, following the compromising reports from I. V. Shervud (July 1825) and A. I. Maiborada (November 1825), found, unheeded, among Alexander’s papers.25 A. N. Golitsyn was to confirm that Alexander had known about the conspiracy but had declined to take any action through ‘political calculation, and the indecisiveness which constituted the dominant feature of his character’.26 Either way, the Decembrist uprising was to have a significant impact on the political future of the Russian nobility. It is this question which comprises the main theme of the concluding section of the present chapter, drawing on contemporary memoirs and correspondence, and on such major contributions to the literature as N. K. Piksanov’s seminal 1933 article.27 The 87-year-old educator and historian, A. T. Bolotov, was among those who in hindsight affirmed that the dangers posed by ‘Carbonari’ and ‘freethinkers’, not only in the two capitals but across Russia’s provinces, had long been known ‘to us all’. In a letter of 30 January 1826 to his grandson, M. A. Leontiev, he wrote that in the absence of any discernible action by the government, and in the context of the widespread dissatisfaction of all classes with its shortcomings, ‘did we not fear

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and dread . . . the outbreak of some disastrous kind of revolution?’ Both Bolotov and Leontiev lived in Tula province, and, while both condemned the Decembrists’ coup, their shared view that Alexander’s government had failed to tackle Russia’s economic problems and endemic corruption was no doubt representative of a significant portion of the educated provincial nobility.28 A. P. Beliaev, whose memoir we have cited in earlier chapters, contends that it was Alexander I himself who sowed the seeds of liberalism and constitutional politics from the very start of his reign and throughout it. Educated society embraced these ideas, but Alexander then proved powerless to prevent corroboration of them spreading into Russia from the West. Beliaev believes that in restoring stability to Russia his successor, paradoxically, was helped by the Decembrist uprising and its ensuing suppression. This was because it generated such panic among educated society, that the majority sought to demonstrate their loyalty as the emperor’s subjects, together with their full support for his actions and his government’s policies. By the same token, though, ‘but for this unhappy uprising’, Beliaev is certain that Nicholas would have initiated the increasingly inevitable root and branch reform of the state, ‘now completed by his great son and successor’. As it was, however, ‘this unfortunate event’ succeeded only in pushing Nicholas onto a different path.29 Beliaev’s assessment was echoed years later by N.  K. Shil’der, biographer of Alexander I  and director of the Imperial Public Library in St Petersburg from 1899 to 1902, who wrote of the responsibility borne by the Decembrists for the consequent consolidation of autocracy: ‘This sad event long deferred the possibility of any kind of liberal reform in Russia.’30 P. A. Viazemskii was a friend of a number of those punished for their part in the conspiracy, and he shared many of their aims, particularly about abolishing serfdom and introducing a constitution. It is therefore not surprising to find this reflection on the significance of the insurrection in a diary entry:  Was it, he asked himself, an expression of a few madmen provoked beyond endurance by the state Russia was in or, rather, something much more representative of a general mood of despair? His own response was unequivocal: ‘This business was the business of the whole of Russia, because the whole of Russia, groaning and suffering, took part consciously or otherwise in the conspiracy. It was nothing less than an explosion of general dissatisfaction.’ Moreover, the entry continues, rootand-branch reform remains the ‘object of the prayers of all true sons of Russia, and of all decent and reasonable citizens’. The government would therefore do well to remember, Viazemskii concludes, that peaceable folk whose hopes were continually disappointed would sooner or later be goaded into forsaking prayer for violence.31 As the years passed, however, Viazemskii’s attitude towards the Decembrists hardened. His letter of 21 November 1871 to P.  A. Bartenev, the publisher of ‘The Russian Archive’ (Russkii arkhiv) included this scathing reference to their memoirs: In not one of them is there even a jot of contrition or acknowledgement that what they had embarked on was an insane, not to say, criminal enterprise . . .

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They have forgotten nothing but enlightened nobody . . . They are stuck on 14 December in perpetuity. For them even after 30 years, 15 December has still not dawned, leaving them incapable of sobering up and returning to their senses.32

Reactions to ‘this unfortunate event’ among the rest of the Russian nobility were predictably mixed, but the evidence suggests that expressions of sympathy for the Decembrists were the exception rather than the rule. Piksanov’s own analysis of the issue starts with an acknowledgement that some voices were raised in support of the Decembrists. Perhaps the most famous among them was that of the future architect of the Decembrist myth and perpetuator of the convicted conspirators’ legend, Alexander Herzen. In his memoirs, Herzen (b.1812) recalls as a teenager accompanying his father in August 1826 to Nicholas I’s coronation in Moscow: ‘As a boy of 14, I swore to avenge those executed and pledged myself to the struggle with that throne, with that altar, and with those cannon’ (140). He was soon joined in his loathing for ‘the Decembrists’ hangman’ by the equally youthful N. P. Ogarev (b.1813), and together on the Sparrow Hills overlooking Moscow the teenagers swore a precocious oath to oppose Russia’s autocratic regime. A further celebrated instance was Alexander Pushkin’s initial response as expressed in his poem, dating from the winter of 1826–7, ‘Epistle to Siberia’ (Poslanie v Sibir’), which seemed sympathetic enough. With its haunting opening couplet, ‘In the depths of Siberian mines/ Keep up your proud forbearance’ (Vo glubine sibirskikh rud/ Khranite gordoe terpen’e), it read as a lament for his now absent friends and the dreadful fate which had befallen them. Later, however, his dawning realization of the threat they had posed to Russia’s stability, and his acknowledgement of Tsar Nicholas’s role in so resolutely preserving it, would cause his attitude towards them to harden too. There were other broadly sympathetic literary expressions as well, such as the poem dating from August 1826 attributed to Pushkin’s friend, N. M. Iazykov, in honour of Ryleev. It opens: ‘Ryleev died like a scoundrel!/ O remember him, Russia/ When you throw off your chains.’ (Ryleev umer kak zlodei!/O, vspomiani o nem, Rossiia/ Kogda vosstanesh’ ot tsepei) (148).33 More typically, however, the Decembrists were the object of the scorn and loathing which peppered their contemporaries’ letters, diaries and memoirs. Even more striking was the number of negative remarks made by their own relatives and close friends. For the most part, such comments express total abhorrence of the Decembrists’ ‘diabolical conspiracy’ and astonishment at the involvement in it of individuals well known to their authors, who now routinely referred to the conspirators as ‘beasts’, ‘swine’ and ‘scoundrels’. Equally, many reacted by heaping praise on Nicholas I for facing down the insurgents with such a courageous display of leadership. An example of such excoriation may be found in a letter written by M.  S. Vorontsov to A. A. Zakrevskii expressing the hope ‘that this will not end without the gallows, and that the sovereign emperor who has already faced such personal risk . . . will now take care of himself and punish the swine’.34 In May 1826, Nicholas I would appoint Vorontsov to the State Council, and a week later sign the manifesto setting up the supreme criminal court responsible for sentencing

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the conspirators, of which Vorontsov would himself be an ex officio member. His wish for the imposition of the death penalty was thus fulfilled. Ironically, it was Vorontsov’s liberal reputation which had attracted the attention of the conspiracy’s leaders as a potential member of the ensuing provisional government. His father, S.R. Vorontsov, who had remained resident in London after serving as Russia’s ambassador to the Court of St James, was even more determined to see capital punishment invoked: ‘The conspiracy against the sovereign emperor’, he wrote, ‘is a conspiracy against the country and the nation.’ He went on to argue that Nicholas did not have the right to pardon the criminals but had a duty to protect his subjects from them: ‘To pardon these monsters would be to fly in the face of justice; it is, rather, the prime obligation of rulers to uphold justice’, Vorontsov Sr concluded.35 Similarly outraged indignation was expressed in a letter of 22 December 1825 from A. Ia. Bulgakov, Moscow’s Director of Posts to his brother, K. Ia. Bulgakov, his opposite number in St Petersburg. It reads, ‘An example has to be made: no one will have any sympathy for these idlers who sought to drag Russia into the same kind of disaster as the French Revolution.’ The very next day, K. Ia. Bulgakov wrote to A. A. Zakrevskii in equally indignant terms, ‘It is painful, my friend, to see mixed up in so vile and abominable an affair, such ancient Russian names as Trubetskoi, Obolenskii and Odoevskii. They will all be getting their richly deserved punishment according to the degree of their guilt.’ On the new tsar’s handling of the insurgency Bulgakov commented, ‘The sovereign conducted himself splendidly, and I can say to you in all honesty that more and more hearts are opening up to him’ (156–7). It was a view of the new emperor fully endorsed, as might be expected, by F. F. Vigel’, who gloated in his memoirs at the suppression of ‘liberalism’: Every action of Emperor Nicholas was in accordance with my own outlook and wishes. Liberalism, so uncharacteristic of us, has been disarmed and suppressed; the words justice and order have replaced the hitherto sacrosanct word liberty. His severity no one dared or wished to call cruelty, for it guaranteed each of us our personal security as well as that of the state. Everywhere could be seen happy and contented faces. The only sad individuals were the friends and relatives of the rebels of 14 December.36

N. M. Karamzin was in the Winter Palace with his daughters on the day of the uprising. Five days after it, on 19 December, he wrote to I. I. Dmitriev, praising Nicholas’s decisiveness: The new emperor displayed both fearlessness and firmness. The first two salvos scattered those madmen from ‘The Polar Star’, Bestuzhev and Ryleev, along with their equally wretched minions . . . I’m just a peaceful historiographer but I really craved the roar of cannon as I was convinced that there was no other way to quell the mutiny . . . Such is the absurd tragedy of our insane liberalists! . . . The soldiers were just victims of their deceitfulness.37

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Karamzin’s shock at the rebel leaders’ betrayal of their subordinates’ loyalty is echoed with even greater vehemence in a diary entry of Baron V.  R. Kaul’bars, where he noted that only after the uprising had been put down did the real reason for it become clear: By this time it was already clear that the cause of the conspiracy was nothing to do with Grand Duke Konstantin Pavlovich, but that his name had been used only in order to incite the lower ranks to mutiny . . . It was the most frightful baseness on the part of the conspirators to draw the unfortunate troops into their sordid enterprise by deceit, convincing them that they would be fulfilling their duty by remaining true to their oath to him.38

M. A.  Korf ’s autobiography records his total shock at the involvement in the uprising of several old school friends, though he does not refer to any of them by name: How can I describe my surprise and horror when it was later revealed that in the ranks of the insane insurgents were a number of my Lycée classmates, several of my closest acquaintances, whom I had never suspected of holding such views, or even having the slightest inclination for them!39

Similar incredulity is combined with withering contempt in the thoroughly negative view of the uprising written by the memoirist M. A. Dmitriev: What kind of conspiracy is it where there were not two men who could agree with each other, no definite aim, no unanimity as to means, and where the rebels came out onto the square without knowing themselves what they were doing and why they were there? This was a childish tantrum thrown by grown-up men, an audacious prank on the part of clever but immature people.40

Another leading light of the educated establishment nobility, the poet V.  A. Zhukovskii, was equally scathing about those whom V.  I. Lenin would later famously describe as ‘the best people of the nobility’. Writing two days after the uprising to the brother of one of them, A. I. Turgenev, Zhukovskii raged, ‘What swine! What did this band of brigands want?’ He went on to dismiss his fellow poet, V.  K. Kiukhel’beker, who had joined the conspirators on Senate Square, as ‘a beast in need of a cage’. The ‘rest of the swine’ he castigated as ‘cowardly scoundrels’ who had acted as ‘bandits’. Commenting on the poet’s outburst, Piksanov wryly stresses the vehemence of the tone struck by so illustrious, so Christian, and so humane a writer, ‘in a letter to the brother of a Decembrist about the Decembrists, among whom he himself had many friends’ (160). Most of those who voiced a personal response to the Decembrists’ conspiracy joined a swelling chorus of deeply hostile disapproval. Far from sympathizing with the convicted Decembrists, many thought they had been treated too leniently thanks to their

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their status and connections. A police report to Benkendorf observed that there was a general feeling that ‘members of other estates and classes would not have got off so lightly’.41 There were some further exceptions to this view. The memoirist Count M. D. Buturlin (1807–1876), writing in the late 1860s, admitted to being surprised in retrospect by his sympathy as a nineteen-year-old for the fate of the executed Decembrists, and his indignation at the government’s reprisals, which was then shared also by his sisters. After all, he now contended, there would have been very few few jurisdictions which would not have executed those found guilty of attempting to overthrow the state and assassinate its leaders. He attributes his benevolent youthful view of the executed Decembrists as ‘the first martyrs of Russian civil freedom’ to his liberal English education. Nevertheless, over forty years later, Buturlin argued that while the Decembrists could be neither excused nor forgiven, they should not be judged too harshly for having shared much the same ‘liberal tendencies’ as had marked the ‘early political actions of the emperor himself ’.42 Another exception was the unusually balanced view of Baron A.  I. Del’vig, an engineer and relative of the poet A. A. Del’vig, who was saddened by the ‘chorus of disapproval’. This extract from his eloquent memoir confirms that the prevailing reaction among the nobility to the Decembrists was indeed hostile: I have the grimmest recollection of those days. Not only did no one make any attempt in their judgments to account for the actions of the secret societies’ members, but they roundly condemned them. The government’s retribution came nowhere close to exceeding the retribution meted out by society, or at least by that society to which I then had access. The clearest evidence of this is that the news of the sentences handed down to the members of the former secret societies, and which were read about over and over again, evinced no sympathy whatsoever. (164)

But another memoirist, A.  I. Koshelev, remembers things very differently. He recalls the shock of the totally unexpected death sentences announced by the supreme criminal court:  ‘There had not been a single death sentence for the whole of Alexander’s reign, and capital punishment was thought to be completely abolished.’ Now, however, ‘no words could convey the astonishment and despair which overwhelmed everybody’. It was a mood which Koshelev claimed carried over into Nicholas I’s coronation in Moscow, which was marked by pervasive gloom and apprehension about the future.43 There was, however, scant sympathy from the Russian Orthodox Church, which also inveighed against the Decembrists. Its New Year message for 1826, ‘To Orthodox Warriors’, focused on the justice of the retribution sought from the convicted insurgents, urging that ‘the need for a strong example demanded their execution’ (167). This unforgiving view was no doubt shared by the nobility in both capitals. For it quickly became obvious to the majority of noblemen that the Decembrists’ attempt to achieve fundamental reform by way of a coup d’état had in fact far exceeded the expectations of the only class which might

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have backed it, and to which the conspirators’ leaders themselves belonged: the Russian nobility. It was precisely the Decembrists’ social provenance that made them unlikely proponents of such audacious direct action in pursuit of equally audacious goals. What is perhaps most remarkable about their confrontational defiance both in St Petersburg and in Ukraine in the winter of 1825–26 was that the uprisings they led there happened at all. A mixture of retrospective amazement and admiration runs through this observation about the Decembrists made in his autobiography by the anarchist M. A. Bakunin (1814–76) who, together with Karl Marx, was among the founder members of the First International: A few hundred men, who were born and lived in privileged circumstances and who occupied more or less brilliant and rewarding positions in society, sacrificed themselves, indeed offered themselves up for slaughter, in order to eradicate privilege and free their slaves. Nothing like this had been seen before anywhere else in the world, but in Russia it really did happen.44

Although Lenin similarly placed the Decembrists firmly in their class context (‘the best people of the nobility’, but ineluctably therefore, ‘terribly remote from the people’), subsequent Soviet historiography  – as typified especially by M.  V. Nechkina – while invariably citing Lenin’s dicta as axiomatic, preferred to place them in the context of Russia’s revolutionary tradition, as its fathers and first martyrs, rather than emphasizing their social provencance. The idealization of their trailblazing martyrdom for the good of the revolutionary cause meant that the Decembrists themselves became somehow sacrosanct, with historiography frequently verging on hagiography. As T. V. Orlova observes, ‘Generally speaking, while duly acknowledging what the Decembrists achieved, it has to be said that in Soviet literature there took place the canonisation of their image.’45 This trend can, of course, be traced back via Lenin to the nineteenth-century architect of the enduring mythology of the Decembrists, Alexander Herzen. Post-Soviet Russian historians of the period, acknowledging their predecessors’ ideological tendentiousness, potentially damaging idealization and exaggeration, have tended to redress this balance to take a more rounded view of the Decembrists’ strengths and weaknesses, both in their contemporary context and in the context of the ‘liberation movement’ (osvoboditel’noe dvizhenie) which culminated in the Bolshevik revolution of October 1917. However, a recent Russian commentator offers this surprisingly flattering definition of ‘Decembrism’: ‘It is an impatient, ardent, often passionate advocacy of the ideas which comprised the philosophical atmosphere of the whole society of the Russian nobility in the last third of the eighteenth and the first third of the nineteenth centuries.’ The same commentator’s definition of the Decembrists themselves is equally flattering and provides confirmation of the varied interpretations to which their history gives rise to this day. Khudushina considers them to be nothing less than ‘the consistent expression of the nobility’s Weltanschauung’, whose fundamental precepts were ‘honour, nobility, and

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devotion to the interests of their fatherland’.46 Nevertheless, while it may be hard to resist this seductive view of the what the Decembrists represented, it remains the case that their reception by their contemporaries, and what they unwittingly achieved for the future through their impetuous direct action, point to rather different conclusions. It is to these that we now turn.

Creating an official historical record Clear evidence of Nicholas’s unwillingness to forget the first day of his reign came on 14 December 1848, the twenty-third anniversary of the uprising. It was marked by the publication of an account of it, with a print run of just twenty-five copies, prepared by M. A. Korf on the basis of Nicholas I’s own memoir of the events of that day, supplemented by a number of official documents, accounts and memoirs, under the title ‘An Historical Description of 14 December 1825 and the Events Leading Up to It’.47 Its emphasis on the decisive role played by Nicholas in suppressing the rebellion and punishing its participants has led one commentator to describe Korf ’s text as bordering ‘more on the panegyric than on history’.48 In December 1847 Korf heard the twenty-year-old Grand Duke Constantine read out his father’s hand-written account of the events of the last weeks of 1825. The tsar’s second son then asked Korf to let him see the history of autocracy in Russia he knew to be in preparation. He returned it to the author the following January with a note of gratitude, saying he had read the manuscript ‘with particular interest’. It prompted Constantine’s request to Korf to produce an account of 14 December based both on the tsar’s notes and Korf ’s, together with other relevant documentation, which would, in his opinion, ‘properly edited, result in something extraordinarily interesting . . . if not for our contemporaries, then at least for future generations’. Nicholas I’s son displayed admirable maturity and foresight, evidently considering these events, which he never heard spoken about himself, so important that they merited the accurate historical record which he was confident his own history teacher, Baron Korf, could provide. The tsar himself was fully aware of his son’s commission and told Korf personally that he was eagerly awaiting the appearance of his book and would, in addition, be interested to read the lectures on Russian history which Korf had delivered to Constantine.49 Six years later, in 1854, the tsar ordered a second edition to be printed, again in only twenty-five copies, entitled simply ‘The Fourteenth of December, 1825’. The tiny print run meant that the work was available only to the select few, even though there was considerable interest at the time in the topic in society generally, but especially in its upper echelons, given the numbers of its members who had been involved in the events the book described. Among the observations reported by M. Fok to Benkendorf was that some talked of writing a history ‘of the period from 1801 to 1826’ and getting it published abroad.50 It was therefore not surprising that in 1857, Alexander II authorized the publication of a third edition of the work with a larger print run to meet public

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interest. Even so this edition, now entitled ‘The Accession to the Throne of Emperor Nicholas I’, quickly sold out. Expanded by the inclusion of official correspondence, the book was translated into a number of foreign languages. These included no less than seven different translations into German alone. The book’s royalties in Russia amounted to some 28,000 roubles which Korf donated to the Imperial Public Library of which he was then director. At the time, the theme and contents of the book were considered too sensitive to subject to normal critical review in Russia. However, as Fetterlein concluded in the article cited, ‘the material it assembled presents to this day an extremely valuable source for historians of the first months of the reign of Nicholas I’.51

The Decembrists and the political future of the Russian nobility The goals and actions of the Decembrist conspirators shattered Nicholas I’s trust in the Russian nobility as a whole. The Senate Square uprising on the day of his accession was a shock from which he never fully recovered, and it undoubtedly affected the political trajectory of his reign. But it could have been worse. It is arguable that had the Decembrists adopted Pestel’’s plan for the annihilation of more than a dozen key members of the Imperial Family and the establishment of a republic, Russia would have been engulfed in a catastrophic upheaval perhaps on the scale of later, twentieth-century events.52 Nicholas’s distrust of the Decembrist, ‘European’ generation of the nobility is therefore not surprising, and it extended far beyond the Decembrists’ immediate circles. This is evident in his choice of foreigners, especially Germans, for key posts in his administration. For most of his reign his closest friends, generals and advisers were drawn from noblemen of German descent, such as Adlerberg, Benkendorf, Dibich, Kleinmikhel, Nesselrode and Wittgenstein. As he put it himself, ‘Russian nobles serve Russia, but Germans serve me.’ One curious detail in this regard is that the Prussian chancellor Bismarck was told by Kaiser Friedrich-Wilhelm IV that he had been requested by Nicholas to provide him with two NCOs of the Prussian Guard to massage him face down, as his doctors had prescribed. This was because he would only have Russian soldiers massage him provided he could look them in the face!53 Nicholas’s shock at the events of December 1825 was compounded for him by their unexpectedness. He had not previously had sight of the reports of secret society activity which Alexander had been receiving and ignoring for several years. Most likely this was because Alexander accepted some responsibility for it himself, as he told I. V. Vasil’chikov in response to the report on secret organizations he received from him in 1821:  ‘You have been in my service since the start of my reign, and you know that I have shared and encouraged these illusions and errors. It is not for me to clamp down (Ce n’est pas à moi à sévir).’54 Alexander’s own reluctance to act was reinforced by the reassuring views of his advisers. When Benkendorf handed Alexander a further report in 1821, the former’s commentary was one of total imperturbability:

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In conclusion I should say that these hotheads would be completely mistaken in their senseless hope for general support . . . I  can state categorically that within Russia there is no thought of a constitution. The nobility, purely through adherence to its own personal advantage, would never lend any support at all to any kind of overthrow.55

Historians of the period subsequently concurred with Benkendorf ’s judgment. Piksanov, for example, agreed that the nobility not only failed to support the uprising, but vehemently condemned it, demonstrably siding with the government’s reaction to it (196). Certainly, Alexander I’s death and the ensuing succession crisis were highly charged episodes which presented a real threat to the regime’s stability. Despite the unforeseen complication in the transfer of power, however, neither the regime itself nor the prevailing balance of forces ultimately suffered any adverse effect. The main outcome of the interregnum was to prompt the woefully unprepared Decembrist organizations into a disastrous open revolt which served only to highlight their own internal contradictions and organizational shortcomings. Their challenge was met in turn by a powerful demonstration of solidarity with the status quo on the part of the government and the nobility. It was the Russian nobility which had underpinned the increasing reaction of the last years of Alexander’s reign and which would continue to do so as reaction increased in the years immediately following the defeat of the relatively isolated Decembrists. Precisely this view of the would-be revolutionary noblemen emerges from the memoirs of the opinionated F.  F. Vigel’. He argued that despite the political opposition in some quarters, and a shift in public opinion in post-Napoleonic Russia, the Decembrists were doomed to failure. After 1812, he wrote, No one in our country could or, it would be truer to say, dared to write boldly and cogently about political issues . . . The praise of liberty continued only as a matter of accepted custom. A handful of malcontents plotted to overthrow our way of rule . . . In any other country this could have had dangerous consequences . . . But for Russians the sacred power of the tsar has always been the central dogma of their faith . . . The events of 14 December showed how few people posed any real danger to the security of the state:  how significant were a few hundred discontented and worthless minds compared to tens of millions?56

As S. A. Ekshtut rightly reminds us, in the early nineteenth century, Russian liberals and conservatives alike viewed the French Revolution as an historical dead end: ‘Its aftermath long prevented its greatness from being seen.’ It meant that not only was revolution perceived as something to be avoided at all costs but that, typically, the revolutionary path to social development was considered ‘extremely undesirable and absolutely devoid of prospects for the future (absoliutno besperspektivnyi)’.57 It turned out that it was precisely the Decembrists’ recourse to violence that so alienated them from mainstream noble society which found that such means in no way justified the end. This applied especially to the question of regicide on which

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the Decembrists themselves were divided. Thus, while Pestel’ actively contemplated it, and Ryleev connived at it, Trubetskoi was emphatically opposed to it, insisting that some form of monarchy was essential. ‘Anyone who thinks otherwise does not know Russia’, he declared.58 On 14 December, when it came down to it, at least two would-be assassins, A. M. Bulatov and A. I. Iakubovich, ultimately shrank from murdering their intended victim, Nicholas I. Even so, the damage was already done: it was precisely the violent character of the Decembrist uprising which would have such disastrous consequences for the development of liberalism in Russia. In the persuasive view of V.  V. Leontovich, an authority on this subject, its negative outcome for the country’s political future can be compared only with the assassination of Alexander II in 1881. The Decembrists’ recourse to armed direct action, which led on the day to the assassination of St Petersburg’s governor-general Miloradovich, marked the opening shot of the ensuing nineteenth-century revolutionary movement which would have ever greater recourse to acts of terrorism. In provoking successive governments’ desperate efforts to clamp down on revolutionary organizations and their outrages, the heirs of the Decembrist proto-revolutionaries effectively marginalized the emergence of any liberal ideological alternative for Russia and thus ultimately paved the way for what Leontovich calls ‘the victory of socialist totalitarianism’ in the twentieth century.59 It is significant that the anniversary of 14 December 1825 was one which Nicholas unfailingly marked. He regarded it as the true date of his accession to the throne, rather than the previous evening, when he had revealed Constantine’s instrument of abdication to a meeting of the State Council. It was on the basis of this that his own accession was immediately promulgated. A service of thanksgiving was held annually either in the chapel of the Winter Palace or in the Anichkin church in the presence of ‘all those directly or indirectly involved in the achievements of that memorable day’.60 Prayers were always said for the ‘servant of God, Count Mikhail (Miloradovich) and for all who died on that day for their faith, tsar and fatherland’. Afterwards, for many years it was Nicholas’s custom to visit the Horse Guard and Preobrazhenskii regiments, as they had been the first to come to Senate Square in defence of the regime and the new tsar. These annual visits ceased only when there were no longer any surviving veterans of 1825. In this connection, M. A. Korf was told in 1839 by the regimental commander, A. A. Essen, that by then there were just eleven NCOs and eight privates still serving. The twenty-fifth anniversary of 14 December held special significance for Nicholas. Although ‘the humble chronicler’ of that day’s events was not himself present at the commemoration, Korf was given a first-hand account of it by an eyewitness. On this particular occasion, in addition to those customarily invited to attend the traditional service of thanksgiving, the guests were joined by officers of the three regiments to which Nicholas was most devoted: the Preobrazhenskii Guards, the Semenovskii Guards and the Life Grenadiers. After the service, the tsar went up to the officers to express his gratitude to them for their loyalty over so many years, a loyalty which he was confident they would continue to display well into the future. His words to the Preobrazhenskii officers were particularly

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emotional: indeed, Korf ’s account suggests there was not a dry eye in the house.61 This vignette gives us some idea of the impact the Decembrists’ actions were to have on the Imperial Family, the court, the military elite and the nobility generally for very many years afterwards. More than 120 Decembrists had first become members of masonic lodges, expecting to find there answers to the social questions which so agitated them. For the most part they were to be disappointed, since lodge members were generally quite conservative. This may be gauged from reactions to the uprising as expressed in a letter from Andrei Kuchanov to Ia. F.  Skariatin who, as a junior officer of the Izmailov Regiment, had actively participated in the assassination of Emperor Paul. They were both members of the ‘Three Virtues’ lodge of which Pavel Pestel’ was also briefly a member, along with at least ten members of the Decembrists’ first secret society, the Union of Salvation. On his own admission, A. N. Muraviev sought to use masonic lodges as a cover for the political aims of the Union of Salvation. In his letter, Kuchanov attributes the growth of the Decembrists’ secret societies to Alexander I’s decision to close masonic lodges in 1822. He believes that its members (‘our Carbonari’) had intended to act during Alexander’s lifetime: specifically, they were anticipating that on 12 March 1826, the twentyfifth anniversary of Alexander’s accession, the tsar would announce a timetable for the emancipation of the serfs and for a constitution ‘for the nobility’. But Alexander’s unexpected death triggered their hurried attempt to seize the initiative themselves:  ‘You can see for yourself what these young fools (mal’chishki) took state administration to mean, actually supposing that they had the right to change the system of government themselves.’62 As Nicholas I made clear in his manifesto of 13 July 1826, the day of the executions of the five Decembrists condemned to death, ‘It is not from audacious dreams, which are always destructive, but from above, that the proper regulation of the fatherland will be accomplished.’63 In his memoirs, A.  I. Koshelev recalls the fear among the Moscow nobility as news reached the city from St Petersburg about the uprising. As details of the arrests, the identities of those rounded up, and of the prisoners’ interrogation in the Peter-Paul Fortress mounted up, ‘the more the general alarm increased’. Even though Koshelev had had no Decembrist involvement himself, he nevertheless feared arrest, such was the atmosphere of panic among the nobility in the first few months of 1826. It also led to the closure of literary clubs. One 1827 police report filed by M. M. Fok noted that, following the ‘unfortunate events of 14 December’, which had involved a number of literary figures, ‘St Petersburg’s literati not only stopped gathering in their friendship circles, as had been their wont, but also stopped going to the privileged literary societies which closed down without any government order to do so’ (145). Surprisingly, however, the output of Decembrist writers was still appearing in 1826 and 1827. It included works by Kiukhel’beker, Odoevskii and the editors of the early 1820s literary almanac ‘The Polar Star’, Bestuzhev and Ryleev. True, they appeared unattributed or under the author’s initials, but experienced readers

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knew whose poems they were. In the circumstances, the most remarkable of such publications were some poems by the executed state criminal, K.  F. Ryleev, in ‘Northern Blooms for 1828’ (Severnye tsvety na 1828) in 1827 and in ‘Album of the northern muses’ (Al’bom servernykh muz) in 1828 (150–51). The memoirs of F. I. Buslaev (1818–1897) shed further light on this matter. From the remote obscurity of Penza, Buslaev rose to become an academician and professor of literature at Moscow University. As the author of On the Teaching of the National Language (M, 1844, 1867), he ranked among the most outstanding nineteenth-century Russian philologists. As a teenager growing up in an educated noble family in Penza, which at that time apparently boasted not a single bookshop, Buslaev expressed his enjoyment of reading Bestuzhev and Ryleev’s almanac, which he came across in his mother’s library:  ‘It was for me an unrivalled and highly edifying anthology of modern Russian literature.’ This recollection led the memoirist to an interesting account of the reception of Decembrist writers in the late 1820s and early 1830s in ‘so provincial a backwater’, suspecting that his late-nineteenth-century readers would be surprised that the reading public, and ‘even grammar-school boys (gimnazisty)’, would have had access at that time to ‘Decembrist publications’. He imagined they would be even more surprised to learn that within the walls of their school they read Ryleev’s Voinarovskii and Dumy and made copies of them ‘for their own manuscript collections’. The simple fact was, Buslaev writes, that it never occurred to anyone, let alone schoolboys, to make any connection at all between such publications as ‘The Polar Star’, with its ‘well-intentioned and morally and politically blameless contributors, such as Zhukovskii and Krylov’, and ‘the criminal deeds of the Decembrists’. In particular, Buslaev and his schoolmates read Ryleev’s Dumy without ever imagining that the poet had been executed as a state criminal; on the contrary, they considered him ‘a fine patriot’. At that time he claimed, they had no idea who or what the Decembrists were, and even if they heard the term it meant nothing to them. Buslaev adds that in Nicholas I’s Russia, ‘such topics of conversation were avoided and even considered dangerous’. Potentially risky talk, either in company or at home, would be conducted in whispers to confound eavesdroppers.64 In assessing Nicholas I’s suppression of the rebellion and its leaders, Richard Wortman stresses the new tsar’s deliberate reaffirmation of traditional Russian values over subversive Western concepts of democracy and individual freedom: He rebelled against these Western doctrines, which he claimed had pervaded the nobility, and his violence hallowed the very fragile dynastic tradition that could perpetuate absolute monarchical power in Russia. He presented his triumph as the triumph of the Russian national spirit. Just as eighteenth-century monarchs defined their governance as resembling European monarchies, Nicholas would define his as distinctively Russian, as loyal to a nationally rooted tradition of authoritarianism. In crushing the rebellion, he heroically began a new era, loyal to a tradition presumably demonstrated by the failure of the rebellion.65

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A. I. Del’vig’s observation regarding the lack of public sympathy for the convicted conspirators tends to corroborate Piksanov’s assertion that, if anything, the negative reaction of public opinion went even further than the government’s. It marked the start of a convergence between the nobility and Nicholas I, many of whose actions were directly prompted by public opinion. For example, there was generally broad support for the establishment in 1826 of a new secret police force, the Third Section, in which the nobility would play an active part. In his biography of Nicholas I, Shil’der wrote:  ‘The tsar thought that the best families and those individuals close to the throne should lead this organisation and engage actively in the eradication of evil’ (172). There was similar support, even from Alexander Pushkin, for the strengthening of censorship. For example, police agent Fok reported to Benkendorf that there was an increasing view that ‘our infected youth demands vigilant and constant scrutiny’.66 It would seem that the poet, like so much of the rest of noble society, saw in Nicholas the surest guarantee of the stability which had been so severely compromised during the days of the two Decembrist uprisings, and which now stood in urgent need of strengthening. This sentiment was apparently reciprocated by Nicholas who, in his ‘execution’ manifesto of 13 July 1826, described the nobility as ‘the defence of the throne and of the people’s honour’. He called on Russian noblemen to serve ‘in this respect, as in all others, as an example to all other estates’ and declared that ‘in our fatherland all routes to honour and service are open to them’ (176–7, 183). With these words, he hoped to draw a line under the aberrant and dishonourable conduct of the Decembrist conspirators and so to move forward with the full support of a chastened and compliant nobility. Tsar and nobility thus sought to put behind them the Decembrists’ crude violation of the tacit and long-standing compact between them. Their tradional interdependency was further reset by means of an acknowlegement of their shared interest both in restored stability at home, and the successful pursuit of greatpower objectives abroad, such as the popular and victorious wars against Persia and Turkey between 1826 and 1829. As for Nicholas himself, he would never forgive or forget those he scornfully referred to as his ‘amis du quatorze’. Rather, he would leave it to his son and successor, Alexander II, to amnesty those still serving out their sentences thirty years on.

AFTERWORD The death of Alexander I, the subsequent interregnum and the Decembrist uprisings all amounted to a turning point in the history of the Russian nobility and of Russia itself. Not for the first time in its history had the Russian nobility found that an attempt from within its ranks to make a lasting political impact would ultimately prove no match for the unassailable power of the incoming or incumbent tsar. In the view of an American scholar, the nobility in Alexander I’s reign had already forfeited whatever political influence it may have brought to bear on the autocrat at an early stage. J. J. Kenney’s study of the Vorontsovs’ ultimate failure by 1803 to bring about the changes needed to see the rule of law established in Russia led him to conclude that an opportunity to make any significant contribution to the political evolution of Russia had been missed, leaving ‘no positive role for the nobility to play’.1 Recent Russian assessments of the nobility’s historical contribution, however, tend to be more generous. Three years after the collapse of the Soviet regime, and with it the doctrinaire historiographical parameters which were an ineluctable aspect of its ideology, one commentator felt emboldened to end a brief article about the Russian nobility on a positively patriotic note. Acknowledging that the recent ‘break-up of totalitarian structures and tenets’ had triggered a growing interest in the subject, the writer notes that the dogmatic Marxist-Leninist insistence on notions of ‘class irreconcilability’ had at last receded, thus allowing due credit to be paid to the nobility for ‘its services to the Fatherland’. He concludes with this ringing endorsement of the Russian nobility in the age of Alexander I: ‘It made an enormous contribution to the construction of Russian statehood, to strengthening the power and greatness of the Motherland, the defence of her borders, the increase of her glory, both on the battlefield and in bringing order to the land; and in the accumulation of spiritual values.’2 We have seen the great historical significance in Alexander I’s reign of the emergent division of opinion as to the country’s future direction of travel. It would mark ‘a parting of ways’ among the nobility between frustrated Europeanized reformers and the unreconstructed conservative majority. This phenomenon was noted by Alexander Herzen, who wrote, ‘The people were passive witnesses of 14 December. Every sentient being saw the frightful consequences of the complete and total division between a national Russia and a Europeanized Russia.’3 The historical narrative of the ‘national’ (natsional’naia) Russia identified by Herzen, both well before and long after the reign of Alexander I, points to the unvarying consistency of popular faith in the absolute authority of a single ruler, whether in the guise of a tsar, a general secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union or a president of the Russian Federation. It has long been, and

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continues to be, deeply embedded in the traditions and customs of the prevailing sociopolitical culture. In the nineteenth century, such faith in God’s anointed ruler was the property not only of the vast majority of the Russian nobility but also of all other sosloviia (estates) as well, especially the peasantry. The shared conviction in the benign paternalism of supreme authority towards all classes and conditions of its subjects was absolute. This undeniable fact made the challenge faced by ‘Europeanized’ reform-minded nobles, the Decembrists among them, all the more daunting and ultimately insurmountable. Any potential traction that European concepts of liberty and democracy may have had on Russia was bound to be confounded by the inherent passivity, forbearance and conservatism of the overwhelming majority of its population, especially the nobility, and not only in the Napoleonic era.4 This is not to say that Russia’s rulers have always been guaranteed unanimous support from below. The very lack of it ensured the violent overthrow of the Romanov dynasty in 1917 after 305  years (an epoch, moreover, which saw the violent deaths of four of its tsars), and the collapse in turn of the USSR in 1991 after just seventy-four years. So turbulent a record suggests that in the absence of developed legal and political institutions, starting with an independent judiciary, the successful eradication of corruption, and the effective parliamentary parties required to ensure duly elected and popularly mandated governments, the shifts in Russia’s historical pathway have inevitably been sudden, drastic and momentous. Indeed, the foregoing might well stand as a serviceable inventory of the chronic fault lines in Russia’s governance, which is just as applicable to the regime of President V.  V. Putin today as it was to the reign of Emperor Alexander I  two centuries ago. Were he able to see it for himself today, M. M. Speranskii, as the chief architect of Alexander I’s many unrealized reforms, would doubtless find the current political and institutional set-up in the Kremlin depressingly familiar. Furthermore, such a record shows that the irreconcilable tensions between the supporters of an aggressively defensive status quo and its would-be but increasingly frustrated reformers have posed, and presumably must continue to pose, a constant threat to that status quo’s stability and sustainability in the longer term.5 In the case of Alexander I’s administration, while the institutions of government, both in the capitals and in the provinces, were largely staffed by the nobility, the estate’s potential as a corporate entity was ultimately no match for the authority vested solely in the person of the emperor. Should the emperor falter, however, the transfer of power would become critical, and the state’s future precarious. Alexander I’s apparent despondency and effective abdication of his unique position of leadership in his final years makes the claim of one commentator that ‘later during his reign, buoyed by his defeat of Napoleon, the emperor became politically more independent of the nobility’ impossible to sustain.6 Rather, the evidence suggests that Alexander opted to ignore the nobility, just as he increasingly neglected almost everything else in Russia, effectively leaving the hapless Arakcheev to govern the empire in his stead. This sorry state of affairs contrasts markedly with the high standing Alexander enjoyed during the patriotic upsurge during 1812, so typically evoked by Leo

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Tolstoy in the pages of War and Peace:  ‘The Emperor entered the hall through a broad path between two lines of nobles. Every face expressed respectful, awestruck curiosity . . . and rapturous exclamations were heard from all sides.’7 Nor was this evocation entirely fictitious: the Decembrist I. D. Iakushkin recalled in his memoirs that, in 1812, Alexander ‘never was before and never would again be so close to his people, who at that time loved and respected him’.8 Yet within only five years of Borodino, Alexander’s popularity had ebbed away, and with it the prospects of a reformed government and society in Russia. His relationship with the nobility, never very easy, deteriorated precisely from the time of Russia’s unifying national triumph over Napoleonic France. This was largely because of his failure to forge with it an effective partnership, leaving young noblemen’s secret societies to conspire in an attempt to initiate reform from below by armed force. Ultimately, the two failed Decembrist uprisings would sever any workable compact between the throne and the nobility in Russia for generations to come, thereby vitiating such prospects of reform from above as were offered by Russia’s final allied victory over Napoleon in 1815. In conclusion, it is worth noting that the Putin regime has tangibly expressed its approval of Alexander I’s place in Russian history. A recent account of Russia under Putin remarks that Alexander I, ‘among the most enigmatic figures in Russian history’, having defeated Napoleon, declared, ‘We have enough land.’ Thus the victorious tsar, in contrast to most of his successors as rulers of the Russian Empire, the USSR and the Russian Federation, respectively, chose not to prioritize territorial expansion. Ironically, then, in 2014, soon after Russia’s unilateral repossession of Crimea and the opening of hostilities with Ukraine, President Putin ordered the erection of a memorial to his illustrious predecessor, Emperor Alexander I, in the centre of Moscow. Accordingly, his statue now stands in the Alexander Park, right beneath the Kremlin’s walls.9 This symbolic show of respect is a revealing indication of Putin’s positive view of Alexander I’s leadership and its historical significance for Russia. Moreover, the gesture carries with it a distinct echo of an eighteenth-century precedent: Catherine the Great’s 1782 tribute to her predecessor, Peter the Great, in the form an equestrian statue – Falconet’s dynamic Bronze Horseman – placed in front of the Senate building in St Petersburg. Thus, both Empress Catherine and President Putin similarly elected to celebrate, and thereby identify with, their respective august role models. Implicitly, they assumed their predecessors’ mantle as resolute curators themselves of Russia’s imperial legacy, and worthy promoters of her assuredly glorious destiny. It all points to a remarkable continuity in Russian history which seventy-four years of twentieth-century Soviet power not only failed to interrupt but rather, as we now see, has in many ways perpetuated.

A NOTE ON SOURCES The research for this book was based on archival and printed sources. The archival sources consulted are listed below. This note on sources also includes a brief discussion of the major publications which have helped shape this book’s approach to the subject. For full publication data of the works cited below, readers are invited to refer to the Bibliography.

Archival sources Glavnyi Arkhiv Rossiiskoi Federatsii (GARF) f.109, sekretnyi arkhiv III otdeleniia. f.1165, op.1, Ugolovnye dela. f.1165, op. 3, 981 ed.khr., Osobennaia kantseliariia ministerstva vnutrennykh del 1821–26. f.98, op. 1, 165 ed.khr., 1781–1906, spiski sekretnykh zakliuchennykh (1813–46). f.48, op. 2, 785 ed.khr., 1801–58, sledstvennaia komissiia po delu dekabristov 1825–26. f.825, op. 1, 1530 ed.khr., 1728–1987, Bakuniny. f.679, op. 1 (Aleksandr I). f.279, op. 1, 1227 ed. khr., Iakushkiny. f.973, op. 1, d.5 (diary of V. V. Levashov, 1816–25). Tsentral’nyi Arkhiv Nizhegorodskoi Oblasti (TsANO) f.639, Nizhegorodskoe gubernskoe deputatskoe sobranie. f.641, Arzamasskii uezdnyi predvoditel’ dvorianstva Nizhegorodskoi gubernii. f.2045, 1-yi Departament Pravitel’stvuiushchego Senata. f.2, Kantseliariia Nizhegorodskogo gubernatora. Rossiiskaia Natsional’naia Biblioteka – Otdel Rukopisei (RNB-OR) f.1000, Sobranie otdel’nykh postuplenii, op.2, d.2595, M. A. Fonvizin. Dnevnikovye zapisi (1826). f.380, M. A. Korf (1800–76). f.550 (OSRK) E IV 814 1-2, I.T. Kalashnikov (1797–1863). f.124, d.2322, A.V. Kurakin

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f.124 (Vaksel’), d.4105, M.M. Speranskii – A.D. Panchulidzevu (1819). f.731 (Speranskii). f.550 (OSRK) F IV.626, Zapiski I.I. Meshkova. f.488, d.52 (Mikhailovskii-Danilevskii). Arkhiv Shil’dera, k.19, n.3 (Otchet 1903, p. 35).

Printed sources Many still valuable contributions to the historiography of the Alexandrine nobility were made at the turn of the twentieth century by such historians as N. F. Dubrovin (1899), S. A. Korf (1906), A. Romanov-Slavatinskii (1912), S. M. Seredonin (1902) and N. K. Shil’der (1897–98). However, for much of the twentieth century the dominant aspects of Alexander I’s reign explored by historians were Russia’s Napoleonic Wars, and the Decembrist movement and uprising.1 Dubrovin (2007) is the first full publication of this work since it first appeared in serial form in Russkaia starina from 1899. Undeservedly neglected as ‘official government historiography’ and suspected by some of perpetuating old clichés, it actually presents a variegated and insightful narrative. It draws on a vast range of interesting sources, thereby retaining its usefulness as a resource for scholars and general readers alike.2 There is, surprisingly, no modern, comprehensive, scholarly study of Tsar Alexander I and his reign, either in Russia or the West, apart from the excellent profile by Janet Hartley (1994) and despite the two recent fuller biographies, one subtitled ‘The Tsar Who Defeated Napoleon’ by the French historian Marie-Pierre Rey (2012), and the other published in the popular series Zhizn’ zamechatel’nykh liudei (‘Lives of Remarkable People’) by A. N. Arkhangel’skii (2012). Neither work lays claim to a focus on the Russian nobility as an estate or its relationship with Alexander I. Pertinent models of what could yet be achieved are the magisterial works by Isabel de Madariaga, Russia in the Age of Catherine the Great (1981), and Lindsey Hughes, Russia in the Age of Peter the Great (1998). The political history of Alexander I’s reign was long neglected by Soviet historians until works by S. B. Okun’ (1956), A. V. Predtechenskii (1957), N. M. Druzhinin (1964) and P.  A. Zaionchkovskii (1978) and, specifically on the reformist role of the ruling elite, by N. V. Minaeva (1982) and S. V. Mironenko (1989). In addition, A. N. Pypin (1871), V. I. Semevskii (1905) and Iu. M. Lotman (1994) have illuminated aspects of the political, cultural and social history of the reign. There are also three pertinent publications in English which highlight the pre-revolutionary Russian nobility more generally: they are by Marc Raeff (1983), Dominic Lieven (2006) and Peter Waldron (2007). While each of these works sheds light on aspects of the history of the Alexandrine nobility, none of them aspires to full-scale treatment of the topic. Since then, the most important contributions to the Russian literature specifically on Alexander I’s reign have been made by O. I. Kiianskaia (2008), T. V. Andreeva (2009) and S. V. Mironenko (2017). They each present ‘post-Soviet’

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approaches to the Decembrists’ secret societies. The former is a collection of essays by various hands, while Andreeva’s volume is the fullest history of the Decembrists since Nechkina’s (1955), but without the latter’s tendentiousness. It is, moreover, a far wider-ranging study of secret societies, government policy and public opinion in the first three decades of the nineteenth century. Mironenko (2017), subtitled Choosing the way ahead, explores the failure of both Alexander I’s government and the Decembrists’ opposition to achieve for Russia clearly overdue political and social reform. Finally, five valuable and recent publications which are of direct relevance to the book’s theme but which do not claim to amount to a systematic treatment of it are Katherine Pickering Antonova (2013); Julie Grandhaye (2012); D. Offord, V. Rjéoutski, G. Argent (2018); A. Schönle, A. Zorin, A. Evstratov, eds (2017); and R. Stites (2014).

NOTES Preface 1 The late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries saw growing interest in the history of the nobility among Russian historians. This was reflected in several significant publications. The most important of those bearing on the early nineteenth century include the following: N. F. Dubrovin, ‘Russkaia zhizn’ v nachale XIX veka’, Russkaia starina (hereafter RS), 1 (1899)–3 (1904). (See the Bibliography, p. 345, for full data and see also the recent reprint edition, N. F. Dubrovin, Russkaia zhizn’ v nachale XIX veka, P. V. Il’in ed., SPb, 2007. Il’in assesses the continuing importance of Dubrovin’s groundbreaking work in his introductory article to the volume); A. I. Elishev, Dvorianskoe delo. Sbornik statei, M, 1898; G. A. Evreinov, Proshloe i nastoiashchee znachenie Russkogo dvorianstva, SPb, 1898; Mikhail Iablochkov, Istoriia dvorianskogo sosloviia v Rossii, SPb, 1876, and his Rossiiskoe dvorianstvo. Istoriia rodov, SPb, 1876, reprinted in Istoriia rossiiskogo dvorianstva, M, 2009; A. V. Romanovich-Slavatinskii, Dvorianstvo v Rossii ot nachala XVIII veka do otmeny krepostnogo prava, Kiev, 1912 (and SPb, 1870), also reprint, M, 2003; N. P. Semenov, Nashe dvorianstvo, SPb, 1899; Sh. ‘Dvorianstvo v Rossii. Istoricheskii i obshchestvennyi ocherk’, VE, 6, 3 (1887), pp. 421–52; S. A. Korf, Dvorianstvo i ego soslovnoe upravlenie za stoletie 1762–1855, SPb, 1906. 2 For accounts of Alexander I’s reign, see Janet M. Hartley, Alexander I, London, 1994; A. McConnell, Tsar Alexander I: Paternalistic Reformer, Northbrook, IL, 1970; MariePierre Rey, Alexander I: The Tsar Who Defeated Napoleon. DeKalb, IL, 2012; S. V. Mironenko, Aleksandr I i dekabristy. Rossiia v pervoi chetverti XIX veka – vybor puti, M, 2017; S. B. Okun’, Istoriia SSSR 1796–1825. Kurs lektsii, L, 1947; A. V. Predtechenskii, Ocherki obshchestvenno-politicheskoi istorii Rossii v pervoi chetverti XIX veka, M-L, 1957, and his article, ‘Otrazhenie voin 1812–14 v soznanii sovremennikov’, Istoricheskie zapiski 31 (1950), pp. 222–44; T. Schiemann, Kaiser Alexander I. und die Ergebnisse seiner Lebensarbeit, Berlin, 1904; N.K. Shil’der, Imperator Aleksandr I. Ego zhizn’ i tsarstvovanie, 4 vols, SPb, 1897–8, especially vols 2 and 4. 3 John Gooding, Rulers and Subjects: Government and People in Russia 1801–1991, London, 1996, p. 24; Nicholas V. Riasanovsky, Mark D. Steinberg, A History of Russia, Oxford, 2005, pp. 254–5; Hartley, Alexander I, pp. 21, 25; Simon Dixon, The Modernisation of Russia 1676–1825, Cambridge, 1999, p. 131. 4 Quoted in V. M. Bokova, ‘Bespokoinyi dukh vremeni. Obshchestvennaia mysl’ pervoi treti XIX v.’, in Ocherki russkoi kul’tury XIX veka. Tom 4: Obshchestvennaia mysl’, L.V. Koshman ed., M, 2003, p. 76. On the theme of cultural convergence, see D. V. Timofeev, Evropeiskie idei v sotsial’no-politicheskom leksikone obrazovannogo rossiiskogo poddannogo pervoi chetverti XIX veka, Cheliabinsk, 2011. 5 Specifically on 1812 and its consequences, see Dominic Lieven, Russia against Napoleon: The Battle for Europe 1807 to 1814, London, 2009; Janet M. Hartley, Paul Keenan, Dominic Lieven, eds, Russian and the Napoleonic Wars, Basingstoke, 2015; and two articles by Alexander M. Martin, ‘The Russian Empire and the Napoleonic

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Notes Wars’, in Napoleon and Europe, P. G. Dwyer, ed., London, 2001, pp. 243–63; ‘Russia and the Legacy of 1812’, in The Cambridge History of Russia, vol. 2, Imperial Russia 1689–1917, D. Lieven, ed., Cambridge, 2006, pp. 145–61. In addition, for the role of the Russian Orthodox Church in 1812, see Liubov’ Mel’nikova, Russkaia pravoslavnaia tserkov’ v Otechestvennoi voine 1812 goda, M, 2008.

Chapter 1 1 L. E. Shepelev, Chinovnyi mir Rossii XVIII-nachalo XX v., SPb, 1999, pp. 357–8. 2 Elise Kimerling Wirtschafter, Social Identity in Imperial Russia, DeKalb, IL, 1997, p. 31. 3 Lindsey Hughes, Russia in the Age of Peter the Great, London, 1998, pp. 179, 181. The fourteen parallel ranks are conveniently set out in D. Longley, The Longman Companion to Imperial Russia, 1689–1917, London, 2000, pp. 29–30. A useful summary of the development of the noble estate, its rights and privileges, can be found in N. A. Ivanova and V. P. Zheltova, Soslovnoe obshchestvo Rossiiskoi imperii (XVIII – nachalo XX veka), M, 2009, in ch. 2. See also N. I. Iakovkina, Russkoe dvorianstvo pervoi poloviny XIX veka. Byt i traditsii, SPb, 2002. 4 Richard Pipes, Russia under the Old Regime, London, 1974, p. 125; Simon Dixon, The Modernisation of Russia 1676–1825, Cambridge, 1999, p. 93. 5 Wirtschafter, Social Identity in Imperial Russia, pp. 23–4. 6 Isabel de Madariaga, Russia in the age of Catherine the Great, London, 1981, p. 89. 7 Iakovkina, Russkoe dvorianstvo, pp. 10–11. 8 S. A. Korf, Dvorianstvo i ego soslovnoe upravlenie za stoletie 1762–1855, SPb, 1906, p. 396. 9 B. N. Mironov, Sotsial’naia istoriia Rossii perioda imperii (XVIII-nachalo XX v.). Genezis lichnosti, demokraticheskoi sem’i, grazhdanskogo obshchestva, i pravovogo gosudarstva, 2 vols, SPb, 1999, vol. 1, p. 85. See also the English-language edition, Boris N. Mironov, The Social History of Imperial Russia, 1700–1917, Boulder, CO, 2000. 10 On this, see Sh., ‘Dvorianstvo v Rossii. Istoricheskii i obshchestvennyi ocherk’, VE, 3.6 (1887), p. 427. 11 Michael Confino, ‘The Nobility in Russia and Western Europe: Contrasts and Similarities’, Russia before the ‘Radiant Future’: Essays in Modern History, Culture, and Society, New York, 2011, pp. 119–40. 12 Martin Malia, Russia under Western Eyes. From the Bronze Horseman to the Lenin Mausoleum, Cambridge, MA, 2000, p. 142. 13 Confino, ‘The Nobility in Russia and Western Europe’, pp. 125–7. 14 On this, see E. N. Marasinova, Vlast’ i lichnost’. Ocherki russkoi istorii XVIII veka, M, 2008, p. 72. 15 M. T. Iablochkov, Istoriia dvorianskogo sosloviia v Rossii, SPb, 1876, pp. 585–6. 16 Korf, Dvorianstvo i ego soslovnoe upravlenie, pp. 301–7. 17 Ibid. 18 Quoted in Janet M. Hartley, Alexander I, London, 1994, p. 45. 19 Janet M. Hartley, A Social History of the Russian Empire 1650–1825, London, 1999, p. 57. 20 J. Gooding, Rulers and Subjects. Government and People in Russia 1801–1991, London, 1996, p. 9. A useful summary of the development of the noble estate in the eighteenth century is at pp. 8–11.

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21 M. Raeff, ‘The Russian Nobility’, in The Nobility in Russia and Eastern Europe, Ivo Banac and Paul Bushkovitch, eds, New Haven, CN, 1983, p. 109. 22 Wirtschafter, Social Identity in Imperial Russia, p. 30. 23 E. N. Marasinova, Vlast’ i lichnost’.Ocherki russkoi istorii XVIII veka, M, 2008, p. 59. 24 A. Ianovskii, ed., ‘Introduction’, in Istoriia russkogo dvorianstva ot IX do kontsa XVIII veka, I. Porai-Koshits, ed., SPb, 1900; A. Romanovich-Slavatinskii, Dvorianstvo v Rossii ot nachala XVIII veka do otmeny krepostnogo prava: Svod materiala i priugotovitel’nye etiudy dlia istoricheskogo issledovaniia, Kiev, 1912, pp. 12–13. 25 Ivanova and Zheltova, Soslovnoe obshchestvo Rossiiskoi imperii, p. 130. 26 P. V. Akul’shin, ed., Istoriia odnoi gubernii: ocherki istorii Riazanskogo kraia 1778– 2000, Riazan’, 2000, p. 34; Ivanova and Zheltova, Soslovnoe obshchestvo Rossiiskoi imperii, p. 122. 27 S. A. Ekshtut, Na sluzhbe rossiiskomu Leviafanu. Istoriosofskie opyty, M, 1998, p. 43. 28 For a detailed analysis of service patterns following the nobility’s ‘emancipation’, see I. V. Faizova, Manifest o vol’nosti i sluzhba dvorianstva v XVIII stoletii, M, 1999. 29 B. Koliubakin, ‘Sabaneev, Ivan Vasil’evich’, RBS, SPb, 1904, vol. 18, p. 1. 30 For an analytical account of one instance of divided loyalties, see Patrick O’Meara, ‘General P.D. Kiselev and Second Army HQ at Tul’chin, 1819–29’, SEER, Special Issue Personality and Place in Russian Culture, 88.1–2 (2010), pp. 261–90. 31 N. A. Sokolova,‘Semeistvo Pestelei i Rossiia: novye arkhivnye materialy’, in Nemtsy v Rossii. Russko-nemetskie nauchnye i kul’turnye sviazi, G. I. Smagina, ed., SPb, 2000, p. 361. I. B.’s avocation did not, incidentally, prevent his career from ending badly. In 1819, a Senate commission was set up to investigate his governing of Siberia, following Speranskii’s review of the Siberian provinces, and as a consequence I. B. Pestel’ was dismissed. See ibid., p. 357, and also ch.5, pp. 87–8. 32 On de Maistre’s residence in St Petersburg from 1803 to 1817, see Richard A. Lebrun, Joseph de Maistre. An Intellectual Militant, Montreal, 1988, ch. 6. Pushkin is quoted in F. P. Dzemeshkevich, Dvorianstvo i revoliutsiia, Sebastopol, 2004, p. 17. See A. S. Pushkin, ‘Zametki o russkom dvorianstve’, Polnoe sobranie sochinenii v shesti tomakh, Iu. G. Oksman and P. E. Shchegolev, eds, M-L, 1934, vol. 6, pp. 191–5. 33 On this, see A. M. Martin, ‘The Russian Empire and the Napoleonic Wars’, in Napoleon and Europe, P. G. Dwyer, ed., London, 2001, p. 243. 34 Quoted in Mironov, The Social History of Imperial Russia, vol. 1, p. 108. 35 John P. LeDonne, Absolutism and the Ruling Class: The Formation of the Russian Political Order, 1700–1825, New York, 1991, p. 24. 36 See Hartley, A Social History of the Russian Empire, p. 99. On the nature and extent of the emergence of civil society in Russia during the latter half of the eighteenth century, see Douglas Smith, Working the Rough Stone: Freemasonry and Society in eighteenth-century Russia, DeKalb, IL, 1999; and also, Elise Kimerling Wirtschafter, Social Identity in Imperial Russia, DeKalb, IL, 1997. 37 L. V. Milov, Velikorusskii pakhar’ i osobennosti rossiiskogo istoricheskogo protsessa, M, 1998, quoted in Ivanova and Zheltova, Soslovnoe obshchestvo rossiiskoi imperii, p. 150. 38 Ibid., p. 722. 39 E. N. Marasinova, ‘Dekabristy: aristokraticheskaia fronda v Rossii?’, Rossiia XXI 1–2 (1994), p. 99. 40 S. S. Mints,‘K voprosu ob urovne klassovoi splochennosti rossiiskogo dvorianstva v kontse XVIII-nachale XIX vv’, Pravitel’stvennaia politika i klassovaia bor’ba v Rossii v period absoliutizma, Kuibishev, 1985, pp. 133–44 (This question is further explored in Vera S. Dubina, ‘The “Distinction”: Russian Nobility and Russian Elites in the

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41 42 43 44

45 46

47 48

49 50

Notes European Context (the 18th–19th Century)’, Social Evolution and History, 7.2 (2008), pp. 80–100.); S. S. Mints, Memuary i rossiiskoe dvorianstvo: istochnikovedcheskii aspekt istoriko-psikhologicheskogo issledovaniia, SPb, 1998, p. 191; V. S. Khvostov, ‘Opisanie zhizni tainogo sovetnika, senatora i kavalera Vasiliia Khvostova’, RA, 1.3 (1869), pp. 551–610; M. P. Leont’ev, ‘Moi vospominaniia, ili sobytiia v moei zhizni’, RA, 2.12 (1913), pp. 599–620. Iablochkov, Istoriia dvorianskogo sosloviia, p. 586. Iakovkina, Russkoe dvorianstvo, pp. 9–10. The theme of the nobility’s economic standing is developed further in the section ‘Wealth, poverty, serfs’ in Chapter 2. I. I. Meshkov, ‘Zapiski’, RA, 6 (1905), pp. 206, 222–4. N. F. Dubrovin, ‘Russkaia zhizn’ v nachale XIX veka’, RS, 11 (1900), pp. 259–60. On Karazin’s views of contemporary Russia which quickly exasperated the tsar, see Patrick O’Meara, ‘ “The Opinion of One Ukrainian Landowner”: V.N. Karazin, Alexander I, and Changing Russia’, Word and Image in Russian History: Essays in Honor of Gary Marker, Boston, MA, 2015, pp. 315–35. Kharkiv University is now named after Karazin. Sh., ‘Dvorianstvo v Rossii’, p. 442. S. V. Mironenko, Dekabristy. Biograficheskii spravochnik, M, 1988, p. 180; N. I. Turgenev, Rossiia i russkie, M, 1907, vol. 2, p. 21. (Reprinted SPb, 2001). Turgenev was on leave in Paris at the time of the Decembrist uprising and ignored the Russian authorities’ summons to return to be tried for his involvement in the conspiracy. He was condemned to death in absentia. His memoir, La Russie et les Russes, was first published in Paris in 1847 (reprinted London, 2010). The three-volume publication was chiefly an examination of serfdom and, while banned in Russia, prompted widespread interest throughout Western Europe. Raeff, ‘The Russian Nobility’, p. 118. Mironov, Sotsial’naia istoriia Rossii perioda imperii (XVIII-nachalo XX v). vol. 1, p. 410. On this, see also the richly illustrated study of the nobility’s provincial habitat by Priscilla Roosevelt, Life on the Russian Country Estate: A Social and Cultural History, New Haven, CN, 1995. Korf, Dvorianstvo i ego soslovnoe upravlenie, pp. 392–3, 396, 399. On this question, see S. M. Seredonin, Istoricheskii obzor deiatel’nosti Komiteta Ministrov, SPb, 1902, pp. 231–3.

Chapter 2 1 N. I. Turgenev, Rossiia i russkie, M, 1907, vol. 2, p. 21. The foreign language in question was French. The bilingualism of the Alexandrine nobility is discussed in the context of nobles’ upbringing and education in Chapter 3. 2 T. A. Volodina, ‘ “Russkaia istoriia” S.N. Glinki i obshchestvennye nastroeniia v Rossii v nachale XIX v.’, Voprosy istorii, 4 (2002), p. 153. The italics are Glinka’s own. Glinka (1775–1847) was the Decembrist F. N. Glinka’s brother. He produced the earliest assessment – essentially a panegyric – of Alexander I’s reign: Istoriia zhizni i tsarstvovaniia Aleksandra I, M, 1828. He also wrote a fourteen-part history of Russia (M, 1824–5) and published Russkii vestnik (1808–24), a journal with the laudable aim, as P. A. Viazemskii put it at the time, ‘of introducing the Russians to Russia’ (Volodina, p. 153).

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3 Janet M. Hartley, A Social History of the Russian Empire 1650–1825, London, 1999, p. 57. 4 N. I. Iakovkina, Russkoe dvorianstvo pervoi poloviny XIX veka. Byt i traditsii, SPb, 2002, pp. 8–9. 5 Richard Pipes, Russia under the Old Regime, London, 1974, pp. 176–7, 182. 6 Hartley, A Social History of the Russian Empire, p. 18. V. I. Buganov gives a figure of 150,500 male nobles in European Russia in 1816, of whom nearly half (44.2%) were service (or life) nobles and the remainder hereditary: ‘Rossiiskoe dvorianstvo’, Voprosy istorii, 1 (1994), p. 37. The figures cited by Theodor Schiemann for the last year of Alexander’s reign (1825) are 225,000 hereditary nobles and 500,000 service nobility. See T. Schiemann, Geschichte Russlands unter Kaiser Nikolaus I. 2. Band: Kaiser Alexander I. und die Ergebnisse seiner Lebensarbeit, Berlin, 1904, p. 389. 7 John P. LeDonne, ‘The Eighteenth-Century Russian Nobility: Bureaucracy or Ruling Class?’, CMRS, 34.1–2 (1993), Noblesse, état et société en Russie XVIe – début du XIXe siècle, pp. 139–47, at p. 142; LeDonne, Absolutism and the Ruling Class: The Formation of the Russian Political Order, 1700–1825, New York, 1991, pp. 22, 24. 8 On this, see A. M. Martin, ‘The Russian Empire and the Napoleonic Wars’, in Napoleon and Europe, P.G. Dwyer, ed., London, 2001, pp. 243–4. 9 D. Lieven, ‘The Elites’, in The Cambridge History of Russia, Volume 2: Imperial Russia 1689–1917, D. Lieven, ed., Cambridge, 2006, pp. 229–30. 10 Iakovkina, Russkoe dvorianstvo, pp. 8–9. On the antagonism between hereditary and life nobles see A. Romanovich-Slavatinskii, Dvorianstvo v Rossii ot nachala XVIII veka do otmeny krepostnogo prava, Kiev, 1912, pp. 22–3; and Marc Raeff, Understanding Imperial Russia: State and Society in the Old Regime, New York, 1984, pp. 103–12. 11 N. F. Dubrovin, ‘Russkaia zhizn’ v nachale XIX veka’, RS, 3 (1899), pp. 547–8. 12 Raeff, Understanding Imperial Russia, p. 135. 13 Quoted in L. E. Shepelev, Chinovnyi mir Rossii XVIII-nachalo XX v., SPb, 1999, p. 359. 14 S. A. Korf, Dvorianstvo i ego soslovnoe upravlenie, za stoletie 1762–1855, SPb, 1906, p. 351. For Troshchinskii’s work as procurator-general, see A. G. Zviagintsev and Iu. G. Orlov, Tainye sovetniki imperii. Rossiiskie prokurory. XIX vek, M, 1995, pp. 127–50. 15 Lieven, ‘The Elites’, p. 239. 16 Ibid., p. 229. 17 LeDonne, Absolutism and the Ruling Class, p. 8. 18 Quoted in Korf, Dvorianstvo i ego soslovnoe upravlenie, p. 362. 19 Ibid., pp. 365–6. 20 A. S. Shishkov, Zapiski, mneniia, perepiska admirala, N. Kiselev and Iu. Samarin, eds, 2 vols, Berlin, 1870, vol. 1, pp. 308–9. Shishkov (1754–1841) succeeded M. M. Speranskii as state secretary in March 1812. He was a conservative champion of Russia’s cultural and linguistic distinctiveness, particularly in his role as Minister of Education from May 1824. 21 Quoted in Korf, Dvorianstvo i ego soslovnoe upravlenie, pp. 375, 368. 22 F. F. Vigel’, Zapiski, M, 2000 [ed. S.Ia. Shtraikh, M, 1928], p. 111. 23 Korf, Dvorianstvo i ego soslovnoe upravlenie, pp. 376–8; Vigel’, Zapiski, p. 571. For Rostopchin’s letter, see Chapter 5. 24 On this exchange, see S. Driver, Pushkin, Literature and Social Ideas, Oxford, 1989, p. 5. Ryleev’s line is from his verse of dedication to A. A. Bestuzhev (‘A.A. Bestuzhevu’) of his poem, ‘Voinarovskii’. See Patrick O’Meara, K.F. Ryleev. A Political Biography of the Decembrist Poet, Princeton, NJ, 1984, p. 189. 25 Korf, Dvorianstvo i ego soslovnoe upravlenie, pp. 381–4.

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26 Robert Pinkerton, Russia: Or, Miscellaneous Observations on the Past and Present State of That Country and Its Inhabitants, London, 1833, pp. 316–17. 27 There is an increasing body of work on the provinces which also explores the rise of provincial identities. For an overview, see Susan Smith-Peter, ‘Bringing the Provinces into Focus: Subnational Spaces in the Recent Historiography of Russia’, Kritika, 12.4 (2011), pp. 835–48. 28 Korf, Dvorianstvo i ego soslovnoe upravlenie, pp. 440, 445, 447–8, 451. 29 P. E. Diumon, ‘Dnevnik Et’ena Diumona ob ego priezde v Rossiiu v 1803 g.’, S. M. Goriainov, ed., Golos minuvshego, 3 (1913), p. 82. See also on the question of the nobility’s financial standing: Janet M. Hartley, Russia, 1762–1825. Military Power, the State, and the People, Westport, CT, 2008; B. N. Mironov, The Social History of Imperial Russia, 1700–1917, Boulder, CO, 2000; and A. Kahan, Russian Economic History: the Nineteenth Century, Chicago, IL, 1989. 30 Shepelev, Chinovnyi mir Rossii, p. 359 ; M. Confino, ‘The Nobility in Russia and Western Europe: Contrasts and Similarities’, Russia Before the ‘Radiant Future’: Essays in Modern History, Culture, and Society. New York, 2011, p. 129. 31 Pipes, Russia under the Old Regime, p. 175. 32 Alison K. Smith, For the Common Good and Their Own Well-being. Social Estates in Imperial Russia, Oxford, 2014, p. 9. 33 I. I Dubasov, ‘Iz Tambovskikh letopisei’, IV, 9 (1880), p. 144. 34 Diumon, ‘Dnevnik’, p. 157. 35 Turgenev, Rossiia i russkie, vol. 2, pp. 11, 18. 36 David L. Ransel, A Russian Merchant’s Tale. The Life and Adventures of Ivan Alekseevich Tolchenov, Based on His Diary. Bloomington and Indianopolis, 2009, p. 236. 37 ‘A.A. Tuchkov i ego dnevnik 1818 goda’, VE, 8 (1900), pp. 690, 694. Aleksei Alekseevich Tuchkov (1800–1878), who came from a prominent noble family, was briefly a member of the Union of Welfare in 1818. Although arrested after 14 December, he was released for lack of incriminating evidence. His daughter, Natal’ia Tuchkova-Ogareva, became the wife of Nikolai Ogarev (from 1849 to 1856) and from 1857 of Alexander Herzen. See S. V. Mironenko, Dekabristy. Biograficheskii spravochnik, M, 1988, pp. 180–1. 38 Jerome Blum, Lord and Peasant in Russia from the Ninth to the Nineteenth Century, New York, 1967, pp. 375–6, 384–5. 39 P. Waldron, Governing Tsarist Russia, Basingstoke, 2007, p. 56; P. V. Akul’shin, ed., Istoriia odnoi gubernii: ocherki istorii Riazanskogo kraia 1778–2000, Riazan’, 2000, p. 54; Confino, ‘The Nobility in Russia and Western Europe’, p. 129. 40 Lieven, ‘The Elites’, p. 231. 41 Elise Kimerling Wirtschafter, Social Identity in Imperial Russia, DeKalb, IL, 1997, p. 33; Hartley, Russia, 1762–1825, p. 56. 42 S. I. Mosolov [Mosalov], ‘Zapiski statskogo sovetnika general-maiora S.I. Mosolova. Istoriia moei zhizni.’ RA, 1 (1905), pp. 124–73, at pp. 156–7. 43 P. Maikov, ‘Baron Gustav Andreevich Rozenkampf ’, RS, 120.11 (1904), p. 428. Pogodin (1800–1875) was born a serf but obtained his freedom in 1806. Aged twenty-six, he became a lecturer then, until 1844, professor of history at Moscow University. He was a champion of conservative, nationalistic, pan-Slav views which he disseminated through ‘Moscow News’ (Moskovskie vedomosti) from 1827 to 1830 and then, between 1841 and 1856, continued to promote in ‘The Muscovite’ (Moskvitianin).

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44 Turgenev, Rossiia i russkie, vol. 2, p. 18. 45 Blum, Lord and Peasant in Russia, p. 379. 46 D. Longley, The Longman Companion to Imperial Russia, 1689–1917, London, 2000, p. 341; Isabel de Madariaga, Russia in the Age of Catherine the Great, London, 1981, p. 81; A. N. Pypin, Obshchestvennoe dvizhenie v Rossii v epokhu imperatora Aleksandra I, SPb, 1871, pp. 122, 348. 47 Blum, Lord and Peasant in Russia, p. 379. 48 Quoted in ibid., p. 385. 49 V. M. Bezotosnyi, ‘Tsena i posledstviia pobedy’, Epokha 1812 goda. Issledovanie. Istochniki. Istoriografiia, M, 2009, vyp. viii, pp. 329–59, at p. 338. The nobility’s material response to the war effort in 1812 features in Chapter 5. 50 A. Kornilov, ‘Epokha Otechestvennoi voiny i ee znachenie v noveishei istorii Rossii’, Russkaia mysl’, 11 (1912), pp. 152, 144. The figure derives from a British government review of Russia’s economy, which was carried out in order to calculate the subsidy needed to ensure the continuation of Russia’s war effort. 51 D. Field, The End of Serfdom: Nobility and Bureaucracy in Russia, 1855–1861, Cambridge, MA, 1976, p. 19. 52 Marc Raeff,‘The Russian Nobility’, in The Nobility in Russia and Eastern Europe, I. Banac and P. Bushkovitch, eds, New Haven, CT, 1983, p. 109. 53 B. N. Mironov, Sotsial’naia istoriia Rossii perioda imperii (XVIII-nachalo XX v.). Genezis lichnosti, demokraticheskoi sem’i, grazhdanskogo obshchestva, i pravovogo gosudarstva, 2 vols, SPb, 1999, vol. 1, p. 379. 54 S. A. Ekshtut, Na sluzhbe rossiiskomu Leviafanu. Istoriosofskie opyty, M, 1998, pp. 51–2. 55 For two specific case studies, see Patrick O’Meara, ‘ “The Opinion of One Ukrainian Landowner”: V.N. Karazin, Alexander I, and Changing Russia’, in Word and Image in Russian History: Essays in Honor of Gary Marker, M. Di Salvo, D. Kaiser and V. Kivelson, eds, Boston, MA, 2015, pp. 315–35; and ‘Timotheus von Bock: Prisoner of Alexander I’, SEER, 90, 1 (2012), pp. 98–123. 56 S. A. Ekshtut, V poiske istoricheskoi al’ternativy. Aleksandr I. Ego spodvizhniki. Dekabristy, M, 1994, p. 54. 57 T. A. Volodina, ‘ “Russkaia istoriia” S. N. Glinki i obshchestvennye nastroeniia v Rossii v nachale XIX v.’, Voprosy istorii, 4 (2002), p. 160. 58 Ekshtut, V poiske istoricheskoi al’ternativy. p. 77; Patrick O’Meara, Russia’s First Republican: The Decembrist Pavel Pestel, Basingstoke, 2003, pp. 20–2, 25–7, 29. 59 I. I. Dmitriev, Vzgliad na moiu zhizn’, SPb, 1895, reprint Cambridge, MA, 1974, p. 9; S. S. Mints, ‘K voprosu ob urovne klassovoi splochennosti rossiiskogo dvorianstva v kontse XVIII-nachale XIX vv’, Pravitel’stvennaia politika i klassovaia bor’ba v Rossii v period absoliutizma, Kuibishev, 1985, p. 136. Dmitriev (1760–1837) was a close friend of Karamzin. His memoirs were first published only in 1866. On his role as Minister of Justice, see A. G. Zviagintsev and Iu. G. Orlov, Tainye sovetniki imperii. Rossiiskie prokurory. XIX vek, M, 1995, pp. 95–123. 60 M. P. Leont’ev, ‘Moi vospominaniia ili sobytiia v moei zhizni’, RA, 2 (1913), p. 614; Mints, ‘K voprosu ob urovne klassovoi splochennosti’, p. 136. 61 Maikov, ‘Baron Gustav Andreevich Rozenkampf ’, p. 166. 62 Mints, ‘K voprosu ob urovne klassovoi splochennosti’, pp. 136, 139, 142. 63 N. A. Ivanova and V. P. Zheltova, Soslovnoe obshchestvo rossiiskoi imperii (XVIII– nachalo XX veka), M, 2009, p. 724.

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64 LeDonne, ‘The Eighteenth-Century Russian Nobility: Bureaucracy or Ruling Class?, CMRS, 34.1–2 (1993), Noblesse, état et société en Russie XVIe – début du XIXe siècle, pp. 141–2. 65 PSZRI, vol. 32, 25, 671, 30 August 1814, p. 907; M. T. Iablochkov, Rossiiskoe dvorianstvo. Istoriia rodov, SPb, 1876, reprinted in Istoriia rossiiskogo dvorianstva, M, 2009, p. 394. 66 Richard S. Wortman, Scenarios of Power. Myth and Ceremony in Russian Monarchy. Volume one: From Peter the Great to the Death of Nicholas I, Princeton, NJ, 1995, p. 228. 67 Dubrovin, ‘Russkaia zhizn’ v nachale XIX veka’, RS, 9 (1900), p. 481.

Chapter 3 1 See L. E. Shepelev, Apparat vlasti v Rossii. Epokha Aleksandra I i Nikolaia I, SPb, 2007, p. 417. The fullest study of one important aspect of the project is James T. Flynn, The University Reform of Tsar Alexander I, 1802–1835, Washington DC, 1988. 2 F. Ia. Mirkovich, F. Ia. Mirkovich. Ego zhizneopisanie sostavlennoe po sobstvennym ego zapiskam, SPb, 1889, pp. 22–3. 3 T. Schiemann, Geschichte Russlands unter Kaiser Nikolaus I, 4 vols, Berlin, 1904, vol. 1, p. 396. 4 On the 1786 statute, see: Isabel de Madariaga, Russia in the Age of Catherine the Great, London, 1981, pp. 496–502. 5 N. F. Dubrovin, ‘Russkaia zhizn’ v nachale XIX veka’, RS, 3 (1899), pp. 541–2. On French as the dominant medium for the education of the Russian nobility in the age of Napoleon, see the useful collection of documents and commentaries in Vladislav Rjéoutski, Quand le français gouvernait la Russie: L’ éducation de la noblesse russe, 1750–1880, Paris, 2016. We return to this theme later in the chapter. 6 Letter to Nicholas I from Privy Counsellor A. I. Arsenev, ‘Issledovanie korennykh prichin proisshedshim zagovoram i buntam protiv prestola i tsarstva’, in Sbornik istoricheskikh materialov izvlechennykh iz arkhiva sobstvennoi ego imperatorskogo velichestva kantseliarii, 15 vols, N. Dubrovin, ed., SPb, 1906, vol. 13, pp. 306–8. 7 T. Schiemann, Aleksandr Pervyi, M, 1908, p. 78. 8 P. M. Maikov, ‘Admiral N. S. Mordvinov i ego arkhiv’, RS, 1 (1905), p. 201. 9 P. E. Diumon, ‘Dnevnik Et’ena Diumona ob ego priezde v Rossiiu v 1803 g.’, S.M. Goriainov, ed., Golos minuvshego, 3 (1913), p. 107. 10 Dubrovin, ‘Russkaia zhizn’ v nachale XIX veka’, RS 3 (1899), pp. 541–3; W. E. Brown, A History of 18th Century Russian Literature, Ann Arbor, MI, 1980, p. 238. 11 M. L. Nazimov, ‘V provintsii i v Moskve s 1812 po 1828 god’, RV, 7 (1876), pp. 101–2. 12 N. V. Basargin, ‘Vospominaniia ob uchebnom zavedenii’, Memuary dekabristov. Iuzhnoe obshchestvo, I. V. Porokh and V. A. Fedorov, eds, M, 1982, p. 145. Less than three years later, N. V. Basargin would be drawn into the Decembrists’ Southern Society at Tul’chin, for which he subsequently served thirty years in Siberia until Alexander II’s amnesty of 22 August 1856. 13 D. G. Tselorungo, Ofitsery russkoi armii – uchastniki Borodinskogo srazheniia, M, 2002, pp. 113–14. Tuchkov’s sons, Sergei and Aleksei, like N. V. Basargin, studied at the Column-leaders’ Academy and attended lectures at Moscow University. Aleksei was arrested in January 1826 for his involvement in the Moscow branch of the

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19 20 21 22 23

24 25 26 27 28

29 30

31

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Decembrists’ Northern Society but was released three months later without charge (S. V. Mironenko, Dekabristy. Biograficheskii spravochnik, M, 1988, p. 180). Quoted in Cynthia H. Whittaker, The Origins of Modern Russian Education: An Intellectual Biography of Count Sergei Uvarov, 1786–1855, Dekalb, IL, 2010, p. 66. S. V. Mironenko, Samoderzhavie i reformy. Politicheskaia bor’ba v Rossii v nachale XIX v., M, 1989, p. 39. T. N. Zhukovskaia, Russkaia memuaristika pervoi treti XIX veka, Petrozavodsk, 2006, p. 40. E. I. Topchiev, ‘Dvorianskii polk v tsarstvovanie Aleksandra I’, RS, 8 (1880), pp. 649–50. P. A. Tuchkov, ‘Glavnye cherty moei zhizni’, RS, 11 (1881), pp. 458–9. During the 1812 war, four Tuchkov brothers served as generals: Sergei Alekseevich, Pavel Alekseevich, Nikolai Alekseevich and Aleksandr Alekseevich. The latter two fell at Borodino. Pavel Alekseevich was taken prisoner and brought before Napoleon who ordered the wounded hero to have his sword returned to him. See S. A. Tuchkov, Zapiski Sergeia Alekseevicha Tuchkova, 1766–1808, K. A. Voenskii, ed., SPb, 1908 (reprint M, 2011), p. 3. Tselorungo, Ofitsery russkoi armii, p. 112. Diumon, ‘Dnevnik’, p. 82. F. P. Dzemeshkevich, Dvorianstvo i revoliutsiia, Sebastopol, 2004, p. 19; Diumon, ‘Dnevnik’, p. 82. Maikov, ‘Admiral N. S. Mordvinov i ego arkhiv’, pp. 201–2. Tselorungo, Ofitsery russkoi armii, p. 112; N. A. Sokolova, ‘Semeistvo Pestelei i Rossiia: novye arkhivnye materialy’, in Nemtsy v Rossii. Russko-nemetskie nauchnye i kul’turnye sviazi, G. I. Smagina, ed., SPb, 2000, p. 361. S. A. Korf, Dvorianstvo i ego soslovnoe upravlenie za stoletie 1762–1855, SPb, 1906, p. 373. Tselorungo, Ofitsery russkoi armii, pp. 113–14. Zhukovskaia, Russkaia memuaristika, p. 38; M. A. Dmitriev, Glavy iz vospominanii moei zhizni, M, 1998, p. 66. B. Koliubakin, ‘Sabaneev, Ivan Vasil’evich’, RBS, SPb, 1904, vol. 18, p. 1. A. N. Shebunin, ‘Brat’ia Turgenevy i dvorianskoe obshchestvo aleksandrovskoi epokhi’, Dekabrist N. I.Turgenev. Pis’ma k bratu S. I. Turgenevu, M-L, 1936, pp. 6, 9; A. S. Pushkin, Evgenii Onegin, 2, vi. The translation is from Vladimir Nabokov, Eugene Onegin, London, 1964, vol. 1, p. 132; Patrick O’Meara, Russia’s First Republican: The Decembrist Pavel Pestel, Basingstoke, 2003, p. 12. S. V. Obolenskaia, Germaniia i nemtsy glazami russkikh (XIX vek), M, 2000, pp. 73, 76. S. V. Rozhdestvenskii, Istoricheskii obzor deiatel’nosti Ministerstva narodnogo prosveshcheniia. 1802–1902, SPb, 1902, p. 117; Janet M. Hartley, Alexander I, London, 1994, pp. 149, 151; Hugh Seton-Watson, The Russian Empire, 1801–1917, Oxford, 1967, pp. 176–7. ‘Vorontsovy’, Brokgaus-Efron entsiklopedicheskii slovar’, SPb, 1892, vol. 7 (13), pp. 222– 3; O. V. Orlik, ‘Turgenevy’, Gosudarstvennye liudi Rossii pervoi poloviny XIX veka: puti i sud’ by, M, 2000, pp. 136–7; ‘Zakrevskii A.A.’, RBS, P, 1916, vol. 7, p. 198. Dubrovin, ‘Russkaia zhizn’ v nachale XIX veka’, RS, 12 (1901), p. 471. N. I. Turgenev, Rossiia i russkie, M, 1907, vol. 2, pp. 12–13. J. Keep, Soldiers of the Tsar: Army and Society in Russia, 1462–1874, Oxford, 1985, p. 244.

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35 S. A. Ekshtut, V poiske istoricheskoi al’ternativy. Aleksandr I. Ego spodvizhniki. Dekabristy, M, 1994, p. 54; S. A. Ekshtut, Na sluzhbe rossiiskomu Leviafanu. Istoriosofskie opity, M, 1998, p. 50. 36 V. I. Safonovich, ‘Vospominaniia’, RA, 1 (1903), p. 113. 37 Shebunin, ‘Brat’ia Turgenevy i dvorianskoe obshchestvo’, pp. 5–6; M. A. Korf, ‘Iz zapisok Barona (vposledstvii Grafa) M.A. Korfa’, RS, 11 (1899), p. 519. The reference is to Turgenev’s On the Theory of Taxes (1818) which enjoyed such success that a second edition followed in 1819. Turgenev’s contribution to the debate on serfdom is considered in Chapter 10. 38 ‘Imperatory Aleksandr I, Nikolai I i Aleksandr II. Istoricheskie materialy, k nim i ikh epokham otnosiashchiesia’, RS, 12 (1881), pp. 883–4. 39 N. I. Tsimbaev, Zapiski A.I. Kosheleva, M, 1999, pp. 49–50. 40 A. Mikaberidze, The Russian Officer Corps in the Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars 1792–1815, Staplehurst, 2005, xxxvii. 41 Schiemann, Geschichte Russlands unter Kaiser Nikolaus I, vol. 1, p. 394; Dubrovin, ‘Russkaia zhizn’ v nachale XIX veka’, RS, 12 (1901), p. 469. 42 B. Mironov, Sotsial’naia istoriia Rossii perioda imperii (XVIII-nachalo XX v.), SPb, 1999, vol. 1, p. 97. 43 On this point, see Elise Kimerling Wirtschafter, Social Identity in Imperial Russia. DeKalb, IL, 1997, p. 30. 44 Muriel Barbery, L’ élégance du hérisson, Paris, 2006, p. 207. ‘In Russia . . . during the Napoleonic wars the aristocracy had to learn to speak Russian all over again because before that they only ever spoke French.’ The Elegance of the Hedgehog, trans. Alison Anderson, London, 2008, p. 165. 45 See L. N. Tolstoi, Voina i mir, M, 1968, vol. 1, pp. 43–5, vol. 4, pp. 7–11. 46 Quoted in Iu. M. Lotman, ‘Liudi 1812 goda’, Besedy o russkoi kul’ture. Byt i traditsii russkogo dvorianstva (XVIII- nachalo XIX veka), SPb, 1994, pp. 329–30. 47 Nicholas V. Riasanovsky, A parting of the ways. Government and the educated public in Russia 1801–1855, Oxford, 1976, p. 95; S. V. Mironenko, Dekabristy. Biograficheskii spravochnik, M, 1988, p. 69. 48 For a wide-ranging exploration of the place of French in Russian society and culture, see Derek Offord, Vladislav Rjéoutski and Gesine Argent, The French Language in Russia. A Social, Political, Cultural, and Literary History, Amsterdam, 2018; and also Derek Offord, Lara Ryazanova-Clarke, Vladislav Rjéoutski and Gesine Argent, eds, French and Russian in Imperial Russia, 2 vols, Edinburgh, 2015. See also Elena Gretchanaia, ‘Je vous parlerai la langue de l’Europe’. La francophonie en Russie (XVIIIe – XIXe siècles). Brussels, 2012, and the interesting discussion of language and cultural identity in Michelle Lamarche Marrese, ‘ “The Poetics of Everyday Behavior” Revisited: Lotman, Gender, and the Evolution of Russian Noble Identity’, Kritika, 11.4 (2010), pp. 701–39. 49 S. N. Glinka, Zapiski, SPb, 1895, p. 66. 50 M. Confino, ‘The Nobility in Russia and Western Europe: Contrasts and Similarities’, Russia before the ‘Radiant Future’: Essays in Modern History, Culture, and Society, New York, 2011, p. 136. See also V. S. Rjéoutski, I. I. Fediukin, V. Berelovich, eds, Ideal vospitania dvorianstva v Evrope XVII–XIX vekov, M, 2018. 51 A. P. Beliaev, ‘Vospominaniia o perezhitom i perechuvstvovannom s 1803 goda’, RS, 1 (1881), pp. 8–9. Beliaev (1803–1887) was an officer in the Marine Guards (Gvardeiskii ekipazh). In 1824 he formed a secret society in his regiment and drew up its constitution. He was not a member of the Northern Society, but did participate

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60

61 62 63 64 65 66 67 68 69 70 71 72 73 74 75

76 77

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in the 14 December uprising, for which he received eight years in Siberia. He wrote his memoirs in 1878 and died in Moscow seven years after their publication, aged eighty-four. Schiemann, Geschichte Russlands, vol. 1, p. 77. Gretchanaia, ‘Je vous parlerai la langue de l’Europe’, p. 265. Marrese, ‘ “The Poetics of Everyday Behavior” Revisited’, p. 718. Quoted in Dubrovin, ‘Russkaia zhizn’’, RS, 2 (1899), pp. 260–1; Dmitriev, Glavy iz vospominanii moei zhizni, pp. 64–5; Safonovich, ‘Vospominaniia’, p. 123. Schiemann, Geschichte Russlands, vol. 1, p. 402. Quoted in A. D. Margolis, Peterburg dekabristov, SPb, 2000, p. 47. Beliaev, ‘Vospominaniia o perezhitom’, RS, 9 (1880), p. 3. Quoted in Margolis, Peterburg dekabristov, pp. 43–5. Zhukovskii would eventually leave Russia and settle in Germany where he spent the last twelve years of his life. In 1841 he married a German woman, Elizabeth Reutern, had two children by her, and died in Baden-Baden in 1852. Gangeblov was arrested days after the Decembrist uprising of 14 December 1825 for his association with the conspirators’ two main societies (Northern and Southern) but was released almost a year later to serve as an officer of the line, a ‘punishment’ which he survived to reach his ninetieth year in 1891. N. P. Barsukov, Zhizn’ i trudy M.P. Pogodina, SPb, 1888, pp. 28, 50; N. N. Aurova, Ot kadeta do generala. Povsednevnaia zhizn’ russkogo ofitsera v kontse XVIII – pervoi polovine XIX veka, M, 2010, p. 46. L. Ivchenko, Povsednevnaia zhizn’ russkogo ofitsera epokhi 1812 goda, M, 2008, pp. 76–7. Mikaberidze, The Russian Officer Corps, xxvii. Beliaev, ‘Vospominaniia o perezhitom’, pp. 30–1. Dmitriev, Glavy iz vospominanii moei zhizni, p. 66. On this, see A. E. Presniakov, Aleksandr I, P, 1924, pp. 15–16. N. Koliupanov, Biografiia A.I. Kosheleva. Molodye gody Aleksandra Ivanovicha, M, 1889, vol. 1, pp. 159–60. A. P. Butenev, ‘Vospominaniia’, RA, 3 (1881), p. 33. Dubrovin, ‘Russkaia zhizn’’, RS, 2 (1899), pp. 260–1. I. A. Raevskii, ‘Iz vospominanii’, IV, 101 (1905), p. 398. The memoirist was a nobleman with estates in Tula province. K. G. Bolenko, ‘Rech’ D.V. Golitsyna na dvorianskikh vyborakh 1822 goda’, www. ruthenia.ru/document/54013.html (accessed Nov. 2017), p. 2. Diumon, ‘Dnevnik’, p. 7. Rozenkampf claimed indignantly, however, that his Russian was perfectly adequate. Schiemann, Geschichte Russlands, vol. 1, p. 397. Raevskii, ‘Iz vospominanii’, p. 398; Safonovich, ‘Vospominaniia’, p. 122. From the memoirs of the Decembrist, A. E. Rozen, a cadet there from 1815 to 1818, quoted in Margolis, Peterburg dekabristov, p. 48. V. O. Kliuchevskii, ‘Evgenii Onegin i ego predki’, Stat’i po russkoi kul’ture. Sochineniia v 9 tomakh, M, 1990, vol. 9, pp. 84–101, first published in Russkaia mysl’, 2 (1887), pp. 291–306. Kliuchevskii, ‘Evgenii Onegin i ego predki’, pp. 95–6. Mariia Maiofis, Vozzvanie k Evrope: Literaturnoe obshchestvo ‘Arzamas’ i rossiiskii modernizatsionnyi proekt 1815–1818 godov, M, 2008, p. 274; N. I. Iakovkina, Russkoe dvorianstvo pervoi poloviny XIX veka. Byt i traditsii, SPb, 2002, p. 134.

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78 Maikov, ‘Admiral N. S. Mordvinov i ego arkhiv’, p. 201. 79 Maiofis, Vozzvanie k Evrope, pp. 274–5. 80 A. S. Gangeblov, ‘Vospominaniia. Kak ia popal v dekabristy i chto za tem posledovalo’, RA, 10 (1886), p. 178. 81 Turgenev, Rossiia i russkie, vol. 2, p. 22. 82 Maikov, ‘Admiral N. S. Mordvinov i ego arkhiv’, p. 202. 83 Diumon, ‘Dnevnik’, p. 87. 84 Gretchanaia, ‘Je vous parlerai la langue de l’Europe’, p. 268. 85 P. A. Viazemskii, ‘Ocherki i vospominaniia’, RA, 1 (1877), pp. 307–8. Viazemskii’s recall of Zhukovskii’s observation bears out Tolstoy’s claim (above) that French was the language ‘our grandfathers’ not only spoke, but thought in too. 86 Quoted in E. Lavrent’eva, Povsednevnaia zhizn’ dvorianstva pushkinskoi pory: etiket, M, 2005, p. 214. 87 Marrese, ‘ “The Poetics of Everyday Behavior” Revisited’, pp. 729–30. 88 Robert Johnston, Travels though Part of the Russian Empire, London, 1815, p. 119; Anon, Letters from the continent, London, 1812, p. 102; Thomas Raikes, A Visit to St Petersburg in the Winter of 1829–30, London, 1838, p. 71. 89 Butenev, ‘Vospominaniia’, p. 39. 90 P. M. Maikov, ‘Baron Gustav Andreevich Rozenkampf ’, RS, 120.10 (1904), p. 141; 11, p. 403; N. V. Sushkov, ‘Iz zapisok o vremeni Imperatora Aleksandra I’, VE, 6 (1867), p. 189. 91 See Patrick O’Meara, ‘Vreden sever: The Decembrists’ Memories of the Peter-Paul Fortress’, in St Petersburg, 1703–1825, A Collection of Essays to Mark the Tercentenary of the City, Anthony Cross, ed., Basingstoke, 2003, p. 178. 92 A. Ia. Bulgakov, ‘Zapiski A.Ia. Bulgakova, Starina i novizna, 22 (1917), p. 139. ‘Troops must be sent to surround them.’ ‘That’s impossible as they greatly outnumber us.’ 93 Iu. N. Bartenev, ‘Rasskazy Kniazia A.N. Golitsyna, Iz zapisok Iu.N. Barteneva’, RA, 3 (1886), p. 377. ‘Prince, Russian blood is being shed.’ ‘Ma’am, it is spoilt and rotten blood which is being shed.’ 94 A. A. Malyshev, ‘Iz vospominanii o proshlom’, IV, 20.6 (1885), p. 655, cited in A. S. Minin, ‘Obraz zhizni nikolaevskogo ministra: (Gr. P.D. Kiseleva v dokumentakh i memuarakh)’, Peterburgskie chteniia – 97: materialy entsiklopedicheskoi biblioteki ‘Sankt-Peterburg-2003’, SPb, 1997, p. 653. Malyshev was an official in the Fifth Department, the Ministry of State Domains. See N. M. Druzhinin, Gosudarstvennye krest’iane i reforma P.D. Kiseleva, 2 vols, M-L, 1946, vol. 1, p. 21. 95 Cited in E. N.Marasinova, Vlast’ i lichnost’. Ocherki russkoi istorii XVIII veka, M, 2008, p. 61. For the other commentators cited here, see also p. 67. 96 See, e.g., Korf, Dvorianstvo i ego soslovnoe upravlenie, pp. 381–4. 97 S. O. Shmidt, Obshchestvennoe samosoznanie rossiiskogo blagorodnogo sosloviia XVII – pervaia tret’ XIX v, M, 2002, p. 121.

Chapter 4 1 Quoted in F. P. Dzemeshkevich, Dvorianstvo i revoliutsiia, Sebastopol, 2004, p. 17. 2 A. Pypin, ‘Novye memuary ob Aleksandrovskoi epokhe’, VE, 12 (1887), p. 672. 3 S. A. Tuchkov, Zapiski Sergeia Alekseevicha Tuchkova, 1766–1808, K. A. Voenskii, ed., M, 2011, p. 343.

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4 PSZRI, vol. 30, 23, 771 (6 August 1809), pp. 1054–7; N. A. Ivanova, V. P. Zheltova, Soslovnoe obshchestvo Rossiiskoi imperii (XVIII — nachalo XX veka), M, 2009, p. 109. On the growth of the bureaucracy in the reigns of Alexander I and Nicholas I, see L. E. Shepelev, Apparat vlasti v Rossii. Epokha Aleksandra I i Nikolaia I, SPb, 2007; and I. A. Fedosov and E. V. Dolgikh, ‘Rossiiskii absoliutizm i biurokratiia’, in Ocherki russkoi kul’tury XIX, Tom 2, Vlast’ i kul’tura, L. V. Koshman, ed., M, 2000, pp. 10–95. 5 Lindsey Hughes, Russia in the Age of Peter the Great, London, 1998, p. 303. 6 N. F. Dubrovin, ‘Russkaia zhizn’ v nachale XIX veka’, RS, 11(1900), pp. 260–5. 7 ‘Pis’ma gosudarstvennykh i voennykh deiatelei’, RNB-OR, f.124 (Vaksel’), op.1, d.4105, M. M. Speranskii – A. D. Panchulidzevu (1819), l.4; P. A. Zaionchkovskii, Pravitel’stvennyi apparat v samoderzhavnoi Rossii v XIX v., M, 1978, pp. 29–30. 8 V. I. Safonovich, ‘Vospominaniia’, RA, 1 (1903), p. 116. 9 S. A. Korf, Dvorianstvo i ego soslovnoe upravlenie za stoletie 1762–1855, SPb, 1906, pp. 370–2. 10 V. I. Bakunina, ‘Dvenadtsatyi god v zapiskakh’, RS, 47, 9 (1885), p. 393. See further on Bakunina and her memoirs, and especially her gleeful account of the reviled Speranskii’s downfall, in Pypin, ‘Novye memuary ob Aleksandrovskoi epokhe’, pp. 680–6. On Speranskii as reformer see further in Chapter 7. 11 Richard Pipes, Karamzin’s Memoir on Ancient and Modern Russia. A Translation and Analysis, New York, 1966, pp. 160–1; Zaionchkovskii, Pravitel’stvennyi apparat, pp. 32–3. 12 Dubrovin, ‘Russkaia zhizn’ v nachale XIX veka’, RS, 11(1900), pp. 270–4; I.A. Galaktionov, Imperator Aleksandr I i ego tsarstvovanie, 2 vols, SPb, 1877–79, vol. 2, pp. 9–10. 13 Daniel T. Orlovsky, The Limits of Reform: The Ministry of Internal Affairs in Imperial Russia, 1802–1881, Harvard, 1981, p .23; Korf, Dvorianstvo i ego soslovnoe upravlenie, p. 369. 14 M. Raeff, Understanding Imperial Russia: State and Society in the Old Regime, Columbia, 1984, pp. 129–30. 15 Iu. A. Disson, ‘ “Blagorodnaya al’ternativa” Rossiiskim universitetam: litsei i universitetskie pansiony v Rossii (konets XVIII – pervaia tret’ XIX vv.)’, Voprosy istorii estestvoznaniia i tekhniki, 4 (2007), pp. 128–9. 16 P. E. Diumon, ‘Dnevnik Et’ena Diumona o ego priezde v Rossiiu v 1803 g.’, S. M. Goriainov, ed., Golos minuvshego, 3 (1913), p. 108. Dumont here describes his encounter with ‘a certain Vasilii Karazin’ who promptly offered him the chair of political economy in Khar’kov University, situated ‘in the most enlightened province, and the only one where Latin was widely taught’. Dumont politely, though equally promptly, declined the offer, obliged as he was ‘by his position’. 17 Jan Kusber, Eliten- und Volksbildung im Zarenreich während des 18. und in der ersten Hälfte des 19. Jahrhunderts. Studien zu Diskurs, Gesetzgebung und Umsetzung, Stuttgart, 2004, p. 316. 18 N. Koliupanov, Biografiia Aleksandra Ivanovicha Kosheleva, Tom 1: Molodye gody Aleksandra Ivanovicha, M, 1889, pp. 159–60. 19 Robert Lyall, The character of the Russians and a detailed history of Moscow, London, 1823, p. 325. 20 L. W. B. Brockliss, ‘The European University in the Age of Revolution, 1789–1850’, in The History of the University of Oxford, Volume 6: Nineteenth-Century Oxford, Part 1, M. G. Brockliss and M. C. Curthoys, eds, Oxford, 1997, pp. 98, 127.

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21 Zaionchkovskii, Pravitel’stvennyi apparat, pp. 29–30; T. Schiemann, Geschichte Russlands unter Kaiser Nikolaus I,1. Band: Kaiser Alexander I. und die Ergebnisse seiner Lebensarbeit, Berlin, 1904, pp. 402–3. 22 D. N. Sverbeev, Zapiski (1799–1826), 2 vols, M, 1899, vol. 1, p. 179. 23 M. T. Iablochkov, Istoriia dvorianskogo sosloviia v Rossii, SPb, 1876, pp. 602–3. The large schools were to be located in: ‘Derpt, Grodno, Volhynia in Kiev, Nizhnii Novgorod, Kazan’, Vologda and Smolensk’; the smaller ones in Tver’, Iaroslavl’, Vladimir, Riazan’, Orel, Khar’kov, Saratov, Orenburg and Tobolsk. The university referred to in Alexander’s ukaz was presumably Moscow, since in August 1801 it was the only one in Russia. 24 A. Mikaberidze, The Russian Officer Corps in the Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars 1792–1815, Staplehurst, 2005, xxvi. 25 M. A. Dmitriev, Glavy iz vospominanii moei zhizni, M, 1998, p. 64; A. S. Gangeblov, ‘Vospominaniia. Kak ia popal v dekabristy i chto za tem posledovalo’, RA, 6 (1886), pp. 182–4. 26 D. I. Zavalishin, ‘Vospominaniia o morskom kadetskom korpuse s 1816 po 1822 god’, Russkii vestnik, 6 (1873), p. 633. 27 N. N. Aurova, Ot kadeta do generala. Povsednevnaia zhizn’ russkogo ofitsera v kontse XVIII – pervoi polovine XIX veka, M, 2010, p. 46. 28 L. Ivchenko, Povsednevnaia zhizn’ russkogo ofitsera epokhi 1812 goda, M, 2008, p. 74. Chichagov (1767–1849) retired abroad in 1813, rejected Nicholas I’s invitation to return to Russia in 1834, and took British citizenship in 1847 (David Longley, The Longman Companion to Imperial Russia, 1689–1917, London, 2000, p. 343). 29 Aurova, Ot kadeta do generala, pp. 90–1. 30 E. I. Topchiev, ‘Dvorianskii polk v tsarstvovanie Aleksandra I’, RS, 8 (1880), pp. 644, 647. 31 D. G. Tselorungo, Ofitsery russkoi armii – uchastniki Borodinskogo srazheniia, M, 2002, p. 117: Mikaberidze, The Russian Officer Corps, xxvi; Ivchenko, Povsednevnaia zhizn’ russkogo ofitsera, pp. 74–5. 32 Topchiev, ‘Dvorianskii polk v tsarstvovanie Aleksandra I’, pp. 641, 648–9. Despite the editor’s expressed appreciation of the uniqueness of Topchiev’s memoir, Russkaia starina was clearly in no hurry to publish it: in the concluding sentence of the editor’s note (p. 650), readers are informed that Topchiev’s son had passed the manuscript of the memoir to the journal a full six years earlier, in 1874! 33 Quoted in A. D. Margolis, Peterburg dekabristov, SPb, 2000, pp. 32–5. 34 Janet M. Hartley, A Social History of the Russian Empire 1650–1825, London, 1999, pp. 129–30; Fedosov, Dolgikh, ‘Rossiiskii absoliutizm i biurokratiia’, p. 45. 35 Disson, ‘ “Blagorodnaya al’ternativa” Rossiiskim universitetam’, pp. 137–8. 36 B. N. Mironov, Sotsial’naia istoriia Rossii perioda imperii (XVIII-nachalo XX v.), SPb, 1999, vol. 1, p. 258; O. B. Bushuev, “ ‘Ves’ byt togdashnii nash kadetskii.” Byt vospitannikov 1-go Kadetskogo korpusa v pervoi polovine XIX veka’, Peterburgskie chteniia – 97: materialy entsiklopedicheskoi biblioteki ‘Sankt-Peterburg-2003’, SPb, 1997, p. 624. In 1802, Malinovskii (1765–1814) wrote a memorandum, ‘Ob osvobozhdenii rabov’, in which he elaborated one of the first proposals for the emancipation of the serfs. See A. N. Dolgikh, Dvorianskie proekty resheniia krest’ianskogo voprosa v Rossii kontsa XVIII – pervoi chetverti XIX veka, Lipetsk, 2003, pp. 42–4. See further on this in Chapter 10. 37 Quoted in Mironov, Sotsial’naia istoriia Rossii, vol. 1, p. 258.

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38 T. N. Zhukovskaia, Russkaia memuaristika pervoi treti XIX veka, Petrozavodsk, 2006, p. 38. 39 The account which follows is based on the manuscript, M. A. Korf (1800–76), ‘Kratkii ocherk moei zhizni’, RNB-OR, f.380, ll.5ob.-9. Korf ’s subsequent career was very distinguished. Nicholas I tasked him to assist Speranskii with the 1833 codification of the laws of the Russian Empire and in 1849 appointed him to the directorship of the St Petersburg Public Library. He held the post until 1861 when his tenure of office was commemorated by the naming of a reading room for him, in which his portrait was hung, with the approval of Alexander II who in January 1857 had appointed him to the Secret Committee on the Peasant Question. K. Fetterlein, ‘Korf, Modest Andreevich’, RBS, 1903, vol. 9, p. 287. 40 E. F. Bradke, ‘Avtobiograficheskie zapiski senatora’, RA, 1 (1875), p. 21. 41 Quoted in Margolis, Peterburg dekabristov, p. 61. 42 On the self-serving character of Zavalishin’s memoirs his friend, S. V. Maksimov noted that Zavalishin’s ‘vanity would sometimes lead him to extremes of needless boastfulness’. The Soviet historian V. A. Fedorov remarked that Zavalishin’s exaggeration of his own contribution to the Decembrist conspiracy, while denigrating those of his confederates, unsurprisingly caused considerable resentment. See V. A. Fedorov, ed., Dekabristy v vospominaniiakh sovremennikov, M, 1988, pp. 430, 497. 43 A. P. Beliaev, Vospominaniia dekabrista o perezhitom i perechuvstvovannom, 1805– 1850, SPb, 1882, p. 30. 44 N. L. Iakovkina, Russkoe dvorianstvo pervoi poloviny XIX veka. Byt i traditsii, SPb, 2002, pp. 141–44; Korf provides a full list of the cohort with a brief account of their careers over the twenty-three years since graduating from the Lycée, in M. A. Korf, ‘Iz dnevnika barona (vposledstvii grafa) M.A. Korfa’, RS, 6 (1904), pp. 550–6. 45 PSZRI, vol. 28, 21, 624 (17 February1805), p. 827. 46 Mikhail Iablochkov, Istoriia dvorianskogo sosloviia v Rossii, SPb, 1876, pp. 599, 602–5; Iakovkina, Russkoe dvorianstvo pervoi poloviny XIX veka, pp. 135–6; S. M. Seredonin, Istoricheskii obzor deiatel’nosti Komiteta Ministrov, SPb, 1902, p. 272. Interestingly, in 1817, the Committee declined a similar proposal to build an institute on this basis and reminded the nobility that it should not be relying on the peasants to fund the building of their schools. Numerous charitable donations made by noble associations and individuals for the establishment and upkeep of schools are also recorded in Heinrich Storch, Russland unter Alexander dem Ersten. Eine historische Zeitschrift, 9 vols, SPb, Leipzig, 1804–8. 47 Disson, ‘ “Blagorodnaia al’ternativa” Rossiiskim universitetam’, pp. 131–4. 48 F. V. Bulgarin, Vospominaniia, M, 2001, pp. 624–25; these memoirs were first published by M.D. Ol’khin, 6 vols, SPb, 1846–9; S. M. Seredonin, Istoricheskii obzor deiatel’nosti Komiteta Ministrov, SPb, 1902, p. 268. 49 Pypin, ‘Novye memuary ob Aleksandrovskoi epokhe’, pp. 670–1. 50 Bradke, ‘Avtobiograficheskie zapiski senatora, pp. 24–5. 51 N. P. Chulkov, ‘Moskva i dekabristy’, Dekabristy i ikh vremia, vol. 2, pp. 295–6; N. V. Basargin, ‘Vospominaniia ob uchebnom zavedenii’, in Memuary dekabristov. Iuzhnoe obshchestvo, I. V. Porokh and V. A. Fedorov, eds, M, 1982, pp. 147, 160–1. Basargin was among those arrested at the end of December 1825 at the Second Army’s HQ in Tul’chin, Ukraine, for his involvement in the Decembrists’ Southern Society. 52 P. A. Tuchkov, ‘Glavnye cherty moei zhizni’, RS, 11(1881), pp. 455–6. He went on to achieve the rank of general-adjutant and to be appointed chief-of-staff of the Grenadier Corps.

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53 N. I. Shenig, ‘Vospominaniia. O Shkole Kolonnovozhatykh’, RA, 3 (1880), p. 297. Note that sources conflict over the origins of the school. Shenig writes that it was originally founded by Prince P. M. Volkonskii in 1811 in St. Petersburg. It was not until 1815 that General N. N. Muraviev, on his return from that year’s campaign, re-established the school in Moscow with his own son, Michael, teaching alongside ‘several Moscow professors’. The school returned to St. Petersburg in 1821 with A. I. Khatov as its director (at pp. 294, 296–7). 54 M. V. Nechina, ed., Vosstanie dekabristov. Materialy i dokumenty. Dela verkhovnogo ugolovnogo suda i sledstvennoi komissii, M, 1975, vol. 13, pp. 22–3. Avramov was among those arrested at the Second Army’s HQ at Tul’chin, Ukraine, for his involvement in the conspiracy. 55 M. V. Nechkina, ‘Sviashchennyi artel’. Kruzhok A. Murav’eva i I. Burtsova, 1814–1817 gg.’, in Dekabristy i ikh vremia, materialy i soobshcheniia, M. P. Alekseev and B. S. Meilakh, eds, M, 1951, p. 161. 56 Bulgarin, Vospominaniia, p. 638; Koliupanov, Biografiia A.I. Kosheleva, vol. 1, p. 378; M. L. Nazimov, ‘V provintsii i v Moskve s 1812 po1828 god’, RV, 7 (1876), pp. 132–3. 57 V. I. Safonovich, ‘Vospominaniia’, RA, 1 (1903), pp. 117, 122. 58 Quoted in P. E. Shchegolev, Dekabristy, M-L, 1926, p. 12. Raevskii was arrested in 1822 in Kishinev for sedition at his military base and is thus known as ‘the first Decembrist’. 59 Nazimov, ‘V provintsii i v Moskve s 1812 po 1828 god’, pp. 150, 144–5. 60 A. P. Beliaev, ‘Vospominaniia o perezhitom i perechuvstvovannom s 1803 goda’, RS, 9 (1880), p. 30. 61 Memuary dekabristov. Iuzhnoe obshchestvo, p. 145. 62 N. P. Barsukov, Zhizn’ i trudy M.P. Pogodina, SPb, 1888, p. 51. 63 Nicole published an article about it : ‘La fondation du Lycée Richelieu à Odessa’, Paris, 1817. See G. Florovsky, Les voies de la théologie russe, Paris, 2001, p. 157. 64 Schiemann, Kaiser Alexander I. und die Ergebnisse seiner Lebensarbeit, p. 395. 65 Quoted in Margolis, Peterburg dekabristov, p. 32. 66 Iakovkina, Russkoe dvorianstvo, pp. 131–2; P. Christoff, The Third Heart: some intellectual-ideological currents and cross currents in Russia 1800–1830, The Hague, 1970, p. 77. 67 N. I. Turgenev, Rossiia i russkie, M, 1907, vol. 2, pp. 20, 195–96. See also: Marie Martin, Maria Fedorovna en son temps, 1759–1828, contribution à l’histoire de la Russie et de l’Europe, Paris, 2003. 68 TsANO, f.641, op.1, d.92, ll.2ob, 4. 69 Isabel de Madariaga, Russia in the age of Catherine the Great, London, 1981, p. 493. 70 A. V. Belova, Chetyre vozrasta zhenshchiny: povsednevnaia zhizn’ russkoi provintsial’noi dvorianki XVIII – serediny XIX v., SPb, 2010, pp. 194, 198–200. 71 Zhukovskaia, Russkaia memuaristika, pp. 38–9. 72 N. I. Alpatov, Uchebno-vospitatel’naia rabota v dorevoliutsionnoi shkole internatnogo tipa. (Iz opyta kadetskikh korpusov i voennykh gimnazii v Rossii), M, 1958, p. 13; Aurova, Ot kadeta do generala, pp. 77–8. 73 Dubrovin, ‘Russkaia zhizn’’, RS, 2 (1899), p. 263; Koliupanov, Biografiia A. I. Kosheleva, vol. 1, p. 378. 74 V. M. Bokova, ‘Bespokoinyi dukh vremeni. Obshchestvennaia mysl’ pervoi treti XIX v’, in Ocherki russkoi kul’tury XIX veka, Tom 4, Obshchestvennaia mysl’, L. V. Koshman, ed., M, 2003, pp. 86–7. Kutuzov was treated with unusual leniency, released

Notes

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76 77 78 79

80 81 82 83 84 85 86 87 88 89

90

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at the tsar’s command on 6 February 1826 after only two weeks’ detention. See S. V. Mironenko, Dekabristy. Biograficheskii spravochnik, M, 1988, p. 94. Anon, ‘O vrednom dukhe nashego vremeni’, in Sbornik istoricheskikh materialov izvlechennykh iz arkhiva sobstvennoi ego imperatorskogo velichestva kantseliarii, N. Dubrovin, ed., SPb, 1901, vol. 11, pp. 258–63, see esp. pp. 258–60. N. K. Shil’der, Imperator Aleksandr I. Ego zhizn’ i tsarstvovanie, 4 vols, SPb, 1898, vol. 4, p. 214. M. L. Magnitskii, ‘Zapiska M.L. Magnitskogo o narodnom vospitanii’, in Sbornik istoricheskikh materialov, Dubrovin, ed., SPb, 1901, vol. 11, pp. 330–8. I. N. Bozherianov, ‘Nevskii Prospekt’. Kul’turno-istoricheskii ocherk dvukhvekovoi zhizni S.-Peterburga, 2 vols, SPb, 1903, vol. 2, p. 367, citing RS, 3 (1874), p. 275. I. O. Witt, ‘Zapiska o nedostatkakh nyneshnego vospitaniia Rossiiskogo dvorianstva (1826)’, in Sbornik istoricheskikh materialov, Dubrovin, ed., SPb, 1906, vol. 13, pp. 235–7. Dubrovin, ‘Russkaia zhizn’’, RS, 3 (1899), p. 546. Richard Pipes, Karamzin’s Memoir on Ancient and Modern Russia. A Translation and Analysis, New York, 1966, pp. 158–9. See Kusber, Eliten- und Volksbildung im Zarenreich, pp. 315, 317. Minerva was the Roman goddess of wisdom and patron of the arts. Dubrovin, ‘Russkaia zhizn’’, RS, 3 (1899), p. 546. A. M. Martin, ‘Russia and the Legacy of 1812’, in The Cambridge History of Russia. Volume 2. Imperial Russia 1689–1917, D. Lieven, ed., Cambridge, 2006, p. 147. Mikaberidze, The Russian Officer Corps, p. xxix. Quoted in Margolis, Peterburg dekabristov, p. 35. Turgenev, Rossiia i russkie, vol. 2, pp. 20, 195–6. Iu. M. Lotman, ‘Liudi 1812 goda’, in Besedy o russkoi kul’ture. Byt i traditsii russkogo dvorianstva (XVIII – nachalo XIX veka), SPb, 1994, p. 323. O. Zhukova, ‘Glinka, Grigorii Andreevich’, RBS, M, 1916, pp. 272–3. Glinka was well connected at court, acting as tutor to Grand Dukes Nicholas and Michael, the tsar’s younger brothers. His brother, V. A. Glinka, was briefly involved in the Union of Welfare but did not suffer any consequences and, following the suppression of the Decembrist conspiracy, continued his successful military career. Quoted in T. V. Andreeva, Tainye obshchestva v Rossii v pervoi treti XIX v. Pravitel’stvennaia politika i obshchestvennoe mnenie, SPb, 2009, p. 138. For an evaluation of Andreeva’s substantial volume, a major contribution to the political history of the age of Alexander I, see Patrick O’Meara, ‘Recent Russian Historiography on the Decembrists: From “Liberation Movement” to “Public Opinion”’, Kritika: Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History, 14 (2013), pp. 805–22.

Chapter 5 1 Iu. M. Lotman, ‘Liudi 1812 goda’, Besedy o russkoi kul’ture. Byt i traditsii russkogo dvorianstva (XVIII- nachalo XIX veka), SPb, 1994, pp. 326, 330. 2 For a recent study of Nizhnii Novgorod, see Catherine Evtuhov, Portrait of a Russian Province: Economy, Society, and Civilization in Nineteenth-Century Nizhnii Novgorod, Pittsburgh, 2011, and also her article, ‘Nizhnii Novgorod in the nineteenth

306

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4 5

6

7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16

17 18

19 20 21

Notes century: portrait of a city’, in The Cambridge History of Russia, Volume 2: Imperial Russia 1689–1917, D. Lieven, ed., Cambridge, 2006, pp. 264–83. S. M. Seredonin, Istoricheskii obzor deiatel’nosti Komiteta Ministrov, SPb, 1902, p. 256; D. Lieven, ‘The Elites’, in The Cambridge History of Russia, Volume 2: Imperial Russia 1689–1917, D. Lieven, ed., Cambridge, 2006, p. 239. Isabel de Madariaga, Russia in the age of Catherine the Great, London, 1981, pp. 281, 286. See also Chapter 1, pp. 4–6. See P. Waldron, Governing Tsarist Russia, Basingstoke, 2007, p. 60; S. A. Korf, Dvorianstvo i ego soslovnoe upravlenie za stoletie 1762–1855, SPb, 1906, p. 305. A detailed account of the infrastructure of provincial administration in Alexander I’s reign is to be found in L. E. Shepelev, Apparat vlasti v Rossii. Epokha Aleksandra I i Nikolaia I, SPb, 2007. L. E. Shepelev, Chinovnyi mir Rossii XVIII-nachalo XX v., SPb, 1999, p. 358; N. A. Ivanova and V. P. Zheltova, Soslovnoe obshchestvo Rossiiskoi imperii (XVIII – nachalo XX veka), M, 2009, p. 144; N. A. Ivanova, ‘Dvorianskaia korporativnaia organizatsiia v Rossiiskom zakonodatel’stve kontsa XVIII – nachala XX v.’, Prizvanie istorika: Problemy dukhovnoi i politicheskoi istorii Rossii: sbornik statei k 60-letiiu professoraV.V. Shelokhaeva, M, 2001, p. 195. Korf, Dvorianstvo i ego soslovnoe upravlenie, p. 310; Boris N. Mironov, The Social History of Imperial Russia, 2 vols, Boulder, CO, 2000, vol. 1, pp. 408–9. T. Schiemann, Zur Geschichte der Regierung Paul I. und Nikolaus I. Neue Materialen, Berlin, 1906, p. 64. On this, see J. LeDonne, Absolutism and the Ruling Class: The Formation of the Russian Political Order, 1700–1825, New York, 1991, p. 27. Korf, Dvorianstvo i ego soslovnoe upravlenie, pp. 400–1, 435; S. V. Mironenko, Samoderzhavie i reformy. Politicheskaia bor’ba v Rossii v nachale XIX v, M, 1989, p. 15. N. F. Dubrovin, ‘Russkaia zhizn’ v nachale XIX veka’, RS, 3 (1899), pp. 555–7. Janet M. Hartley, A Social History of the Russian Empire 1650–1825, London, 1999, p. 99. Korf, Dvorianstvo i ego soslovnoe upravlenie, pp. 402, 405. Korf, Dvorianstvo i ego soslovnoe upravlenie, pp. 313–31. Mironov, The Social History of Imperial Russia, vol. 1, p. 409; Ivanova, ‘Dvorianskaia korporativnaia organizatsiia’, p. 193. TsANO, f.641 (Kantseliariia Nizhegorodskogo gubernatora 1814–1917), op.1, d.79, 11,11ob. Prince P. S. Trubetskoi (1761–1817) was the father of the Decembrist S. P. Trubetskoi, who was born in NN in 1790. S. P. Trubetskoi’s mother was Princess D. A. Gruzinskaia, the sister of G. A. Gruzinskii who would succeed Trubetskoi père as provincial marshal in 1807 and remain in post until 1830. See P. J. O’Meara, ‘Trubetskoi, Sergei Petrovich’, Modern Encyclopedia of Russian and Soviet History, 40 (1985), pp. 9–12, p. 9; [S. V.] Liubimov, Predvoditeli dvorianstva vsekh namestnichestv, gubernii i oblastei Rossiiskoi Imperii: 1777–1910 g, SPb, 1911, p. 39. TsANO, f.641, op.1, d.79, ll.5, 5ob. TsANO, f.639, op.124, d.1332, for example, consists of the bound volume of 305 pages (listy) of the edicts and notices received by the NN provincial marshal’s office during the year 1809. Quoted in A. P. Mel’nikov, Ocherki bytovoi istorii Nizhegorodskoi iarmarki (1817– 1917), 2nd ed., NN, 1993, pp. 66–67. F. F. Vigel’, Zapiski, M, 2000 [ed. S.Ia. Shtraikh, M, 1928], p. 408. TsANO, f.641, op.1, d.76, l.2.

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22 Ibid., d.170, l.1. 23 OR-RNB, f.488 (Mikhailovskii-Danilevskii), d.52, ‘Zhurnal 1824 goda. Vospominaniia [1827–28]’, ll.27–28 ob. 24 In highly emotional language, Alexander I called on every Russian nobleman ‘to find the Pozharskii within him’ and to throw back the enemy ‘with a cross on his heart, and a weapon in his hand’. See M. T. Iablochkov, Rossiiskoe dvorianstvo. Istoriia rodov, SPb, 1876, reprinted in Istoriia rossiiskogo dvorianstva, M, 2009, p. 394. The immediately recognizable historical reference was to the liberation of Moscow from occupying Polish forces in 1612 by a national Russian army led by Prince Dmitrii Pozharskii together with a butcher, Kuzma Minin, the elected head of NN. Their victory marked the end of the Time of Troubles and led to the inauguration of the Romanov dynasty. 25 V. P. Apukhtin, Nizhegorodskoe dvorianskoe opolchenie, 1812–1814 gg. Kratkii ocherk i materialy o sformirovanii Nizhegorodskoi voennoi sily i o deistviiakh polkov Nizhegorodskogo opolcheniia v 1813 g. za granitsei, Nizhnii Novgorod, 1912, pp. 2–4. Kriukov’s two sons, Alexander and Nicholas, were both members of the Decembrists’ Southern society in Tul’chin for which they served long sentences of hard labour in Siberian exile. Their mother was an Englishwoman, Elizabeth Mangin. (See S. V. Mironenko, Dekabristy. Biograficheskii spravochnik, M, 1988, pp. 92–3; Vigel’, Zapiski, p. 405). 26 I. I . Dubasov, ‘Iz Tambovskikh letopisei’, IV, 3 (1880), pp. 144–5. 27 M. T. Iablochkov, Istoriia dvorianskogo sosloviia v Rossii, SPb, 1876, p. 615. On 1812’s impact on the provincial nobility, see further: Janet M. Hartley, Russia, 1762–1825. Military Power, the State, and the People, Westport, CT, 2008, esp. ch. 4 on the scale of noble contributions in certain provinces, and Alexander M. Martin, ‘The Russian Empire and the Napoleonic Wars’, in Napoleon and Europe, P. G. Dwyer, ed., London, 2001, pp. 243–63, for a discussion of claims for compensation in the aftermath of 1812. 28 TsANO, f.639, op.124, d.1618, ll.161, 240. 29 Korf, Dvorianstvo i ego soslovnoe upravlenie, pp. 402–6, 410–12. 30 Mironenko, Samoderzhavie i reformy, pp. 51–4. 31 RNB-OR, op.1, f.124 (P.L. Vaksel’), d.4105 (Pis’ma gosudarstvennykh i voennykh deiatelei. M. M. Speranskii – A. D. Panchulidzevu, 1819), ll.72ob., 73, 77. The file contains a good lithograph of Speranskii, and a cutting of Dobrokhotov’s article (on this, see further p. 137). It is reproduced in: V. Dobrokhotov, ‘Po povodu 50-letiia so dnia konchiny gr. Speranskogo’, Russkie vedomosti, 42 (1889). 32 RNB-OR, f.550 (OSRK), E.IV. 814 1-2,(I.T. Kalashnikov, 1797–1863, ‘Vospominaniia. Zapiski irkutskogo zhitelia’), l.135 ob. An abbreviated version of the memoir is published in RS, 7 (1905), pp. 187–251; 8, pp. 384–409; 9, pp. 609–46. 33 Vigel’, Zapiski, p. 403. 34 Dubasov, ‘Iz Tambovskikh letopisei’, p. 136. 35 Vigel’, Zapiski, pp. 190–1. 36 N. A. Sokolova, ‘Semeistvo Pestelei i Rossiia: novye arkhivnye materialy’, in Nemtsy v Rossii. Russko-nemetskie nauchnye i kul’turnye sviazi, G.I. Smagina, ed., SPb, 2000, p. 357. 37 I. B. Pestel’, ‘Bumagi Ivana Borisovicha Pestelia’, P. Bartenev, ed., RA, 1.4 (1875), p. 370. 38 Patrick O’Meara, Russia’s First Republican: The Decembrist Pavel Pestel, Basingstoke, 2003, p. 11. 39 Korf, Dvorianstvo i ego soslovnoe upravlenie, pp. 339, 343.

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40 K.G. Bolenko, ‘Rech’ D.V. Golitsyna na dvorianskikh vyborakh 1822 goda’, www. ruthenia.ru/document/54013.html (accessed Nov. 2017). 41 Dubrovin, ‘Russkaia zhizn’ v nachale XIX veka’, RS, 3 (1899), pp. 564–5. 42 S. M. Seredonin, Istoricheskii obzor deiatel’nosti Komiteta Ministrov, SPb, 1902, pp. 262, 277–8. Some examples of such ‘sick notes’ will be found in Chapter 6, under ‘The noble assembly in action: Health and wealth’. 43 Korf, Dvorianstvo i ego soslovnoe upravlenie, pp. 420–5. 44 M. M. Fok, ‘Peterburgskoe obshchestvo pri vosshestvii na prestol Imperatora Nikolaia po doneseniiam M.M. Foka – A.Kh. Benkendorfu’, RS, 9 (1881), p. 191. 45 V. O. Kliuchevskii, ‘Evgenii Onegin i ego predki’, Stat’i po russkoi kul’ture. Sochineniia v 9 tomakh, M, 1990, vol. 9, pp. 84–101. Pushkin wrote his remarkable verse novel between 1823 and 1831. Published in 1833, it is rightly regarded as his masterpiece and ranks among the highest achievements of Russian poetry. 46 Sh., ‘Dvorianstvo v Rossii. Istoricheskii i obshchestvennyi ocherk’, VE, 3.6 (1887), pp. 421–42; Seredonin, Istoricheskii obzor deiatel’nosti Komiteta Ministrov, p. 258. 47 Quoted in Richard Pipes, Russia under the Old Regime, London, 1974, p. 183. 48 Dubrovin, ‘Russkaia zhizn’ v nachale XIX veka’, RS, 3 (1899), pp. 566–8; Korf, Dvorianstvo i ego soslovnoe upravlenie, p. 428. 49 Marc Raeff, Understanding Imperial Russia: State and Society in the Old Regime, New York, 1984, p. 157. 50 Korf, Dvorianstvo i ego soslovnoe upravlenie, pp. 356–7. 51 A. Romanov-Slavatinskii, Dvorianstvo v Rossii ot nachala XVIII veka do otmeny krepostnogo prava, Kiev, 1912, p. 509. 52 RNB- OR, f.550 (OSRK), F IV.626 (Zapiski I.I. Meshkova, 1767–1844), l.90ob [p. 166]. 53 Vigel’, Zapiski, p. 295. A verst is approximately 1 kilometre. Penza is 1,350 km east of St Petersburg, while Irkutsk is considerably more remote, at 5,600 km. 54 I. T. Kalashnikov, ‘Zapiski Irkutskogo zhitelia’, RS, 7 (1905), p. 219. 55 E. F. Bradke, ‘Avtobiograficheskie zapiski senatora’, RA, 1 (1875), p. 36. 56 M. T. Iablochkov, Dvorianskoe soslovie Tul’skoi gubernii, 13 vols, Tula, 1899, vol. 1, pp. 130–1. 57 B.M. Eikhenbaum, S.P. Zhikharev. Zapiski sovremennika, M-L, 1955, p. 648. 58 N. P. Semenov, Nashe dvorianstvo, SPb, 1899, p. 27. 59 M. A. Leont’ev, ‘Moi vospmominaniia, ili sobytiia v moei zhizni’, RA, 2.11 (1913), pp. 613–15. 60 Romanov-Slavatinskii, Dvorianstvo v Rossii, p. 446. 61 Korf, Dvorianstvo i ego soslovnoe upravlenie, p. 351. 62 Waldron, Governing Tsarist Russia, p. 60. 63 Dubrovin, ‘Russkaia zhizn’ v nachale XIX veka’, RS, 3 (1899), p. 540. For a detailed description of the voting procedures for noble elections at this time, see Mary W. Cavender, Nests of the Gentry: Family, Estate, and Local Loyalties in Provincial Russia, Newark, NJ, 2007, pp. 159–60. 64 Korf, Dvorianstvo i ego soslovnoe upravlenie, pp. 352–5; A. Ianovskii, ‘Vvedenie’, in Istoriia russkogo dvorianstva ot IX do kontsa XVIII veka, I. Porai-Koshits, ed., SPb, 1900, reprint M, 2003, p. 15. 65 Seredonin, Istoricheskii obzor deiatel’nosti Komiteta Ministrov, pp. 262–3. 66 Dubrovin, ‘Russkaia zhizn’ v nachale XIX veka’, RS, 3 (1899), pp. 562, 565. 67 Sh., ‘Dvorianstvo v Rossii’, pp. 439, 441; Seredonin, Istoricheskii obzor deiatel’nosti Komiteta Ministrov, p. 278.

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68 Quoted in S. A. Ekshtut, Na sluzhbe rossiiskomu Leviafanu. Istoriosofskie opyty, M, 1998, pp. 43–4. (Ia mesiats v gvardii sluzhil,/ A sorok let v otstavke byl,/ V derevne ia uchil sobak,/ Lovil zverei, kuril tabak,/ Nalivki pil, seka krest’ian,/ Zhil veselo i umer p’ian.) 69 On this, see Raeff, Understanding Imperial Russia, pp. 161–2; M. Iablochkov, Istoriia dvorianskogo sosloviia v Rossii, SPb, 1876, p. 586.

Chapter 6 1 TsANO, f.2045 (Pervyi departament pravitel’stvuiushchego senata), op. 1881, d. 176, ll. 3-5ob. 2 B. N. Mironov, The Social History of Imperial Russia, 1700–1917, 2 vols, Boulder, CO, 2000, vol. 1, p. 405. 3 Ibid., vol. 1, p. 411. 4 S. A. Korf, Dvorianstvo i ego soslovnoe upravlenie, SPb, 1906, pp. 399, 418. 5 TsANO, f.641 (Kantseliariia Nizhegorodskogo gubernatora 1814–1917), op. 1, d. 94, ll .7–8. 6 Ibid., f.639, op. 124, d. 1192, l.10. 7 J. LeDonne, Absolutism and the Ruling Class: The Formation of the Russian Political Order, 1700–1825, New York, 1991, p. 26. 8 L. E. Shepelev, Chinovnyi mir Rossii XVIII-nachalo XX v., SPb, 1999, p. 357. 9 A. M. Martin, Romantics, Reformers, Reactionaries. Russian Conservative Thought and Politics in the Reign of Alexander I, DeKalb, IL, 1997, p. 9. 10 A. Ianovskii, ‘Vvedenie’, Istoriia russkogo dvorianstva ot IX do kontsa XVIII veka, SPb, 1900, pp. 22, 24; N. N. Ivanova and V. P. Zheltova, Soslovnoe obshchestvo Rossiiskoi imperii (XVIII – nachalo XX veka), M, 2009. p. 143. 11 Daniel Field, The End of Serfdom: Nobility and Bureaucracy in Russia, 1855–1861, Cambridge, MA, 1976, p. 16. 12 TsANO, f.639 (Kantseliariia Nizhegorodskogo gubernatora 1814–1917), op. 124, d. 955, ll. 4–13, 22, 23. 13 Ivanova and Zheltova, Soslovnoe obshchestvo Rossiiskoi imperii, p. 135. 14 Korf, Dvorianstvo i ego soslovnoe upravlenie, p. 322. 15 Seredonin, Istoricheskii obzor deiatel’nosti Komiteta Ministrov, pp. 257, 260. 16 Ianovskii, ‘Vvedenie’, in Porai-Koshits, Istoriia russkogo dvorianstva, pp. 14, 17; Mironov, The Social history of Imperial Russia, vol. 1, pp. 408–409. 17 TsANO, f.639, op. 124, d. 955, ll. 50-51ob. Incidentally, the fact that copyists used little punctuation and frequently elided prepositions with nouns serves only to exacerbate the archival researcher’s already challenging task of deciphering. 18 Ibid., d. 2281, ll. 18, 21, 21ob, 22ob. 19 ‘Vsepoddanneishee donesenie Petra Obreskova ob osmotre im Nizhegorodskoi gubernii’ (16 June 1810), pp. 177–8; ‘Vsepoddanneishee donesenie Petra Obreskova ob osmotrennykh im guberniiakh Permskoi, Viatskoi, Kazanskoi, Nizhegorodskoi i Vladimirskoi’ (31 June 1810), in Sbornik istoricheskikh materialov izvlechennykh iz arkhiva sobstvennoi ego imperatorskogo velichestva kantseliarii, N. Dubrovin, ed., SPb, 1896, vol. 8, pp. 179–88. This was possibly Senator P. A. Obreskov (1752–1814), whose father A. M. Obreskov (1718–87) was one of the authors of the 1772 Treaty of Kuchuk-Kainardji with Turkey.

310

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20 Korf, Dvorianstvo i ego soslovnoe upravlenie, pp. 342, 344; M. T. Iablochkov, Istoriia dvorianskogo sosloviia v Rossii, SPb, 1876, p. 590. 21 Seredonin, Istoricheskii obzor deiatel’nosti Komiteta Ministrov, pp. 265–7. 22 Ibid., p. 272. 23 Korf, Dvorianstvo i ego soslovnoe upravlenie, p. 345. 24 Ibid., pp. 359, 445–6. See, for example, Zapiski I.V. Lopukhina, London, 1860, pp. 107–17. 25 TsANO, f.2 (Kantseliariia Nizhegorodskogo gubernatora 1814–1917), op. 3, d. 20, ll. 9, 32, 85, 154, 183. Kozodavlev would succeed Kurakin as minister in 1811. 26 Korf, Dvorianstvo i ego soslovnoe upravlenie, p. 331. 27 TsANO, d.639 (Kantseliariia Nizhegorodskogo gubernatora 1814–1917), op. 124, d. 1715, 23, ll. 1–2. The signatory was Prince G. A. Gruzinskii. 28 Ibid., f. 2, op. 3, f. 639, op. 124, d. 1209, ll. 1–2. 29 Ibid., f. 639, op. 124, d. 1673 (Journals of the NN noble assembly, 1813–15), ll. 78ob-79. 30 Ibid., f. 639, op. 124, d. 1673, l.31ob; d. 1573, l.62. 31 Ibid., f. 641, op. 1, d. 169. 32 Ibid., f. 639, op. 124, d. 1067, ll. 1–2 (‘kniga prikhodnaia dlia zapiski vychitaemykh pri vydache iz dvorianskoi summy zaimobrazno pod zalogi imeniem i vznosimykh pri peresochie na blagotvorenie bednym dvorianam deneg’). 33 Ibid., f. 639, op. 124, d. 955, l.6. 34 Ibid., d. 2715, l.8. 35 Ibid., d. 1811, ll. 1–2 ob., 4 (January–October 1814). 36 Ibid., d. 955, l.10ob. 37 A. P. Beliaev, ‘Vospominaniia o perezhitom i perechuvstvovannom s 1803 goda’, RS, 3 (1881), p. 488. 38 N. P. Barsukov, Zhizn’ i trudy M. P. Pogodina, 22 vols, SPb, 1888–1910, vol. 1, p. 48. 39 T. Schiemann, Zur Geschichte der Regierung Paul I. und Nikolaus I. Neue Materialen, Berlin, 1906, p. 68. Despite his own and his siblings’ association with the Decembrists’ secret societies and his subsequent arrest, this particular Muraviev was pardoned by Nicholas I. He was appointed deputy governor of Vitebsk, and then governor of Mogilev. He went on to serve the crown loyally in a variety of senior posts until his death in 1866. When he ferociously quelled the 1830 insurrection in Livonia, he famously declared that he was ‘a Muraviev who hangs rather than one who gets himself hanged’. 40 Korf, Dvorianstvo i ego soslovnoe upravlenie, pp. 442–4. 41 Dubrovin, ‘Russkaia zhizn’ v nachale XIX veka’, RS, 6 (1899), pp. 487–8. 42 S. Kucherov, Courts, Lawyers and Trials under the Last Three Tsars, New York, 1953, p. 3. 43 Dubrovin, ‘Russkaia zhizn’ v nachale XIX veka’, RS, 4 (1899), pp. 56, 73–4; RS, 3 (1899), p. 541. 44 Dubrovin, ‘Russkaia zhizn’ v nachale XIX veka’, RS, 6 (1899), pp. 493–5. 45 K. G. Bolenko, ‘Rech’ D.V. Golitsyna na dvorianskikh vyborakh 1822 goda’, www. ruthenia.ru/document/54013.html (accessed November 2017). 46 Kucherov, Courts, Lawyers and Trials, p. 1. See also Patrick O’Meara, K.F. Ryleev. A Political Biography of the Decembrist Poet, Princeton, 1984, pp. 52–61. 47 N. A. Bestuzhev, ‘Vospominanie o Ryleeve’, Vospominaniia Bestuzhevykh, M. K. Azadovskii, ed., M-L, 1951, p. 13.

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48 M. V. Nechkina, Dvizhenie dekabristov, M, 1955, vol. 1, p. 200. A. A. Bestuzhev told the Investigating Committee that Ryleev had been the first to raise the idea of serving in the courts. M. N. Pokrovskii, ed., Vosstanie dekabristov. Materialy po istorii vosstaniia dekabristov, M-L, 1925, vol. 1, p. 444. 49 Vosstanie dekabristov, vol. 2, p. 67. 50 Bestuzhev, ‘Vospominanie o Ryleeve’, p. 13. 51 N. I. Grech, Zapiski o moei zhizni, M, 1990, p. 442. 52 O’Meara, K.F. Ryleev, pp. 60–1. 53 Dubrovin, ‘Russkaia zhizn’ v nachale XIX veka’, RS, 6 (1899), pp. 486, 497–8, 505, 508. 54 See, for example, V. N. Kozliakova and A.A. Sevast’ianova, ‘Kul’turnaia sreda provintsial’nogo goroda’, in Ocherki russkoi kul’tury XIX veka, Tom 1: Obshchestvennokul’turnaia sreda, L. V. Koshman, ed., M, 1998, p. 128. 55 I. T. Kalashnikov, ‘Zapiski Irkutskogo zhitelia’, RS, 8 (1905), pp. 388–9. On books and their readership in, for example, Tula province, see O. E. Glagoleva, Tul’skaia knizhnaia starina. Ocherki o kul’turnoi zhizni XVIII – pervoi poloviny XIX vv., Tula, 1992; and also the same author’s study of that province’s cultural life more broadly: Russkaia provintsial’naia starina: ocherki kul’tury i byta Tul’skoi gubernii XVIII – pervoi poloviny XIX vv., Tula, 1993. 56 Kalashnikov, ‘Zapiski Irkutskogo zhitelia’, p. 391. 57 RNB-OR, f.731 (Speranskii), d. 1882, ll. 1ob-2. 58 G. G. Kushelev, Pis’ma G.G. Kusheleva k synu, Chernigov, 1900, pp. 1, 11–12, 56. The newspaper Kushelev requested was Le Conservateur Impartial, published in St Petersburg in French. Kushelev’s reference is to Taganrog, the small town on the Black Sea (Sea of Azov) where Alexander I died. 59 TsANO, f. 641, op. 1776a, d. 19, ll.1, 1ob., 5, 9, 10. 60 Ibid., op. 1, d. 93, ll. 1, 1 ob, 5, 5ob. 61 Ibid., d. 106, ll. 2, 2ob, 3. 62 TsANO, f. 641, op. 1, d. 123, ll.1, 2–3. 63 Ibid., op. 1776, d. 22, ll. 2, 2ob, 3, 3ob, 4. Arthur Young (1741–1820) was a prolific English writer on agriculture, politics and economics. His journeys through England and Wales resulted in a first-hand account of his agricultural observations which were the subject of several books published between 1768 and 1770. Among them was ‘A six weeks tour through the southern counties of England and Wales’. They enjoyed considerable success and by 1792 had been translated into most European languages (www.britannica.com/biography/Arthur-Young). John Mills (1717–1794) was an English writer on agriculture and agronomy. His most important work, A New System of Practical Husbandry, was published in five volumes in 1797. 64 N. N. Aurova, Ot kadeta do generala. Povsednevnaia zhizn’ russkogo ofitsera v kontse XVIII – pervoi polovine XIX veka, M, 2010, pp. 262–3. 65 TsANO, f. 639 (Kantseliariia Nizhegorodskogo gubernatora 1814–1917), op. 124, d. 2069, l.1. 66 Ibid., d. 2068, ll. 1, 3, 4, 5. 67 Ibid., d. 2281, l.24ob. 68 Quoted in S. V. Obolenskaia, Germaniia i nemtsy glazami russkikh (XIX vek), M, 2000, p. 88. 69 See Korf, Dvorianstvo i ego soslovnoe upravlenie, pp. 437–8. 70 L. N. Engel’gardt, Zapiski, 1766–1836, M, 1868, p. 238. Engel’gardt, who died in 1836, started writing these memoirs in 1826. They end with an interesting account of Alexander I’s death.

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71 Quoted in Dubrovin, ‘Russkaia zhizn’ v nachale XIX veka’, RS, 11 (1900), pp. 258–9. 72 Korf, Dvorianstvo i ego soslovnoe upravlenie, p. 377. 73 Lieven, ‘The Elites’, p. 239.

Chapter 7 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8

9 10 11

12 13 14

15 16

17 18 19

P. Maikov, ‘Baron Gustav Andreevich Rozenkampf ’, RS, 120, 10 (1904), pp. 167–8. Ibid., p. 158. F. F. Vigel’, Zapiski, ed. S. Ia. Shtraikh, M, 1928, p. 102. S. A. Ekshtut, V poiske istoricheskoi al’ternativy. Aleksandr I. Ego spodvizhniki. Dekabristy, M, 1994, p. 50. Richard S. Wortman, Scenarios of Power: Myth and Ceremony in Russian Monarchy, 2 vols, Princeton, NJ, 1995, vol. 1, p. 204. Dominic Lieven, ‘The Elites’, in The Cambridge History of Russia, Volume 2: Imperial Russia 1689–1917, D Lieven, ed., Cambridge, 2006, p. 239. B. Mironov, The Social History of Imperial Russia, 2 vols, Boulder, CO, 2000, vol. 2, p. 31. N. F. Dubrovin, ‘Russkaia zhizn’ v nachale XIX veka’, RS 4 (1899), pp. 53–7. For a recent study of Karazin’s interaction with Alexander, see Patrick O’Meara, ‘ “The Opinion of One Ukrainian Landowner”: V.N. Karazin, Alexander I, and Changing Russia’, in Word and Image in Russian History: Essays in Honor of Gary Marker, Boston, MA, 2015, pp. 315–35. Also see I. K. Zhuravleva and E. A. Uzbek, eds, ‘Ia smelo mogu stat’ pred sudom potomkov . . .’: Karazinskii sbornik, Khar’kov, 2004. Dubrovin, ‘Russkaia zhizn’ v nachale XIX veka’, RS, 4 (1899), pp. 53–7; ‘Zavadovskii, Petr Vasilievich’, RBS, P, 1916, vol. 7, p. 142. Dubrovin, ‘Russkaia zhizn’ v nachale XIX veka’, RS, 6 (1899), pp. 489–90. Janet M. Hartley, Alexander I, London, 1994, p. 83; V. I. Storozhev, ‘Imperator Aleksandr I i russkii pravitel’stvennyi liberalizm nachala XIX veka’, Tri veka, 6 vols, M, 1912–13, vol. 5, p. 124. I. D. Iakushkin, Zapiski, stat’i, pis’ma dekabrista, M, 1951, p. 10. V. A. Fedorov, ‘Aleksandr I’, Voprosy istorii, 1 (1990), p. 55; Iakushkin, Zapiski, p. 10. Dubrovin, ‘Russkaia zhizn’ v nachale XIX veka’, RS, 10 (1901), p. 38. Madame de Staël’s memoirs, Dix années d’exil (1821), were written between 1810 and 1813. They contain many interesting comments on Russia and the Russian character. After Napoleon’s fall in 1814, she returned to Paris and died there three years later, aged fifty. Istoricheskie dokumenty iz vremen tsarstvovaniia Aleksandra I, Leipzig, 1880, pp. 39–40. ‘No monarch, no nobility; no nobility, no monarch.’ Quoted in S. O. Shmidt, Obshchestvennoe samosoznanie rossiiskogo blagorodnogo sosloviia, XVII – pervaia tret’ XIX veka, M, 2002, p. 114. Dubrovin, ‘Russkaia zhizn’ v nachale XIX veka’, RS, 5 (1904), p. 261. A. S. Pushkin, ‘Zametki o russkom dvorianstve’, in Polnoe sobranie sochinenii v shesti tomakh, Iu. G. Oksman and P. E. Shchegolev, eds, M-L, 1934, vol. 6, p. 192. Quoted in Marie-Pierre Rey, Alexander I: The Tsar Who Defeated Napoleon, DeKalb, IL, 2012, p. 180. On Tilsit, see further N. A. Troitskii, Aleksandr I i Napoleon, M, 1994, pp. 113–28; Fedorov, ‘Aleksandr I’, p. 61. For the broader historical context, see

Notes

20 21 22

23

24 25

26

27

28 29 30

31 32 33 34 35

36 37 38

313

Hugh Ragsdale, Détente in the Napoleonic Era: Bonaparte and the Russians, Lawrence, KS, 1980. A. Kornilov, ‘Epokha Otechestvennoi voiny i ee znachenie v noveishei istorii Rossii’, Russkaia mysl’, 11 (1912), p. 127. Richard A. Lebrun, Joseph de Maistre: An Intellectual Militant, Kingston and Montreal, 1988, p. 185. M. A. Korf, ‘Aleksandr I i ego priblizhennye do epokhi Speranskogo’, RS, 2 (1903), pp. 232–3; T. V. Andreeva, Tainye obshchestva v Rossii v pervoi treti XIX v.: pravitel’stvennaia politika i obshchestvennoe mnenie, SPb, 2009, p. 200. Maikov, ‘Baron Gustav Andreevich Rozenkampf ’, p. 399; Erik Amburger, Geschichte der Behördenorganisation Russlands von Peter dem Grossen bis 1917, Leiden, 1966, pp. 171, 474. Dubrovin, ‘Russkaia zhizn’ v nachale XIX veka’, RS, 9 (1900), p. 483. M. A. Dmitriev, Glavy iz vospominanii moei zhizni, M, 1998, pp. 42, 520. Dmitriev (1796–1866) was brought up in a well-to-do noble family in Simbirsk province and educated at the Boarding School for the Nobility at Moscow University. The memoirist was a minor poet whose work was published in K. F. Ryleev and A. A. Bestuzhev’s Poliarnaia zvezda (‘The Polar Star’) in 1824. A. A. Kornilov, Kurs istorii Rossii XIX veka, M, 1918, p. 155; A. M. Martin, ‘The Russian Empire and the Napoleonic Wars’, in Napoleon and Europe, P. G. Dwyer, ed., London, 2001, p. 256; Vigel’, Zapiski, p. 193. Roksandra Skarlatovna Edeling, ‘Iz zapisok Grafini Edeling’, RA, 2 (1887), p. 217. Countess Edeling (or Edling) was for some years a lady-in-waiting to the tsar’s wife, Empress Elizabeth (Elizaveta Alekseevna). See further on her and her memoirs: A. Pypin, ‘Novye memuary ob Aleksandrovskoi epokhe’, VE, 12 (1887), pp. 693–702. Kornilov, ‘Epokha Otechestvennoi voiny’, pp. 133–4. Alexander Pope (1688–1744), An Essay on Man (1733), Epistle 3, 1. 303–4. V. A Fedorov, ‘Mikhail Mikhailovich Speranskii’, in Rossiiskie reformatory XIX-nachalo XX v, A. P. Korelin, ed., M, 1995, p. 46; V. I. Semevskii, ‘Vopros o preobrazovanii gosudarstvennogo stroia Rossii v XVIII i pervoi chetverti XIX veka’, Byloe 1 (1906), p. 36. There is an enormous literature on Speranskii but for present purposes I draw on only a fraction of it. See particularly, Marc Raeff, Michael Speransky, Statesman of Imperial Russia, 1772–1839, The Hague, 1961; V. A. Fedorov, M.M. Speranskii i A.A. Arakcheev M, 1997; I. D. Osipov, M.M. Speranskii. Rukovodstvo k poznaniiu zakonov, SPb, 2002; V. A. Tomsinov, Speranskii, M, 2006. M. T. Iablochkov, Rossiiskoe dvorianstvo. Istoriia rodov, SPb, 1876, reprinted in Istoriia rossiiskogo dvorianstva, M, 2009, p. 381. Dubrovin, ‘Russkaia zhizn’ v nachale XIX veka’, RS, 10 (1901), pp. 22–4, 26, 31–2. A. Zorin, Kormia dvuglavogo orla . . . russkaia literatura i gosudarstvennaia ideologiia v Rossii v poslednei treti XVIII – pervoi treti XIX veka, M, 2001, p. 222. Maikov, ‘Baron Gustav Andreevich Rozenkampf ’, RS, 11 (1904), p. 401. J. LeDonne, ‘The Eighteenth-Century Russian Nobility: Bureaucracy or Ruling Class?’ CMRS, 34, 1–2 (1993), Noblesse, état et société en Russie XVIe – début du XIXe siècle, p. 141, citing S. Seredonin, ‘Speranskii, M.’, RBS, 19 (1909), pp. 193–240. Vigel’, Zapiski, p. 119; LeDonne, ‘The Eighteenth-Century Russian Nobility’, pp. 141, 143. Vigel’, Zapiski, p. 119. LeDonne, ‘The Eighteenth-Century Russian Nobility’, p. 146.

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39 S. V. Mironenko, Samoderzhavie i reformy. Politicheskaia bor’ba v Rossii v nachale XIX v., M, 1989, p. 5. 40 Istoricheskie dokumenty iz vremen tsarstvovaniia Aleksandra I, pp. 69–72. 41 A. M. Martin, Romantics, Reformers, Reactionaries. Russian Conservative Thought and Politics in the Reign of Alexander I, DeKalb, IL, 1997, p. 107. Count Rostopchin (1763–1826) was appointed governor-general of Moscow in May 1812. 42 Dubrovin, ‘Russkaia zhizn’ v nachale XIX veka’, RS, 10 (1901), pp. 38–9. 43 F. P. Lubianovskii, Vospominaniia Fedora Petrovicha Lubianovskogo, 1777–1834, M, 1872, pp. 227–30. 44 V. Bakunina, ‘Dvenadtsatyi god v zapiskakh’, RS, 9 (1885), p. 393. 45 Vigel’, Zapiski, pp. 296, 571. 46 Korf, ‘Aleksandr I i ego priblizhennye do epokhi Speranskogo’, p. 16. 47 S. Shashkov, ‘Dvizhenie russkoi obshchestvennoi mysli v nachale XIX veka’, Delo, 6 (1871), p. 163; Fedorov, ‘Aleksandr I’, p. 61; V. Ia. Grosul, Russkii konservatizm XIX stoletiia. Ideologiia i praktika, M, 2000, pp. 65–7; V. V. Ulybin, Aleksandr I. Obratnaia storona tsarstvovaniia. Vlast’ i tainye obshchestva v 1801–1825 godakh, SPb, 2004, p. 186. See also, Osipov, ‘Istinnaia monarkhiia grafa M.M. Speranskogo’, Rukovodstvo k poznaniiu zakonov, pp. 3–42; Tomsinov, Speranskii, pp. 198–230. 48 D. P. Runich, ‘Iz zapisok’, RS, 2 (1901), p. 356; Grosul, Russkii konservatizm XIX stoletiia, p. 76. 49 Dmitriev, Glavy iz vospominanii moei zhizni, p. 78. A. S. Shishkov was the president of the Russian Academy of Sciences from 1812 to 1841, and Minister of National Education from 1824 to 1828. 50 Muraviev is quoted in E. N. Tumanik, ‘Dekabrist A.N. Murav’ev v Peterburge: vospitanie dushi’, in Dekabristy v Peterburge. Novye materialy i issledovaniia, P. V. Il’in, ed., SPb, 2009, pp. 126–7. 51 M. A. Korf, ‘Ssylka M.M. Speranskogo v 1812’, RS, 16, 5 (1876), p. 88. 52 Fedorov, ‘Mikhail Mikhailovich Speranskii’, pp. 65–6. 53 K. Fetterlein, ‘Korf, Modest Andreevich’, RBS, SPb, 1903, vol. 9, p. 284. 54 RNB-OR, f.124 (Vaksel’), ‘Pis’ma gosudarstvennykh i voennykh deiatelei’, op.1,d.4105, M. M. Speranskii – A. D. Panchulidzevu (1819) (‘Vse vozstalo protiv derzkogo reformatora . . . Obvineniia [privilegirovannoi kasty] pereshli na opasnuiu pochvu.’) 55 M. A. Korf, ‘Iz dnevnika barona (vposledstvii grafa) M. A. Korfa’, RS, 2 (1904), p. 285. 56 T. A. Bogdanovich, ‘Iz perepiski Aleksandra I s V.P. Kochubeem’, Russkoe proshloe, 5 (1923), pp. 101–11. The account that follows is largely based on Bogdanovich’s commentary. The reference to N. V. Gogol’ is an allusion to his 1831–2 short-story cycle, ‘Evenings on a farm near Dikan’ka’ (Vechera na khutore bliz Dikan’ki), which first brought him to the attention of Russia’s reading public. Also on Kochubei, see D. N. Shilov, Gosudarstvennye deiateli rossiiskoi imperii. Glavy vysshikh i tsentral’nykh uchrezhdenii 1802–1917, SPb, 2002, pp. 362–5. 57 Bogdanovich, ‘Iz perepiski Aleksandra I s V. P. Kochubeem’, p. 109. 58 Ibid., p. 111. 59 M. A. Davydov, ‘Oppozitsiia ego velichestva’. Dvorianstvo i reformy v nachale XIX v., M, 1994, pp. 4–5; V. A. Udovik, ‘M.S. Vorontsov i dekabristy’, 14 dekabria 1825 goda. Istochniki. Issledovaniia. Istoriografiia. Bibliografiia, vyp. VIII, SPb, 2010, p. 359; and see Anthony L. H. Rhinelander, Prince Michael Vorontsov, Viceroy to the Tsar, Montreal, 1990.

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60 The corps in question was the Narva Infantry Regiment. On Vorontsov as commander, see Dominic Lieven, Russia against Napoleon. The Battle for Europe, 1807 to 1814, London, 2009, pp. 112–13, 499–501. 61 Udovik, ‘M.S. Vorontsov i dekabristy’, p. 353. 62 This account is largely based on Ekshtut, V poiske istoricheskoi al’ternativy, pp. 134, 139–43. 63 Udovik, ‘M.S. Vorontsov i dekabristy’, pp. 360–1. 64 Quoted in V. Iakushkin, Speranskii i Arakcheev, SPb, 1905, p. 4. See further on Arakcheev: V. A. Tomsinov, Arakcheev, M, 2003; and the useful biography by Michael Jenkins, Arakcheev: Grand Vizier of the Russian Empire, London, 1969; E. E. Davydova and E. E. Liamina, Arakcheev: svidetel’stva sovremennikov, M, 2000. 65 ‘Zakrevskii, Arsenii Andreevich’, RBS, P, 1916, vol. 7, p. 196. 66 Vigel’, Zapiski, pp. 348–9. 67 Rey, Alexander I, p. 418. 68 Ibid., pp. 354, 418. 69 F. Bulgakov, ‘Russkii gosudarstvennyi chelovek minuvshikh trekh tsarstvovanii’, IV, 1 (1882), pp. 146–7, 150; Patrick O’Meara, K.F. Ryleev. A Political Biography of the Decembrist Poet, Princeton, NJ, 1984, pp. 156–9; Vosstanie dekabristov. Dokumenty, M. V. Nechkina, ed., M, 1969, vol. 12, p. 95. 70 A. P. Butenev, ‘Vospominaniia’, RA, 3 (1881), p. 59. 71 D. A. Obolenskii, Khronika nedavnei stariny. Iz arkhiva kniazia ObolenskogoNeledinskogo-Meletskogo, SPb, 1876, p. 256; ‘Obolenskii, Aleksandr Petrovich’, RBS, SPb, 1905, vol. 12, p. 18. A. P. held the post for about seven years. 72 A. S. Shishkov, Zapiski, mneniia, perepiska admiral A.S. Shishkova, N. Kiselev and Iu. Samarin, eds, 2 vols, Berlin, 1870, vol. 2, pp. 161–290. 73 A. V. Kochubei, Semeinaia khronika. Zapiski A.V. Kochubeia, 1790–1873, SPb, 1890. For Metternich’s own account of his typically roller-coaster relationship with Alexander, written in 1820, see ‘Imperator Aleksandr I’, January 1880, ibid., pp. 168– 80, which is cited in the next section of this chapter. 74 S. A. Tuchkov, Zapiski Sergeia Alekseevicha Tuchkova, 1766–1808, K. A. Voenskii, ed., SPb, 1908, p. 350. 75 K. von Metternich, ‘Imperator Aleksandr I’, IV, 1 (1880), pp. 168–80. Klemens von Metternich (1773–1859) was among the most outstanding diplomats and statesmen of his age. As Austria’s minister of foreign affairs from 1809 to 1821, he became effectively head of government following his appointment as chancellor in 1821, a post he held until 1848. From June 1814 to June 1815, he hosted the Congress of Vienna. 76 Metternich, ‘Imperator Aleksandr I’, p. 172. 77 Ibid., p. 168. 78 Marc Raeff, Understanding Imperial Russia: State and Society in the Old Regime, Columbia, 1984, pp. 126–7. The theme of political opposition among Russia’s nobility to Alexander and his government will be developed in Part VI. 79 Edeling, ‘Iz zapisok Grafini Edeling’, RA, 2 (1887), pp. 213–14. 80 Quoted in N. K. Shil’der, Imperator Aleksandr I. Ego zhizn’ i tsarstvovanie, 4 vols, SPb, 1897–98, vol. 4, pp. 182–3. 81 Ekshtut, V poiske istoricheskoi al’ternativy, pp. 62–3. A pood was equivalent to 16.38 kg. 82 Dmitriev, Glavy iz vospominanii moei zhizni, p. 233. Alexander I’s constitution for Poland is discussed in the next chapter.

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83 N. I. Grech, Biografiia Imperatora Aleksandra I, SPb, 1835, pp. 53, 58, 61. 84 I. I. Meshkov, ‘Zapiski’, RA, 6 (1905), p. 237. 85 V. Kashpirev, Pamiatniki novoi russkoi istorii. Sbornik istoricheskikh statei i materialov, SPb, 1887, vol. 2, pp. 152–3. 86 Tuchkov, Zapiski Sergeia Alekseevicha Tuchkova, pp. 343, 357–61, 371. 87 I. M. Dolgorukii, Kapishche moego serdtsa ili slovar’ vsekh tekh lits, s koimi ia byl v raznykh otnosheniiakh v techenii moei zhizni, M, 1874, pp. 257–8. 88 Götze is quoted in E. P. Karnovich‚ ‘Kniaz’ Aleksandr Nikolaevich Golitsyn i ego vremia’, IV, 5 (1882), pp. 263–4. 89 Iu. N. Bartenev, ‘Rasskazy Kniazia A.N. Golitsyna, iz zapisok Iu.N. Barteneva’, RA, 5 (1886), pp. 86–7.

Chapter 8 1 A. I. Gertsen, Sobranie sochinenii v 30-i tomakh, M, 1956, vol. 7, p. 193. 2 See J. P. LeDonne, Absolutism and the Ruling Class: The Formation of the Russian Political Order, 1700–1825, New York, 1991. 3 N. P. Koliupanov, Biografiia Aleksandra Ivanovicha Kosheleva, 2 vols, M, 1889, vol. 1, book 1, p. 379. 4 Iu. M. Lotman, ‘Liudi 1812 goda’, in Besedy o russkoi kul’ture. Byt i traditsii russkogo dvorianstva (XVIII- nachalo XIX veka), SPb, 1994, pp. 314, 319. 5 L. Ia. Pavlova, Dekabristy – uchastniki voin 1805-1814 gg., M, 1979, pp. 99–118; A. A. Smirnov, ‘Dekabristy i Otechestvennaia voina 1812 g. v zerkale statistiki’, in Dekabristy i ikh vremia, V. M. Bokova, ed., M, 1995, p. 16. 6 N. Barsukov, Pis’ma N.M. Karamzina k Kniaziu P.A. Viazemskomu 1810–1826 (Iz Ostaf ’evskago arkhiva), SPb, 1897, pp. 178–9 (letter from Karamzin to I. I. Dmitriev, 20 March 1811). In Warsaw in March 1818, Alexander I was to boast to Prince P. A. Viazemskii, ‘with visible self-satisfaction’, that he had read the whole of Karamzin’s History ‘from start to finish’ (p. 186). 7 V. I. Semevskii, ‘Vopros o preobrazovanii gosudarstvennogo stroia Rossii v XVIII i pervoi chetverti XIX veka’, Byloe, 1 (1906), p. 27. 8 See I. A. Galaktionov, Imperator Aleksandr I i ego tsarstvovanie, 2 vols, SPb, 1877– 79, vol. 1, pp. 35–6; V. V. Leontovich, Istoriia liberalizma v Rossii 1762–1914, M, 1995, p. 85. 9 F. Rosen, ‘Bentham, Jeremy’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, 2004 (www. oxforddnb.com/view/printable/2153). Cited in Fiona Hill and Clifford G. Gaddy, Mr Putin: Operative in the Kremlin, Washington DC, 2015, p. 453; Leontovich, Istoriia liberalizma v Rossii, p. 57. 10 Quoted in Elise Kimerling Wirtschafter, Russia’s Age of Serfdom 1649–1861, Oxford, 2008, p. 205. A useful overview of government policies on political reform at this time, on which my account draws, may be found here (pp. 203–9). 11 For a nuanced discussion of Alexander’s attitude to and understanding of constitutions, see Janet Hartley, ‘The “Constitutions” of Finland and Poland in the Reign of Alexander I: Blueprints for Reform in Russia?’, in Finland and Poland in the Russian Empire: A Comparative Study, M. Branch, J. Hartley and A. Maczak, eds, London, 1995, pp. 41–59, especially pp. 42–5. 12 M. T. Iablochkov, Rossiiskoe dvorianstvo. Istoriia rodov, SPb, 1876, reprinted in Istoriia rossiiskogo dvorianstva, M, 2009, p. 377.

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13 Semevskii, ‘Vopros o preobrazovanii gosudarstvennogo stroia Rossii’, pp. 34, 36–7, 44. 14 T. V. Andreeva, Tainye obshchestva v Rossii v pervoi treti XIX v.: pravitel’stvennaia politika i obshchestvennoe mnenie, SPb, 2009, p. 148. 15 Andreeva, Tainye obshchestva v Rossii, pp. 397–9; N. V. Minaeva, Pravitel’stvennyi konstitutsionalizm i peredovoe obshchestvennoe mnenie Rossii v nachale XIX v., Saratov, 1982, pp. 125–9. 16 Richard Stites, The Four Horsemen: Riding to Liberty in Post-Napoleonic Europe, Oxford, 2014, p. 55. 17 V. Ia. Grosul, Russkii konservatizm XIX stoletiia. Ideologiia i praktika, M, 2000, p. 71. See also Marc Raeff, Plans for Political Reform in Russia, 1730–1905, Englewood Cliffs, NJ, 1966, pp. 74–120. 18 N. K. Shil’der, Imperator Aleksandr I. Ego zhizn’ i tsarstvovanie, 4 vols, SPb, 1897–98, vol. 3, p. 244. 19 GARF, f. 1165, op.1, d.7, ll. 14ob., 21, 24, 32, 49, 72ob, 75. 20 ‘Vsepoddaneishee pis’mo kollezhskogo sovetnika Naumova s predostavleniem bumag do predmetov gosudarstvennogo upravleniia kasaiushchikhsia’, RGIA, f.1409 (SEIVK), op.2, d.5403. See Andreeva, Tainye obshchestva v Rossii, p. 100. 21 PSZRI, vol. 33, 25,824 (3 May 1815), p. 65; 25,826 (3 May 1815), pp. 71, 75; 25,842 (9 May 1815), pp. 117–19. 22 Dubrovin, ‘Russkaia zhizn’ v nachale XIX veka’, RS, 3 (1904), p. 485. Although arrested for his involvement in Decembrist secret societies, Orlov was treated relatively leniently, thanks to his connections at court and his outstanding military record. Even by the standards of 1812, Orlov’s rise through the ranks was meteoric: by the age of twenty-six, having fought at Austerlitz and Borodino, he had already attained the rank of major-general. His political free-thinking and independence of action, however, caused an abrupt change in the tsar’s opinion of him. On release from the Peter-Paul Fortress in June 1826, he was permitted to return to (but ordered to remain on) his estate in Kaluga province, which comprised 1,300 souls and a crystal glass factory (khrustal’nyi zavod). See S. A. Ekshtut, V poiske istoricheskoi al’ternativy. Aleksandr I. Ego spodvizhniki. Dekabristy. M, 1994, p. 85; S. V. Mironenko, Dekabristy. Biograficheskii spravochnik, M, 1988, pp. 135–6. 23 Semevskii, ‘Vopros o preobrazovanii gosudarstvennogo stroia Rossii’, p. 48. 24 Quoted in Iablochkov, Rossiiskoe dvorianstvo. Istoriia rodov, p. 377. 25 A. P. Beliaev, ‘Vospominaniia o perezhitom i perechuvstvovannom s1803 goda’, RS, 3 (1881), pp. 364–5. 26 Semevskii, ‘Vopros o preobrazovanii gosudarstvennogo stroia Rossii’, p. 52. 27 Dubrovin, ‘Russkaia zhizn’ v nachale XIX veka’, RS, 4 (1904), p. 28. 28 Quoted in Semevskii, ‘Vopros o preobrazovanii gosudarstvennogo stroia Rossii’, p. 52. 29 Quoted in Andreeva, Tainye obshchestva v Rossii, p. 209. 30 See S. V. Mironenko, Samoderzhavie i reformy. Politicheskaia bor’ba v Rossii v nachale XIX v., M, 1989, pp. 157–9. 31 See G. Vernadskii, ‘Dva lika dekabristov’, Svobodnaia mysl’, 15 (1993), p. 87. 32 N. I. Turgenev, Rossiia i russkie, 2 vols, M, 1907 (reprint SPb, 2001), vol. 1, p. 51. 33 S. P. Mel’gunov, ‘Pravitel’stvo i obshchestvo posle voiny’, in Otechestvennaia voina i russkoe obshchestvo 1812–1912, A. K. Dzhivelegov and S. P. Mel’gunov, eds, M, 1912, vol. 7, pp. 151–235, at p. 197. 34 Mironenko, Samoderzhavie i reformy, p. 159. 35 Turgenev, Rossiia i russkie, vol. 1, p. 52.

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36 V. E. Iakushkin, Gosudarstvennaia vlast’ i proekty gosudarstvennoi reformy v Rossii, SPb, 1906, pp. 87–8; N. V. Minaeva, Potaennye konstitutsii Rossii, M, 2010, p. 40. 37 N. K. Kul’man, ‘Iz istorii obshchestvennogo dvizheniia v Rossii v tsarstvovanie imperatora Aleksandra I’, Izvestiia otdeleniia russkogo iazyka i slovesnosti Imperatorskoi Akademii Nauk, SPb, 1908, book 1, p. 107. 38 A. V. Predtechenskii, Ocherki obshchestvenno-politicheskoi istorii Rossii v pervoi chetverti XIX veka, M-L, 1957, p. 377. 39 Ibid., pp. 376–8. 40 Mironenko, Samoderzhavie i reformy, p. 203. 41 Andreeva, Tainye obshchestva v Rossii, p. 211. 42 Mel’gunov, ‘Pravitel’stvo i obshchestvo posle voiny’, pp. 196–8. Kozodavlev had a reputation for transparency and openness, both as minister and as editor of Severnaia pchela (‘The Northern Bee’) which, from 1810 to 1819, published a string of interesting articles on social and economic themes. Its publication ceased with his death in 1819. See M. Polievktov, ‘Kozodavlev, Osip Petrovich’, RBS, A. A. Polovtsov, ed., SPb, 1903, vol. 9, pp. 55–60. 43 A. N. Shebunin, ‘Brat’ia Turgenevy i dvorianskoe obshchestvo aleksandrovskoi epokhi’, in Dekabrist N.I. Turgenev. Pis’ma k bratu S.I. Turgenevu, M-L, 1936, p. 67. 44 Hartley, ‘The “Constitutions” of Finland and Poland’, pp. 41, 50. 45 Grosul, Russkii konservatizm XIX stoletiia, p. 74. 46 Frank W. Thackeray, Antecedents of Revolution: Alexander I and the Polish Kingdom 1815–1825, Boulder, CO, 1980, pp. 30–1, 44, 53. 47 Mariia Maiofis, Vozzvanie k Evrope: Literaturnoe obshchestvo ‘Arzamas’ i rossiiskii modernizatsionnyi proekt 1815–1818 godov, M, 2008, p. 429; for a full commentary on Uvarov’s speech, see Cynthia H. Whittaker, The Origins of Modern Russian Education: An Intellectual Biography of Count Sergei Uvarov, 1786–1855, Dekalb, IL, 2010, pp. 46–51. 48 N. Koliupanov, Biografiia A.I. Kosheleva, M, 1889, vol. 1, p. 382. 49 V. G. Bazanov, Uchenaia respublika, M-L, 1964, pp. 44, 46. Lord Erskine (1750–1823) was a British lawyer and politician who served as Lord Chancellor between 1806 and 1807 in the Ministry of All the Talents. He was famed for his defence of radicals and reformers, including (albeit unsuccessfully) Thomas Paine (1737–1809) who faced charges of seditious libel after the publication in 1792 of the second part of his Rights of Man. See J. A. Lovat-Fraser, Erskine, Cambridge, 1932, p. 45; V. M. Bokova, ‘Bespokoinyi dukh vremeni. Obshchestvennaia mysl’ pervoi treti XIX v.’, in Ocherki russkoi kul’tury XIX veka. Tom 4: Obshchestvennaia mysl’, L. V. Koshman, ed., M, 2003, p. 92; N. I. Grech, Zapiski o moei zhizni, SPb, 1886, p. 219. 50 Koliupanov, Biografiia Kosheleva, vol. 1, p. 524. 51 Ibid., p. 259. 52 Dubrovin, ‘Russkaia zhizn’ v nachale XIX veka’, RS, 1 (1904), p. 28. 53 Semevskii, ‘Vopros o preobrazovanii gosudarstvennogo stroia Rossii’, p. 57. 54 Mel’gunov, ‘Pravitel’stvo i obshchestvo posle voiny’, p. 156. 55 A. Pypin, ‘Novye memuary ob Aleksandrovskoi epokhe’, VE, 12 (1887), p. 680. 56 On this, see Richard S. Wortman, Scenarios of Power: Myth and Ceremony in Russian Monarchy, 2 vols, Princeton, NJ, 1995, vol. 1, p. 238. 57 Semevskii, ‘Vopros o preobrazovanii gosudarstvennogo stroia Rossii’, p. 53. Viazemskii refers to Deshan in his memoirs as ‘the French jurist and publicist Deschamps’. See S. V. Mironenko, Aleksandr I i debrakristy. Rossiia v pervoi chetverti XIX veka –vybor puti, M, 2017, p. 81.

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58 Minaeva, Potaennye konstitutsii Rossii, pp. 40–1, 43, 47; L. V. Koshman, ‘Obshchestvenno-kul’turnaia sreda’, Ocherki russkoi kul’tury XIX veka, M, 1998, vol. 1, p. 95. 59 Nicholas V. Riasanovsky, A Parting of the Ways: Government and the Educated Public in Russia 1801–1855’, Oxford, 1976, pp. 71–2. Novosil’tsov’s ‘Gosudarstvennaia ustavnaia gramota Rossiiskoi Imperii’ was published as an appendix to N. K. Shil’der, Imperator Aleksandr I. Ego zhizn’ i tsarstvovanie, vol. 4, pp. 499–526. See also G. Vernadsky, La Charte constitutionélle de l’émpire russe de l’an 1820, Paris, 1933. 60 Semevskii, ‘Vopros o preobrazovanii gosudarstvennogo stroia Rossii’, p. 56. 61 Iakushkin, Gosudarstvennaia vlast’ i proekty, pp. 88, 92–4; Minaeva, Potaennye konstitutsii Rossii, p. 42. 62 Adam Zamoyski, 1812. Napoleon’s fatal march on Moscow, London, 2004, p. 551. 63 Bokova, ‘Bespokoinyi dukh vremeni’, pp. 76–7, 81, 83–5, 89. 64 Shebunin, ‘Brat’ia Turgenevy i dvorianskoe obshchestvo’, p. 25. 65 Quoted in V. A. Fedorov, ‘Aleksandr I’, Voprosy istorii, 1 (1990), pp. 67, 70. 66 D. I. Zavalishin, Zapiski dekabrista, SPb, 1906, pp. 50–1, 113. The Vasil’chikov family was well connected at court. L. V. was brother of I. V. Vasil’chikov, who was governor-general of St. Petersburg at the time of the 1822 ban on all secret societies. The Osterman referred to here may well be General Count A. I. Osterman-Tolstoi, an ‘independent character’ indeed, whose inglorious military record makes for interesting reading. See Dominic Lieven, Russia against Napoleon: The Battle for Europe, 1807 to 1814, London, 2009, passim. 67 L. N. Engel’gardt, Zapiski, 1766–1836, M, 1868, p. 237. 68 M. A. Davydov, Oppozitsiia ego velichestva, M, 1994, p. 127. 69 Shil’der, Imperator Aleksandr I, vol. 4, p. 214. 70 See Koshman, Ocherki russkoi kul’tury XIX veka, vol. 1, p. 91. 71 Beliaev, ‘Vospominaniia o perezhitom’, RS, 12 (1880), p. 849; 1 (1881), p. 9. 72 F. F. Vigel’, Zapiski, S. Ia. Shtraikh, ed., M, 1928, pp. 352, 101. 73 GARF, f.973, op. 1, d. 5, l.41, Diary of Count Vasilii Vasilievich Levashov Snr., 1816–25. Prince Volkonskii was father-in-law to his old friend George Herbert, Earl of Pembroke, who had married his daughter, Catherine, in 1807. Volkonskii settled in England, never returned to Russia and died in London in 1832. See J. J. Kenney, ‘The Vorontsov Party in Russian Politics, 1785–1803: An Examination of the Influence of an Aristocratic Family at the Court of St Petersburg in the Age of Revolution’, unpublished PhD thesis, New Haven, CT, 1975, pp. 312–13. 74 V. Ikonnikov, Graf N.S. Mordvinov: Istoricheskaia monografiia, SPb, 1873, p. 4. 75 On this, see A. V. Semenova, Vremennoe revoliutsionnoe pravitel’stvo v planakh dekabristov, M, 1982, ch. 2. 76 Turgenev, Rossiia i russkie, vol. 2, p. 60. 77 Mironov, The Social History of Imperial Russia, vol. 2, p. 173. 78 O. V. Orlik, Gosudarstvennye liudi Rossii pervoi poloviny XIX veka: puti i sud’by M, 2000, pp. 37–8. 79 N. V. Sushkov, ‘Iz zapisok o vremeni Imperatora Aleksandra I’, VE, 6 (1867), pp. 175–200. Troshchinskii (1754–1829) was among the select group of noblemen who had served under Catherine the Great, when he had been procurator-general, and then survived Paul’s reign to serve in Alexander’s government. Sushkov remarked that Troshchinskii was unusually scrupulous in not taking advantage of his personal access to Alexander, regarding one or two audiences a month as quite sufficient ‘in normal circumstances’. Also noteworthy was his desire to see Senate decisions placed in the

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81 82 83 84 85 86 87 88 89

Notes public domain in the interests of openness (glasnost’) ‘at a time when openness was not yet even thought of by any of us’ (pp. 179–80). Grosul, Russkii konservatizm XIX stoletiia, p. 85; Leontovich, Istoriia liberalizma v Rossii, pp. 115, 118. Karamzin recounted his conversation with the tsar to this effect in a letter to I. I. Dmitriev of 2 September 1825. A. I. Mikhailovskii-Danilevskii, ‘Iz vospominanii 1819–21’, RS, 7 (1897), p. 71. On this point, see Hartley, ‘The “Constitutions” of Finland and Poland’, pp. 54–5. On this, see V. I. Storozhev, ‘Imperator Aleksandr I i russkii pravitel’stvennyi liberalizm nachala XIX veka’, Tri veka, 6 vols, M, 1912–13, vol. 5, p. 170. See Boris N. Mironov, The Social History of Imperial Russia, 2 vols, Boulder, CO, 2000, vol. 2, pp. 188–9. A. A. Kornilov, Kurs istorii Rossii XIX veka, M, 1918, p. 267. S. V. Mironenko, Stranitsy tainoi istorii samoderzhaviia, M, 1990, p. 83. N. K. Shil’der, ‘Aleksandr I’, RBS, A. A. Polovtsev, ed., SPb, 1896, vol. 1, pp. 361–2. Quoted in N. V. Minaeva, Vek Pushkina, M, 2007, p. 94. Laibach is today the Slovenian capital, Ljubljana. Leontovich, Istoriia liberalizma v Rossii, p. 55.

Chapter 9 1 See, for example, V. M. Bokova, ‘Bespokoinyi dukh vremeni. Obshchestvennaia mysl’ pervoi treti XIX v.’, in Ocherki russkoi kul’tury XIX veka. Tom 4: obshchestvennaia mysl’, L. V. Koshman, ed., M, 2003, p. 64. 2 See David Marshall Lang, The First Russian Radical: Alexander Radishchev, 1749– 1802, London, 1959; ‘A.Ia. Polenov on the Serf Condition of the Peasants, c.1768’, in Russia under Catherine the Great. Volume 1: Select Documents on Government and Society, Paul Dukes, ed., Newtonville, MA, 1978, pp. 68–88; Roger Bartlett, ‘Poselenie inostrantsev v Rossii pri Ekaterine II i proekty osvobozhdeniia krepostnykh krest’ian’, in Evropeiskoe prosveshchenie i tsivilizatsiia Rossii, E. Iu. Zholud, ed., M, 2004, pp. 255–63. 3 There is, even so, an extensive literature on the preceding debate on serf emancipation, particularly during the reign of Catherine II. The fullest account, albeit stronger on narrative than on analysis, remains: V. I. Semevskii, Krest’ianskii vopros v Rossii v XVIII i pervoi polovine XIX veka, 2 vols, SPb, 1888; see also Iu. V. Got’e, Ocherk istorii zemlevladeniia v Rossii, Sergiev Posad, 1915, pp. 139–45; N. M. Druzhinin, Gosudarstvennye krest’iane i reforma P.D. Kiseleva, 2 vols, M-L, 1946, vol. 1, pp. 121–64; Isabel de Madariaga, Russia in the Age of Catherine the Great, London, 1981, pp. 133–6. For Alexander I’s reign, see the article by Susan P. McCaffray, ‘Confronting Serfdom in the Age of Revolution: Projects for Serf Reform in the Time of Alexander I’, The Russian Review, 64 (January 2005), pp. 1–21; I. D. Koval’chenko, Krestiane i krepostnoe khoziaistvo Riazanskoi i Tambovskoi gubernii v pervoi polovine XIX v., M, 1959; David Moon, The Abolition of Serfdom in Russia, 1762–1907, Harlow and London, 2000, pp. 38–48; E. Kimerling Wirtschafter, Russia’s Age of Serfdom 1649–1861, Oxford, 2008, pp. 208–10. 4 V. I. Buganov, ‘Rossiiskoe dvorianstvo’, Voprosy istorii, 1 (1994), pp. 36–7; A. Kornilov, ‘Epokha Otechestvennoi voiny i ee znachenie v noveishei istorii Rossii’, Russkaia mysl’, 11 (1912), p. 150.

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5 From a letter of 1818 to N. M. Longinov, quoted in A. N. Shebunin, ‘Brat’ia Turgenevy i dvorianskoe obshchestvo aleksandrovskoi epokhi’, Dekabrist N. I. Turgenev. Pis’ma k bratu S. I. Turgenevu, M-L, 1936, p. 80. 6 P. V. Akul’shin, Istoriia odnoi gubernii: ocherki istorii Riazanskogo kraia 1778–2000, Riazan’, 2000, pp. 52–3. 7 N. I. Turgenev, Rossiia i russkie, vol. 2, M, 1907, p. 188. 8 E. P. Karnovich, Zamechatel’nye bogatstva chastnykh lits v Rossii: ekonomicheskoistoricheskoe issledovanie, SPb, 1874 (reprint, The Hague, 1965), p. 372. 9 Ar. Fatéev, Le problème de l’individu et de l’homme d’état dans la personalité historique d’Alexandre I, empereur de toutes les Russies, Prague, 1936–38, quatrième partie, p. 5; Sh., ‘Dvorianstvo v Rossii. Istoricheskii i obshchestvennyi ocherk’, VE, 3, 6 (1887), pp. 429–30; Janet M. Hartley, A Social History of the Russian Empire 1650–1825, London, 1999, p. 69. 10 The remarks of Stroganov and Kochubei are cited in M. M. Safonov, Problema reforma v pravitel’stvennoi politike Rossii na rubezhe XVIII i XIX vv., L, 1988, pp. 102–4. On this, see also J. LeDonne, ‘The Eighteenth-Century Russian Nobility: Bureaucracy or Ruling Class?’, CMRS, 34, 1–2 (1993), Noblesse, état et société en Russie XVIe – début du XIXe siècle, p. 145. 11 V. V. Leontovich, Istoriia liberalizma v Rossii 1762–1914, M, 1995, pp. 58, 65. 12 I. A. Galaktionov, Imperator Aleksandr I i ego tsarstvovanie, 2 vols, SPb, 1877–9, vol. 1, p. 34; A. Romanov-Slavatinskii, Dvorianstvo v Rossii ot nachala XVIII veka do otmeny krepostnogo prava, Kiev, 1912, pp. 389–91. 13 A. A. Kizevetter, Deviatnadtsatyi vek v istorii Rossii, Rostov-on-Don, 1905, p. 16; I. A. Fedosov and E. V. Dolgikh, ‘Rossiiskii absoliutizm i biurokratiia’, in Ocherki russkoi kul’tury XIX. Tom 2: Vlast’ i kul’tura, L. V. Koshman, ed., M, 2000, p. 15. 14 N. S. Mordvinov, ‘Odna iz mer osvobozhdeniia ot zavisimosti krest’ian (zapiska admirala Mordvinova)’, in Sbornik istoricheskikh materialov izvlechennykh iz arkhiva sobstvennoi ego imperatorskogo velichestva kantseliarii, 15 vols, N. F. Dubrovin, ed., SPb, 1895, vol. 7, p. 183. On Derzhavin’s role as minister of justice, see A. G. Zviagintsev and Iu. G. Orlov, Tainye sovetniki imperii. Rossiiskie prokurory. XIX vek, M, 1995, ch. 1. 15 Romanov-Slavatinskii, Dvorianstvo v Rossii, pp. 391–2; S. Shashkov, ‘Dvizhenie russkoi obshchestvennoi mysli v nachale XIX veka’, Delo, 5 (1871), p. 127. 16 N. K. Shil’der, Imperator Aleksandr I. Ego zhizn’ i tsarstvovanie, 4 vols, SPb, 1897, vol. 2, p. 110. 17 Bokova, ‘Bespokoinyi dukh vremeni’, p. 67. Ivan Pnin argued here that the educated individual could create ‘the good society’. Man, as he put it, ‘dictates his laws to the world; he is on earth what God is in the universe’. See Marc Raeff, Origins of the Russian Intelligentsia: The Eighteenth-Century Nobility, New York, 1966, p. 167; J. LeDonne, Absolutism and the Ruling Class: The Formation of the Russian Political Order, 1700–1825, New York, 1991, p. 175; Patrick O’Meara, ‘I.P. Pnin (1773–1805)’, in Biographical Dictionary of Modern European Radicals and Socialists, New York, 1988, vol. 1, pp. 209–11. Iatsenkov, publicist and censor, would in due course find himself on the wrong side of an increasingly vigilant censorship regime. See Chapter 11. 18 Daniel T. Orlovsky, The Limits of Reform: The Ministry of Internal Affairs in Imperial Russia, 1802–1881, Cambridge, MA, 1981, p. 23. 19 TsANO, f.639, ‘Nizhegorodskoe gubernskoe dvorianskoe deputatskoe sobranie’, op.124, d.1288, ll.2, 3, 9, 16–19, 32, 36; d.2110, ll. 2-2ob.,14, 33–4. 20 Ibid., d.1229, ll.3, 18–19.

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21 Ibid., d.1309, ll.3, 3ob., 4. 22 Ibid., d.1757, ll.1–3. 23 Marc Raeff, Understanding Imperial Russia: State and Society in the Old Regime, Columbia, 1984, p. 121. 24 Akul’shin, Istoriia odnoi gubernii, p. 53. 25 Allen McConnell, Tsar Alexander I. Paternalistic Reformer, Northbrook, IL, 1970, p. 35. On Fonvizin’s view, see further pp. 187–8 below. 26 Wirtschafter, Russia’s Age of Serfdom 1649–1861, p. 208. 27 V. A. Fedorov, ‘Aleksandr I’, Voprosy istorii, 1 (1990), p. 59; Janet M. Hartley, Alexander I, London, 1994, p. 48. Fonvizin put the number at ‘fewer than 100,000’. A further source gives the figure of 153,000 souls for the entire term of the law’s implementation, that is, from 1803 to 1858 (Fedosov and Dolgikh, ‘Rossiiskii absoliutizm i biurokratiia’, p. 87). 28 TsANO, f.639, op.124, d.2322, ll.1, 1ob. 29 A. V. Kochubei, Semeinaia khronika. Zapiski A.V. Kochubeia, 1790–1873, SPb, 1890, p. 33. 30 Shashkov, ‘Dvizhenie russkoi obshchestvennoi mysli’, Delo 6 (1871), p. 164; V. I. Bakunina, ‘Dvenadtsatyi god v zapiskakh’, RS, 47, 9 (1885), p. 397; T. V. Andreeva, Tainye obshchestva v Rossii v pervoi treti XIX v.: pravitel’stvennaia politika i obshchestvennoe mnenie, SPb, 2009, p. 212. 31 Kornilov, ‘Epokha Otechestvennoi voiny’, p. 149; V. M. Bezotosnyi, ‘Tsena i posledstviia pobedy’, Epokha 1812 goda. Issledovanie. Istochniki. Istoriografiia, M, 2009, vyp.VIII, p. 349. 32 Turgenev, Rossiia i russkie, vol. 2, pp. 119–20. 33 P. Maikov, ‘Baron Gustav Andreevich Rozenkampf ’, RS, 120, 10 (1904), pp. 168–9, 174. 34 S. V. Mironenko, Samoderzhavie i reformy. Politicheskaia bor’ba v Rossii v nachale XIX v., M, 1989, pp. 332–4. 35 S. A. Korf, Dvorianstvo i ego soslovnoe upravlenie za stoletie 1762–1855, SPb, 1906, p. 430. 36 McCaffray, ‘Confronting Serfdom in the Age of Revolution’, p. 7. 37 S. M. Seredonin, Istoricheskii obzor deiatel’nosti Komiteta Ministrov, SPb, 1902, p. 268. 38 N. V. Putiaty, ‘Obozrenie zhizni i tsarstvovaniia Imperatora Aleksandra I-go’, in Deviatnadtsatyi vek. Istoricheskii sbornik, 2 vols, P. Bartenev, ed., M, 1872, vol. 1, pp. 471–2. 39 Andreeva, Tainye obshchestva v Rossii., p. 211; N. K. Shil’der, Imperator Aleksandr I. Ego zhizn’ i tsarstvovanie, 4 vols, SPb, 1898, vol. 4, p. 40. 40 A. Mal’shinskii, ‘Vysshaia politsiia pri Imperatore Aleksandre I’, IV, 1 (1889), p. 175. 41 Romanov-Slavatinskii, Dvorianstvo v Rossii, p. 395; A. M. Martin, Romantics, Reformers, Reactionaries: Russian Conservative Thought and Politics in the Reign of Alexander I, DeKalb, IL, 1997, p. 103. 42 See, for example, V. Ia. Grosul, Russkii konservatizm XIX stoletiia: Ideologiia i praktika, M, 2000, p. 88. 43 GARF, f.48, op.1, d.193, ll.1, 18. Kochubei (acting state counsellor), Stepan Mikhailovich. He was also the author of a ‘Project for the management of the estate and peasants of a Poltava landowner’, which he wrote in 1818. See Chapter 10. 44 V. S. Ikonnikov, Graf N.S. Mordvinov: Istoricheskaia monografiia, SPb, 1873, p. 226; Hartley, Alexander I, p. 177; Andreeva, Tainye obshchestva v Rossii., p. 213.

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45 V. Zubov, ‘Pis’mo pomeshchika Tverskoi gubernii Kashinskogo uezda Vasiliia Zubova grafu Arakcheevu’, in Sbornik istoricheskikh materialov izvlechennykh iz arkhiva sobstvennoi ego imperatorskogo velichestva kantseliarii, 15 vols, N. F. Dubrovin, ed., SPb, 1895, vol. 7, pp. 186–7. 46 S. V. Mironenko, Stranitsy tainoi istorii samoderzhaviia, M, 1990, p. 81; Mariia Maiofis, Vozzvanie k Evrope: Literaturnoe obshchestvo ‘Arzamas’ i rossiiskii modernizatsionnyi proekt 1815–1818 godov, M, 2008, p. 283. 47 M. A. Fonvizin, ‘Obozrenie proiavlenii politicheskoi zhizni v Rossii’, in Obshchestvennye dvizheniia v Rossii, V. I. Semevskii, ed., SPb, 1905, p. 149. Fonvizin lived on his brother’s estate at Mar’ino in Moscow province from 1839, having spent thirteen years in Siberian exile, and died in 1853. See also, Mironenko, Samoderzhavie i reformy, pp. 64, 67. 48 Maikov, ‘Baron Gustav Andreevich Rozenkampf ’, p. 159. 49 Quoted in David Longley, The Longman Companion to Imperial Russia, 1689–1917, London, 2000, p. 121.

Chapter 10 1 N. I. Tsimbaev, ‘Vvedenie’, in Ocherki russkoi kul’tury XIX veka. Tom 4: Obshchestvennaia mysl’, L. V. Koshman, ed., M, 2003, p. 10; A. N. Dolgikh, Dvorianskie proekty resheniia krest’ianskogo voprosa v Rossii kontsa XVIII – pervoi chetverti XIX veka, Lipetsk, 2003, pp. 276–8. Dolgikh here lists no less than thirtynine documents, written between 1798 and 1824, representing individual noblemen’s suggestions for resolving the peasant question; S. V. Mironenko, Samoderzhavie i reformy. Politicheskaia bor’ba v Rossii v nachale XIX v., M, 1989, pp. 61–2. On nobles’ proposals, see also N. A. Miliutin, ‘Zapiska o raznykh predlozheniiakh po predmetu osvobozhdeniia krest’ian’, Deviatnadtsatyi vek, 2 vols, P. I. Bartenev, ed., M, 1872, vol. 2, pp. 145–208. 2 On Gur’ev’s 1824 report, see N. M. Druzhinin, Gosudarstvennye krest’iane i reforma P.D. Kiseleva, 2 vols, M-L, 1946, vol. 1, pp. 154–64. 3 OR-RNB f.731, f.637, d.837, d.899. See N. V. Minaeva, Potaennye konstitutsii Rossii, M, 2010, pp. 36–7; M. M. Speranskii, ‘O krepostnykh liudiakh’ (1826), Rukovodstvo k poznaniiu zakonov, I. D. Osipov, ed., SPb, 2002, pp. 464–77. See also Edgar Melton, ‘Enlightened Seigniorialism and Its Dilemmas in Serf Russia, 1750–1830’, Journal of Modern History, 62 (1993), pp. 675–708. 4 Patrick O’Meara, Russia’s First Republican: The Decembrist Pavel Pestel, Basingstoke, 2003, p. 79; N. V. Minaeva, Pravitel’stvennyi konstitutsionalizm i peredovoe obshchestvennoe mnenie Rossii v nachale XIX v., Saratov, 1982, pp. 226, 228, 234. 5 S. G. Volkonskii, Zapiski Sergeia Grigor’evicha Volkonskogo (dekabrista), SPb, 1902, pp. 407–408. Their early declared interest in serf emancipation did not check their subsequent distinguished careers: Bludov served on the Investigating Committee into the Decembrists and as minister of justice and minister of internal affairs under Nicholas I. He worked with Vasil’chikov on the Committee of the 6 December 1826 set up to work through the papers of Alexander I and to advise Nicholas on reform, and they were both members of the First Committee on the Peasant Question established on the same day. Nicholas appointed Vorontsov as his viceroy

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8

9

10 11 12 13

14 15

16 17 18 19 20 21

22 23

24

Notes in Bessarabia and then in the Caucasus. On this, see further the section below, ‘M.S. Vorontsov and noblemen-abolitionists’. N. F. Dubrovin, ‘Russkaia zhizn’ v nachale XIX veka’, RS, 4 (1904), p. 18; N. K. Shil’der, Imperator Aleksandr I. Ego zhizn’ i tsarstvovanie, 4 vols, SPb, 1898, vol. 4, p. 40; A. P. Zablotskii-Desiatovskii, Graf P.D. Kiselev i ego vremia, 4 vols, SPb, 1882, vol. 4, pp. 197–8. N. G. Repnin-Volkonskii, ‘O preobrazovanii krest’ian’, in Sbornik istoricheskikh materialov izvlechennykh iz arkhiva sobstvennoi ego imperatorskogo velichestva kantseliarii, 15 vols, N. Dubrovin, ed., vol. 11, SPb, 1901, pp. 269–73. S. M. Kochubei, ‘Project for the Management of the Estate and Peasants of a Poltava Landowner’, 1818, in Dolgikh, Dvorianskie proekty resheniia krest’ianskogo voprosa, pp. 130–7. O. V. Orlik, Gosudarstvennye liudi Rossii pervoi poloviny XIX veka: puti i sud’by, M, 2000, p. 148; N. I. Turgenev, Rossiia i russkie, M, 1907, vol. 2, p. 54; see also B. Hollingsworth, ‘Nicholas Turgenev. His Life and Works’, unpublished PhD thesis, University of Cambridge, 1966, 2 vols. S. V. Obolenskaia, Germaniia i nemtsy glazami russkikh (XIX vek), M, 2000, p. 78. T. Schiemann, Zur Geschichte der Regierung Paul I. und Nikolaus I. Neue Materialen, Berlin, 1906, pp. 148–9. Quoted in Dubrovin, ‘Russkaia zhizn’ v nachale XIX veka’, RS, 4 (1904), p. 19. For Zubov’s letter to Arakcheev about serf emancipation (1 February 1819), see Chapter 9. On Storch, see Susan P. McCaffray, ‘Confronting serfdom in the Age of Revolution: Projects for serf reform in the time of Alexander I’, The Russian Review, 64 (January 2005), pp. 12–13. N. N. Shipov, ‘Istoriia moei zhizni. Rasskaz byvshego krepostnogo krest’ianina’, RS, 5 (1881), pp. 146–7. A. N. Shebunin, ‘Brat’ia Turgenevy i dvorianskoe obshchestvo aleksandrovskoi epokhi’, in Dekabrist N.I.Turgenev. Pis’ma k bratu S I. Turgenevu, M-L, 1936, pp. 81–2. Minaeva, Pravitel’stvennyi konstitutsionalizm, p. 205; V. S. Ikonnikov, Graf N.S. Mordvinov. Istoricheskaia monografiia, SPb, 1873, pp. 234–5. Turgenev, Rossiia i russkie, vol. 2, pp. 57, 59, 114–15. Ibid., pp. 68, 81, 100, 101. Orlik, Gosudarstvennye liudi Rossii, pp. 37–8. P. M. Maikov, ‘Admiral N.S. Mordvinov i ego arkhiv’, RS, 1 (1905), p. 204. N. S. Mordvinov, ‘Odna iz mer osvobozhdeniia ot zavisimosti krest’ian (zapiska admirala Mordvinova)’, in Sbornik istoricheskikh materialov, N. Dubrovin, ed., SPb, 1891, vol. 7, pp. 183–5. I. A. Galaktionov, Imperator Aleksandr I i ego tsarstvovanie, 2 vols, SPb, 1877–79, vol. 1, p. 34. P. V. Akul’shin, P.A. Viazemskii. Vlast’ i obshchestvo v doreformennoi Rossii, M, 2001, p. 120. On Kaisarov (1782–1813), see M. I. Sukhomlinov, A.S. Kaisarov i ego literaturnye druz’ia, SPb, 1897; Iu. M. Lotman, ‘A.S. Kaisarov i literaturnoobshchestvennaia bor’ba ego vremeni’, in Uchennye zapiski Tartuskogo gosudarstvennogo universiteta, Tartu, 1958, no. 63. For a Russian translation of Kaisarov’s dissertation, see I. Ia. Shipanov, Russkie prosvetiteli (ot Radishcheva do dekabristov): sobranie proizvedenii v dvukh tomakh, M, 1966, vol. 1. Minaeva, Pravitel’stvennyi konstitutsionalizm, pp. 204–5; N. K. Kul’man, ‘Iz istorii obshchestvennogo dvizheniia v Rossii v tsarstvovanie imperatora Aleksandra I’,

Notes

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30 31 32 33 34 35

36 37

38

39 40

41 42 43 44 45 46 47

48

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Izvestiia otdeleniia russkogo iazyka i slovesnosti Imperatorskoi Akademii Nauk, 1 (1908), pp. 108, 111; Akul’shin, P.A. Viazemskii, pp. 120–1. GARF, f.1165 (Osobennaia kantseliariia ministerstva vnutrennykh del), op.1 (Ugolovnye dela), d.93 (January–March 1818), ll.5, 5ob, 6, 8, 29-31ob. D. N. Sverbeev, Zapiski (1799–1826), 2 vols, M, 1899, vol. 1, p. 246. GARF, f.1165, op.1, d.94, l.3; d.95, l.1. Mironenko, Samoderzhavie i reformy, pp. 97–8. P. K. Shchebal’skii, ‘Materialy dlia istorii russkoi tsenzury, 1803-1825g.’, in Besedy v obshchestve liubitelei rossiiskoi slovesnosti, SPb, 1871, vol. 3, pp. 21–4. Repnin’s speech is in Dolgikh, Dvorianskie proekty resheniia krest’ianskogo voprosa, pp. 115–18. We shall return again to the stand-off between the censor and Dukh zhurnalov in the next chapter: ‘G.M. Iatsenkov and Dukh zhurnalov versus the censor’. Kul’man, ‘Iz istorii obshchestvennogo dvizheniia’, p. 107. Ibid., p. 105. Ibid., pp. 142–3. Istoricheskie dokumenty iz vremen tsarstvovaniia Aleksandra I, Leipzig, 1880, pp. 129–30; Kul’man, ‘Iz istorii obshchestvennogo dvizheniia’, p. 100. Quoted in Akul’shin, P.A. Viazemskii, p. 130. Karamzin was married to Viazemskii’s sister. Minaeva, Pravitel’stvennyi konstitutsionalizm, pp. 205, 276; E. L. Rudnitskaia, Liki russkoi intelligentsii, M, 2007, p. 80. For a full assessment of the role played by Karazin in this episode, see S. V. Mironenko, Aleksandr I i debrakristy. Rossiia v pervoi chetverti XIX veka – vybor puti, M, 2017, pp. 159–68. Rudnitskaia, Liki russkoi intelligentsii, p. 80; Mironenko, Samoderzhavie i reformy, pp. 131–2. N. Tikhii, V.N. Karazin, vinovnik uchrezhdeniia universiteta v Khar’kove, Khar’kov, 1905, pp. 220–2, 224; Kul’man, ‘Iz istorii obshchestvennogo dvizheniia’, p. 115; Andreeva, Tainye obshchestva v Rossii, pp. 214–15. S. Shashkov, ‘Dvizhenie russkoi obshchestvennoi mysli v nachale XIX veka’, Delo, 5 (1871), p. 113; A. Romanov-Slavatinskii, Dvorianstvo v Rossii ot nachala XVIII veka do otmeny krepostnogo prava, Kiev, 1912, pp. 295–6; N. K. Shil’der, Imperator Aleksandr I. Ego zhizn’ i tsarstvovanie, 4 vols, SPb, 1898, vol. 4, p. 42; V. A. Fedorov, ‘Aleksandr I’, Voprosy istorii, 1 (1990), p. 59. Mironenko, Samoderzhavie i reformy, pp. 81–3. Vosstanie dekabristov. Materialy i dokumenty. Dela verkhovnogo ugolovnogo suda i sledstvennoi komissii, A. A. Pokrovksii, M. N. Pokrovskii and M. V. Nechkina, eds, M-L. 1925, vol. 1, p. 166. A. V. Predtechenskii, Sovremennik dekabristov T.G. Bok, Tallinn, 1953, p. 58. Kul’man, ‘Iz istorii obshchestvennogo dvizheniia’, p. 117. Ibid., pp. 116–21. M. A. Davydov, ‘Oppozitsiia ego velichestva’. Dvorianstvo i reformy v nachale XIX v., M, 1994, p. 109. Turgenev, Rossiia i russkie, vol. 2, pp. 119–20. Ibid., pp. 124–5. Quoted in V. A. Udovik, ‘M.S. Vorontsov i dekabristy’, in 14 dekabria 1825 goda. Istochniki. Issledovaniia. Istoriografiia. Bibliografiia, O. I. Kiianskaia, ed., SPb, 2010, vyp. VIII, pp. 354–5. Ibid., p. 356.

326

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49 S. A. Ekshtut, V poiske istoricheskoi al’ternativy. Aleksandr I. Ego spodvizhniki. Dekabristy, M, 1994, p. 147. 50 Udovik, ‘M.S. Vorontsov i dekabristy’, pp. 354, 357. 51 Turgenev, Rossiia i russkie, vol. 2, pp. 124–6; Ekshtut, V poiske istoricheskoi al’ternativy, p. 139; Andreeva, Tainye obshchestva v Rossii, p. 215. 52 L. Hamilton Rhinelander, ‘Vorontsov, Mikhail Semenovich’, Modern Encyclopedia of Russian and Soviet History, 43 (1986), p. 52. See also Anthony L. H. Rhinelander, Prince Michael Vorontsov: Viceroy to the Tsar, Montreal, 1990. 53 Udovik, ‘M.S. Vorontsov i dekabristy’, p. 374. 54 Ibid., p. 376. 55 N. N. Muraviev, ‘Vsepoddanneishee pis’mo stats-sekretaria N. Muravieva. 30 marta 1824 goda’, in Sbornik istoricheskikh materialov izvlechennykh iz arkhiva sobstvennoi ego imperatorskogo velichestva kantseliarii, N. Dubrovin, ed., 15 vols, SPb, 1895, vol. 7, pp. 462–8; Dolgikh, Dvorianskie proekty resheniia krest’ianskogo voprosa, pp. 254–9, on which this section draws. The owner of large estates in Moscow province, N. N. Muraviev was appointed by Nicholas I as director of the First Department of His Imperial Majesty’s Own Chancellery. 56 Jerome Blum, Lord and Peasant in Russia from the Ninth to the Nineteenth Century, New York, 1967, p. 480. 57 Quoted in Druzhinin, Gosudarstvennye krest’iane i reforma P.D. Kiseleva, vol. 1, p. 131. 58 Ia. V. Abramov, V.N. Karazin, Osnovatel’ Khar’kovskago Universiteta. Ego zhizn’ i obshchestvennaia deiatel’nost’, SPb, 1891, pp. 60–6; Tikhii, V.N. Karazin, p. 215; Patrick O’Meara, ‘ “The Opinion of One Ukrainian Landowner”: V.N. Karazin, Alexander I, and Changing Russia’, in Word and Image in Russian History: Essays in Honor of Gary Marker, Boston, MA, 2015, pp. 322–5. 59 Tikhii, V.N. Karazin, p. 212. 60 V.N. Karazin, ‘Pis’mo V.N. Karazina k Slobodsko-Ukrainskomu gubernatoru Ivanu Ivanovichu Bakhtinu, ot 30 ianvaria 1810 g., iz Moskvy’, RS, 3 (1871), pp. 335–66. 61 V. Sreznevskii, ‘Karazin, Vasilii Nazar’evich’, RBS, vol. 8, p. 492. 62 V. N. Karazin, Opyt sel’skogo ustava dlia pomeshchich’ego imeniia, sostoiavshchego na obroke, SPb, 1818; Sreznevskii, ‘Karazin, Vasilii Nazar’evich’, pp. 493–4. 63 V. M. Bokova, ‘Bespokoinyi dukh vremeni. Obshchestvennaia mysl’ pervoi treti XIX v.’, in Ocherki russkoi kul’tury XIX veka. Tom 4: Obshchestvennaia mysl’, L. V. Koshman, ed., M, 2003, p. 75. 64 V. A. Fedorov, ed., Memuary dekabristov. Severnoe obshchestvo, M, 1981, pp. 30, 321; T. V. Andreeva, ed., Nikolai I: Lichnost’ i epokha. Novye materialy, SPb, 2007, p. 238. 65 V. I. Semevskii, Krest’ianskii vopros v Rossii v XVIII i pervoi polovine XIX veka, SPb, 1888, vol. 1, p. 378. 66 ‘Imperator Aleksandr Pavlovich i ego vremia. Istoricheskie materialy, k nemu i ego epokhe otnosiashchiesia. Tolki i nastroenie umov v Rossi po doneseniiam vysshei politsii v S.-Peterburge s avgusta 1818 po 1-e maia 1819 g.’, RS, 11 (1881), p. 669. The ‘flight to Warsaw’ rumour cited here may have derived from Prince Lopukhin’s claimed exchange with the tsar recounted on p. 211. 67 Quoted in S. P. Mel’gunov, Krepostnoe pravo i krest’ianskaia zhizn’, M, 1911, pp. 20, 243, 245. Mel’gunov’s book was among several publications marking the fiftieth anniversary of emancipation. See also Patrick O’Meara, ‘Yakushkin, Ivan Dmitrievich (1783–1857)’, The Modern Encyclopedia of Russian and Soviet History, 44 (1987), pp. 181–4. 68 Shashkov, ‘Dvizhenie russkoi obshchestvennoi mysli’, pp. 124, 127.

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69 D. Geyer, Russian Imperialism: The Interaction of Domestic and Foreign Policy, 1860– 1914, New Haven, CT, 1987, p. 24. 70 N. I. Iakovkina, Russkoe dvorianstvo pervoi poloviny XIX veka. Byt i traditsii, SPb, 2002, pp. 18, 21, 25, 32. 71 J. Keep, ‘Foreword’, Marc Raeff, Understanding Imperial Russia: State and Society in the Old Regime, Columbia, 1984, xvii; S. A. Korf, Dvorianstvo i ego soslovnoe upravlenie za stoletie 1762–1855, SPb, 1906, p. 429. 72 Quoted in Dubrovin, ‘Russkaia zhizn’ v nachale XIX veka’, RS, 5 (1904), p. 261. 73 I. V. Lopukhin, Zapiski, London, 1860 (reprint, M, 1990), pp. 194–5. 74 N. I. Stoianovskii, ‘Aleksei Nikolaevich Olenin 1763–1843. Perepiska s grafom Arakcheevym 1817–1833’, RS, 14 (1875), pp. 285–8. Olenin was appointed the first director of the Imperial Public Library in St Petersburg in 1811. 75 Bokova, ‘Bespokoinyi dukh vremeni’, pp. 68–9. While similar to N. G. Viazemskii’s, Karamzin’s outlook was diametrically opposed to that of his brother-in-law, P. A. Viazemskii. 76 Iakovkina, Russkoe dvorianstvo pervoi poloviny XIX veka, pp. 27–34. 77 M. L. Nazimov, ‘V provintsii i v Moskve s 1812 po 1828 god’, RV, 7 (1876), p. 94. 78 K. K. Pavlova, ‘Vospominaniia’, RA, 10 (1875), pp. 222–40, at pp. 239–40. 79 Dubrovin, ‘Russkaia zhizn’ v nachale XIX veka’, RS, 3 (1904), pp. 495, 502. 80 Shashkov, ‘Dvizhenie russkoi obshchestvennoi mysli’, p. 128. 81 A. Pypin, ‘Novye memuary ob Aleksandrovskoi epokhe’, VE, 12 (1887), pp. 702–3, 709–10. 82 A. Romanov-Slavatinskii, Dvorianstvo v Rossii ot nachala XVIII veka do otmeny krepostnogo prava, Kiev, 1912, pp. 398–9; Janet M. Hartley, Alexander I, London, 1994, p. 177. 83 A. N. Sakharov, Aleksandr I, M, 1998, p. 70. Lopukhin’s son, Pavel, owed much to his father’s reputation and position at court. He was a member of Decembrist secret societies from 1817 to 1822. Although arrested in connection with the 1825 uprising, he was released without charge after a preliminary interrogation. 84 On this, see Andreeva, Tainye obshchestva v Rossii, p. 212.

Chapter 11 1 On the importance of memoir literature and its scale, see, for example, A. G. Tartakovskii, Russkaia memuaristika XVIII – pervoi poloviny XIX v., M, 1991. 2 This is the main theme also of S. V. Mironenko, Samoderzhavie i reformy. Politicheskaia bor’ba v Rossii v nachale XIX v., M, 1989. 3 On this, see T. V. Andreeva, Tainye obshchestva v Rossii v pervoi treti XIX v.: pravitel’stvennaia politika i obshchestvennoe mnenie, SPb, 2009, pp. 515–27. 4 E. P. Kovalevskii, Graf Bludov i ego vremia, SPb, 1866, p. 68. 5 Quoted in V. M. Bokova,‘ Bespokoinyi dukh vremeni. Obshchestvennaia mysl’ pervoi treti XIX v.’, in Ocherki russkoi kul’tury XIX veka. Tom 4: Obshchestvennaia mysl’, L. V. Koshman, ed., M, 2003, p. 76. 6 M. A. Korf, ‘Aleksandr I i ego priblizhennye do epokhi Speranskogo’, RS, 2 (1903), p. 232. 7 Kovalevskii, Graf Bludov i ego vremia, pp. 68–9.

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8 A. N. Pypin, Obshchestvennoe dvizhenie v Rossii v epokhu imperatora Aleksandra I, SPb, 1871, p. 192; Mironenko, Samoderzhavie i reformy, pp. 29–36. 9 D. I. Zavalishin, Zapiski dekabrista, SPb, 1906, p. 109. 10 J. M. Hartley, Russia, 1762–1825: Military Power, the State, and the People, Westport, CT, 2008, p. 66. 11 On this, see further B. B. Glinskii, ‘Bor’ba za konstitutsiiu’, IV, 1 (1906), pp. 248–57. 12 M. A. Fonvizin, ‘Obozrenie proiavlenii politicheskoi zhizni v Rossii’, in Obshchestvennye dvizheniia v Rossii v pervuiu polovinu XIX veka. Tom1: Dekabristy, V. I. Semevskii, ed., SPb, 1905, pp. 182–3. 13 Quoted in S. O. Shmidt, Obshchestvennoe samosoznanie rossiiskogo blagorodnogo sosloviia XVII – pervaia tret’ XIX v., M, 2002, p. 115. 14 N. I. Tsimbaev, ed., Zapiski A.I. Kosheleva, M, 1999, p. 51; N. P. Koliupanov, Biografiia Aleksandra Ivanovicha Kosheleva, M, 1889, vol. 1, pp. 379–80. 15 Dubrovin, ‘Russkaia zhizn’ v nachale XIX veka’, RS, 1 (1904), p. 26. 16 N. I. Grech, Zapiski o moei zhizni, SPb, 1886, p. 229. 17 S. I. Maevskii, ‘Moi vek ili istoriia Sergeia Ivanovicha Maevskogo 1813–26’, RS, 9 (1873), pp. 298–9. 18 Koliupanov, Biografiia Kosheleva, vol. 1, book 1, p. 312. 19 Dubrovin, ‘Russkaia zhizn’ v nachale XIX veka’, RS, 1 (1904), p. 27. 20 On this, see G. Vernadskii, ‘Dva lika dekabristov’, Svobodnaia mysl’, 15 (1993), p. 85. 21 N. K. Shil’der, Imperator Aleksandr I. Ego zhizn’ i tsarstvovanie, 4 vols, SPb, 1898, vol. 4, p. 252; Andreeva, Tainye obshchestva v Rossii, p. 417. 22 L. N. Engel’gardt, Zapiski, M, 1868, pp. 226, 231–2. 23 Quoted in Dubrovin, ‘Russkaia zhizn’ v nachale XIX veka’, RS, 1 (1904), p. 26. 24 A. P. Zablotskii-Desiatovskii, Graf P.D. Kiselev i ego vremia, SPb, 1882, p. 57. 25 Quoted in Mironenko, Samoderzhavie i reformy, p. 35. 26 Ibid., p. 36. 27 A. M. Martin, ‘The Russian Empire and the Napoleonic Wars’, in Napoleon and Europe, P. G. Dwyer, ed., London, 2001, p. 256. 28 S. A. Korf, Dvorianstvo i ego soslovnoe upravlenie1762-1855, SPb, 1906, pp. 385–6; Dubrovin, ‘Russkaia zhizn’ v nachale XIX veka’, RS, 10 (1900), p. 63. 29 Koliupanov, Biografiia Kosheleva, vol. 1, book 1, p. 379. 30 Zavalishin, Zapiski dekabrista, p. 104. 31 Quoted in V. M. Bezotosnyi, ‘Tsena i posledstviia pobedy’, in Epokha 1812 goda. Issledovaniia. Istochniki. Istoriografiia, M, 2009, vol. VIII, p. 342. 32 Iu. M. Lotman, ‘Liudi 1812 goda’, Besedy o russkoi kul’ture. Byt i traditsii russkogo dvorianstva (XVIII- nachalo XIX veka), SPb, 1994, pp. 314, 319. 33 A. N. Shebunin, ‘Brat’ia Turgenevy i dvorianskoe obshchestvo aleksandrovskoi epokhi’, in Dekabrist N.I. Turgenev. Pis’ma k bratu S.I. Turgenevu, M-L, 1936, pp. 30–1; S. Shashkov, ‘Dvizhenie russkoi obshchestvennoi mysli v nachale XIX veka’, Delo, 6 (1871), p. 165. Uvarov was appointed president of the Imperial Academy of Sciences in 1818 at the age of 32, an office which he held until his death in 1855. He was Nicholas I’s minister of education from 1833 to 1849. See Cynthia H. Whittaker, The Origins of Modern Russian Education: An Intellectual Biography of Count Sergei Uvarov, 1786–1855, Dekalb, IL, 2010, p. 57. 34 N. Barsukov, Pis’ma N.M. Karamzina k Kniaziu P.A. Viazemskomu 1810–1826 (Iz Ostav’evskago arkhiva), SPb, 1897, pp. 179–80. 35 Richard S. Wortman, Scenarios of Power. Myth and Ceremony in Russian Monarchy, 2 vols, Princeton, 1995, vol. 1, pp. 215, 231.

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36 S. A. Ekshtut, V poiske istoricheskoi al’ternativy. Aleksandr I. Ego spodvizhniki. Dekabristy. M, 1994, p. 54. On von Bock, see further in the last section of this chapter on the case files of the secret police and also, Patrick O’Meara, ‘Timotheus von Bock: Prisoner of Alexander I’, SEER, 90, 1 (2012), pp. 98–123. 37 O. V. Orlik, Gosudarstvennye liudi Rossii pervoi poloviny XIX veka: puti i sud’by, M, 2000, p. 137. 38 N. I. Turgenev, Rossiia i russkie, M, 1907, vol. 1, pp. 49–50. 39 Quoted in Dubrovin, ‘Russkaia zhizn’ v nachale XIX veka’, RS, 3 (1904), pp. 485–6. 40 Ibid., pp. 486, 489. A. I. Mikhailovskii-Danilevskii (1790–1848), a military historian, served first as an adjutant to Field Marshal M. I. Kutuzov, and then in 1816 was appointed an aide-de-camp to the tsar. 41 Richard Stites, The Four Horsemen: Riding to Liberty in Post-Napoleonic Europe, Oxford, 2014, p. 56. 42 V. S. Ikonnikov, Graf N. S. Mordvinov. Istoricheskaia monografiia, SPb, 1873, p. 404; the Decembrists cited here are quoted in A. V. Predtechenskii, ‘Otrazhenie voin 1812– 14 v soznanii sovremennikov’, Istoricheskie zapiski, 3 (1950), pp. 241–2; S. Ia. Shtraikh, Zapiski, stat’i, pis’ma dekabrista I.D. Iakushkina, M, 1951, p. 7. 43 Dubrovin, ‘Russkaia zhizn’ v nachale XIX veka’, RS, 3 (1904), p. 489. 44 Korf, Dvorianstvo i ego soslovnoe upravlenie, pp. 387–8, 391, 394–5, 441. 45 M. A. Davydov, Oppozitsiia ego velichestva, M, 1994, pp. 134–5. The perils of Kiselev’s closeness to P. I. Pestel’ and other Southern Society members who were Second Army officers based at Tul’chin, Ukraine, are discussed in Patrick O’Meara, ‘General P.D. Kiselev and Second Army HQ at Tul’chin, 1819–29’, SEER, 88, 1–2 (2010), pp. 261–90. See also on Kiselev and the Decembrists: A. V. Semenova, ‘Nachal’nik shtaba 2-i armii’, Vremennoe revoliutsionnoe pravitel’stvo v planakh dekabristov, M, 1982, pp. 142–75. 46 Mariia Maiofis, Vozzvanie k Evrope: Literaturnoe obshchestvo ‘Arzamas’ i rossiiskii modernizatsionnyi proekt 1815–1818 godov, M, 2008, pp. 732, 735; H. Seton-Watson, The Russian Empire 1801–1917, Oxford, 1967, p. 175; J. Hartley, Alexander I, London, 1994, pp. 143–7. The literary circle ‘Arzamas’ was formed in 1815 and dissolved in April 1818. Its members included Karamzin, N. M. Muraviev, M. Orlov, A. and N. Turgenev, Uvarov, Vigel’ and Zhukovskii. 47 They were A. N. and N. M. Muraviev, S. I. and M. I. Muraviev-Apostol and Prince S. P. Trubetskoi. P. I. Pestel’, another member of the same lodge, joined them in 1817. 48 On this, see I. V. Nemirovskii, ‘Pushkin i P.D. Kiselev’, Vremennik Pushkinskoi komissii, 27 (1996), p. 27. 49 Anon, ‘O vrednom dukhe nashego vremeni’, in Sbornik istoricheskikh materialov, N. Dubrovin, ed., SPb, 1901, vol. 11, pp. 258–63, at pp. 258–9. This could be a reference to State-Councillor Lieutenant-Commander V. M. Golovnin, who, as a naval officer, was held prisoner by the Japanese on Hokkaido for over two years from 1811 to 1813. See Seton-Watson, The Russian Empire 1801–1917, p. 178. Golovnin was, from its opening in 1816, a member of the Masonic lodge ‘Three Luminaries’ (Tri Svetila). See Andreeva, Tainye obshchestva v Rossii, p. 430. 50 P. M. Maikov, ‘Admiral N.S. Mordvinov i ego arkhiv’, RS, 1 (1905), pp. 204–5. 51 G. V. Zhirkov, ‘Vek ofitsial’noi tsenzury’, in Ocherki russkoi kul’tury XIX veka, Tom 2: Vlast’ i kul’tura, L. V. Koshman, ed., M, 2000, pp. 171–2. 52 Koliupanov, Biografiia Kosheleva, vol. 1, pp. 495–6. 53 Ibid. 54 S. V. Rozhdestvenskii, Istoricheskii obzor deiatel’nosti Ministerstva narodnogo prosveshcheniia. 1802–1902, SPb, 1902, p. 160.

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55 D. Longley, The Longman Companion to Imperial Russia, 1689–1917, London, 2000, p. 372; Rozhdestvenskii, Istoricheskii obzor, pp. 160–1. 56 P. K. Shchebal’skii, ‘Materialy dlia istorii russkoi tsenzury, 1803-1825g.’, Besedy v obshchestve liubitelei rossiiskoi slovesnosti, SPb, 1867, vol. 1, pp. 15–24. 57 M. Liubavin, ‘Grigorii Maksimovich Iatsenkov (1774–1852): vpolne obyknovennyi russkii chelovek na sluzhbe imperatoru i prosveshcheniiu’, Imperskaia Rossiia/Classical Russia 1700–1825, 3–5 (2008–10), pp. 141–55, from which this section draws on pp. 148–52 in particular. 58 John P. LeDonne, Absolutism and the Ruling Class: The Formation of the Russian Political Order, 1700–1825, New York, 1991, pp. 175, 177. 59 ‘On the censorship of the Ministry of Police 1816. A memorandum of the Minister of Police, 25 January 1816’, in Sbornik istoricheskikh materialov, Dubrovin, ed., SPb, 1896, vol. 8, pp. 189–94. A. D. Balashov was minister of police from 1810 to 1819, and his representative as the ministry’s director from 28 February 1812 to 15 October 1819 was S. K. Viazmitinov. See Erik Amburger, Geschichte der Behördenorganisation Russlands von Peter dem Grossen bis 1917, Leiden, 1966, p. 141. 60 F. F. Vigel’, Zapiski, S. Ia. Shtraikh, ed., M, 1928, pp. 515–16. 61 Engel’gardt, Zapiski, pp. 228, 237. On Alexander at the Congress of Troppau, see Hartley, Alexander I, pp. 149–51. 62 A. K. Gribbe, ‘Graf A. A. Arakcheev, v 1822–1826 gg. Vospominaniia polkovnika A.K. Gribbe’, RS, 1 (1875), p. 103. 63 Turgenev, Rossiia i russkie, vol. 1, p. 90. 64 V. Ia. Grosul, Russkii konservatizm XIX stoletiia. Ideologiia i praktika, M, 2000, p. 80. Of the twelve volumes of Karamzin’s history, eleven were published between 1816 and 1826, the year of his death. Volume 12 appeared in 1829. 65 Quoted in Shmidt, Obshchestvennoe samosoznanie rossiiskogo blagorodnogo sosloviia, p. 112. 66 N. Barsukov, Pis’ma I.I. Dmitrieva k Kniaziu P.A. Viazemskomu 1810–1836 godov (Iz Ostaf ’evskogo arkhiva), SPb, 1898, pp. 17–18. 67 Koliupanov, Biografiia Kosheleva, vol. 1, pp. 495–6. 68 Grech, Zapiski o moei zhizni, p. 200. 69 GARF, f.1165, op.1 (Ugolovnye dela), d.56 (Col. Grabbe), d.212 (Shmarov), d.418 (Lt. Nashchokin), d.419 (Nebol’sin). 70 GARF, f.109 (Archive of the Third Department), op.229, d.11, ll.23, 100, 109–10. 71 Shashkov, ‘Dvizhenie russkoi obshchestvennoi mysli’, pp. 158–60. 72 V. Sreznevskii, ‘Karazin, Vasilii Nazar’evich’, RBS, SPb, 1897, vol. 8, pp. 486–99. 73 V. K., ‘Eshche otryvok iz dnevnoi zapiski ukraintsa’, Syn otechestva, 59, 2 (1820), pp. 93–6; V. I. Saitov, Ostaf ’evskii Arkhiv kniazei Viazemskikh, Perepiska kniazia P.A. Viazemskago s A.I. Turgenvym 1820–1823, 5 vols, SPb, 1899, vol. 2, Primechaniia, no. 259, p. 377. Italics are Karazin’s. 74 Saitov, Ostaf ’evskii Arkhiv kniazei Viazemskikh, vol. 2, pp. 111, 116; Primechaniia, no. 337, p. 436. 75 Ibid., vol. 2, p. 124. 76 N. K. Kul’man, ‘Iz istorii obshchestvennogo dvizheniia v Rossii v tsarstvovanie imperatora Aleksandra I’, in Izvestiia otdeleniia russkogo iazyka i slovesnosti imperatorskoi Akademii Nauk, 1908, book 1, p. 122. 77 Ibid., p. 130. 78 For Alexander’s treatment of the more independently minded of his subjects, and on the parallels between the fates of Karazin and Timotheus von Bock, see two articles by

Notes

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80 81 82

83 84

85 86 87

331

Patrick O’Meara, ‘Timotheus von Bock: Prisoner of the Tsar’, SEER, 90, 1 (2012), pp. 98–123, esp. pp. 121–3; ‘ “The Opinion of One Ukrainian Landowner”: V.N. Karazin, Alexander I, and Changing Russia’, in Word and Image in Russian History: Essays in Honor of Gary Marker, Boston, MA, 2015, pp. 315–35. N. P. Lyzhin, ‘Znakomstvo Zhukovskogo so vzgliadami romanticheskoi shkoly’, in Letopisi russkoi literatury drevnosti izdavaemye Nikolaem Tikhonravovym, N. S. Tikhonravov, ed., 5 vols, M, 1859, vol. 1, section 1, p. 67. O’Meara, ‘Timotheus von Bock. Prisoner of the Tsar’, p. 106. GARF, f.109, op.214, ll.5, 6ob. Alexander I loved music and played the violin. In 1804 he appointed a French violinist (Rhode) to his household staff. See H. Storch, Russland unter Alexander dem Ersten, St. Petersburg, Leipzig, 1804, vol. 4, p. 369. Lyzhin refers to von Bock’s local renown as a musician, ‘Znakomstvo Zhukovskogo so vzgliadami romanticheskoi shkoly’, p. 63. A. V. Predtechenskii, Sovremennik dekabristov T.G. Bok, Tallinn, 1953, pp. 85, 87. On V. F. Raevskii, see further, A. G. Kolesnikov, V.F. Raevskii: politicheskaia i literaturnaia deiatel’nost’, Rostov-on-Don, 1977; O’Meara, K.F. Ryleev: A Political Biography of the Decembrist Poet, Princeton, NJ, 1984, pp. 51–2; O’Meara, ‘General P. D. Kiselev’, pp. 273–4. N. F. Annenskii, ed., Gallereia Shissel’burgskikh uznikov, SPb, 1907, part 1, p. xxiii. Quoted in B. M. Eikhenbaum, S.P. Zhikharev. Zapiski sovremennika, M-L, 1955, p. 646. R. Pinkerton, Russia: or, Miscellaneous Observations on the Past and Present State of That Country and Its Inhabitants, London, 1833, p. 365.

Chapter 12 1 OR-RNB, f.488 (Mikhailovskii-Danilevskii), d.52 (Zhurnal 1824 goda. Vospominaniia [1827–28]), ll.44 ob-45. 2 On this, see N. K. Shil’der, Imperator Aleksandr I. Ego zhizn’ i tsarstvovanie, 4 vols, SPb, 1898, vol. 4, p. 214. 3 N. I. Turgenev, Rossiia i russkie, M, 1907, vol. 2, pp. 88, 90. 4 On the spread of Lancaster Schools during this period, see A. A. Orlov, ‘Teper’ vizhu anglichan vblizi . . .’: Britaniia i britantsy v predstavleniiakh rossiian o mire i o sebe: vtoraia polovina XVIII – pervaia polovina XIX vv., M, 2008. 5 On this, see V. M. Bokova, ‘Bespokoinyi dukh vremeni. Obshchestvennaia mysl’ pervoi treti XIX v.’, in Ocherki russkoi kul’tury XIX veka. Tom 4: Obshchestvennaia mysl’, L. V. Koshman, ed., M, 2003, p. 88. 6 M. Raeff, ‘The Russian Nobility’, in The Nobility in Russia and Eastern Europe, Ivo Banac and Paul Bushkovitch, eds, New Haven, CT, 1983, pp. 111–12. 7 Janet M. Hartley, A Social History of the Russian Empire 1650-182, London, 1999, pp. 257–58. 8 E. N. Marasinova, ‘N.I. Novikov (“Chastnyi chelovek” v Rossii na rubezhe XVIII- XIX vekov)’, Chelovek v mire chuvstv: Ocherki po istorii chastnoi zhizni v Evrope i nekotorykh stran Azii do nachala novogo vremeni, M, 2000, p. 477; E. S. Fedorova, ‘Iz perepiski roditelei dekabrista V.P. Ivasheva’, Dekabristy: aktual’nye problemy i novye podkhody, O. I. Kiianskaia, ed., M, 2008, p. 45. V. P. Ivashev served ten years in Siberia. On the tenth anniversary of the uprising (and of Nicholas’s accession) he was allowed to return to Tobolsk province where he died five years later, in December 1840, aged forty-four.

332

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9 S. G. Volkonskii, Zapiski Sergeia Grigor’evicha Volkonskogo (dekabrista), SPb, 1901, pp. 401–2, 407, 409. 10 Wilson greatly admired Moscow’s governor, Count F. V. Rostopchin, for letting the city burn, including his own house at Voronovo, in order to frustrate the occupying French forces. See Sir Robert Wilson, The Invasion of Russia, London, 1860; Hugh Seton-Watson, The Russian Empire, 1801–1917, Oxford, 1967, p. 135. 11 M. Dovnar-Zapol’skii, ‘Review of Zapiski Sergeia Grigor’evicha Volkonskogo (dekabrista), SPb, 1901’, Zhurnal ministerstva narodnogo prosveshcheniia, 340 (1902), pp. 469, 471–2. 12 Ibid., p. 476. 13 A. P. Beliaev, ‘Vospominaniia o perezhitom i perechuvstvovannom s 1803 goda’, RS, 3 (1881), pp. 488, 492, 509. 14 ‘To put an end to this government’. N. I. Tsimbaev, Zapiski A.I. Kosheleva, M, 1999, p. 51. Naryshkin was a Moscow-based member of the Decembrists’ Northern Society. 15 D. N. Sverbeev, Zapiski (1799–1826), 2 vols, M, 1899, vol. 1, pp. 248–52. 16 L. N. Engel’gardt, Zapiski, M, 1868, p. 231. 17 T. Schiemann, Zur Geschichte der Regierung Paul I. und Nikolaus I. Neue Materialen, Berlin, 1906, p. 119. 18 Schiemann, Zur Geschichte der Regierung Paul I. und Nikolaus I, p. 122. 19 G. Vernadskii, ‘Dva lika dekabristov’, Svobodnaia mysl’, 15 (1993), pp. 82–3. 20 P. V. Akul’shin, P.A. Viazemskii. Vlast’ i obshchestvo v doreformennoi Rossii, M, 2001, p. 146. Muraviev was a member of the Decembrists’ Southern Society who was sentenced to twenty years of exile in Siberia where he died in Irkutsk in 1846. 21 Schiemann, Zur Geschichte der Regierung Paul I. und Nikolaus I, pp. 123, 146–7, 151. Further on Kiselev and the Decembrists, see A. V. Semenova, Vremennoe revoliutsionnoe pravitel’stvo v planakh dekabristov, M, 1982, pp. 142–75. 22 I. V. Nemirovskii, ‘Pushkin i P.D. Kiselev’, Vremennik Pushkinskoi komissii, 27 (1996), p. 18. 23 Nemirovskii, ‘Pushkin i P.D. Kiselev’, p. 25. 24 M. A. Davydov, Oppozitsiia ego velichestva, M, 1994, p. 137; O. V. Orlik, Gosudarstvennye liudi Rossii pervoi poloviny XIX veka: puti i sud’by, M, 2000, pp. 89–90, 96. 25 See E. N. Marasinova, ‘Dekabristy: aristokraticheskaia fronda v Rossii?’, Rossiia, 21.1– 2 (1994), pp. 96–7. 26 For a discussion of the ‘Praetorian’ role of the Russian Guards regiments during the long eighteenth century, see J. Keep, Soldiers of the Tsar: Army and Society in Russia, 1462–1874, Oxford, 1985. 27 Vernadskii, ‘Dva lika dekabristov’, p. 83. 28 N. I. Grech, Zapiski o moei zhizni, SPb, 1886, p. 230. 29 P. V. Il’in, ‘K kharakteristike dvorianskoi liberal’noi oppozitsii v Rossii v pervuiu chetvert’ XIX v.: problemy izucheniia sostava uchastnikov konspirativnykh ob’’edinenii dekabristov’, in Vlast’, obshchestvo i reformy v Rossii (XVI – nachalo XX v.), SPb, 2004, pp. 68–85. Further references are to page numbers in the text (in parentheses). 30 D. M. Fel’dman, ‘Dekabristovedenie segodnia: terminologiia, ideologiia, metodologiia’, Dekabristy. Aktual’nye problemy i novye podkhody, O. I. Kiianskaia, ed., M, 2008, pp. 663, 668. 31 Patrick O’Meara, K.F. Ryleev. A political biography of the Decembrist poet, Princeton, NJ, 1984, p. 23.

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32 On this, see Vernadskii, ‘Dva lika dekabristov’, p. 89. 33 A. V. Semenova ‚ ‘M.M. Speranskii i dekabristy’, Istoricheskie zapiski, 102 (1978), p. 209. 34 T. V. Andreeva, Tainye obshchestva v Rossii v pervoi treti XIX v.: pravitel’stvennaia politika i obshchestvennoe mnenie, SPb, 2009. 35 P.V. Il’in, Novoe o dekabristakh. Proshchennye, opravdannye i neobnaruzhennye sledstviem uchastniki tainikh obshchestv i voennykh vystuplenii 1825–1826 gg., SPb, 2004, pp. 573–643. Further references are to page numbers in the text (in parentheses). 36 N. A. Borovkov, ‘A.D. Borovkov i ego avtobiograficheskie zapiski’, RS, 11 (1898), pp. 350–1. A. D. Borovkov was the secretary of the Investigating Committee. This extract from his autobiography contains thumb-nail sketches of 16 Decembrists. Borovkov’s complete 1827 ‘Alphabet of members of the former criminal secret societies’ (Alfavit chlenam byvshikh zloumyshlennykh tainykh obshchestv) may be found in S. V. Mironenko, Dekabristy. Biograficheskii spravochnik, M, 1988, pp. 215–345. 37 D. I. Zavalishin, Zapiski dekabrista, SPb, 1906, p. 209. 38 Quoted in N. F. Dubrovin, ‘Russkaia zhizn’ v nachale XIX veka’, RS, 3 (1904), p. 511. 39 F. P. Dzemeshkevich, Dvorianstvo i revoliutsiia, Sebastopol, 2004, p. 17. 40 Zavalishin, Zapiski dekabrista, p. 207. 41 S. N. Chernov, Pavel Pestel’: izbrannye stat’i po istorii dekabrizma, SPb, 2004, p. 238. 42 A. A. Zakrevskii, ‘Bumagi grafa A.A. Zakrevskogo’, Sbornik Imperatorskogo russkogo istoricheskogo obshchestva, SPb, 1890, vol. 73, p. 325. The redoubtable and implacably orthodox Soviet academician argues her case for Griboedov’s Decembrist status over the course of 600 pages in: M. V. Nechkina, A.S. Griboedov i dekabristy, M, 1951. For a fuller discussion of secret societies in early nineteenth-century Russia as an organizational model, and of the government’s knowledge of and attitude to them, see T. N. Zhukovskaia, ‘ “Tainye obshchestva” pervoi treti XIX v. i organizatsionnye modeli dekabrizma. Chast’ 1’, in 14 dekabria 1825 goda. Istochniki. Issledovaniia. Istoriografiia. Bibliografiia, SPb-Kishinev, 2002, vol. 5, pp. 63–94. 43 A. P. Ermolov, Zapiski 1798–1826, V. A. Fedorov ed., M, 1991, pp. 15–16. 44 F. F. Vigel’, Zapiski, S. Ia. Shtraikh, ed., M, 1928, p. 508. 45 M. F. Kamenskaia ‚‘Vospominaniia M.F. Kamenskoi’, IV, 4 (1894), pp. 30–3. 46 G. Vasilievich, ‘Konnaia gvardiia 14 dekabria 1825 g. Vypiska iz dnevnika Barona Kaul’barsa za 1825 god’, Mezhdutsarstvie i vosstanie 1825 goda, M, 1908, p. 85. 47 Marc Raeff, Understanding Imperial Russia: State and Society in the Old Regime, Columbia, 1984, p. 141. 48 M. A. Fonvizin, ‘Obozrenie proiavlenii politicheskoi zhizni v Rossii’, in Obshchestvennye dvizheniia v pervuiu polovinu XIX veka. 1. Dekabristy, V. I. Semevskii, ed., SPb, 1905, p. 185. 49 Orlik, Gosudarstvennye liudi Rossii, p. 140. 50 S. A. Ekshtut, V poiske istoricheskoi al’ternativy. Aleksandr I. Ego spodvizhniki. Dekabristy, M, 1994, pp. 56, 154; Zavalishin, Zapiski dekabrista, p. 114. 51 Akul’shin, P.A. Viazemskii, p. 150. 52 Quoted in N. V. Minaeva, Pravitel’stvennyi konstitutsionalizm i peredovoe obshchestvennoe mnenie Rossii v nachale XIX v., Saratov, 1982, p. 206. 53 See Akul’shin, P.A. Viazemskii, pp. 142–6, 150. 54 Quoted in V. A. Udovik, ‘M.S. Vorontsov i dekabristy’, 14 dekabria 1825 goda. Istochniki. Issledovaniia. Istoriografiia. Bibliografiia. O. I. Kiianskaia, ed., SPb, 2010, vyp. 8, p. 352.

334

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55 56 57 58

Mironenko, Dekabristy. Biograficheskii spravochnik, p. 326. Sverbeev, Zapiski (1799–1826), p. 481. Orlik, Gosudarstvennye liudi Rossii, pp. 147–8. Anatole G. Mazour, The First Russian Revolution, 1825. The Decembrist Movement, Stanford, 1961, p. 65; O’Meara, K.F. Ryleev, p. 18. 59 Turgenev, Rossiia i russkie, vol. 2, pp. 54–9. 60 Quoted in N. K. Piksanov, ‘Dvorianskaia reaktsiia na dekabrizm. 1825-1827gg’, Zven’ia, M-L, 1933, p. 189; Vernadskii, ‘Dva lika dekabristov’, p. 83.

Chapter 13 1 Taganrog lies on the north-east reach of the Black Sea, the Sea of Azov. For a detailed account of Alexander’s last days in Crimea, see Velikii Kniaz’ Nikolai Mikhailovich, Imperator Aleksandr I, P, 1914 (Reprint M, 1999), pp. 252–4; for further analysis of the circumstances of Alexander’s death, and his awareness of the developing conspiracy during the last year of his life, see T. V. Andreeva, ‘Aleksandr I: 1825’, 14 dekabria 1825 goda. Istochniki. Issledovaniia. Istoriografiia. Bibliografiia, P. Il’in, ed., SPb, 1997, vyp. 1, pp. 63–74. 2 See, for example, the magisterial study by T. V. Andreeva, Tainye obshchestva v Rossii v pervoi treti XIX v.: pravitel’stvennaia politika i obshchestvennoe mnenie, SPb , 2009, especially chs 4 and 5; Ia. Gordin, Miatezh reformatorov: 14 dekabria 1825 goda; Posle miatezha: Khronika (Tainy istorii v romanakh, povestiakh i dokumentakh), M, 1997; Patrick O’Meara, K.F. Ryleev. A Political Biography of the Decembrist Poet, Princeton, NJ, 1984, ch. 1; a still useful account of the revolt in Ukraine is by I. V. Porokh, ‘Vosstanie Chernigovskogo polka’, in Ocherki iz istorii dvizheniia dekabristov, N. M. Druzhinin and B. E. Syroechkovskii, eds, M, 1954, pp. 121–85. 3 S. V. Mironenko, Stranitsy tainoi istorii samoderzhaviia, M, 1990, pp. 85–6. For a full analysis of how Alexander I’s handling of his succession led to a near-calamitous confrontation between his brothers, see T. V. Andreeva, ‘Protivostoianie: Konstantin i Nikolai’, 14 dekabria 1825 goda. Istochniki. Issledovaniia. Istoriografiia. Bibliografiia. P. Il’in, ed., SPb-Kishinev, 2000, vyp. 2, pp. 175–208. 4 On this, see selected documents from the archive of the Institute of Russian Literature (IRLI) reproduced in T. N. Zhukovskaia, ‘Zimnie tetradi. Sobytiia zimy 1825–1826 gg. glazami sovremennikov’, 14 dekabria 1825 goda. Istochniki. Issledovaniia. Istoriografiia. Bibliografiia, P. Il’in, ed., SPb, 1997, vyp. 1, pp. 11–28. 5 S. I. Maevskii, ‘Moi vek ili istoriia Sergeia Ivanovicha Maevskogo 1813–26’, RS, 11 (1873), pp. 771–2. 6 N. I. Tsimbaev, Zapiski A.I. Kosheleva, M, 1999, p. 52. 7 A. I. Turgenev, Khronika russkogo. Dnevniki 1825–26, M, 1964, p. 374–5. 8 P. S. Demenkov, ‘Chetyrnadtsatoe dekabria 1825 goda’, RA, 3.10 (1877), pp. 259, 266–7. Demenkov’s is just one of more than 150 published eyewitness accounts of the events of 14 December 1825. For full details, see P. V. Il’in, 14 dekabria 1825 goda: Vospominaniia ochevidtsev, SPb, 1999. On memoirs of the period more generally, see also T. N. Zhukovskaia, Russkaia memuaristika pervoi treti XIX veka, Petrozavodsk, 2006. 9 E. P. Karnovich, ‘Kniaz’ Aleksandr Nikolaevich Golitsyn i ego vremia’, IV, 5 (1882), pp. 264–6.

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10 G. Vasilievich, ‘Konnaia gvardiia 14 dekabria 1825 g. Vypiska iz dnevnika Barona Kaul’barsa za 1825 god’, Mezhdutsarstvie i vosstanie 1825 goda, M, 1908, pp. 85, 88–9, 93. 11 A. P. Beliaev, ‘14 dekabria 1825 g. Zametki N.S. Golitsyna, A.E. Rozena, A.P. Beliaeva’, RS, 2 (1881), pp. 449–55; N. S. Golitsyn, ‘14 dekabria 1825 g.’, RS, 2 (1881), pp. 450–1; Beliaev, ‘Dekabristy’, RS, 2 (1881), pp. 454–5. 12 V. R. Marchenko, ‘Dve zapiski V.R. Marchenki, 1. Sobytiia, v glazakh moikh sovershivshiiasia, pri vstuplenii na prestol imperatora Nikolaia I’, in ‘Avtobiograficheskie zapiski gosudarstvennogo sekretaria Vasiliia Romanovicha Marchenki’, 1732–1838 gg., RS, 86, 5 (1896), pp. 309–10, 312, 314. 13 Marie-Pierre Rey, Alexander I. The tsar who defeated Napoleon. DeKalb, IL, 2012, p. 376. 14 For a detailed account of Nicholas’s actions on the day, see: L. V. Vyskochkov, ‘14 dekabria 1815 – odin den’ iz zhizni imperatora Nikolaia Pavlovicha’, 14 dekabria 1825 goda. Istochniki. Issledovaniia. Istoriografiia. Bibliografiia, P. Il’in, ed., SPb, 1997, vyp. 1, pp. 75–84. 15 V. Lopatnikov, P’edestal. Vremia i sluzhenie kantslera Gorchakova, M, 2003, p. 44. 16 RNB-OR, f.380, d.1, l.22 ob. (M.A. Korf, 1800–76, ‘Kratkii ocherk moei zhizni’). 17 A. Ia. Bulgakov, ‘Zapiski A.Ia. Bulgakova’, Starina i novizna, 22 (1917), pp. 109, 123, 137–9. Bulgakov (1781–1863) was Moscow’s Director of Posts, a senator and an historian. 18 E. F Komarovskii, Zapiski Grafa E.F. Komarovskogo, SPb, 1914, pp. 243–4. 19 E. N. Marasinova, ‘Dekabristy: aristokraticheskaia fronda v Rossii?’, Rossiia XXI, 1–2 (1994), p. 106. 20 N. A. Borovkov, A.D. Borovkov i ego avtobiograficheskie zapiski, RS, 11 (1898), pp. 353–62. Baten’kov, a member of the Northern Society, occupied a number of senior administrative posts in government, including the office of M. M. Speranskii, both in St Petersburg and while he was governor of Siberia; Shteingeil’, from the Moscow nobility, joined the Northern Society in 1824, and was active in planning and participating in the 14 December uprising; Bestuzhev, prominent in St Petersburg’s literary circles, also joined the Northern Society in 1824 and was on Senate Square during the uprising; Peretts was an official in the office of M. A. Miloradovich, St Petersburg’s governor-general, and joined the Union of Welfare but not the Northern Society. Although he attempted to warn the authorities on the eve of the uprising in which he did not himself participate, he was nevertheless exiled to Perm and then Ust’sysol’sk for a total of thirteen years for his membership of a secret society (S. V. Mironenko, Dekabristy. Biograficheskii spravochnik, M, 1988, pp. 139–40). 21 Boris N. Mironov, The Social History of Imperial Russia, 2 vols, Boulder, CO, 2000, vol. 2, pp. 171–2. 22 OR-RNB, f.488 (Mikhailovskii-Danilevskii), d.52, l.34 (‘Zhurnal 1824 goda. Vospominaniia’ [1827–28]). The Muraviev-Apostol in question was Matvei Ivanovich, a member of the Southern Society, who participated in the Chernigov regiment’s uprising. His brother, Sergei, was executed for leading it (together with M. P. Bestuzhev-Riumin). Matvei was sentenced to twenty years of hard labour in Siberia. The diarist was mistaken in at least one respect, however: Troshchinskii died in 1829 aged seventy-six. In 1824 he was therefore around seventy, not eighty. 23 M. M. Fok, ‘Peterburgskoe obshchestvo pri vosshestvii na prestol Imperatora Nikolaia po doneseniiam M.M. Foka – A.Kh. Benkendorfu’, RS, 9 (1881), p. 182.

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24 I. I. Pushchin, Zapiski o Pushkine. Pis’ma, M, 1988, p. 84. Pushchin duly participated in the uprising for which he served thirty years in Siberia until the amnesty of 26 August 1856 permitted his return to his estate near Moscow. There he died fifteen months later. 25 On this, see T. Schiemann, Zur Geschichte der Regierung Paul I. und Nikolaus I. Neue Materialen, Berlin, 1906, p. 156. 26 Iu. N. Bartenev, ‘Rasskazy Kniazia A.N. Golitsyna. Iz zapisok Iu.N. Barteneva’, RA, 3 (1886) p. 375. 27 N. K. Piksanov, ‘Dvorianskaia reaktsiia na dekabrizm. 1825–1827 gg.’, Zven’ia, M-L, 1933, vyp. 2, pp. 131–99. Further references to this article are indicated in the text by the relevant page number in parentheses. 28 Zhukovskaia, ‘Zimnie tetradi’, pp. 23–24; Andreeva, Tainye obshchestva v Rossii, pp. 361, 825. 29 A. P. Beliaev, ‘Vospominaniia o perezhitom i perechuvstvovannom s1803 goda’, RS, 3 (1881), p. 490. 30 Quoted in I. F. Khudushina, Tsar’, Bog, Rossiia: Samosoznanie russkogo dvorianstva konets XVIII– pervaia tret’ XIX vv., M, 1995, p. 104. 31 P. A. Viazemskii, Zapisnye knizhki (1812–1848), V. S. Nechaev, ed., M, 1963, pp. 130–1. On Viazemskii, see also E. L. Rudnitskaia, Liki russkoi intelligentsii, M, 2007, pp. 99–122; and M. I. Gillel’son, P.A. Viazemskii. Zhizn’ i tvorchestvo, L, 1969. 32 Quoted in P. V. Akul’shin, P. A. Viazemskii. Vlast’ i obshchestvo v doreformennoi Rossii, M, 2001, pp. 149–50. 33 On responses to Ryleev’s death and legacy, see also O’Meara, K.F. Ryleev: A Political Biography of the Decembrist Poet, pp. 312ff. 34 Quoted in V. A. Udovik, ‘M.S. Vorontsov i dekabristy’, 14 dekabria 1825 goda. Istochniki. Issledovaniia. Istoriografiia. Bibliografiia, O. I. Kiianskaia, ed., SPb, 2010, vyp. 8, pp. 362–3. 35 Quoted in Udovik, ‘M.S. Vorontsov i dekabristy’, p. 363. 36 F. F. Vigel’, Zapiski, S. Ia. Shtraikh, ed., M, 1928, p. 512. 37 Quoted in Andreeva, Tainye obshchestva v Rossii, pp. 802–3. 38 Ibid., p. 785. 39 RNB-OR, f.380, d.1, l.23 (M.A. Korf, 1800–76, ‘Kratkii ocherk moei zhizni’). 40 M. A. Dmitriev, Glavy iz vospominanii moei zhizni, M, 1998, p. 245. 41 Fok, ‘Peterburgskoe obshchestvo’, p. 183. 42 M. D. Buturlin, ‘Zapiski Grafa M.D. Buturlina’, RA, 2.5 (1897), pp. 49–50. 43 Tsimbaev, Zapiski A. I.Kosheleva, pp. 54–5. 44 Quoted in T. V. Orlova, ‘Osobennosti istoricheskogo puti Rossii v zerkale dekabristskogo dvizheniia’, 14 dekabria 1825 goda. Istochniki. Issledovaniia. Istoriografiia. Bibliografiia. I. V. Lukoianov, ed., SPb, 2005, vyp.7, p. 510. 45 T. V. Orlova, ‘Dvizhenie dekabristov s tochki zreniia istorii mental’nostei’, in Dekabristy. Aktual’nye problemy i novye podkhody, O. I. Kiianskaia, ed., M, 2008, pp. 520–31, p. 528. In the same volume, see also O. I. Kiianskaia, ‘“Nos amis du quatorze”, ili dekabristovedenie i dekabristovedy XXI veka’, pp. 9–12; and G. D. Kaz’mirchuk and Iu. V. Latysh, ‘Sovremennoe dekabristovedenie na postsovetskom prostranstve’, pp. 640–62, esp. pp. 643–4, 657; see also Patrick O’Meara, ‘Recent Russian Historiography on the Decembrists. From “Liberation Movement” to “Public Opinion” ’, Kritika: Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History, 14.4 (2013), pp. 805–22. For an orthodox Marxist exegesis of Lenin’s pronouncements on the Decembrists, typical of

Notes

46 47 48 49 50 51 52 53 54 55 56

57 58

59 60 61 62

63 64 65 66

337

Soviet historiography, but at the same time a model of the genre, see M. V. Nechkina, Dvizhenie dekabristov, 2 vols, M, 1955, vol. 1, pp. 19–29. Khudushina, Tsar’, Bog, Rossiia, pp. 94, 104. K. Fetterlein, ‘Korf, Modest Andreevich’, RBS, SPb, 1903, vol. 9, pp. 289–90. Ludmilla A. Trigos, The Decembrist Myth in Russian Culture, New York, 2009, xxiv. M. A. Korf, ‘Iz zapisok Barona (vposledstvii Grafa) M.A. Korfa’, RS, 3 (1900), pp. 548–9, 550–1. Fok, ‘Peterburgskoe obshchestvo’, p. 182. Fetterlein, ‘Korf ’, RBS, pp. 289–90. On this, see Patrick O’Meara, Russia’s First Republican: The Decembrist Pavel Pestel, Basingstoke, 2003, pp. 142–4. Lopatnikov, P’edestal, pp. 41–2. N. K. Shil’der, Imperator Aleksandr I. Ego zhizn’ i tsarstvovanie, 4 vols, SPb, 1898, vol. 4, p. 214. Quoted in Piksanov, ‘Dvorianskaia reaktsiia na dekabrizm’, pp. 192–3. Vigel’, Zapiski, p. 312. A good Bolshevik view of the nineteenth-century Russian nobility is articulated in Shtraikh’s 1928 commentary on Vigel’’s memoirs: ‘They are very valuable as a vivid portrayal of the mores of the decaying nobility, particularly of its rotten elite – the ruling aristocracy’ (p. 6). S. A. Ekshtut, V poiske istoricheskoi al’ternativy. Aleksandr I. Ego spodvizhniki. Dekabristy. M, 1994, p. 222. Quoted in O’Meara, K.F. Ryleev. A Political Biography of the Decembrist Poet, p. 148. This question is more fully discussed in D. S. Artamov, ‘Terroristicheskaia i tiranoborcheskaia modeli v politicheskoi kul’ture dekabristov’, 14 dekabria 1825 goda. Istochniki. Issledovaniia. Istoriografiia. Bibliografiia, O. I. Kiianskaia, ed., SPb, 2010, vyp. 8, pp. 113–42. V. V. Leontovich, Istoriia liberalizma v Rossii 1762–1914, M, 1995, pp. 112–13. M. A. Korf, ‘Iz zapisok Barona (vposledstvii Grafa) M. A. Korfa’, RS, 7 (1899), p. 29. For a recent edition of Korf ’s memoirs, see M. A. Korf, Zapiski, M, 2003. Korf, ‘Iz zapisok’, RS, 6 (900), pp. 517–18. S. P. Mel’gunov, ‘Iz perepiski masonov o 14 dekabria 1825 g’, Golos minuvshego, 12 (1915), pp. 228–30; O’Meara, Russia’s First Republican: The Decembrist Pavel Pestel, p. 42. For a discussion of the political and cultural significance of one Masonic lodge, ‘Ovid’, see Iu. M. Lotman, ‘Dekabrist v povsednevnoi zhizni’, Besedy o russkoi kul’ture. Byt i traditsii russkogo dvorianstva (XVIII- nachalo XIX veka), SPb, 1994, pp. 369–74. Quoted in Piksanov, ‘Dvorianskaia reaktsiia na dekabrizm’, p. 162. F. I. Buslaev, Moi vospominaniia, M, 1897, pp. 78–9. R. Wortman, Scenarios of Power: Myth and Ceremony in Russian Monarchy. Volume 1: From Peter the Great to the Death of Nicholas I, Princeton, NJ, 1995, p. 266. Fok, ‘Peterburgskoe obshchestvo’, p. 186.

Afterword 1 J. J. Kenney, ‘The Vorontsov Party in Russian Politics, 1785–1803: An examination of the influence of an aristocratic family at the court of St. Petersburg in the Age of Revolution’, unpublished PhD thesis, Yale University, 1975, pp. 316, 321. 2 V. I .Buganov, ‘Rossiiskoe dvorianstvo’, Voprosy istorii, 1 (1994), p. 40.

338

Notes

3 A. I. Gertsen, ‘O razvitii revoliutsionnykh idei v Rossii’, Sochineniia v deviati tomakh, M, 1956, vol. 2, p. 461. For a perceptive analysis of this development, see further Nicholas V. Riasanovsky, A Parting of Ways: Government and the Educated Public in Russia 1801–1855, Oxford, 1976, especially ch. 2. 4 For a nuanced discussion of this question, see the article by T. V. Orlova, ‘Osobennosti istoricheskogo puti Rossii v zerkale dekabristskogo dvizheniia’, 14 dekabria 1825 goda. Istochniki. Issledovaniia. Istoriografiia. Bibliografiia, I. V. Lukoianov, ed., SPb, 2005, vyp.7, pp. 510–22. 5 The historical connections between the political culture of Alexander I’s reign and Putin’s regime are profitably discussed in Julie Grandhaye, Russie: la république interdite. Le moment décembriste et ses enjeux (XVIIIe-XXIe siècles), Seyssel, 2012. The ultimate failure of what Grandhaye sees as the Decembrists’ most significant legacy – the concept of the sovereignty of the people – to gain any traction in Putin’s Russia (‘le peuple sans voix’) is the main theme of her book’s final chapter: see pp. 307–38. For a wide-ranging discussion of Putin’s application of Russian historical (and philosophical) antecedents to his governance of the Russian Federation, see Michel Eltchaninoff, Inside the Mind of Vladimir Putin, London, 2017, especially ch. 5. However, a note of caution in drawing historical analogies (‘Into the hall of ever simplifying mirrors’) in analyses of Putin’s discharge of his role as Russia’s president is sounded in Andrew Monaghan, The New Politics of Russia: Interpreting Change, Manchester, 2016, pp. 46–8. 6 Boris N. Mironov, The Social History of Imperial Russia, 2 vols, Boulder, CO, 2000, vol. 2, p. 31. 7 Leo Tolstoy, War and Peace, Louise and Aylmer Maude, tr., Oxford, 1991, p. 728. 8 S. Ia. Shtraikh, ed., Zapiski, stat’i, pis’ma dekabrista I.D. Iakushkina, M, 1951, p. 7. 9 M. Zygar’, Vsia kremlevskaia rat’. Kratkaia istoriia sovremennoi Rossii, M, 2016, p. 24.

A Note on Sources 1 See the Bibliography for the full publication data of works cited here. 2 See P. V. Il’in’s introductory article: ‘ “Blagorodnyi truzhenik nauki”: sud’ba i nasledie istorika Nikolaia Fedorovicha Dubrovina’, in N. F. Dubrovin, Russkaia zhizn’ v nachale XIX veka, SPb, 2007, pp. 5–43.

APPENDIX Chapter 10: Projects for the Reform of Serfdom, 1814–1824 Among the papers produced (listed in chronological order) were those by the following: I. A. Gagarin, ‘On the alleviation of slavery in Russia by means of the abolition of house serfs’, 1814–15. P. D. Kiselev, ‘On the gradual eradication of slavery in Russia’, 1816. F. Gernet, ‘On the harm and loss to the fatherland through forced peasant marriages’, 25 February 1816. V. N. Karazin, ‘The opinion of one Ukrainian landowner expressed after a discussion with his peers about the edict of 23 May 1816 and its Estland provisions’, 1816. A. F. Malinovskii, A letter to A. A. Arakcheev on ways of granting freedom to peasants in Russia, 17 June 1817. D. P. Izvol’skii, ‘On the abolition of slavery in Russia’, 1817. S. M. Kochubei, ‘Project for the management of the estate and peasants of a Poltava landowner’, 1818. O. P. Kozodavlev, ‘An argument for the gradual liberation of peasants from slavery and the ways by which civil liberty might be safely conferred on them’, c.1818. N. S. Mordvinov, ‘One way of freeing the peasants from dependency’, 1818. A. A. Arakcheev, ‘Memorandum on freeing the peasants’, 1818. E. F. Kankrin, ‘Peasant project’, 1818. N. I. Turgenev, ‘On the condition of enserfed peasants in Russia’, 1819. I. D. Iakushkin, ‘The opinion of a Smolensk landowner on freeing the peasants from serf dependency’, 1819–20. N. N. Muraviev, ‘A letter to His Imperial Majesty from State-Secretary N. Muraviev, and a memorandum on landownership without possession of tenanted peasants’, 30 March 1824.

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INDEX Adams, John Quincy 25 Aleksandra Fedorovna, Empress 263 Alekseev, P. A. 84, 118 Alexander I (ruled 1801–25) 7, 19, 27, 41, 89, 124, 242, 331 n.82 accession 6, 115, 124, 210 assessments of 169, 170–1, 188, 218, 219, 221, 238–9, 245, 254, 264–7, 268 constitutional reform 149–53, 157, 169, 170, 171, 219, 229, 233 court of 3, 9, 123–43 death of 115, 141, 143, 144, 166, 171, 239, 244, 253, 259, 276 Decembrist conspiracy 252, 267, 275, 334 n.1 educational reforms 55, 57, 58, 59, 62, 64, 69, 71, 72, 171 Finnish constitution (see also Finland) 152–3 Napoleon (see also Alexander I, at Tilsit) 127, 130, 183 nobility (see also nobility, Russian) 12, 18, 28, 56, 92, 95, 105, 126, 127 noble assemblies (see also nobility, Russian, noble assemblies) 11, 113 personal relationships (see also Arakcheev ; Karamzin; Karazin; Kochubei V.; Metternich; Speranskii; Vorontsov M.) 65, 123–47 Polish constitution (see also Warsaw) 156, 158, 160, 162, 163, 244 reforms and policies 25, 78, 80, 83, 186, 254 serf reform (see also serfdom, serf reform) 124, 149, 175–88, 190, 192, 195–9, 211 succession crisis 253, 259–60, 263, 276, 334 n.3

at Tilsit (see also Napoleon; Tilsit, Treaty of) 128–30 Unofficial Committee (see also Unofficial Committee) 7, 16, 24, 28, 150, 188 Alexander II (ruled 1855–81) 201, 263, 274, 277 amnesty for Decembrists in exile 243, 280 great reforms 13, 94, 216 serf emancipation 21, 175, 176, 184–5, 187, 192, 201, 205, 207, 208, 210–12 Alexander III (ruled 1881–94) 53, 263 America 25, 166, 168, 169, 182, 203, 229, 230, 245 Andreeva, T. V. 152, 154, 159, 216, 250, 305 n.90 Angal’t, Count Friedrich 47 Anna Ivanovna, Empress (ruled 1730–40) 43 Arakcheev, A. A. 19, 36, 95, 153, 245, 262–3 and Alexander I 123, 131, 139, 140–3, 165, 219, 260 Arakcheevshchina 37, 140, 232, 241 chief minister 71, 144, 146, 149, 169, 183, 210, 225–6, 231, 232, 266–7, 282 serf reform 186–7, 189, 208–9 Arkhangelsk (Archangel) 99, 100, 154 Arkharov, N. P. 85 Armfel’d, A. O. 136 Arsenev, A. I. 35 Arzamas, literary society 17, 227, 329 n.46 Arzamas, Nizhnii Novgorod province 82, 84, 99, 100, 108, 115, 116, 117, 118 Astrakhan 11, 99, 107 Avramov, I. B. 66, 304 n.54

356

Index

Bakhtin, I. I. 206 Bakunin, M. A. 273 Bakunina, V. I. 55, 135, 301 n.10 Balashov, A. D. 136, 228, 231, 330 n.59 Balug’ianskii, A. M. 187 Baltic provinces 4, 87, 128, 166, 169, 185, 196, 206, 236–7 serf emancipation in 184, 195, 246, 261 Bartenev, P. A. 268 Basargin, N. V. 36, 66, 68, 296 n.12, 303 n.51 Bashutskii, A. P. 262 Baten’kov, G. S. 250, 264, 335 n.20 Batiushkov, K. N. 168 Beccaria, C. 162 Beliaev, A. P. 44, 45, 64, 109, 156, 167, 168 Decembrist 244, 249, 262, 268, 298 n.51 naval officer 43, 67, 166 Belinksii, V. G. 222 Belorussia 65, 232 Benkendorf, A.Kh. 51, 68, 70, 139, 166, 203, 266, 272, 274, 275–6, 280 Benkendorf, K. Kh. 68 Bennigsen, L. L. 81 Bentham, Jeremy 151, 162, 230 Bentham, Samuel 151 Berlin 128, 143 Bessarabia 153, 203, 323–4 n.5 Bestuzhev (Marlinksii), A. A. 210, 225, 251, 253, 254, 264, 270, 278, 311 n.48, 335 n.20 Bestuzhev, M. A. 249 Bestuzhev, N. A. 112 Bestuzhev-Riumin, M. P. 157, 266, 335 n.22 Bezborodko, I. A. 65, 183 Bezobrazov, A. M. 87, 88 Bibikov, I. I. 94 Bible Society, in Russia 20, 38, 147, 165, 186, 234, 242 Bismarck, Otto von 275 Bludov, Count D. N. 190, 217, 323 n.5 Blum, J. 22–3, 24 Bock, Timotheus von 201, 223–4, 236–8, 329 n.36, 331 n.82 Bogdanovich, T. A. 137, 138 Bolotnikov, A. U. 155 Bolotov, A. T. 267–8 Borovkov, A. D. 247, 249, 250, 251, 255, 264, 266–7, 333 n.36

de Boudrie 63 Bradke, E. F. von 63, 65 Broker, A. F. 221 Bucharest, Treaty of 153 Bulatov, A. M. 277 Bulgakov, A. Ia. 93, 263–4, 270, 335 n.17 Bulgakov, K. Ia. 135, 270 Bulgarin, F. V. 65, 66, 67, 113, 219–20 Burtsova, I. G. 41, 247 Buslaev, F. I. 279 Butenev, A. P. 46, 50, 142 Buturlin, M. D. 272 Bychkov, A. F. 217 Byron, George 261 Catherine II (the Great, ruled 1762–96) 9, 124, 143, 188, 201, 266, 228, 283 Charter to the Nobility 3, 4, 5, 7, 16, 78, 79, 104, 205 Partitions of Poland 16, 157, 163 reforms of 6, 10, 34, 69, 78, 100, 176, 186, 194, 230 and the Russian nobility 14, 20, 34, 91, 92, 106, 110, 113, 114, 137, 177, 208, 210 Caucasus 16, 67, 107, 158, 202, 203, 252 Caulaincourt, Marquis Armand de 130, 217 censorship 27, 171, 179, 197, 212, 215, 224, 227–34, 242, 280, 321 n.17, 325 n.29 Chateaubriand, F.-R. 128 Chekhov, A. P. 24 Cheliabinsk 84 Chemodanov, E. A. 82, 100, 116, 117 Cherkasskaia, V. A. 25 Cherkasskii, A. M. 25 Chernigov Regiment, see Decembrists, uprisings; Ukraine Chernov, S. N. 251 Chichagov, P. V. 59, 302 n.28 Chichagov, V. I. 166 Committee of Ministers 39, 65, 80, 85, 95, 102, 105, 106, 151, 185, 303 n.46 Confino, M. 5, 6, 43, 44 Constant, Benjamin 256 Constantine (Konstantin Nikolaevich), Grand Duke 274

Index Constantine (Konstantin Pavlovich), Grand Duke 73, 115, 141, 271 in Poland 156, 267 succession crisis 147, 171, 250, 253, 259, 260, 261, 263–4, 277 Constitutional reform, see Alexander I; Mordvinov; Novosil’tsov; Orlov; Speranskii; Turgenev N.; Viazemskii Cournand, Antoine de 47 Czartoryski, Adam 135, 151 and the Unofficial Committee 24, 28, 49, 50, 129, 138, 150, 178 D’Anthes, G.-Ch. 64 Danzas, K. K. 64 David, Jacques-Louis 63 Davydov, D. V. 41, 139 Davydov, M. A. 139 Davydov, V. L. 41 Decembrists 43, 66, 167, 206 contemporary assessments of 255, 257, 267–74, 276 critiques of Russia’s governance 224–5, 226, 264–7 definitions of 247–52 early secret societies 189, 232, 238, 244, 245 Union of Salvation 126, 200, 216, 225, 227, 246, 249, 278 Union of Welfare 57, 70, 112, 139, 192, 216, 251, 253, 255, 256, 294 n.37, 305 n.89, 335 n.20 Investigating Committee 66, 103, 112, 139, 186, 200, 210, 225, 235, 247, 250, 251, 255, 257, 263, 264, 311 n.48, 323 n.5, 333 n.36 Northern Society 12, 43, 112, 163, 200, 224, 225, 251, 255, 256, 259, 267, 296 n.13, 332 n.14, 335 n.20 political culture 241–7 and Russian nobility 275–80 Southern Society 40, 66, 71, 142, 157, 163, 243, 247, 249, 251, 296 n.12, 303 n.51, 307 n.25, 329 n.45, 332 n.20, 335 n.22 Soviet historiography 203, 249, 251, 273, 336 n.45

357

uprisings 9, 90, 103, 140, 144, 150, 183, 222, 248, 250, 251, 283 St Petersburg 139, 147, 224, 225, 244, 246, 249, 253–5, 259–64 Ukraine (Chernigov regiment) 225, 252, 273, 334 n.2, 335 n.22 punishment 103, 167–8, 244, 250 ‘without December’ 243, 252–5 Del’vig, A. A. 64, 272 Del’vig, A. I. 272, 279 Demenkov, P. S. 261 Demidov, P. G. 57 Derpt (Dorpat, Tartu) 74, 77, 135, 302 n.23 Derzhavin, G. R. 179, 184, 321 n.14 Deshan, P. I. (Deschamps) 162, 318 n.57 Dibich, I. I. 36, 41, 141, 275 Divov, V. A. 254 Dmitriev, I. I. 27, 74, 157, 223, 233, 270, 295 n.59, 316 n.6, 320 n.80 Dmitriev, M. A. 38, 44, 45, 59, 130, 136, 145, 271, 313 n.25 Dmitriev-Mamonov, M. A. 210 Dobrokhotov, V. 87, 137, 307 n.31 Dolgorukov, I. M. 74, 146–7 Druzhinin, N. M. 221 Dubrovin, N. F. on Alexander I 125–6, 134 district courts 109, 111–13, 125 nobles’ education 34, 35, 40, 46, 54, 70, 220 Russian nobility 11, 12, 17, 19, 72, 79–80, 91, 95, 210 Dumont, Etienne 20, 21, 23, 35, 37, 46, 49, 57, 151, 301 n.16 economy, of Russia 130, 132, 165, 179, 187, 194, 204, 205–7, 217, 230, 265, 295 n.50 Edeling (Edling), Roxandra 130, 145, 313 n.27 Edinburgh 58, 229 Ekaterina Pavlovna, Grand Duchess 144 Ekshtut, S. A. 9, 41, 96, 254, 276 Elizabeth, Empress (ruled 1741–61) 43, 51, 58, 168 Elizaveta Alekseevna, Empress 141, 313 n.27 Elizaveta Pavlovna, Grand Duchess 129

358

Index

Engel’gardt, L. N. 119, 165, 221, 232, 311 n.70 Engelhardt, E. A. 161 England (Britain) 63, 124, 129, 150, 155, 194, 256, 272 Russian admirers of 45, 166, 167, 168, 169, 193, 204, 218, 234, Russian visitors to 45, 143, 153, 166, 319 n.73 Ermolov, A. P. 126, 139, 158, 202, 225, 252 Erskine, Lord 161, 318 n.49 Essen, A. A. 277 Falconet, É.-M. 283 Fernando VII, King of Spain (ruled 1808, 1813–33) 153 Ferronays, A.de la 171 Field, D. 26, 102 Filaret, Archbishop of Moscow 251, 260 Finland 11, 40, 51, 89, 129, 132, 141, 152, 153, 163 Finland Regiment 252–3 Finnish constitution, see Alexander I Fon-der Brigen, A. F. 41 Fok (Fonfok), M. M. 266, 274, 278, 280 Fonvizin, D. I. 35, 74, 187–8 Fonvizin, M. A. 181, 182, 225, 252, 253, 323 n.47 France 16, 39, 42, 45, 58, 65, 157, 168, 222, 255 French language (see also nobility, Russian, foreign languages) 111, 117, 129, 151, 153, 158, 159, 167, 228, 232, 234, 292 n.1, 296 n.5, 298 nn.44, 48, 300 n.85, 311 n.58 French Revolution (1789) 37, 63, 191, 222, 255, 260, 270, 276 French tutors, see nobility, Russian, foreign tutors Russian admirers of 43, 162, 204, 244 Russia’s relations with (see also Napoleon; Napoleonic Wars) 43, 47, 127, 128, 130, 153, 164, 171, 262, 283 Russians’ experience of 19, 126, 139, 141, 149, 161, 166, 210, 218, 219, 220, 224, 253, 255, 318 n.57 Francis I, Emperor of Austria (ruled 1804–35) 143, 144, 160

Frederick-William (Friedrich-Wilhelm) III, King of Prussia (ruled 1797– 1840) 126, 143 Frederick-William (Friedrich-Wilhelm) IV, King of Prussia (ruled 1840– 61) 275 Frederiks, P. A. 253 free cultivator’s law, see serfdom Free Economic Society 116, 117, 189 Gagarin, I. A. 339 Gan, P. V. 87 Gangeblov, A. S. 44–5, 48, 59, 299 n.59 Gatchina 19 German language (see also nobility, Russian, foreign languages) 43, 44–5, 275 German states 50, 73, 118, 131, 138, 153, 192, 195, 204, 221, 224, 256, 299 n.59 German universities 39, 40, 43, 65, 184 Germans in Russia 16, 47, 50, 61, 71, 74, 90, 123, 126, 135, 147, 193, 261, 275 George, Prince of Oldenburg 144 George IV, King of England (ruled 1820– 30) 143 Gernet, F. 339 Gibraltar 43, 166 Glinka, F. N. 220, 292 n.2 Glinka, G. A. 74, 305 n.89 Glinka, S. N. 15, 27, 43, 292 n.2 Glinka, V. A. 305 n.89 Goethe, J. W. von 45 Gogol’, N. V. 82, 101, 104, 137, 314 n.56 Golitsyn, A. N. 41, 51, 147, 182, 233, 260, 267 Bible Society 38, 242 Minister of Education 61, 64, 70, 71, 197, 228, 229, 230–1 Golitsyn, D. V. 46, 47, 93, 112, 251 Golitsyn, N. S. 262 Golitsyna, Princess 49 Golovkin, Iu. A. 160 Golovnin V. M. 227, 329 n.49 Gooding, J. 7 Gorchakov, A. M. 64, 263 Götze 261–2 Grabbe, P.Kh. 252 Graham, Lord Charles 153 Grandhaye, J. 338 n.5

Index Grech, N. I. 113, 145–6, 161, 220, 227, 228, 248 publisher of Syn otechestva, see periodicals and newspapers, ‘Son of the Fatherland’ Gribbe, A. K. 232 Griboedov, A. S. 242, 243, 252, 253 Gribovskii, M. K. 139, 144, 216 Grodno 105 Gruzinskaia, D. A. 306 n.16 Gruzinskii, G. A. 83, 84, 85, 180, 181, 306 n.16, 310 n.27 guards’ regiments 57, 58, 70, 76, 162, 165, 200, 224, 227, 234, 244, 248, 250, 251, 261, 262, 264, 277, 278, 298 n.51, 332 n.26 Preobrazhenskii 57, 235, 261, 277 Semenovskii (see also Semenovskii Regiment mutiny) 40, 57, 164, 235, 246, 277 Gukovskii, G. A. 51 Gur’ev, A. D. 187, 190, 323 n.2 Gustavus Adolphus IV, King of Sweden (ruled 1792–1809) 129 Hartley, J. M. 80, 243, 286 Herzen, A. I. 99, 149, 206, 219, 248, 269, 273, 281, 294 n.37 Hitler, A. 129, 223 Holy Alliance 164, 183, 227, 232 Hume, David 151 Iakovkina, N. I. 11 Iakovlevich, A. 154 Iakubovich A. I. 154, 277 Iakushkin, I. D. 50–1, 126, 207, 208, 225, 246, 249, 283, 339 Iaroslavl’ 57, 65, 106, 168, 234 Iatsenkov, G. M. 197, 220, 229–31 Iazykov, N. M. 269 Iberian peninsula 39, 43 Il’in, P. V. 248, 250–1 Imperial Academy of Arts 209 Imperial Russian Academy 233, 235, 314 n.49 Irkutsk 87, 88, 92, 93, 114, 115, 308 n.53 Italian peninsula 39, 40, 45 Iushnevskii, A. P. 247 Iusupov, I. B. 25

359

Iusupova, Princess 68 Ivan IV (the Terrible, ruled 1533–98) 233 Ivashev, P. I. 243 Ivashev, V. P. 243, 331 n.8 Izmailov, A. E. 96 Izmailov, L. D. 79–80 Izvol’skii, D. P. 339 Johnston, Robert 50 Kachalov, M. S. 69 Kachenovskii, M. T. 114 Kaisarov, A. S. 195 Kakhovskii, P. G. 225, 246, 262 Kalashnikov, I. T. 87, 92–3, 114, 115 Kaluga 20, 127, 142, 197, 208, 317 n.22 Kamenskaia, M. F. 252–3 Kankrin, E. F. 135, 198 Kant, Immanuel 71 Karamzin, N. M. 50, 57, 223, 247, 261–2, 295 n.59, 325 n.34, 329 n.46 and Alexander I 27, 45, 150, 169, 199, 233, 320 n.80 on the Decembrists 270–1 History of the Russian State 168, 233, 316 n.6, 330 n.64 Memoir on Ancient and Modern Russia 55, 72, 124, 127, 185, 209, 217 on M. M. Speranskii and reform 137, 157–8, 179, 185, 327 n.75 on the Russian nobility 17, 20, 46, 49, 74, 111 Karazin, V. N. 12, 72 and Alexander I 11, 125, 146, 203, 234, 292 n.44, 312 n.8 arrest and detention 234–6, 238 Khar’kov (Kharkiv) University 11, 64, 301 n.16 serf reform 189, 198–201, 202, 204–6, 218, 226, 325 n.35, 339 Katenin, P. A. 41 Kaul’bars, V. R. 253, 262, 271 Kazan’ 27, 71, 84, 104, 105, 108, 210, 233 Keep, J. 40 Kenney, J. J. 281 Khar’kov (Kharkiv) 57, 206, 232, 236 Khar’kov (Kharkiv) University (see also Karazin) 11, 57, 64, 72, 198, 235, 292 n.44, 301 n.16

360

Index

Khatov, A. I. 304 n.53 Kherson 73 Khudushina, I. F. 273 Khvostov, V. S. 10 Kiev (Kyiv) 17, 64, 65, 259 Kikin, P. A. 245 Kiselev, P. D. 51, 139, 140, 142, 157, 221 Decembrists at Tul’chin 238, 246–7, 250, 251–2, 329 n.45, 332 n.21 serf emancipation 189, 190–1, 208, 226, 339 Kishenskii, N. F. 114 Kislenskii, I. P. 115, 116 Kiukhel’beker, V. K. 64, 161, 254, 271, 278 Kleinmikhel, P. A. 263 Kliuchevskii, V. O. 47, 89–90, 156, 209 Kochubei, A. V. 142, 143–4, 182–3 Kochubei, S. M. 186, 191, 196, 322 n.43, 339 Kochubei, V. P. 267 and Alexander I 123, 137–8, 142, 143, 146, 147 Minister of Internal Affairs 56, 61, 79, 80, 81, 115, 205 serf reform 177–8, 180–1, 182–3, 189, 199, 201, 205 and the Unofficial Committee 49, 137, 138, 321 n.10 Komarovskii, E. F. 264 Korf, Baron M. A. 41, 135, 136, 137, 217, 263, 274–5, 277–8, 303 n.39 Tsarskoe Selo Lycée (see also St Petersburg) 60, 62–4, 271 Korf, S. A. 17, 18, 20 district courts 109, 111 nobles’ education 19, 38, 106, 110, 226 noble elections 89, 92, 94 provincial administration 79, 80, 107 Kornilov, A. A. 171, 183 Korsak, I. A. 156 Koshelev, A. I. 41, 45, 67, 70, 149, 219, 245, 260, 272, 278 Koshelev, R. A. 41, 158 Kostroma 84 Kozodavlev, O. P. 95, 107, 118, 159, 310 n.25, 318 n.42 Kriukov, A. S. 85, 307 n.25 Krivtsov, N. I. 87 Krivtsov, S. I. 87

Krudener, J. De 147 Krylov, I. A. 279 Kuchanov, A. 278 Kugushev, K. P. 83 Kul’man, N. K. 236 Kunitsyn, A. P. 161 Kurakin, A. B. 101, 107, 180, 182 Kursk 60, 67 Kushelev, A. G. 115 Kushelev, G. G. 114–15, 311 n.58 Kutuzov, M. I. 329 n.40 Kutuzov, N. I. 70, 304 n.74 La Harpe, F.-C. 146, 150 Lancaster schools 139, 242, 331 n.4 Lauriston. Jacques 217 law courts (see also nobility, Russian, in provincial administration) 89, 105 LeDonne, J. 10, 18, 28, 133, 149, 231 Leipzig 127 Lenin, V. I. 271, 273 Lenivtsev, P. A. 85–6, 107 Leontiev, M. A. 94, 267–8 Leontiev, M. P. 10, 27 Leontovich, V. V. 277 Levashov V. V. 50, 166 Lieven, D. 17–18, 120, 124 Lieven, K. A. 20 Likharev, V. N. 142 literary circles (kruzhki) 9, 17, 74, 241, 242, 278, 335 n.20 Lobanov-Rostovskii, Ia. I. 74 Locke, John 234 Loder, Professor 45 Lokhvitskii, A. V. 99 Lolme, J.-L. de 151, 162 London 38, 128, 137, 139, 166, 167, 202, 231, 244, 255, 263, 270 Longinov, N. M. 139, 140, 202 Lopukhin, I. V. 111, 124, 208, 209 Lopukhin, P. V. 74, 211, 327 n.83 Lorer, N. I. 73, 158 Lotman, Iu.M. 74, 77, 150, 222, 242, 286 Lubianovskii, F. P. 134 Lyall, Robert 58 Madariaga, Isabel de 4 Maevskii, S. I. 220, 260

Index Magnitskii, M. L. 71, 229, 233, 234 Maksimov, S. V. 303 n.42 Maiboroda, A. I. 216, 238, 267 Maikov, P. M. 37 Maistre, Count Joseph de 9, 129, 132, 291 n.32 Malia, M. 5 Malinovskii, A. F. 42 Malinovksii, V. F. 61, 302 n.36 Malyshev, A. A. 51, 300 n.94 Mangin, E. 307 n.25 Mansurov, D. A. 93, 105 Marasinova, E. N. 8, 51, 243 Marat, Jean-Paul 63 Marchenko, V. R. 262, 263 Maria Fedorovna, Dowager Empress 44, 51, 68, 136, 144 Marrese, M. 49 Martens, Governor of Olonets 89 Martin, A. M. 101–2, 134, 222 Marx, K. 273 Masonic lodges 6, 17, 39, 208, 220, 252, 329 n.49, 337 n.62 closure in 1822 9, 144, 216, 227, 241, 278 Menshikov, A. S. 198, 199, 200, 202, 203 Meshkov, I. I. 11, 92, 146 Metternich, Klemens von 123, 160, 165, 315 n.75 and Alexander I 131, 142, 143–4, 145, 219 Michael (Mikhail Pavlovich), Grand Duke 84, 187, 253 Mikhailovskii-Danilevskii, A. I. 110, 170, 220, 224, 241, 266, 329 n.40 military colonies (settlements) 71, 96, 141, 142, 165, 227, 231, 232, 247, 260, 265 Mills, John 117, 311 n.63 military academies, see Moscow ; St Petersburg military parades, see nobility, Russian Miliukov, P. N. 9, 51, 247 Miloradovich, M. A. 112, 192, 198, 225, 246, 262, 277, 335 n.20 Milov, L. V. 10 Minaeva, N. V. 153, 199 Minin, K. 307 n.24 Mints, S. S. 10, 27, 28

361

Mirkovich, A. Ia. 57 Mirkovich, F. Ia. 34 Mironenko, S. V. 36, 86–7, 134, 159, 171, 200 Mironov, B. N. 13, 26–7, 99, 100, 124, 170 Mogilev 65 Molotov, V. M. 129 Montesquieu, Charles, Baron de 162, 223 Mordvinov, N. S. 35, 37, 48, 51, 74, 127, 138, 151, 228, 250, 256 constitutional reform 156, 157, 167–8 serf reform 178–9, 189, 192, 194, 218, 227, 339 Moscow 14, 20, 24, 25, 58, 70, 74, 130, 149, 156, 223, 244, 260 boarding schools 66–8 English Club 17 military academies 36, 64–6, 68, 303 n.53 nobility 16, 36, 37, 47, 68, 77, 93, 183, 198, 211, 220, 254, 260, 263, 278 Russian State (formerly Lenin) Library 77 Moscow Regiment 253, 261, 264 Moscow University 38, 39, 41, 44, 45, 57, 58, 66, 67, 70, 227, 229, 245, 279, 296 n.13 Boarding School for Nobles at 38, 39, 41, 44, 45, 47, 56, 66, 67, 70, 136, 229 Mosolov, S. I. 23, 24 Muraviev, A. M. 126 Muraviev, A. N. 41, 66, 136, 246, 278 Muraviev, A. Z. 41, 246, 332 n.20 Muraviev, M. N. 33, 110, 310 n.39 Muraviev, N. M. 163, 190, 246, 266 Muraviev, N. N. 65, 66, 68, 204–5, 304 n.53, 326 n.55 Muraviev-Apostol, M. I. 225, 246, 266, 329 n.47, 335 n.22 Muraviev-Apostol, S. I. 246, 248, 329 n.47 Napoleon (see also Alexander I; Tilsit, Treaty of) 49, 97, 126, 128, 129, 131, 135, 152, 222, 228, 282 defeat of 11, 127, 128, 143–4, 149, 155, 161, 170, 186, 197, 215, 216, 219, 221, 223, 224, 225, 232, 238, 239, 246 invasion of Russia in 1812 25, 43, 84, 92, 130, 134, 136, 183, 189, 217–18 244, 246, 265, 332 n.10

362

Index

Napoleonic Wars (see also nobility, Russian, in the Patriotic War) 10, 33, 42, 81, 90, 97, 117, 118, 140, 150, 153, 162, 164, 185, 236, 244, 256 Naryshkin, D. L. 21 Naryshkin, L. A. 21 Naryshkin, M. M. 41, 245 Naryshkina, M. A. 130 Naumov, Ivan 153–5 Nazimov, M. L. 36, 67, 210 Nechkina, M. V. 252, 273, 333 n.42 Nelidov, G. V. 87 Nepliuev, G. 65 Nessel’rode, K. V. 198 Nicholas I (ruled 1825–55) 24, 27, 37, 135, 171, 187, 203, 235, 237 accession 46, 51, 66, 89, 253, 259, 261– 2, 263–4, 269, 272, 277, 278 Decembrist conspiracy 35, 50, 139, 168, 225, 247, 251, 255, 267, 270, 274, 277, 279, 280 legislation 4, 125, 136, 151, 155, 268 nobility 73, 110, 252, 280 Official Nationality 71, 164 serf reform 176, 182, 188, 190, 211–12 Nicole, Abbé C. E. 44, 68 Nikoleva, M. K. 61–2 Nizhnii Novgorod 36, 69, 78, 81–3, 84–5, 99–104, 105, 134, 152 nobility, Russian 10, 15, 16, 119 assessments of 12, 17, 18, 19–20, 106, 169, 211 attitudes to service 6, 10, 89–97, 105 and bureaucracy 11, 13, 14, 18, 19, 20, 33, 102, 103, 129, 133, 184, 207, 215, 226 corporate identity 8–14, 78, 81, 97, 105 education and upbringing of 18, 53–76, 208 educational funding from 64–5, 106, 303 n.46 elections 7, 8, 14, 46, 78, 81, 82, 88, 89, 91–6, 99, 101–3, 112, 196, 197, 308 n.63 financial standing 4, 10, 11, 13, 20–7, 57, 65, 67, 72, 85, 92, 94, 95, 96, 97, 108–9, 200, 221 foreign languages 33, 37, 38, 42–51, 57, 61, 62, 68, 69, 70, 117, 137

foreign travel 36, 39, 218 foreign tutors 35, 38, 44, 48 genealogy, register of (rodoslovnaia kniga) 3, 81, 82, 95, 101, 103 government inspection 104–6 health issues 60, 69, 83, 91, 92, 107–9 hereditary (potomstvennoe) nobility 5, 6, 8, 10, 15, 16, 19, 23, 42, 54, 74, 78, 91, 99, 101, 127, 128, 133, 293 nn.6, 10 journal subscriptions 82, 113–18 literacy 56, 73, 139, 242, 266 as Marshals of the 5, 6, 12, 17, 69, 77–86, 89, 90, 92–6, 99, 100–8, 114–16, 118, 127, 180, 181, 185, 195, 196, 197, 208, 210, 306 nn.16, 18 military parades 19, 28–9, 73, 244, 246 military service 41–2 in Nizhnii Novgorod 99–102, 180–2 noble assemblies 46, 77–9, 81, 85, 88, 92, 96, 99–109, 114, 118, 180, 195–6, 236 office holders 77–97, 119 in the Patriotic War 8, 13, 23, 25–8, 37, 43, 84–6, 88, 97, 114, 117, 169, 183, 218, 222, 223 personal (lichnoe) nobility 5, 8, 10, 42, 85, 101, 293 nn.6,10 in provincial administration 77–97, 102–20 bribery and corruption 7, 79, 87, 88, 89, 94, 109–13, 268, 282 district courts 109–13, 125 as provincial governors 19, 58, 79, 86–9, 100, 102, 104–6, 111–12, 117, 119, 133, 142, 155, 180, 185, 203, 210 rights and privileges 5, 6, 7, 8, 12, 17, 26, 42, 61, 73, 81, 91, 101, 170, 178, 182, 185, 190, 205, 210, 290 n.3 serf owners 21, 23, 36, 139, 161, 202, 207–8, 210 serfdom 11, 100, 105, 189–95, 207–12 size of 15–16, 28, 293 n.6 status and service 3–8, 10, 13–23, 26–9, 41, 42, 54, 69, 70, 72, 79, 95, 103, 124, 132, 133 nobility, Western 7, 10, 16, 17, 43, 44, 127–8

Index Noble Land Forces Corps 43 Noblemen’s Regiment 36, 59–60, 73, 169 Novgorod 24, 93, 232 Novikov, N. I. 110 Novosil’tsov (Novosil’tsev), N. N. 24, 123, 130, 147, 151 constitutional reform 149, 153, 162–3, 170, 218 in Poland 158, 162, 186 serfdom reform 186, 191, 192, 194 and the Unofficial Committee 28, 49, 129, 138 Obolenskii, A. P. 142 Obolenskii, D. A. 142 Obolenskii, E. P. 245 Obreskov, A. V. 181 Obreskov, M. A. 263 Obreskov, P. A. 104–5, 309 n.19 Odessa 57, 140 Odoevskii, A. I. 278 Ogarev, N. P. 269 Oldenburg, Prince of 144 Olenin, A. N. 209, 327 n.74 Olonets 64, 88, 95, 99, 100 Orenburg 16, 65, 84, 87, 95, 99, 196 Orlov, M. F. 68, 242, 329 n.46 constitutional and serf reform 163, 190, 200 Decembrist 156, 157, 243–4, 253, 254, 256, 317 n.22 Orlova, T. V. 273 Osterman-Tolstoi, Gen. Count A. I. 165, 319 n.66 Oxford, University of 153 Paine, Thomas 318 n.49 Panchulidzev, A. D. 182 Paris 49, 58, 65, 126, 137, 138, 141, 159, 220, 225, 232, 255, 257, 260, 266 Treaty of 143 Parrot, G. F. 135 Paul I, Emperor, (ruled 1796–1801) 11, 47, 111, 143, 144, 228, 235 assassination of 6, 238, 278 and the nobility 7, 23, 29, 42, 78, 114, 138, 146, 147, 177, 208, 210, 319 n.79 Paulucci, F. O. 237

363

Pavlova, K. K. 210 Pembroke, Earl of 139, 167, 319 n.73 Penza 43, 44, 47, 87, 90, 92, 104, 109, 114, 134, 135, 146, 157, 176, 279, 308 n.53 Peretts, G. A. 264, 335 n.20 periodicals and newspapers ‘Album of the northern muses’ (Al’bom severnykh muz) 279 ‘The European Herald’ (Vestnik Evropy) 50, 74, 111, 114, 212 ‘Moscow News’ (Moskovskie vedomosti) 114, 118, 159, 294 n.43 ‘Neva Spectator’ (Nevskii zritel’) 142 ‘The Northern Bee’ (Severnaia pchela) 318 n.42 ‘Northern Blooms for 1828’ (Servernye tsvety na 1828) 279 ‘The Northern Post’ (Severnaia pochta) 118, 159 ‘Notes of the Fatherland’ (Otechestvennye zapiski) 83 ‘Polar Star’ (Poliarnaia zvezda) 254, 270, 278, 279, 313 n.25 ‘Russian Antiquity’ (Russkaia starina) 60, 217, 286, 302 n.32 ‘The Russian Archive’ (Russkii arkhiv) 268 ‘Russian News’ (Russkie vedomosti) 137, 307 n.31 ‘The Russian Herald’ (Russkii vestnik) 15, 162, 292 n.2 ‘The St Petersburg Journal’ (SanktPeterburgskii zhurnal) 115 ‘The St Petersburg News’ (SanktPeterburgskie vedomosti) 116, 117, 154, 177, 183 ‘Son of the Fatherland’ (Syn otechestva) 114, 161, 196, 212, 220, 227, 235, 330 n.73 ‘Spirit of the Journals’ (Dukh zhurnalov) 197, 220, 227, 229–31, 325 n.29 ‘The Veteran’ (Invalid) 115, 118 Perm 84, 99, 104, 105, 134 Pestel’, I. B. 9, 37, 87, 136, 183, 291 n.31 Pestel’, P. I. 9, 27, 39, 41, 43, 88, 246, 275, 277, 278 ‘Russian Justice’ (Russkaia pravda) 190, 251, 266 Southern Society 163, 247, 248, 249

364 Peter I (the Great, ruled 1689–1725) 43, 169, 283 nobility 26 reforms of 54, 95, 106 Table of Ranks 3, 4, 5, 6, 8, 9, 54 Peter III (ruled 1761–2) 4, 6, 13, 18, 96 Peter-Paul Fortress 50, 225, 238, 245, 253, 264, 266, 278, 317 n.22 Petrozavodsk 89 Piksanov, N. K. 267, 269, 271, 276, 280 Pinkerton, Robert 20, 238 Pipes, R. 21 Pirogov, N. I. 46 Pisarev, A. A. 41 Plater-Ziberkh, Count 196 Pnin, I. P. 179, 321 n.17 Podol’sk 65 Pogodin, M. P. 24, 45, 68, 110, 294 n.43 Poland (see also Warsaw) 10, 16, 128, 145, 153, 220, 244 constitution, see Alexander I Kingdom of 150, 155–60, 163, 246 Polenov, A. Ia. 175 Poltava 17, 191, 196, 197, 229 Pope, Alexander 131 Popov, V. M. 186 Potocki, S. S. 199 Pozharskii, Prince D. 307 n.24 Predtechenskii, A. V. 158, 159 Prokopovich-Antonskii, A. A. 66 Przhetslovskii, O. A. 71 Pskov 92, 95, 114, 115, 154 Pugachev, E. 176, 187, 195 Pushchin, I. I. 60, 64, 245, 267, 336 n.24 Pushkin, A. S. 49, 74, 140, 166, 167, 168, 242, 253, 280 Decembrists 53, 243, 251 education 64, 68 Evgenii Onegin 11, 39, 47, 89–90, 308 n.45 literary works 67, 269 nobility 9, 19, 37, 54, 128 Putin, V. V., President/Prime Minister of Russia (ruled 2000-) 282, 283 Pypin, A. N. 53, 211, 218 Radishchev, A. N. 110, 175–6, 218 Raeff, M. 7, 12, 17, 26, 56, 92, 144, 181, 242, 253–4

Index Raevskii, A. F. 118 Raevskii, G. F. 237–8 Raevskii, I. A. 46, 47, 299 n.69 Raevskii, V. F. 67, 237–8, 247, 304 n.58 Raikes, Thomas 50 Ransel, D. 21–2 Razumovskii, A. K. 48, 73, 228, 230 Razumovskii, K. G. 21 Repinskii, K. G. 152, 190 Repnin-Volkonskii, N. G. 191, 197, 229, 325 n.29 Repnin, N. V. 177 Reutern, Elizabeth 299 n.59 Riasanovsky, N. 43 Riazan’, 20, 23, 60, 79, 84, 93, 105, 176, 181, 234 Ribbentrop, J. von 129 Rimskii-Korsakov, A. M. 196 Robespierre F.-M.-J. de 63 Rostopchin, F. V. 19, 113, 136, 140, 156, 162, 179, 184, 211, 221 governor-general of Moscow 134, 154, 159, 314 n.41, 332 n.10 Rozen, A. E. 44, 224, 249, 299 n.74 Rozenkampf, Baroness 24, 124 Rozenkampf, G. A. 24, 28, 46, 50, 123–4, 129, 133, 184, 188, 299 n.71 Rudnitskaia, E. L. 199 Rumiantsev, N. P. 94, 129 Rumiantsev, S. P. 179 Runich, D. P. 71, 136, 221 Runovskii, A. M. 82, 107 Russian State Archive (RGA) 154 Russian State Historical Archive (RGIA) 155 Ryleev, K. F. 112–13, 203, 253, 254, 269, 270, 277–8 Northern Society 200, 245, 249, 311 n.48 poetic works 19, 142, 245, 278–9 Sabaneev, I. V. 8, 9, 38, 139, 202 St Petersburg 25, 39, 111, 130, 162, 254 boarding schools for boys 44, 47, 48, 65, 66–8 boarding schools for girls 47, 65, 68–9 Corporal punishment in 61–2 Corps of Pages 58–9 education in 36, 44, 45, 47, 65

Index English club 12, 17 life in 12, 95, 146, 231, 241 military academies 57, 59–60, 61, 63, 67, 70, 73, 303 n.53 and nobility 11, 16, 19, 47, 77, 113, 219, 220, 226 Public (now Russian National) Library 46, 64, 71, 87, 137, 153, 268, 275, 303 n.39 Tsarskoe Selo Lycée (see also Korf M.) 56, 57, 60–4, 71, 73, 161 university 58, 71, 161, 187, 221 Safonov, M. M. 177 Safonovich, V. I. 41, 44, 67 Saltykov, N. I. 11 Saltykov, P. S. 23 Saratov 11, 107, 176 Schelling, Friedrich 71 Schiemann, T. 34, 35, 43, 44, 110, 245, 246 Schlötzer, Professor 39 Semenovskii Regiment mutiny (see also guards’ regiments) 40, 164, 235 Semevskii, V. I. 156, 162, 163, 206 Senate 3, 55, 78, 83, 84, 105, 106, 123, 125, 135, 216, 262, 291 n.31, 319 n.79 Seredonin, S. M. 89, 96 serfdom (see also nobility, Russian) 11, 165 ‘Economic’ peasants 204 Free Cultivator’s Law 169, 175, 178–82, 195, 208 serf reform (see also Alexander I; Alexander II; Arakcheev; Baltic provinces; Karazin; Kiselev; Mordvinov; Nicholas I; Orlov; Viazemskii; Vorontsov M.) 175– 88, 231, 246, 261 Sergeevich, V. I. 26 Shakhovskoi, F. P. 154 Shakhovskoi, P. I. 154 Shashkov, S. 207 Shenig, N. I. 66 Shenshin, V. N. 253 Sheremetev, D. N. 25 Sheremetev, N. P. 25 Sheremetev, P. B. 25 Shervud, I. V. 238, 267 Shestakov, A. I. 45 Shil’der. N. K. 171, 185, 200, 268, 280

365

Shipov, N. N. 1193 Shishkov, A. S. 18–19, 136, 142, 185, 229, 245, 293 n.20, 314 n.49 Shlissel’burg fortress 197, 206, 235, 236, 237, 238 Shmidt, S. O. 52 Shteingeil’, Baron V. I. 61, 159, 225, 233, 250, 264, 335 n.20 Shtraikh S. Ia. 19 Siberia 40, 88, 100, 114, 156, 183, 186, 225, 233, 243 Sievers, F. von 184, 185 Simbirsk 12, 20, 44, 95, 139, 192, 234, 243 Skariatin, Ia. F. 278 Smith, Adam 39 Smolensk 16, 20, 60, 64, 85, 88, 92, 207 Sophia Dorothea of Wuerttemberg, see Mariia Fedorovna, Dowager Empress Sokolova, N. A. 88 Spain 39, 153, 166 Speranskii M. M. 36, 46, 50, 113, 124, 125, 129, 151, 165, 250, 282, 313 n.30 and Alexander I 123, 128, 131–7, 140, 143, 146, 147 constitutional reform 150, 153, 162, 163, 216, 217–18 dismissal and exile 128, 134, 135, 136, 152, 157 educational reform 53–6, 57, 60, 61, 119 Governor of Penza (1816) 87, 92, 136, 157 Governor of Siberia (1819) 87, 88, 114, 136 growth of bureaucracy 132, 133, 134 nobility 18, 19, 20, 26, 42, 91 serfdom 132, 169, 190, 211 Staël, Mme G. de 126, 312 n.14 Stalin, J. V. (ruled USSR mid 1920s to 1953) 129, 223 Stanhope, Lord 167 State Council 36, 37, 41, 50, 132, 136. 171, 190, 221, 256, 262, 269, 277 and Alexander I 125, 177, 179, 186, 211, 216, 267 Stedingk, K. de 129 Stein, Karl von 223 Stolypin, A. A. 157

366

Index

Storch, H. 193 Stroganov, A. S. 111 Stroganov, P. A. 17, 147 and the Unofficial Committee 16, 24, 28, 49, 166, 195 Stroganova, Countess 49 Strojnowski, Walerjan 186 Sturdza, A. S. 229 Sudakov, V. P. 107 Sukaladzev, A. 140 Sukhomlinov, M. I. 229 Sushkov N. V. 50, 168 Sverbeev, D. N. 58, 196, 245, 255 Sweden 16, 130, 152 Taganrog 115, 140, 141, 143, 259, 334 n.1 Talleyrand, C.-M. de 131 Tambov 21, 57, 64, 84, 85, 87 Thackeray F. W. 160 Tikovskii 231 Tilsit, Treaty of 127, 128–30, 134, 138, 155, 217, 222, 223 Tobolsk 87, 93, 210 Tolchenov, Ivan 21, 22 Tolstoi, F. P. 252–3 Tolstoy, L. N. 42, 282–3 Topchiev, E. I. 36, 37, 60, 302 n.32 Treskin, N. I. 87 Troppau, Protocol of 39, 232 Troshchinskii, D. P. 17, 168, 181, 266, 293 n.14, 319–20 n.79, 319 n.79, 335 n.22 Trubetskoi, P. S. 81, 82, 84, 100, 108, 116, 118, 180, 181, 306 n.16 Trubetskoi, S. P. 187, 192, 206, 246, 256, 264, 277, 306 n.16, 329 n.47 Tsarskoe Selo Lycée, see Korf M.; St Petersburg Tuchkov, A. A. 22, 36, 66, 294 n.37 Tuchkov, N. A. 66, 297 n.18 Tuchkov, P. A. 37, 66, 303 n.52 Tuchkov, S. A. 38, 66, 146, 296 n.13 Tuchkova-Ogareva, N. A. 294 n.37 Tukhachevskii, N. S. 93 Tula 37, 47, 57, 64, 65, 90, 93, 94, 111, 142, 234, 268 Tul’chin 246, 329 n.45

Turgenev, A. I. 39, 41, 93, 159, 243, 247, 253, 255, 271 as liberal reformer 164, 195, 199, 209, 254, 260–1 Turgenev, A. M. 210, 211 Turgenev, I. P. 39 Turgenev, I. S. 24 Turgenev, N. I. 39, 41, 159–60, 167, 218, 233, 234, 235, 246 constitutional reform 158, 160–1, 162 Decembrist secret societies 192, 224, 241–2, 243, 255–7 educational standards 40, 48, 68 La Russie et les Russes (‘Russia and the Russians’) (1847) 193, 257, 292 n.46 nobility in Russia 12, 15, 21, 24, 73 ‘On the Theory of Taxes’ (Opyt teorii nalogov) 41, 168, 192, 256, 298 n.37 serf reform 176, 183–4, 189, 191–5, 197–9, 200–1, 226 Turgenev, S. I. 41, 163, 164, 198, 202, 243, 253, 255 Tver’ 21, 95, 144, 150, 187, 192 Udovik, V. A. 203 Ufa 84, 108 Ukraine 4, 11, 64, 65, 72, 191, 197, 206, 229, 235, 246, 266, 273, 283, 303 n.51, 304 n.54, 329 n.45, 334 n.2 Unofficial Committee (see also Czartoryski; Kochubei; Novosil’tsov; Stroganov) 7, 177, 178, 179, 192, 228 Uvarov, S. S. 36, 71, 136, 160–1, 197, 223, 230, 231, 328 n.33, 329 n.46 Vasil’chikov, I. V. 190, 200, 203, 264, 275, 319 n.66, 323 n.5 Vasil’chikov, L. V. 165, 319 n.66 Vernadsky, G. 160, 248 Viatka 84, 99, 104, 105 Viazemskii, A. I. 74 Viazemskii, N. G. 127–8, 138, 197, 208, 209, 327 n.75 Viazemskii, P. A. 38, 49, 74, 158, 162, 167, 233, 235, 237, 247, 292 n.2,

Index 300 n.85, 316 n.6, 325 n.34, 336 n.31 constitutional reform 158, 162–4, 218, 318 n.57, 327 n.75 and Decembrists 19, 243, 246, 253, 254–5, 268–9 serf reform 176, 195, 198–9, 201, 209, 218 Viazmitinov, S. K 154, 155, 230, 236, 330 n.59 Victor Emmanuel I, King of Sardinia (ruled 1802–21) 9 Vienna 160 congress of 143, 170, 220, 315 n.75 treaty of 155 Vigel’, F. F. 83, 88, 92, 166, 232, 329 n.46 on Alexander I 124, 130 on the Decembrists 252, 270, 276 on the Russian nobility 18, 19, 43, 55, 68, 95, 133, 141, 337 n.56 on Speranskii 87, 133, 135 Vil’no (Vilna, Vilnius) 105, 136, 185, 195, 196 Virtembergskii, A., see Württemberg Vitembergskii, E., see Württemberg Vladimir province 36, 68, 104, 105, 106, 147 Voenskii, K. A. 146 Volga Tatars 4, 95 Volhynia 65, 95 Vologda 84 Volkonskii, P. M. 65, 141, 304 n.53 Volkonskii, S. G. 40, 68, 158, 190, 243–4 Volkonskii, S. R. 167, 319 n.73 Vologda 20, 99 Voltaire, F.-M. 38, 234 Voronezh 64, 87, 154, 162, 202, 232 Vorontsov, A. R. 47, 74, 150, 153

367

Vorontsov, M. S. 38, 253, 269–70, 315 n.60, 323 n.5 and Alexander I 123, 138–40, 146 serf reform 139, 140, 176, 178, 190, 198, 199, 200, 201–3 Vorontsov, S. R. 113, 139, 140, 150, 153, 156–7, 159, 202, 211, 270 Waldron, P. 94 Warsaw 81, 162, 163, 207, 220, 235, 246, 263, 265, 267 Alexander I at the sejm 149, 155–60, 164, 186, 197, 198, 211, 212, 216, 226 Grand Duchy of 128, 155, 183 Washington, George 169 Wellington, Duke of 126 Wilson, Robert 244, 332 n.10 Witt, I. O. 71–2 Wortman, R. 28, 124, 223, 279 Württemberg, Duke Eugen of 264 Württemberg, Prince Alexander of 65 Young, Arthur 117, 311 n.63 Zakrevskii, A. A. 11, 40, 50, 139, 141, 158, 233, 252, 269, 270 Zamoiski, A. 164 Zavadovskii, P. V. 33, 125, 151 Zavalishin, D. I. 43, 63, 64, 165, 218, 222, 251, 254, 303 n.42 Zeier, F. I. 153 Zhikharev, S. P. 93–4 Zhukovskii, V. A. 44, 49, 209, 237, 271, 279, 299 n.59 Zubov, V. 187, 192