The Romance of the Romanoffs

by Joseph McCabe

But we are passing to Alexander’s last phase, the phase of reaction, without having considered the reforms which came of his early humanitarian zeal. He had, we saw, been educated (in part) by humanitarians like La Harpe, imbued with the French spirit. Catherine herself had, as I said, leaned to reaction, and let her reforms droop, in her later years; and the interlude of Paul’s reign had been thoroughly bad. Yet Alexander came to the throne with a magnificent resolution to reform Russia. He was dreamy by temperament, and he had neither the positive knowledge nor the quality of painstaking perseverance which were necessary to construct a detailed scheme of reform for so comprehensively backward a country. However, he appointed a Committee of Reform, and he followed its deliberations with keen interest.

During many years, especially from 1807-1812, Alexander had for this work the splendid ability and devotion of a remarkably enlightened and democratic statesman named Speranski. Professor Kornilov regards him as “one of the most remarkable statesmen in all Russian history.” He was the son of an obscure priest, a child of the people; and his large mind and great capacity for detail enabled him to give definite shape to the Tsar’s vague dreams of justice. He not only studied the new democratic constitution of the United States, of which the Tsar obtained a copy from Washington, but he followed Napoleon’s constructive work with much sympathy and admiration. To Speranski the Tsar owed the great scheme of reform which at first he made some effort to impose upon Russia. It, unhappily, remained for the most part a paper-scheme. Years afterwards, in 1830, the rebellious Poles found a copy of Speranski’s liberal constitution and printed it, but Nicholas I emphatically suppressed it.

The first task was to reform the central part of the administration, which was chaotic. Eight ministries were created, and, although the Tsar made the inevitable blunder of appointing favourites rather than competent men in some cases, the change helped to create a more effective machine. The heads of the departments were to form a cabinet, or Council of Ministers, responsible to the Emperor, and below them the administrative structure went down gradually as far as the Mir, or village-council. The legislative machinery also began with the Mir, and ended with the Duma, or national council, from which there could be an appeal to the Imperial Council. The administration of justice was to begin in the village and end in a reconstituted Senate; and Speranski sketched a new code of laws on the model of the Code Napoleon.

Of this great scheme very little was carried out. The reformed Senate found most of its proposals opposed by the Imperial Council, and the Tsar himself, who was to be guided by it, chafed when it did not fall in with his wishes, and often issued ukases in defiance of the opinion of the majority. The new code of laws was put upon the shelf, and remained there until the reign of Nicholas I. The hierarchy of popular councils was not created. Alexander seemed to shrink from the logical consequences of his “sacred maxims” when they were drawn out on paper by a practical statesman, and he lent too ready an ear to the reactionaries. As his piety increased, the conservatives found it convenient to represent to him that these progressive ideas were associated with atheism and revolt. The familiar type of political adventurer, a man named Arakcheeff, appeared at court and secured wealth and power. This man and his associates suggested to Alexander, in 1812, that Speranski was promoting Freemasonry and subversive ideas, and the great statesman—a man so far from Voltaireanism that he had translated “The Imitation of Christ” into Russian—had to go. The Tsar wept maudlin tears while he dismissed him.

The ministry of education, or of National Enlightenment, whose task was vital to the reform of the country, seemed to make greater progress. Alexander entrusted it to his mother’s educational adviser, Count Tzadovski, and his own tutor Muravieff. Afterwards it was controlled by Prince Golitzin, a follower of the new mysticism, but a serious and liberal statesman. He was a patron of the Protestant Bible Society, which Alexander permitted to open premises in St. Petersburg in 1812. Alexander found from two to three million rubles a year for the education department, and paid out of his own purse for the translation of western works. Students were sent abroad for pedagogical training, and after a time training-colleges were established in Russia. Three new universities (Dorpat, Kazan, and Kharkoff) were founded, and these and the older universities were to become central points in a scheme of enlightenment for the various districts of Russia.

It is, however, usual to exaggerate the work done. We have already heard much about the reforms of various rulers—of Philaret, of Peter I, of Elizabeth, and of Catherine—but the fact remains that far more than ninety per cent of the Russian people were still illiterate and densely ignorant at the death of Alexander, and, although we shall hear of further reforms, at least eighty-five per cent of the Russian people were illiterate at the beginning of the twentieth century. The sum provided for education was ludicrously insufficient for the task, and the opposition was considerable. Merchants grumbled that they must pay for the teaching of something more than reading, writing, and arithmetic; the bulk of the nobles wanted only a military education for their sons. In all about 200 higher schools (with classes of Latin and Greek) and 2,000 elementary schools were founded: barely enough to educate the five per cent of the population which was attracted to new ideas. The work, like all the other reforms, languished in Alexander’s later years, and was deliberately checked, in the interest of the dynasty, by his successor.

The next great problem was the emancipation of the serfs, and here the Tsar’s vacillation between his sentiments of benevolence and his vague perception that they threatened the aristocratic system is more apparent than ever. Catherine had had the same experience. She had spoken of liberty and equality; and she had bestowed upon her favourites hundreds of thousands of serfs who would, she must have known, be regarded and treated as cattle. The restriction of the freedom of the peasant, by which Godunoff had converted him into a serf, really handed over his freedom to the higher authorities or put it into the hand of the landowner. When a peasant wished to move, he might secure permission from his lord by a payment of money. When a noble obtained a grant of new lands he had to buy, or obtain by favour, a great batch of serfs to work it. In practice the wealthy landowners bought and sold the population just as cotton-planters then did in America, and the serfs were generally treated with brutality.

Nearly every other country in Europe had long since abolished serfdom, and Alexander saw clearly enough how inconsistent the institution was with his “sacred maxims.” He discussed with his friends this “barbarous” traffic in human beings, and we can understand how they assisted him to salve his conscience. Reform must be gradual; an evil which was centuries old, and rooted in the very structure of Russian society, could not be cured in a day. In other words, the great sacrifice, which justice demanded, must be thrown upon a later generation. Alexander expended his zeal upon small alleviations of the sufferings of the serfs. He forbade the masters to break up families, or to enforce marriage upon reluctant serfs. He restricted the right of punishment, opened the courts to the serf, and set aside large sums for the emancipation of batches of serfs. He had a pamphlet published in which owners were urged to treat the serfs humanely and promote emancipation. So much was done under pressure of the humanitarians, but it was only a trifling mitigation of the worst evil of mediæval Russia, and the new regulations were not properly enforced. Russia was the land of the wealthy. The millions of descendants of the original free Slavs must toil on in squalor and ignorance. The day of reckoning was still to come.

Arakcheeff tried an experiment in this connection which was bitterly resented. He induced the Tsar to settle regiments of soldiers, with their families, on the crown-lands, in military colonies. They were to be special breeding grounds for recruits, and were to spread amongst the peasants the spirit of military discipline. They were so carefully organised—for Arakcheeff had ability—that even the mother was provided with a set of rules which she must hang beside the holy ikons. The peasants hated the innovation, and on Arakcheeff’s own estate they rebelled and killed his mistress, who ruled them with the brutality that he encouraged. The institution was afterward suffered to decay.

In the fiscal world, which was but another section of the Augean stable of the Russian system, Alexander set out to make enlightened reforms, and ended in the usual listlessness. The treasury had long been artificially filled by the excessive creation of paper-money. Alexander recalled a large proportion of it, but the strain of the war put an end to this reform. An Imperial Bank was founded, a sinking fund was started, and it was decided to publish an annual budget. It was proposed, and partly attempted, to relieve the duty on the importation of raw materials and impose heavy duties on luxuries. At the same time the abandonment of Catherine’s extravagance at court relieved the exchequer. These reforms were, like the others, a comparatively slight mitigation of a great evil, and were in Alexander’s later years suffered to droop.