In fine one must mention prison-reform, though the state of Russian jails decades later does not dispose us to attach much importance to it. During Alexander’s earlier years, we saw, there was at St. Petersburg a great regard for English ideas, and at that time England was producing many humanitarians. Robert Owen was then elaborating his comprehensive and advanced schemes of reform, from the betterment of schools and prisons to the substitution of arbitration for war. It is the enfeebled echo of these liberal English ideas, and of American and French ideas, that we find in the Russian schemes. One of the English prison-reformers, Mr. Venning, asked permission to visit the Russian jails. The Tsar, who was still in his early humanitarian fervour, gladly assented, and asked Venning to make a report to him on what he saw. As a result a Society for the Welfare of Prisoners was founded at St. Petersburg, and afterwards at Moscow.
These liberal ideas represent, it must be understood, the early attitude of the Emperor. After the fall of Speranski in 1812, and especially after the Tsar’s close association with Metternich in 1814, Alexander passed slowly from a state of nebulous zeal for Charity and Justice to an attitude of positive reaction, tempered by a faint lingering glow of his early dreams. Metternich persuaded him that the real struggle of light and darkness was the struggle of the enlightened monarchies against these democratic and “atheistic” emanations from the smothered volcano of the French Revolution. In private he cynically observed to his friends: “I have the Tsar safely at anchor.” The humanitarian ideas on which the United States had been set up, and the early and sane part of the French Revolution had been based, remained in the mind of Europe. They threatened the restored monarchies, which reverted to mediæval ideas of their power, and the terrible conflict which fills the first half of the nineteenth century in Europe began long before the death of Alexander. It is to his credit that he recognised the blunders and crimes of his fellow-monarchs and never entirely sacrificed his early ideals.
But the sinister Arakcheeff and the dreamy Golitzin spoiled the efforts of Speranski. Golitzin introduced to the Tsar a “converted atheist” named Magnitski, an abominable adventurer, and the man was put in control of the universities. The higher teaching was reduced to a comedy. Golitzin himself was too liberal and cultivated for the plotters, and Admiral Shishkoff replaced him in charge of the ministry of National Enlightenment. Shishkoff hated liberalism, and would suffer no education that did not strengthen in the pupils’ mind a spirit of blind subservience to the Church and the autocracy. A third power among the reactionary forces was the Novgorod abbot, Photi, a zealot of the old type who gathered about him a crowd of aristocratic women and worked through them. Professors who had any tincture of liberalism were now expelled from the schools. Some of the new schools were suffered to disappear, and in all, lower and higher, the teaching was rendered ridiculous by the fierce determination to protect the pupils’ respect for his pastors and masters. Political economy and the new discoveries of science were rigorously banned. The Russophile school was established; the fight against enlightenment was inaugurated.
But enlightenment could no more be suppressed in Russia than in Italy, Spain, Portugal, and France, where the Papacy and the restored monarchs used the old bludgeons against it. A large part of the nobles was, as in France before the Revolution, imbued with the new ideas; and the economic and other reforms were creating a middle class which, as in England, gave many recruits to the humanitarian cause. Students, teachers, writers, medical and other professional men joined the emancipated nobles. The army of light began slowly to gather round its various banners and face the army of darkness. As repression increased, the many societies and liberal journals were merely driven underground and their rhetoric became more fiery. There were “unions” for everything of an advanced nature. In obscure clubs young men began to talk even of a Russian Republic. The Tsar’s refusal to help the Slav and Greek rebels against the Turk increased the anger of the liberals and gave them a basis in the popular mind.
By the year 1824 Alexander had fallen into so morbid a state that he spoke of resigning. He wept over his Bible and wondered if his sins were not the curse of Russia. Even his domestic life was a burden. He had married a Princess of Baden, and her lack of good looks was not redeemed by any other charm except the cold adornments of virtue and piety. She dressed dowdily, and she generally presented at his board a face as melancholy as her creed. For many years Alexander had lived apart from her, and he had no children. The genial dignity and self-esteem of his earlier years broke down altogether. His next brother, Constantine, had made a morganatic marriage, and forfeited the throne, and Alexander distrusted the third brother, Nicholas. Alexander slowly and sadly drifted toward the grave. His courtiers discovered a plot against the autocracy, but he would do nothing. He died on December 1st, 1825: a high-minded, well-meaning man, too little endowed in intellect and strength of will to solve the mighty problems which were raised by his own ideals.
CHAPTER XIII
THE FIGHT AGAINST LIBERALISM
On an earlier page I remarked that the element of romance passed out of the story of the Romanoffs with the last lovers of Catherine and the murder of Paul. This is true of what we may call personal romance, but it will have been apparent that a larger, impersonal romance now opens. Not individual Romanoffs, but the Romanoff dynasty, must fight for existence. Life at court is now too earnest for bibulous companions of monarchs, and handsome lovers of queens, and plots of the anteroom. The comedy is over; if one may call a comedy the enthronement of a selfish and profligate monarchy upon the poverty and ignorance of millions of human beings. The play now assumes the sombre note of tragedy. The people, represented by a few of the educated few, begin to awaken and claim their rights. The rest of the story is a ghastly record of the efforts of the Romanoffs to prevent the spread of that awakening.
Nicholas I, who succeeded Alexander, represents the struggle of the dynasty in a form which might be reconciled with conscience. He differed materially from Alexander in two respects. First, although he was, like Alexander, moderately endowed in intellect, he had great strength of character and would stubbornly pursue any policy which he adopted. In the second place, that policy was inevitably shaped by the accident that he was born many years after Alexander. The eldest son of Paul I had received his education at a time when Catherine was under the influence of the French humanitarians. Nicholas came to the years of discretion during her second phase, when the Revolution had soured her taste of all things French and liberal. His chief tutor had been a French emigrant, an incompetent teacher and a bitter enemy of liberal ideas. Nicholas had grown up a rough and conceited boy. Later he had had abler teachers, but he had yawned over their lessons. He had in 1817 married a daughter of the King of Prussia, and, like almost all the Romanoffs, he thought a minute acquaintance with military drill the first equipment for life. In spite of hints from Alexander he refused to prepare for the serious task of governing a great nation. By an unfortunate accident his vague despotic mood was at the very opening of his reign hardened into an attitude of fierce hostility to the new culture.
His elder brother Constantine had, as I said, forfeited his right to the throne. He had fallen in love with a charming Polish lady, the Countess Jeannette Grudzinsky, after divorcing his first wife. As no amount of personal charm, not associated with royal blood, fitted a woman to occupy the throne of Elizabeth and Catherine, the Tsar had, in 1822, given him the alternative of losing either the lady or his right to the throne. Constantine had not a regal disposition. He married Jeannette and abdicated the right he had to the throne on the restored principle of inheritance.
Nicholas knew of this abdication, though it was otherwise known only to a few intimate councillors. But he knew that there was much feeling against him in St. Petersburg, and he proceeded diplomatically. He proclaimed Constantine Tsar. Prince Golitzin and others who knew of the abdication begged him to refrain until the Council had opened a certain sealed letter which Alexander had left, but Nicholas persisted and sent word to his brother at Warsaw. Constantine refused the throne, and for several weeks letters went backward and forward. Nicholas was very much attached to his brother, but it is probable that he wanted time to study the threatening situation in St. Petersburg and secure the stability of his throne. He yielded on December 13th, and fixed the following day for the taking of the oath of allegiance.