As a person, Paul was harsh and punctilious, and given to furious outbursts of rage which generated widespread rumours that he was mentally unbalanced. He was undoubtedly inconsistent, but his madness, if that is what it was, reflected the objective situation of the Russian monarchy, with its vast claims to power and its limited practical means of exercising that power.
The nobles in general, and especially the Guards officers, chafed at the symbolic and substantive humiliations he inflicted. In 1801 a group of them, headèd by Count Petr Palen, Governor-General of St Petersburg, managed to obtain the consent of the heir, Grand Duke Alexander, to depose Paul. In the event, they not only did that, but also murdered him, something to which Alexander had not agreed, and which left him with an abiding burden on his conscience.
ALEXANDER 1 Paul’s reign had shown how fragile were the privileges and freedoms of the nobility, and that the minimal civil liberties which existed in Russia could be liquidated at a stroke. The accession of Alexander was therefore welcomed with great satisfaction and eager expectation. Like his grandmother a devotee of the European Enlightenment, Alexander had been brought up under the guidance of a tutor chosen by her, La Harpe, a Swiss republican, who inculcated in him a vivid impression of the evils of despotism and the benefits of the rule of law. These lessons were reinforced by the negative experience of his father’s rule.
Alexander, however, was not merely repelled by his father. He had spent his youth in two courts, that of his grandmother and that of his father, and he had learned from both. He found the contrast between them extremely difficult to digest, and it marked his personality with a permanent ambivalence. He was never quite able to make a clear choice between the alternative paths open to him.
As heir to the throne, he gathered round himself a circle of young aristocratic friends with whom he would discuss ideas for a future freer and better government, yet he never ceased to be attracted by the military model of social order. At times he would give up trying to reconcile the warring aspects of his personality and would shrink back before the awful responsibility of governing Russia, dreaming instead of withdrawing to a cottage in the country somewhere in Germany. Sometimes he hoped that it might be possible to grant a constitution first, and then seek out his rural idyll, leaving the nation to govern itself. He told his tutor: ‘Once … my turn comes, then it will be necessary to work, gradually of course, to create a representative assembly of the nation which, thus directed, will establish a free constitution, after which my authority will cease absolutely; and, if Providence supports our work, I will retire to some spot where I will live contentedly and happily, observing and taking pleasure in the well-being of my country.’ It was sentiments of this kind which led Berdiaev to call Alexander a ‘Russian intelligent on the throne’.4
When he came to power, Alexander declared in a manifesto that he would return to the principles of Catherine. He undid many of his father’s acts, declaring a general amnesty for political prisoners, abolishing the tainaia ekspeditsiia, restoring the Charters to the Nobles and the Towns, and the right of importing books from abroad, and inviting the Senate to make proposals regarding its own future functions.
On the other hand, the circumstances of his father’s deposition and murder left Alexander with a sense of guilt and unease which lasted the whole of his life. The conspirators who assassinated Paul were senior aristocrats who had definite views on these matters. They belonged to the ‘Senatorial party’, adherents of the view that noble privilege should be bolstered. Responding to Alexander’s invitation, they outlined their view that the Senate should be elected by the dvorianstvo, and should act as guarantor of the rule of law, by advising the Emperor to reject any proposed legislation which contradicted the existing legal framework, by ensuring that freedom of property and person was upheld, and by supervising administrative officials. Under this scheme the Senate would also have the right to propose taxes, nominate senior personnel, and submit to the Tsar ‘the nation’s needs’. Count Alexander Vorontsov, the leading figure in the group, composed a ‘Charter to the Russian People’, enshrining these principles, which it was hoped Alexander would proclaim at his coronation. Such a proclamation could have laid the basis for an English Whig approach to government, or for an aristocratically guaranteed Rechtstaat.5
However, Alexander was also susceptible to the other concept of liberty, extended to all social classes rather than guaranteed by the privileges of only one of them. This was the French Jacobin rather than the English Whig view, and it was the one held in his circle of young friends, one of whom, Pavel Stroganov, had attended meetings of the Club des Jacobins in Paris. On his accession he summoned them to regular consultations as his ‘Secret Committee’ (Neglasnyi Komitet), or his ‘Committee of Public Safety’, as he sometimes jokingly called it. Before he came to the throne, he declared to another of its members, the young Polish aristocrat, Prince Adam Czartoryski, his ‘hatred of despotism, wherever and by whatever means it was exercised’, and affirmed that he ‘loved liberty and that liberty was owed equally to all men’.6
It was not, though, at all clear how such a concept of liberty could be adapted to a country a large number of whose inhabitants were serfs. It could only be done, if at all, by abolishing serfdom, that is by undermining the property and privileges of those who possessed the limited amount of civil liberty currently available in the Russian state. And that in turn could only be done, if at all, by a monarch who retained in his hands the fullness of autocratic authority. That was the fundamental dilemma which Alexander never resolved, throughout his reign: to carry out serious reform, he needed to retain his autocratic powers intact. Alexander’s personality was equivocal and secretive, as a result of his long sojourn at the court of his father, where he combined his humane and liberal studies with a genuine enthusiasm for the military parades which so delighted Paul. But his ambivalence was intensified by the objective situation in which he found himself when he came to the throne, for it meant he could introduce liberty only through despotism.
For that reason, his Secret Committee remained secret, and its deliberations were never published. All its members were aware that any public discussion of the possible abolition or even amelioration of serfdom would excite expectations among the peasants which could easily lead to massive public disorder. In the event, Alexander got nowhere even with his modest proposal to regulate the burdens which landowners could impose on their serfs. The only product of their deliberations was a law of 1803 which permitted (but certainly did not require) landowners to emancipate whole villages of serfs, with all the land they cultivated. Even that law was passed without consulting the Senate, which might well have objected to it.
In 1802, in deference to the Senatorial party, Alexander had granted the Senate the droit de remontrance, but he had then ignored their advice the first time they tried to exercise it, over a law governing the conditions for the retirement of army officers. In practice, it lapsed thereafter. In that way, Russia received neither a Rechtstaat nor the Jacobin style of civil liberty.7
Though his early reforming efforts came to nothing, and the Secret Committee broke up, Alexander never altogether abandoned the hope of bringing about a beneficial transformation of Russian society. He tried to approach the dilemma from the side, as it were, by trying out reforms in the more westernized non-Russian areas, with constitutions in Finland and Poland [see Part 1], and with an emancipation of the serfs in the Baltic provinces. He continued to commission proposals for a Russian constitution from his advisers, notably Speranskii in 1808–12, and Novosil’tsev in 1817.
EDUCATION At the end of the eighteenth century the crucial aspects of official education policy were in place, largely as a result of the work of Catherine II. The main aim at secondary and higher levels was to prepare candidates for state service, while at primary level it was to teach practical skills and to inculcate religious and moral principles – in spite of which the state system was kept quite separate from the church one, and Catherine II’s ‘Duties of