Читать книгу The St. Petersburg Connection - Alexis S. Troubetzkoy - Страница 11

Alexander I

By the time the twenty-three-year-old Alexander I was catapulted onto the throne in 1801, St. Petersburg’s population had grown to over three hundred thousand, overtaking that of eight-hundred-year-old Moscow. The newly enthroned emperor came from a mixed and complicated lineage of rulers: on the one hand, a number were intelligent and determined; on the other, some were unstable, even mentally deranged. Alexander’s father was the bitter and unpredictable Paul, son of the formidable and enlightened Catherine. In 1762, following the murder of Paul’s father, the sickly and slow-witted Peter III, Catherine simply assumed the throne, leaving her son standing on the sidelines of government and power for thirty-four years, harbouring resentment and hatred of his usurping mother.

When Catherine died unexpectedly in 1796, Paul gleefully took possession of his rightful inheritance and immediately proceeded to reverse his mother’s enlightened domestic and foreign policies. Bitter years of maternal neglect and frustration had further deteriorated his warped mind. Imagined danger, shadowy conspiracy, and ruthless enemies lurked everywhere — nobody was to be trusted. “In Russia,” he declared, “the only person of importance is the one with whom I speak — and then only for the duration of the conversation.” It wasn’t long before the country was on its knees before the paranoid and unpredictable emperor. It cried for deliverance, and delivered it was on the night of March 11, 1801. A group of conspirators, fortified by generous quantities of brandy, broke into Mikhailovsky Castle where Paul had secluded himself behind moats and stout walls. A tumultuous confrontation took place, followed by a scuffle during which the tsar was struck on the forehead with a gold snuffbox — a mortal blow. An anguished Alexander was informed of his father’s death (“a fit of apoplexy,” he was told) and with no small degree of reluctance, the young man assumed the throne.

The newly anointed tsar brought together his closest, like-minded friends to form an advisory group called the Committee of Friends. This select body of young men consisted of liberal, reform-minded thinkers whose primary focus was on constitutionalism and serfdom. They were well familiar with the French Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen, and, drawing from the example of the United States, a constitution was deemed desirable, one that would give a voice to the people. As for the serfs — by far the largest segment of the population, accounting for 90 percent of the country’s gross national product — they required emancipation. Serfs were not slaves, yet they were not free agents. They were permanently attached to the land, and a nobleman’s wealth was measured not in terms of the acreage he possessed but in the number of “souls” he owned. Serfs enjoyed certain rights and protection of the law, but at the same time they were entirely at the discretion of the owner. Some proprietors were benign and caring while others were ruthless and cruel, and there certainly was much abuse of the system.

On the issue of a constitution, the young idealists heartily agreed that it was needed, but that there was no way of framing it without encroaching on the emperor’s autocratic power. As for emancipation, the Committee of Friends concluded that serfdom was evil, but the group reckoned little could be done about it for fear of alienating the nobility. Alexander and his short-lived committee talked the talk, but weren’t prepared to walk the walk.

During the course of the early deliberations and those that followed, Alexander corresponded with Thomas Jefferson, whom he held in high regard. “I would be extremely grateful to you,” he wrote to his former tutor, Frédéric-César de La Harpe, “if you would be helpful to make my closest acquaintance with Jefferson.” As a youth, he had read the Declaration of Independence and he knew that the singular document came from the pen of this one man. In June 1776, the thirty-three-year-old Virginian had been in Philadelphia to attend the fateful Continental Congress and rented the two second-floor rooms of a modest home belonging to a bricklayer, on the corner of Market and Seventh Streets. And there, at the urging of his congressional colleagues, Jefferson isolated himself for ten hot summer days, working and reworking the reverberating words that came to affect the world so profoundly. “When in the course of human events it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bonds which have connected them with another …”

Alexander I.

Stefan Semjonovitsj Stjukin. Oil. 1808. Museum of Pavlovsk, Russia.

Alexander I and Thomas Jefferson made an interesting pair. One of them was a youthful, idealistic, and naive autocrat, newly come to the throne; the other was an elderly, pragmatic, and experienced republican with decades of service to his country. They were two visionaries from radically dissimilar worlds. Jefferson’s devotion to a constitution and democratic principles was as firmly fixed as his abhorrence of slavery (although he, himself, owned slaves). What was good for him was equally good for his friends, and he considered the tsar a friend. “A more virtuous man, I believe, does not exist,” he wrote. “Nor one who is more enthusiastically devoted to better the condition of mankind.” The elderly statesman was paternalistically solicitous of the young sovereign and he sought to encourage him. To the American representative in St. Petersburg, Jefferson wrote, “The Emperor entertained a wish to know something of our Constitution. I have therefore selected the two best works we have on the subject for which I pray you to ask for a place in his library.” Deep down, however, Jefferson harboured grave doubts that a constitution could be had in Russia — the populace simply was not prepared for it. It would be “an Herculean task,” he wrote to a friend, to attend “to those who are not capable of taking care of themselves. Some preparation seems necessary to qualify the body of a nation for self-government.” This was vintage Jefferson, and words that resonate today around the world.

Thomas Jefferson.

Gilbert Stuart, c. 1898. Oil. Library of Congress.

The young Alexander was indeed the virtuous man Jefferson said he was, and without a doubt he embraced the idea of “bettering the condition of man.” Emotionally and psychologically, however, he was a person of contradictions: complex and elusive — “the sphinx,” he was called, or “the enigmatic tsar” — he often seemed not to know his own mind. “Something is missing in his character,” commented Napoleon, “but I find it impossible to discover what it is.” One of his more conspicuous shortcomings was indecisiveness, especially with respect to controversial or unpopular issues. Emancipation and constitutional talk were indeed controversial and unpopular — certainly among the wealthy and influential. All such discussions came to naught. The emancipation of the serfs had to wait until 1861. A constitution with any degree of credibility was not produced until after perestroika took hold in the 1980s and ’90s.

The Committee of Friends, as well as similar groups in the imperial reigns that followed, clearly identified Russia’s problems, but they lacked the capacity or the will to address them except under extreme pressure. Alexander and his successors were well aware not only of the issues at hand but also of the solutions. Furthermore, this line of autocrats possessed the power to force solutions, but the fibre to do so simply was missing. The tragedy of that massive and magnificent country was that it lacked the collective will to tackle such reform challenges head on.

During Alexander’s twenty-four-year reign, the benign and supportive relationship between Russia and the United States blossomed and held for a century thereafter.