Читать книгу Russia: People and Empire: 1552–1917 - Geoffrey Hosking - Страница 16

By the end of the eighteenth century the society created by Peter the Great had survived, but its culture and traditions had taken root only in one social estate, the nobility. To bridge the gap thus opened between the nobility and other strata, the ruler could now proceed in two alternative ways: either by confirming the freedoms (or privileges) of the nobility and letting them percolate gradually down the social scale, or by reining the nobility back and enforcing more equitably the universal principle of state service.

PAUL 1 (1796–1801) Paul was an exemplar of the second approach. He heartily disliked his mother, and took a positive pleasure in declaring her practice of enhancing privilege misguided. Everywhere, and especially in the army, he promoted obedience, discipline and efficiency. Paul was an extreme adherent of the ‘Prussomania’ prevalent in many late eighteenth-century European courts: the fascination with precise formation and immaculate drill. In seventeenth-century France drill had originally been introduced to enhance the battle-readiness of the soldiers; but under Paul its purpose changed, and it became a means of glorifying the monarch as symbolic hero, an embodiment of the disciplined social order he liked to think he headed. Each day at 11 a.m. throughout his reign, in the brooding Mikhailovskii Palace which was his residence, he would review the troops of the watch in their new-style Prussian uniforms.

He insisted that nobles should play their due part in this parade ground display and dedicate themselves to service, especially military service, whatever their theoretical exemption from it. He lavished decorations and serfs on those who excelled, but humiliated and punished those who evaded their duties. The Guards suffered especially from his authoritarianism: having being gallant comrades-in-arms at the elegant court of the Empress, they became mere subalterns in Paul’s grim parade lines.¹

Paul stabilized the monarchy by issuing an unambiguous Law of Succession, providing for descent of the throne by way of the oldest male heir, and stipulating the precise provisions for a regency, should one be needed. He also assumed the role of religious ruler with greater panache than any monarch since the seventeenth century. He accepted the office of Grand Master of the Knights of Malta after the Knights’ home island had fallen to Napoleon, and used the occasion to cultivate his image as doughty defender of Christianity against the aggressive atheism of the French revolution. What was involved was not just Orthodoxy but Christianity as a whole, the first sign that the Russian monarch aspired to a universal religious mission. He intended that the new order of the Knights of Malta should offer an example of chivalry and re-inspire in nobles the ideals of service: self-sacrifice, duty and discipline.²

To isolate Russia from the contagion of the French revolution, Paul forbade the import of books and journals and, in an extraordinary abrogation of previous practice, prohibited travel abroad-which had been the normal way for Russian nobles to round off their education. He also made abundant use of his intelligence service, the tainaia ekspeditsiia (inherited, ironically, from his mother) to spy on nobles whom he suspected of opposition to himself. Although he never repealed the Charter to the Nobility, he undid many of its provisions. Local assemblies of the nobility were abolished, together with their right to elect local officials, who were instead appointed by the government. Landed estates were subjected to taxation, and the gentry’s emancipation from corporal punishment was ended: in certain circumstances, nobles could now be flogged.

On the peasant question Paul was inconsistent, since he awarded his favourites land populated by serfs no less bountifully than his mother; but at the same time he restored the right of serfs to petition the crown over mistreatment, he restricted the selling of serfs without land, and he recommended limiting the number of days of the week on which landlords could require their serfs to work for them.³

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 Man and Citizen’ was prescribed as a basic text. All social estates, except private serfs, were to have access to education at all levels, and a ‘ladder’ was to exist to ensure that progress was possible from one level to another. Higher education followed a German model of corporate autonomy, with freedom of research as the motor of all scholarship and teaching.

In many ways these principles were remarkable, and they showed how serious Russia was in trying to live up to the standards of a European great power: self-governing institutions and the spirit of free intellectual enquiry were difficult to accommodate to an autocracy, while broad social entry was at odds with a thoroughly hierarchical society. But a closed elite educational system was not an option for Russia. A strong service nobility based on the Table of Ranks required a steady supply of young men rising from below and educated to the highest European standards. As Prince Karl Lieven, rector of Dorpat University, pointed out, ‘Where the nobility extends from the foot of the throne at one end and nearly merges with the peasantry at the other, where every year many from the lower urban and rural estates enter the nobility by achieving the necessary rank in the military or civil service – in Russia it is very difficult to organise schools [on the basis of closed hereditary estate].’⁸

In spite of the difficulties, then, Alexander confirmed his grandmother’s principles in his ‘Preliminary Regulation for Public Education’ of 24 January 1803, and even extended them by declaring the intention of establishing schools at village as well as uezd and guberniia level. His plans specifically aimed to consolidate Catherine’s meritocratic view of education: they envisaged providing a ladder from each level of schooling to the next, so that disadvantaged children with talent could rise from the lower classes to serve the state. His Regulations for Educational Establishments stipulated that they should ‘inspire in [pupils] the eagerness and devotion to learning which, upon their leaving school, will stimulate them to continue towards even further improvement of themselves.’⁹

Furthermore, the existing universities at Moscow, Vil’na and Dor-pat were to be joined by new foundations at St Petersburg, Khar’kov and Kazan’. Each university was to be self-governing, with control over its own curriculum and the appointment of professors, though under the supervision of a state-appointed curator. It was expected to assist the expansion of education by taking charge of an educational district, training teachers for the schools in it and establishing and supervising their curriculum.¹⁰

The new universities experienced great difficulties in their early years. There were not enough students: those who did present themselves were often poorly prepared, indisciplined and rowdy, and dropped out before acquiring a diploma. Most of the early professors were foreign, and lectured in German or Latin, to the dismay of their less educated listeners; in 1814 Count Kochubei argued that it would be better to bring in clergymen to do the teaching rather than subject students to German tuition. With school districts to inspect, the faculty was greatly overworked, and not all of them took their teaching duties seriously. Conflicts often broke out between Russian and foreign teachers, with the Russians complaining that the foreigners were indifferent towards the students, and the foreigners dismissing the Russians as boorish and unscholarly. An established university, like Moscow, or one backed by fierce local loyalties, like Vil’na or Dorpat, could overcome these problems. But Khar’kov, Kazan’ and even St Petersburg experienced very trying early years, when they were vulnerable to financial and official pressure. Some of them were under attack for fostering libertinism and atheism.¹¹

By the end of Alexander’s reign, it was clear that neither the legacy of the Enlightenment nor the zeal of the Bible Society could provide an adequate foundation for flourishing universities which would be genuinely Russian. His successor, Nicholas I, was deeply suspicious of them, and would have liked to subordinate them completely to the state. But his Minister of Education, Count S.S. Uvarov, resisted this tendency and evolved a compromise, embodied in the University Statute of 1835. It deprived universities of their function of supervising schools, and also eroded their immunities by abolishing the courts in which they maintained student discipline. Professors were in future to be appointed by the Minister of Education.

Yet in all other respects Alexander’s principles were upheld: universities continued to elect their own rectors, to determine their curricula, run their examinations and award their own diplomas. Uvarov did not waver from the view that a general liberal-arts education, rather than cameralism or vocational training, was most appropriate for the upper levels of the civil service. He wanted to combine Europeanism – including a good grounding in the classics – with religious-moral instruction and Russian patriotism. His was a compromise which was very difficult to maintain, but he stuck to it for some fifteen years, until the European revolutions of 1848 sharply intensified Nicholas’s fear of thin and hungry graduates.¹²

The hard-won success of the universities greatly improved the quality of recruits to the civil service, and laid the basis for the later reforms of Alexander II. At the same time that success opened wider the gulf which separated the educated elites from the mass of the population. The further down the educational system one went, the more halting was the expansion of schooling. Alexander’s plans for village schools proved especially over-optimistic: neither the treasury nor local sources were ready to provide the means to make even a serious start to their provision. At a time when Prussia and Austria were beginning to expand primary education even in the small towns and villages, Russia’s rural regions were serviced only by a meagre network of small parish schools.

NAPOLEON BONAPARTE Alexander’s reign was overshadowed by a figure who was an example both to emulate and to abhor: Napoleon Bonaparte. The continual presence and intermittent deadly threat of Napoleon dramatized the duality of Alexander’s personality and of his situation. Napoleon’s principles of government were rooted in Enlightenment thinking, and in exaggerated form they exemplified what Alexander would have liked to achieve: a meritocracy led by an authoritarian leader, mobilizing the resources of the population for military action, and able to rely on convinced patriotism among all social classes. Yet Napoleon appeared in such a form that he was a challenge not only to Alexander personally, but to Russia as a whole. His social and political ideals were a direct affront to the unearned privileges of the nobility, while his 1812 invasion threatened the very survival of Russia. The way in which he unsettled Europe, both by his military campaigns and more fundamentally by the challenge to create new nation states on the French model, faced Alexander with ever fresh quandaries to which he had to find his own answers.