The Tsarist State
and the Origins of Revolutionary Opposition
in the 1860s
Alan Kimball
University of Oregon
A presentation to the Northwest Scholars of
Russian and Soviet History and Culture
Seattle WA
1998 November 7
The title of this piece promises more than one conference presentation can
deliver. What I propose to do here is open the discussion of the active role of the tsar
and his ministers in provoking a revolutionary underground. Lets look at the first
five years of the era of "great reforms", from 1856 into the fall of 1861. This
carries us from the earliest official announcements of big changes ahead and up to the
appointment of Petr Valuev as Interior Minister. By the time of Valuevs appointment,
the leading power ministries had put themselves on a collision course with a mobilizing
public. Efficiency suggests not only that we focus on these first five years but also that
we concentrate on official reaction to only three sorts of social mobilization: the landed
gentry, the Sunday school movement, and the universities. We can set the tsarist agenda
for reform and take the story up to the first serious clash between the state and urban
society in the reform epoch, the student disorders in the fall of 1861.
Under pressure of military failure in the Crimean War, economic crisis, and
international challenge in an era of rapid European modernization, the
tsarist state with the young Alexander II at its head, mobilized its many bureaus and
offices for purposes of extensive reform. The state could not rely solely on traditional
instruments of tsarist administration. Novel institutions in pursuit of novel objectives
set the tone for the drama that followed. Peasants responded with a mobilization of their
own, acting within traditional village institutions for the most part. When necessary,
villagers were as able as the tsar to invent appropriate new devices, like the well
organized temperance societies. On other occasions they following the lead of ecstatic
leaders, as in the tragic episode of the Bezdna massacre just south of Kazan. The
landowning gentry tried also to influence the course of events through their traditional
noble assemblies, but increasingly moved outside these bodies and into novel organizations
of an incipient civil society. The state tried to force peasants and lure gentry
aristocrats again behind the ramparts of state power, away from the increasingly alluring
voluntary associations.
The dramatic and complex story of social mobilization, the quick rise and fall
of an activist public between 1859 and 1863 is one of the least well understood moments in
modern Russian history. Public enterprise ramified in complex networks, reaching out from
capital cities into the provinces. Satellite organizations sprang up without official
razreshenie [license, approval]. State bureaus with the authority to license these initiatives were
unable to maintain control over this rapid growth of social volunteerism. In fact, state
bureaus flaked members into the ranks of social volunteerism and thus lent greater force
to them.
{_{ An account of social mobilization in this era. }_}
As events unfolded, society began to "mill about", shifting between
state assignments and social volunteerism. Large numbers were losing
contact with traditional group identities. It is easy to understand how one might well
lose faith in traditional social categories watching the activist state dismantle and
transform the life of aristocrats and peasants, playing freely with traditional social
formations.
Less easily anticipated were the great numbers who drifted from state service
into varieties of independent business and professional associations and companies. There
was milling, but quickly many discovered new, shared interests and perspectives. As
customary forms of assigned and natal identity deteriorated, groups began to coalesce in a
wide variety of public associations. One gestating network of allied groups formed along a
spectrum of endeavor associated with the print-media. Scores of bookish societies,
publishing businesses, journals, book dealers, public libraries, schools, and universities
with their professors and students represented something very much like a backbone of a
civil society in embryo.
The state took alarm and launched a counter offensive. The countryside was aflame with peasant revolt, certain gentry leaders just
would not sit down and shut up, Polish Rebellion loomed, mysterious fires raged in the
capital, and more threatening proclamations appeared. The state apparatus itself wavered
as even leading ministerial figures concluded that revolution was imminent. Perhaps this
would be the Russian 1789 or 1848, or maybe a simpler coup d'etat. The state pulled itself
together under the leadership of Interior Minister Petr Valuev and War Minister Dmitrii
Miliutin, and with the solid backing of the Chief Gendarme Vasilii Dolgorukov. Troops
crushed peasant rebellion. Police agencies worked closely with the Interior Minister to
suppress voluntary associations like the Sunday Schools, the Free University, the Chess
Club, the Student Sections of Litfond, student organizations (courts, treasuries,
assemblies, libraries, reading rooms, and the like). The state harassed other societies,
like the committees for the promotion of literacy, the Political-Economic committees of
the Russian Geographic Society and Free Economic Society. It arrested hundreds of
activists, put scores of them on trial, convicted dozens and just administratively exiled
still more, and punished, sometimes with extreme severity, even the most moderate of
independent or oppositional acts.
The state assault on domestic public activism got under way in the months
leading up to the announcement of serf emancipation, intensified in the fateful spring
1861 meetings of the Council of State, and became all-out war in the spring of 1862. The
struggle flared up again in 1866, once the Polish uprising was safely put down. The
revolutionary movement was the result of successful state action against an emerging civil
society or, to put it another way, was the result of failure to pursue social and
political reform along with all those other "great reforms". From the huge,
legal Literary Fund, through the pedagogical societies and schools, the Free University
and Litfond Student Section, the shady, quasi-conspiratorial Chess Club, to the
revolutionary Land and Liberty, Russian public initiative gravitated from open to
underground politics, from reform to revolution. A revolutionary intelligentsia tapped
what sustenance it could from a trampled early blossom of Russian civil society.
***
The state was not monolithic or anonymous, however autocratic in theory or lofty and out of touch with its subjects in practice. The state did not lurk off stage in the unfolding drama; it was firmly planted on the foundations of national life.
{_{ See V. G. Chernukha, Vnutrenniaia politika tsarizma s serediny 50-kh do nachala 80-kh gg. XIX v. (LGR:1978) and her more recent and narrowly focused Pravitel'stvennaia politika v otnoshenii pechati 60--70-e gody XIX veka (LGR:1989).}_}
Often histories of Russian social movements and political opposition put the state off stage, like violence in Greek drama. Taking a metaphor from botany rather than stage architecture, I would suggest that an analysis of Russian social movements without constant attention to the state is a study of blossoms rather than roots.
{_{ Thus Venturi's now classic Il populismo russo (Turino:1952) was badly served by the title affixed to the English translation, Roots of Revolution. To get at the root of the problem we must, to use Theda Skocpol's phrase, "bring the state back in". Theda Skocpol, States and Social Revolutions: A Comparative Analysis of France, Russia, and China (C:UP,1979).}_}
The little word "state", when we are talking about the Russian
imperial state, packages a large and complex network of official posts and institutional
functions intimately fused with an equally complex network of social and economic
relations. The state contained numerous factions squirming in uneasy institutional or
"assigned" association. The state not only claimed autocratic authority within
its own agencies and throughout the social structure, but it had a legally established
position along the full spectrum of volunteer public endeavors, from charity to
manufacturing and trade.
The Emperor, his royal family and court, along with their high titled favorites
and plenipotentiary aides-de-camp, stood at the top of the institutional structure. Around
them gathered the ministerial elite, the sanovniki [grandees] of state service,
like Chief Gendarme and Head of the Third Section of His Majestys Own Chancery
Vasilii Dolgorukov (who actually functioned at the higher and more personal level of one
within the Tsars personal Suite) and Prince Illarion Vasil'chikov, the Governor
General of Kiev Province, military governor of Podolia and Volhynia provinces, and
Commander of the Kiev military district. Around these and others like them large numbers
of state servitors functioned: not only the famous chinovniki [bureaucrats] in the
civil agencies and provincial administration, but also military officers (and the troops
under their command), clergy, and courtiers, all organized within the hierarchies of the
Table of Ranks. Impoverished students and their professors had a functional or assigned
relationship to the towering institution called the state, as did the whole network of
theological seminaries and academies, monasteries and parish churches, and secular
gymnasia and lyceums.
{_{ See N. P. Eroshkin, Istoriia gosudarstvennykh uchrezhdenii dorevoliutsionnoi Rossii (MVA:1983); Krepostnicheskoe samoderzhavie i ego politicheskie instituty (pervaia polovina XIX veka) (MVA:1981), and the earlier handbook Ocherki istorii gosudarstvennykh uchrezhdenii dorevoliutsionnoi Rossii: Posobie dlia uchitelia (MVA:1960).}_}
The state faced the imperative need to "make a better life" for
itself or risk collapse, and thus the Emperor Alexander II and his close advisers launched
the era of uluchshenie byta with the byt of the tsarist state
at the center of attention. In the days after the signing of the Peace of Paris ending the
Crimean War, in March 1856, the imperial state issued a series of announcements which
opened the political drama that followed. The Emperor's public promise that peasants would
be liberated "from above" meant that the gentry-owned serfs, more than one-third
of the population of the Empire, were to see the servile legal system dismantled in the
shortest period of time. The phrase uluchshenie byta therefore meant that
more than twenty one million human beings who had been for at least two centuries the
private property of the landed nobility were to be freed. Perhaps with land and village
institutions intact, perhaps not, no one knew for sure. It therefore also meant that the
most particular possession of more than a half-million Russian gentry--the serfs and about
half the gentry lands--were to be expropriated. Perhaps with compensation, perhaps not, no
one knew that for sure either. Furthermore the exclusive juridical and administrative
powers of noble landlords across the Russian countryside were threatened with destruction.
The conditions of life of the two fundamental social formations [sosloviia] of the
old regime--peasants and nobles--were to be altered almost beyond recognition. Many
radical movements proposed many radical changes in the 19th century, but nothing else this
radical actually happened. Emancipation was the major event of 19th century Russian
history. It is one of the great legal and social events of all times.
The big reform measure, emancipation, appeared to be part of a thorough plan of
national renewal. A commission was formed to consider the overhaul of the burgeoning
bureaucracy, the system of chinovnichestvo. The word
chinovnichestvo
referred to the formal system of comprehensive national administration by state servitors
holding rank--chin--up and down the "Table of Ranks". The Table of Ranks
established appropriate, hierarchical rungs for civilian, military, church, and royal
court servitors. This scandalous system had fallen into shambles long ago, so the pressing
need for reform here was obvious to all.
Addressing another ancient deficiency, plans were laid for judicial reforms
that would place restraints on traditional administrative arbitrariness and promised to
give some limited protection to what are called "civil rights". Clerical reforms
hinted at reversal of the pitiful subordination of the church to the state and the
reconciliation of the state with its vast population of illegal "Old Ritualists"
[Staroobriadtsy; old believers, schismatics]. A commission took up the question of
the Orthodox Christians who had separated themselves from the official church two
centuries earlier. This touched on the spiritual life of not thousands but millions of
Russian subjects.
Plans for educational reform lagged, even though Russian illiteracy had become
a shame among European nations, a serious obstacle to modernization, and possibly a
contributing cause to humiliation in the Crimea. Educational reform was a definite item on
the agenda, but for the longest time officials took no positive steps. Educational
institutions drifted in directions set by professors and students. Society jumped far
ahead of the state as it launched the first nation-wide system of elementary education,
the Sunday schools.
In 1859, the state began deliberations behind closed doors on reforms in local
self-government which were to produce Zemstvos in 1864. Zemstvos were startling
innovations in regional and local self-administration (if not quite self-government). In
time they were established over Russian territory about the size of all the rest of
Europe, territory which for centuries had been accustomed to contradictory extremes of
central administrative control and neglect.
At the heart of the state's own hopes for uluchshenie byta were
the military and financial reforms. It took more than a full decade, but by 1872 the
reforming War Minister Dmitrii Miliutin had achieved his main objectives. Financial reform
was more complicated. Dolgorukov warned Alexander that financial conditions in the Empire
made it impossible for either peasant or landlord to benefit from serf emancipation.
Committees and commissions immediately took up the overhaul of taxation, banking and
fiscal systems; the state took measures to encourage economic modernization.
{_{ V. I. Neupokoev, "Podatnoi vopros v khode reformy 1861 goda", EC.RSR:212-229.}_}
Financial reform aimed at two targets: the backward banking system and the
absence of a unified national budget in Europe's ostensibly most centralized state power.
Commissions were formed to look into the questions of the creation of a state bank and
establishment of legal guidelines for private banks. The state banks were closed down in
1859 and nothing appeared to take their place for several months.
Beyond the agencies of state power, social initiatives were launched to deal
with the problem of low capital accumulation which hindered economic development. Tension
between state control over the national economy and the energies and interests of
privateers complicated and delayed progress in this realm. In May of 1860 the State Bank
was founded, but its capitalization was slight and its salutary influence on the economy
was delayed for years. Inter-ministerial competition blocked easy progress in the realm of
a unified state budget while statist insiders blocked developments in the general
political economy that might have opened things up for broader development.
{_{ On the financial crisis in this period, see V. Ya. Laverychev, Krupnaia burzhuaziia v poreformennoi Rossii, 1861-1900 (MVA: 1974); I. F. Gindin, Gosudarstvennyi bank i ekonomicheskaia politika tsarskogo pravitel'stva (1861-1892 gody) (MVA: 1960); and L. E. Shepelev, Aktsionernye kompanii v Rossii (1973) and Tsarizm i burzhuaziia vo vtoroi polovine XIX veka: Problemy torgovo-promyshlennoi politiki (LGR: 1981); and Michael Florinsky, Russia 2:941-5. In May, 1989, in Philadelphia, Steven Hoch presented suggestive paper on the financial foundations of peasant reform to the NEH Conference on the Great Reforms.}_}
No one had a better view of the emerging crisis than Chief Gendarme Vasilii Dolgorukov. For the Emperor's eyes only, the vast police network which the Third Section dispatched over the entire face of the Empire compiled, digested and summarized intelligence gathered on the material and moral condition of the nation. Dolgorukov was predisposed to attribute Russia's woes to evildoers, to foreign corruption of young minds, and to the machinations of international conspiracies. But he also had a good eye for actuality. Dolgorukov may have known more about the byt of the wide Russian realm than any other individual. Like most effective intelligence and police agencies, the Third Section was in a position to know most about the zhivaia zhizn', even when it had no real intention to make it better. Dolgorukov perceived the outline, at least, of the massive and interlocked range of national problems which could no longer be ignored.
{_{ Dolgorukov's reports are found in GARF (State Archive of the Russian Federation) f. 109, op. 85, ed. khr. 21-34, "Otchet deistviia IIIgo [variation: "3ogo", etc.] Otdeleniia Sobstvennoi Vashego Imperatorskogo Velichestva Kantseliarii i Korpusa Zhandarmov za 1856 [-1869] god" [hereafter: OD3 za ]. On the Third Section, see I. V. Orzhekhovskii, Iz istorii vnutrennei politiki samoderzhaviia v 60--70-kh godakh XIX veka (Gor'kii: 1974); and Samoderzhavie protiv revoliutsionnoi Rossii (1826-1880 gg.) (MVA: 1982). Also see Peter S. Squire, The Third Department (LND: 1968); and Sydney Monas, The Third Section: Police and Society under Nicholas I (Cambridge MA: 1961).}_}
Dolgorukov, the secret police chief, was thus one of the most ardent reformers
of his time. The only question was, whose life did he hope to make better?
He reported that the whole nation suffered from an inadequate system of credit
banks and land banks. Furthermore the national economy found itself in a serious slump. An
excessive influx of paper money, the disappearance of hard currency, and a weakened faith
in joint stock endeavors and in other industrial enterprises: altogether, these had
depressed stock market values, stagnated trade, and caused serious hardship, particularly
for the poor. In addition to all this, in search for means to reestablish faith in state
finances and in the value of Russian currency undermined by the disastrous Crimean War,
the state itself exposed for all to see the faulty foundations of the national credit
system.
{_{ OD3 za 1859 g., ed. khr. 24, p. 190.}_}
***
The Finance Committee, under the watchful eyes of the Tsar and his most
elevated associates, simply had not the strength to raise the central question. Can a
medieval statist economy and hybrid feudal social structure sustain an industrial-age
military establishment? The long-term answer to that fearful and largely unasked question
was to be given in World War One, and it was to be negative. The short term answer
appeared to be yes, so long as one discrete but massive change takes place, the
emancipation 22 million serfs, plus several careful, measured collateral adjustments. In
the belief that the answer was yes, the state launched its reforms, guided by a formula
that was to destroy it in the long run: push antiquated systems to their limits in order
to modernize state power.
The crisis trickled down from the top and was first felt as a crisis in the
system of taxation, when peasants resisted increases in the taxation of spirituous
liquors, and then as a banking crisis, when investors withdrew from a crumbling system of
state banks. The state doubled the excise on vodka, leaned hard on flimsy banking
institutions, and heated the snarled and uncoordinated budgetary system to the melting
point. Peasants went on strike against vodka, which amounted to a tax rebellion, and
investors lost confidence in the banks and withdrew their money in something of a banking
run. The nation--or at least the state--tottered on the brink of financial ruin.
In the winter of 1862, Russia negotiated a fifteen million pound loan from
England. This was supplemented that spring with a loan squeezed out of the Rothschild
banking house. These loans applied to redemption of the money that had rolled off the
state printing presses in recent times to cover expenditures. Together these loans were an
effective shot in the arm which carried the state through the short-term crisis and
emboldened it in the direction of resistance to social pressure for more extensive reform.
With time the broader reform agenda suggested in the expanding social movement of the day
was rejected and silenced, and the limited official reforms began to have their effect.
Russian finances were never put on a very sound footing, but the immediate and severe
crisis of 1857-1862 was weathered.
Short-term success can sometimes jeopardize long-term success. It has been
widely noted that nothing was accomplished in this dramatic reform era to alter in
principle the power and authority of the autocrat. In other words, the one biggest
political or institutional problem, tsarist power, received no serious, open governmental
attention, even though everyone thought and whispered about it. The memory of Mikhail
Loris-Melikov "constitutional" proposal on the very eve of Alexander IIs
assassination in March, 1881, is largely a legend designed to sweeten the poignancy of the
Tsar-liberators assassination and to strengthen the useful myth that revolutionists
prevented the tsar-batiushka from giving a constitution to his deserving subjects.
It has not been so widely noted that the one biggest social problem was also
neglected. Like an untreated wound surrounded by bandages of reform, we observe the
dysfunctional social/service class structure. Autocracy and its antiquated but essential
foundation--the formal social estates or sosloviia and the formal civil service
system or chin--emerged from the reform era unaltered. The two basic medieval
social estates were utterly transformed--the most numerous, the serfs, and the most
privileged, the gentry masters--but with renewed zeal the state continued to protect the
larger system, of which the now transformed estates were components.
{_{ A specialist on the politics of Alexander II has summarized the situation: "To overcome Russia's military weakness he [Alexander] had to smash the rigid social system which had been created for the same reason it was about to be destroyed--to provide the state with the men and money to wage war" [Rieber, Politics:25]. I would amend that trenchant summary in only one way. The reforms did not "smash the rigid social system", they transformed it in such a way as to accommodate the inescapable need to modernize state power yet to preserved it everywhere possible.}_}
The autocratic state laid claim to authority even in the intimate details of village life and on the manors and within the institutions of the rural gentry. As a corporate personality, the state was inseparably bound up with all legally recognized social formations, not just peasants and gentry. Over the long duration, the rights and duties of the larger set of social aggregates were shaped and reshaped to suit the interests of autocracy. From one perspective, peasants were born peasants and nobles were born nobles, as in a recognizable "feudal" social system. From another perspective, the rights and duties of peasants and nobles, as well as those of the other formal social estates, were designed and redesigned by the state.
{_{ Richard Hellie, Enserfment and Military Change in Muscovy (Chicago:1971) measures the degree to which even serfdom was created to meet state needs and was itself, to use my terms, something of an assigned group with natal or heritable qualities. See also Robert Crummey, Aristocrats and Servitors: The Boyar Elite in Russia, 1613-1689 (P:UP,1983); and Robert Edward Jones, The Emancipation of the Russian Nobility, 1762-1785 (P:UP,1973).}_}
The birth-right and "natal" identity of serfs and landlords were now
the targets of autocratic reform. These two fundamental social formations were once again
to be assigned new identities under the authority of the state and in line with state
needs. The social formations thus bridged two different categories of self-identity: birth
and state designation. In other words, the social formations were both natal and assigned.
The state also sustained a formal institutional or assigned presence in the intellectual
and business life of the whole empire. Through censorship and an elaborate system of
licensing and regulation [razreshenie and reviziia], the state kept its hand
in the affairs of nearly every enterprise and profession.
There was no other state like this in the modern European experience. The state
expressed itself in powerful institutions staffed by a bulky network of assigned groups,
and in social formations that arranged huge groupings of imperial subjects in increasingly
dysfunctional ranks and files. Whether groups of considerable continuity and duration,
like chinovniks, military officers, soldiers, priests, and professors, or groups of
briefer association, like students, or groups of an irregular sort, like those under
surveillance, under arrest, imprisoned, and in exile, or even the formal social estates,
like peasants (who paid taxes and otherwise provided servile labor or rents) and nobles
(those who served the state directly), all of these groups were shaped by official and
institutional assignment.
Half of the peasants were "state peasants" and their lives had been
transformed already by a semi-secret "in-house" emancipation in the 1830s which
left them still the laborers of the autocratic administration. The tsar was the head of a
gentry landowning family, of sorts. The royal familys possessions in land and labor
were distinguished from state possessions. Royal or "udel" serfs were
emancipated only in the 1860s (leaving the royal family in personal possession of lands
almost equal in extent to the combined territories of Austria, Prussia, and France). In
the time of Catherine II nobles had themselves been "emancipated" from service
to the tsarist state, but those who drifted from state service did not for the most part
form anything like a vital and independent civilian social force or civil society. Those
who drifted loose found themselves in a famous and pitiful condition of
"superfluity" which confirms rather than alters the picture of compounded
natal/assigned condition of Russian society.
{_{ See Nicholas V. Riasanovsky, A Parting of the Ways: Government and the Educated Public in Russia, 1801-1855 (O:UP,1976).}_}
***
The state wavered dangerously as it embarked on reform after Crimea, but it
continued to push ahead with organizational innovations. Shortly after the publication of
new liberal censorship regulations allowing more glasnost' [public deliberation]
with respect to peasant reform and the convocation of provincial gentry committees to
deliberate on it, the state created a Secret Committee, headed by General Yakov Ivanovich
Rostovtsev, second generation service noble, grandson of a merchant, yet now the Emperor's
closest adviser. The clear purpose was to remove the whole business from both public and
bureaucratic deliberation, to neutralize the reformed censorship and local participation
of the landowners, but also to free the process from normal bureaucratic procedures.
Beginning with great promises of change, Alexander soon found himself forced to retreat
and to compromise with a deeply divided governmental machinery. Divisions within the
tsarist administration with respect to the extent, pace, and character of reform
threatened the stability of state power from within. Even without external social
resistance, the reforms shook the old regime.
As early as 1857, Dolgorukov noticed that the state itself was generating some
of its most dangerous opposition. Dolgorukov understood that this was to be an era of
reform, and thus competent reformist ministers were to be esteemed. Yet Dolgorukov also
understood that the state could lose control of the process. In the early phases,
Dolgorukov lavished praise on the reform-minded Nikolai Miliutin (brother of the future
War Minister Dmitrii), the driving force for reform within the Interior Ministry.
Dolgorukovs praise cut both ways. Nikolai Miliutin, he said, is the most capable and
educated administrator in the Interior Ministry. "He has traveled abroad, is
committed to Western ideas, and is a well-known participant in the creation of the local
well-ordered [City] Duma, in which a special General Duma with Western representational
forms has been established, according to his plan." The phrase "Western
representational forms" allowed Dolgorukov a useful double entendre. Dolgorukov knew
and shared Alexander's revulsion for representational forms or any sort of
institutionalized participatory politics.
{_{ "Ocherk Glavnykh Upravlenii", in OD3 za 1857 g., ed. khr. 22, pp. 85ff, esp. p. 86.}_}
By "representational forms" Dolgorukov could not have meant
"democratic forms" because they all--Alexander II, Dolgorukov and Nikolai
Miliutin--despised active participation of the public in governmental policy. Dolgorukov
meant "ministerial self-management and other forms of bureaucratic independence from
autocratic control", an institutional innovation that Miliutin would have liked but
one that Alexander and Dolgorukov feared above all others. Dolgorukov, it must be
remembered, was the head of the Third Section, one of the surviving irregular and
arbitrary autocratic institutions from the time of Nicholas I.
Dolgorukov took it upon himself to watch over the sprawling state apparatus and
keep Alexander informed about its readiness to participate "in the current epoch of
state reorganization". This is a time, said Dolgorukov, which more than any other
requires great technical and moral soundness within the administration. The Third Section
set itself the task of nothing less than measuring the potential and monitoring the
progress of about thirteen ministerial bureaucracies participating "in the movement
throughout the whole state system". These long and careful reports were intended to
keep the Emperor in touch with the political and intellectual condition of the whole
nation. Dolgorukov accepted the reform mission of Alexander II, and was particularly
concerned that the state--under the firm direction of the Tsar--remain the sole agent of
reform, if not the sole profiteer. He scrutinized all branches of imperial administration,
measuring and reporting on their "readiness" to meet the challenge. His reports
describe a mounting despair as he came to see that "society" showed a
willingness and enthusiasm for reform superior to that of the state apparatus. In the
thick of public unrest in 1861-62, he feared that the state was losing its control over
affairs and that society was gaining the upper hand.
***
The imperial bureaucracy had a lot of power, wealth, and independence from society below and seemed sometimes to be independent of the autocrat above.
{_{ "By 1855 the Ministry of Internal Affairs and other ministries had attained a position of momentary semi-independence from traditional social estates and from the emperor himself." Daniel T. Orlovsky, The Limits of Reform: The Ministry of Internal Affairs in Imperial Russia,1802-1881 (C:HUP,1981):198.}_}
Several developments in the early reform era suggested that some elements
within the state bureaucracy might be ready to strike an alliance with an emerging civil
society against the unlimited autocracy.
Only a small fraction of the 280 most prominent public activists of the reform
era lived a life independent of state service.
{_{ Kimball Files, PBL.}_}
Russian civil society in its infancy was to a large degree a byproduct of an autocratic, bureaucratic state in crisis.
***
In 1857 Alexander created a new State Council which he convened and chaired,
and which he intended to assume direct administration over the larger reform process,
subordinating the Council of Ministers and other more regular bodies to a novel
institution more easily maneuvered in uncharted waters of reform.
These innovations, taken together, worked to strengthen the imperial autocrat's
hand and free it from the unwieldy and untrustworthy machinery of everyday government. In
this the Autocrat and his closest advisers showed as much inventiveness as any of the
leaders of the burgeoning social movement. At the same time these innovations put
independent social forces at a greater distance from the business of administration and
strengthened the ability of the tsar to deal "administratively" with bureaucrats
or with subjects when they did get out of hand. The Autocrat had no choice but to mobilize
his bureaucracy and, to some degree, his subjects to the tasks of reform. Many signs
indicated that moral discontent deepened as political ambition leapt upward in the
chanceries and bureaus, in the barracks and officers' quarters, even in the parishes, and
on the university campuses.
Service in the autocratic state and the achievement of a better life came
increasingly to seem contradictory to great numbers of educated and capable Russians on
state payroll, and this in conjunction with rumblings in the universities, lycea,
gymnasia, cadet corps, academies and institutes, even in the seminaries, out of which the
next generation of state servitors would have to come. With irregular agencies and
unlimited power on the alert, Alexander sought in every way to restrain and channel the
molten energy which he was compelled to release. Thus the imperial state equipped itself
with irregular institutions styled originally in the time of Nicholas and designed like
asbestos gloves to handle hot objects.
***
In the spring of 1860 Dolgorukov reported to Alexander II in a tone of nervous anticipation. "In a word", he wrote, "all parts of the state apparatus are more or less going through changes, and although perhaps Russia might anticipate a bright future, her current transitional condition very naturally gives rise to danger and negation".
{_{ OD3 za 1859 g., ed. khr. 24, p. 190 ob.}_}
Reporting again on "the movement of the national spirit" in 1861, he warned the autocrat that with each passing year the Russian national spirit [narodnyi dukh] strives more vigorously "for guarantees and extensions of civil rights, for the expansion of the material well-being of the nation [narod] which that implies, and for the broadening of the sphere of its intellectual activity in accordance with contemporary liberal principles". Despite censorship, said the chief gendarme, journals express themselves too freely, even dangerously.
{_{ OD3 za 1860 g., ed. khr. 25, p. 32.}_}
Dolgorukov understood that everything depended on the successful mobilization
of the ministries for the business of reform. He also understood that success very likely
hinged on whether civilian and military servitors were mobilized within or beyond the
ramparts of state power. Large numbers of the very best of these state servitors came to
think and act like they preferred mobilization within something like a "civil
society" rather than within the autocratic service state. This was as true of
"conservatives" as of "liberals". In this way the main lines of
struggle were drawn along social-institutional lines rather than along ideological lines.
The struggle was between the state, especially the sanovnik insiders, and the
subjects of that state, especially an intense minority called obshchestvo. Radicalism,
liberalism, conservatism: these were not significant distinctions as the crisis unfolded.
This or that "ism" might embellish the struggle, but the struggle was at heart
institutional and social, what the nineteenth century called
"political-economic".
The line between state and society had never been a clear one in Russian
history. State institutions and offices overlapped with social designations like nowhere
else in Europe. This overlap helped create a revolutionary situation which exhibits many
of the characteristics of an "internecine" struggle within the ranks of an
intense minority, ready to rule either in the traditional bureaus of autocratic power or
in transformed institutions of a more public and voluntaristic sort.
Thus a weakened and disordered state launched the reform epoch in order to make
a better life for itself and in the hope that this might benefit certain others as well.
The state's own emancipation plan was to be firmly implemented and other administrative
reforms, including the ultimate military reforms, moved ahead. But along the way the state
fell back from thoroughgoing social and political reform, and in the process provoked a
revolutionary situation. The state was not the only force at work here, nor was it
independent of the larger trends of macro-economic life, but the autocratic state was the
most powerful and active ingredient of Russian imperial social life.
***
On 19 March 1856, Tsar Alexander II issued a most august manifesto exhorting his subjects to devote themselves strenuously to "educational and every other form of useful activity [poleznoi deiatelnosti]". All social classes responded. A new printing and publishing house built its name on the central concept of the tsarist manifesto, Tovarishchestvo "Obshchestvennaia Polza" ["Good of Society" Company] and functioned as something very much like a voluntary society dedicated to the promotion of literature and pedagogy, responding to the Tsars ostensible invitation. Nikolai Vodov, Grigorii Pokhitonov, and Aleksandr Strugovshchikov were founders. Nikolai Pisarevskii was an associate director.
{_{ Obshchestvennaia Polza, Tridtsat....}_}
Vodov and Pokhitonov were among the 77 Founders of Litfond, nominated by the
"patriarch and Mathusala" of Russian journalism, Andrei Kraevskii, while
Strugovshchikov was nominated in February 1862 by Petr Lavrov. Vodov associated
"Obshchestvennaia Polza" with an expanding, nation-wide literacy movement
headquartered in the Third Department of the venerable Imperatorskoe Volnoe ekonomicheskoe obshchestvo [Imperial Free Economic Society, or VEO].
Free-wheeling pedagogical and book-trade initiatives extended over the Empire with
surprising speed, all in response to the Tsars expressed wishes. Pisarevskii was
soon rocking the capital as free-enterprising editor of a most unlikely periodical, the
official War Ministry newspaper, Russkii invalid [Russian Veteran (military
pensioner)]. Pisarevskii took that publication further down the road of social initiative
and independence than the War Ministry was willing to tolerate. One of Dmitrii
Miliutins first acts as War Minister in late 1861 was to appoint Pisarevskii to the
sensitive editorial post, but within a year he fired him. The newspaper had become a
prominent defender of extensive institutional and social reform, pushing the implications
of Alexanders invitation to society to their limits.
Nine months after Alexanders invitation to society to get cracking with
"educational and every other form of useful activity", in December 1856,
Vladimir Lamanskii came down from Saint Petersburg to Moscow to talk up his project for a
Russkaia Matitsa ili narodnyi kapital [Russian Maçica or national
wealth]. This project was philosophical and learned, but the quality that distinguished it
in all minds was Lamanskiis linkage of cultural creativity with national prosperity
and his call for action on a scale seldom before contemplated. Lamanskii's audience in
Moscow, made up of Slavophiles and other enthusiasts of the Russian renaissance--for
example, Konstantin Aksakov and Mikhail Pogodin, and the literary or bookish figures who
gathered around the entrepreneurs Aleksandr Koshelev and Dmitrii Chizhov--understood that
the project was a model for the solid, organized actualization of the scattered potential
they felt among themselves.
{_{ BJP,15:294-302.}_}
The Lamanskii project addressed three problems at once: disunity among the
literate and learned stratum of the population, their isolation from the wider population
of the Empire, and ignorance or backwardness among the laboring masses. The project
offered to improve the wealth of the nation as a whole and at the same time provide a
better life for that amorphous group that would soon begin to call itself the
intelligentsiia. The project offered solutions to the disunited and yet fettered qualities of the received
traditions of soslovie and chin, and pointed the way toward appropriate structures of
self-actualization for writers and scholars. The project presented for the first time a
model of voluntary social action on a national level toward the creation of a ramified
system of secular education and scholarship in all branches of technical and cultural
learning. The model furthermore lent itself to easy generalization on broader national
political issues. The goal was no less than a transformation of the existing civilization,
out of the hand of officials, and a realization of a "Russian civilization", at
the hand of a native intelligentsia. It was an indirect assault on the Uvarov legacy of
"Official Nationality" and the Nicholas trend toward a statist ideology. It was
a direct appeal to a nascent civil society to declare its independence and unite with the
whole nation in the name of universal science and nativist tradition.
The state and its church had until recent decades monopolized public
expressions of truth and beauty and had controlled their dissemination. Education and
censorship were housed in the same ministry. Writing, reading, speaking, listening, and
thus "thinking" too, were all bound up with publishing and distributing the
printed word. No more sensitive and formal moment of distribution or consumption of the
printed word can be found than in the schools. In the reform era a budding civil society
assumed significant responsibilities for founding schools and teaching in them. In this
way another natural professional interest of the public came into conflict with the state
in an area where the state was accustomed to something very much like a monopoly. The
clerical and lay educational establishments responsible for that near monopoly had been
for years drifting. When social initiatives rushed into the field of popular education, an
old dog in the manger was roused.
The only substantial issue of contention was about who should be the agent of
enlightenment: the church, the state, and/or civil society. Literacy therefore was both a
pedagogical and a political issue. When combined with the powerful 19th century belief in
progress, science, and learning, literacy also found a niche in any number of the more
visionary schemes of that time. Also, just at that point, the promotion of literacy
attached to the mundane needs of an emerging intelligentsia. Teaching was an occupation,
like literature and journalism, to which people of learning might turn with greatest
success. The promotion of literacy had an immediate professional meaning to obshchestvo in
search of a better life. How very flattering to think that becoming a teacher, librarian,
book dealer, publisher, or writer, making a career for yourself, also promoted the better
world that so many perceived ahead in this most optimistic 19th century.
In October 1859 the head of the Kiev regional educational office N. I. Pirogov
granted permission to create a Sunday school near Kiev. Pirogov was one of the purely
positive heroes produced for Russia in the miserable Crimean War. A founder of the Russian
Red Cross and a tireless surgeon and administrator of medical services in that vicious
war, he now moved into higher educational administration and in 1858 was appointed
Superintendent of the Kiev education district reporting directly to the Education Ministry
in Petersburg. This gave him responsibility for all formal secondary and higher education
in the south central region of the European empire. Student organizations at Khar'kov and
Kiev universities flourished under his administration. The school which Pirogov approved
in Kiev was operated by a group under the leadership of Platon Pavlov, professor of
history at Kiev University, and made up of seventeen students there, plus one student from
the Kiev Spiritual Academy.
The "Sunday school movement" is often taken to have been launched by
this group.
{_{ Pirogov claimed to be the originator of the Sunday school movement, a claim bravely put in a defense of the institution a few months after the state suppressed it [Pirogov, "O voskresnykh shkolakh":464]. On the movement, see Reginald E. Zelnik, Labor and Society in Tsarist Russia: The Factory Workers of St. Petersburg, 1855-1870 (Stanford: 1971); M. K. Lemke, Ocherki osvoboditel'nogo dvizheniia "shestidesiatykh godov" po neizdannym dokumentam s portretami [hereafter LOD] (SPB: 1908): 399-438; G. I. Ionova, "Voskresnye shkoly v gody pervoi revoliutsionnoi situatsii (1859-1861)", Istoricheskie zapiski 57 (1956): 177-209; R. A. Taubin, "Revoliutsionnaia propaganda v voskresnykh shkolakh Rossii v 1860-1862 godakh", Voprosy istorii 8 (1959); Ya. I. Linkov, "Voskresnye shkoly i russkoi revoliutsionnoe dvizhenie 1860-kh godov", Istoricheskii arkhiv 6 (1956): 176-79; Raznochinno-demokraticheskoe dvizhenie v Povolzh'e i na Urale 1 ["A. I. Gertsen, N. P. Ogarev i obshchestvennoe dvizhenie v Povolzh'e i na Urale"] (KZN: 1964).}_}
It is clear, however, that Pirogov and Pavlov were only two of many pedagogical wildflowers sprouting in the field of education.
{_{ A participant in the movement wrote later that by the time Pavlov got underway a wide variety of privately sponsored elementary schools were holding classes, for children, girls, adults, and no longer just "Sunday", but other selected days and evenings as well [Stasov,Stasova:86-116].}_}
Their importance stems less from their being first or second on the field and more from the fact that they were the first in the cross-hairs of state reaction against public initiative in elementary education. Police officials arrested several Kharkov students in February, 1860, and over the next year began to fabricate an elaborate conspiratorial image of these young activists, designed to incriminate the self-organizational and particularly the educational initiatives of students in the south of Russia. Pirogov was fired in March, 1861. One year later Pavlov was arrested and immediately sent into administrative (non-trial) exile. At the beginning, Pavlov stayed only five more weeks in Kiev, then set off to the capital city Petersburg to accept a teaching post at the prestigious School of Jurisprudence in the Law Ministry. He took with him a vague plan to create a national Sunday school movement, blissfully unaware of his eventual fate, inspired by the thought that he was on a mission consecrated by tsar-batiushka himself.
***
The most significant and misunderstood of all Alexanders invitations to
action came in the fall of 1857. At that time the Tsar invited committees elected in
dvorianskie sobraniia [provincial noble assemblies] to deliberate on peasant reform. No parallel
gesture had been made toward peasant assemblies. Freed peasants were likely to come into
possession of about one half of all private farmland, and furthermore the peasant
deliberative assembly, mirskoi skhod, was somehow expected to
become a fundamental administrative and judicial institution at the lowest
level, replacing the landlord. But it would never have occurred to the tsar to
invite peasants or their deputies to deliberate and to advise him on these vital
public issues. For one thing, the peasant assembly was not recognized in law
with the firmness of the noble assembly. And the tsar was, after all, an
aristocrat, not a peasant. Yet the contrast in the way the emperor treated these
two social formations is not as striking as the similarity. The salient fact of
the matter is this: the state had no real plans for independent deliberation or
administration in either dvorianskie sobraniia or mirskie skhody.
From his post on high, Tsar-batiushka was prepared to grant to gentry but a
touch of active, institutional involvement. Provincial noble landowners often
misunderstood just this point. Alexander's invitation was taken in many gentry assemblies
to grant greater local initiative than intended. Within traditional corporate institutions
some gentry thus thought themselves empowered to slow or prevent reform, others thought to
hasten or expand reform. In either case, pulling back or pushing forward, these noble
assemblies and related committees and deputies represent a second phase of political
opposition in the era, following on the heels of the peasant temperance movement.
{_{ Discussion of gentry politics depends on Terence Emmons, The Russian Landed Gentry and Peasant Emancipation (Cambridge: 1968) and Daniel Field, The End of Serfdom: Nobility and Bureaucracy in Russia, 1855-1861 (Cambridge, Mass.: 1976). Emmons is more interested than Field in the institutional and political life of the gentry. Field sees gentry more in terms of tactics and positions taken with respect to emancipation up to its enactment in 1861. I speak here of gentry pulling and pushing. Field concentrates on gentry who pulled back, Emmons on those who pushed forward. The revolutionary implications of mobilized conservative or reactionary opinion are explored in Friedrich Diestelmeier, Soziale Angst: konservative Reaktionen auf liberale Reform-politik in Russland unter Alexander II. (1855-1866) (Frankfurt a. M., Bern, and NYC: 1985). See also A. P. Korelin, Dvorianstvo v poreformennoi Rossii 1861-1904 gg.: sostav, chislennost', korporativnaia organizatsiia (MVA:1979), esp. 235-53, re. noble assemblies. Svatikov, Obshchestvennoe dvizhenie:3-21 still serves as an informative and compact statement on gentry politics.}_}
Gentry mobilization in their assemblies and through their deputies appears to have been foredoomed. On 21 April 1858 Alexander II made his decision to put gentry committees at a significant distance from the actual decision-making process, to "...disallow any wide-ranging initiative by the gentry on the fundamentals of peasant emancipation."
{_{ RSR.KM:190-1; Emmons, Gentry:209-10.}_}
In March, 1859, an Editing Commission was formed, headed by Rostovtsev. A grandson of the merchant soslovie had become arbiter of the fate of peasant and noble sosloviia alike. These things depended on favorable proximity to the interests of the tsarist elite themselves, not social status. On 23 October 1859, Rostovtsev reminded Alexander of their controlling strategy: The state will create a social order like nowhere else in Europe. "To this task of state (and not to any idylic aspiration to promote peasant welfare) even the interests of aristocracy were subordinated."
{_{ Zakharova, Samoderzhavie:197.}_}
Gentry landowners, like peasants, were mobilized by state-initiated reform. Out
of that process came the remarkable proclamations of the Tver gentry. Ex-serfs and
ex-serfowners were products of the same political process. But a triumphant union of
peasants with the rest of society against the crown proved to be just a dream or
nightmare, nothing more. The state overcame peasant resistance, but a constant rumble from
the countryside rattled ministry windows in the cities. And soon the state had to quell
disorder in the midst of other social formations. Like peasants, gentry concentrated on
maximizing their position within traditional organizations, and, like peasants, they
failed. Failure of traditional corporate or NATAL institutions to meet social and
political needs created an organizational vacuum which nobles, more often than peasants,
sought to fill with novel forms of VOLUNTARY association.
A famous but minuscule number of gentry aristocrats seized on new and
extravagant revolutionary identities. Young noble Petr Zaichnevskii's father was a retired
colonel and gentry landowner. As a second-year student at Moscow University in the winter
of 1861, young Petr was active in student kruzhoks. He drew notice of police when he
participated in a spontaneous demonstration in Moscow, a memorial for Poles killed by
Russian troops in Warsaw. When the school year came to a close in June, in the same weeks
that Kavelin went to Samara to negotiate with his ex-serfs, Petr set out on horseback for
a mad summer of barn-storming, revolutionary agitation on his way home to his family
estates in Orel Province, about 200 miles south of Moscow. He signaled his new identity
even in the red blouse he now wore, and delivered reckless, theatrical speeches to polite
peasants. The dashing young aristocrat rebel wrote bold letters back to Moscow in which he
chided more cautious associates. He detailed wild rumors he heard about Bezdna and other
peasant uprisings. He saw these events as components of an unfolding pan-European
liberation. He was gladdened to see that the "red banner" now was unfurled in
Russia.
This 18-year-old was under a quixotic spell of world revolutionary
transformation worthy of Police Chief Dolgorukov's own fevered imagination. This
difference was that Zaichnevskii fell into his spell as a way to escape the legacy of a
dying class, while Dolgorukov fell into his as a way to justify harsh measures against all
independent efforts to escape the dying systems of soslovie and chin.
Only a few miles out of Moscow, in Podol'sk, Zaichnevskii came unhinged while
attending a ceremonial opening of negotiations between a great landlord and his ex-serfs.
Prince Aleksei Obolenskii, Moscow Provincial Governor and sanovnik of the old regime,
surrounded by priests and local Peace Arbitrators, addressed villagers. Obolenskii
recommended the newly appointed Peace Arbitrators to the elected representatives of his
ex-serfs. "Earlier I was your father and protector, now, they are. In me you earlier
found a barin [feudal lord] and defender, but now you will find that in them."
{_{ 1922:KrA#1:270f; KzmI:180-9.}_}
One is tempted to imagine the thoughts of Zaichnevskii as he witnessed this
decisive turning point in the fate of his own soslovie, as he watched Obolenskii discard
the authority of the barin. Here Obolenskii, the crafty grandee insider, handed
over traditional gentry power and privilege to a novel institution which was assigned an
unprecedented task of negotiating settlements with elected representatives of ex-serfs.
The young visionary Zaichnevskii then took the platform with a speech in which he asserted
that Arbitrators were unnecessary. The land already belonged to peasants. If landowners
don't volunteer it to peasants, peasants should take it. Rather than transfer allegiance
from gentry to Arbitrator, peasants should cease to cooperate with any masters.
Zaichnevskii did presume that peasants should listen to him, and his letters reported that
elders appeared to agree with him. He did not relate how Obolenskii reacted. The
possibility of revolutionary leadership served Zaichnevskii as a substitute for the
leading role of his gentry class in the centuries prior to Obolenskiis casual
relinquishment.
Other episodes followed on the road to Orel in which flamboyant Zaichnevskii
raised toasts to revolutionary socialism and the memory of 1848. He praised the obshchina,
the superiority of which lay "in dependence of government officials on their
obshchestvo
[society], their responsibility to it". The essence of the obshchina was
"election and answerability of officials to the mir". If this is good for
peasants, said Zaichnevskii, it must be "the very best for all of society". He
also praised communal authority and condemned "the injustice of personal and
heritable ownership of the land". However, his main accent was on authorities chosen
by the people, in contrast to Arbitrators chosen by the elite and manipulated by grandee
princes. Only programs designed by the people can fill the people's needs.
{_{ PPR:17-19; KzmI:196-7, see also 323.}_}
He was soon arrested in Orel. Showing a braggadocio in his interrogation every
bit as reckless as his speeches, he compromised his Moscow associates, exposing them to
quick arrest. Tireless organizer and true guiding light of the student kruzhok, Perikl
Argiropulo, was taken to jail and soon died there. In prison in the spring of 1862
Zaichnevskii wrote, pretty much on his own inspiration, one of the most famous and
inflammatory pamphlets of the day, "Young Russia". The pamphlet was very nearly
universally denounced, right and left, even by his own associates back at Moscow
University.
Zaichnevskii was a brilliant singularity, but still might be said to reflect
something fundamental about these years. He sought and found a new and satisfactory
self-definition to replace an inherited but emasculated natal identity, which he could not
bear to see insulted by Governor Obolenskii before his very eyes. Not many gentry were
able to react with Zaichnevskii's impulsiveness. Most just hunkered down. But a
significant body of gentry came to life and, so to speak, gussied themselves up in more
reserved models of Zaichnevskii red blouse.
The social process in which state servitors were first mobilized within their
bureaus and then gravitated beyond the ramparts of the autocratic state (as in the case of
Nikolai Serno-Solov'evich) was joined by a similar process in which gentry were first
mobilized within traditional corporate institutions and then gravitated beyond these into
innovative voluntary associations. Significant numbers experienced this larger process of
mobilization which soon represented an actual threat to autocracy greater than all the
Zaichnevskies.
In times like these, Dolgorukov said more than once, it is altogether natural
that ill-intentioned or misled individuals should be inspired to acts of political
madness. If there are noblemen or gentry among the political opposition, it is because
they have "abandoned their agrarian unity for the arena of politics".
{_{ OD3 za 1861 g., ed. khr. 26, p. 217 ob.; DCh:119.}_}
Dolgorukov felt vindicated by that singular comet Zaichnevskii, but he had
little inkling of just how badly "agrarian unity" had been broken throughout the
ranks of the gentry. Understandably, he refused to grant the possibility that "the
arena of politics" might be the very best place to create a new and better
"agrarian unity". He refused because he sensed that the agrarian unity implied
in gentry projects, even the most modest of them, could not be created except out of the
hide of the state.
Reform eras are always colored by "pathological manifestations", he
said, sustaining his mood of reassurance and minimization. But at the same time he
emphasized that strong measures had to be taken. Dolgorukov defined the enemy as a well
organized clutch of rootless writers and intellectuals, gathered in Litfond auxiliaries,
Chess Club, and other voluntary societies. In other words, his sharp policeman's eye had
not been altogether blinded by the nightmare of world revolution or the useful
Zaichnevskii episode. He saw the actual process of social mobilization in detail. But he
conceptualized it as an alien growth, inspired by world revolutionary ideologists from
abroad and growing like a cancer on the otherwise healthy body politic. With close
attention he followed the momentum of public mobilization out of ministries and gentry
assemblies into voluntary societies, into obshchestvo. He saw the first innovative
associations created by civil society beginning to cope with all the change. And what is
critical here is this: He saw these organizations as symptoms rather than cure of the
broken "agrarian unity". He sought to embitter the Emperor's thinking about
these novel organizations, and to draw his attention away from the pitiful realities of
traditional social formations.
However weak and short-lived the gentry phase of public reaction to reform, it
generated a significant opposition and quickened mobilization of a wider public. Professor
Kavelin found himself, willy-nilly, at the center of turmoil in Litfond and university
disturbances. The latifundia agriculturalist Koshelev published tracts abroad like an
underground conspirator. Nikolai Serno-Solovevich spiraled out of government service
toward staunch oppositional politics. Aleksei Unkovskii and other gentry continued to play
an important role after emancipation, but by then their institutional base in gentry
committees had dissolved and in any event their political horizon had lifted above the
provincial level. Defeated in this great struggle, both Unkovskii and Golovachev abandoned
the countryside and drifted into careers in journalism and other non-agricultural
pursuits.
{_{ "Many nobles saw the redemption of plowland as a means of cashing in their chips--liquidating their estates as a form of enterprise with minimal financial loss" [Field, End:220].}_}
From emancipation onward, their actions were taken beyond their provincial
domiciles, within a broad context of national political crisis.
When the Emperor called on gentry to join him in this exciting time of change
he had in mind a pro-forma gathering of gentry acquiescence, if not approval, of state
initiatives. He would not tolerate either pushing or pulling. Much turmoil can be traced
to gentry refusal to accept Alexander's narrow invitation. Eventually, Alexander ignored,
even seemed to betray, the very gentry committees he had encouraged to study and make
recommendations on the question of emancipation. A parallel with the peasant sense of
betrayal, once they read or heard the prolix and indecisive Emancipation Manifesto, is
inescapable. The Tsar was thought to have called forth wide social and political
discussion, then he appeared to throttle it. Alexander, like his Chief policeman
Dolgorukov, did not understand changes then underway in the ranks of the best born, his
own fellow aristocrats. And he could not in his wildest imagination have foretold nor
could he comprehend the eruption of other social forces into what he had expected to be a
cordial deliberation among wellborn gentlefolk.
The Emperor responded to unrest among gentry committees as if it were nothing
more than an expression of narrow, reactionary self-interest [intérêts particuliers]
opposed to the general welfare [bien général]. Using just these phrases, he wrote
to Bariatinskii in December, 1858, that gentry committees were shot through with
"ignorance and self-interest which is harmful to general welfare". Idealizing
Tsar-batiushka in his own cunning way, Alexander implied that he had no self-interest and
was concerned always with the general welfare.
{_{ Alfred J. Rieber, The Politics of Autocracy: Letters of Alexander II to Prince A. I. Bariatinskii, 1857-1864 (Paris-The Hague: 1966):126. Rieber emphasizes the sluggish and self-centered qualities of gentry politics [29 and 35].}_}
Alexander's view was not altogether accurate, or perhaps not altogether honest.
As time went on, it became clear that, by striving for "narrow soslovie
interests", gentry did not distinguish themselves from other actors on the historical
scene, including the state. Through their assemblies gentry furthermore formulated
programs that often contained clearer expression of their own, and of national interests,
than one finds in deliberations of state committees. Gentry sought ways to combine who
they were, their intérêts particuliers, with the bien général without
intending serious damage to either. In this regard they were no more or less
"selfish" than the state and its apparatus, or than any other factional
interests caught up in the era of reform. It was not clear at first, but it was the state
that had the power to restrain gentry action, not the other way around.
The gentry's social and institutional base was too weak to force a Magna Carta
on Alexander II. And the state was too strong. Throughout the months of gentry
mobilization, Dolgorukov made some effort to shield Alexander II from the full scope of
the political challenge they represented. More than any other leading figure in central
administration, Dolgorukov strove to exonerate traditional class formations from any
essential culpability in the political crisis. He did not want to assign positive
political intent to the great mass of the people, or to any traditional soslovie. Seeking
causes of "criminal acts" of rebellion which gripped the Empire in 1862, he
reported to the Emperor that rebellion flowed from abroad and had no roots in Russian
"native soil" [literally, narodnykh istochnikakh or "popular
sources].
{_{ OD3 za 1863 g., ed. khr. 28, pp. 405-406 ob.}_}
Dolgorukov was happier with the chimera of revolutionary conspiracy than
with the actual forms of active mobilization produced within the broken-down tsarist
social/service structure.
Dolgorukov was inclined to see peasantry, and to some degree also nobility, as
naughty or misled children. He was careful to portray gentry assemblies as nothing more
than selfish and narrow defenders of gentry privilege who represented no political threat.
He knew better when he reported that gentry opposition had so far produced nothing
resembling an open call for "political revolution", but he preferred to fib to
his tsar rather than face the implications of rebellion rooted in the native soil of
Russia.
{_{ OD3 za 1861 g., ed. khr. 26, p. 217 ob.; DCh:119.}_}
He sought always to picture opposition as a foreign infection, and to fit it in
a small corner of a larger general scene of vigorous, successful state reform.
Head policeman and tsar were forced to see gentry politics as sluggish defense
of superannuated privilege, thus in some deep sense loyal, perhaps even a defense of
soslovie. The state sought to preserve its own self-image as arbiters of national progress
and to dodge more advanced reform projects. The advantage was to keep open the option
later to relent, to give in to gentry "interests", but only to those interests
they were willing to recognize according to the traditions of soslovie, not those implied
in novel programs put forward by gentry groups themselves. In truth, gentry politics were
least acceptable to Alexander in the fall of 1859 during the first convocation when gentry
projects were least selfish, when rule by all sosloviia in national representative
institutions with the authority to administer national wealth were the leading themes.
Gentry politics became more acceptable to the state in the fall of 1860, when they became
more selfish, when a narrow fear of sharing power with peasants washed over the second
convocation and attenuated its political resolve. The guiding concepts of Valuevs
later policy of "favoritism to the aristocracy" were in place months before he
became Interior Minister.
Alexander II could not acknowledge gentry programs of elaborate social and
political reform. Without question, gentry projects were designed to satisfy gentry
interests, but not for the most part traditional interests or old privileges. On the
contrary, gentry programs often assaulted the principle of "title by birth". In
these cases gentry were willing to exchange title for a clear bill of sale; they were
willing to exchange tattered remains of privilege and exemption for self-rule. Gentry
programs often reached far beyond superannuated class privilege toward forms of advantage
more compatible with anticipated post-emancipation conditions. While some gentry
sluggishly resisted reform, many pushed far ahead. Gentry petitions, appeals,
proclamations and manifestos expressed a broader political mentality and a richer and more
visionary sense of "interests" than the tsarist state was prepared to recognize.
Some gentry were ready, in fact, to attack "superannuated" privileges of an
autocratic throne, including its mortmain property claim to almost half the Empire. The
cutting edge of gentry politics pressed against soslovie and bureaucratic, managerial
autocratic institutions.
***
In 1859 Moscow Governor-General A. A. Zakrevskii reported on political unreliables in Moscow. TABLE ONE contains 28 names of the most diverse sort of people. Westernizer or Slavophile, Prince or merchant, ranking bureaucrat or student-chinovnik, rich or poor, famous or obscure, it made no difference to Zakrevskii, all were subject to suspicion. Almost half were from the ranks of the most prominent social activists of the era, but the clearest shared characteristic of those on the Governor-General's list was active involvement in voluntary social organizations and promotion of inter-soslovie collusion. TABLE ONE lists Muscovite unreliables in Zakrevskii's order and with some indication of reasons for their inclusion, either Zakrevskii's own stated reasons or, in his silence, the presumed reasons. In the table Zakrevskiis report is supplemented with indications of the most important voluntary associations of these unreliables, as a suggestion of the hidden structure of Zakrevskii's suspicion: uppity merchant involvement in public affairs (Kokorev and associates), association with the émigré publicist Alexander Herzen, and above all else significant involvement in voluntary public activism.
TABLE ONE:
An Analysis of Governor-General Zakrevskii's 1859 List
of Political Unreliables in Moscow
Legend:
Reasons for inclusion (in parenthesis) = Zakrevskii's own
Reasons for inclusion [in brackets] = presumed but unstated
Reasons for inclusion indicate names of untrustworthy associates
Parenthesis around X means association soon after date of report
Lower-case f after X means founder of the society in question
Name |
Reasons for inclusion |
||||
Aksakov,Ivan |
[leader of Slavophiles] |
X |
|
X |
|
Khomiakov,Aleksei |
[leader of Slavophiles] |
X |
X |
X |
|
Koshelev,Aleksandr |
[activist; Slavophile] |
X |
X |
X |
|
Armfel'dt,Aleksandr |
(Slavophile) |
|
X |
|
|
Maslov,Stepan A |
(Slavophile)
|
X |
X |
X |
|
Katkov,Mikhail |
(Westernizer)
|
X |
|
X |
|
Kokorev,V |
(provokes disorder,Democrat,Westernizer) |
X |
X |
|
|
Mamontov,Ivan F |
(Kokorev)
son? |
|
|
|
|
Stepanov,P |
(Kokorev) |
|
|
|
|
Ketcher,N |
(evil sborishcha [little gatherings]) |
|
|
|
Xf |
Yakushkin,E |
(son of political exile) |
X |
|
|
(X) |
Soldatenkov |
(Old-Ritualist Westernizer; Kokorev) |
|
|
|
X |
Pogodin,Mikhail |
(strives for disorder; Herzen) |
X |
|
X |
X |
Kruze,N |
(friend of Slavophiles & Westernizers) |
|
|
X |
(X) |
Pavlov,N |
(ready for anything; Herzen) |
X |
|
X |
Xf |
Obolenskii,Yu |
(Herzen)
|
|
X |
|
|
Golitsyn,N |
(Herzen) |
|
|
|
|
Shchepkin,M |
(wants revolution; ready for anything) |
|
|
|
X |
Shchepkin,N |
(son of MS above) |
X |
(X) |
|
X |
Ger,Osip |
(ready for anything; Kokorev) |
|
|
|
|
Pikulin,P |
(wants revolution; ready for anything) |
|
|
(X) |
(X) |
Samarin,Yu |
(wants rev.;ready for anything,Sl-phile) |
|
|
X |
|
Kozlov,Aleksei |
(Vertepnik) |
X |
|
|
|
Kotliarevskii,Axr |
(Vertepnik) |
|
|
(X) |
(X) |
Razsadin |
(Vertepnik) |
|
|
|
|
Satin,N |
[Active gentry entrepreneur; Herzen] |
|
|
|
(X) |
Babst,Ivan |
|
X |
(X) |
(X) |
Xf |
Kittary,Modest |
|
X |
X |
|
(X) |
N=28 |
|
n=13 |
n=9 |
n=12 |
n=13 |
[Sources: *1885:RAr#2:447-50, Spisok podozritel'nykh lits v Moskve
|
BJP,17:39-40 | Kimball Files.]
_________________________________________________________________
Perhaps the strangest thing about Zakrevskii's list was the dominant presence
of illustrious Muscovites whose ambitions and entrepreneurial energy bore close
resemblance to what was called "the middle class" or "bourgeoisie",
terms applied to a class of people then transforming the rest of Europe beyond
recognition. The simplest explanation is this: While Alexander II and his ministries
wanted the productive and financial rewards of modernization, they were unwilling to
compromise their monopolies, even those that hobbled modernization. Many on Zakrevskii's
list got their start in tax farming and other state projects, and while a certain leeway
could be allowed, they would have to be disciplined in the long run to state agendas. If
the state first defeated the gentry as rebel barons with various magna cartas, it would
now have to defeat them as a fledgling bourgeoisie. Russian industrial modernization was
not to be launched for another quarter century, and the vagaries of social and political
reform in the 1860s, as reflected in Zakrevskiis list, were an important reason for
that.
A wide variety of voluntary economic societies appeared on the scene for the
first time or were infused with new and unprecedented vigor. These societies pursued
practical, real-life objectives. Economic societies numbered 56 (ca. 1/3) of the 160 most
important voluntary societies, 1857-1862.
{_{Kimball Files, GRP.}_}
TABLE TWO lists about half of these economic societies, the most important or representative.
TABLE TWO:
Representative Economic Societies (1857-62),
(%) = percentage among all econ. societies represented by all in particular
category (not just "Representative") "o" stands for obshchestvo
1. AGRICULTURE (9%)
1765:SPB Vol'noe ekonomicheskoe o, Imp. [Free Economic S.; VEO]
1820:MVA Sel'skogo khoziaistva, Imp. Moskovskoe o. [Moscow Agricultural S.]
1829:ODE Sel'skogo khoziaistva iuzhnoi R.,Imp. o.[Southern Rus. Agricultural S.]
1857:SPB Sel'skii khoziain [The Farmer]
2. MANUFACTURING (13%)
1859:VsR Pooshchreniia otechestvennoi promyshlennosti, O.
1862:SPB Sodeistviia protsvetaniiu otechestvennoi promyshlennosti
3. TRADE AND FINANCE (25%)
1839:KZN Ekonomicheskoe o. [Economic Society]
1859:SPB Bankovoe i torgovoe o., Glavnoe [Central Bank & Trade Society]
1859:SPB Politiko-ekonomicheskii komitet [Political-Economic Committee of VEO]
1859:SPB Politiko-ekonomicheskii komitet [Political-Economic Committee of RGO]
1859:SPB Kommercheskogo kredita, O. [Commercial Credit Society]
1860:TVR Zemskii bank [Land Bank]
1861:KIV Zemskoe kreditnoe o. [Land Credit Society]
1861:SPB Kreditnoe o., SPB-skoe gorodskoe [Petersburg City Credit Society]
4. LABOR (RURAL AND URBAN) (2%)
1840:SPB Vspomogatel'naia kassa dlia tipografov....
1858:VsR Trezvosti, O. (or Bratstva) [Temperance Societies or Brotherhoods]
5. URBAN SERVICES AND UTILITIES (8%)
1858:SPB Stolichnogo osveshcheniia, O. [Society for Streetlights in the Capital]
1859:MVA Pracheshnykh zavedenii, O. publichnykh [Public Laundry Society]
1860:SPB Obshchestvennogo zdraviia, O. [Public Health Society]
1861:ODE flx Vodoprovoda, Odessa-Dnestr O. [Odessa/Dnestr River Water Works]
6. TRANSPORTATION (10%)
1856:ODE Parokhodstva i Torgovlia, Russkoe o.
1857:SPB Zheleznykh dorog, Glavnoe o. Rossiiskikh
1859:MVA Ekipazhei, O. Moskovskikh obshchestvennykh [Moscow Public Transport S.]
1859:SAR Zheleznoi dorogi, O. Saratovskoi [Saratov Railroad Society]
7. INSURANCE, CHARITY, COOP (33%)
1857:SPB Uluchsheniia v SPb-e pomeshchenii rabochego..
1858:MVA Strakhovoe ot ognia o. [Fire Insurance Society]
1859:SPB Deshevykh kvartir...., O. dlia dostavleniia
1860:SAR Damskogo popechitel'stva o bednykh, O. dlia
1861:PRM Vzaimnogo vspomoshchest, O. [Mutual Aid Society]
1862:Riga Vzaimnogo zastrakhovaniia, O. [Mutual Insurance Society]
[Source: Kimball Files, GRP]
_____________________________________________________________
In the Nicholas era, never more than two or three joint-stock companies formed in any year. In one reform year, 1859, forty three such companies were founded with total capital value of 63 million rubles. Between 1857 and 1860, one hundred joint stock companies were founded with a capital value of 186 million r.
{_{ L. E. Shepelev, Aktsionernye kompanii v Rossii (LGR: 1973); and Tsarizm i burzhuaziia vo vtoroi polovine XIX veka: Problemy torgovo-promyshlennoi politiki (LGR: 1981).}_}
A broad survey of public enterprises reported in the official War Ministry newspaper Russkii invalid in November, 1861, contrasting these developments with the previous era of deadly stagnancy [mertvennogo zastoia].
{_{ 1861no29:RIn#265:1095.}_}
Hybrid private/state reform commissions were formed within various ministries. The Editing Commission for peasant reform employed "experts" who were not themselves bureaucrats. The Commission for the Revision of the System of Taxes and Duties brought veteran bureaucrats together with selected experts. Notable also is the fact that as of mid-1861 nine of the 20 commissioners--these nine a mixture of both bureaucrats and experts--were members of the Geographic Society (six of them active in the new section devoted to political-economic advocacy and policy issues). Nine were also members of Litfond (five of them founders).
{_{ See the list of commission members in 1861:Vek#1:5.}_}
Educated civil society was a by-product of the long history of state reforms
initiated by Peter I and Catherine II, and continued into the reign of Alexander II. Tsars
nurtured something like a civil society but pruned it severely in rococo, statist
patterns. The state enjoyed the advantages of large numbers of enterprising, educated and
talented individuals, but it would not let them flourish according to their own rude
nature. It would not allow them to exercise talent, education or enterprise too far beyond
the ramparts of the centralized state. It sought to fix them tightly in hierarchies of
rank and social estate, and to harness them to bureaucratic enterprises. The expanding
bureaucratic institutions of the centralized, unlimited, autocratic state jealously
monopolized these individuals. It favored them only so long as they decorated the garden
of state power.
The number of "licensed" volunteer organizations with a clear bridged
relationship to state bureaus grew, but also showed signs of qualitative, rather than
purely quantitative evolution, in the direction of generalized and independent public
organization. Four organizations from the time of Peter I, Catherine II, and the early
19th century played critical roles in the Era of Great Reforms: Academy of Sciences with
its several monopolies (most gallingly its monopoly on the publication of the wildly
popular and potentially profitable kalendary, but also its ownership of the oldest
daily newspaper), the Free Economic Society (VEO) with its Political-Economic Committee,
the Russian Geography Society (RGO) also with a Political-Economic Committee and the
Literacy Committee, the Moscow Agricultural Society (MAS) with its several empire-wide
projects, including public schooling. These securely licensed and bridged institutions
burst into new life in the 1860s and helped force imperial organizational life off the
field of normal autocratic license and out of bounds.
Soon the Litfond and Chess Club were to appeal openly to progressive state
servitors, not per se, not as state servitors with a night off, but as critical members of
obshchestvo with a more permanent and vested interest in the public sphere. Public
participation in voluntary societies and in the reform process swelled in the early months
of Alexander's reign. In truth, Alexander invited it, as when he personally appealed to
the gentry to mobilize themselves and deliberate on the great movement to make a better
life for the peasantry, as when he seemed to invite independent initiative across the
board. When the Temperance Movement swept the land in 1858, organizers in the Kovno
villages claimed that the movement was blessed by Alexander on a recent visit there.
{_{ CLW:295.}_}
Quickly public participation in the reform process had become more than an
embellishment of an enlightened monarchy, as in the dream of Catherine II. Permission and
independence were thrown way off balance. Volunteer association had become both essential
to the orderly course of autocratic reform, and at the same time a threat to autocratic
and bureaucratic power.
"Liberal" professions and employments grew daily in importance, most
of them unknown to Peter I at the time the Table of Ranks was put in place.
{_{ Wortman and Frieden.}_}
The schools which the state thought of as training grounds for state servitors
also trained the first cadres of the Russian professional classes, writers, teachers,
university students, engineers, chemists, agronomists, economists, publishers and bookmen,
newspaper editors, lawyers, medical doctors, joint stock company members, and other sorts
of professional entrepreneurs whose existence put them on the margin between the state
structure and the laboring narod, and almost always beyond any meaningful definition in
the systems of soslovie and chin. The state was determined to stretch soslovie and chin to
the dimensions of modernization. For example, the professional category prisiazhnye poverennye [court advocates] created after the legal reforms of 1864, was
considered a soslovie designation.
The inescapable truth was this: the old soslovie system was pushed beyond
reasonable limits. The state preferred that to the abolition of the system itself to make
room for more functional, more modern, political-economic structure. These modern
technical or professional groups were fast becoming the real backbone of "civil
society", strengthening an urban society earlier more exclusively composed of local
garrison officers, administrators with the night off, and wintering landowners. Yet the
political-economic structure designed to accommodate a society in which these antiquated
formations were the central ingredients still dominated the Russian spirit and compromised
the future of the nation.
It was as if the following questions were being put at the national level.
Using the word "public" in its English sense, are publicly controlled railroad
companies and steamship lines to be the agencies of modernization of Russian imperial
transportation, or will the Ministry of Transportation and Communications, and other
high-placed insiders in the Finance Ministry, maintain lofty control over the process?
What of the vast royal domains, land that could be used to "finance"
emancipation? What of royal and state control over mines and forests? Are the cities and
their dumy [councils] to be agents of Imperial power or municipal enterprises
administering urban utilities and services? Will the new courts be independent or even
more sophisticated extensions of bureaucratic power?
The relative weight and meaning of these and the several other varieties of
public association become clear only in the field of action, as we continue to follow the
experience of the mobilizing civil society, particularly as it was concentrated in that
range of endeavors from belles-lettres to students, as it developed in the sequence of
organizational experience from the Literary Fund, into the journals and publishing houses,
out into the private schools and volunteer organizations dedicated to the promotion of
literacy, and back into the universities and other specialized institutions of higher
education.
We have seen how the ambitious gentry assemblies sought to augment tsarist
power in the locales and came into conflict with a state unready to share power with
anyone. The growth of entrepreneurial enterprise posed the same threat. The state had good
reason to suspect that too many provincial activists agreed with Unkovskii when he
suggested that local agencies might be given authority over state property. The suggestion
was in the air: Publicly controlled modernization was superior to state controlled
modernization. The cluster of economic enterprises shaped itself to the contours of this
suggestion.
This was a situation easily generalized throughout the body politic. Similar
questions were raised by the organizations where scholars, writers, publishers, teachers,
and other professionals dominated. Are those several activities associated with the full
spectrum of the print-media to be allowed to drift away from the exclusive dominion of the
state, of the censorship bureaus and subsidized journals, and of the church? Will the
public or the state and church prevail over the first system of primary education known to
Russia? The economic societies presented a challenge to the central authorities, but the
liberal professions more naturally generalized on their first questions, moving quickly to
questions about the way in which public business was conducted at all levels. Great social
and political unrest can be found in these gray areas between state and society where
traditional practice had been discredited, or where there was no previous tradition.
Obshchestvo [civil society] formed obshchestva [voluntary societies] as outposts in the
struggle between the state and emerging public. Were these organizations going to serve
the state or a civil society? Were the members of these voluntary societies subjects or
citizens?
***
By 1861 Alexander II strengthened his personal suite and his ministries to
weather the internecine struggle. Dolgorukov and the Third Section, inherited from
Nicholas I's irregular "own chanceries", were still securely by his side. Valuev
was soon in the Interior Ministry, and shortly thereafter Dmitrii Miliutin in the War
Ministry. The key domestic "power ministries" were in line to steady the ship of
state. They all recognized the need for technical, professional changes in the military
and throughout the state structure. But they all hoped to sever the connection between
these changes and the larger visions of progress and change that the reforms naturally
provoked in the minds of many within the mobilized state structure. Specifically, they all
recognized the need for emancipation, but sought to sever the connection between peasant
emancipation and inspired visions of parliamentary government, social equality and civil
liberty. The severance they all sought was necessary to neutralize both reactionaries, who
didn't want any change, and radicals, who wanted too much change, and to convert the whole
reform era into a simpler mechanical or administrative process. The state sought to fix a
protective screen between its own discreet repair jobs and the huge plans for major
transformation sparked by the repair process itself. That screen was never more than
semi permeable.
Disgruntled military servitors and also civilian chinovniks swelled the ranks
of voluntary organizations and brought a fresh and informed anger to social movements. The
process of their radicalization is one in which they were shaken from the ranks of the
stop-go reforming bureaucracy. The state constantly spun off from its heavy flanks large
numbers of people who could no longer bear careers behind the wall of state power. Leading
figures were often disappointed or all-too-ambitious servitors of the very regime they
came to oppose. Uvarov, from his high post, saw the early beginnings of this process and
identified it with modern Revolution; these renegade servitors, from their lowly position,
assumed a reciprocal attitude toward the tsarist system: autocracy came to seem the main
obstacle to progress in their nation.
All branches of government contributed to the social ferment in the Sixties,
but none had greater consequences for the social and political history of the reform era
than the Education Ministry. The Education Ministry was created in the time of Alexander
I. At that time also the single Russian university in Moscow was joined by newly created
Saint Petersburg, Kazan, and Khar'kov universities. Many of the most durable volunteer
societies were established in nominal close relationship to the universities and Education
Ministry. Around these institutions a palpable new public consciousness was forming.
More than other Imperial ministries, the Education Ministry suffered
instability of leadership and policy. Educational policy inherited from Nicholas I was in
shambles. Since the Crimean War revisions of contemptible 1835 University statutes were
under discussion in official circles, but in the meantime the universities had been
allowed to move ahead on their own without explicit sanction to introduce unofficial
practices at variance with old statutes. Spontaneous transformation of the universities
ran far ahead of the sluggish bureaucratic reform process. When Grigorii Shcherbatov
became Superintendent at Saint Petersburg University in 1856, he seemed to say, "Have
at it. Lets reform our university on our own informal initiative". Professors
began to dream of corporate independence and students hurried to take control over their
own daily lives. Beginning in 1858 the state pursued a policy of benign indifference to
internally motivated developments within the universities, all of which pointed in the
direction of university autonomy.
In just four years, 1858-1861, there were three very different Education
Ministers. On 23 March 1858 Evgraf Pavlovich Kovalevskii became Minister of Education, and
he set the system loose to seek its own level. Evgraf was brother to the successful
ambassador Egor (who was soon to take a leading role in the powerful volunteer society
Litfond). Evgraf shared with his activist brother a forward-looking, reformist and
progressive vision for Russia. For the next three years Evgraf Kovalevskiis ministry
unbuckled a large part of the Nicholas legacy, even when it did not formally rescind
Nicholas legislation or promulgate explicit change of policy. Throughout the realm of the
Education Ministry's responsibility, reformist action and spontaneous implementation of
reform raced far ahead of legislation, creating a most dangerous situation for all
involved.
University degrees were often the key to professional and bureaucratic careers
within the Table of Ranks. Over the years, university admissions were widened or narrowed
according to the oscillations of state need, subjecting a young, talented and
impressionable segment of the imperial population to a very particular rhythm of hope and
disappointment. The numbers of students shot up in the 1840s, declined in the 1850s, and
erupted like never before after Crimea. Even then, universities found it increasingly
difficult to graduate each year sufficient numbers of new recruits to fill the expanding
ranks of civil service. Disregarding an important privilege of the wellborn, officials
sanctioned a new open-door policy for talented students from less privileged social
formations. Young people, the likes of which had been largely excluded from educational
opportunity in earlier times, now filled seats in imperial universities (particularly in
Petersburg and Kazan), gymnasia, lyceums, cadet corps, and other special schools. An
imperial system of higher education with a few hundred students now had to deal with
several thousand students. Through the half decade after 1849, enrollment at Petersburg
University hovered in the range of 300-400. After enrollment restrictions were lifted in
1856, the numbers grew. By January 1859, there were 1000. In the 1860-61 academic year, on
the eve of the state assault on the universities, there were 1442.
{_{ Girgor'ev,VV:305. See also Berkov, "Iz rannei...":95-6.}_}
For the most part, the new students were of severely limited financial means and were familiar with an unsavory option: endure the miserable life of the impoverished student and prepare for a career appropriate to a university degree or return home, often to the provincial glush' where levels of misery exceeded by wide margins even those in the dreary student neighborhoods of the capital cities.
{_{ Leikina-Svirskaia, "Formirovanie...":84-5. See also Daniel R. Brower, Training the Nihilists: Education and Radicalism in Tsarist Russia (Ithaca NY: 1975). Some figures for the year 1864 in the Volga and Ural regions illustrate this point. One-third of the students in the twelve ostensibly exclusive gymnasia were from the commoner classes [VR-D:99].}_}
Enrollments expanded, organized student life became a force in the university like never before, professors also bestirred themselves in new efforts at self-management, and it seemed the administration of the whole educational system might be transformed in such a way as to free it from exclusive governmental control and to allow authority to devolve into the hands of the schools themselves, as semi-independent corporations. Professors and students in the higher educational institutions, like those in the key universities of Saint-Petersburg, Moscow, Kazan, Kiev, and Khar'kov, in the Central Pedagogical Institute, the School of Jurisprudence, and the Alexander Lyceum, jumped at this unique opportunity at self rule. They sought to redefine the university, to remove it as far as possible from the old state guardianship and relocate it in the heart of civil society. Faculty and students sensed that they were stealing the march on the state and grew bolder with that realization. Like the intellectual elite at Lamanskiis presentation, like the gentry assemblies, like even those peasants who bowed their heads to the wishes of tsar-batiushka, students also felt "invited" by their tsar to question the old ways and to work to change them.
{_{ R. G. Eimontova, "Professora starye i novye na rubezhe 50--60-kh godov XIX v." in PIR; and Russkie universitety na grani dvukh epokh: Ot Rossii krepostnoi k Rossii kapitalisticheskoi (MVA:1985). Samuel D. Kassow, Students, Professors, and the State in Tsarist Russia (Berkeley CA:1989):14-15 explores the question of how the universities, as institutions, were a threat to the principles of the autocratic state, concentrating on the period from the 1899 to the 1905 Revolution.}_}
Not only were enrollments in these critical educational institutions expanding
like never before, and not only was the social composition of the student body changing
dramatically from the old aristocratic norm, but also the assumptions made by students
from all social classes about the meaning of their degree were changing as well.
Increasingly students aimed at careers independent of the state bureaucracy, and they
began as students, even prior to graduation, to conduct themselves in a
"liberal" professional way.
At Petersburg University Viktor Ostrogorskii found a professional career. In my
capacity as a teacher, he wrote, I "firmly decided to dedicate my life to the service
of obshchestvo".
{_{ OKak:79.}_}
This was a small personal decision with large political implications in the
Russian setting, directly echoing the sentiment that Dmitrii Miliutin deplored among
cadets in his War Ministry and paralleling the pervasive atmosphere in the seminaries and
spiritual academies under the authority of the Holy Synod.
These trends disturbed Dolgorukov and other loyal sanovniki. Pirogov provoked
one of the earliest sharp intramural clashes among state servitors of different vision
about reform. Pirogov seemed to students the very embodiment of a new generation of
progressive bureaucrats, picking up where the aging Nicholas progressives left off. His
views were in close harmony with those of the central educational administration. He
supported a more spontaneous and independent system of higher education. The upward course
of his career was a clear inspiration to all who shared these views. Then came the shock
when Kharkov and Kiev university students were arrested in February, 1860. These
arrests appeared to be a power play on the part of the Governor General Vasilchikov,
underscoring his discomfort with "liberal" educational administration. In his
struggle against military/bureaucratic intervention into the life of the universities
under his administration, Pirogov felt compelled to put hand to heart and swear that
university groups represented no threat to the power of autocracy. After heroic service in
the medical corps in the Crimean War, Pirogov seemed on the verge of a second heroic
career as the battle lines were drawn between him and Prince Illarion Vasil'chikov, the
Governor General of Kiev Province, military governor of Podolia and Volhynia provinces,
and Commander of the Kiev military district.
Pirogov's correspondence with Vasilchikov in the early months of 1860 is
a record of growing tension on several fronts: civilian vs. military styles of
administration, pedagogical vs. police assumptions about those under their authority,
reformist hopes for the future vs. reactionary defense of the past, glasnost vs.
secretiveness, and finally social service vs. state service orientations toward the
performance of one's governmental assignment.
Much of the heat the rose from the one-sided conflict between Vasil'chikov and
Pirogov derived from the broader issue of central control vs. greater independence of
imperial universities and other educational institutions. Were these institutions to
remain the moral and political instruments of state power or where they to be allowed to
expand toward fulfilling the needs of an independent civil society? Vasil'chikov and his
subordinates, particularly those in the police administration, perceived how Pirogov and
university administrators were moving toward greater organizational autonomy, and they
perceived the importance in this process of the new links which the university was forging
with civil society and the people at large.
{_{ V63U,1:29-37, 41, 44-7, and 49-53.}_}
Vasil'chikov and his police apparatus responded with counter-measures designed
to insinuate police and clerical authority between students and their new champions in the
university administration and faculty, in civil society, and among the people.
Pirogov responded to Vasil'chikov's countermeasures in a memo which stressed
that he was no different than Vasil'chikov in his dedication "to the good of
society". Pirogov, the Moscow and Derpt trained surgeon, son of a successful treasury
official, cut to the heart of the differences between him and Governor-General Prince
Vasilchikov. Universities have immense influence on civil society, he reminded
Vasil'chikov, because it is the university that trains "the productive people [deiatelei]
of the future". And the public in its turn influences the university, particularly in
so far as the "spirit of the youth" is shaped in a social environment long
before any student enters the university. Like Vasil'chikov, Pirogov was concerned about
the struggle between various nationalities, particularly between Ukrainians and Poles at
Khar'kov University. Pirogov's policy was to encourage the development of student
libraries, lecture series, and other organizations like the Sunday schools. These helped
create a more generalized sense of identity as "students" and members of a
larger national citizenship.
{_{ V63U,1:60-4.}_}
The emergence of student societies was in Pirogovs mind an antidote to
more narrow natal forms of ethnic identity.
That is why Pirogov saw nothing but benefit in the Sunday schools, literary
societies, and the various student assemblies. These were extending the mission of the
modern university to shape "the productive people of the future". Pirogovs
schools and universities would forge a new national citizenship. Pirogov stressed how many
students were being inspired to careers in teaching as a result of Sunday school work.
{_{ V63U,1:61.}_}
He chided Vasil'chikov's witch-hunt and spoke out against exclusion of the so-called Khar'kov-Kiev society and Jews from the staffs of the Sunday schools.
{_{ While defending the Sunday schools and university independence as far as he could, Pirogov complied with state efforts to allow greater official and church control over Sunday schools, and he cooperated with the December 1858 order which allowed deacons of the Orthodox Church to watch over the conduct of professors [V63U,1:62,64].}_}
Pirogov made some effort to resist the state's efforts to purge the Sunday schools of every teacher in the Kiev region who had any dealings at all with the arrested youths. He thought the trumped up arrests and the connection of the arrests to the Sunday schools were an official provocation. He saw behind that front to the fact that the state could not tolerate university students, largely from the ranks of the raznochintsy, teaching sensitive topics like history to students from the lower classes.
{_{ Pirogov, "O voskresnykh shkol": 466.}_}
A long and probing report of Third Section official Ivan Vasilevich Annenkov, signed on April 12, 1860, vindicated Pirogov's faith in the innocence of those around the so-called "Khar'kov-Kiev Society", but he saw beyond this narrow and insignificant legal point to the larger issues. Annenkov emphasized how student self-organization represented a falling away from defined assignments. Students were pulled away from the "calling to fulfill their obligations faithfully". He reified the tensions between the old assigned qualities of student life and the recent voluntarism there, and he generalized on the meaning of recent dissent in the relationship of old-fashioned officials on the scene and lax officials in the Education Ministry. Annenkov perceived the dangers of the new "bridged" quality of imperial higher education as it sought to serve the old statist functions as well as new social and professional functions. He expressed concern about the "commitments of university youth". "Thus students at both universities see before their very eyes two different administrative tendencies and two systems of rule which in no way facilitate the creation for youths of a proper understanding of the obligations and behavior appropriate to them." He warned that independent universities and schools contradicted the standard imperial notions of censorship. Like the emigre publishing houses and the new domestic press, where journalists felt free to discuss things just as they pleased, so also were students and teachers being misled by notions of unbridled freedom. At the foundation of all this, he detected the flow of marginal social types into the university.
{_{ V63U,1:55-60.}_}
Annenkov discovered family unhappiness beneath the surface of student disorder, but exerted himself to minimize and isolate the problem. These troublemakers, he said, do not represent "the majority of their comrades"; their efforts to organize failed to attract many associates; their societies in Khar'kov and in Kiev remained "fully isolated societies".
{_{ V63U,1:59.}_}
Annenkov tried to exculpate the system, both the Education Ministry and its students, and the broader imperial institutional/social structure. The problem is caused by a few social types of "mixed soslovie", of mongrel family backgrounds. The members of the student society were an expression of the lamentable qualities of a "disordered elementary education" which a small number of students in Russian universities experience. These youths matriculated "with their outlook already perverted, blaming the whole civil structure of society [grazhdanskoe ustroistvo vsego obshchestva] for everything they saw in their families and experienced in the period of their youth, most of which derived from the absolute absence of domestic supervision".
{_{V63U,1:57.}_}
Thus Annenkov saw a truth and blinded himself to it. He saw into the heart
of the social problem faced by provincial youths, then sought to marginalize, to place
outside normal life, to "outlaw" social disorder and political opposition. The
police desired the body politic to be healthy and sound. Activists and critics therefore
had to be the disease, even if those activists and critics saw themselves as doctors and
their antics as therapy. But traditional family "relationships" were in a deeper
crisis than Annenkov could allow himself to admit. Like Vasil'chikov, Annenkov reacted
against intellectual and social mobility out of the control of the state.
Here under the microscope is a paradigmatic moment in the political crisis of
the 1860s. Pirogov thought of student organizations as voluntary associations, more like
professional societies than like military postings or bureaucratic assignments. In this
way Pirogov reflected the views of students, many professors, and society at large. To
them the university provided vital new voluntary and avocational opportunities, where the
virtues of the liberal professions predominated.
Vasil'chikov, like most of his police and military-government associates,
thought that universities, lyceums, institutes, and academies derived their official
justification from their role as training grounds for state service. In the official eye
enrollment in educational institutions was identical to state service. Professors and
students were not thought properly to be a part of civil society; professors in the Table
of Ranks were as military officers, students were as soldiers, or at least cadets in
training for a civilian commission. Most officials continued to perceive students in these
various institutions as fledgling servitors, whose prime virtues ought to be ability to
follow instructions and get their work done. Vasil'chikov did not hesitate to go around
university officials when he sent police in to investigate Kiev University. In disdain for
Education Ministry officials, he unilaterally established police surveillance over the
universities, stooping only to inform Pirogov, in one case with a long memo in which he
explained his intention to crush corporate life among students, even though these student
associations were sanctioned by the Education Ministry.
{_{ V63U,1:29-30, 46-7, 49-53.}_}
Governor Generals had armed police; Education Ministers had clerks.
The Russian university represented one of the most spectacular examples of the
crumbling of established definitions and procedures, and of intramural disorder among
tsarist ministries. Different points of view could be taken on the matter: one faction
worked to pull the Nicholas university down, either to build anew and better, or for the
malicious joy of destruction; another faction sought to shore it up, either to protect
traditional quality, or to preserve corruption and incompetence from reform, but mainly to
shore up conventional autocratic political culture. In the defense of conventional
autocratic political culture Vasil'chikov did not resist the opportunity to exaggerate
political dangers in his region and to stir up hysteria back in Saint Petersburg. He
sought to heighten the atmosphere surrounding his investigation of student life and his
contest with Pirogov by dispatching an urgent telegram to Dolgorukov warning that an
assassination attempt on the life of Alexander II was in the planning.
{_{ V63U,1:40-1.}_}
After Pirogov was fired, the "liberal" Education Minister, Evgraf Kovalevskii, ordered the Kiev Educational Region to comply with the Governor-General's demand that closer control be established over student life. At the same time Kovalevskii insisted that the old lines of authority and control in the universities should be re-established and that closer surveillance of professors should be maintained. He finally ordered the Kiev Region to halt the independent expansion of the Sunday-school movement and subordinate the schools to the official educational hierarchy. Before any new schools were to be authorized, officials should received a detailed statement of all financial and other support, official or public. The curriculum was henceforward to be strictly limited. And university students were to be allowed almost no role.
{_{ V63U,1:54-5.}_}
The way was being cleared for more decisive counter-measures, but these were not to follow for another year. Educational institutions continued to drift further from state control until the power ministers organized their counter-offensive in the spring of 1861. Filled to overflow, and more, by officially expanded admissions policies in the early reform era, universities became training grounds for public activism and a battle ground within the tsarist administration. Pirogovs dismissal in March 1861, as Emancipation got under way, might be the earliest harbinger of the reactionary counter measures against social mobilization.
{_{ See A. Z. Baraboi, "O prichinakh uvol'neniia Pirogova s posta popechitelia Kievskogo uchebnogo okruga", 1959se-oc:ISSR:108-13. Also see Mathes"VSH:43-4. Mathes devotes proper attention to the struggle between Vasil'chikov and Pirogov, and the tendency of the state to exaggerate the political meaning of Sunday schools, though it seems to me that he is wrong to call this case "typical". Nothing like this had yet happened in the reform era. Better to call the action against Pirogov a chilling premonition of things to come.}_}
After his dismissal, Pirogov was described on the pages of Kolokol [The Bell] as one committed to "serving society by deeds, Pirogov served society openly". The emigre journal took some delight in the internecine struggles within the higher bureaucracy. Pirogov challenged the ruling governor-general in his region without recourse to chancery secretiveness, and thus revealed the divisions within the state administration.
{_{ 1862ja01:Kolokol#118:988, "N. I. Pirogov".}_}
But Herzen's delight hardly compensated the Russian public for the loss of
Pirogov. Finally, Pirogov lost and was fired; Vasil'chikov won a minor but portentous
skirmish.
***
Tensions in the bureaus of state administration were building toward the
higher-educational crisis of 1861. The state was very slow to make up its mind about
social initiatives in the realm of education. At least in the early months of reform, the
state was compelled to run with the hare and hunt with the hound. At first its inability
to catch up was interpreted as encouragement and support for private efforts to establish
schools, book distributorships, public libraries, and a variety of pedagogical societies.
In much the same way, state inaction with respect to new, reform-era university policy to
license faculty and student initiatives. In a six month period, from December 1960 to
April 1861, the state took a stand against social initiatives in public education and then
launched a counterattack against university students, the main source of pedagogical
activity among the folk and the most vigorous force for public mobilization within the
universities. By the summer of 1862, with British and Rothschild loans in pocket, the
state was ready to bite the rabbit.
In March, 1860, the Interior and Education ministers informed all provincial
governors to take notice of Sunday schools and support them. "They are certain to be
of real benefit to urban society."
{_{ Petr Valuev, "O voskresnykh shkolakh i o deistviiakh Sledstvennoi kommisii Vysochaishe uchrezhdenoi dlia izsled. deistvii lits zavedyvavshikh nekotorymi shkolami v SPb-e", RGIA (Russian State Historical Archive), f. 1275, op. 1, ed. khr. 41, pp. 49 ob. [1862 September 11]. For Interior Minister Lanskoi's circular, see LOD:402; see also Stasov,Stasova:104.}_}
Even Dolgorukov was relatively sanguine about the movement through the first half of 1860. In the spring he reported to the Tsar that the movement to establish "private Sunday schools for lower-class people of both sexes" had received remarkable acceptance in society. In a very short while many such schools opened not only in the capital but also in the provinces and districts. The higher clergy, young people from the schools and several officers were among the managers of these schools. Dolgorukov assured the Emperor that the schools were not altogether "private". They were under the jurisdiction of educational authorities. And just to make sure that there were no "harmful consequences" local officials were keeping a sharp eye on them.
{_{ OD3 za 1860 g., ed. khr. 25, pp. 76-77.}_}
Tensions mounted as the pedagogical networks extended themselves into the life
of the great mass of the people at a time of temperance unrest and anxiety about impending
emancipation. The political implications of the paired trends, public activism and peasant
discontent, promised serious crisis. Where city-centered ferment reached furthest into the
provinces and the countryside, there the state became most alarmed. The proclamations were
one form of reach, but rather flimsy; the Sunday schools and other pedagogical endeavors
were another matter. These were substantial, organized, persistent, intimate, and very
successful. Activists from all over the Empire broadcast Petersburg and Muscovite ferment
into the lives of the vast population. Competition with the state was most clear here.
Many felt that the competition was good, and that it showed the superiority of
publicly supported schooling. Pirogov personally observed the workings of the Sunday
schools in the Kiev region and remarked on their success in comparison with he other
"state schools" [kazennye shkoly, i.e., the government schools in
the districts and the church or parochial schools]. Sunday school students met only a
couple of hours once a week, yet they learned to read two or three times faster than
similar students who attended state schools every day. Students fled from the state
schools into the Sunday schools and quickly overcrowded them. The success of the Sunday
schools was in part a judgment against the quality of the official school system.
{_{ Pirogov, "O voskresnykh shkol":466-7.}_}
With all their insufficiencies--lack of teacher training, lack of budget, lack
of experience, lack of books and materials--the Sunday schools were better than church and
state schools.
Few officials were ready to go as far as Pirogov in their praise. Education
Minister Evgraf Kovalevskii tried to keep up his good credentials in society and the
bureaucracy. In May 1860, as the Sunday schools swelled and the various publishing houses
and book dealerships extended their operations throughout the land, Kovalevskii called for
closer monitoring of the teachers and curricula of the Sunday schools, and insisted that
they teach only reading, writing and arithmetic out of books approved by the state.
{_{ Mathes"VSH":43.}_}
An editor of Dukh Khristianina, Father A. V. Gumilovskii, and other church figures saw that these civilian and secular schools competed with church schools. Responsible church leaders felt pressure also from a state that had severely limited the church's role in these matters. Polemicists of less responsibility, first of all Askochenskii, answered the challenge with venomous invective. The public schools drew students away from timeless truths and taught a modern, diabolical, secular science. It was not difficult to frame this institutional competition in doctrinal terms: the Sunday schools were not just educational institutions competing with success and by implication shaming the church curriculum; they were demons undermining Orthodox Christianity.
{_{
Florovsky, WRT,1; Mathes"VSH:43. The struggle between secular &
religious education is
discussed in
Eklof, Russian Peasant Schools, ch6:155-68.}_}
Church officials urged the state to attach a priest to each school to protect
true Christianity.
The worldly Dolgorukov was not swayed by these church complaints, but as he got
to know more about the character and extent of the national movement in which Pavlov was
beginning to play an acknowledged role, he changed his earlier sanguine opinion of the
Sunday schools. Vasilchikovs struggle with Pirogov down in the Kiev District
must also have played a role in Dolgorukovs new alertness to the Sunday schools. On
18 December 1860, he presented a report to the Emperor which for the first time laid out
the nearly conspiratorial vision which came to dominate the state's thinking on this
matter: Pavlov started them, following the emigre Herzens directions and based on
the failed dreams of the criminal Petrashevtsy. But with an almost naïve bluntness,
Dolgorukov summarized the situation in this way: "The state cannot allow a situation
to develop in which one half of the national population becomes dependent for its
education not on the state but on its own efforts or the private, beneficent effort make
by one of the other sosloviia". Teachers become even more important "on the
solid basis of trust and gratitude bestowed upon them by the popular masses".
{_{ LOD:403. Ionova:194-5, citing TsGIAM, f. 109, 1 eksp., 1859 g., d. 230, pp. 45-45 ob., identifies Adjutant General N. N. Annenkov, serving then as Governor-General of the Kiev District, as the author of this zapiski, and she presents it as if it were two documents, the first half Annenkov's personal communiqué to Alexander I and the second half a statement of governmental policy. She is not interested in the divisions within the higher bureaucracy over these questions or the place of these zapiski in the struggle between the Third Section and the Education Ministry.}_}
The state did not have the resources to take full control over the pedagogical movement. It did not have the will or resources to initiate an equal national literacy project. Yet it was unwilling to let the project move forward on its own. Dolgorukov drew nine conclusions from the situation as of the end of 1860.
{_{ Text of zapiska, LOD:403-5. See Vdnv,1:361; Alexander Herzen picked up on this mounting pressure against social initiative, "Zlodeistvo Dlgorukova", Klk (1861 February 1):91; and Herzen, SoS 15:25.}_}
Dolgorukov was reacting in part to the apparent mutual passion for these schools, shared by those who organized or taught in them and those who sought to study in them. The newspapers of both capitals were filled with stories of workers in the cities or peasants in the provinces requesting schools or seeking those who could organize such schools and teach them.
{_{ See, e.g., 1860no29:Svd, 1860au17:Mvd, and 1860oc09:Mvd.}_}
Dolgorukov was not so foolish as to ignore the great confluence of interests that drew widely different people together, beyond the controls of traditional soslovie and chin. He felt it prudent for the state to "give the appearance of facilitating their rapid spread", but his fondest hope was that this fad soon would pass. Any other policy at this point would only serve as a pretext for discontent among teachers and students.
Possibly on Dolgorukov's initiative, a second police report appeared four days after his report, repeating his formulas and reinforcing his message. Further "incriminating" details about Pavlov and the schools came into the narrative. Pavlov had recently been fired from the teaching post at the School of Jurisprudence, but he and his associates didnt get the message. Since bringing the Sunday school movement to Petersburg, Pavlov and the Sunday school teachers met in open gatherings in the Summer Gardens. Police reports emphasized the non-authoritarian relationship among teachers and their indifference in their teaching to the principles of soslovie and chin. The report emphasized that the teachers were guided by the principle that "the only difference between the person of the distinguished aristocratic soslovie and the impoverished simple commoner is the literacy and education of the former, and once the simple commoner becomes educated, he will have made himself the equal of the well-born and distinguished person". Such a pernicious and laughable idea required no further comment from the police spies. Further obvious evidence of wrongheadedness was provided by the fact that teachers employed no compulsion in their classrooms. Individual students were invited to discover on their own the benefits of learning and the desirability of equality with the privileged sosloviia. All the teacher must do is make it clear that students must learn those things known by the educated sosloviia. Knowledge was the distinguishing feature of the ruling elite. Students were inspired by a natural desire to achieve "equality of status" by achievement of equality of knowledge.
Police also expressed revulsion at teachers meetings and the self administration implied in them. They presumed that meetings or any gatherings out of the range of state authority could be for one reason only, to plot the overthrow of the existing order. Once a month, the reports noted, teachers gathered under the chairmanship of Pavlov to discuss how things were going throughout Russia, and planned ways to insure unity in curriculum in all schools. Police expressed some astonishment at the fact that administrative measures taken against Pavlov and the mounting of police surveillance failed to discipline the Sunday school movement. They were not easily intimidated. As evidence of this, police reported that shortly after his dismissal Pavlov accompanied a crowd of Sunday school students to an art exhibit at the Imperial Academy of Art. There he delivered a lecture "in a communist spirit" about Ivanovs famous painting of the appearance of Christ.
After the Ivanov episode the Third Section intensified its surveillance over Sunday schools, but reported that "so far nothing suspicious has been noted in them". Police thought that their actions should have been sufficient warning, but Sunday school teachers were nonetheless heard to express "an extremely free manner of thought" after school, and to express full agreement with Pavlovs ideas. Those who knew Pavlov well informed the police that the "clandestine goal" of his undertaking (the creation of a national system of public education, which the police took to imply revolution) was known to many teachers. Pavlov himself was content for the time being to limit his activities to the mustering of support and expansion of Sunday schools. The police were for their part content to keep a close watch on him.{_{ 1860de22: state report. Linkov, "Voskres...":178-9; Ionova:182.}_}
Since the spring of 1859 the state had been responding with sluggish measures designed to encourage but also restrain these startling educational initiatives. Now Dolgorukov, inspired by Vasilchikov and then by Annenkovs report on the arrested Kharkov and Kiev students, brought the system to attention. In the process he antagonized Pirogovs boss, Education Minister Evgraf Kovalevskii, who dispatched a hasty circular to superintendents of educational districts, saying "Sunday schools must serve only as supplement to parish schools" so long as parish schools were not sufficient to meet local needs. Sunday schools were thus only a temporary expedient. Local authorities were asked not to grant them any status of their own or recognition independent of standard parish practices. Kovalevskii expressed alarm that history was taught in Kiev and that German and French languages were taught in other localities. These and other subjects, like geography, were not authorized to be taught in Sunday schools. In an effort to consolidate his position and to show that he was not simply letting Sunday schools go their own way, Kovalevskii recommended six measures:
- Sunday schools must restrict their curriculum to those subjects and units taught in the parish schools: religion [zakon bozhii], reading, writing, elementary arithmetic, and drawing and draftsmanship "where local requirements make that necessary"
- Use only approved textbooks
- Establish control of local education officials over appointment of principals and teachers
- Impose regular inspection by local officials
- If any sacrilege, treason or immorality is expressed or committed by principles or teachers, they should be removed at once
- Do not allow any young men to teach girls; all teachers at schools for girls must be female
{_{ LOD:405-6. The circular is dated 1860 December 30. Ionova: 406-7, citing Abramova, appears to have confused a May circular with the December "Pravila dlia voskresnykh shkol", but she is right on the mark when she suggests that these efforts to control the curriculum were motivated by a desire to preserve soslovie distinctions. "Governmental repression of the Sunday schools in itself gives witness to the fact that the very organization of the schools and their independent teachings had great revolutionary significance" [194]. In line with the traditions of Soviet scholarship, she sees things much like Dolgorukov, placing main emphasis on the revolutionary intentions of the youthful teachers, as well as the "objective" contribution of those who participated even without knowing about, much less using in their classrooms, revolutionary literature [195].}_}
In preparation for a meeting of the Council of Ministers scheduled for January 5th, Dolgorukov shared his December report on Sunday Schools with Valuev.
{_{ Vdnv,1:56-7.}_}
Dolgorukov planted the seeds of significant policy in Valuevs mind, still one season before Valuev became Interior Minister. The key power ministers were beginning to build consensus for decisive counter-measures against unbridled social initiative. Valuev studied the situation with the care of a young government official ambitious to find just the right path for career advancement. At the meeting, N. P. Ignatev described the dangers of unregulated schools and asserted that the notorious fat journals were used as textbooks. Kovalevskii defended the Sunday schools and the conduct of his Education Ministry. Sunday schools, he argued, were not unnatural; they had their cause and reason, very much in harmony with the very forces that gave rise to the reform era itself. Kovalevskii was confidant that sufficient state regulation was already in place. He reminded the Council that the state was itself unable to perform this vital task. He scoffed at Dolgorukov's suggestion that teachers come only from the noble soslovie. In effect, he advised the Tsar and his ministers to trust local forces at work in this critical area of national concern, and to expect good things to come of public initiatives.
{_{ LOD:406-7.}_}
Valuev recorded his impressions of the meeting in his diary. Dolgorukov suggested assigning permanent, on-sight observers to each school. Sukhozanet cautioned against adult education. N. N. Annenkov, Governor-General of the Kiev District, suggested that all directors and observers should be priests. The Minister of State Domains defended his own schools. Panin was dismayed to report that when one Sunday school raised the question "Who was Abraham", the answer was "a myth". Kniazhevich, Adlerberg, Prianishnikov & Bludov were silent. Lanskoi said two or three words of unclear meaning, with which nonetheless Grand Prince Konstantin Nikolaevich and General Chevkin found themselves in agreement. Gorchakov spoke with emphasis, but in essence said nothing. Panin spoke smoothly; his voice seemed quite fine to Valuev, but his ability to pull things together feeble. Kovalevskii handled himself well, but he spoke too plaintively, in Valuevs view, as if overburdened by the weight of Ignatev and Dolgorukovs unjust reproaches.
{_{ Vdnv,1:57.}_}
For the time being, the Tsar supported Kovalevskii and resisted Dolgorukovs more aggressive line. On the basis of Kovalevskii's December circular, new "Pravila dlia voskresnykh shkol" [Regulations for Sunday schools] were issued, though their publication was delayed a month, and many activists in the literacy movement learned of them only through rumor.
***
In the days immediately following emancipation, in part under the impulse of wide-spread peasant and growing landlord opposition, and in part under the impulse of purely internal differences of vision within the central government, the state apparatus drifted in a daze of uncertainty about the further direction of reform. Were there to be further social reforms or reforms of the central administration, a constitution perhaps? On 13 April 1861, the Council of Ministers, with the Emperor in the chair, made a fateful decision to move against social independence, first and most decisively as expressed in the universities. On the agenda were restrictive new administrative regulations for the universities.
A report written by E. V. Putiatin was the basis of the Council discussion of the need for more restrictive regulation of higher education. Putiatin was an Admiral and, like other leading figures in this drama (Kovalevskii, Ignatev), had recent success in the field of imperialist diplomacy, contributing to the reversal of the 17th-century Treaty of Nerchinsk and extension of Russian power in the direction of China and Japan. He was no specialist on education, high or low, but that was not really why the sanovniki asked him to report to the Council. Education was not the center of his attention. He spoke for those who sought to restore discipline to a Russian society thought to be out of control. His report opened with the expectation that rebellion was on the horizon. Its source "does not appear exclusively in the soslovie of students, unfortunately it belongs to obshchestvo.... It does not transmit itself from students to obshchestvo but the other way around".{_{ Putiatins report is found in RGIA f. 908#125:8. Snytko, V63K:180, found a report in Third Section archives that suggests Putiatin was speaking for Dolgorukov at this fateful meeting. The report emphasized that Moscow University students were unable on their own to spark a wider social conflagration; the university was "only an expression of things transpiring beyond it, in obshchestvo".}_}
Isolation from society might protect the students, but "corporate" distinctiveness of universities was not at all desirable policy. The Council considered the Putiatin recommendations which became the basis for a solution of the defined dilemma based on the faith in the loyalty and uncorruptibility of the soslovie elite, and on the power of a little payroll bribery:
- All students must pay 50r tuition
- These funds must be used to increase professorial pay
- The student body must not be allowed to form a distinct corporate identity. Only soslovie and level of gymnazium preparation should distinguish students from the main body of the population
The report emphasized that speedy action was called for. All these measures should be introduced at the beginning of the coming academic year "and published at an appropriate time". The school year was winding down, students were heading off for the summer soon. The question of timing played a big role in the tactic of Putiatin and those who thought like him. They anticipated and perhaps even welcomed an open clash with the student segment of this new and brash Russian obshchestvo.
Sergei Stroganov, an old hand in imperial politics, active in school administration since just after the Decembrist Revolt, and a great landowner-entrepreneur much affronted by emancipation, brushed aside the draft university regulations under deliberation. Measures to restrict access to higher education and to restrain student self-organization, he said, are here taken in a vacuum, they are vague and don't touch on the root of the problem. Only in the course of the discussion did his meaning become clear.We do not know what our government is directing us toward. Well-intentioned representatives of conservative principles are unable to speak out so long as preventive censorship exists along side repressive legislation with respect to the press. In order to achieve further historically rooted development, the central principles must be firmly and formally stated and sustained in practice. Right now no one is willing to write in defense of the principles of unlimited autocracy. We must know whether Your Majesty has in mind to lead us to a constitutional form of government or not.
{_{ Vdnv,1:98.}_}
At first Alexander seemed not to perceive that the Council was maneuvering carefully around the fundamental political or institutional issue of the day. Apparently no one at this most elevated meeting was yet clear as to the direction of state policy in this regard. Finally the Emperor caught the point, smiled and said that no one should have any doubts at all about the form of government. He explained that he had no plans to introduce a constitution. The minister of transportation hurried to affirm his view that the autocracy must remain inviolable, that the laws must not be broken, and that "autocratic principles are offended by any failure to obey a law which we firmly authorize". The minister's words grabbed Alexander's attention more firmly than any of the previous discussion. Not without a touch of spitefulness, Alexander broke in to ask, "What do you mean we? It is I who authorizes laws".
The transportation minister's slip of tongue triggered an autocratic reaction which was a perfect expression of one of the most deep-rooted problems of autocracy, the very quandary that inspired Uvarov's fear of the bureaucracy, Nicholas I's creation of the chanceries, and Dolgorukov's faithful reports. The Council of Ministers itself was created by autocratic decree in 1857 to serve as yet another extraordinary institutional expression of autocratic power in the implementation of statist reforms. It would eventually function much as the Emperors personal Suite and His Majestys Own Chanceries. True autocracy cannot be limited even by the standard structures and procedures of its own government.
In this April meeting, the transportation minister stuttered and answered that he was referring to "all of us together". Another foolish eructation, but the Emperor decided to let the matter rest. That night Petr Valuev recorded the symbolic moment in his diary with an appropriate English word: "The incident was closed."{_{ Vdnv,1:99.}_}
But it was not closed, it was in a sense only now opening. Within hours of this meeting, hundreds of miles into the provincial interior at Bezdna not far from Kazan, troops opened fire on an unarmed village of striking peasants, confused and angry about the character of the emancipation. Still unaware of the violence at Bezdna, back in the capital Dolgorukov approached Valuev about the possibility of his taking some as yet unnamed ministerial post.
It was clear enough that Dolgorukov and the Emperor wanted to strip away the "red" element from the Interior Ministry, represented by Nikolai Miliutin, but Valuev was at first coy. He informed Dolgorukov that without strong and clear central leadership no one in the world could be a good minister of interior. Perhaps when Valuev edited his memoirs later, he made himself seem very bold at this moment, but he claims to have asserted that the Emperor is autocrat in name only. In the currently bureaucratic system, even important state questions slip away from the ruler's direct control. "Our system of government is a ministerial oligarchy." Valuev stated an equally bold pair of objectives if he were minister: "the educated classes" must be given some measure of participation at least in provincial affairs, and ministers must be given some degree of independence from the autocrat.{_{ Vdnv,1:100.}_}
These reported words correspond to Valuevs fondest self image.
On 22 April 1861, Valuev was appointed minister of interior. Sergei Lanskoi and Nikolai Miliutin were asked to step down. These two had done their part to loosen old structures for reform, now the Tsar needed ministers to tighten them again. In his first audience with the Emperor, Valuev learned that his mission was to achieve "de l'ordre et des améliorations qui ne changent point les bases du gouvernement".{_{ Vdnv,1:104.}_}
In other words, achieve order first, a better life second, and all this without fundamental institutional or political change. Valuev was no reactionary, but his appointment did seem to signal the end of the first, most hopeful, but disordered, phase of Alexander's reign.
{_{ On Valuev's political ideology, see Orlovsky, Limits:70-80.}_}
Valuevs own program of action implied significant reforms, including ministerial independence, a startling innovation in the way the highest state business was conducted. In addition he sought to grant a controlled measure of independence to reliable elements in the countryside. He succeeded in the latter and failed in the former program. He eventually took credit for overseeing the zemstvo reforms, which allowed limited public participation in provincial affairs, but he graciously accepted Alexander's refusal to support his plan for the decentralization of ministerial power or any other limitation on autocratic power.
In Valuev, Alexander had found just the man for his program of "order and reform", and in just that sequence. In a few months Dmitrii Miliutin became minister of war, so that Dolgorukov and Valuev were joined at the highest levels of imperial administration by a third and decisive opponent of wavering and disorder within the government, and of pressure from obshchestvo.
In May, the State Council continued its discussion of university regulations. A new committee made up of Stroganov, Panin and Dolgorukov took over the project but built directly on Putiatins report. Soon, additional recommendations were drafted.
- Recreate the classical gymnasium
- Administer university entrance exams in these gymnasiums
- "Re-establish full subordination of students to university authorities, suppressing absolutely all assemblies and presentations to authorities via deputies or communiqués" [vosprewwaya polojitel'no vsyaki sxodki i ob"yasneniya s naqal'stvom qrez deputatov ili soobwweniem]
- No noisy gatherings at lecture
- Place direct responsibility for order on university authorities
- Don't authorize any auditors except state servitors or known scholars or teachers
- Allow students to advance from the freshman to the sophomore year only on basis of exams
- No young students
- Exempt only very few from tuition
- Offer aid or stipends only to most outstanding gymnasium students
- Use increased tuition to increase professors pay
{_{ RGIA f.908#125,pp.26-30.}_}
Several further recommendations followed, indicating some disagreement on whether rectors and prorectors should be elected or appointed. It was fully decided at this time that the 1828/1835 Statutes would be strictly enforced. Those were the very same disgusting and oppressive Nicholas-era statutes that had fallen by the wayside everywhere since 1856, and with evident conscious approval of all parties involved in higher education. The Council focused on students described as not belonging in the university, students described as "immoral" or "of harmful political outlooks". Put this together with the accent on privileged and exclusive gymnasia as the path into the university (and thus to careers) and it becomes clear that the reactionary policies of Dmitrii Tolstoy, thought to be the product of a much later period, were very much in evidence at this early time. Toward the end of the committee list of recommendations, the central concern popped out: strengthen the ties between university degrees and the preparation of young people for service in the Table of Ranks.
The new regulations were issued on May 31, but were not to be published until the June issue of the official journal of the Education Ministry. The regulations destroyed student organizational life by suppressing assemblies, treasuries, and libraries. Students were disallowed to gather any sort of funds to support fellow students, except under the control of the rectors office. Exemption from tuition (50r) was abolished along with all but a small handful of state scholarships. Sixty-five percent of Russian university students were on scholarship, now only one percent would be. Entrance exams were to be administered by the gymnasia. Stricter exams were introduced, including the test before advancement from freshman to sophomore year. The student uniform was obligatory for all students. The wearing of clothing suggesting "particular nationalities or clubs or societies" was strictly forbidden.{_{ 861je:JMNP#10 | ROGBL f. 169 (D. Miliutin), carton 13.4, pp. 106-106 ob. Only twelve scholarships were to be offered at Petersburg University and eighteen at Moscow [Awv:69] | BJP,18:210-91 covers whole epoch of university disturbances | RSR.KM:200-1 provides a summary of official measures taken against universities.}_}
The timing of the publication of the regulations could not have been more cunningly designed by officials dedicated to the provocation of student rebellion. The timing assured that the new regulations were not available to students or other interested members of the public until early June. As if to signal the general desire of the state to control such information as it saw fit, Alexander II informed the Main Administration of the Press (the main censorship bureau) in late August that "from henceforward, do not permit any articles to be published on topics that relate to issues of state policy that have already come under deliberation within the higher state bureaus or have been finally decided".
{_{ RGIA, f. 772, op. 1, ed. khr. 4899, pp. 52 ob.}_}
In the Soviet period, such a thought would be associated with the Leninist concept of democratic centralism. Students were off on summer vacation, so it was certain that nearly all of them would be in the dark until school took up again in the fall. Half of those from Moscow University and two-thirds from Saint Petersburg University would return to school in September, some of the poorest walking hundreds of miles, to learn that they had been in effect expelled as a result of the states precipitous and malicious withdrawal of scholarships.
Those who lived closest to the ministries that plotted this attack learned first of the emerging crisis. Litfond stepped up its formal institutional involvement in student life, taking on a new active role in settling problems that had arisen in the newly created student treasury (one of the student initiatives that the new regulations sought to terminate).{_{ Pvsp:156f.}_}
At this time the first issue of the troublesome underground political tract "Velikorus" appeared, produced by activists within the government bureaus, several of them Litfond members and even more of them soon to join Chess Club. The tract circulated by regular post to administrators in the major capitals and the provinces. It seemed almost in direct response to the decisions taken since the April 13 meeting of the State Council. It can be seen as an appeal of government servitors opposed to the newly decided counter attack on social initiative. By mid-August, the activist take-over of the Chess Club was first initiated.
Kovalevskii felt pressured to resign, and Putiatin was appointed Minister of Education.{_{ Dmitrii Miliutins archival memoirs savage Putiatin as a man known among sailors as extremely severe, strict to the extent of cruelty, ill prepared for ministerial post in the Education Ministry, or for any sort of civilian state service. He was a martinet and a member of the old guard whose career had advanced solely as a result of insider favoritism. He was given only one goal: "restore discipline among the disordered crowd of students" [ROGBL f. 169 (D. Miliutin):106]. Given Miliutins detailed grasp of events, which must include the knowledge of the role of Putiatin in the months prior to his appointment, most notably at the April 13 meeting of the State Council, it cannot be said with any certainty that he referred only to students or professors when he blamed the university disorders on zloumywlenniki [ROGBL f. 169 (D. Miliutin), carton 13.4, p. 101].}_}
Not only students, but also faculty were affected by new assault policy of the State Council. These reactionary measures were also aimed at the programs of those faculty members who had been moving toward greater independence of the university from the state. In the broadest terms, the reversal of university policy seemed a serious slap in the face of social and intellectual progress as perceived by some of the most important supporters of reform in society, among faculty, and among the students. The manner of deliberation in tsarist ministries and the timing of the announcement of the reversals were obvious affronts to civil society. The issues cut through all strata of civil society. We remember that this was Putiatins initial statement of premise: disorder comes from obshchestvo into the universities. The new university regulations were an indirect assault on obshchestvo.
Working with the Petersburg superintendent of education, General Filipson, Putiatin opened his ministerial career by gutting the recommendations of the "Kavelin Commission", a most promising expression of the trends in higher education which Putiatin was attacking. Kavelin was professor at Petersburg, a prominent reformist, and executive within Litfond. He had worked with other progressives at Petersburg University to bring some ordered reform measures into existence, better to reflect actual changes in the daily behavior of the institutions of higher learning since Alexander became Tsar. It was not until the end of July that Admiral Putiatin sent "orders" to all his professors. They balked, and this represented the first direct resistance to new state regulations.{_{ ROGBL f. 169 (D. Miliutin), carton 13.4 accounts professorial resistance.}_}
***
Over the eighteen months that followed Valuevs appointment as Interior Minister, the state made no concessions to those who dreamt of reform in the central imperial administration, assumed a certain posture of conciliation with its gentry, and mainly hunkered down for the coming struggle against the predictable outbursts of disappointment. Peasant disorder mounted in the countryside; tension in the cities was palpable.
Unexpectedly, as the counter-reform was launched in April, the state took an unexpected, bold step. To moderate the negotiations between landlords and ex-serfs, the state created a hybrid institution, the Peace Arbitrators [Mirovye posredniki] that bridged state and society in some ways like the taxation commissions and even, in principle, the gentry committees. The Arbitrators however represented a much greater concession to society. The evident difficulties of implementing serf emancipation forced the state further than ever onto the shaky bridged realm of assignment and voluntarism. It was a gamble. After one significant midterm adjustment, between the first and second convocations, the gamble paid off.{_{ Easley dissertation. Also see N. F. Ustiantseva, P. A. Zaionchkovskii, Provedenie v zhizn' krest'ianskoi reformy 1861 g. (Moscow: 1958), ch. 2, esp. pp. 88-113; A. A. Kornilov, "Deiatel'nost' mirovykh posrednikov", in DVR 5:237-252; and Jerman W. Rose, "The Russian Peasant Emancipation and the Problem of Rural Administration; the Institution of the Mirovoi Posrednik" (PhD dissertation, University of Kansas, 1976).}_}
In a move which must be in the exact opposite direction from the move that created the Peace Arbitrators--and thus it was a move intended to hedge bets--on 6 August 1861 Alexander secretly asked Grand Prince Mikhail Nikolaevich to convene around him a special gathering which came to be called the Secret Supreme Council [Neglasnyi Vysshii Sovet or NVS]. This irregular body was convened at least three times during the reform era and was also known as Comité du salut publique, Gouvernement provisoire, Komitet obshchestvennogo spaseniia, and Osoboe soveshchanie. In this first instance, Valuev and Miliutin joined Petersburg Governor-General P. N. Ignat'ev, Shuvalov, Chevkin, and other regional military commanders as necessary. In explaining the NVS mission, Dolgorukov told Valuev they were to deal with "la fermentation qui régne en général dans toutes les classes".
{_{ Vdnv,1:319.}_}
When they communicated in French, these high dignitaries often spoke blunt truths. Dolgorukov went with Alexander to the Crimea and thus was not a member.
NVS met secretly in the Winter Palace under the Hermitage on the Neva River. No protocols were kept, nor were usual formalities observed. Meetings often continued around tea and cigars. They met rarely in August, but that fall, with public protests, proclamations, student rebellion at Saint-Petersburg University, and the first large street demonstrations, things picked up.{_{ ROGBL f. 169 (D. Miliutin), carton 13.4, p. 102.}_}
Miliutin took measures to prepare the army for future "éventualités".
{_{ Vdnv,1:108.}_}
On 4 September 1861, he circulated a memorandum within the War Ministry on the great dangers of revolutionary propaganda. He recommended that precautionary measures be taken and recommended that military discipline be sharpened. "It is particularly necessary to strengthen the supervision of the young officers, the Junkers."
{_{ ROGBL f. 169 (D. Miliutin), carton 13.4, p. 101 ob.}_}
Tsarist institutions like the aides-de-camp, the Secret Supreme Conference, the later Comité du salut publique, Peace Arbitrators, and the Editorial Commission and State Council themselves represented a judgment, in practice, against the reliability of standard governmental institutions. They were however institutional innovations every bit as necessary to the state as the associational innovations were to the public, the voluntary societies. These tsarist innovations were expressions of the same political situation that created the peasant temperance societies, the gentry agricultural societies, and the major voluntary societies of civil society: Litfond, Chess Club, and eventually Land and Liberty. These innovations were instruments of interest group mobilization in unprecedented struggle for control over the process of mid-century change. NVS was an innovation designed to deal with disorders that were expected from public innovations, especially from students and their organizations provoked by state action in the spring.
On August 29, Valuev learned that the prosecution of the Zaichnevskii case would be given over to the Interior Ministry, rather than to the Third Section. This ministerial victory pleased him. Valuev had already started thinking about the "Kharkov-Kiev Society" and was now working closely with P. A. Shuvalov, Governor General of the Petersburg District, who assured Valuev that Zaichnevskii would not be the end of it. Shuvalov was already planning massive action, involving the arrest of a significant number of people "of various social rank [zvanii]".{_{ Vdnv,1:110}_}
Within the first two weeks of September, the inflammatory proclamation "To the Young Generation" circulated in Petersburg, confirming and justifying the states expectation of confrontation. Mikhail Mikhailov was quickly arrested in this connection. The second "Velikorus" appeared. From a purely administrative point of view, these events all added up to some great opportunities for the Interior Ministry.
Returning to campus in the fall, students and many faculty for the first time learned of the radical changes made by the new university regulations. They protested en masse. The state responded harshly; it closed Saint Petersburg University and arrested hundreds of students there and in other university cities.
Until Peter Valuev became Interior Minister, Dolgorukov was relatively alone among the central state officials in his fear of the Sunday school movement. Valuev later conceded that Ignat'ev's dire warnings about the schools, which had gone unheeded in January of 1861 had proven correct.{_{ Vdnv,1:310.}_}
Valuev's personal crusade against the literacy movement played an important role eventually in the state's decision to bring an end to it. The arrest and interrogation of those students whom we have come to call the "Khar'kov-Kiev Society" had animated Vasilchikov, who in turn tried to provoke animosity back in Petersburg, working against the moderate views of Pirogov in Kiev and Annenkov in Petersburg. Dolgorukov took Vasilchikovs point, and now handed the matter over to Valuev. It took several months, but by the spring of 1862, Valuev had worked the dossiers of the several Kharkov and Kiev students into a "Kharkov-Kiev Secret Society" and produced an analytical narrative that strengthened his Interior Ministrys hand for action against the whole Sunday school movement. Valuevs formula also linked Sunday school conspirators with the movement for university autonomy.
***
Throughout this crisis, the forces of "order and reform" felt surrounded. Events threatened to break in on them from any of several directions; anything from a massive peasant war to a swift palace coup d'état seemed possible. Valuev heard from a visiting Frenchman, Lord Napier, who moved in very high circles, that "over the six months that I have been here, it has been difficult to find more than a few persons, members of the German party, as it is described here, who would take the side of the government in my presence". Within the year, scores would be arrested, and some sent into exile, for statements of that sort. The Grand Princess Mariia Nikolaevna predicted to Valuev that "before the year is out, they will chase us all out of here". It is hard to tell just who she meant by "they".
In September, as the newly appointed minister of war Dmitrii Miliutin began the reorganization of the Russkii invalid journal staff, he was asked directly if he intended to oppose "the preparation of ministries for a constitution". Miliutin came to dislike the editorial policy of Nikolai Pisarevskii and preferred to call it socialism.{_{ Brooks"Military; Fedorov, Obshch.dvizh.:75-76.}_}
At that time Valuev observed that Minister of State Domains Mikhail Murav'ev "has already reset his sails to shifting winds and prepares himself to become a member of a constitutional ministry". Murav'ev told Valuev that current roster of ministers should be dismissed in order to form a new cabinet (and Valuev used the English word). He went even further, saying that the aristocracy "as a caste" cannot exist much longer and that it would be better to form an "aristocracy on the principle of land ownership".
{_{ Vdnv,1:114, 117.}_}
We can presume he meant that the compromised assigned and natal gentry-style aristocracy had outlived itself. Earlier Pogodin risked his career, and later dozens of others would be arrested and exiled, for saying what Murav'ev could say with impunity. Murav'ev further adhered to a popular, but equally illegal, view that the current gentry soslovie ought to be replaced by an aristocracy of those who held land in the countryside, a nobility that might include ex-serfs along with ex-serfowners. These were conversations among the highest state servitors about the need for significant political and social reform to complete the larger inventory of "Great Reforms". This Murav'ev was, after all, brother of the Decembrist constitutionalist Aleksandr and himself earlier a member of Soiuz blagodenstviia. Some Russians had been hanged for thoughts like these thoughts that were discussed up and down the halls of state power in 1861.
Political reform beyond the trace embodied in Zemstvo reform and social reform beyond the unanticipated consequences of the other "Great Reforms" did not happen. Thus, Murav'ev was destined, not for a cabinet post, but fame as "hangman" of Lithuanian independence fighters and, in his last year, 1866, his final loyal appointment as president of a special tsarist Commission which carried out the ruthless suppression of some of the most noteworthy members of Russian civil society who had somehow survived the 1862 suppression which was earlier being designed in the power ministries at the very time he spoke rashly of the need for a cabinet. Murav'ev reset his sails over and again.
***
In October, as public disorders raged, Valuev sensed that "a crisis in government approaches".{_{ Vdnv,1:109, 119, 121.}_}
In his late-night diary entries, Valuev fretted over many strange inner struggles and competitions among ministers and within the imperial court. Grand Princes Alexandra Iosifovna spread the word about Grant Prince Konstantin Nikolaevichs favorite, Aleksandr Golovnin (now Education Minister). She warned, "cette araigneé a une constitution dans sa bosse" [That spider's spinning a constitution].
{_{ Vdnv,1:156.}_}
That fall, conversation around the dinner table among imperial grandees turned to history, particularly to the European experiences of 1830 and 1848 when the "bourgeoisie" or "tiers état" came to power. One of the several eventualities, of which Valuev was much aware, was a transfer of power from the ineffective oligarchy [the "German party"] to another, fresher and more effective government, which might very well include himself.
Valuev had "views", but he was no ideologue; he was not strapped by a narrow vision of desired outcome. He was a crafty politico who had carefully considered the many possible outcomes. He positioned himself to do as well as possible, whatever should come. With informative dispatches he assiduously cultivated Alexander and Dolgorukov on vacation in Crimea through the late summer. When they returned, they thought of him as one of theirs, which he was, in his fashion. At the same time, reform-oriented colleagues had no reason to think of him as an outright enemy. He had good ties with obshchestvo; he was a member of the Imperial Geographic Society and attended the meetings of its unruly Political-Economic Committee. The gentry heard regularly that Valuev was their friend. On the eve of Alexander's return from Crimea in mid-October, leading figures in the administration said it was inevitable: "either revolution or change of policy". Valuev held to a cautious middle position in these open discussions, but he stayed up half the night with Samuel Grieg, a high-ranking servitor in the Finance Ministry, experimentally designing membership lists and programs of action for a new "cabinet", and he used the English expression because he and Grieg were talking about something like the English institution.{_{ Vdnv,1:119-121.}_}
While perhaps not a "man for all seasons", Valuev was just the man for this season.
{_{ Go to an account of the crisis of 1862 [TXT].}_}