Alexander II: A Revisionist ViewAuthor(s): Alfred J. RieberReviewed work(s):Source: The Journal of Modern History, Vol. 43, No. 1 (Mar., 1971), pp. 42-58Published by: The University of Chicago PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/1877924 .Accessed: 03/08/2012 06:43

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Alexander II: A Revisionist View

Alfred J. Rieber University of Pennsylvania

Few rulers have come to power under less promising circumstances than Alexander II. From the lips of his dying father he received not only the reins of his "command" but also an apology for the lamentable state of affairs in the empire.' Nicholas I was not easily moved to ask forgiveness from any earthly being. He left behind a dispirited country, humiliated by military reverses, threatened with bankruptcy, and riddled with cor- ruption. Peasant disorders were increasing ominously, and an even more threatening coalition of foreign enemies was gathering. As Alexander and his closest advisers soon realized, continued fighting offered little hope of success and could easily release the powerful centrifugal forces which had been held in check for so long by the unchallenged authority of the state.) By negotiating the Treaty of Paris in 1856, Alexander relieved the pressure of military defeat and avoided possible dismem- berment of the empire, but more fundamental changes were needed to save Russia from a similar fate at a later time.

The character and tempo of such changes depended largely upon Alexander's perception both of his own role as autocrat and of the social forces with which he had to contend. His early training and the forceful personality of his father, which deeply influenced his outlook, were themselves rooted in the well-established traditions of the Russian em- pire. Thus to try, as most historians have, to judge his motives and goals by artificial criteria lifted from the experience of western Europe is to miss the basic continuity in Alexander's reign. Not surprisingly, the charge of inconsistency and weak will often leveled at Alexander by the liberal school has helped preserve the myth that he vacillated constantly between liberal and conservative forces. That the charge has some substance has been amply documented by his tutors' memoirs. "It often happens with the Grand Duke," wrote K. K. Merder to Nicholas in 1829, "that he becomes listless, displays an unusual apathy and a complete

1 Nicholas's last words to Alexander were: "I want to take with me all the un- pleasantness and all the troubles and only pass on to you an orderly, calm and happy Russia" (S. S. Tatishchev, Imperator Aleksandr Vtoroi [St. Petersburg, 19031, 1:140).

2 "Ob opastnosti v 1856 g. voennykh deistvii," Istoricheskii Archiv (January- February 1959), no. 1, pp. 206-8; E. V. Tarle, Krymskaia voinia (Moscow, 1950), 2:546-49.

Alexander II 43

absence of firmness and consistency.":3 What has been ignored or forgot- ten is his considerable success in masking his boyish- weakness through a combination of stubbornness, suspicion, and devotion to duty. Instilled since childhood with the belief that the tsar was "the genuine father of his people," "a sacred person," and responsible only to God, Alex- ander soon developed from experience, as he wrote to his mother in 1857, "a very low opinion of the human race in general and in par- ticular, with very few exceptions."4 Throughout his life he rejected any form of constitutionalism, "not because he was jealous of his authority," wrote his disappointed minister of interior, P. N. Valuev, "but because he was genuinely convinced that it would harm Russia and would lead to its dissolution."" He alone could hold in check the warring interests.

In Alexander's eyes no single class held a monopoly on loyalty by virtue of its past behavior or present status. Loyalty had to be proven by individual acts of unquestioning obedience or personal sacrifice. Al- though he spoke of himself as "the first noble," he could not forget the nobility's opposition to the emancipation, its constitutional projects, its hostility to the army reforms. He regarded the peasants as naive but often rebellious children, and he feared that they would anticipate his plans to free them by rising against their hated landlords. To him the youth of Russia was corrupted by the press, and, as he wrote his sister, "in general [they] wish to eliminate all authority."6 As for the national- ities, he expressed his skepticism of their trustworthiness even before they had proven him right. With the Polish revolt still seven years away, he brooded: "I would very much like and would be happy to believe in the sincere sympathy of the Poles, but I recognize that in spite of my [enthusiastic] reception in Warsaw, I have not the least faith in them."7 As for the merchantry, he shared the suspicion of the court and the in-

*3 "Zapiskii K. K. Merdera, vospitatelia tsesarevich Aleksandra Nikolaevicha, 1824-34," Russkaia Starina 48 (1885):542.

4Tsentral'nyi istoricheskii arkhiv v Moskve (hereafter TsGIAM), "Pis'ma v.k. Aleksandra Nikolaevicha materi imp. Aleksandre Fedorovne, 1830-1857," dated Chernigov, October 8/20, 1857 (original in French), fund 678, folder 701.

5 P. N. Valuev, Dnevnik P. A. Valueva (Moscow, 1961), 1:181. Later Valuev wrote: "In our time it is impossible to be [as Alexander wishes] a warrior tsar and a civilian leader of the Council [of Ministers]. From this [desire] spring all our differences" (ibid., p. 300).

6TsGIAM, fund 728, folder 2612-a, letter to Olga Nikolaevna dated October 8/20, 1861, as cited in Lu. I. Gerasimova, "Krizis pravitel'stvennoi politiki v gody revoliutsionnoi situatsii i Aleksandr It," Revoliutsionnaia situatsiia v Rossii v'

1859-1861 gg (Moscow, 1962), p. 104. For Alexander's hostile view of the press in general, see Valuev, 1:98.

7TsGIAM, fund 728, folder 2456, letter to Olga Nikolaevna dated April 21, 1856, as cited in Gerasimova, p. 104.

44 Alfred J. Rieber

telligentsia that they lacked initiative and slipped easily into corrupt and dishonest dealings. He despised the intelligentsia.

Many of his advisers tried to play upon his apprehensions by exag- gerating one or another form of discontent and opposition. It was not surprising, therefore, that he distrusted the intrigues of his own bureau- crats and, most of all, the court. The confusion of government, lamented D. A. Miliutin, was due to the tsar's unwillingness to "give exclusive influence to any one of us."8 On occasion Alexander violated his own precepts, as when the clever Peter Shuvalov gained ascendance over the tsar, but his disappointment, disillusion, and revenge were all the greater when Shuvalov failed the ultimate test of loyalty by criticizing Alex- ander's liaison with Countess Dolgorukaia.

In order to protect himself Alexander devised a method of balancing off the contending groups and personalities who sought his favor. With- out surrendering any of his autocratic prerogatives, he placed responsi- bility in the hands of those who expressed in word and deed their un- swerving personal loyalty to him. On matters about which he had made up his mind, he usually found a loyal subordinate, "an instrument of his will," to carry it out. Where he felt himself uncertain, he tossed the issue like a juicy bone into the pack of his squabbling ministers and waited to be convinced by the strongest or most clever of them. Thus, Alexander pursued his own policies by unconsciously exploiting rather than reconciling the conflicting interests within the government and throughout the country. As a result, political alignments constantly shifted on different issues, but all of them revolved around the person of the autocrat.

Despite the inauspicious debut of his reign, Alexander faced his new responsibilities with some concrete advantages. In contrast with three out of his four predecessors, his accession to the throne was legitimate and unopposed. A surge of hope greeted him from all quarters. He re- sponded quickly by relaxing his father's most repressive measures and thus gained much good will, which is valuable even to an autocrat. Alexander had served a long and instructive apprenticeship, having chaired, for example, important secret committees on peasant reform and railroad construction. Consequently, he had a better grasp of ad- ministrative and financial matters than most previous grand dukes and, just as important, a more realistic view than his father of Europe's in- dustrial power.9

8 Manuscript Division of the Lenin Library (hereafter MDLL), D. A. Miliutin, "Vospominaniia," fund 169, box 14, no. 2 (1862), p. 111.

9 A. N. Savin, "Nikolai I i tsesarevich Aleksandr Nikolaevich v ikh perepiske 1842-1847 godov," in Sbornik statei, v'ypusk 1, Trudy instituta istorii (Moscow, 1926), p. 139.

Alexander II 45

The army, though defeated, was intact and loyal. In fact, only a small proportion had seen service in the Crimea. Fresh line divisions had re- mained inactive in Poland and the Caucasus. Alexander could still call upon the services of some enlightened if now venerable reformers from his uncle's reign as well as a new generation of technically trained civil servants who, despite Nicholas's repressive educational measures, were well educated and eager to undertake a massive program of reforms from above.'0 Finally, the defeat itself discredited the old rigid social and political system and opened up a broader range of options for the new tsar. The continued existence of serfdom and autocracy well into the nineteenth century rested in no small measure upon the ability of the system to satisfy the pressing demands of the state. What had these demands been and how could they now be met most effectively? By reforms which copied the institutions of western Europe as in the time of Peter the Great? By transforming the autocracy into a parliamentary government and the serf economy into a capitalist one?

Historically, the driving force behind Russia's state policy had been the vital necessity of becoming and remaining a great European power. Only by borrowing from Western forms of culture and technology could Russia resist domination by the West and secure stable frontiers in Asia through conquest and colonization. As the great Russian historian P. N. Miliukov has so persuasively argued, significant social and administra- tive reforms in Russia since the fifteenth century have sprung from the urgent necessity to mobilize human and material resources-men and money-in order to repel foreign invasion and advance toward the center of civilization."t The education and training of Alexander I, Nicholas I, and Alexander II reflected a keen awareness of this com- pelling tradition. Shaken by the Napoleonic Wars, Alexander I warned his younger brother that he must be a soldier or perish, advice which Nicholas passed on in turn to his son: "He must be a soldier at heart or else in this century he will be lost."''2 The complementary lesson

10 One outstanding survivor of the "Decembrist generation" was Alexander's new minister of interior, S. S. Lanskoi, a former Mason, friend of A. N. Murav'ev, and member of the Union of Welfare; see P. P. Semenov-Tian-Shanskii, Memuary epokha osvobozhdeniia krest'ian v Rossii, 1857-1861 (Petrograd, 1915), 3:4. Another was Count D. N. Bludov, head of the second section of the tsar's chan- cellery, who had been a close friend of Karamzin and a member of the literary so- ciety Arzamas. Both men soon discovered that they lacked the energy and the technical qualifications to satisfy Alexander. After playing a role in initiating the peasant and judicial reforms, they were moved aside by younger specialists. For Bludov on this point, see Richard Wortman, "Judicial Personnel and the Court Reform of 1864," Canadian Slavic Studies 3, no. 2 (Summer 1969) :228-30.

11 P. N. Miliukov, Ocherki po istorii russkoi kultury (St. Petersburg, 1904), 1:145-49. Miliukov, however, as a Russian liberal, regarded the reforms of the 1860s as a break with this tradition.

12 "Zapiski K. K. Merdera," p. 514.

46 Alfred J. Rieber

was also driven home by the financial tutor of the young heir, E. F. Kankrin, Nicholas's minister of finance, who repeated Peter the Great's doctrine that "money was the main artery of war."''3 At a staggering cost to society, this policy paid for Russia's membership in the world's most exclusive club, the European Concert.

On many occasions, to be sure, Alexander's predecessors had acknowl- edged the desirability of reform. As early as 1818 Alexander I authorized the drafting of a peasant reform but insisted that the plan "not include any measure harmful to the landowners and especially that those mea- sures display no sign of force on the part of the government"-a quali- fication which effectively blocked action except for the landless liberation of peasants in the Baltic provinces.'4 Nicholas regarded serfdom as "an evil, palpable and obvious to all," but despite the warning of his secret police chief, Count A. Benckendorff, that "serfdom is a powder keg under the government," and his recommendation in 1839 that it be gradually abolished, the tsar believed the immediate consequences would "be an even more disastrous evil."'-'- Both Alexander I and Nicholas I feared alienating the mass of the nobility upon whom they relied to defeat Napoleon, put down the Decembrists in 1825, and crush the Poles in 1830. The gap between benevolent attitudes and hard poli- tics could not be bridged until defeat or revolution threatened the very existence of the state. Defeat took place first, overcame open resistance by the nobility who had most to lose from the reform, and thrust upon Alexander II, a reputedly weak-willed man, the historic role of "tsar- liberator."

Historians who have subjected Alexander to a liberal critique gener- ally agree on dividing his reign into reformist and conservative periods, neatly separated by the attempt upon his life in 1866 by the student Dmitri Karakozov. Before that fatal date, the argument runs, the "great reforms" were launched: emancipation of the serfs, far-reaching changes in local government, the judiciary, press, and universities. Following the shock of near-assassination, the dark forces of reaction rose again to the surface. Liberal reformers lost their positions, non-Russian national- ities were persecuted, and the revolutionary movement occupied the

13 "Vsepoddanneishaia dokladnaia zapiska Ministra Finansova E. F. Kankrina . . 1838 g.," Sbornik imperatorskogo russkogo istoricheskogo obshchestva 31

(1881) :10. 14 V. I. Semevskii, Krest'ianskii vopros v Rossii v XVIII i pervoi polovinle XIX

v. (St. Petersburg, 1888), 1:437. 15 E. A. Morokhovets, Krest'ianskoe dvizlienie, 1827-1869 (Moscow, 1931), p.

32. This was the report for 1839.

Alexander II 47

ground abandoned by the defeated gradualists. Alexander, the liberals concluded, had betrayed the ideals of his age.'16

This scheme seeks to explain Alexander's motivation and the direction of his policies with scant regard for the rare consistency of his views on the two vital questions of his reign. Military and fiscal reforms pro- vided the impetus for emancipation and continued to overshadow all other aspects of Russian politics. In the mid-nineteenth century Russia maintained the largest and most expensive peacetime army in Europe. Based on long-term serf recruits, the armed forces lacked a trained stra- tegic reserve and thus could not be expanded in time of emergency. Largely immobile, because of long, exposed frontiers, an unsettled internal situation, and the absence of modern transportation, army units could not be rushed to reinforce the regular forces under attack at an exposed position, like the Crimea, where only a fraction of the men under arms actually fought the enemy. The huge cost of keeping an army in full readiness meant that sums much needed for modernizing equipment and building strategic railroads and fortresses could not be spared. An unsuccessful war like that in the Crimea added almost a bil- lion rubles to the national debt and shook the monetary stability of the country to its foundations. Alexander and a few of his military advisers recognized that among all the other evils spawned by serfdom, an out- moded army and a crippled treasury were the most intolerable. By liberating the serfs, Alexander could not only free Russia from a moral blight but furnish it with both a smaller, more efficient standing army with a large ready reserve and also a modern fiscal system with a Euro- pean-style budget.17

The architects of these policies were M. Kh. Reutern and D. M. Miliutin, whose activities cannot easily be accommodated by the liberal interpretation. Although both men are traditionally considered liberals, their service careers span the better part of Alexander's reign, Reutern as minister of finance, 1862-78, and Miliutin as minister of war, 1861- 81. During this time they worked consistently and often successfully to introduce profound changes in their respective ministries. Both men took an active part in preparing the first two important reforms which followed the emancipation-namely, the creation of a unified treasury,

16 Alexander Kornilov, Modernz Russiani History, trans. Alexander Kaun (New York, 1952), 2:106, 111-12, 179, whence much of the influence on Western sec- ondary accounts. See, for example, P. N. Miliukov, Ch. Seignobos. and L. Eisen- mann, Histoire de Russie (Paris, 1933), 3:864, 905 (this section was written by Miliukov himself); M. T. Florinsky, Russia, a Historv andl an Initerpretatinon (New York, 1953), 2:1033, 1065-66; W. E. Mosse, Alexander 11 anid the Modernization of Russia (London, 1958), pp. 132, 178.

17 A. J. Rieber, The Politics of Aulocracy (The Hague. 1966), pp. 25-29.

48 Alfred J. Rieber

a cost accounting budget, and a territorial system for the army, all of which were introduced in the first year of their tenures as ministers. When Reutern left office, it was not because he had been dismissed, like so many others. He resigned because Alexander had decided to sacrifice fiscal stability to military requirements, to choose Miliutin's advice to go to war with the Ottoman Empire over Reutern's strong opposition. Not only did 1866 fail to interrupt their reforming activity, but it marked a new phase. Reutern's memorandum of September 1866 set forth a plan for Russia's fiscal and economic growth which in part foreshadowed Count Sergius Witte's views a generation later.'8 The same year Miliutin responded to the victory of the Prussian mass army over Austria in the Seven Weeks' War by initiating the changes which culmi- nated in 1874 with the introduction of universal conscription.'9 This he accomplished only with Alexander's unflinching support in the face of a long and stubborn opposition by the leaders of the die-hard nobility. Yet, can there be any doubt that Alexander was less interested in de- mocratizing the army and encouraging capitalism than in utilizing West- ern techniques to bolster the twin pillars of the Russian autocracy?

A similar unifying thread can be seen running through the broad range of legislation which necessarily followed the decision to free the serfs. It cannot be emphasized too much that the emancipation undermined the whole legal and institutional structure which had existed in Russia since the seventeenth century. Having outlived the purpose for which it was created, the harsh separation of social classes into closed hereditary estates, each with its own set of corporate obligations, could not be swept away entirely by introducing a brand new set of institutions borrowed wholesale from western Europe. The lesson of Peter the Great's in- discriminate haste had not gone unnoticed. Moreover, Alexander lacked his ancestor's demonic energy as well as confidence in the abilities of his people, fettered or corrupted by 200 years of serfdom, to fulfill the role of responsible citizens. The error and frustration of the liberals con- sisted in their unwillingness to acknowledge the resilience of the tra-

18 A. N. Kulomzin and B. G. Reutern, M. Kli. Reutern (St. Petersburg, 1910), appendix, pp. 64-137.

19 MDLL, "Ob'lasnitel'naia zapiska k schete Voennogo Ministerstva na 1867 god," Fund Miliutina, F 169, box 28, no. 6, pp. 1-2, 54-57. The most effective critic of Miliutin's budgets was Reutern, not the so-called reactionaries (ibid., "Moi starcheskie vospominaniia za 1816-73 godov, box 15, no. 3, pp. 269-71). Most historians have accepted Miliutin's public image of himself as the lonely embattled "liberal" within the government after 1866 as part of the generally ac- cepted periodization of Alexander's reign into two halves. See esp. P. A. Zaion- chkovskii, Voennye reformy 1860-1870 godov v Rossii (Moscow, 1952), and For- restt A. Miller, Dmitrii Miliutin and tlde Reform Era in Russia (Vanderbilt, 1968).

Alexander II 49

ditional cultural pattern. The economic settlement of 1861 is a case in point.

Attempts to measure Alexander's policies against the standards of European capitalism cause far more difficulties than they resolve. On this issue, however, the liberal historians do not stand alone, nor do they occupy the first rank. Soviet historians, in particular, have sought to establish 1861 as the dividing line between feudal and capitalist periods in Russian history, although they have clearly demonstrated that, on the one hand, capitalist relations developed in Russia as early as the late eighteenth century, and, on the other hand, the Russian bourgeoisie remained for some time after 1861 a small and cautious class bound closely to the state bureaucracy. They attribute the peculiar and in- complete character of Russian capitalism to Alexander's subjective defense of the landlords' interests even as his reforms were creating the objective conditions for the growth of capitalism.20 Ironically, non- Marxist historians have drawn inspiration from Engels's more determin- ist analysis that the main motive for the emancipation was the economic necessity to free the labor and capital with which to industrialize Russia.2'

A close look at the complicated economic terms of the emancipation seriously challenges both interpretations. Although Alexander admitted that "everything possible was done to safeguard the interests of the gentry," he warned the State Council that he would accept revisions in the draft law he laid before them "only if they do not require a manifest sacri- fice on the part of the peasantry, . . . for the basis of the entire affair should be the improvement of the peasants' condition, not just in words but

21 The literature on this subject is extensive. See, for example, N. M. Druzhinin, "Konflikt mezhdu proizvoditel-nymi silami i feodal'nymi otnosheniiami nakanune reformy 1861 goda," Voprosy Istorii 1, no. 7 (July 1954) :56-76; P. A. Zaion- chkovskii, Otmena krepostnogo prava v Rossii (Moscow, 1960), esp. pp. 142-49; 356-61; I. F. Gindin, Gosudarstvennvi bank i ekonomicheskaia politika tsarskogo prai'itel'stva, 1861-1892 gody (Moscow, 1960), esp. chap. 1.

21 Theodore Von Laue, "The State and the Economy," in The Transformation of Russian Society, ed. C. E. Black (Cambridge, Mass., 1960), p. 211; Alfred Skerpan, "The Russian National Economy and Emancipation," in Essays in Rus- sian History, ed. A. D. Ferguson (New Haven, Conn., 1962). A brilliant modern interpretation of the relationship between the emancipation and industrialization is Alexander Gerschenkron, "Agrarian Policies and Industrialization: Russia 1861- 1917," in Thle Cambridge Economic History of Europe (Cambridge, 1965), vol. 6, pt. 2, where the emphasis is placed on the liberation "as an essentially political act" taken primarily "to obviate outbreaks of peasant violence and the threat of catastrophic consequences to the regime." Most important, the author shows that industrialization was initiated "almost as an incidental and not quite desirable by-product of a political action oriented to other goals and inspired by other con- siderations" (ibid., p. 711) .

50 Alfred J. Rieber

in fact."22 That improvement, however, remained limited by the fiscal interests of the state. The real liberals, like K. D. Kavelin, B. N. Chicherin, and A. I. Koshelev, envisaged a landed peasantry as the basis of a commercial capitalist economy. Another group of landlords who also claimed to represent the capitalist spirit favored freeing the serfs without land and hiring them back as wage laborers. Two staggering difficulties impelled the government to reject both solutions. Once the landlords' patrimonial authority was removed, who was going to make certain that the landed peasants would pay and that the landless peasants could pay their taxes? The state was still unable to shoulder the cost of collecting its own taxes; and even had it tried, the reaction of both the nobility and the peasantry, who already resented the "bureau- cratic invasion" of the countryside, might well have caused serious diffi- culties. As the Journal of the Secret and Main Committee reveals, the decision by the state to maintain the communal forms of landholding by the peasants in the bulk of the European provinces was based upon the dual need to maintain the individual peasant taxpayer on the land and at the same time to preserve the joint guarantee of taxes by the collective.23 By this ingenious device the government made certain that the peasant, now saddled with redemption dues for his land over a period of forty-nine years as well as the poll tax, could not leave the land without the approval of the other heads of households, who would have to take upon themselves his share of the communal tax burden.

In a different way but to the same effect, the nobility was denied the reality of its compensation for the loss of its serfs and almost half its land. The government did not make outright cash payments to the nobility; indeed it could not have done so without having gone com- pletely bankrupt. Rather, it issued interest-bearing bonds and redemp- tion certificates which could be used only to pay off state obligations in the amount of up to 80 percent of a sum capitalized at 6 percent of the value of previous dues minus the landlord's debt to the credit institutions. In brief, this meant that the landlords obtained very little capital from the transaction that might enable them to reorganize their estates, on a capitalist basis. Because of their enormous indebtedness to the state treasury, they received, in fact, only about one-half of the 600 million rubles awarded to them on the basis of the subsequent settlement, and that sum could not be converted into cash but had to be either placed in banks as securities paying 5 percent or turned in to the

22 Zhurnaly i memorii obshchogo sobraniia Gosudarstvennogo Soveta po krest'ianskomu delu s 28 ianv. po 12 marta 1861 gody (Petrograd, 1915), 2:3-5.

23 Zhurnal sekretnogo i glavnogo komiteta po krest'ianskomu delu (Petrograd, 1915), 2:194-95, 198.

Alexander ll 51

Treasury as payment for future loans. In the meantime, the district treasury agents received the additional 20 percent of the land value in cash from the peasantry and continued to collect 6 percent of the total capitalized sum while paying back to the landlord only 5 percent of one-half that sum in the form of bonds. Defenders of the nobility and the peasantry lamented the fate of both, and not without good reason.24 Their interests and the interests of Russian capitalism were sacrificed to the fiscal stability of the state.

More or less consistently throughout Alexander's reign, the same considerations dominated policies in other economic areas such as tariffs and railroad building. From 1856 to 1878 the main strategic lines were built linking the administrative capitals-Moscow and St. Petersburg- with the western frontier-Warsaw-and the Black Sea-Odessa. More to increase trade with western Europe than to develop internal markets, other lines connected the great ports with the grain-producing provinces, for example, St. Petersburg-Moscow-Nizhnii, St. Petersburg-Moscow- Voronezh, Riga-Tsaritsyn, and Kursk-Kharkov-Odessa. By the end of the 1870s the dramatic results justified the high expectations. On the eve of the Russo-Turkish War in 1876 only fifteen days were required for general mobilization, while in 1859 during the French-Piedmontese War against Austria it had taken the army five months to partially mo- bilize four corps along the Galician frontier. Similarly, in 1861 grain amounted to just under 40 percent of Russia's exports. By 1878 that figure had topped 60 percent.)5 Beginning with the tariff of 1857 duties on pig iron and steel were substantially reduced and free importation of rails and rolling stock was permitted to hasten the construction of the first planned railroad network under French management. In fact, the general purpose of slightly lower Russian tariffs up to 1881 was to raise revenue rather than to protect domestic industries. The main casualty of these policies was the bulwark of industrial development in the modern age-the metallurgical industry, which stagnated for the entire decade of the 1860s as a result of loss of labor due to emanci-

24 The fiscal details are drawn from Zaionchkovskii, Otmenia, pp. 136-38. Despite his careful analysis, Zaionchkovskii comes to the astonishing conclusion that "the redemption operation permitted the landlord to maintain fully that income which he received before the reform" (ibid., p. 139).

25 Roger Portal, "The Industrialization of Russia," in The Cambridge Econiomic History of Europe, 6, pt. 2:813. There is considerable evidence, however, that the government still failed to grasp the economics of railroad transportation. During the Russo-Turkish War, for example, no effort was made to increase the overall carrying capacity of lines in operation in order to accommodate heavy troop move- ments in addition to maintaining the normal level of grain trade. See A. P. Pogrebinskii, "Stroitel'stvo zheleznykh dorog v poreformennoi periode," istori- cheskie Zapiski (1954), no. 47, p. 166.

52 Alfred J. Rieber

pation, foreign competition due to the tariffs, and absence of direct railroad connections between coal and iron sources. Recovery was slow until the late 1870s and early 1880s, when the first railroad linked the Urals with the Donets Basin, the poll tax on peasants was abolished, increasing their mobility, and a high protective tariff to be paid in gold encouraged domestic industry. The realization was late in coming that only by means of state encouragement and support of industry could both military power and fiscal stability be assured.

The zemstvo reforms under Alexander were no more designed to serve the cause of liberalism-or conservatism, for that matter-than the emancipation was planned to further Russia's capitalist development. Once the patrimonial rights which the landlords had exercised over the peasants had been abolished by the emancipation, the autocracy faced again the recurring dilemma in Russian history of devising some means by which the provinces could be tied to the center. How much local autonomy could be permitted without undermining the authority of the autocrat? On the other hand, how could the state bureaucracy shoulder the enormous burden of maintaining public services through vast and remote areas without modern transportation and communications? The long-delayed opportunity to raise the cultural and economic level of the rural population was now at hand, making the problem more acute than ever before. Yet the autocracy resorted to nothing more imaginative than the traditional forms of local government dressed up in a new guise.

In the most general terms, the zemstvo reform of 1864 can be char- acterized as a compromise between political centralization and socio- economic decentralization. Or, as Alexander once stated when rejecting a petition of the Baltic nobility concerning an alleged violation of their local rights, "all legislation takes its authority from the unified autoc- racy. "26 Russian Liberals praised the elective principle upon which the reform rested. How, then, is one to explain why the reputedly "liberal" (or was he simply enlightened?) N. A. Miliutin submitted a draft of the reform which, in contrast with other plans, substantially increased the power of the bureaucrats at the expense of the locally elected repre- sentatives? Was it because he believed that under conditions prevailing at that time the bureaucrats would be more disinterested than the no- bility, who, by virtue of their own great personal influence in the coun- tryside and the indirect, three-class voting system, were certain to domi- nate the zemstvo assemblies and boards? And had not this suspicion been more than justified during the preparation of the emancipation by the landowners' selfish and impassioned defense of their own economic

26 MDLL, Miliutin, "Vospominaniia," fund 169, box 17, no. 3 (1870-71), p. 5.

Alexander 11 53

interests? In theory, to be sure, the government could have accepted the principle of "one man, one vote," but in practice this would have meant submerging Russia's only provincial elite in the gray mass of the peas- antry. In its final form the zemstvo legislation posted bureaucratic watch- dogs over the local elective bodies in the person of the district police chief and the governor, whose duty it was to check the political ambitions of the nobility and protect the peasant against such exploitation by former landlords as might cripple their tax-paying abilities or turn them into desperate rebels. In this way the state continued the policies of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, when, as Kliuchevskii explained, it was perfectly willing to turn over the peasant to the tender mercies of the landlord as long as the peasant continued to be able to fulfill his primary obligations to the state.27

As it turned out, certain sections of the nobility supported by the zemstvo specialists (teachers, engineers, doctors, agronomists, etc.) proved to be more concerned with improving education, health, trans- portation, and other public services than were the bureaucrats. They also furnished the cadres for a genuine liberal movement in the western European tradition. Yet, even granting this, it is still a moot point whether these zemstvo liberals reflected the basic interests of the peas- antry as the peasantry saw them. It is less doubtful that bureaucratic interference in local government was aimed not so much at the socio- economic functions of the zemstvos as at the political aspirations of the provincial nobility.28 In characteristic fashion Alexander never doubted throughout his long reign that representative bodies should function exclusively as administrative arms of the center. When, near the end of his life in the face of terrorist attacks, he placed complete confidence in Count Loris-Melikov to save the regime, he also gave his wholehearted approval to the political philosophy which underlay "the dictatorship of the heart": "for Russia any organization of people's representatives in forms borrowed from the West is unthinkable, [but also] a simple recreation of representative forms of olden times [the zemskii sobor]

27 V. 0. Kliuchevskii, "Proiskhozhdenie krepostnogo prava v Rossii," Opyty i issledovaanfia (Petrograd, 1918). p. 232. Kliuchevskii shows that under Mikhail Romanov the government was forced to substitute the peasant household for the area of plowland as the unit of taxation because the landlords began to move their peasants from one plot to another in order to avoid or reduce their state obligations.

28 V. V. Garmiza, Podgotovka zemskoi reformy 1864 goda (Moscow, 1957), p. 154, shows that N. A. Miliutin, whose project strongly opposed any political role for the zemstvos and even sought to restrict their economic activities, was a deter- mined supporter of the centralized bureaucracy: "Let the gentry do the electing, but the government must approve." Yet she accepts without question Miliutin's own analysis of his dismissal in 1861 as a victory for the "reaction."

54 Alfred J. Rieber

would be difficult to achieve, and in any case, a dangerous experience in returning to the past."29

It may be accepted as an axiom of Alexander's reign that the farther removed an issue from the central concerns of fiscal and military security, the greater the latitude his advisers enjoyed in reforming outmoded and decayed institutions.3 In the three traditional bulwarks of civil liberties -the press, the universities, and the judiciary-Alexander permitted a degree of freedom never before equaled in Russian history. But as soon as it became evident that journalists, students, teachers, and lawyers were exercising those rights in order to express and defend their own values rather than to prove their devotion to the tsar, as Alexander thought they should, then he turned upon them with wrath and indigna- tion. In his eyes the press ought to serve the government's need to explain its policies to the people.:" Criticism from either the Right or the Left he considered a betrayal of that obligation. At times, even the most loyal subject, like M. N. Katkov, was warned that unless he refrained from attacking government officials, no matter how justifiable this might seem to him in terms of the true interests of the autocracy, his paper would be closed down.3' Ivan Aksakov, who supported the autocracy in principle but demanded such conservative measures as russification, had two newspapers he edited shut down on government orders and lost his job on a third.33 As with the censorship statute of 1865, so with the university statute of 1863; the new regulatory ma- chinery shifted responsibility for upholding order from those who ad- ministered the law, the bureaucrats, to those who were supposed to enjoy

29 N. V. Golitsyn, "Konstitutsiia grafa Lorisa-Melikova," Byloe, nos. 4-5 (1918), p. 163. See also P. A. Zaionchkovskii, Krizis samoderzhaviia na rubezhe 1870- 1880-x godov (Moscow, 1964), pp. 207-10, 238-43, 287.

30 Yet even primary school education was linked to the military security of the state. See Allen Sinel, "Educating the Russian Peasantry: The Elementary School Reforms of Count Dmitrii Tolstoi," Slavic Review 27, no. 1 (March 1968):49.

31 Such was Alexander's reasoning in 1858, when he permitted discussion of serfdom in the press for the first time, and in 1859, when he supported recom- mendations for censorship reform (S. M. Seredonin, Istoricheskii obzor deiatel'nosti komiteta ministrov [St. Petersburg, 1902], 3, pt. 2:196-97). Charles Ruud has re- cently shown that the aim of both the Committee on Press Affairs in 1859 and the censorship statute of 1865 was to control the press more effectively. As Ruud points out, these repressive regulations preceded the Karakozov attack on the tsar in 1866, "which is frequently cited as a turning point in press policy" (Charles Ruud, "The Russian Empire's New Censorship Law of 1865," Canadian Slavic Studies 3, no. 2 [Summer 1969]:244). Another telling blow against the myth of 1866.

.32 E. M. Feoktistov, Za kulisami politiki i literatury 1848-1896 (Leningrad, 1929), pp. 252-53.

33 M. Lemke, Epokha tsenzurnykh reform 1859-1865 godov (St. Petersburg, 1904), pp. 181-82.

Alexander ll 55

its protection, the university professors. The basically repressive nature of this device soon became apparent.'4

Alexander measured out doses of freedom to his subjects in relation to their ability to understand exactly how he wanted them to use it. Like his other reforms, the extension of civil liberties was meant to increase the opportunities of the people to serve and obey him. They would become more devoted and unified by assuming their new role as active citizens in contrast with their previous role as passive subjects. Alexander favored, as did his father, a narrow functionalism in school curricula in order to prepare individuals for a specific bureaucratic job and prevent them from developing a generalized view of society. One concrete and positive aspect of his policies was the dramatic growth of technical cadres in law, education, and other neglected professions. Still, a great distance separated the idea of voluntary acceptance of the will of the tsar from the liberal ideal of the inalienable rights of the individual.

Alexander's attitude toward nationalism also reflected his deep con- cern over the fragile unity of the empire. The two most prominent aspects of nineteenth-century nationalism were the myth of popular sovereignty and the exclusiveness of a single language and culture. As the absolute ruler of a multinational empire in which the Great Russians were slowly losing their majoritarian position, Alexander refused to en- dorse either of these principles. This by no means suggests that russi- fication under Alexander can be discounted, much less ignored, but rather that it must be considered in the light of the political and strategic requirements of the autocracy. Only in this way is it possible to explain the variety of response to the nationalities question in Finland, Poland, the Baltic provinces, and the Caucasus. Alexander laconically acknowl- edged Finland's loyalty: "My father relied on you. All of you have fulfilled your duty." Consequently he rewarded the Grand Duchy by granting a large degree of political and cultural autonomy, far more liberal, for example, than that which the English extended to the Irish.35 Consistent with this policy, the autocracy offered the Finnish majority important cultural advantages at the expense of the minority Swedish elite, whose sympathies with Stockholm diluted their loyalty to St. Peters- burg.3" By contrast Alexander's initial willingness to extend similar rights

34 R. G. Eimantova, "Universitetskaia reforma 1863 g., Istoricheskie zapiski, no. 70 (1961), pp. 177-81.

35 Alexander refused, however, to permit the use of the word "constitution" to describe his concessions (M. Borodkin, Iz noveishei istorii Finlandii ([St. Peters- burg, 1905], pp. 22-23).

36 By sharply reversing Nicholas I's policy of favoring the Swedish upper classes, Alexander helped to stiffen Finnish resistance to the appeals of the Polish rebels exorting them "to take advantage of the situation in order to break away from

56 Alfred J. Rieber

to the Poles aimed at winning over the aristocracy. When the revolt of 1863 discredited that policy, Alexander angrily demanded a more thor- oughgoing russification of Polish administration and culture than a ma- jority of bureaucratic specialists in the Committee for the Western Re- gion, and he consistently supported N. A. Miliutin's drive to liberate the Russian peasants from their Polish landlords on more generous terms than those enjoyed by the peasantry in the Central and Black Earth Provinces.37

Because the Baltic Germans had served the autocracy loyally for so long, Alexander not only upheld their economic and social privileges against the nascent Estonian and Latvian nationalists but also rebuked overzealous right-wing patriots for attacking them with, in his words, "a sharpness which instead of uniting Russia into a single whole involved its division."38

In the recently conquered Caucasus, Alexander approved sizable deportations and resettlement of Circassian tribes who forcibly resisted assimilation into the administrative structure of the empire. The problem here as with other Muslim peoples was the powerful attraction of Con- stantinople and Mecca upon the faithful. At the suggestion of the viceroy of the Caucasus, Prince A. I. Bariatinskii, Alexander established the Society for the Reestablishment of Christianity in the Caucasus, and Orthodox missionaries rather than language teachers took up the main burden of transforming former enemies into obedient subjects.39 Their quasi-political activities soon spread into the Tatar areas of the Volga. Together with the revival of missionary work in the Western Provinces, the campaign converted over 600,000 by the end of the reign.

Largely at the instigation of his younger brother, Grand Duke Con- stantine Nikolaevich, the tsar sought to revitalize and modernize the ad- ministrative and educational functions of the church in order to prepare it for a more active role beyond the frontiers. In 1876 a twenty-year project to translate for the first time the entire Bible into modern Russian was finally completed. In 1867-69 a large-scale reform of clerical education was undertaken. Overseas missions were dispatched to the Near East and the Americas.40 In his attempts to use the church as a political weapon,

Russia and return [sic!] to the structure of a Scandinavian Monarchy" (MDLL, Miliutin, "Vospominaniia," fund 169, box 14 [1863], p. 8).

37Ibid., box 15, no. 1 (1864), pp. 42, 111; box 15, no. 2 (1865), pp. 61-62. :38 Ibid., box 15, no. 2 (1865), p. 100. 39 A. L. Zisserman, Fel'dmarshal' ksaiz' Aleksandr Ivanovich Bariatinskii, 1815-

1879 (Moscow, 1890), pp. 100-107. The tsar and tsaritsa took the society under their personal protection (Polnoe sobranie zakotnov Rossiiskoi imperii, 2d ser., vol. 35, no. 35897 [June 9, 1860]).

40Tatishchev (n. 1 above), 2:224, 227.

Alexander II 57

Alexander was gradually drawn into much the same ambivalent position toward the Balkan Slavs as his father. Consistently, if at times reluc- tantly, he encouraged the belief that Russia would champion Orthodox Christianity against Islam, although he left unclear the extent of that support. "I will do what I can," he answered the request of a visiting delegation of Serbs to help them clear Belgrade of the Turks.41 Officially Alexander opposed the grandiose designs of the Pan-Slavs, but his moral commitment to Orthodoxy as a kind of substitute for national unity left him helpless to resist their pressure at the decisive moment. By 1877 he reached the point where he had unwittingly staked his own honor and that of the empire upon saving the rebellious Christian population of the Ottoman Empire from their legitimate sovereign.

Rejecting Great Russian nationalism as divisive and Pan-Slavism as adventurist, Alexander relied on the traditional loyalty to tsar, church, and state to carry the empire through the war. But whatever enthusiasm the war generated came from an emotional identification with Russia's mission with which the tsar did not fully sympathize and therefore could not exploit. Victory in the Balkans cost Russia more men and treasure than defeat in the Crimea. In psychological terms the paradox was even greater. European intervention robbed Russia of the choicest fruits of victory, leaving the disgruntled Pan-Slavs without Constantinople and the disillusioned liberals without a constitution. The reformed army had not been ready, and the fragile fiscal structure buckled under the strain. Faced with rising pressure from the postwar revolutionary terror, Alex- ander appealed in vain for public support. The great reformer had been unable to tap the emotional wellsprings of the people, nor was he willing to provide them with the constitutional rights that even liberated Bulgaria enjoyed. Deeply embittered and frightened, Alexander could not under- stand why he was being "hunted like a wild beast" in his own country. Ever since he had been a child, he had wanted people to love and respect him. He wept when his tutors gave him poor marks, and he grieved later when his people misunderstood his policies. Above all, it appeared to him he had sought to unite the empire, to reconcile the con- flicting interests through compromise; yet in the end he stood alone.

Given Alexander's personal character and the socioeconomic situation in mid-nineteenth century Russia, was it not possible that a policy based upon liberalism, capitalism, and nationalism might have produced ex- actly the opposite effect in Russia that it did in western Europe? Rather than unifying the country, it might have destroyed it. On the one hand,

41 S. A. Nikitin, Slavianskie koniiietv v Rossii v 1858-1876 godakhl (Moscow, 1960), pp. 194-95.

58 Alfred J.Rieber

Alexander clearly lacked the strength of will, imagination, and boldness of Peter or Lenin. He was only too well aware of his own weaknesses. On the other hand, the obstacles to Petrine revolution were far greater than in 1700, and the prospects of a mass revolution, far less than in 1917. The Muscovite state had become a multinational European power with a more stable social and political elite and a more complex economy than at the end of the seventeenth century. Conversely, al- though Crimea had been a defeat, it had not rent the fabric of society as was to happen during World War I. The risks of upheaval from above outweighed the dangers of disintegration from below.

Alexander worked hard to preserve both the power of the state and the loyalty of his subjects. The two aims proved to be incompatible, and in the end his policy of reconciliation collapsed. We can hardly ex- pect him to have tried revolution instead. Neither he nor the times were suited to it. The heavy responsibility for state security and social order had rested too long upon the shoulders of the autocracy for Alex- ander to be willing or for society to be able to share it.

Yet Alexander's personal fate would yield more significant insights if his struggle to solve the problems which defeated him were placed in a different historical perspective, one free of the inadequate categories originally defined and best suited for western European history. Surely, it is no longer possible to discuss the politics of Russian autocracy in terms of an artificial dualism, whether liberal-conservative, Westernizer- Slavophil, or rational-national. These no more than capitalism and nationalism suggest the real preoccupations of those who held power as distinct from those who wanted it.

Erratum

In the September 1970 issue, in Paul Avrich's review of A Russian European: Paul Miliukov in Russian Politics, by Thomas Riha, on page 440, line 8, for "a distinct figure" read "a distant figure."