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Russian Empire
Table of Contents
Russian Empire

 * Introduction
   
 * The reign of Peter the Great
    * Economy
   
    * Military, finance, and administration
   
    * Church and education
   
    * Relations with the West
   
    * Internal disturbances

 * 
   Peter’s immediate successors
   
 * 
   Catherine the Great
   
 * 
   Paul
   
 * Alexander
    * Initial liberalism
   
    * Nationalism and reaction
   
    * The revolutionary movement

 * Nicholas I
    * Slavophiles and Westernizers
   
    * The Crimean War

 * Alexander II
    * Emancipation of the serfs
   
    * Administrative reforms
   
    * The revolutionary movements
      * Populism
      * Terrorism
      * Loris-Melikov
   
    * Foreign policy
   
    * Industrial progress

 * Alexander III
    * Administration and economy
   
    * Foreign policy

 * Nicholas II
    * Reassertion of autocratic principles
   
    * Administration and economy
   
    * Russification policy
   
    * Resurgence of revolutionary activity
   
    * Other political movements
   
    * Foreign policy and the Russo-Japanese War
   
    * Revolution of 1905 and the First and Second Dumas
   
    * Stolypin’s regime
      * Agricultural reform
      * Russian nationalism
   
    * World War I
   
    * The end of the Romanov dynasty

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 * Article History


NICHOLAS I


Nicholas I

Nicholas was quite unlike Alexander. With a rough nature and incurious
intellect, he was conscious of his inferiority and sincerely disliked the idea
of becoming emperor. Once on the throne, he was sure that he would be
enlightened from above for the accomplishment of his divine mission, and he
conceived an exalted idea of his personal dignity and infallibility. He was,
however, no mystic. Cold and reserved, he inspired fear and hatred, and he
consciously made use of these feelings as the instrument of his power. His aim
was to freeze every germ of free thought and independent moral feeling, as
disturbing agents of the order of things entrusted by God to his personal care.

Nicholas’s reign is divided into three periods by two European sets of
revolutions: those of 1830 and those of 1848. During the first five years he did
not feel quite sure of himself, and he appealed for help to advisers of
Alexander’s liberal period, such as Kochubey, Speransky, and Egor Frantsevich,
Count Kankrin. In December 1826 he even instructed a special committee to
collect for him all useful hints about necessary reforms. While punishing
severely the Decembrists (five of them were hanged, others sent to Siberia), he
wished to make use of all their good ideas. He reserved for himself the control
over public opinion and confided to Aleksandr Khristoforovich, Count
Benckendorff, the organization of a new secret police of gendarmes controlled by
the “third section” of the personal and imperial chancery.

Nicholas adopted Alexander’s policy of protecting the kings from their peoples,
but he made an exception for Christian Turkish subjects. He thus carried on a
war against Turkey (1828–29). By the Treaty of Adrianople, Greece was liberated;
the hospodars (princes) of the Danubian principalities were to be appointed for
life and free from Turkish interference in internal affairs. The Straits (the
Dardanelles and the Bosporus) and the Black Sea were to be open.



Nicholas I

Nicholas especially attended to education; he wished to clear it of everything
politically dangerous and confine it to the upper class. He abolished the
liberal university statutes of Alexander (1804). By the new statutes of 1835 he
detached the primary education intended for the lower classes from the
gymnasiums and universities, where only children of gentry and of officials were
to be admitted.

The expulsion of Charles X from France and the November Insurrection (1830–31)
in Poland determined the legitimist tendency of Nicholas’s foreign policy. He
wished to become a real “policeman” of Europe, and at Münchengrätz (Mnichovo
Hradiště), in September 1833, he renewed relations with Metternich. His
excessive interest in the “sick man” (Ottoman Empire) in Constantinople finished
by rousing Europe against him. In 1833 Nicholas saved the sultan from the
Egyptian rebel Muḥammad ʿAlī, and by the Treaty of Hünkâr Iskelesi (July 8,
1833) appeared to receive for that service free passage for Russian ships to the
Mediterranean. To all other powers, the Dardanelles were to be closed during
wartime. This concession drew the attention of the European powers, and in 1841
all the five great powers (France, Britain, Prussia, Russia, and Austria) agreed
that the Dardanelles should be closed to warships of all nations.




SLAVOPHILES AND WESTERNIZERS


Mikhail Bakunin

In sharp contrast with Nicholas’s educational policy, a new generation grew up
which was bred by Russian universities, especially Moscow State University,
between 1830 and 1848. They were not politicians or liberals of a Franco-English
type. They were idealists and students of the philosophy of Schelling, Fichte,
and Hegel. In Moscow literary salons, they did not discuss the form of the
government but dug deep into the very foundations of Russian history and the
Russian national mind. Most of them declared that Russia was unlike Europe and
that its type of civilization was potentially far higher than the European. They
execrated Peter the Great’s Europeanization of Russia as a fatal deviation from
the genuine course of Russian history, and they wanted Russia to come back to
the forsaken principles of the Eastern Church and state—to orthodoxy and
autocracy. Nevertheless, the majority of public opinion, led by Aleksandr
Ivanovich Herzen, Vissarion Grigoryevich Belinsky, Mikhail Bakunin, Timofey
Granovsky, and others, revolted against this Slavophile doctrine. They opposed
it with their own doctrine of the Western origin of Russian civilization. Herzen
and Bakunin emigrated from Russia on the approach of the Revolutions of 1848.
They became the originators of Russian socialism, and Herzen saw socialist
elements in the Russian peasants’ commune (mir).



Nicholas was not insensible to the chief social question in Russia—that of
serfdom. How could he be when peasant uprisings were steadily growing in
frequency? They numbered about 41 in the first four years of his reign, and
there were 378 between 1830 and 1849, along with 137 during the last five years.
Nicholas formed a series of secret committees which, after many failures,
prepared the law of 1842 on voluntary accords, which abolished personal serfdom
and fixed the amount of peasant lots and payments. Through Pavel Dmitriyevich
Kiselyov’s energy, the same changes were introduced in Poland (1846) and the
Russian provinces (1847).

A real persecution of intellectuals began after the Revolutions of 1848. A
secret committee, presided over by Dmitry Buturlin, was founded to punish press
offenses. Minister of Education Sergey Semyonovich, Count Uvarov, was himself
found too liberal, and he resigned. His successor, Prince Platon
Shirinsky-Shikhmatov, wished to “base all teaching on religious truth.” The
university chairs of philosophy were closed, and the number of students limited;
many writers were arrested, exiled, or otherwise punished. The private circle of
followers of Mikhail Petrashevsky, a young utopian socialist, was sent to forced
labour in Siberia for having read and discussed prohibited literature. The group
included a young Fyodor Dostoyevsky, and the psychological torment that he
suffered while in prison would inform much of his later writing.




THE CRIMEAN WAR


Crimean War

Nicholas also wished to dictate his will to Europe. “Submit yourselves, ye
peoples, for God is with us”: thus ended his manifesto published on April 8
(March 27, Old Style), 1848. He sent a Russian army to subdue Hungary when it
revolted against the Habsburgs. A few years later he inadvertently provoked a
conflict with Turkey, because of a special question on the distribution of holy
places in Jerusalem between Catholic and Orthodox priests, which he involved
with the question of the general protectorate of Russia over Christian subjects
of the sultan. European powers would not admit this protectorate, and Nicholas
found himself confronting not only Napoleon III and Britain but also “thankless
Austria.”



Siege of Sevastopol

On October 23, 1853, Turkish forces attacked the advanced Russian troops in the
Danubian principalities; on November 1, Russia declared war on Turkey. France
and Britain declared war on Russia on March 27, 1854. The courage displayed in
the defense of Sevastopol proved useless, as the whole fabric of Russian
bureaucratic and autocratic government appeared incapable of competing with
European technique. Corruption and lack of communication, feeble development of
industry, and financial deficiency deprived the valiant soldiers of the most
necessary means of defense. Nicholas died in St. Petersburg on March 2 (February
18, Old Style), 1855, feeling that all his system was doomed to destruction. A
wholesale change of regime was indicated to his son and successor, Alexander II.




ALEXANDER II


Alexander II

The emperor Alexander II was a man of weak character who possessed no steadfast
views on politics. During the reign of his father he had sometimes surpassed
Nicholas in reactionary intentions. The Crimean War proved too clearly the
danger of Nicholas’s martinet system, however, and public opinion was too
impetuous for Alexander to resist. He swam with the current, and this period
coincides with the great reforms which made his reign a turning point in Russian
history. Alexander was always conscious of his power as unlimited monarch, and
his liberalism ended as soon as his reforms brought with them a revival of
political or autonomous tendencies. He then began to waver; the reforms were
left unachieved or curtailed. Public opinion grew impatient, extremist
tendencies won the ground, and the gap between the government and advanced
opinion finally became insuperable. As a consequence, the original impulse for
reform was exhausted as early as 1865. There followed a period of faltering
which turned into a sheer reaction as the revolutionary movement grew.


EMANCIPATION OF THE SERFS

The greatest achievement of the era was the liberation of peasants. It paved the
way for all other reforms and made them necessary. It also determined the line
of future development of Russia. Alexander’s chief motive is clearly expressed
in his words to the Moscow gentry: “The present position cannot last, and it is
better to abolish serfdom from above than to wait till it begins to be abolished
from below.” Alexander knew, of course, of the mounting dissatisfaction of the
peasants and of support of their grievances by the progressive intelligentsia.
However, he met with passive opposition from the majority of the gentry, whose
very existence as a class was menaced.

The preparatory discussion lasted from 1857 to March 1859, when the drafting
commissions of the main committee were formed. These young officials were
enthusiastically devoted to the work of liberation. Iakov Ivanovich Rostovtsev,
an honest but unskilled negotiator enjoying the full confidence of the emperor,
was mediator. The program of emancipation was very moderate at the beginning,
but was gradually extended, partly under the influence of the radical press and
especially Aleksandr Herzen’s Kolokol (“The Bell”). Alexander wanted the
initiative to belong to the gentry. He exerted his personal influence to
persuade reluctant landowners to open committees in all the provinces, while
promising to admit their delegates to discussion of the draft law in St.
Petersburg. No fewer than 46 provincial committees comprising 1,366
representatives of noble proprietors were at work during 18 months preparing
their own drafts for emancipation. They held to the initial program, which was
in contradiction with the more developed one. The delegates from the provincial
committees were only permitted—each separately—to offer their opinions before
the drafting committees.

By the Emancipation Manifesto of March 3 (February 19, Old Style), 1861, the
peasants became personally but formally free, and their landlords were obliged
to grant them their plot for a fixed rent with the possibility of redeeming it
at a price to be mutually agreed upon. The peasants remained “temporarily
bonded” until they redeemed their allotments. The redemption price was
calculated on the basis of all payments received by the landlord from the
peasants before the reform. If the peasant desired to redeem a plot, the
government paid at once to the landowner the whole price (in 5 percent bonds),
which the peasant had to repay to the exchequer in 49 years. Although the
government bonds fell to 77 percent and purchase was made voluntary, the great
majority of landowners—often in debt—preferred to get the money at once and to
end relations which had become insupportable. By 1880, 15 percent of the
peasants had not made use of the redemption scheme, and in 1881 it was declared
obligatory. The landowners tried, but in vain, to keep their power in local
administration. The liberated peasants were organized in village communities
that held comprehensive powers over their members. Nominally governed by elected
elders, they were actually administered by crown administrative and police
officials.


ADMINISTRATIVE REFORMS


Alexander II

After the emancipation of the peasants, the complete reform of local government
was necessary. It was accomplished by the law of January 13 (January 1, Old
Style), 1864, which introduced the district and provincial zemstvos (county
councils). Land proprietors held a relative majority in these assemblies. The
gentry and officials were given (in all Russia) 42 percent of the seats,
merchants and others 20 percent, while the peasants had the remaining 38
percent. The competence of zemstvos included roads, hospitals, food, education,
medical and veterinary service, and public welfare in general. Before the end of
the century services in provinces with zemstvo government were far ahead of
those in provinces without.

A third capital reform touched the law courts. The law of December 2 (November
20, Old Style), 1864, put an end to secret procedure, venality, and dependence
on the government. Russia received an independent court and trial by jury. The
judges were irremovable; trials were held in public with oral procedure and
trained advocates. Appeals to the senate could take place only in case of
irregularities in procedure.

Later came the reforms of municipal self-government (1870) and of the army
(1874). Gen. Dmitry Alekseyevich, Count Milyutin (the brother of Emancipation
Manifesto framer Nikolay Alekseyevich Milyutin) reduced the years of active
service from 25, first to 15 and then, by the law of 1874, to 6 years, and made
military service obligatory for all classes. The term of service was further
shortened for holders of school diplomas. Military courts and military schools
were humanized.



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