Paul of Russian Empire
Catherine’s son and successor, Paul, mounted the throne on November 17 (November 6, Old Style), 1796, when he was 42, barely sane, and with a bitter feeling of having been deprived by his mother of his right to succeed his assassinated father, Peter III. He hated Catherine’s favourites and her policy, both internal and external. Paul stabilized the succession of the Russian throne by his imperial family statute (1797; in force until 1917). He sent Suvorov to Italy to fight against the French Revolution, but he ended his reign while preparing with Napoleon an expedition to India against England.
In social questions Paul’s policy was also inconsistent: he alleviated the burden of a serf’s compulsory work by reducing it to three days a week, but he gave away the peasants of the crown to noble proprietors as serfs in an even larger number than Catherine had (120,000 yearly). This did not make him popular among the nobility, however, as his exalted idea of the emperor’s divine right caused him to treat them in a purely condescending way. He claimed that a person could be reputed of importance only as long as he was permitted to converse with his majesty. His tyrannical proclivities inspired fear in his associates, and in the sixth year of his reign he was assassinated, on March 23 (March 11, Old Style), 1801, by court conspirators led by Leonty Leontyevich, count von Bennigsen.
Alexander
Paul’s son and successor, Alexander, began his reign, as had Catherine (whom he professed to imitate), with attempts at liberal legislation, which gave way to active foreign policy and wars. There followed a new attempt at a constitutional reform, hampered by the nationalist opposition, which urged and approved the annexation of Finland and Bessarabia. The invasion of Napoleon (1812) brought the national feeling to extreme tension. The following years were devoted to the assertion of Russia’s influence in Europe. The last years of the reign were marked by a reactionary policy, which provoked the first revolutionary movement in Russia.
Alexander received a careful education at the hand of his grandmother, who wished him, instead of his father, to inherit the throne. The Swiss republican Frédéric-César de La Harpe had a strong influence on him in his early years (1784–95). This education was interrupted by Alexander’s marriage at age 16 and did not go beyond imparting to him some general ideas unsustained by exact knowledge. His sentimental feelings were cooled by the court intrigues, by the hidden enmity between his grandmother and father, and finally by the harsh system of Paul’s reign, which Alexander was expected to approve and obliged to share in. The consequence was that he grew up a past master in dissimulation and self-restraint. His evasiveness in face of other people’s strong opinions was often taken for weakness, but he knew how to promote his own views, and if impeded in his designs he was capable of violent explosions of wrath.
Initial liberalism
In the first year of his reign, Alexander surrounded himself with a few friends of his youth—Prince Adam Czartoryski, Count Pavel Stroganov, Count Viktor Kochubey, and Nikolay Novosiltsev—a “private committee” whom he wished to help him in drafting large schemes of reforms. He at once canceled a series of Paul’s reactionary measures and declared his desire to abolish arbitrariness and to inaugurate a reign of law. Public opinion received Alexander with enthusiasm. But the private committee, which met regularly from 1801 till the end of 1803, found dangerous and untimely both a formal declaration limiting the autocrat’s power and the abolition of serfdom. The most important fruit of these good intentions was the introduction of ministries instead of the colleges of Peter the Great, which had been practically abolished by Catherine. A new senate statute was intended to make this institution the highest legal authority (1802).
A very cautious ukaz (“decree”) of 1803 permitted noble landowners to liberate their serfs and grant them parcels of land. Only 47,000 serfs were to be thus liberated. Somewhat larger measures limited the power of landowners over the serfs in Livonia and Estonia (1804–05). A new and important impulse was given to public education, which was considered to be a preliminary condition to all substantial reforms. Three new universities were created.
From the earliest days of his reign, Alexander had feared the consequences of Napoleon’s ambition, and in 1804 he joined a new coalition against France formed by England. He was involved in wars which ended in crushing defeats at Austerlitz and Friedland. He then changed his policy and concluded an accord with Napoleon directed against England, whose commerce with Europe had been forbidden in all countries which adhered to this Continental System. At his personal meeting with Napoleon at Tilsit on July 7 (June 25, Old Style), 1807, Alexander played a part which made Napoleon call him a “northern Talma” (a renowned French actor) and a “Byzantine Greek.” In truth, Alexander was in part genuinely under Napoleon’s influence, but he was also entangled in other wars: with Sweden, which finished with Russian annexation of Finland (1809), and with Turkey, which lasted for six full years (1806–12) and ended with Russian annexation of Bessarabia. More than a year after the Tilsit meeting (October 12, 1808) Alexander again met Napoleon, at Erfurt, but Napoleon’s intention to raise the Polish question did not please Alexander. Relations were very strained by the end of 1810.
Conservative opinion was very much incensed against Alexander’s alliance with the “Corsican usurper,” especially as at that very time that another and more serious attempt was made to introduce constitutional government in Russia. Mikhail Mikhaylovich, Count Speransky, a prominent statesman whose views were favoured by the emperor at that time, prepared a moderate scheme, based on the introduction of self-government in four stages, beginning with electoral assemblies (dumas) in the cantons and ending at the top with the duma of the state. Each lower duma elected deputies to the upper one: cantonal to district, district to provincial; the last bodies sent all their members to the state duma, a legislative assembly deprived of legislative initiative but enjoying the right to make motions concerning the interest of the state, the responsibility of functionaries, and the violation of fundamental laws. The senate retained only judicial power, while the newly reformed ministries remained organs of the executive. The council of state, composed of high dignitaries and presided over by the emperor, was to prepare drafts of laws. In fact, nothing except the council of state and the reformed ministries was realized. Conservative opinion, as represented by nobility and bureaucracy, was furious with Speransky, and the emperor did not choose to defend him. On a futile pretext Speransky was dismissed from his office of imperial secretary and sent into exile (1812). His successor was an extreme nationalist and conservative, Aleksandr Shishkov.