IN THE DAYS OF NAPOLEON
THE story of the Romanoffs has three phases. The first is the
preparation, when the primitive democracy of the Slavs is slowly
destroyed and the people are enslaved to an autocracy. The second, and
longest, phase is the enjoyment of power by the Romanoffs: the
succession of brutal or genial, strong or weak, merry or pious
sovereigns whom the accident of birth or the red hand of revolution
raises to the throne. A certain nervous instability runs through nearly
the whole series, but it is almost invariably expressed in a
determination to enjoy--to kill, to drink, to love, to spend, to seize
territory, to use power for self-gratification. In Peter the Great we
find a glimmer, amidst the old disorder, of a new day. In Catherine the
Great it revives and grows. Now the middle phase is over. We enter upon
a period of grave and sober-living monarchs, at first bent upon the
reform of their people, according to their ideals, then struggling in
fear against the people they have awakened from a long slumber.
The reign of Paul I is merely a dark episode between the second and the
third phase. He was now forty-two years old: a short, ugly, bald,
sour-tempered man, of diseased nerves. He hardly concealed his joy as he
hastened to the throne and strove to obliterate the memory of his great
mother. If she must have an imperial funeral, his martyred father shall
have one also. He digs up the corpse, or what is left of it after
thirty-four years, puts it in a magnificent coffin, and makes the
survivors of the conspiracy of 1762 walk humbly behind it, before they
are exiled. St. Petersburg is still a land of rumours, and we do not
know precisely what form his mad idea took. Some say that there was body
enough left to seat in the throne; some say that the skull was put upon
the altar and crowned with a superb diadem; some say that only the boots
and a few fragments of Peter III were found. Whatever there was received
an imperial funeral; and the bones of Potiamkin were dug up and cast
into a ditch. The usual golden shower descended upon the new brood of
favourites.
Then Paul began to enforce his grand schemes of military reform--and
alienate the army. They must abandon those new and serviceable uniforms
which Potiamkin had given them. They must return to powdered hair and
pigtails. Paul went along the line, on parade, and used his cane freely.
Old General Suvoroff grumbled, and was banished; though he had to be
recalled when war broke out. A regiment one day threw Paul into one of
his hurricanes of rage. “March--to Siberia,” he thundered; and they
marched, but were stopped on the way. Everything must be done on the
German model. Anything that reminded him of France was anathema. More
than 12,000 people were exiled or imprisoned in four years, generally
for trivial offences. He made some useful changes, but so many that
were petty and irritating that men thought him insane. He was, in fact,
on the road to insanity. He suffered from insomnia, and took opium.
People fled at his approach.
Paul sincerely wanted peace, but the French were overrunning Europe, and
he joined forces with Austria against them. Austria co-operated so badly
that his army, ably led by Suvoroff, had to retreat disastrously.
Bonaparte watched him astutely, and bribed his chief ministers. Next
England irritated him. Like Catherine, he challenged England’s right to
search neutral vessels, and, whereas England kept its Russian prisoners,
Bonaparte sent home, neatly dressed and armed, those that had been taken
by France. When England went on to take Malta, Bonaparte had an easy
victim. Paul had become grand master of the Order of St. John of
Jerusalem, and he considered that this gave him a special interest in
Malta.
At the beginning of 1801 Paul was pledged to France and set about the
formation of a league against England. And on March 24th, after a gloomy
reign of four and a half years, Paul met the end he had expected. He had
heavily fortified the Mikhailovski Palace, in which he lived, but about
midnight (March 23-24) Count Zuboff, Count Pahlen, General Bennigsen,
and a few others entered his chamber, roused him, and invited him to
abdicate. He refused, and it is presumed that a scuffle followed. It is
at least certain that Paul was strangled. It was officially announced
that Paul died of “apoplexy.” “Isn’t it time they invented a new
disease in Russia?” said Talleyrand when he heard. Napoleon was furious.
Alexander I lay upon his bed, dressed, when Count Zuboff rushed in to
say that “all was over.” He started, but he was at once addressed as
Emperor and could not misunderstand. He had agreed to the enforcement of
his father’s abdication, but had assuredly done no more. Whether he had
looked beyond or no we cannot say, but Alexander was a high-minded man,
a new type of Romanoff. While they talked, Paul’s widow came and heard
the news. She shrieked that she was Empress, and begged the soldiers to
support her rights. There was a second horrible scene in the darkness of
that winter night. They drew her away, and, when the day broke, St.
Petersburg burst into open and enthusiastic rejoicing, such as Romans
had shown at the death of Domitian, that the gloomy and misguided Paul
had gone the way of so many Tsars and princes. Strangers embraced in the
streets. There was no trial, but those who had been in the plot were
leniently removed.
Alexander I, the monarch who opens the new phase, came to the throne
with large and vague and lofty ideals. Not only should Russia become
happy and prosperous under his benevolent despotism, but all Europe
should be illumined. He averted the threatened war with England, which
had sent a fleet to the Baltic, and reaffirmed the friendship with
Napoleon. His new minister of foreign affairs, Kotchubey, agreed with
him. Russia must be kept clear of the entanglement of war and
concentrate upon internal reform. Kotchubey had soon to give place to
the Pole Czartoryski, who more sincerely shared Alexander’s romantic
idealism. The Tsar of Russia was to inaugurate “a new era of justice and
right” for the whole of Europe. An envoy was sent to London to
propose--there is nothing new under the sun--a sort of League to Enforce
Peace. England and Russia, the two powers which desired no further
territory, were to form its nucleus. Other Powers might join.
One hears plainly the echo of the French humanitarians and the English
whom they inspired. But how was the league to enforce peace upon France?
Russia moved slowly toward war. In 1804 the Duc d’Enghien was murdered,
and Alexander was outraged. He came to an agreement with England to
chastise Napoleon: only--as far as Alexander was concerned--for his
monstrous breaches of international law. Napoleon became Emperor and
King of Italy, and Alexander was further outraged. Kings were born, not
made. In 1805 he joined the Austrians on the battle-fields of Italy.
The story of Alexander I, the monarch who was going to impose peace upon
a foolish and distracted world, is one long story of wars, and it does
not enter into the scheme of this book to describe wars. How far
Alexander was to blame for the entry of his country into the struggle
against Napoleon, or into Napoleon’s struggle against England, is a
point on which opinions differ. His entire change of attitude--from
neutrality to war against France, then to friendship with Napoleon, then
back to the English alliance--annoyed his ministers and people, and lays
him open to a charge of nervous instability. Such a charge he would have
rebutted with warmth and astonishment. His portrait is familiar: a
smooth-faced, dignified man, reflecting righteousness in every feature.
He would have given a hundred reasons for each change in his policy. We
will notice these and the issues of his wars briefly, before we consider
his personality and his domestic work.
His first war ended in the historic rout of Austerlitz (1805), and his
optimism was sadly clouded. But when his mind was fixed upon what he
regarded as a righteous cause, he could be obstinate. Prussia and
Austria came to terms with France, and Alexander’s advisers were for
doing the same, but he refused. He entered the new coalition (Russia,
Prussia, Sweden, and England). Napoleon smote the Prussians at Jena,
frightened the Swedes into peace, and inflicted appalling losses upon
the Russians at Eylau. Alexander would not desist. He saw the King of
Prussia and swore eternal alliance, and Napoleon overran Poland
(1806-7). But Napoleon understood the naive mind of the Tsar, and knew
that he was angry at the remissness of England in supporting him. Before
long he met Alexander on a raft in the middle of the Niemen, and the
charm of his manner and righteousness of his proposals won the large
heart of the Tsar; besides that Napoleon cleverly conveyed to his mind
the impression that he thought seriously of choosing Alexander’s sister
Anna as his second wife. At the entreaty of his new friend Napoleon
spared the sovereignty of Frederick William of Prussia, though he
relieved him of his Polish gains and turned Poland into a Duchy of
Warsaw.
Kornilov, the ablest of recent Russian historians, maintains that
Alexander was not duped. He wanted time, and played his cards skilfully.
It is not easy to credit Alexander with such subtlety; and there are
those who think that Alexander sacrificed his honour and the interest of
his country. He was to break with England, when all St. Petersburg had
been educated to admire England, and he was _not_ to receive
Constantinople as his reward. St. Petersburg was thoroughly angry at the
change of policy, and Alexander had to change his ministers. The Russian
ambassador at Paris secured a confidential document in which Napoleon
declared that Russia was the natural ally of Austria and inevitable
enemy of France. Still Alexander persisted, though he was not a very
useful ally. He did, it is true, make war upon Sweden because it would
not place an embargo on British ships; but out of that war he got the
remainder of Finland, with 900,000 souls, for Russia.
The two Emperors met again at Erfurt in 1810. Napoleon had there a
mighty gathering of his royal vassals, partly to impress Alexander, and
he seemed to succeed. In later years, however, Napoleon himself
considered that Alexander was fooling him. He said that the Tsar had
“the duplicity of a Byzantine Greek.” Napoleon was a judge of duplicity,
but I prefer to believe in the simple-mindedness of Alexander, and do
not even see ground to seek psychological explanations of his
vacillations. He respected to the end the genius of Napoleon, but the
alliance was hollow, and in the next year the causes of quarrel
multiplied. Napoleon said no more about the Tsarevna Anna: he married an
Austrian. He seemed anxious to turn Poland into a French province. On
the other hand, Napoleon complained that his ally spoiled his
continental blockade against England, and put heavy duties on French
wine. Alexander, pushed by intriguers, got rid of his ablest minister,
Speranski, who was pro-French, made peace with Turkey and Sweden, and at
length entered into an alliance with England and Sweden. Both Emperors
now massed their troops at the frontier and joined them.
Napoleon’s famous Russian campaign of 1812 need not be described here.
The Poles hailed him as a deliverer, and he ran on until the continuous
retreat of the Russians and the appalling desolation they created as
they retreated made him uneasy. It was Alexander’s generals who were
responsible for that strategy. The Tsar himself expressed impatience. At
length, on September 15th, Napoleon gazed upon the golden roofs of
Moscow and felt that the end was in sight. How could Russia yield its
ancient capital and not acknowledge defeat? The next day began the
historic fire of Moscow, already evacuated by its population. Whether or
no General Rostopchin ordered the fire, the Tsar was not privy to it. He
wept when he heard of the tragedy. But it was a tragedy for Napoleon
also. The grip of winter soon began to close upon the desolated land.
The Tsar was whipping up his weary people with manifests after
manifests, imploring them to break the tyrant and help to take
“the blessings of liberty” to other nations. We shall see
presently that at this period he became almost fanatically religious.
[IMAGE: img266.jpg The Red Square, Church of St. Basil and
Redeemer Gate, Moscow]
At the head of his inspirited troops--he would, he said, not again leave
his armies to unenterprising generals, who could only retreat--Alexander
followed the pale and emaciated remnant of Napoleon’s “grand army”
across the corpse-strewn wastes. Then came Leipsic, the first nail in
Napoleon’s coffin. The Austrian statesman Metternich saw the Tsar at
Frankfort, and was for moderation in victory. On to Paris, said the
Tsar; and the encircling movement pushed the French gradually in toward
their capital. He was at Paris for the end, and he spent a few weeks in
London before he returned to receive a magnificent, and not unmerited,
ovation at St. Petersburg.
Alexander went himself to Vienna for the Congress which was to settle
the map of Europe. Again one must glance at his portrait to imagine him
at Vienna. He was the modest arbiter of the destinies of Europe, the
conqueror of Napoleon, Behind the scenes, however, was a limping
diplomatist named Talleyrand, who had returned to office with Louis
XVIII, and he and Metternich and Castlereagh ruled. Against
Alexander’s wish Poland was again divided, only Cracow and its
district receiving a republican independence. Napoleon suspended their
intrigues for a season by his dramatic return, but after Waterloo the
monarchs and statesmen met again at Paris to complete their work.
Here the personality of Alexander attracted considerable, and not very
flattering, attention, and we may linger over one of the last bits of
personal romance--of very chaste romance--in the story of the Romanoffs.
In the house adjoining his hotel, and connected with it, Alexander
established a lady who was soon known to all Paris. This was the
Baroness Barbara Juliana von Krüdener. In her youth Juliana had been a
fascinating and gay lady, of Prussian birth, who had virtually deserted
her elderly and prosy German baron for a French officer. Her nerves
deteriorated with her charms, and in 1804, her fortieth year, she had
been very seriously converted. A gentleman who was paying court to her
had fallen dead at her feet. Wandering to and fro in a state of extreme
nervousness, she came into touch with the Moravian Brethren and “got
religion.” The long war and comprehensive disturbance of Europe had led
to remarkable eruptions of mysticism. Napoleon was anti-Christ: the end
of the world was at hand. Prophets arose in every German village; and
Juliana eagerly sought them. She became convinced that it was her
mission to preach the millennium which was to precede the end.
In 1814 she met the Tsarina Elizabeth at Baden, and through her she
attempted to reach the Tsar. Alexander refused for some time to see her,
but he in turn went to Baden in 1815 and he allowed her to call. She
found him in a receptive mood. Since the burning of Moscow he had spent
much time over the Scriptures, and he was at this moment brooding over
the open page, seeking in vain the remedy of his mysterious
restlessness. Juliana harangued him, stormily, for three hours, and
captured him. He brought her to Paris, put her in the house next his
own, and attended her prayer-meetings. Nobles and famous writers of
Paris attended. Over all the horrors of the past men saw dawning the
glory of a new religious epoch.
All this has more historical and practical import than may be imagined.
Alexander invented a “Holy Alliance” of monarchs to put into force the
lofty moral tenets of the new mysticism. He showed the Baroness one
day--she annoyed him afterwards by claiming that she had written it--the
draft of a manifest of the Alliance. In three short articles the royal
signatories would bind themselves thenceforward to be guided, in
domestic and foreign policy, by “the precepts of that holy religion
[Christianity], namely, the precepts of Justice, Charity, and
Peace.” The whole document breathed the spiritual exaltation in
which the Tsar was at the time. The King of Prussia signed it without
wincing--to oblige his friend. Francis of Austria, very pious, but
taught by the Jesuits to suspect heresy everywhere, consulted
Metternich, who said it was a harmless piece of folly. He signed it.
Castlereagh advised the English Prince Regent that it was a piece of
sublime mysticism and nonsense; and the gay Regent accepted it in
principle, without signing it, and assured the Tsar that he would follow
its “sacred maxims.” The Pope refused to sign.
The practical importance of the matter is that the Holy Alliance became,
in effect, an alliance for the bloody suppression of democracy and
enlightenment, and the charter drawn up by Alexander became the code of
his persecuting successors and their nationalist supporters. Western
Christianity became faithless; it compromised with democracy, with
science, with liberalism. So the “holy religion” must be the
uncompromising Church of Russia, with its profound reverence for
autocracy and its hostility to enlightenment.
Alexander became sensitive that his association with the Baroness made
him seem rather ridiculous. He got rid of her, and from that time
maintained only a coldly polite correspondence. The astute Metternich
gained increasing influence over him, and there was no vagueness about
Metternich. Kings must guard their crowns, and ministers their
portfolios, against anybody--adventurers or democracies--who
wanted them. When the Greeks rose against Turkey in 1821 the Baroness
rushed to St. Petersburg and urged her pupil to take up “the holy
war.” Metternich told him that the situation was that the Greeks
had rebelled against their lawful sovereign, the Sultan. So Alexander
would not send a gun to aid either the Slav or Greek victims of the
terrible Turk. The whole Russian nation opposed him. When a great flood
brought tragedy upon St. Petersburg in 1824, men said that God was
punishing the Tsar. He was troubled, but did nothing. Justice, Charity,
and Peace he still loved; but he would lend no aid to insurrection. For
the remainder of his life he defended the absolute divine right of kings
and assisted in attempting to retard the birth of modernism.
The Poles felt his gradual deterioration. Russian Poland was at first,
with a show of generosity, converted into an autonomous kingdom under
the Russian crown. Alexander was the king; though the Poles had their
old flag with the white eagle. The Grand Duke Constantine was commander
of the army; though it was a Polish army. An officer of Napoleon’s army
was made Viceroy, and a general amnesty was granted. But Warsaw was far
away, and the harsh Constantine and the Tsar’s more reactionary
ministers ruled it. The Diet was soon left in abeyance, and the promises
of reform unfulfilled. The Poles angrily muttered that they had been
duped, and secret societies spread, with a result which we shall see
later.
But we are passing to Alexander’s last phase, the phase of reaction,
without having considered the reforms which came of his early
humanitarian zeal. He had, we saw, been educated (in part) by
humanitarians like La Harpe, imbued with the French spirit. Catherine
herself had, as I said, leaned to reaction, and let her reforms droop,
in her later years; and the interlude of Paul’s reign had been
thoroughly bad. Yet Alexander came to the throne with a magnificent
resolution to reform Russia. He was dreamy by temperament, and he had
neither the positive knowledge nor the quality of painstaking
perseverance which were necessary to construct a detailed scheme of
reform for so comprehensively backward a country. However, he appointed
a Committee of Reform, and he followed its deliberations with keen
interest.
During many years, especially from 1807-1812, Alexander had for this
work the splendid ability and devotion of a remarkably enlightened and
democratic statesman named Speranski. Professor Kornilov regards him as
“one of the most remarkable statesmen in all Russian history.” He was
the son of an obscure priest, a child of the people; and his large mind
and great capacity for detail enabled him to give definite shape to the
Tsar’s vague dreams of justice. He not only studied the new
democratic constitution of the United States, of which the Tsar obtained
a copy from Washington, but he followed Napoleon’s constructive
work with much sympathy and admiration. To Speranski the Tsar owed the
great scheme of reform which at first he made some effort to impose upon
Russia. It, unhappily, remained for the most part a paper-scheme. Years
afterwards, in 1830, the rebellious Poles found a copy of
Speranski’s liberal constitution and printed it, but Nicholas I
emphatically suppressed it.
The first task was to reform the central part of the administration,
which was chaotic. Eight ministries were created, and, although the Tsar
made the inevitable blunder of appointing favourites rather than
competent men in some cases, the change helped to create a more
effective machine. The heads of the departments were to form a cabinet,
or Council of Ministers, responsible to the Emperor, and below them the
administrative structure went down gradually as far as the Mir, or
village-council. The legislative machinery also began with the Mir, and
ended with the Duma, or national council, from which there could be an
appeal to the Imperial Council. The administration of justice was to
begin in the village and end in a reconstituted Senate; and Speranski
sketched a new code of laws on the model of the Code Napoleon.
Of this great scheme very little was carried out. The reformed Senate
found most of its proposals opposed by the Imperial Council, and the
Tsar himself, who was to be guided by it, chafed when it did not fall in
with his wishes, and often issued ukases in defiance of the opinion of
the majority. The new code of laws was put upon the shelf, and remained
there until the reign of Nicholas I. The hierarchy of popular councils
was not created. Alexander seemed to shrink from the logical
consequences of his “sacred maxims” when they were drawn out on paper by
a practical statesman, and he lent too ready an ear to the
reactionaries. As his piety increased, the conservatives found it
convenient to represent to him that these progressive ideas were
associated with atheism and revolt. The familiar type of political
adventurer, a man named Arakcheeff, appeared at court and secured wealth
and power. This man and his associates suggested to Alexander, in 1812,
that Speranski was promoting Freemasonry and subversive ideas, and the
great statesman--a man so far from Voltaireanism that he had translated
“The Imitation of Christ” into Russian--had to go. The Tsar wept maudlin
tears while he dismissed him.
The ministry of education, or of National Enlightenment, whose task was
vital to the reform of the country, seemed to make greater progress.
Alexander entrusted it to his mother’s educational adviser, Count
Tzadovski, and his own tutor Muravieff. Afterwards it was controlled by
Prince Golitzin, a follower of the new mysticism, but a serious and
liberal statesman. He was a patron of the Protestant Bible Society,
which Alexander permitted to open premises in St. Petersburg in 1812.
Alexander found from two to three million rubles a year for the
education department, and paid out of his own purse for the translation
of western works. Students were sent abroad for pedagogical training,
and after a time training-colleges were established in Russia. Three new
universities (Dorpat, Kazan, and Kharkoff) were founded, and these and
the older universities were to become central points in a scheme of
enlightenment for the various districts of Russia.
It is, however, usual to exaggerate the work done. We have already heard
much about the reforms of various rulers--of Philaret, of Peter I, of
Elizabeth, and of Catherine--but the fact remains that far more than
ninety per cent of the Russian people were still illiterate and densely
ignorant at the death of Alexander, and, although we shall hear of
further reforms, at least eighty-five per cent of the Russian people
were illiterate at the beginning of the twentieth century. The
sum provided for education was ludicrously insufficient for the task,
and the opposition was considerable. Merchants grumbled that they must
pay for the teaching of something more than reading, writing, and
arithmetic; the bulk of the nobles wanted only a military education for
their sons. In all about 200 higher schools (with classes of Latin and
Greek) and 2,000 elementary schools were founded: barely enough to
educate the five per cent of the population which was attracted to new
ideas. The work, like all the other reforms, languished in Alexander’s
later years, and was deliberately checked, in the interest of the
dynasty, by his successor.
The next great problem was the emancipation of the serfs, and here the
Tsar’s vacillation between his sentiments of benevolence and his vague
perception that they threatened the aristocratic system is more apparent
than ever. Catherine had had the same experience. She had spoken of
liberty and equality; and she had bestowed upon her favourites hundreds
of thousands of serfs who would, she must have known, be regarded and
treated as cattle. The restriction of the freedom of the peasant, by
which Godunoff had converted him into a serf, really handed over his
freedom to the higher authorities or put it into the hand of the
landowner. When a peasant wished to move, he might secure permission
from his lord by a payment of money. When a noble obtained a grant of
new lands he had to buy, or obtain by favour, a great batch of serfs to
work it. In practice the wealthy landowners bought and sold the
population just as cotton-planters then did in America, and the serfs
were generally treated with brutality.
Nearly every other country in Europe had long since abolished serfdom,
and Alexander saw clearly enough how inconsistent the institution was
with his “sacred maxims.” He discussed with his friends this “barbarous”
traffic in human beings, and we can understand how they assisted him to
salve his conscience. Reform must be gradual; an evil which was
centuries old, and rooted in the very structure of Russian society,
could not be cured in a day. In other words, the great sacrifice, which
justice demanded, must be thrown upon a later generation. Alexander
expended his zeal upon small alleviations of the sufferings of the
serfs. He forbade the masters to break up families, or to enforce
marriage upon reluctant serfs. He restricted the right of punishment,
opened the courts to the serf, and set aside large sums for the
emancipation of batches of serfs. He had a pamphlet published in which
owners were urged to treat the serfs humanely and promote emancipation.
So much was done under pressure of the humanitarians, but it was only a
trifling mitigation of the worst evil of mediæval Russia, and the new
regulations were not properly enforced. Russia was the land of the
wealthy. The millions of descendants of the original free Slavs must
toil on in squalor and ignorance. The day of reckoning was still to
come.
Arakcheeff tried an experiment in this connection which was bitterly
resented. He induced the Tsar to settle regiments of soldiers, with
their families, on the crown-lands, in military colonies. They were to
be special breeding grounds for recruits, and were to spread amongst the
peasants the spirit of military discipline. They were so carefully
organised--for Arakcheeff had ability--that even the mother was provided
with a set of rules which she must hang beside the holy ikons. The
peasants hated the innovation, and on Arakcheeff’s own estate they
rebelled and killed his mistress, who ruled them with the brutality that
he encouraged. The institution was afterward suffered to decay.
In the fiscal world, which was but another section of the Augean stable
of the Russian system, Alexander set out to make enlightened reforms,
and ended in the usual listlessness. The treasury had long been
artificially filled by the excessive creation of paper-money. Alexander
recalled a large proportion of it, but the strain of the war put an end
to this reform. An Imperial Bank was founded, a sinking fund was
started, and it was decided to publish an annual budget. It was
proposed, and partly attempted, to relieve the duty on the importation
of raw materials and impose heavy duties on luxuries. At the same time
the abandonment of Catherine’s extravagance at court relieved the
exchequer. These reforms were, like the others, a comparatively slight
mitigation of a great evil, and were in Alexander’s later years suffered
to droop.
In fine one must mention prison-reform, though the state of Russian
jails decades later does not dispose us to attach much importance to it.
During Alexander’s earlier years, we saw, there was at St. Petersburg a
great regard for English ideas, and at that time England was producing
many humanitarians. Robert Owen was then elaborating his comprehensive
and advanced schemes of reform, from the betterment of schools and
prisons to the substitution of arbitration for war. It is the enfeebled
echo of these liberal English ideas, and of American and French ideas,
that we find in the Russian schemes. One of the English
prison-reformers, Mr. Venning, asked permission to visit the Russian
jails. The Tsar, who was still in his early humanitarian fervour, gladly
assented, and asked Venning to make a report to him on what he saw. As a
result a Society for the Welfare of Prisoners was founded at St.
Petersburg, and afterwards at Moscow.
These liberal ideas represent, it must be understood, the early attitude
of the Emperor. After the fall of Speranski in 1812, and especially
after the Tsar’s close association with Metternich in 1814,
Alexander passed slowly from a state of nebulous zeal for Charity and
Justice to an attitude of positive reaction, tempered by a faint
lingering glow of his early dreams. Metternich persuaded him that the
real struggle of light and darkness was the struggle of the enlightened
monarchies against these democratic and “atheistic” emanations from the
smothered volcano of the French Revolution. In private he cynically
observed to his friends: “I have the Tsar safely at anchor.” The
humanitarian ideas on which the United States had been set up, and the
early and sane part of the French Revolution had been based, remained
in the mind of Europe. They threatened the restored monarchies, which
reverted to mediæval ideas of their power, and the terrible conflict
which fills the first half of the nineteenth century in Europe began
long before the death of Alexander. It is to his credit that he
recognised the blunders and crimes of his fellow-monarchs and never
entirely sacrificed his early ideals.
But the sinister Arakcheeff and the dreamy Golitzin spoiled the efforts
of Speranski. Golitzin introduced to the Tsar a “converted atheist”
named Magnitski, an abominable adventurer, and the man was put in
control of the universities. The higher teaching was reduced to a
comedy. Golitzin himself was too liberal and cultivated for the
plotters, and Admiral Shishkoff replaced him in charge of the ministry
of National Enlightenment. Shishkoff hated liberalism, and would suffer
no education that did not strengthen in the pupils’ mind a spirit
of blind subservience to the Church and the autocracy. A third power
among the reactionary forces was the Novgorod abbot, Photi, a zealot of
the old type who gathered about him a crowd of aristocratic women and
worked through them. Professors who had any tincture of liberalism were
now expelled from the schools. Some of the new schools were suffered to
disappear, and in all, lower and higher, the teaching was rendered
ridiculous by the fierce determination to protect the pupils’
respect for his pastors and masters. Political economy and the new
discoveries of science were rigorously banned. The Russophile school was
established; the fight against enlightenment was inaugurated.
But enlightenment could no more be suppressed in Russia than in Italy,
Spain, Portugal, and France, where the Papacy and the restored monarchs
used the old bludgeons against it. A large part of the nobles was, as in
France before the Revolution, imbued with the new ideas; and the
economic and other reforms were creating a middle class which, as in
England, gave many recruits to the humanitarian cause. Students,
teachers, writers, medical and other professional men joined the
emancipated nobles. The army of light began slowly to gather round its
various banners and face the army of darkness. As repression increased,
the many societies and liberal journals were merely driven underground
and their rhetoric became more fiery. There were “unions”
for everything of an advanced nature. In obscure clubs young men began
to talk even of a Russian Republic. The Tsar’s refusal to help the
Slav and Greek rebels against the Turk increased the anger of the
liberals and gave them a basis in the popular mind.
By the year 1824 Alexander had fallen into so morbid a state that he
spoke of resigning. He wept over his Bible and wondered if his sins were
not the curse of Russia. Even his domestic life was a burden. He had
married a Princess of Baden, and her lack of good looks was not redeemed
by any other charm except the cold adornments of virtue and piety. She
dressed dowdily, and she generally presented at his board a face as
melancholy as her creed. For many years Alexander had lived apart from
her, and he had no children. The genial dignity and self-esteem of his
earlier years broke down altogether. His next brother, Constantine, had
made a morganatic marriage, and forfeited the throne, and Alexander
distrusted the third brother, Nicholas. Alexander slowly and sadly
drifted toward the grave. His courtiers discovered a plot against the
autocracy, but he would do nothing. He died on December 1st, 1825: a
high-minded, well-meaning man, too little endowed in intellect and
strength of will to solve the mighty problems which were raised by his
own ideals.