Russia. A History

The first concern of governing élites was to establish a framework of legality, by which they meant protection of the person and property of nobles. Tsar Paul had assaulted their security time and again. Beyond this, the leadership understood that Russia’s administrative and social institutions needed reform. During the eighteenth century, most Russian nobles had become Europeanized and the best educated among them regarded themselves as members of a wider European society. They could not remain unaffected by the revolutionary changes occurring in Europe and the challenge these changes presented to the dynastic and feudalist regime that they led. Opinions about how best to meet that challenge coalesced in three groups at court.

Initially the most important was the group near Alexander who had plotted and carried out the overthrow and assassination of Tsar Paul. The principal leaders were a military man Count Peter Pahlen and a civil servant Nikita Panin. They hoped to impose constitutional limitations on tsarist power and may even have obtained Alexander’s agreement to such a reform before the coup d’état.

Their aim was to prevent a recurrence of the despotism that they had just ended. At first, Alexander appeared to be frightened of these men, fearful perhaps that if he did not do their bidding, they would turn on him as they had on his father. To counter their influence he summoned to St Petersburg friends from his youth in whom he had more confidence. This group of advisers became known as Alexander’s ‘young friends’ or ‘the unofficial committee’.

The young friends included men who had grown up with Alexander, or associates of these men. Unlike Alexander, all of them had spent time abroad and acquired a comparative measure of Russia’s development. They were well aware of Russia’s need for administrative and social reform if the country were to compete successfully with the Western powers. Among the young friends were Adam Czartoryski, a Polish aristocrat and later acting Minister of Foreign Affairs for Alexander, Pavel Stroganov, a mathematician who had studied in Switzerland and in France and had joined a Jacobin club in Paris, Viktor Kochubei, another well-educated member of the Russian upper class and for most of the 1790s Russian envoy to the Ottoman government, and Nikolai Novosiltsev, at 40 the oldest of the ‘young friends’, scion of a large landholding family, and a cousin of Pavel Stroganov. In contrast to the other political groupings, these men were not interested in placing restrictions on the power of the monarch but in using his supreme authority to bring Russia closer, socially and economically, to the West. This meant promoting economic development under an enterprising middle class and doing something about serfdom, which these men considered a disgrace and an anachronism. Such aims prompted worried conservatives to refer to these advisers as the ‘Jacobin gang’.

With the support of his ‘young friends’ and his increasing popularity with the public (the result of a series of decrees overturning his father’s despotic rules affecting the nobility and the armed forces) Alexander soon began to feel more secure on the throne, sufficiently so to dispatch the assassins. Within two months of the coup d’état, he forced Pahlen to retire to his estates in the Baltic region and, a few months later, ordered Panin into internal exile as well.