Russia. A History

If reform was to occur, it had to be limited to changes in social and economic relationships and not touch the political order. Here the role of the ‘young friends’ was important. Above all, they wanted change in Russian serfdom. The impulse was not new with them: Catherine the Great had intimated eventual abolition of the serf order in Russia thirty-five years earlier in her ‘Instruction to the Legislative Commission of 1767’. Her son Paul took the first step towards regulating relations between serfs and masters in an edict limiting corvée labour (barshchina

) to three days a week (1797). Alexander and his young friends supported such reform, spoke of the need to abolish serfdom, but in the final analysis proposed small changes that did not threaten the established social order. They imposed a ban on the advertisement of serfs for sale and issued a law on Free Cultivators (1803), whereby landlords—with the approval of the emperor—could free whole villages of serfs on the basis of agreements negotiated with the peasants. But this transaction, which required the voluntary participation of the landlord and payments on the part of the peasants, resulted in fewer than 50,000 manumissions by the end of the reign—an infinitesimal percentage of the tens of millions of serfs. Somewhat greater progress was made in the Baltic provinces of Estland, Lifland, and Kurland, where local nobles agreed to regulate serf obligations and grant the peasants rights to their lands. These were steps towards what would be a full-scale emancipation of the serfs in the Baltic provinces in the years 1816–18.

An important initiative early in Alexander’s reign came in the field of higher education. Although the Russian Empire boasted universities at Moscow, Dorpat, and Vilnius, only the first of these educated predominantly Russian students (the other two served, respectively, German and Polish constituencies). To these, Alexander added three new universities (Kharkov, Kazan, and St Petersburg, the founding of the last delayed until 1819) on the basis of equality of admissions without regard to class status. It was hoped that the universities would train the public servants so badly needed by the Russian government. A continuing concern of the ruling élite throughout the first half of the nineteenth century was the inadequate supply of talented administrators and consequent frustration of government action either by an absence of qualified personnel or by corrupt practices of ill-educated and undisciplined officials. The educational institutions founded by Alexander and their expansion during subsequent reigns went far towards supplying trained people for administration.

Missing from the court and high politics of Alexander’s reign was the participation of women, a dimension of Russian politics prominent in the eighteenth century. The sole exception was imperial charity, which included the largest foundling homes in Europe, hospitals, schools, huge manufacturing operations and banking institutions—all were managed efficiently and lovingly by Paul’s wife, Empress Maria Fedorovna, until her death in the late 1820s. Except for this traditional female concern, women lost their former prominent place in government; Paul’s succession law of 1797 specifically excluded women from rulership until all male heirs from all collateral lines of the imperial family had died off. The change coincided with a shift in the mores of the society and court towards a reinforcement of the domesticity of élite women, stressing their role in early child-rearing and intimate family social life, in contrast to politics and court entertainment. Princess Ekaterina Dashkova, who served during Catherine II’s reign as director of both the Russian Academy and the Imperial Academy of Sciences, justifiably complained of the misogyny of Alexander’s court and the diminished place of women in Russian society more generally. Henceforth, the importance of women in Russian politics, apart from the symbolic roles of women in the imperial family, would be in individual acts of protest and in movements of opposition to the established order.

International Affairs

Although the reforming impulse at the Russian court did not die out after 1803, it had to give way for a time to the government’s concern with international affairs. Peter the Great’s conquests in the early eighteenth century had brought Russia into the European state system; the ensuing wars and alliances showed Russia to be an intimate partner in the balances and conflicts of the system. The country could not stand apart from the upheaval now being caused in the European state system by Napoleonic France’s wide-ranging conquests, rearrangements of national borders, and dominance of continental policy.