by Will Durant
More and more nobles and officers joined in a conspiracy to unseat him. General Levin Bennigsen enlisted Count Nikita Panin, minister of foreign affairs, and won over to their plan Count Peter von Pahlen, who commanded the city soldiers and police. They sought and finally obtained Alexander’s consent, on condition that no bodily harm should come to his father. They agreed to this, knowing that a fait accompli is a convincing argument. At two o’clock on the morning of March 24, 1801, Pahlen led the conspirators and a band of officers into the Mikhailovsky Palace, where they overcame all guards, surrounded the struggling Emperor, and choked him to death. A few hours later they notified Alexander that he was now czar of Russia.
III. THE EDUCATION OF AN EMPEROR
It is hard for minds immersed for years in the tale of the comet called Napoleon to realize that Alexander I (Aleksandr Pavlovich, 1777–1825) was as much beloved in Russia as Bonaparte in France; that, like his friend and enemy, he was brought up on the French Enlightenment, and tempered his autocracy with liberal ideas; that he achieved what the greatest modern general (for we must respect the Czar’s namesake) had tried and failed to accomplish—led his army across the Continent from his own capital to his foe’s, and overcame him; and that in the hour of triumph he behaved with moderation and modesty, and, amid so many generals and geniuses, proved to be the best gentleman of them all. Could this paragon have come from Russia? Yes, but after a long immersion, by a Swiss, in the literature and philosophy of France.
His education deserved another Xenophon to make it into a second Cyro-paedeia about the youth and training of a king. Many conflicting elements confused it. First his solicitous but absent and busy grandmother, the great Catherine herself, who had removed him from his mother, and transmitted to him, before she lost them, the principles of enlightened despotism, mingled with snatches from her then favorite authors—Voltaire, Rousseau, and Diderot. Probably at her suggestion he was taught from his early childhood to sleep, lightly covered, with the windows wide open, and on a mattress of morocco leather stuffed with hay.14 He became almost immune to weather, and enjoyed “extraordinary health and vitality”; but he died at the age of forty-eight.
In 1784 Catherine brought in from Switzerland, as Alexander’s principal tutor, Frédéric-César de La Harpe (1754–1838), an enthusiastic devotee of the philosophes, and later of the Revolution. Through nine years of dedicated service he initiated Alexander into the history and literature of France. The Prince learned to speak French perfectly, and almost to think like a Frenchman. (Napoleon spoke French imperfectly, and thought like a Renaissance Italian.) A nurse had already taught Alexander English; and now Mikhail Muraviov instructed him in the language and literature of ancient Greece. Count N. J. Saltykov transmitted to him the customs of imperial autocracy. There were special tutors in mathematics, physics, and geography. And Archpriest Somborsky conveyed to him the ethics of Christianity in the principle that each must “find in every human being his neighbor in order to fulfill the law of God.”15 Perhaps we should add, to this roster of Alexander’s teachers, Luise Elisabeth of Baden-Durlach, who in 1793, at Catherine’s request, married him, then sixteen, and—now named Elizaveta Alekseevna—presumably taught him the proper ways of a man with a woman.
It was an education fit to make a scholar and a gentleman, but hardly an “autocrat of all the Russias.” When the progress of the French Revolution frightened Catherine out of Voltaire and Diderot she dismissed La Harpe (1794), who returned to Switzerland to lead the revolution there. Alexander found realities at court and at Gatchina confusingly unlike the disputes of philosophy and the ideals of Rousseau. Dismayed by the complexity of the problems that faced the government, and perhaps missing the optimism of La Harpe, and brooding over his grandmother’s death, he wrote in 1796 to his close friend Count Kochubey:
I am thoroughly disgusted with my situation. It is far too brilliant for my character, which fits much better with a life of peace and quiet. Court life is not for me. I feel miserable in the society of such people. … At the same time they occupy the highest offices in the empire. In one word, my dear friend, I am aware that I was not born for the high position which I now occupy, and even less for that which awaits me in the future, and I have sworn to myself to renounce it in one way or another…. The affairs of state are in complete disorder; graft and embezzlement are everywhere; all departments are badly managed…. Notwithstanding all this, the Empire tends only toward expansion. Is it possible, therefore, for me to administer the state, even more to reform it and to abolish the long existing evils? To my mind it is beyond the power of a genius, not to speak of a man with ordinary capacities like myself. Taking all this into consideration, I have arrived at the aforesaid decision. My plan consists in abdicating (I cannot say when), and in settling with my wife on the shores of the Rhine to live the life of a private citizen, devote my time to the company of my friends and to the study of nature.16
Fortune gave him five years in which to adjust himself to the demands of his situation. He learned to appreciate the constructive elements in Russian life: the idealism and devotion inspired by Christianity, the readiness for mutual aid, the courage and hardihood that had been developed in the wars with the Tatars and the Turks, the power and depth of the Slavic imagination, which was soon to create a literature profound and unique, and the silent pride that rose from consciousness of Russian space and time. When, on March 24, 1801, Alexander, poet and would-be recluse, was suddenly challenged with opportunity, he found in his roots and dreams the understanding and character to summon his people to greatness, and to make Russia the arbiter of Europe.
IV. THE YOUNG CZAR: 1801–04
He did not at once dismiss Panin or Pahlen, who had arranged the death of his father; he feared their power, and was not sure of his own innocence; he needed Pahlen and his police to keep Moscow quiet, and Panin to deal with England, whose fleet, after destroying the Danish Navy, was threatening to do the same to the Russian. Britain was appeased; the Second League of Armed Neutrality collapsed. Pahlen was dismissed in June, Panin resigned in September, 1801.
On the first day of his reign Alexander ordered the release of thousands of political prisoners. He soon dismissed the men who had served Paul as counselors, or as agents in his terroristic measures. On March 30 he brought together “twelve high officials least mistrusted,”17 and formed them into a “Permanent Council” to advise him in legislation and administration. He called to his side, some from banishment, the most liberal of the nobles: Count Viktor Kochubey as minister of the interior, Nikolai Novosiltsov as secretary of state, Count Pavel Stroganov as minister of public instruction, and, as minister of foreign affairs, Prince Adam Jerzy Czartoryski, a Polish patriot reconciled to Russian sovereignty. These and other departmental heads, together, constituted a Committee of Ministers, serving as another advisory council. As still another adviser Alexander recalled La Harpe from Switzerland (November, 1801) to help him formulate and coordinate his policies. Under this executive structure was a senate of nobles with legislative and judicial powers, whose ukases or decrees (corresponding to the senatus consulta under Napoleon) had the force of law unless vetoed by the czar. Provincial administration continued to be by appointees of the central government.
All this resembles the imperial constitution under Napoleon, except for the lack of a popularly elected lower chamber, and the continuance of a serfdom quite devoid of political rights. Alexander’s advisers, in his first years of rule, were liberal and well-educated men, but (in Napoleon’s phrase) they were “subject to the nature of things.” In that context “rights” seemed to be fanciful abstractions in the face of necessities—for economic and political order, for production and distribution, defense and survival—in a nation ninety percent composed of strong, unlettered peasants who could not be expected to think beyond their village. Alexander was subject to a powerful nobility almost self-sustained by their organization and local rule of agriculture, the judiciary, the police, and rural indust
ry. Serfdom was so deeply rooted in time and status that the Czar did not dare attack it for fear of disrupting social order and losing his throne. Alexander received complaints sent up from the peasants, and in “many cases he inflicted severe punishments on the guilty owners,”18 but he could not build upon such cases a program of liberation. Sixty years would pass before Alexander II (two years before Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation) succeeded in freeing the serfs of Russia. Napoleon, returning defeated from Russia in 1812, found no fault with his victorious foe in this matter. “Alexander,” he told Caulaincourt, “is too liberal in his vision and too democratic for his Russians;… that nation needs a strong hand. He would be more suited to the Parisians…. Gallant to women, flattering with men… His fine bearing and extreme courtesy are very pleasing.”19*
Within the imposed limits Alexander made some progress. He managed to free 47,153 peasants. He ordered the laws to be reduced to system, consistency, and clarity. “Basing the people’s welfare on the uniformity of our laws,” said his explanatory rescript, “and believing that various measures may bring the land happy times, but that only the law may affirm them forever, I have endeavored, from the very first day of my reign, to investigate the conditions of this department of the state.”20 Accusation, trial, and punishment were to follow a definite and prescribed procedure. Political offenses were to be tried before ordinary courts, not before secret tribunals. New regulations abolished the secret police, forbade torture (Paul had forbidden it, but it had continued throughout his reign), allowed free Russians to move about and go abroad, and allowed foreigners to enter Russia more freely. Twelve thousand exiles were invited to return. Censorship of the press remained, but it was placed under the Ministry of Education, with a polite request that it be lenient with authors.21 The embargo on the import of foreign books was ended, but foreign magazines remained under the ban.
A statute of 1804 established academic freedom under university councils.
Alexander realized that no reform could prosper unless supported and understood by a wide proportion of the people. In 1802 he gave to the Ministry of Education, aided by Novosiltsov, Czartoryski, and Mikhail Muraviov, the task of organizing a new system of public education. A statute of January 26, 1803, divided Russia into six regions, and called for at least one university in each region, at least one secondary school in each guberniya, or province, at least one county school in each county seat, and at least one primary school for every two parishes. To the existing universities at Moscow, Vilna, and Dorpat were added universities at St. Petersburg, Kharkov, and Kazan. Meanwhile the nobles maintained tutors and private schools for their children, and orthodox rabbis bade Jewish parents boycott state schools as devious devices for undermining the Jewish faith.22
V. THE JEWS UNDER ALEXANDER
Catherine II had considerably improved the condition of the Jews within the “Pale of Settlement”—i.e., those regions of Russia in which Jews were allowed to settle. In 1800 this Pale included all Russian territory formerly belonging to Poland, and most of southern Russia, including Kiev, Chernigov, Ekaterinoslav, and the Crimea. Outside this Pale no Jew could qualify for permanent domicile. Within it the Jews, numbering some 900,000 in 1804,23 were to enjoy all civil rights, including eligibility to office, with one exception: Jews desiring enrollment in the mercantile or business class in the cities were to pay a tax double that imposed upon other businessmen, who claimed that unhindered Jewish competition would ruin them;24 so the merchants of Moscow (1790) had lodged a complaint against Jews who sold “foreign goods by lowering the correct prices, and thereby inflicting very serious damage upon the local trade.”25 Meanwhile their competition was resented by rural tavern keepers, and every effort was made by the government to keep them out of villages and confine them to the towns. In 1795 Catherine ordered that Jews should be registered (and acquire civil rights) only in towns.
In November, 1802, Alexander appointed a “Committee for the Amelioration of the Jews” to study their problems and submit recommendations. The committee invited the Kahals—the administrative councils through which the Jewish communities governed and taxed themselves—to send deputies to St. Petersburg to consult with the government about Jewish needs. The committee submitted its recommendation to these deputies. These, after much discussion, asked for a delay of six months, which would enable them to obtain more specific authority and instructions from their Kahals. The committee, instead, sent its recommendations directly to the Kahals. These objected to the committee’s proposals to exclude Jews from the ownership of land and the sale of liquor, and asked that these measures be postponed for twenty years to allow time for difficult economic adjustments. The committee refused, and on December 9, 1804, the Russian government, with the sanction of Czar Alexander, issued the “Jewish Constitution” of 1804.
It was both a bill of rights and an edict of urban confinement. The rights were substantial. Jewish children were assured free access to all public schools, Gymnasia, and universities in the Russian Empire. The Jews might establish their own schools, but one of three languages—Russian, Polish, or German—must be taught there and be used in legal documents. Each community might elect its rabbis and Kahal; but the rabbi must never issue excommunications, and the Kahal was to be responsible for collecting all taxes levied by the state. Jews were invited to engage in agriculture by buying unoccupied land in specified regions of the Pale, or by settling on crown lands, where, for the first few years, they would be exempt from state taxes.
However, by January 1, 1808, “no one among the Jews in any village or hamlet shall be permitted to hold any leases on land, to keep taverns, saloons, or inns, … or to sell wine in the villages, or ever to live in them under any pretext whatever.”26 This meant the displacement of sixty thousand Jewish families from their village homes. Hundreds of petitions poured into St. Petersburg, asking for postponement of this mass evacuation, and many Christians joined in the appeal. Count Kochubey pointed out to Alexander that Napoleon was planning to convene in Paris, in February, 1807, a Sanhedrin of rabbis from all Western Europe to formulate measures for the full enfranchisement of the Jews. Alexander ordered the debated program to be postponed. His meetings with Napoleon at Tilsit (1807) and Erfurt (1808) may have revived his ambition to impress the West as a fully enlightened despot. In 1809 he informed his government that the evacuation plan was impracticable because “the Jews, on account of their destitute condition, have no means which would enable them, after leaving their present abodes, to settle and found a home in new surroundings, while the Government is equally unable to place them all in new domiciles.”27 When invasion of Russia by the French became imminent Alexander complimented himself on having kept his Jewish citizens fond of him, and loyal to the state.
VI. RUSSIAN ART
The Prince de Ligne, who knew everybody and everything of account in the Europe of his time, described St. Petersburg, about 1787, as “the finest city in the world.”28 In 1812 Mme. de Staël judged it to be “one of the finest cities in the world.”29 Peter I, jealous of Paris, began the adornment of his newborn capital; Catherine the Great consoled her discarded lovers with palaces more lasting than her love; and Alexander I continued the royal guard of classic columns sternly fronting the Neva. It was the neoclassic period in Europe, and Czar and Czarina, alike forgetting Russian forms and recalling Rome, sent to Italy and France for architects and sculptors to come and uphold Slavic pride with classic art.
The Winter Palace, begun in 1755 by Bartolomeo Rastrelli, and completed in 1817 by Giacomo Quarenghi and C. J. Rossi, was the most imposing royal house in Europe, dwarfing and outshining Versailles: fifteen miles of corridors, 2,500 rooms, countless columns of marble, a thousand famous paintings; on the lowest floors, two thousand servants, and, in one wing, hens, ducks, goats, and pigs,30 in a consortium paved with straw.
Alexander I, especially after meeting Napoleon at Tilsit, found stimulus to rival him not only in the reach of his power but in the grandeur of his cap
ital. He brought in French and Italian architects to support with their backgrounds and skills the zeal and energy of native builders. The Western artists remained attached to classic models, but they went beyond Rome and its ruins to southern Italy and such Greek survivals as the temples of Hera at Paestum (Paese, near Salerno); these were as old as the Parthenon, and almost as beautiful; and the masculine strength of their Doric columns gave fresh spirit to Russia’s neoclassic ecstasy.
But the distinguishing feature of Alexander’s “Empire style” was the gradual emergence of Russian architecture from Latin tutelage. Whereas the outstanding builders of Catherine II’s reign (1762–96) were three Italians—Bartolomeo Rastrelli, Antonio Rinaldi, and Giacomo Quarenghi—the chief architects under Alexander I were Thomas de Thomon, Andrei Voronykhin, and Adrian Zakharov, three Russians under French influence,31 and an Italian, Carlo Rossi, who came to the fore in the later part of Alexander’s reign.
In 1801 Alexander commissioned Thomas to design and build a Stock Exchange to grace the activities of the rising class of merchants and financiers in St. Petersburg. The ambitious architect raised (1807 ff.) an immense fane inspired by the temples of Paestum, and matching the contemporary Bourse (1808–27) of Alexandre Brongniart in Paris. —Voronykhin’s chef-d’oeuvre is the Kazansky Sobor—the cathedral dedicated to Our Lady of Kazan, and built on the banks of the Neva in 1801–11; its fine semicircular colonnade and three-tiered dome frankly go back to the masterpieces of Bernini and Michelangelo, or, more immediately, Soufflot’s Panthéon in Paris. —More highly rated is the Admiralty, a quarter-mile-long complex of columns, caryatids, frieze, and sharply pointed steeple, designed for the Russian Navy. —Rivaling this sanctuary are the Offices of the General Staff, raised in the Palace Square by Rossi shortly after Alexander’s death.
