Alexander I: Tsar of War and Peace

by Alan Palmer

  This round condemnation of Arakcheev was a distortion of the truth. Had the General been a cruel and capricious taskmaster and nothing else, Alexander would never have given him such authority. Arakcheev did more to remedy abuses in the administration of the Empire than any other of Alexander’s public servants. He visited every region through which the invaders and liberators had fought their way. If the local provincial Governors were incompetent or corrupt, Arakcheev himself took charge of the tasks of reconstruction, intimidating fumbling bureaucrats and serf labourers alike. It was his will-power which enabled Smolensk to be speedily re-built and his systematic attention to detail that instituted a comprehensive survey of all the devastation caused by the war.20 Local officials were never certain when ‘the Tsar’s representative’ was going to descend on them, and he had an unfailing instinct for discovering graft and corruption. If told by one of the ministries there was no need to inspect a particular area since it had already been visited by a high-ranking civil servant, he made a point of going there at the first opportunity, suspecting that someone was covering up major irregularities. Alexander invariably supported Arakcheev:21 to stamp out fraud, embezzlement and bureaucratic knavery was essential as a first stage towards the modernization of the Empire. Unfortunately Arakcheev was not good at picking subordinates nor at showing others what should be done: one of his most loyal assistants, General Maevsky, once grumbled that Arakcheev ‘always thought that by being rude to someone he was in fact teaching them’.22 When Arakcheev was present in a town or province things got done. In his absence all the old abuses flourished – and continued to do so well into the eighteen-thirties when Gogol satirized the whole bureaucratic maladministration in his classic comedy The Government Inspector.

  In July 1816 Alexander showed his confidence in Arakcheev by travelling to Gruzino with Prince Volkonsky and spending two nights as the General’s guest. So devoted was Arakcheev to his sovereign that he kept a record of everything done by the Tsar in his thirty-six-hour visit and deposited it in the church. We can thus read how Alexander took breakfast in a tent beside the Volkhov river, how he inspected by droshky all the recent buildings constructed on the estate, and how he lunched at two o’clock while an orchestra played in the shaded avenues of Arakcheev’s private garden.23 But Alexander’s visit was more than a social courtesy. After seeing Gruzino for the first time in 1810 the Tsar had encouraged its master to draw up the plans of an experimental military colony in the province of Moghilev:* it had failed, partly through the conflict of settlers and peasants and partly because the worsening situation abroad made it an inappropriate time to beat swords into plough-shares. But now that the wars were over, Alexander was increasingly attracted by the possibilities of combining soldiery with farming. With Arakcheev’s collaboration, he planned another pilot military colony, to be sited this time on the Volkhov river itself, between Gruzino and the city of Novgorod, where the General could in person make frequent inspections and keep Alexander informed month by month of how the experiment was progressing.

  Less than eight weeks after Alexander’s visit to Gruzino the first troops, a battalion of the Count Arakcheev Regiment, arrived at Vysotsk on the Volkhov.24 The General gave them little time to settle in. He was determined the Tsar should find the colony a flourishing enterprise by the following summer. Before the end of autumn they had constructed a nucleus of stone buildings and delimited the fields and boundaries of the settlement. Arakcheev drove his officers relentlessly, threatening backsliders with severe disciplinary action, and the officers duly gave their men no peace. Within a mere nine months Arakcheev was able to report success to the Tsar, who was delighted. Despite strong opposition from Barclay de Tolly and the whole military establishment in St Petersburg the Tsar gave orders for new military settlements to be set up near Novgorod and Pskov and also in the Ukraine.25 Within five years over a hundred infantry battalions and some two hundred squadrons of cavalry were stationed in these so-called colonies, which collectively housed as many as three-quarters of a million people. No enterprise of comparable scale, involving the regimentation of so many human beings, had been attempted by any Tsar since Peter the Great’s construction of his new capital: nor was Russia to witness a similar social revolution until the enforced collectivization of Stalin’s first Five Year Plan.

  The military colonies, more than any other institution, reflected Alexander’s own ideas of enlightened reform. He believed the system would be beneficial for the soldiery and valuable to the State. Peasants and soldiers would live together, under the patriarchal protection of a regiment but quartered with their families rather than in some remote garrison town. The military settlements, so the Tsar himself declared, were intended ‘to make the obligation of those entering military service less burdensome’ by ensuring that ‘in peacetime a soldier serving the Fatherland is not separated from his home area’.26 Eventually, he believed, the whole organization of the Russian army, in time of peace, would be based upon this system: ‘When, with God’s help, these settlements take their final form’, he wrote in August 1818, ‘there will be no need for general recruitment anywhere in the entire Empire.’27 The combination of soldiering and farming would make it possible for veterans who had served more than twenty years with a regiment to spend the remainder of their days gainfully employed on the land. Organization and experience should raise the agricultural yield of the Russian countryside. There was even a possibility that the new system would, by contrast, show up the deficiencies of the serf economy and thereby speed a process of serf emancipation by progessively-minded landowners, a development Alexander had always favoured (and one in which he sought to interest Arakcheev).28 The scheme promised to reduce the expenses of supporting a large army while, at the same time, making it certain that difficult tracts of land were beneficially farmed. It was a typical product of muddled sentiment in an eighteenth-century mind: the soldier became, in Alexander’s dream, almost a ‘Noble Savage’, practising domestic virtues in Arcadian delights and uncorrupted by the thoughts and habits of town life. Unfortunately those who sought to put Alexander’s ideal into practice were not themselves products of the Age of Reason; they did not share their sovereign’s good intentions, if only because they could not understand them.

  Foreign visitors to the military colonies were favourably impressed.29 The settlers were well-housed, cared for with hospitals and improved sanitation, and their children received a good schooling, in many cases even learning a language other than their own. But the colonies were regarded by soldiers and peasants as a new form of servitude, rural stamping-grounds of despotism in which harsh discipline was imposed alike on men, women and children. ‘Nothing at the end of the war provoked as much public indignation against Alexander … as the compulsory establishment of military settlements’, wrote a young Guards officer, looking back on these years more than a decade later.30 ‘All was organized in the German, Prussian manner’, another contemporary wrote: ‘Everything was counted, weighed and measured. Exhausted by the day’s labour in the fields, the military settler had to stand at attention and march. When he came home, he found no peace; he was compelled to scrub and clean his house and sweep the street. He had to report every egg laid by his hens.’31 The settlements were universally unpopular: soldiers disliked the imposition of farming duties; peasants disliked the imposition of military discipline; independent landowners disliked economic competition from what were (in material terms) pampered collectives; and the military establishment disliked the creation of a private Arakcheevan empire. But no one could convince Alexander that the military colonies were as grimly repressive as penal settlements. His faith in their beneficent qualities remained unshaken – despite petitions, revolts and mutinies – until the end of his reign.

  Technically the colonies were a success, with a record yield of cereals to their credit. They were, however, too closely associated with the Alexander-Arakcheev partnership to become a permanent feature of Russian life. Effectively they were alrea
dy a thing of the past when Arakcheev died in 1834.32† Liberal intellectuals, disillusioned by the Tsar’s failure to do more for the veterans returning from the wars, remembered the military settlements as ‘the most despotic and hateful’ institutions created in Alexander’s reign. It would have been happier for Russia had he concentrated on constitutional reform and on securing the emancipation of the serfs; it would have been better for his reputation had he summoned back Speransky rather than looked to Arakcheev as his principal lieutenant. But Speransky, quite apart from the unpopularity he had aroused among the landowners, was too closely identified in Alexander’s mind with specifically Napoleonic-style reforms. Ironically, it was through Arakcheev’s intervention that Speransky was reinstated as a government official for, at the end of 1816, Alexander at last appointed the disgraced State Secretary to a post: he was made Governor of the town of Penza, more than three hundred miles east of Moscow and over seven hundred miles from the centre of affairs in St Petersburg.33 The Tsar’s choice of advisers on home affairs was limited by the embarrassment with which past enthusiasms assailed him. No far-sighted and dispassionate judge of men, faced with the problems of modifying autocratic government after a foreign war, would have retained Arakcheev and his private Chancery in Liteiny Prospect while allowing Speransky to waste his talents in running a small town on the Mordovian steppes.

  Imperial Weddings

  One at least of Alexander’s closest associates from earlier years was soon removed from further interference in Russian affairs. On 9 January 1816 Grand Duchess Catherine was at last betrothed to William of Württemberg. There was a religious ceremony at midday and a grand dinner and grand ball in the evening, to which all the ladies of the Imperial Household, headed of course by the indefatigable Marie Feodorovna, wore traditional Russian robes. The marriage itself was celebrated a fortnight later: ‘I do not know why there is, in this marriage, something that makes me shudder’, wrote the Empress Elizabeth in a note to her mother.34 And soon afterwards Catherine left Russia for the Neckar and the Black Forest. She had not been able to visit Oldenburg in the lifetime of her first husband but conditions had changed in Europe with the creation of the German Confederation, and William, as heir to the throne, was needed in Stuttgart. Within ten months Catherine was a Queen and the mother of a daughter. She never saw Russia again and, though she continued to seek from Alexander favours for the Württemberg family,35 there is no evidence that she offered him advice any longer on political questions. He remained deeply devoted to her and had every intention of visiting her in Germany as often as his travels permitted; but, perhaps fortunately, there was never again that close affinity between brother and sister which had proved so disastrous during the English visit of 1814.

  Little more than a fortnight after Catherine’s second marriage the youngest of Alexander’s sisters, Anna, was betrothed to Prince William of Orange, the twenty-three-year-old heir to the throne of the Netherlands. He was popular with all the members of the Russian Imperial family (which says much for his tact and charm) and had fought under Wellington both in the Peninsular Campaign and at Waterloo. Since there was a difference of seventeen years between Alexander and Anna, he never became so closely attached to her as to his older sisters. Anna, for her part, had spent her childhood with Nicholas and Michael at Pavlovsk and Gatchina and looked on her elder brother as a distant and awe-inspiring person. Yet the prospect of her departure for the Netherlands drew all the family closer together. The Orange wedding took place before the coming of Lent but the young couple remained in Russia until the end of June and that spring and summer there were long evenings of nostalgia and sentiment in the gardens of Tsarskoe Selo and beside the fountains of Peterhof.36 When at last Anna and her husband set out westwards Alexander himself accompanied them on the first stages of the slow journey to The Hague. It was the first time for many decades that a Romanov bride had left Russia for a non-Germanic kingdom.‡

  A year later Alexander’s emotions were subjected to a different stress. In July 1817 Grand Duke Nicholas married the eldest daughter of Louise of Prussia, who was originally baptized Charlotte but took the names Alexandra Feodorovna on her reception into the Orthodox Church. The Tsar had known the newest Grand Duchess since his first visit to Berlin at the end of October 1805, when she was a girl of seven, and it was Alexander who acted as matchmaker for Nicholas, although as soon as the two young people met (in the early summer of 1814) they did indeed fall deeply in love.37 Nicholas was considered in Berlin, not without justice, to be ‘the most handsome prince in Europe’ while his bride had enough of her mother’s beauty and vivacity to trouble the mind with ghostly memories. Alexander was pleased at the union of the two dynasties and his admiration for Alexandra’s intelligence and light-hearted spirits led him to pay more attention to Nicholas than in the past. Here was a man who seemed to possess the qualities for which Alexander looked in a sovereign – and who knew it. Although everyone assumed that Constantine was heir-apparent, the Tsar began in the first year of Nicholas’s married life to treat him increasingly as the most fitting successor. With Constantine long separated from his wife and permanently resident in Warsaw, it was natural that Nicholas and Alexandra should be welcomed in the whirling centre of Petersburg Society. There were some doubts about him-a prudish temperament ill-fitted his cavalry-officer mentality-but hardly about her. No one waltzed so lightly or danced so graceful a mazurka as the Grand Duchess Alexandra.38

  The Empress Elizabeth, long since weary of solemn festivities, was pleased to welcome the Prussian Princess to St Petersburg. It was good to have a young sister-in-law with whom to exchange confidences. When Elizabeth arrived back in Russia after her long absence in Germany she had been deeply moved by the sight and smell of a country she loved so deeply; but, so she wrote, ‘my heart stopped short as the Winter Palace loomed up ahead of us’, and the prospect of Court life in full tedium nearly overwhelmed her.39 Within weeks she was complaining in her letters of intrigues, of the presumption of the Naryshkin family, of the cold hostility shown by the Dowager Empress; nothing had changed at St Petersburg or Pavlovsk.40 But in the autumn of 1817 there was an innovation in Court routine. Alexander and Elizabeth travelled to Moscow, where they remained in residence throughout the winter, the Empress staying even longer as her husband set out to tour the central provinces, the heart of old Muscovy. In earlier years Elizabeth had found the old capital a greater strain than the new but on this occasion she was spiritually uplifted by the phoenix-like quality of life in Moscow after the tragedies of occupation and fire. Now at last Elizabeth sensed the historical continuity which gave to the city its will to endure, its extraordinary atmosphere of resilient piety.41 If Elizabeth could be so moved by the experience of wintering in the Kremlin, the effect of Moscow on Alexander was greater still. He always identified himself with its tremendous sense of a holy past.

  Alexander continues his Spiritual Quest

  When Alexander returned from western Europe and Poland, he freed himself from the compelling mysticism of Julie von Krüdener. His personal religious devotions continued to play a prominent role in his life, but he now turned for guidance to those whom he had long known and trusted rather than to the prophetess who had descended on him so opportunely at Heilbronn. She continued to write him long letters, rambling on through pages of incoherent ecstasy. He did not answer them himself but tended increasingly to leave all such matters to Prince Golitsyn, the friend who had first taught him how to find in the Scriptures the inspiration to bear the burdens of 1812.42 From 1816 to the spring of 1824 Golitsyn served Alexander as a kind of devotional secretary, not so much a conventional confessor as a courier escorting him on a quest for spiritual satisfaction.43 During these years the Tsar’s religious emotions were more highly developed than the commoner emotions of private life; and Golitsyn was closer to him than Arakcheev or any other minister of the State.

  Prince Alexei Golitsyn had been Procurator of the Holy Synod, the chief lay official in the Russian
Church, since the year 1802. He was also Director of the Spiritual Affairs of Foreign Confessions, an office which the Tsar had created in 1810 in order to integrate non-Orthodox religious bodies within the general structure of his Empire. In addition to these posts, Golitsyn became in 1816 Minister of Education and in the following October all his responsibilities were amalgamated in a special government department, the Ministry of Spiritual Affairs and Education. Quite apart from his personal friendship with the Tsar, he was thus a person of outstanding influence in Russia.44

  Golitsyn, whose responsibilities for education included the censorship of dangerous publications, was far from being a liberal in social thought or in politics; but he was a remarkably tolerant religious believer, intellectually curious over the teachings and practices of other faiths and convinced that it was natural to gratify the longings of the soul by self-absorption in a mystical emotionalism. In this respect there was little difference in the attitude of Golitsyn and Alexander. It was under the Prince’s guidance that the first Russian Bible Society was set up but it was the Tsar himself who persuaded the Holy Synod to have the Scriptures translated into the vernacular. At times Golitsyn was, perhaps, unduly generous in his comprehensive tolerance and some odd religious practices crept into the capital. There was, for example, a sect of ecstatic dancers, moved on occasions to utter prophecies in a language no one could understand, some of whose gatherings were attended by Golitsyn himself. Although Alexander knew of their existence, it is unlikely he had any direct contact with the sect for its leader was an officer’s widow granted a grace-and-favour apartment in the Mikhailovsky Palace; and Alexander would never have sought mystic joy within the Mikhailovsky’s grim walls.45