9 The Pinnacle of Autocracy
The first acts of the new reign were the capture, investigation, and trials of the Decembrists, as they were known immediately and for ever after. Several hundred officers and men of the rebel regiments, as well as a few civilians, were immediately arrested. Tsar Nicholas appointed a court of numerous officials and high officers, the most distinguished being Michael Speranskii, who had returned from exile and was now again in favor. The investigation was long and detailed, conducted in secret, and eventually ended in the execution of five of the rebels, including Pestel’ and the poet Ryleev, for the crime of plotting against the life of the tsar. Thirty-one others were sentenced to death as well for the same crime, but Nicholas decided to ignore their obvious guilt and commuted the sentences to labor and exile in Siberia. All together one hundred twenty-one of the rebels made the long journey east. Another four hundred fifty were either released without punishment or demoted and transferred to line regiments in the Caucasus.
In Russian history the punishment of the Decembrists became a classic example of official cruelty, but the most striking aspect of their treatment was its lenience. The number of death sentences was about the same as in the reprisals for the Italian constitutionalist revolts of 1820–21 and far less than for similar actions in Spain. Nicholas chose to hold back, perhaps because he still held a very old-fashioned conception of the tsar as the stern father of his people. In any case the Decembrists in Siberia had various fates. Eight of the most “guilty” actually worked in an open-pit silver mine for several months, while others had lighter tasks. The labor sentences were lightened by the 1830s. A number of the Decembrists’ wives were allowed to join them, and as the years passed the labor sentences were entirely commuted to simple prison and eventually exile (outside of prison). Many of the former rebels were given positions in the local administration. In Siberian towns the Decembrists and their wives provided the first glimpse of European culture, for they set up schools and orphanages, put on amateur theatricals, and became the centers of local society. What they were not allowed to do is publish anything or even to return to European Russia. A blanket of silence descended around them, to remain until the death of Nicholas thirty years later.
The new tsar could now turn to ruling the country, which he did with an iron hand. Nicholas was nearly twenty years younger than Alexander, for he was born in 1796. Thus he entirely missed the reign of his grandmother Catherine, and his formative years were those of the defeat of Napoleon. His upbringing was narrowly military and he was not educated as a future ruler. Personally he was convinced that only autocracy could prevent the spread of revolution, liberalism, and constitutional government, all of these essentially the same in the minds of European and Russian conservatives. He relied on the ministries to provide his government with a trained staff to execute the laws, but increasingly he centralized decision making and in particular directed any new initiatives from his personal chancellery using men, mostly with military backgrounds, who were personally close to the tsar himself.
One of his first acts was to add a “Third Section” to his personal chancellery, one that was to keep track of potential political opponents through the Corps of Gendarmes and their network of agents. The new organ removed political police from the Ministry of Internal Affairs and subordinated it directly to the tsar through its head, General Alexander Benckendorf. The Third Section reflected in its actions the conceptions of the tsar, for in addition to looking for “secret societies” of revolutionaries it was to track insults to the tsar and imperial family, counterfeiters, and religious sects, especially the Old Believers. It was also supposed to collect news of peasant discontent and rebellion, a new note from a government hitherto only concerned about liberal ideas among the nobility. The Gendarmes who were its main agents were also to look out for corruption among government officials, especially in the provinces. In the mind of Nicholas, paternalism and the repression of revolution were two sides of the same coin. Though the actual agents of the Third Section were few and it continued to rely heavily on denunciations, it was large enough to become a major factor in the life of Russia’s small political and cultural elite.
Nicholas was not in theory opposed to all reform, and he set up a series of committees to consider the needs of the country and even to wrestle with the issue of serfdom. None of the reform programs came to anything, for the tsar believed serfdom to be an evil, but also that any attempt to change the system would lead to a massive revolt like that led by Pugachev in the previous century. Perhaps the only important positive measure of the reign was the codification of Russian law, a massive task entrusted to the capable hands of Michael Speranskii. In 1835 his committee published a code of law derived from carefully collected Russian precedent. Speranskii and his staff also compiled codes of local law from Finland, the Baltic provinces, and the formerly Polish provinces in the western part of the empire. Speranskii’s code remained the basis of Russian law until 1917. Nicholas was himself enthusiastic about the project, as it fitted his image of himself as the stern yet just monarch, careful of the law as well as of his own authority.
The utter stagnation of government was not matched by stagnation in Russian society, slow as it was to develop. The colonization of the southern steppe continued, and Odessa emerged as a major port, exporting the growing surplus of Russian grain to Europe. In the interior of Russia all was not stagnant either, for within and around the serf system industrial capitalism made its first appearance. In the villages of Ivanovo and Voznesenskoe, Sheremetev estates northeast of Moscow, textile factories powered by steam engines were built starting from the 1790s. The entrepreneurs who bought and imported English steam engines, however, were themselves serfs who only gradually bought themselves out in the course of the early nineteenth century. The workers were also mostly Sheremetev serfs, though they worked for the factory owners and only paid the count, their owner, a yearly rent. Peasant entrepreneurs, some of them serfs, and townsmen began to start small enterprises in and around St. Petersburg, Moscow, and other towns and villages of the Russian interior. In St. Petersburg many of the businessmen were foreign or non-Russian citizens of the empire – Germans, Swedes, Finns, Englishmen. In Moscow many of the richest textile manufacturers came from Old Belief groups, and thus for religious reasons were treated with some suspicion by the authorities. By the standards of Western Europe all this activity was small, labor was expensive, and industry was usually technically backward, but it was a beginning. The overall prosperity of the Russian Empire also benefited from the beginnings of industrialization in Russian Poland, the Baltic provinces and Finland.
Figure 9. A village council from John Augustus Atkinson, A Picturesque View of the Manners, Customs, and Amusements of the Russians, London, 1803–04.
The attitude of the tsar and his government toward industrialization was highly ambiguous. On the one hand he supported it, if modestly, establishing the first commercial high schools and maintaining a protective tariff. Nicholas played a major role in the construction of Russia’s first railroad, the line from the capital to the Tsarskoe Selo (1837) and then in a much more important project, the line from St. Petersburg to Moscow that opened in 1851. Russia acquired its first engineering school in 1828 with the St. Petersburg Technological Institute, but the builder of the Moscow-Petersburg railroad was the American engineer, G. W. Whistler, the father of the famous painter. Russia simply did not have the trained specialists for the project. Nicholas supported the railroad, but at the same time he did not want Russia to acquire a large industrial base, as he saw that as the seedbed of revolution as well as fundamentally unnecessary. The most basic issue was, of course, serfdom, for as long as that lasted Russia was saddled with increasingly backward agriculture, a highly restricted labor market, and capital tied up in serfs and noble estates. Russia could not hope to move forward until that system was removed, but that act would entail fundamental change in society, the legal system and the state. Nicholas would not have that.