A more thorough reexamination of Siberian affairs soon followed, and the man of the hour was Mikhail Speransky, an official of exceptional intellectual range. The son of a priest (in Russia the lower clergy were free to marry), Speransky was familiar with the philosophical and scientific thought of the Enlightenment, and had taught mathematics, rhetoric, and philosophy before entering politics in 1796. Hardworking and articulate, he earned rapid advancement: from secretary to the Attorney General of the Senate he rose to Assistant Minister of Justice, held posts in the Interior Ministry, and in 1808 accompanied the tsar to his critical meeting with Napoleon, who afterwards described him as “Russia’s only clear head.”497
In January 1810, Speransky emerged from among a number of more prominent candidates as state secretary to the newly established State Council, and in this capacity, for four years, seemed destined, through a series of proposed constitutional reforms, to revolutionize Russian political life. But in the general reaction following the outbreak of the Napoleonic Wars, Speransky fell from favor and, summarily dismissed in March of 1812, returned home at midnight to find a police carriage waiting at his door. Four years of exile (to provinces west of the Urals) ended with his appointment as governor of Penza Province in 1816, where his skill in administration once again caught the monarch’s eye. Three years later he was appointed governor-general of Siberia, and after an extensive tour of the colony, returned to the capital in 1821 to draft and supervise the implementation of a number of far-reaching reforms.
Speransky had traveled to places in Siberia where no previous governor had gone, and although, as his biographer observes, he had come to Siberia “with the stereotype picture of a backward, cold, dreary, and unpromising country, fit to be only a penal colony, deprived of any serious economic and social value to Russia,” he discovered “a hard-working, patient, and resolute people.”498 He was also struck by Siberia’s potential, its great agricultural and mineral wealth, and the untapped possibilities of the China trade. That nothing should stand in its way, he ferreted out corrupt and arbitrary officials – 681 in all were charged with various misdeeds – established Lancaster schools of mutual instruction (in which brighter or more proficient children were used to teach others under the direction of an adult), sought more humane working conditions for the mines, began the systematic survey of the province of Yakutsk (a territory the size of India), and took an interest in the cultural life and customs of the natives, whose villages and festivals he made part of his regular tour.
Although he pressed the campaign against merchant monopolies (while abolishing their state equivalents), he maintained the state granaries as a safety net for those in need, established new markets and fairs, and tried to come up with a rational scheme for the settlement of exiles, although their steadily increasing tide would eventually overwhelm his plans. To increase agricultural production, he freed Cossacks of the line from many of their military obligations, and peasants from irregular labor drafts.
With regard to native affairs, he could see that the smaller and more backward tribes, isolated and subjected to disease and periodic famines, had become “stepchildren of the empire” and were dying out, while among the more prosperous groups (principally the Buryats and Yakuts) the old clan system was breaking down and a kind of class-consciousness evolving among them, based on economic activity and wealth.499 In recognition of these changes, Speransky divided the native peoples into three groups: settled, nomads, and vagrants. He recommended that the settled be grouped administratively with the Russian peasantry (with whom they now had much in common), but that the latter two groups be administered as nearly as possible according to their own laws. Each encampment (ulus) of fifteen families or more was to form a clan administration, and several encampments a native administration, to which the clan administration was subordinate. Several clans together were entitled to a Steppe Duma, or nomad forum, made up of prominent members of the community. These institutions (although subject to Russian authority, of course) allowed for a considerable degree of self-government and helped keep the thread of their cultural traditions alive.
As a result of his various recommendations, a special Committee on Siberian Affairs was set up as an oversight body in the capital, two governor-generalships were created for Western and Eastern Siberia, and advisory councils were established to assist the governor-generals in executing their tasks.
Speransky’s reforms were long-lasting, even as the colony’s organization evolved. In 1838, the special oversight committee was superseded by a Siberian Bureau; in 1879, Western Siberia was divided into four provinces (Tobolsk, Tomsk, Semipalatinsk, and Akmolinsk), and Eastern Siberia into six (Irkutsk, Yakutsk, Yeniseysk, Transbaikai, Amur, and Maritime). By the end of Muravyov-Amursky’s tenure, the larger geopolitical subdivisions had also been fixed: “Western Siberia,” as extending from the Urals to the Yenisey; “Eastern Siberia” from the Yenisey to the Yablonovy-Stanovoy mountain ranges of the Transbaikal; and the “Russian Far East” as that portion of Siberia – the Transbaikal, Amur, and Maritime provinces – that drained to the Pacific Ocean. (The Maritime Province, created in 1857, comprised the coastal area down to Vladivostok.) In 1882, the Western Siberian governor-generalship was abolished, Tomsk and Tobolsk provinces came directly under the jurisdiction of the Interior Ministry, and a new governor-generalship of the steppe was created out of portions of both Western Siberia and Turkestan. In 1884, the government of the Amur Province assumed responsibility for the Russian Far East and Sakhalin Island.
Three years after drafting his Siberian reforms, Speransky was appointed to the special tribunal that tried and sentenced the Decembrists. At the tsar’s behest, he personally drew up the rules of procedure, but the task was a torment to him, for a number of the defendants had been his friends. One of them recalled that when he was summoned to answer the questions put to him by the court, Speransky, standing nearby, “looked at him sadly, and a tear rolled down his cheek.”500 It subsequently became known that the Decembrists had once considered Speransky as a possible interim head of state.
Never an anti-monarchist, in fact, Speransky had always been less interested in changing the structure of the state than in improving its functioning. His life-long passion was legal procedure, and in his twilight years he became the leading force in the project for the codification of Russian laws. In 1830 his career was crowned with the publication of the first Complete Collection of the Laws of the Russian Empire.
With the reappearance of the Amur River Valley as the hope of the Russian Far East, the importance of the Okhotsk seaboard and Kamchatka had declined. And it was not long before the very name of Petropavlovsk was uttered with disgust by Europeans and Russians from St. Petersburg. Despite its heroic reputation from the Crimean War, and monuments to Bering and La Perouse commemorating the town’s role in the history of navigation and discovery, in 1866 it consisted of little more than a cluster of log cabins thatched with bark, a church with a green painted dome, a crumbling wharf, and vaguely cut paths that meandered like sheepwalks among the scattered houses and slumbering cows.