Internal Affairs
In a recent essay, Willard Sunderland (2010: 120) asks why imperial Russia never created a Ministry of Colonial Affairs. The person who asked this question the first time, August von Haxthausen, stated that Russia had to establish a colonial ministry, "like England, although in a somewhat different sense" (1856: 2/76). But even this proposal was too little too late. An answer to the question of why Russia did not have a colonial ministry is that it did have one, or two.
Intellectuals in Power
The motto on the coat of arms of Count Lev Perovsky, Minister of Internal Affairs of the Russian Empire (1841-52), said, "Being, not Seeming." An illegitimate son of Count Aleksei Razumovsky, Minister of the Enlightenment (1810-16), Perovsky earned his title by service in proximity to Nicolas I. His motto was devised by Vladimir Dal, a military surgeon who authored the magisterial dictionary of the Russian language and was also the head of Perovsky's special chancellery (Melnikov-Pechersky 1873: 310). As it happened, to achieve "being," the minister surrounded himself with writers and scholars, experts in deceitful disciplines of "seeming." In Russian intellectual history, people of the 1840s have usually been represented as highbrow idealists, connoisseurs, and devotees of German romantic philosophy (Berlin 1978). Those in the Ministry of Internal Affairs belonged to a different species. Political foxes rather than romantic hedgehogs, these intellectuals knew a lot about power and eagerly demonstrated their value, as intellectuals, to those in power. Within their lifetime, knowledge gave power over nature. Science created vaccinations, navigation tools, and other successes that everyone could appreciate but only specialists could apprehend. In a similar way, sophisticated, specialized knowledge about the population - as these intellectuals would say, about the People - would provide power that would be beneficial to the People and the Empire. Being was different from hearsay, though only trained professionals could differentiate between them. The apparent phenomena that were accessible to the public were irrelevant to the art of governing. In the 1840s and 1850s, the Ministry of Internal Affairs hired first-rate philosophers, orientalists, and, in particular, many writers.1 This was a brilliant group of intellectuals. The contemporaneous staffs of the imperial universities in Moscow or Petersburg were negligible in comparison to this group.
The Empire was entering the new age of rational, bureaucratized modernity, when the nobility needed experts and became experts themselves (Weber 1979: 973). Producing millions of documents every month (Lincoln 1982), the Ministry of Internal Affairs controlled enormous areas of general administration, including the nation-wide police force, healthcare, and censorship. It managed most of the communications between the sovereign and the provinces; it appointed provincial governors, sent inspections, drew maps, oversaw roads, and ruled over the religious and ethic minorities. Though it did not have power over the serfs, it defined rules for the seigniors. The habits of aristocratic rule felt obsolete, but replacing them was difficult. Cameralism, a Germanic science of government, introduced the statistics of population, budget accounting, and economic rationality; but its practice was very different from its theories (Wakefield 2009). Though edited by the philosopher Nikolai Nadezhdin, the journal of the ministry was increasingly filled with statistical tables along with detailed maps, technical blueprints, and psychiatric case studies. The famous Schlozer had taught statistics to Perovsky's father, and the ministry tried to introduce some of these scientific devices; but they were not the only methods in vogue there. Under Perovsky and even much later, the majority of high officials in the ministry were generalists (Orlovsky 1981: 111). Even by nineteenth-century criteria, many were still dilettantes: a medical
The philosophers were Nikolai Nadezhdin, Konstantin Kavelin, and Petr Redkin. The Orientalists were Ivan Liprandi, Vasilii Grigoriev, Pavel Savel'ev, and Iakov Khanykov. The writers were Pavel Mel'nikov, Ivan Turgenev, Ivan Aksakov, Vladimir Odoevsky, Vladimir Sollogub, Nikolai Saltykov- Shchedrin, Evgenii Korsh, Nikolai Leskov, and others.
doctor wrote a dictionary, a philosopher practiced ethnography, an intelligence officer invented religious studies, and an orientalist censored the press. There were aspects of the imperial experience and control which found better expression in high literature or collections of folklore than in the emerging statistics. The very scale of the Empire, the enormity of its problems and the miniscule numbers of the ministerial stuff, required a writer, preferably a romantic sentimentalist with his broad vision, quick pen, and heroic propensity for simplification. As one of the employees of the ministry, the satirist Nikolai Saltykov-Shchedrin, wrote in the 1860s, "I am a publicist, a metaphysician, a realist, a moralist, a financier, an economist, and administrator. If needed, I can become even a friend of the people" (Saltykov-Shchedrin 1936: 10/71).
The minister's father was a Ukrainian Cossack, a nephew of the secret husband of Empress Elizabeth. Trained at home, he became Minister of the Enlightenment. Married to the richest heiress in Russia, he fathered 10 children with a daughter of his horse groom, one of them the future Minister of Internal Affairs, Lev Perovsky. The most popular novel of the period, Ivan Vyzhigin (1829) by Faddei (Tadeusz) Bulgarin, featured a bastard, the illegitimate offspring of an aristocratic, Ukrainian-based family, who made his way through various trials, including beggary, prostitution, and a clandestine religious sect, to finally reach high imperial posts. A Polish intellectual, Bulgarin shifted his allegiances from being an officer of Napoleon's army to an agent of what today would be called Russia's secret service; he penned hundreds of pages of reports and denunciations for this agency (Reitblatt 1998). In the Empire, the rivalry between various law-enforcement agencies was routine; Bulgarin provided it with a literary dimension.
Though illegitimate, the Perovsky brothers occupied the very top of the imperial pyramid. After his spell as Minister of Internal Affairs, Lev became Minister of Crown Lands and Director of the Imperial Cabinet until his death in 1856. The eldest bother, Nikolai, a member of the mission to China in 1805, was later Governor of the Crimea. Vasilii was General-Governor of Orenburg in the Southern Ural, from where he led a series of colonial endeavors that began with remarkable failures but resulted in the Russian annexation of Central Asia. Close to literature and very close to the dynasty, in 1839 he read to the imperial family the most sacrilegious text of Russian poetry, Lermontov's Demon, which would be forbidden for publication for several decades (Gershtein 1964: 69-73). In the 1870s, Lev Tolstoy planned to write a whole novel about this Perovsky.
Sofiia Perovskaia
terrorist hanged in 1881
Sergei Uvarov
Lev Perovsky Governor of St Petersburg
Aleksei K. Tolstoy writer
Minister of Enlightenment
Anna Perovskaia
Boris
Aleksei Perovsky Perovsky tutor of writer Alexander III
Razumovsky, Minister of Enlightenment