Maria Sobolevskaia
Figure 12: The Perovsky descendants of Aleksei Razumovsky
(1748-1822).
Source: A. Etkind
his wife Varvara <- Sheremeteva
Vasilii Nikolai Lev Perovsky Perovsky Perovsky Minister of General Governor of Internal Governor the Crimea Ekaterina Affairs of Orenburg Razumovskaia
The younger Aleksei became known as the writer Antonii Pogorelsky. A socialite and the author of several novellas, he is remembered mainly for a fairytale, "Black Hen," in which the little protagonist sees a group of ministers even in his night dream. The youngest brother, Boris, was tutor to the future Emperor, Alexander III. Sergei Uvarov, Minister of the Enlightenment and the author of many initiatives of the period, was a brother-in-law of the Perovskys. Through the decades of the rule of Nicolas I, the clan of Perovsky brothers competed with the clan of Pashkov sisters, who were married to the Minister of Justice and the two most powerful leaders of the State Council (Korf 2003: 73).
The Perovsky brothers collaborated on many levels. A friend of Pushkin and other literati, Aleksei connected his brothers to the literary elite; he recruited Vladimir Dal for his service in the colonial administration in Orenburg under Vasilii Perovsky. Later, Dal moved from Orenburg to Petersburg to serve in Lev Perovsky's Ministry of Internal Affairs. Some other officials moved in the opposite direction,from Petersburg to Orenburg. Introducing innovations, the Empire tested their models externally and applied them inside the country; one family managed both parts of the colonization boomerang. Trained in justice and rationality, this new group of imperial experts inevitably gave birth to the latest group of dissidents. A son of the eldest Perovsky brother became the Governor of St. Petersburg. His daughter, Sofia, organized the assassination of Alexander II and was hanged in 1881.
The Ministry of Internal Affairs was in charge of legal, administrative, and agrarian reforms. Starting from the 1830s and throughout the larger part of Perovsky's tenure, the chief of staff of the ministry was Karl von Paul, a Moravian Brother whose unusual disciplinary ideas created conflicts with the provincial governors whom he oversaw (Shumakher 1899: 109). From early 1840, Perovsky implemented collective works in the estates belonging to the royal family. This new regime, which Perovsky called "social plowing," forced peasants not only to pay their taxes collectively, but to do their actual work in a collective way. Typical for the German colonies on the Volga, this method was not known in Russian peasant communities. Perovsky introduced "social plowing" with the help of the hired managers who
Figure 13: Vasilii Perovsky on the capital of a column, 1824. Portrait
by Karl Briullov.
Source: Wikimedia Commons
received, in a very capitalist way, a percentage of the output. A little later, the Ministry of State Properties, led by Count Pavel Kiselev, emulated and rivaled Perovsky's model among the state peasants. Kiselev's previous job had been the administration of lands that constituted contemporary Moldavia and Rumania; he also brought his external experience to the internal governance. His ministry sponsored Haxthausen's trip to Russia and, therefore, the discovery of the Russian commune. The idea of the commune flourished among philosophers and lawyers within the Ministry of Internal Affairs, though the agricultural specialists of the ministry knew that communal land usage was an impediment to productivity (Lincoln 1982: 123). The Emancipation of 1861 made the commune the central mechanism of social and financial control in the countryside. Though the actual reforms were penned after Perovsky's term expired, the leading authors made their careers under his auspices. Lev Perovsky was also a very rich landowner who was able to hire a British manager to oversee his estates. In anticipation of the reforms, he was buying up cheap peasants in the impoverished central provinces and resettling them to his land in the south. Unlike the protagonist of Dead Souls, Perovsky speculated with living peasants (see Chapter 10).
As minister, Perovsky once ordered a map "of all the corners of the State, with marking by different colors all the various tribes, aliens, and natives" (Liprandi 1870b: 111). Empires have always been obsessed with maps, which often were models for, and not models of, their actual possessions (Brubaker 1992; Suny 2001; Stoler 2009). Perovsky had no interest in standardizing political rights or economic goods across the Empire, but rather welcomed the variety of the imperial colonies, provided that they could be controlled, mapped, and taxed. The imperial space was filled with these imagined communities, colorful and exotic. Groups, not individuals, were the units of imperial rule. The ministry took responsibility for drawing the correct boundaries between these multicolored groups, for comprehending their organic essences, and for harmonizing their relations for the sake of the common good. In these ceaseless efforts, the ministry was concerned even more about confessional communities than about ethnic ones.
Especially Dangerous Sects
In 1843, Ivan Liprandi organized the ministerial "Committee for Schismatics, Castrates, and other Especially Dangerous Sects." With origins in the Spanish gentry, Liprandi founded Russian counterintelligence during the Napoleonic Wars, pursued lifelong studies on oriental languages and politics, and sought police measures against the Slavophiles whom he believed to be a sect. He was a friend of Pushkin and the protagonist of some of his stories (Grossman 1929; Eidelman 1993); his investigation of a political conspiracy resulted in Dostoevsky being sent to a labor camp in Siberia. A true imperial thinker, Liprandi wrote:
Fortunately or unfortunately for Europe, the idea of natural boundaries and national unifications has been disseminated among the nations. . . . In itself, the idea is sublime and enduring, as it satisfies the natural inclinations of human nature, but in practice it . . . will drown Europe in crimson flows of blood. At first, Turkey and Austria will become sacrifices of this great but fantastic idea; then it will overturn all of Europe, and finally spread beyond its borders to other parts of the world. (Liprandi 1870a: 234)
Since "different lands of one and the same tribe" are often more hostile to one another than to "an alien race," Liprandi predicted the collapse of German and Italian unification efforts. Russian imperial power had to rest not on tribal pan-Slavic feelings, but on the power of information and coercion. Since "tribes" did not matter, Liprandi saw his task as exploring and exploiting other, less evident units of imperial management. Following this logic, he singled out religious communities as his special subject. Working mainly with police files and missionary reports, he made himself into an early and incomparable expert in the Russian Schism, which he categorized into "sects," some of which manifested a "dangerous" or "very dangerous" character. He evaluated the total number of these sectarian communities at six million people, which was approximately ten times more than what had been estimated earlier. Interestingly, his intuition of the mutual hatred between similar peoples (better known to us as the Freudian "narcissism of small differences") did not apply to the sectarians. On the contrary, he believed that many of these variegated communities were integrated into one "confederative religious republic." This republic within the monarchy had large capitals, its own means of communication, and even a secret language, which the ministerial linguist, Vladimir Dal, was commissioned to put to paper. It was precisely the sectarians' secrecy that justified the efforts of the illustrious intellectuals of the ministry (Liprandi 1870b: 107). A discovery of a colony inside the mother country, this confederation was mapped not geographically but theologically. But it needed policing, and urgently. Among the sects, Liprandi revealed such horrifying vices as "incest, sodomy, the unpunished cohabitation of women with women," and the belief that "movable property belongs to everyone" (immovable property, land, did not belong to peasants anyway). "Is it not a true communism?" asked Liprandi (1870b: 82-5). Equally grave was Liprandi's suspicion that these religious schismatics from the people communicated with the political dissidents from the elite, an inter-estate conspiracy that had been the nightmare of Russian authorities since the famous trial of the publisher Nikolai Novikov in 1792.