The weakest link in the chain of reforms was finances, and it was only after the war of 1877-8, against a background of financial crisis, social and political discontent, and terrorist acts, that Alexander II and the government acknowledged the need to continue the Great Reforms. This attempt would be undertaken by M. T. Loris-Melikov with the agreement and approval of Alexander II. The most recent research has convincingly shown that Loris-Melikov's programme was not a set of separate measures, but a definite 'scheme', organically linked to those reforms which had been carried out in the first decade of Alexander II's reign. The tsar himself expressed his understanding of this continuity, in particular in his confession to Loris-Melikov that 'there was one person in whom I had full confidence. That was Ia. I. Rostovtsev ... I have that same confidence in you and perhaps even more.'[47]
As N. A. Miliutin had done in the late 1850s to early 1860s, Loris-Melikov at the end of the 1870s considered it crucial to unite Russian society around a reforming government which rested on the support of public opinion. Without neglecting to strengthen the police, he argued that it was impossible to defeat nihilism by police measures alone. 'Not only did the reforms of the 1860s need to be cleansed from subsequent deviations but their principles had to be developed further.' Loris-Melikov's programme envisaged a whole system of interrelated reforms. Above all it had in mind provincial reform: the reorganisation of the local administrative and social institutions, by removing the antagonism between the zemstva and the state administration, and the transformation of the police in the localities. The improvement of the peasant situation occupied a significant place in the programme: the salt tax was abolished and the tsar's agreement was given to a reduction in redemption payments and a number of other measures. The transformation of the taxation and passport systems was also planned, as was a more flexible policy in the borderlands.
The creation of preparatory commissions along the lines of the Editing Commissions of 1859-60 was proposed in order to facilitate the implementation of this programme. Subsequently, a General Commission attached to the State Council would be created with the participation of representatives of the zemstva and town self-governments. This was what in the literature has been called the Loris-Melikov 'constitution' and what A.V Mamonov considers a return to (and development of, I would add) Miliutin's concept of the 'enterprising monarchy'. On i March i88i, Alexander II approved the draft government report on the upcoming reforms but died a few hours later. The programme for the further development of the Great Reforms died with him for ever, although certain individual elements of it were realised by N. Kh. Bunge during his time as minister of finance between i88i and i886. Bunge's attempts to develop the i86i peasant reform (he was a believer in independent peasant farming) and modernise the taxation and banking systems only affected limited aspects of state policy, however, and were in any case compromised by the overall programme of counter-reforms carried out in the reign of Alexander III.[48]
By the late nineteenth to early twentieth century, it was understood by the few reformers still alive at the time that the possibility of continuing the reforms that had been decisively and radically begun by the abolition of serfdom had been lost. Russia entered the twentieth century, the century of revolutions and shocks, which they had tried so hard to avoid. In the first months of the i905 Revolution four elder statesmen gave an independent and realistic appraisal of the Great Reforms and of subsequent government policy. These statesmen - Count K. I. Pahlen, A. A. and P. A. Saburov and A. N. Kulomzin - had experienced the Great Reforms in their early years of service and subsequently participated in their implementation. They produced a memorandum for Nicholas II which stated that the empire's current crisis was rooted in the 'fateful misunderstanding' that the reason for i March i88i (i.e., the assassination of Alexander II) was 'the liberating policy of the tsar- reformer'. They criticised 'the government's endeavour over the last twenty- five years to limit the privileges and advantages which were bestowed on Russia in the epoch of the reforms of Alexander II'.[49]
The revolution wrested from the autocracy the Manifesto of i7 October i905 and led to the creation of the first Russian parliament (the Duma) and of a true ministerial cabinet and prime minister. The last great reformist statesman of the old regime, P. A. Stolypin, rose on the wave of the revolutionary events and in the struggle with them. While adopting harsh police measures in the struggle with terror, he worked out and began the realisation of fundamental changes. In the first place, as in the i860s, there was agrarian reform, which allowed peasants to leave the obshchina, strengthened peasant property-ownership and aided migration to Russian Asia. It was proposed to combine these paramount reforms with the expansion of local self-government and the extension of the reforms to the empire's borderlands. However, Stolypin's plans were not realised. He was killed in Kiev in 1911, where he had gone for the ceremonial opening of a monument to the Tsar-liberator in connection with the half-century jubilee of the abolition of serfdom. The final possibility for transformations had once again been lost. Russia would soon take part in the First World War and live through a revolution which would
sweep away the monarchy and shake the world.
***
The Great Reforms, which were organically linked to socioeconomic and political processes in the first half of the nineteenth century, were at the same time a turning point in the history of Russia. While they neither intended nor ensured a simultaneous transformation in all the spheres of public life, they laid the foundations for this turnaround and ruled out the possibility of a restoration of the pre-reform order. As a result of the transformations, 'a basic principle of Russian life was destroyed - the link of progress with serfdom'.[50]The modernisation of Russia continued on a new basis - labour freed from serfdom, the development of private initiative, the origins of civil society. In this context the year 1861 was a watershed, 'the beginning of a new history, a new epoch in Russia' - as many contemporaries understood the abolition of serfdom at the time and as many historians evaluated it later. However, the degree and the depth of the turning point remain to be clarified. In this regard there still remains much for scholars to do.
Among the questions which demand attention are study of the statesmen of the Great Reforms themselves and of the actual circumstances in which they put together their plans. It is probably worth listening more closely to the terms and concepts used by them, their understanding, their perception of reality. For example, it is important to understand how they conceived of 'the new system of agrarian relations', which was supposed to be the result of the implementation ofthe peasant reform, how they envisaged the coexistence of the landlord and peasant economies. The idea of the reformers about the reforms as a process which would necessitate constant modifications by the government also merits attention. Undoubtedly, when studying the Great
Reforms, as well as the counter-reforms, there is the challenge of adopting a differentiated approach to the different stages and 'levels' ofthe process: to the ideology which lay at the basis of the intended transformations, to the initial draft laws, to the laws as actually adopted (a significant distinction) and finally to how these laws were realised and faced the test of reality.
Such an approach enables one to avoid one-sidedness in the evaluation of the Great Reforms, sometimes observed in the historiography, when either the unbridgeable gulf between epochs or the complete continuity in the gradual advance of the autocracy on the path of reform is emphasised. The undoubted links between the abolition of serfdom and attempts at earlier legislation, the traditions and structures of the pre-reform order, do not contradict the concept of the transformation of various aspects of the country's life begun by the reforms. On the other hand, to acknowledge the inevitability ofmodifications to the reforms and the presence of pragmatic elements in the legislation of the i880-90s does not remove the fundamental difference between the Great Reforms and the counter-reforms. For example, it is true that legislative measures were needed to strengthen the system of peasant self-government, and that the volost' court needed to be co-ordinated with the socially inclusive structures of the new court system. In the end, too, and despite the government's original intentions, the Statute of i890 did not signify a radical change to the zemstvo as created by the reform of i864. Realities neutralised the conservative amendments which were adopted. But it is impossible to derive from these truths the argument that there were no basic differences between the policies of the i860s reformers and Loris-Melikov on the one hand, and the instigators of the counter-reforms on the other.
47
A. V Mamonov, 'GrafM. T. Loris-Melikov: kkharakteristike vzgliadovigosudarstvennoi deiatel'nosti',
49
P. Sh. Ganelin, 'Politicheskie uroki osvoboditel'nogo dvizheniia v otsenke stareishikh tsarskikh biurokratov', in
50
N. A. Ivnitskii(ed.),