In these years (1807–12) when he had the Emperor's confidence, Speransky was responsible for a number of financial and administrative reforms designed not to change the essence of the state structure but to improve its functioning. His obvious pro-French leanings, however, added to the hostility of the nobles, whose pocketbooks had suffered by Russian participation in the Continental System, the systematic economic warfare employed by Napoleon against England.
Speransky's aloof personality and his continued association with persons inferior to him in social standing had prevented him from making friends among men with political prestige. He was thus left defenseless against his high-placed enemies at court, including the Emperor's sister, Catharine of Oldenburg. In 1811 the renowned historian N.M. Karamzin (Karamzin, Nikolay Mikhaylovich) attacked him in his well-known memoir, Of Old and New Russia.
Exile.
In March 1812, Speransky was summarily dismissed. Returning to his home at midnight, he found a police carriage waiting at his door. Without even taking leave of his daughter, the fallen minister started on the long journey to exile in Nizhny-Novgorod, whence he was soon transferred to the even more distant Perm, in the Urals.
Two years later he was permitted to return to his estate near Novgorod, but it was not until 1816 and only after he had stooped to appeal to his successor in Alexander's favour, Count A.A. Arakcheyev (Arakcheyev, Aleksey Andreyevich, Graf) (whom the poet Pushkin contrasted with Speransky as Alexander's “evil genius”), that he was permitted to reenter state service—though only as provincial governor in remote Penza. In 1819, however, he was promoted to be governor general of Siberia, where he effected significant administrative reforms. In 1821 he was summoned to St. Petersburg and appointed a member of the State Council, in which he was too prudent to advocate further reforms, lest he again irritate his master.
Work for Nicholas I.
Under Alexander's successor, Nicholas I, Speransky's great talents were again utilized, first as a member of the special tribunal that tried and sentenced the Decembrists, a group of officers who staged a liberal revolt on Nicholas' accession in December 1825. Here he again demonstrated his ability to read an emperor's mind; it was he who drafted the letter to the court that secured a significant reduction of the sentences the tribunal had imposed. In the same year he became, in effect, the head of the Second Division of the Emperor's personal chancellery. Still an efficient workhorse, he took part in the labours of Nicholas' secret committees for study of the peasant problem. His major achievement, however, was the publication, in 1830, of the first Complete Collection of the Laws of the Russian Empire (Polnoye sobraniye zakonov Rossiyskoy imperii). On the basis of this compilation, which began with the Code (Sobornoye ulozheniye) of 1649, he supervised preparation of a Digest of the Laws (Svod zakonov Rossiyskoy imperii). In 1837 he was awarded the highest grade of the Order of Andrew the First-Called and, in January 1839, was accorded the title of count. He died a few weeks later in St. Petersburg.
Jesse Dunsmore Clarkson
Additional Reading
Marc Raeff, Michael Speransky: Statesman of Imperial Russia, 1772–1839, 2nd rev. ed. (1969, reprinted 1981), is an excellent biography. See also his Siberia and the Reforms of 1822 (1956). For Speransky's own early writings (to 1809), see M.M. Speranskii: Proiekty i zapiski, ed. by S.N. Valka (1961).
Arakcheyev, Aleksey Andreyevich, Graf
▪ Russian general and statesman
born October 4 [September 23, Old Style], 1769, Novgorod province, Russia
died May 3 [April 21], 1834, Gruzino, Novgorod province
military officer and statesman whose domination of the internal affairs of Russia during the last decade of Alexander I's (Alexander I) reign (1801–25) caused that period to be known as Arakcheyevshchina.
The son of a minor landowner, Arakcheyev studied at the Artillery and Engineering Corps for Noble Cadets from 1783 to 1787 and was commissioned an artillery officer in the Russian army in the latter year. He became a close associate and adviser to the tsarevich Paul, who, when he became emperor in 1796, gave Arakcheyev the task of reorganizing the entire army. When his harsh disciplinary measures alienated the officers' corps, however, he was dismissed (1798) and was recalled to active duty only after Alexander I ascended the throne. Made an inspector general of the artillery in 1803, Arakcheyev reorganized that branch of the army; he then became minister of war (1808), and in 1809, during the Russo-Swedish War of 1808–09, he personally compelled the reluctant Russian forces to cross the frozen Gulf of Finland and make the attack on the Åland Islands that ultimately resulted in Sweden's cession of Finland to Russia (September 1809).
Arakcheyev generally opposed the liberal administrative and constitutional reforms considered by Alexander, and, when Alexander created the advisory Council of State (1810), Arakcheyev resigned as minister of war. He later accepted a post as head of the council's military department; and, as one of Alexander's most trusted military advisers, he handled all of the emperor's military correspondence and dispatches during the invasion by Napoleonic France in 1812. Afterward, when Alexander became almost exclusively involved in foreign affairs, Arakcheyev was made responsible for supervising the Council of Ministers' management of domestic matters (1815).
For the next decade Arakcheyev dominated the administration of Russia's internal affairs, carrying out his bureaucratic functions with brutal and ruthless efficiency. Despite his basic conservatism, he took part in the emancipation of serfs in Russia's Baltic provinces (1816–19) and also developed a plan for gradually emancipating all of Russia's serfs (1818). In addition, he supervised the creation of a system of military-agricultural colonies, which between 1816 and 1821 housed nearly one-third of Russia's standing army. After Nicholas I succeeded Alexander (1825), Arakcheyev resigned all of his offices (April 1826) and went into retirement.
Alexander II
▪ emperor of Russia
Introduction
Russian in full Aleksandr Nikolayevich
born April 29 [April 17, Old Style], 1818, Moscow, Russia
died March 13 [March 1, Old Style], 1881, St. Petersburg
emperor of Russia (1855–81). His liberal education and distress at the outcome of the Crimean War, which had demonstrated Russia's backwardness, inspired him toward a great program of domestic reforms, the most important being the emancipation (1861) of the serfs. A period of repression after 1866 led to a resurgence of revolutionary terrorism and to Alexander's own assassination.
Life
The future Tsar Alexander II was the eldest son of the grand duke Nikolay Pavlovich (who, in 1825, became the emperor Nicholas I) and his wife, Alexandra Fyodorovna (who, before her marriage to the Grand Duke and baptism into the Orthodox Church, had been the princess Charlotte of Prussia). Alexander's youth and early manhood were overshadowed by the overpowering personality of his dominating father, from whose authoritarian principles of government he was never to free himself. But at the same time, at the instigation of his mother, responsibility for the boy's moral and intellectual development was entrusted to the poet Vasily Zhukovsky (Zhukovsky, Vasily Andreyevich), a humanitarian liberal and romantic. Alexander, a rather lazy boy of average intelligence, retained throughout his life traces of his old tutor's romantic sensibility. The tensions created by the conflicting influences of Nicholas I and Zhukovsky left their mark on the future emperor's personality. Alexander (Alexander I) II, like his uncle Alexander I before him (who was educated by a Swiss republican tutor, a follower of Rousseau), was to turn into a “liberalizing,” or at any rate humanitarian, autocrat.
Alexander succeeded to the throne at age 36, following the death of his father in February 1855, at the height of the Crimean War. The war had revealed Russia's glaring backwardness in comparison with more advanced nations like England and France. Russian defeats, which had set the seal of final discredit on the oppressive regime of Nicholas I, had provoked among Russia's educated elite a general desire for drastic change. It was under the impact of this widespread urge that the tsar embarked upon a series of reforms designed, through “modernization,” to bring Russia into line with the more advanced Western countries.