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In considering who would inherit the Russian throne after her,
Catherine the Great hoped to bypass her unloved son Paul and
make her grandson Alexander (1801-1825, b.1777) her immediate
successor. It did not come about quite as she intended. But
because she had such high hopes for her grandson, she took
special interest in Alexander’s education. Catherine invited the
Swiss tutor LaHarpe to introduce her grandson to some of the
achievements of the European social and political thought, in
which she herself had always had such a keen interest. |
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The democratically-minded LaHarpe, who, strangely enough for
a tutor of a future autocratic ruler, was an advocate of a
republican form of government, became a major influence on
Alexander’s childhood, implanting in his royal pupil a
respect for the ideas of the Enlightenment. (It is worth
noting that LaHarpe was the cousin of the French
revolutionary leader Marat.) Raised on the milk of the
Enlightenment, Alexander became the first tsar to address
seriously the twin problems of serfdom and autocracy and to
draw plans for a complete transformation of the Russian
social and political system. |
The young
Emperor was supported in these activities by a small group of
earnest young aristocrats and officials. The leading part in this
close circle of reform-minded men was played by
Michael Speransky
(1772-1839) - a man of low origin who rose to the highest reaches of
the Russian government to become probably the most brilliant Russian
statesman of the nineteenth century. In the course of several years
Speransky had risen to the position of the tsar’s closest adviser.
Alexander entrusted him with the preparation of memoranda containing
a detailed analysis of Russian society and a program of far-reaching
reforms. These papers, which were made public only many decades
after Speransky’s death, were written with maximum frankness and
fairness, for they were intended for the consideration of the Tsar
alone. Speransky’s analysis, made by a man who uniquely combined an
extensive practical knowledge of administration and government with
personal understanding of the life of the people, gave the most
authoritative and truthful picture of Russian social and political
system at the beginning of the nineteenth century.
Speransky
told Alexander the unpalatable truth about the Russian political
system, describing its chief defects, such as the complete neglect
of the principle of separation of powers and the unlimited
prerogatives of the supreme autocrat. Without mincing his words, he
branded such a system as despotic and saw it as a main reason why
Russia’s population was deprived of civil and political rights:
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The fundamental principle of Russian government is the
autocratic ruler who combines within his person all
legislative and executive powers, and who disposes
unconditionally of all the nation’s resources.
There are no physical limits to this principle...
When the powers of the sovereign authority are
unlimited, when the forces of the State are combined
within the sovereign authority to such an extent that no
rights are left over for the subjects - then such a
State exists in slavery and its government is
despotic...
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According to
Speransky, a State founded on the autocratic principle, whatever
superficial constitution it may have, or whatever may be asserted in
its Charter of the Nobility, cannot be law-based, because its so
called ‘Codes’ and ‘laws’ are nothing but the arbitrary decisions of
the tsar and his government which they can revoke or changed any
time they please. In such a State all subjects and all social
classes, regardless of their relationship to one another, exist in
slavery to the autocratic authority which is in complete possession
of the political and civil liberties of its subjects:
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I wish someone could point out to me the difference
between the peasants’ subservience to their landowners
and the nobility’s subservience to the Sovereign, or
could show that the Sovereign’s powers over the
landowners
are not identical with those the landowners wield over their
peasants?
In short: instead of all the pretentious divisions of
the free Russian people into the absolutely free classes
of nobility, merchants, etc., I can find only two
conditions existing in Russia: the Sovereign’s slaves,
and the landowners’ slaves. The first can be termed free
only with regards to the second, but actually there are no truly
free men in Russia, except beggars and philosophers.
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The
significance of Speransky’s analysis is that it clearly shows that,
despite the Petrine Reform and Catherine’s ‘enlightened absolutism’,
the basic, essential features of Russia’s socio-political system
were still practically unchanged in the nineteenth century from what
they had been three hundred years before, during the reign of Ivan
the Terrible (1547-1584). The State was still omnipotent exercising
unlimited control over the lives and property of all its subjects.
If anything, as a result of the Petrine Reform and of the final
enserfment of the peasantry, it had become even stronger. And,
towering above everything else, was the unchallenged authority of
the supreme ruler. No laws, institutions, or liberties could exist
outside the autocrat’s sovereign will.
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Tsarist Russia |
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