The Polish political classes as a whole would not be reconciled, however. Traditionalists still hankered after the greater Poland of a former age, while many of the educated young were fired by revolutionary ideas. But there were some prominent Poles who believed in working with the Russians for the good of their country. It was a policy that soon bore fruit. Largely due to their reforms of the 1820s, for example, the foundations of a modern economy were laid in Poland. 13
The prospects darkened, however, with the Warsaw uprising of 1830—31. Led by a group of young intellectuals, including army officers, it did not gather much of a popular following, and was put down with relative ease. But it raised the spectre of Jacobinism again. Fear of radicalism ran very deep in governments across Europe, including Russia’s. Thenceforth Russian policy in Poland became much harsher. Strangely perhaps, this failed to elicit any protest from Russia’s own radicals, the so-called Decembrists, who had themselves attempted to overturn the autocracy in 1825, when Tsar Alexander died and was unexpectedly succeeded, not by the elder of his surviving brothers, Constantine, but by the younger, Nicholas. On the contrary, Aleksandr Pushkin, who had sympathized with the Decembrists, was outraged by ‘demagogues’ in the French Assembly who protested about the crushing of the Polish rebels. In an angry poem, he dismissed the protest as unbased and unjustified. The repression in Poland was merely a phase in the longstanding ‘domestic quarrel’ between two Slav peoples, which foreigners should stay out of. Had Westerners protested when Polish forces occupied Moscow? Why did they hate Russia, rather than being grateful for its saving Europe from the Turks and from Napoleon? Russians had spilled their blood for Europe’s freedom. If the West dared back its rhetoric with action it would find
a shield of flashing steel raised
Over the Russian land from Finland’s cold rocks to flaming Colchis,
From the shimmering Kremlin to the walls of impassive China.
So, you demagogues, send us your sons indoctrinated in hate.
There’s room enough for them in Russia’s fields
Alongside the graves of their compatriots. 14
Pushkin’s poetic diatribe reflected not only patriotism but a pride in empire which most educated Russians seemed to share. And the sense of estrangement from the West and the possibility of war conveyed by the poem were prophetic. Russia’s imperialism was indeed to provoke a war with the West — though not in Pushkin’s lifetime, and not over Poland, but over Russia’s expansion to the south.
The besetting imperial dilemma of St Petersburg’s bureaucrats at that time was whether to devolve power in the Empire or to centralize it. Should governors be accorded the freedom to act as local circumstances demanded, which would impede centralization and the enforcement of legal rights? Or should the government insist that all regions comply with the law laid down by St Petersburg, which would promote officialism and insensitivity to local conditions and sentiment?
In Finland and in Russia’s other Baltic territories imperial rule continued to be marked by a certain complaisance, although when Alexander had confirmed the rights and privileges of Estland and Livland he had taken care to add the proviso ‘insofar as they are consistent with the general decrees and laws of our State.’ 15 But trying to draft laws that would be equally appropriate to the educated populations of the western territories, the Russians of the heartlands, and the tribesmen of the Caucasus, Central Asia and Siberia turned out to be much like attempting to square the circle.
Alexander had grappled with ideas of constitutional reform since the beginning of the century. He had corresponded with Thomas Jefferson about them, consulted John Quincy Adams, and discussed them with his inner circle of able advisers. These included Novosiltsov, who wanted to redesign the Empire as a federation of twelve huge provinces, each with a bicameral ruling council
One solution to the problem of running so vast and variegated an empire equitably was federalism. But the desperate war against Napoleonic France and the threat of revolution that loomed over Europe afterwards discouraged the idea of dismantling the autocracy, so the proposed federalist solution had been diluted, reduced to the creation of a few super-provinces, in central Russia, the north-west (including the Baltic) and the south (where New Russia, Bessarabia and the Caucasus were brought together). There was also some tinkering with provincial institutions, but Speranskii himself was sent away to be governor of Penza province, and then to Siberia as governor-general.
