Russia. A History полностью

At first, they thought that Alexander shared their beliefs and hopes. His postwar pronouncements about a constitution for Russia encouraged this belief, just as the tsar’s conservative advisers had warned him it would. But increasing repression at home, the reform of the universities, Alexander’s opposition to movements for national independence in Greece and elsewhere soon disillusioned those hoping for a continuation of the liberal reform plans of the early reign. When Alexander reinstituted a secret police regime in 1821 following a rebellion in one of the élite regiments of the capital cities, the young dissidents formed secret societies and prepared for revolution. Although the leaders were divided on their ultimate aims—some preferring a federated system, others a unified state; some preferring a constitutional monarchy, others a republic—they held together long enough to attempt a putsch during an interregnum in December 1825 caused by the sudden death of Alexander on a tour of the south of the country. The tsar died childless, and confusion about which of his two brothers was supposed to succeed to the throne gave the insurgents an opportunity to strike. The rebellion had two phases, the first in the capital St Petersburg and the second two weeks later in the Ukraine; both were quickly defeated. Five leaders were hanged, and 284 other participants, many from the most prominent families of the nobility, were imprisoned or exiled to Siberia. This insurgency, known to history as the Decembrist Rebellion, exhibited features of both a palace guards coup of the eighteenth century and a modern revolution in the name of popular sovereignty. However, by virtue of a rich legacy of memoirs, poetry, art, and historical reconstruction, the event shed its archaic features and became semioticized into the first act of the Russian Revolution. An important element of its appeal was the role of the wives of the Decembrists, many of whom left comfortable upper-class homes and followed their convicted husbands into Siberian exile. Although women had made such sacrifices earlier, the Decembrists’ wives were the first to be inscribed as a literary model and hence the first to provide a script for Russian women’s selfless devotion to the cause of resistance to autocracy.

Nicholas I: The Early Years

The new tsar, Nicholas I, had not expected to become ruler and had prepared for a military career. Historians have been inclined to interpret his policies and behaviour as those of a militarist martinet. If Alexander has been known for his earnest planning for political and social reform (and even perhaps excused, because of the epic struggle with France, for not having carried it through), Nicholas has usually been described as a ruler lacking in vision, a thoroughgoing conservative who sought only to hold back change. This contrast is misleading. Alexander was ultimately far more committed to the rhetoric of reform than its substance, and Nicholas’s actual accomplishments surpassed those of his older brother. Indeed, both regimes shared central values and goals, including most prominently a dedication to the notion of disciplined administration, legality in governance, and the role of the tsar as benevolent overseer of this legal order (however imperfectly these ideas may have been realized in practice). The misleading contrast in the popular picture of the two regimes may stem from the sharply differing reform methods of the two rulers. Alexander and his ‘friends’ adopted a deductive approach to reform typical of the age of rationalism in which they were nurtured, whereas Nicholas preferred an inductive approach of investigating issues exhaustively before implementing changes. Moreover, having learned from the Decembrist revolt the dangers of encouraging hopes of reform, Nicholas insisted on the strictest secrecy in the consideration and formulation of plans for change. The reforms that he introduced were carefully thought through and implemented under controlled conditions. Though intended to strengthen the given system of authority and property relations, Nicholas’s reforms laid an essential foundation for the momentous social, economic, and legal transformations of the next reign.