The first months of Nicholas’s reign were taken up with the investigation and prosecution of the Decembrist rebels, a task that the new ruler delegated to Mikhail Speranskii, the reformist state secretary of the previous reign who had been exiled to Siberia in 1812. After this, Speranskii and a former member of Alexander I’s ‘committee of friends’, Viktor Kochubei, were put in charge of a commission to look into government operations and recommend changes where needed. The commission’s broad mandate advised it to discover: what is good now, what cannot be left as it stands, and what should replace it. The commission sat for several years and produced a shelf of reports. Its final recommendations proposed incremental improvements in established institutions and policies rather than fundamental reforms. In regard to serfdom, the commissioners advised against allowing the transfer of serfs from field work to the squire’s household (to allay fears caused by an increasing number of landless peasants); it also proposed to improve the situation of state peasants in ways that would create a model for emulation by private landlords. In regard to the upper class, the commission wanted to restrict the flow of new entrants to the nobility through the Table of Ranks and instead to reward deserving non-nobles with privileges not tied to hereditary status. Concern for the preservation of the nobility found expression in a recommendation to establish entail and thereby prevent the fragmentation of noble landed estates. The commission also took up some of Speranskii’s favourite ideas about the division of the Senate into separate administrative and judicial bodies.
But before reforms could proceed, a number of challenges rocked the regime at the start of the 1830s, a circumstance that strengthened the hand of those who favoured repression over reform. After three decades of the Russian army’s steady, successful penetration of the Caucasus Mountains and subjection of its peoples, a reaction occurred. Native peoples overcame their differences and united in a resistance that threatened to disrupt Russia’s near-eastern policies. Second, the Russian home front was stricken by a devastating cholera epidemic, the first in a series of outbreaks that recurred in the nineteenth century. Initially, the hardest hit was the south-central agricultural province of Tambov, where terrified peasants rioted and in some instances were joined by the soldiers dispatched to bring them under control. When the epidemic spread to the capital cities, disturbances erupted there as well. In one case, Tsar Nicholas himself, no coward, rode on horseback into a panicked and rioting crowd on Haymarket Square in St Petersburg, scolded them, and sent them home. The third and most disturbing event, however, was a national rebellion in Poland towards the end of 1830. Sparked by the overthrow of the restored Bourbon monarch Charles X in France earlier that year, which provided a stimulus for rebellion in Italy, Germany, and elsewhere, the Polish insurgency lasted through much of 1831 and brought an end to the Poles’ autonomy in internal affairs. The constitution granted Poland by Alexander I was replaced by an Organic Statute, making Poland an integral or ‘organic’ part of the Russian Empire.
In response to these crises and the continuing challenge of liberal ideas and national aspirations, Russian leaders devised a new ideological formula (later dubbed ‘Official Nationality’) that sought to co-opt the spirit of romantic nationalism and put it to the service of fortifying a dynastic, imperialist regime. The new formula, first enunciated in 1832 by the deputy minister of education, Sergei Uvarov, exalted the principles of Orthodoxy, Autocracy, and Nationality. The first implied a rejection of the Voltairian scepticism of the eighteenth-century court and likewise an end to the experiments with biblical fundamentalism sponsored by Alexander I. The principle of Autocracy was meant to reinforce the notion of a personal rule sanctioned by divine right, which was necessarily incompatible with either enlightened absolutism (and its appeal to Reason), conservative constitutionalism (as proposed in the reform projects of Nikita Panin, Alexander Bezborodko, and Mikhail Speranskii), or the radicalism of the Decembrists. The murky principle of Nationality (
