Russia. A History полностью

Reforms of the Mature Years

However delusory the new ideology of Official Nationality, a number of significant reforms were carried out by the regime that fostered it. One of the most important of these reforms was the creation of a comprehensive law code, the first since 1649. Again, the tsar turned to Mikhail Speranskii and asked him to direct the work. Speranskii departed from the previous generation’s (and his own earlier) method of designing reforms on general principles and borrowing directly from foreign models; in line with the new notions about the organic nature of society, he assembled past law, beginning with the Code of 1649 and including the thousands of statutes enacted in the intervening 180 years (omitting some, such as those related to government crises); the Complete Collection of Laws of the Russian Empire was published between 1828 and 1830 in 45 volumes and has been an invaluable tool for historians ever since. He then distilled from this compendium a thematically organized fifteen-volume codex of living, currently applicable law called the Digest of Laws, which went into effect in 1835. Though not systematic and normative, the new code addressed the contradictions and chaos of the accumulated statutes and presented law in a usable form, accessible to courts throughout the land. Yet, as government officials understood, a country without a corps of jurists knowledgeable about and committed to a legal system was a country in which laws remained vulnerable to manipulation in courts influenced by bribery and clientelism. Here, too, Nicholas’s government made a valuable contribution, opening a School of Jurisprudence in 1835 to train sons of élite families in modern legal practice. The graduates of this institution played an indispensable role in the creation and widely acknowledged success of the sweeping juridical reforms of the 1860s, which adopted such key features of Anglo-American practice as justices of the peace, trial by jury, and life tenure for judges.

Important changes were also made in state financial policy. Half a century of war and administrative expansion paid for by increasingly inflated paper money (assignats) had wreaked havoc on state finances. Building on ideas initially sketched by Speranskii during Alexander I’s reign, the Minister of Finance, Egor Kankrin, succeeded in bringing inflation under control by tying the value of assignats to that of the silver rouble and thereby laid a solid foundation for economic growth. The Crimean War at the close of the reign, it is true, undid much of this work and left Russia poorly prepared to manage the costs of the reforms of the 1860s, but matters would have been far worse without Kankrin’s policies.

Nicholas should be given credit for preparing the ground for the reform of serfdom, even if during his reign little change occurred in the actual status of the serfs. At best, a law passed in 1842 allowed landlords to manumit with land serfs who were able to come up with a high buy-out price. But this option, dependent as it was on the acquiescence of the landlord, resulted in few manumissions. The law nevertheless underlined the government’s insistence that freed serfs be provided with land, an ominous sign for noble landlords who hoped that emancipation would recognize their title to all the lands currently in their possession. More significant was a reform of state peasants carried through by the Ministry of State Domains under the leadership of Count P. D. Kiselev. This reform, introduced in the late 1830s and early 1840s, granted state peasants a measure of self-government, village schools, public-health facilities, and agricultural extension services; it also shifted the method of taxation from an assessment on individuals to an assessment on the amount of cultivable soil, a fairer measure because of its link to potential productivity. This reform, though affecting only peasants under state supervision, bore unmistakable implications for the eventual abolition of serfdom. Indeed, during the latter half of Nicholas’s reign secret committees were already at work designing such a reform.