After the War
The post-Napoleonic settlement for the European world associated with the name of the Congress of Vienna created a long period of general peace for the continent despite continuing stormy calls for democracy and national self-determination and the occasional limited conflicts they generated. The new state system, often mistakenly labelled a balance of power, was in reality a set of interlocking hegemonies exercised by Russia, Great Britain, and Austria. As long as the governments of these countries were able to maintain amicable relations, no major conflicts arose in Europe or its dependencies. Towards the end of Alexander’s reign, the principles of the system—the legitimacy of established governments and territorial integrity of existing countries—were tested by the rebellion of Greeks within the Ottoman Empire. Many Russians were sympathetic to the Greek cause. Catherine the Great had even worked out a plan in her time to resurrect Greece under the rulership of her grandson Constantine (named purposely after the last Byzantine emperor). But Alexander did not succumb to calls for Russian intervention on the side of the Greeks, and he held to the ideas of legitimacy and stability of established relations. Russia played a larger role in the Greek conflict after Alexander’s death, when a part of Greece became independent. Conflicts in this region ultimately destroyed the Congress of Vienna settlement, but during Alexander’s reign, Russia supported the conservative European regimes in resisting popular aspirations throughout the continent for greater political participation and national expression.
In Russia itself, the same conflict being played out on the European stage between dynastic (and in some cases still feudalistic) regimes and the proponents of democratic nationalism was repeated on a smaller scale. The stunning victory over Napoleonic France resolved the earlier doubts on the part of most of Russia’s leaders about the country’s administration and social system. The autocrat had held firm, the nobility had served and led the conquering army, the common people had remained loyal and even fought partisan campaigns against the invader. The victory strengthened the ruling groups’ belief in the system such that they no longer saw the necessity for fundamental reform. The mood had begun to shift in favour of the conservative voices in high politics. This mood accompanied a European-wide change in political thinking away from the rationalist, mechanistic ideas of the eighteenth century towards organic theories of society on the model enunciated by Edmund Burke, Joseph de Maistre, and Friedrich Karl von Savigny. De Maistre, a refugee from Napoleonic Europe who spent many years in Russia, was able to exert a direct personal influence on Russian statesmen.
Until recently, historians have seen the post-Napoleonic period (or final ten years) of Alexander’s reign as a single piece characterized by a sharp turn away from the reform policies of the previous era. In terms of the outcomes, this view may still be justified. Yet recent research has made a strong case for dividing the period into two five-year segments, in which the first witnessed a continuing sympathy on the part of the tsar and some of his close advisers for the reform ideas of the early reign. Alexander continued as late as 1818 to speak publicly of his wish to establish a constitutional order for Russia, and privately he was still expressing such hopes in 1820. Work on a draft constitution was apparently also in progress as late as 1820. Nor had Alexander given up on making a start towards emancipating serfs from bondage to private landlords despite opposition from most of the nobles in high government. In 1818 he instructed one of his closest aides, General Aleksei Arakcheev, to design a project for emancipation and the following year ordered his minister of finance to work out the fiscal problems associated with a possible emancipation. Finding no support for a broad project of reform in 1820, Alexander proposed at least to bar the sale of serfs separate from their families and without land. But this proposal too met near unanimous opposition from the members of the State Council.
The reform impulse died after 1820. Vigorous opposition from the nobility finally convinced the tsar of the hopelessness of attempting a change in the status of the serfs. The courts, dominated by the nobility, were even proving reluctant to enforce laws for the protection of serfs already on the books. Since ideas of constitutional order were linked in the minds of reformers with the necessity for emancipation of the serfs, opposition to serf reform doubled as opposition to constitutionalism. It seems, moreover, that Alexander had lost interest in the idea of a constitution for Russia after dealing with the increasingly refractory Polish diet (Sejm). In 1821 he told a French envoy that constitutional government may be appropriate for enlightened nations, but would be unworkable in the less educated societies of Europe. No more was heard about a constitution for Russia, and, indeed, the government now turned to repression of any voices that echoed the tsar’s earlier promises of a constitutional order.
Some reforms were implemented in the post-war period of Alexander’s reign, but they were of an entirely different kind; they represented an accommodation and adaptation to the given political and social system. The most prominent such reform was the creation of military settlements, frontier colonies for the maintenance of army units in peacetime. Since it was impossible to demobilize an army of former serfs and send them back to their estates and yet too expensive to keep them continually under arms, the government settled them on lands occupied by state peasants near the frontier and set them to producing their own maintenance through farming. The reform included some enlightened features such as subsidies to families, government-sponsored health care and birthing services, and regulation of community hygiene. Even so, the settlements were not popular with either the peasants or the soldiers on whom they were imposed. They joined the hard labour of peasant farming and a highly regimented military life in a combination so odious that it frequently sparked mutinies. Surprisingly, in view of the poor record of the settlements in saving on military expenditures and the easy target they made for opponents of the regime, this reform was the most enduring of Alexander’s reign. Military settlements lasted until the Great Reforms of the 1860s.
This period also brought conservative reform to Russian universities. Under the influence of a religious revival following the victory over Napoleon and Alexander’s own spiritual conversion during the war, the Ministry of Education was combined in a dual government department with the Directorate of Spiritual Affairs (the former Holy Synod). In 1819 a member of this institution’s governing committee, Mikhail Magnitskii, visited Kazan University and discovered to his horror that professors were teaching about the rights of citizens and the violence of warfare. Although Magnitskii could think of no better recommendation than closing down the university, Alexander decided instead to appoint him rector with powers to reform the institution. Magnitskii promptly dismissed eleven professors and shifted the curriculum towards heavy doses of religion and the classics, a direction that was subsequently followed at St Petersburg University and others.