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 (narodnost) stressed the unique character (samobytnost’) of the Russians as a people and therefore the inappropriateness of foreign political and social institutions for Russia. Thus Uvarov’s new formula sought to replace the universalistic assumptions of the Enlightenment by asserting the distinctive character of Russia and its political and social systems. But, unlike modern cultural relativism, it conferred a higher value on Russian ideas, institutions, and especially on the Russian people, who were celebrated as trusting, faithful, and pure of heart.
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.
Lest there be any doubt about the government’s willingness to infringe on the nobility’s rights and privileges, Nicholas also enacted a reform of the nobility itself, a remarkable and revealing act in European affairs, demonstrating that the Russian upper class was not a self-governing social estate of the European type that had evolved ahead of or in tandem with the monarchy but rather a creation of the monarchy, its place and privileges subject to definition by the ruler. The reform was occasioned by a growing division in the nobility between those who built their economic livelihood and status on the management of their serf estates and those who did so primarily on positions in the state administration. Many of the second group had acquired patents of nobility by education and advancement through the Table of Ranks, and these new arrivals did not share the values of the established landed nobility. In response to pressure from the hereditary landed nobility to restrict entry to the class, Nicholas’s reform commission proposed to create new status designations to reward persons who advanced through merit to high government office. But Nicholas, no doubt rightly, feared that such a change would impede the government’s efforts to recruit capable men for government service; he did not agree to end ennoblement through the Table of Ranks but only to stiffen requirements for attaining personal nobility and hereditary nobility (qualification for individual nobility for life being raised from the 14th to the 9th rank, that for hereditary from the 8th to the 5th rank). The principal effect of this change was to speed up promotion through the ranks.