THE RUSSIAN NOBILITY IN THE AGE OF ALEXANDER I ii THE RUSSIAN NOBILITY IN THE AGE OF ALEXANDER I Patrick O’Meara BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC Bloomsbury Publishing Plc 50 Bedford Square, London, WC1B 3DP, UK 1385 Broadway, New York, NY 10018, USA BLOOMSBURY, BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC and the Diana logo are trademarks of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc First published in Great Britain 2019 Copyright © Patrick O’Meara, 2019 Patrick O’Meara has asserted his right right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as Author of this work. Cover image: Grigory Grigorievich Chernetsov, 1802–1865. Parade on the occasion of the opening of the monument to Alexander I in St. Petersburg on August 30, 1834. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. 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CONTENTS Preface ix A Note on the Text xiii List of Plates xv Map: The provinces of European Russia xvi Part I RUSSIA’S NOBLE ESTATE (SOSLOVIE) Chapter 1 RUSSIAN SOCIETY AND NOBILITY FROM 1801 3 The nobility’s privileges and legal status 3 Developments in the eighteenth century 3 The impact of Alexander I’s accession 6 Corporate identity and social cohesion 8 Chapter 2 DEFINITIONS OF THE NOBILITY’S STANDING 15 Social status and state service 15 Wealth, poverty, serfs 20 Sources of the nobility’s social prestige 26 Part II EDUCATING THE RUSSIAN NOBILITY Chapter 3 PARENTAL SUPERVISION, FOREIGN TUTORS AND LANGUAGE ACQUISITION 33 Home education and foreign tutors 34 Career paths and social mobility 38 Language, bilingualism and its consequences 42 Chapter 4 EDUCATIONAL ASPIRATION AND INSTITUTIONAL REALITY 53 Speranskii and the 1809 education reform 53 The nobility’s alma mater 56 The Corps of Pages and Cadets 58 The Noblemen’s Regiment 59 The Tsarskoe Selo Lycée 60 vi Contents The nobility’s input: The Column-leaders’ Academy 64 Boarding schools (pansiony) in Moscow and St Petersburg 66 Boarding schools for girls 68 The nobility’s educational attainment and reaction to it 70 Part III THE NOBILITY IN LOCAL GOVERNMENT AND ADMINISTRATION Chapter 5 THE NOBILITY AS OFFICE HOLDERS 77 Provincial administration: Organization and structures 78 The marshal of the nobility: The role and its functions 79 The marshal: A Nizhnii Novgorod case study 81 Receiving royalty 83 The marshal’s role in the Patriotic War 84 The provincial governor 86 The provincial nobility: A reluctant service gentry 89 Chapter 6 THE NOBLE ASSEMBLY IN PROVINCIAL LIFE 99 The noble assembly: Constitution and elections 99 The noble assembly’s agenda 102 ‘The Government Inspector’ 104 The noble assembly in action: Health and wealth 106 District courts, bribery and corruption 109 The administration of provincial cultural life 113 Part IV THE TSAR, THE NOBILITY AND REFORMING RUSSIA Chapter 7 THE ALEXANDRINE NOBILITY: POLITICS AND POWER 123 Alexander I and his court: The throne and its service class 123 Alexander I and Napoleon at Tilsit: Reaction in Russia 128 Alexander I and his relationships with Russia’s leading statesmen 131 M. M. Speranskii: Unwelcome bellwether of reform 131 V. P. Kochubei: From devotion to indifference 137 M. S. Vorontsov: From devotion to humiliation 138 A. A. Arakcheev: From devotion to deference 140 Klemens von Metternich: Friendship’s ‘five-year cycle’ 143 Assessments of Alexander I’s leadership 144 Contents vii Chapter 8 ALEXANDER I, THE NOBILITY AND CONSTITUTIONALISM 149 Alexander I as a would-be constitutional monarch 150 ‘Practical legal study’ for Russian citizens: The Naumov affair 153 Alexander I’s constitution for Poland: The response of Russia’s nobility 155 The ‘music of constitutions’ among Russia’s nobility 160 Nobility views of a Russian Rechtsstaat, the rule of law and the West 165 Assessments of Alexander I’s constitutional intentions 170 Part V GOVERNMENT, NOBILITY AND THE ‘PEASANT QUESTION’ Chapter 9 APPROACHES TO SERF REFORM FROM ABOVE 175 Alexander I and the peasant question 175 The 1803 law: Prelude to serf emancipation? 178 The false dawn of serf emancipation 182 Chapter 10 APPROACHES TO SERF REFORM FROM BELOW 189 The nobility and emancipation: Pro et contra 189 N. I. Turgenev and the reformers 191 Official reaction to reformist initiatives 195 The proposed ‘Society of Benevolent Landowners’ 197 M. S. Vorontsov and noblemen-abolitionists 202 N. N. Muraviev: A government official makes the case for reform 204 V. N. Karazin: A Ukrainian landowner’s opinion 205 Traditionalists hold the line 207 Part VI THE RADICAL NOBILITY CHALLENGES AUTOCRACY Chapter 11 GOVERNMENT AND THE NOBILITY: REFORM VERSUS CONTROL 215 Public opinion and reformist expectations before and after 1812 215 The social and political impact on Russia’s nobility of Napoleon’s defeat 218 Decembrist views of 1812’s impact on Russia’s nobility 224 The status quo in post-war Russia: Challenged but unchanged? 225 Censorship and ideological pressure 227 G. M. Iatsenkov and Dukh zhurnalov versus the censor 229 The censors’ intensified post-war vigilance 231 Social control and the secret police: Some case files 234 viii Contents Chapter 12 THE SOCIAL AND POLITICAL CULTURE OF THE DECEMBRISTS 241 The post-1812 generation: The emergent Decembrist fronde 241 Individual paths to dissidence 243 Defining and quantifying ‘Decembrists’ 247 ‘Decembrists without December’ 252 Chapter 13 THE DECEMBRISTS’ FAILURE TO RADICALIZE THE RUSSIAN NOBILITY 259 Reaction to Alexander I’s death; eyewitnesses on 14 December 1825 259 Decembrist critiques and retrospective views of Alexander I’s reign 264 The Decembrists’ reputation following the uprising 267 Creating an official historical record 274 The Decembrists and the political future of the Russian nobility 275 Afterword 281 A Note on Sources 285 Notes 289 Appendix 339 Bibliography 341 Index 355 PREFACE The purpose of this book is to offer its readers a densely textured social and political portrait of the Russian nobility (dvorianstvo) in the age of Tsar Alexander I, who reigned from 1801 to 1825. For the Russian Empire this was a twenty-five-year era of rapidly shifting international relations, dominated by the imperial ambitions of Napoleon Bonaparte and, indeed, their aftermath. By contrast, domestic polity was remarkably hesitant, reflecting Alexander I’s characteristic vacillation in nearly all important matters of state. The nobility (the English rendering of dvorianstvo preferred in this study over ‘gentry’ or ‘aristocracy’) was, second only to the imperial court, the key elite in Russia’s pre-revolutionary social hierarchy, and it played a vitally important part in the functioning of civil society. Its history, therefore, is central to a fuller understanding of the dynamics of tsarist autocracy.1 This project is accordingly based on a wide variety of rarely cited sources, both published and unpublished, including personal collections (lichnye fondy), local government papers, memoirs, diaries and correspondence. Taken together, they allow the historian the privilege of a kaleidoscopic view of the Alexandrine nobility, both collectively and individually. Such a wealth of sources would readily facilitate a variety of approaches to a reconstruction and analysis of the historical narrative they illuminate. However, I have elected to focus particularly on the political culture of the nobility in both capitals and in the provinces, in an attempt to produce the first comprehensive work (in English or Russian) to situate Alexander I in this crucially important context: one of my study’s main objectives is to shed new light on the character of this famously enigmatic tsar. The accompanying analysis of Alexander’s relationship with the Russian nobility serves to plug an important gap in the literature on the political history of Russia in the first quarter of the nineteenth century.2 On Alexander’s accession in March 1801, the Russian nobility looked to their new tsar for a restoration of the 1785 Charter’s rights and privileges which had been withdrawn from the estate by his authoritarian father, Emperor Paul I, during his wayward and erratic reign. Paul’s distrust of the nobility was reflected in what John Gooding has described as ‘a reign of terror’ unleashed on the estate, which included his 1797 proclamation that serfs should work no more than three days a week for their master and take Sundays off. He also withdrew the nobility’s immunity from corporal punishment, imposed travel and foreign dress restrictions on the estate, even banning the import of luxury goods from Britain to spite the St Petersburg and Moscow nobles, and relied increasingly on the bureaucracy and the army rather than the nobility in both central and local administration. Against this, however, ignoring the provisions of the 1762 emancipation, he