notably the police, and opened the way to some fantastic adventurers as well as to countless run-of-the-mill informers, who flooded the gendarmery with their reports. The false reports turned out to be so numerous that the Third Department proceeded to punish some of their authors and to stage weekly burnings of the denunciations.
The desire to control in detail the lives and thoughts of the people and above all to prevent subversion, which constituted the main aims of the Third Department, guided also the policies of the Ministry of Education - which we shall discuss in a later chapter - specifically in censorship; and, indeed, in a sense they guided the policies of Nicholas's entire regime. As in the building of fortresses, the emphasis was defensive: to hold fast against the enemy and to prevent his penetration. The sovereign himself worked indefatigably at shoring up the defenses. He paid the most painstaking attention to the huge and difficult business of government, did his own inspecting of the country, rushed to meet all kinds of emergencies, from cholera epidemics and riots to rebellion in military settlements, and bestowed special care on the army. Beyond all that, and beyond even the needs of defense, he wanted to follow the sacred principle of autocracy, to be a true father of his people concerned with their daily lives, hopes, and fears.
However, as already indicated, all the efforts of the emperor and his government bore little fruit, and the limitations of Nicholas's approach to reform revealed themselves with special clarity in the crucial issue of serfdom. Nicholas I personally disapproved of that institution: in the army and in the country at large he saw only too well the misery it produced, and he remained constantly apprehensive of the danger of insurrection; also, the autocrat had no sympathy for aristocratic privilege when it clashed with the interests of the state. Yet, as he explained the matter in 1842 in the State Council: 'There is no doubt that serfdom, as it exists at present in our land, is an evil, palpable and obvious to all. But to touch it now would be a still more disastrous evil… The Pugachev rebellion proved how far popular rage can go.' In fact throughout his reign the emperor feared, at the same time, two different revolutions. There was the danger that the gentry might bid to obtain a constitution if the government decided to deprive the landlords of their serfs. On the other hand, an elemental, popular uprising might also be unleashed by such a major shock to the established order as the coveted emancipation.
In the end, although the government was almost constantly concerned with serfdom, it achieved very little. New laws either left the change in the serfs' status to the discretion of their landlords, thus merely continuing
Alexander's well-meaning but ineffectual efforts, or they prohibited only certain extreme abuses connected with serfdom such as selling members of a single family to different buyers. Even the minor concessions granted to the peasants were sometimes nullified. For instance, in 1847, the government permitted serfs to purchase their freedom if their master's estate was sold for debt. In the next few years, however, the permission was made inoperative without being formally rescinded. Following the European revolutions of 1848, the meager and hesitant government solicitude for the serfs came to an end. Only the bonded peasants of Western Russian provinces obtained substantial advantages in the reign of Nicholas I. As we shall see, they received this preferential treatment because the government wanted to use them in its struggle against the Polish influence which was prevalent among the landlords of that area.
Determined to preserve autocracy, afraid to abolish serfdom, and suspicious of all independent initiative and popular participation, the emperor and his government could not introduce in their country the much-needed fundamental reforms. In practice, as well as in/theory, they looked backward. Important developments did nevertheless take place in certain areas where change would not threaten the fundamental political, social, and economic structure of the Russian Empire. Especially significant proved to be the codification of law and the far- reaching reform in the condition of the state peasants. The new code, produced in the late 1820's and the early 1830's by the immense labor of Speransky and his associates, marked, despite defects, a tremendous achievement and a milestone in Russian jurisprudence. In January 1835 it replaced the ancient
The reorganization of the state peasants followed several years later after Count Paul Kiselev became head of the new Ministry of State Domains in 1837. Kiselev's reform, which included the shift of taxation from persons to land, additional allotments for poor peasants, some peasant self-government, and the development of financial assistance, schools, and medical care in the villages, has received almost universal praise from pre-revolutionary historians. The leading Soviet specialist on the subject, Druzhinin, however, claimed, on the basis of impressive evidence, that the positive aspects of Kiselev's reform had a narrow scope and application, while fundamentally it placed an extremely heavy burden on the state peasants, made all the more difficult to bear by the exactions and malpractices of local administration. Finance minister Egor Kankrin's policy, and in particular his measures to stabilize the currency - often cited among the progressive developments in Nicholas I's reign - proved to be less effective and important in the long run than Speransky's and Kiselev's work.
But even limited reforms became impossible after 1848. Frightened by European revolutions, Nicholas I became completely reactionary. Russians were forbidden to travel abroad, an order which hit teachers and students especially hard. The number of students without government scholarships was limited to three hundred per university, except for the school of medicine. Uvarov had to resign as minister of education in favor of an entirely reactionary and subservient functionary, who on one occasion told an assistant of his: 'You should know that I have neither a mind nor a will of my own - I am merely a blind tool of the emperor's will.' New restrictions further curtailed university autonomy and academic freedom. Constitutional law and philosophy were eliminated from the curricula; logic and psychology were retained, but were to be taught by professors of theology. In fact, in the opinion of some historians, the universities themselves came close to being eliminated and only the timely intervention of certain high officials prevented this disaster. Censorship reached ridiculous proportions, with new agencies appearing, including 'a censorship over the censors.' The censors, to cite only a few instances of their activities, deleted 'forces of nature' from a textbook in physics, probed the hidden meaning of an ellipsis in an arithmetic book, changed 'were killed' to 'perished' in an account of Roman emperors, demanded that the author of a fortune-telling book explain why in his opinion stars influence the fate of men, and worried about the possible concealment of secret codes in musical notations. Literature and thought were virtually stifled. Even Michael Pogodin, a Right-wing professor of history and a leading exponent of the doctrine of Official Nationality, was impelled in the very last years of the reign to accuse the government of imposing upon Russia 'the quiet of a graveyard, rotting and stinking, both physically and morally.' It was in this atmosphere of suffocation that Russia experienced its shattering defeat in the Crimean War.
If the Crimean debacle represented, as many scholars insist, the logical termination of Nicholas I's foreign policy and reign, it was a case of historical logic, unique for the occasion and difficult to follow. For, to begin with, the Russian emperor intended least of all to fight other European powers. Indeed, a dedicated supporter of autocracy at home, he became a dauntless champion of legitimism abroad. Nicholas I was determined to maintain and defend the existing order in Europe, just as he considered it
his sacred duty to preserve the archaic system in his own country. He saw the two closely related as the whole and its part, and he thought both to be threatened by the same enemy: the many-headed hydra of revolution, which had suffered a major blow with the final defeat of Napoleon but refused to die. Indeed it rose again and again, in 1830, in 1848, and on other occasions, attempting to reverse and undo the settlement of 1815. True to his principles, the resolute tsar set out to engage the enemy. In the course of the struggle, this 'policeman of Russia' assumed added responsibilities as the 'gendarme of Europe.' The emperor's assistants in the field of foreign policy, led by Count Karl Nesselrode who served as foreign minister throughout the reign, on the whole shared the views of their monarch and bent to his will.
Shortly after Nicholas I's accession to the throne, Russia fought a war against Persia that lasted from June 1826 to February 1828. The hostilities, which represented another round in the struggle for Georgia, resulted in the defeat of Persia, General Ivan Paskevich emerging as the hero of the campaigns. While the Treaty of Turkmanchai gave Russia part of Armenia with the city of Erivan, exclusive rights to have a navy on the Caspian sea, commercial concessions, and a large indemnity, Nicholas I characteristically refused to press his victory. In particular, he would not support a native movement to overthrow the shah and destroy his rule.
