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heightening the position of the state servant than most of the independently wealthy aristocracy. As the husband of an Englishwoman and an admirer of Bentham, he was particularly interested in the English tradition of public service.125
Thus, while Speransky edited Radishchev's last contribution to Russian thought, the 'Charter of the Russian People,' he had little sympathy with the latter's abstract, rhetorical approach.126 He spent his early years in practical administrative activity: reforming Russia's chaotic financial system and attempting to establish clear responsibility and delineation of authority within the newly created ministries. Recognizing the need for a better- educated civil service, he helped organize two new schools for training them: the polytechnical institute and the lycee at Tsarskoe Selo. The latter in particular became a major channel through which reformist ideas were to penetrate the Russian aristocracy.127
After Alexander's rapprochement with Napoleon at Tilsit in 1807, the idea of a thoroughgoing …reform., of the Russian government on French models gained favor. Asked to prepare a secret plan for the reform, Speransky proposed a constitutional monarchy with a separation of powers, transformation of the senate into a supreme judiciary, and a system of regional representative bodies under a central legislature. The executive was to be responsible to the central legislature; but ultimate control remained with the tsar and an imperial council responsible solely to him.128
This ingenious, somewhat eclectic proposal of 1809 was never taken any further than the creation of the imperial council with Speransky himself as secretary. Speransky's determination to tax the aristocracy more effectively and to require systematic examinations for the civil service was resented by the aristocracy. As a man of humble origins popularly identified with the French alliance, Speransky was vulnerable to attack when Napoleon invaded Russia. Thus, although Alexander had assured La Harpe only the year before that 'liberal ideas are moving ahead'129 in Russia, he dismissed Speransky and exiled him to the East in 1812. With him went the most serious plan for the introduction of representative and constitutional forms into the Russian monarchy that was to appear for nearly a century.
Nicholas Karamzin, the spokesman for autocratic conservatism, entered the political arena dramatically with his Note on Old and New Russia: a frontal attack on Speransky written at the request of the Tsar's sister in 1811. The Tsar was delighted by the piece and invited Karamzin to take up residence at the Anichkov palace, where he secured his position as the new court favorite by writing his famous multi-volume History of the Russian State.
Karamzin was a widely traveled aristocrat whose journalistic and liter-
ary activities had already established him as a champion of Westernization and linguistic modernization. Like others who became politically conservative after the French Revolution, Karamzin preferred the wisdom of history to that of abstract laws: the rule of 'people' to that of 'forms.' He had been abroad in 1789, during the Revolution, and had a real aversion to revolutionary slogans. In an ode to Alexander at the time of his coronation he wrote pointedly:
Freedom is where there are regulations, Wise freedom is holy; But equality is a dream.130
With verve and erudition he hammered away at the need to return to the absolutism of the past. The simplicity of his message appealed to an age perplexed by the profusion of new proposals for reform and by the fact that the reformer-in-chief of Europe, Napoleon, had suddenly become the foe of Russia. The sophistication of his arguments also made conservatism appear intellectually respectable. His examination of possible political alternatives was typical of the Enlightenment and similar to that of Speransky .[Anarchy is the worst solution of the political problem, and despotism almost as bad.f Republicanism is theoretically the best but requires a small country to be effective .(Aristocratic rule can lead only to fragmentation and political domination by foreigners. (Therefore, autocratic monarchy is the best form of rule for Russia.131
For all its elegance, however, Karamzin's position remains little more than an attack on innovation fortified with sentimentality and casuistry. He attacks Speransky unfairly as a 'translator of Napoleon,' makes the questionable contention that the aristocracy is a more faithful servant of the crown than civil servants, and plays on the anti-intellectualism of the petty nobility by ridiculing Speransky's educational requirements for state service. His History, too, for all its style and erudition, is propagandistic in intent. All history is that of the triumphant state, which is a patrimony of the tsar, whose moral qualities determine success or failure. For decades histories of Russia were merely paraphrases of this work, which at times seems closer to the historical romances of Walter Scott than to analytic history.
Karamzin was a kind of monastic chronicler in modern dress. He rehabilitated for the intellectuals of St. Petersburg many of the old Muscovite beliefs about history: the belief that everything depended on the tsar, that Providence was on the side of Russia if it remained faithful to tradition, that foreign innovation was the source of Russia's difficulties. He echoed the Old Believer and Cossack defenders of Old Muscovy by professing hatred for bureaucracy and compromise; but he gave these attitudes a totally new
appeal in St. Petersburg by suggesting that the true ally of the tsar was not the isolated defenders of the old rites or the old liberties but rather the aristocracy. Any dilution of the powers that Catherine had wisely given it would be dangerous for Russia. Karamzin criticizes Ivan the Terrible and Peter the Great for their indifference to established authority, praising the holy fools and prophets who warned against headstrong innovation and Westernization. Karamzin seems to have viewed himself as a latter-day version of these court prophets, warning Alexander against liberalization.
Karamzin's hero in Russian history is Ivan III, in whom tsarist authority was undiluted and under whose all- conquering banners the chivalric aristocracy of that time spontaneously rallied and marched off to heroic battle. In his story 'Martha the City-leader or the Subjugation of Novgorod,' Karamzin glorifies the conquest of that city by Ivan III. 'They should have foreseen,' one of the characters asserts, 'that resistance would lead to the destruction of Novgorod, and sound reasoning demanded from them a voluntary sacrifice.'132 In another speech, one of the conquering princes notes that 'savage people love independence, wise people love order, and there is no order without autocratic power.' Or again, in lines that could have been taken from any dictator of modern times, one of the characters notes that 'not freedom, which is often destructive, but public welfare, justice, and security are the three pillars of civil happiness.'133 It is curiously fitting to see Soviet editors defending the 'progressiveness' of Ivan's conquest and of Karamzin's interpretation against the glorification of Martha and of Novgorod's freedom by the revolutionary Decembrists.134
The gradual triumph of Karamzin's conservatism at court forced proponents of reform in the second half of Alexander's reign to assume more extreme positions than those taken by Speransky. The exposure of the officer class to the West after the pursuit of Napoleon gave them new ideas. Alexander kept alive the old hope of 'reform from above' by vaguely promising to make the constitution granted Poland a pattern for his entire empire and by appointing a commission under Novosiltsov to draft a federal constitution for Russia.
The political reformers that history has come to call the Decembrists can be thought of as returning war veterans, hoping to make Russia worthy of the high calling it had assumed through victory over Napoleon. They were unified mainly by certain things they opposed: the military colonies of Arakcheev, the irrational cruelties of petty officialdom, and the succession of Nicholas I to the throne. They were, in part, simply bored with Russia,
