Between East and West by R. D. Charques

Author:R. D. Charques
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Pegasus Books

CHAPTER XII

ST PETERSBURG AND REVOLUTIONARY EUROPE

IF, DURING THE TWO centuries which divide the Russia of Peter the Great from the Bolshevik revolution, there was any period in which the spell of the authoritarian past might have been overcome, the forms of the state liberalized in a constitution and the course of Russian development merged with the historic currents of the west, it is the earlier part of the reign of Alexander I. Or so, for a moment, one is tempted to think. For the oppressive closing years of Catherine’s reign, the ruinous caprice of her successor and the French Revolution itself had not been without effect upon thoughtful minds in Russia. In the years before 1812 it was above all the emperor who appeared convinced, perhaps more convinced than any of his subjects, that Russia’s needs could be met only by a scheme of constitutional government and the abolition of serfdom. And it might be supposed that Alexander’s will would be sufficient to secure his ends.

Yet a legacy of misfortune and political error on the scale of the Russian past is not easily cast off. Where in the vast, undeveloped and venally administered empire were the resources of legality and consent which would be required to transform from top to bottom a system of government and society basically unchanged since Peter the Great? And how, precisely, was so radical a transformation to be made? The example of the west bore no relevance to Russian conditions, and in any case the points of contact between the bureaucratic absolutism of St Petersburg and revolutionary Europe were still few. Whatever, in fact, the force of Alexander’s conviction, the opportunity he offered or appeared to offer was beyond the grasp of Russian society. There was only the narrowest foundation of the rule of law on which to raise a structure of constitutional government, only a flickering idealism to light the way towards the ending of serfdom. And Alexander, for all his strangely compounded liberal impulse and despotic self-will, was not the ruler to try to impose either on Russia. For the truth is, of course, that the only form of constitution he was prepared to concede was one which left intact the sovereign principle of autocracy, while no one had better cause than he to know that the nobility would give their assent to the liberation of the serfs only on the impossible condition that it did not injure them.

Unfailingly courteous and gentle, the show of weakness in him constantly belied by an intransigent temper, Alexander is the most complex and most elusive figure among the emperors of Russia. Napoleon called him ‘the sphinx’, ‘the Talma of the north’, ‘the cunning Byzantine’, and the descriptions match Napoleon’s experience at his hands. But they are valid in a more general context. Dissimulation came almost by the light of nature to Alexander. Originally a need he had cultivated in youth in professing dangerously divergent loyalties as the pupil of Catherine and his father’s son, it became an overmastering habit.

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