Age of Empires by Robert Aldrich

Author:Robert Aldrich
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Thames and Hudson Ltd
Published: 2019-09-04T16:00:00+00:00

Government of the empire

In the Tsarist empire, there was no strong sense of difference between metropole and colony, in part because Russia was a land-based empire lacking clear physical dividing features. This was reflected in the administrative structure. Although there needed to be some decentralization of authority from the capital, this was to administrative regions or provinces (guberniia) that were drawn on broadly administrative rather than ethnic lines. It was also reflected in the composition of the ruling elite. The Russian elite saw itself as the inheritor of European values, a stance which made it open to entry by non-ethnic Russians. This is reflected in the strong representation of Baltic Germans in Russia’s ruling circles, especially in the eighteenth century.

Generally provinces were headed by a civil governor, while some frontier regions, the capital and some other provinces of special significance were headed by a governor-general who had direct access to the emperor.4 Governors were directly responsible to the central government and were appointed by them; they were not accountable to those over whom they ruled. This system was generally maintained, with some strengthening of the governor’s powers in 1837, until the ‘great reforms’ of the 1860s, which introduced an element of representative government into the running of local affairs. However, such representation was strictly limited, both in terms of the personnel involved and the matters over which this body (the zemstvo) had jurisdiction. Their most important role was as a forum for the expression of enlightened opinion. Finland and Poland were exceptions to this general rule of administration; both enjoyed significant autonomy in internal affairs.

The powers of the governor at the provincial level were more than matched by those of the emperor at the centre. Absolutist monarchy had been established in the sixteenth century, and despite a number of weak emperors and the breakdown of the centralized monarchy in the early seventeenth century,5 this principle was maintained until 1905. The tsar, or emperor, was all-powerful, citing the principle of divine right and believing that he had no accountability to those over whom he ruled. Government ministers were purely advisory, holding office at the emperor’s pleasure. Although some ministers were able to exercise significant influence over government policy at different times – Speransky and Arakcheev in the early nineteenth century and Witte in the late nineteenth century are good examples – formally they always acted as the cipher of the emperor and the final decision always lay in the latter’s hands. The reforms introduced following the 1905 revolution seemed to modify the absolutism of the imperial office by introducing an elected legislative organ, the Duma, but in practice this did little to curb the imperial prerogative.

The theoretically high levels of centralism were not always realized in practice. This is principally because the state bureaucracy was not a very efficient machine and could not easily cope with the vast distances that needed to be spanned if the empire was to be effectively governed. Not only were communications slow and clumsy, a fact

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.