Lieven D. (ed.) The Cambridge History of Russia, Volume 2: Imperial Russia, 1689-1917

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Autocrat and autocracy

Whatever the extent to which the subordinate organs improved in the impe-

rial era, if the supreme organs failed to regulate the relationship between

the highest members of the bureaucracy and to provide the means for rela-

tive unity in both policy-making and execution at the very top, governmen-

tal paralysis and disaster could ensue. Central to the issue of the supreme

organs was the monarch, who appointed the highest members of the state

apparatus and was ultimately responsible for co-ordinating and directing their

actions. The importance of this role increased in the absence of a ﬁrst min-

ister. The monarch’s modus operandi, views and opinions until the collapse

of the Romanov state clearly exercised a vital impact on the subordinate and

supreme organs’ everyday operation and on the state’s ability to act and react

to the changing environment in which it found itself. Several years before

the revolution of 1905 Witte summed up the situation for Nicholas II. ‘These

questions [i.e. key strategic issues – Z.S.] can only be properly solved if you

yourself take the lead in the matter, surrounding yourself with people chosen

for the job. . . . The bureaucracy itself cannot solve such matters on its own.’

Autocracy was the form of government in Russia until 1905 when in theory

a semi-constitutional monarchy was established. The ofﬁcial conception of

the autocracy stressed that all political power and legitimacy emanated from

the autocrat, who claimed to be God’s representative on earth and responsible

to Him alone. The autocracy was seen as uniquely Russian and the historical

source of her greatness, indeed the only institution capable of mobilising and

directing Russia’s resources and of ensuring the empire’s unity and moderni-

sation. Therefore it was said that any diminution of its power, in theory or in

practice, would have negative consequences for the future of Russia. The idea

of union between the people and the autocratic tsar with strong paternalistic

overtones constituted the base of the autocracy’s ideology. Whilst carrying the

title of emperor the tsar was also known as the ‘little father’ who according

to apologists for the autocracy acted as the arbiter between the various self-

interestedgroups in society, preventing exploitation and guaranteeing supreme

truth and justice. The vast and relatively quick expansion of the bureaucracy

in the nineteenth century made the emperors suspicious of its growing power

and potential to infringe on the exercise of autocratic power. One result was

a longing for a time when the tsar supposedly ruled his domains directly and

maintained contact with his people. Consequently the monarch began to be

portrayed as the defender of the people from his own bureaucracy. Nicholas

14 Quoted in D. Lieven, Nicholas II (London: John Murray, 1993), p. 84.

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II took on this view to a much greater extent than any of his predecessors,

which resulted in a behaviour that only created greater chaos in the central

governing organs at a time of growing social and political problems.

The emperors and supporters of the autocratic principle understood that

the growthof the bureaucracy, and speciﬁcallythe functional specialisation and

impersonalisation of government that accompanied it, was slowly and seem-

ingly irreversibly eroding the practical extent to which the autocrat could

exercise his power. At the same time the emperors recognised the need to

instil order into the expanding system in order to improve co-ordination of

governmental organs and policy-making and establish a form of legality and

predictability. Their goal remained that the autocrat was to create laws and

establish institutions which were to operate within the law whilst he would

remain above the law, implementing absolute justice. Yet the systemisation

of the governing organs eroded further the practical exercise of autocratic

authority. Therefore the emperors whilst on the one hand attempting to intro-

duce order into the system, at the same time undermined their own supreme

organs, seeing in them a potential threat to their power. They established ad

hoc committees or commissions to draw up decrees,supervise the execution of

policy, or oversee the government of a territory. Alexander III’s remark that he

despised the administration and drank champagne to its destruction succinctly

describes how Russia’s emperors felt about the bureaucratic machine.

Even Alexander III, the embodiment of paternalist autocrat, clearly under-

stood, however, that he could not govern without the bureaucracy. Even an

intelligent and active monarch could not hope to govern the realm without the

guidance, knowledge and administrative help of ministers. Ideally decisions

were to be made within the supreme organs through the gathering of infor-

mation and deliberation and analysis by experts. The reality of government

then as always differed. Institutional and personal rivalries abounded, opinions

differed sharply among ministers and top ofﬁcials as regards both strategy and

tactics. Of course, people seldom reach the top in politics without powerful

egos and aggressive and ambitious personalities. The chief executive ofﬁcer

of any regime must ensure that such egos and squabbles do not paralyse the

state’s capacity to act and react. No Russian minister could formulate or exe-

cute any major policy without the explicit support of the monarch, who was

therefore essentially the chief executive.

A successful minister had to retain the monarch’s favour and consequently

fortify and expand his power and inﬂuence with him by limiting the inﬂuence

of, or discrediting fellow ministers. Consequently, a monarch could end up

with a group of men who, rather than striving for a uniﬁed government,

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engaged in factional ﬁghting and policy sabotage. This situation is attributable

also to the absence of collective responsibility or of a common institutional or

ideological loyalty (e.g. to a political party) amongst the ministers to balance

departmental and personal conﬂicts. In the end most monarchs realised that

a great degree of ministerial unity was needed if the government was to

accomplish anything. That is particularly true as the bureaucratic apparatus

grew in scale and specialisation and society became more complex.

However, one key question was who would fulﬁl the role of the co-

ordinating centre? There was no reason in principle why a monarch himself

could not fulﬁl the role of a ﬁrst minister, engendering unity and co-ordinating

the state’s servants at the highest level. Louis XIV of France, Alexander III of

Russia and Joseph II of Austria all governed in this way.

But to act as life-

time chief executive ofﬁcer and bear the burdens of head of state could easily

break a twentieth-century monarch given the sheer complexity and scale of

a modern government’s activity. Alternatively, if the monarch recognised his

unwillingness or inability to fulﬁl this role he could throw the full weight of

the monarchy’s power behind a chief minister. This would be done to ensure

governmental unity in the absence of an active monarch. The relationships

between Louis XIII and Cardinal Richelieu, Wilhelm I of Prussia/Germany

and Otto von Bismarck, Alexander I and Count A. A. Arakcheev and Empress

Maria-Teresa of Austria and Kaunitz are examples of this situation. Russian

emperors could in extraordinary circumstances decide to appoint, perhaps

temporarily, a Richelieu. Despite the growing size of the tsarist bureaucracy

there was no reason one ﬁgure could not macro-manage it.

To entrust the job

to a man who could be dismissed if too unpopular and who was not burdened

with the job of chief executive ofﬁcer for life made good sense. If, however,

the monarch for any reason could not fulﬁl this co-ordinating role and refused

to allow a capable ﬁrst minister to do so, a hole in the centre of government

emerged, fatally weakening its ability to act and react.

Russian emperors feared that a uniﬁed ministry would lead to ‘ministerial

despotism’, whereby ministers would either limit the ﬂow of information to

the monarch or present a uniﬁed front on various policy decisions with the

aim of obtaining imperial consent. Ministers did in fact have the opportunity

to block both the ﬂow of information to the monarch and the execution of

policy since it was they who controlled to a great extent what the emperor did

15 T. C. W. Blanning, Joseph II (London: Longman, 1994); R. Hatton, Louis XIV and Absolutism

(London: Macmillan, 1976); M. Deon (ed.), Louis XIVpar lui-m

eme. (Paris: Gallimard, 1991).

16 Yaney, Systematization of Russian Government,p.307.

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and did not see. Therefore the emperors adopted a form of divide and rule in

a bid to protect monarchical power and the monarch’s room for manoeuvre.

These were not problems or expedients unique to the Russian monarchy. A

monarch’s problems became more acute with the growth of the bureaucratic

machinery of state. Not surprisingly, Imperial China, the ﬁrst polity to develop

a large and sophisticated bureaucracy, also provided some of the earliest and

most spectacular examples of a monarch’s efforts to struggle against bureau-

cratic encroachment on royalpower. The Ming Emperor Wanli (1572–1620), dis-

gusted with bureaucratic inﬁghting, inertia and intransigence withdrew from

governing altogether, refusing for years to meet with his top bureaucrats.

The ﬁrst Ming emperor, T’ai-tsu, deeply suspicious of high-level bureaucrats,

‘fractured bureaucratic institutions’ in order to exercise real control and enable

greater ﬂow of information to himself. When his successors proved less com-

petent or willing chief executives than the dynasty’s founder this contributed

greatly to the Ming regime’s collapse.

A more modern example of the chief executive’s dilemma is provided by

President Richard Nixon’s building up of the National Security Council in

order to make certain that various viewpoints could be heard and debated

at the top, and clear policy choices thereby presented to him. Nixon wanted

all differences of view to be ‘identiﬁed and defended, rather than muted or

buried’. Nixon stated that he did not want ‘to be confronted with a bureaucratic

consensus that leaves me no option but acceptance or rejection, and that gives

me no way of knowing what alternatives exist’.

The Russian emperors’ response to the chief executive’s dilemma was

use of courtiers, unofﬁcial advisers, or ofﬁcials from outside the ‘responsi-

ble’ ministry’s line-of-command to the great chagrin of their ministers. At

times these ﬁgures constituted a useful alternative source of information and

opinion. However, even when this was true, the co-ordination and consis-

tency/execution of policy once a decision had been made had to be ensured,

which often failed to happen under Nicholas II. Sometimes Nicholas would

use such people to implement a policy which for some reason or another was

not being followed by the responsible ministry. This happened as regards for-

eign policy in the Far East, with the Russo-Japanese War as its consequence:

17 J. Spence, The Search for Modern China (New York: Norton, 1990), p. 16. See also R. Huang,

1587. A Year of No Signiﬁcance (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1981).

18 J. Dull, ‘The Evolution of Government in China’, in P. Ropp (ed.), The Heritage of China

(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990). On Ming government see above all C.

Hucker, ‘Ming government’, in D. Twitchett and F. Mote (eds.), The Cambridge History

of China, vol. VIII, Part 2 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996).

19 Quoted in J. McGregor Burns, Leadership (New York: Harper and Row, 1977), pp. 412–13.

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another example was the establishment of the police trade unions, the rem-

nants of which led the march to the Winter Palace on Bloody Sunday.

The last emperor was infamous for his suspicion of his ministers. During a

meetingover foreignpolicyin the FarEast, Ministerof War Aleksei Kuropatkin,

worried by Nicholas’s tendency to listen to the counsel of unofﬁcial advisors,

complained that, ‘(your) conﬁdence in me would only grow when I ceased

to be a minister’. Nicholas responded, ‘It is strange, you know, but perhaps

that is psychologically correct.’

To do Nicholas justice, this was not a unique

situation. Louis XV, frustrated by his foreign minister’s failure to share his

enthusiasm for Poland and Sweden, conducted a secret policy with these two

countries, whilst George II of England sent secret agents to negotiate with

Saxony and Austria in contradiction with his own government’s policy.

Post 1905

As a result of the revolutionof 1905 Russia became a semi-constitutional monar-

chy. The now half-elected State Council became the upper house of the par-

liamentary system. The Duma made up the lower house.

The major change in the central governing organs was the prominence

given to the Council of Ministers as the focal point of the administration and,

more importantly, the emergence of the council’s chairman. This ﬁgure held

the responsibility of co-ordinating policy-making and ministerial activity and

ensuring unity in the council. Many ﬁgures inside and outside of government

came to the conclusion that the causes of the disasters of 1904–6 could be

linked to the chaos and disunity of the subordinate organs resulting from

faulty supreme organs. Particular blame was placed on Nicholas II who came

to be regarded as unable to play the co-ordinating role demanded by the

autocratic system. This drive for ministerial unity under the leadership of the

chairman of the Council of Ministers predictablyraised sensitivities concerning

infringement on the emperor’s real power and role. Nicholas II summed up his

feeling in a telling comment. ‘He (Peter A. Stolypin, chairman of the Council

of Ministers, 1906–1911) dies in my service, true, but he was always so anxious

to keep me in the background. Do you suppose that I liked always reading

20 ‘Dnevnik Kuropatina’, KA 2 (1922): 57–8.

21 R. McKean, The Russian Constitutional Monarchy, 1907–1917 (London: Macmillan, 1977);

W. Mosse, ‘Russian Bureaucracy at the end of the Ancien Regime: The Imperial State

Council’, SR (1980): 616–32; D. Macdonald, United Government and Foreign Policy in Russia,

1900–1914(Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1992); R. Sh. Ganelin, Rossiiskoe

Samoderzhavie v 1905 gody (Leningrad: Nauka, 1991); A. P. Borodin, Gosudarstvennii Sovet

Rossii, 1906–1917 (Kirov: Vytka, 1999).

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in the papers that the chairman of the council of ministers had done this...

The chairman had done that? Don’t I count? Am I nobody?’

For the rest of

his reign Nicholas worked towards the emasculation of the chairman’s power,

which he considered a direct threat to his authority. However, he himself was

unable to co-ordinate his government or provide astute political leadership –

with disastrous consequences.

Nicholas’s undermining of his own government was owed above all to his

personality, though also to his conception of his role as patriarch of his people,

and to the suspicion and contempt of bureaucracy widespread in Russian soci-

ety.

Even Kaiser Wilhelm II of Germany, let alone Emperor Francis Joseph

of Austria never undermined their chief ministers to the degree Nicholas

sabotaged Stolypin and after him, Vladimir Kokovtsev. More importantly,

the Hohenzollern and Habsburg monarchs did not see a fundamental differ-

ence between themselves and the policies followed by their governments.

Nicholas, however, regarded the Council of Ministers and the bureaucracy as

direct threats to his power and worked to undermine them, which lead to

paralysis of the central governing organs in the years before and during the

First World War.

Modernisation from above

Inseparable from this discussion is the regime’s institutional response to the

challenges posed by modernisation from above. Unsurprisingly the achieve-

ment and maintenance of great power status, an essential plank in Romanov

legitimacy, became a driving force behind the evolution of subordinate and

supreme governing organs under Peter the Great and subsequently. Defeat in

the Crimean War put on top of the agenda not only the necessity for major

socioeconomic reform on a scale not seen since the time of Peter, such as the

abolition of serfdom, inculcation of legal principles and industrialisation, but

also the enlargement and improvement of the bureaucracy, whose responsi-

bility now was transformation of a society regarded as backward in relation

to the advanced powers of Europe.

22 V. Kokovtsev, Iz moego proshlego (Paris: priv. pub., 1933), pp. 282–3.

23 See e.g. R. Wortman, Scenarios of Power (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000),

vol. II, part 3; Lieven, Nicholas II.

24 The literature on Wilhelm is immense; for guidance see C. Clark, Kaiser Wilhelm II

(Harlow: Longman, 2000), pp. 262–5, J. C. G. Rohl, The Kaiser and his Court: Wilhelm II

and the Government of Germany (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987); On Franz

Josef, see e.g. S. Beller, Francis Joseph (Harlow: Longman, 1995) and J.-P. Bled, Franz Joseph

(Oxford: Blackwell, 1992).

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The Russian bureaucracy undertook one of the ﬁrst programmes of mod-

ernisation from above, having been forced to play many roles which belonged

to private groups in the economically advanced countries of Europe. The

regime collapsed in 1917, but to deny the positive contributions of the bureau-

cratic system, despite all its faults, is difﬁcult. Even if we just focus on the

period from the Great Reforms to the Revolution the list of achievements is

impressive: emancipation of the serfs, establishment of an independent judi-

ciary system and local government (zemstvos), industrialisation, construction

of a vast railway network, the beginnings of a constitutional form of govern-

ment, Stolypin’s land reforms, attempts at a genuine social welfare system

and expansion of mass education. All of these required a fairly competent

bureaucratic infrastructure as well as expertise and professionalism.

But the

subordinate organs needed direction from above. In the absence of effec-

tive supreme organs, many times the ministries handled ‘personal and par-

ticular problems, to the obvious detriment of larger, more important issues

and unforeseen circumstances’.

In the end, Russia’s subordinate organs in

St Petersburg to a signiﬁcant extent operated well, while the more serious

problems of governing existed elsewhere in the supreme organs and in the

modus operandi of the emperors and most especially of Nicholas II.

25 On senior late-imperial ofﬁcials, see D. Lieven, Russia’s Rulers Under the Old Regime

(London: Yale, 1989): chapter 1 surveys the literature on the Russian bureaucracy.

26 A. Verner, The Crisis of Russian Autocracy: Nicholas II and the 1905 Revolution (Princeton:

Princeton University Press, 1990), p. 46.

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Provincial and local government

janet m. hartley

Introduction

A study of local government raises several important questions about the

nature of the imperial Russian state, the level of development of provincial

Russian society and the relationship between government and society in Rus-

sia. To what extent did the government allow or wish to encourage a genuine

decentralisation or devolution of power to the provinces? Could local gov-

ernment institutions – either corporate institutions or ‘all-class’ institutions –

ﬂourish given both the pressures from the centre and the poor economic and

cultural levels of rural Russia which inhibited the growth of an educated and

politically conscious provincial society? To what extent can we even speak of a

structure of local government when a signiﬁcant proportion of the population –

the peasants – were only rarely touched by it, at least until the Emancipation

of 1861 and to some extent even thereafter? The status of local government –

either as separate from the central bureaucracy or as an integral part of the

government structure – was a major debate in Russia in the nineteenth cen-

tury. At the root of these questions is the fundamental issue of the relationship

between local government and the modernisation of the Russian state. On

the one hand, local government was potentially a tool to stimulate corporate

identity, urban self-conﬁdence and economic and cultural progress across all

sectors of society, including the peasantry after 1861. On the other hand, prob-

lems in local government could be interpreted as symbolic of the failure, or

the unwillingness, of the tsarist regime to adapt to change and to establish an

effective relationship between state and society. If the latter has some validity,

then we have to ask in addition whether local government contributed to the

downfall of the regime which created it.

Local government was a matter which concerned all the tsars but there were

periods of particularly intensive and signiﬁcant legislative activity, namely: (i)

the reign of Peter I (1682–1725) when urban administration was reformed

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(in 1699 and more notably in 1721 when urban magistracies were established)

and when, in 1718, the country was re-divided into gubernii (provinces), which

were in turn subdivided into provintsii and uezdy (districts); (ii) the reign of

CatherineII (1762–96) when threemajorlaws werepromulgated– the Statute of

Provincial Administration of 1775 and the Charters to the Nobles and the Towns

in 1785; (iii) the era of reforms in the decade which followed the Emancipation

of the Serfs in 1861, which saw the introduction of the zemstvos (local elected

assemblies) and the re-structuring of the legal system and reform of urban

administration; (iv) the 1890s when many of the reforms of the 1860s were

modiﬁed or curtailed. In addition, legislation which ostensibly only concerned

central government – in particular the establishment of the Senate in 1711,

the Ministry of Internal Affairs in 1802 and then the introduction of national

representationin the State Duma (Parliament) in 1905 – had a signiﬁcant impact

on the functions of local institutions and their relationship with the centre.

This chapter is concerned with Russian local administration but it should

be noted that different structures, different traditions and even different law

codes applied in many of the non-Russian parts of the empire until well into

the nineteenth century and sometimes until 1917. These areas include the

Baltic provinces, the lands of former Poland-Lithuania, the Ukraine, the Grand

Duchy of Finland, the Caucasus and Central Asia.

The Centre and the provinces

Local government was an issue which spawned extensive, and lengthy, legis-

lation over the whole imperial period (the 1775 Statute of Provincial Adminis-

tration, for example, comprised 491 articles; the two statutes of 1864 and 1890

on the zemstvos comprised 120 and 138 articles respectively). The provenance

and nature of this legislation reﬂect something of the relationship between

the centre and the provinces. For the most part in the ﬁrst two hundred years

of this study, legislation was not stimulated by demands for its introduction

from nobles or townspeople or by local ofﬁcials. This does not mean, how-

ever, that these groups had no views on the matter. When they were asked

for opinions – as they were in the Legislative Commission of 1767,byN.A.

Miliutin in the 1840s in the context of municipal reform of St Petersburg, and

in the formulation of what became the zemstvo legislation in the late 1850s

and early 1860s – they were prepared to give them and to highlight the inade-

quacies of current local administration at the same time. But the timing and

content of local government legislation was primarily determined by the tsars

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Provincial and local government

and their advisers and the institutional structures created were often based on

Western models (which could be Swedish, Baltic, Prussian, French or English)

rather than being drawn from analyses of local needs or the experiences of the

provinces.

The ‘dynamic, interventionist and coercive state’, as Marc Raeff charac-

terised Petrine Russia,

had always assumed that it had the power and the

obligation to govern all aspects of the lives of its citizens. This belief was not, of

course, unique to the Russian government, either in the eighteenth century or

afterwards, but possibly featured most strongly in the Russian case because of

the lack of balancing factors such as bodies representing estate interests, well-

developed urban institutions or a powerful and independent Church hierarchy

which existed elsewhere in Europe. A study of the legislation concerning local

government, however, is not only central to the understanding of the inten-

tions of central government but also exposes the weakness of the central

government and the essential contradictions in tsarist policy. The government

wanted to stimulate provincial and urban institutions of self-government and,

by extension, stimulate the development of a provincial society, but it needed

to control these institutions and ensure above all that they fulﬁlled state obliga-

tions as a greater priority than satisfying local needs. The potential for conﬂict

between provinces and the centre was always there but became more acute

after the establishment of the zemstvos in the 1860s. The government also

needed the participation of elected, and poorly paid, ofﬁcials from members

of provincial noble and urban society (and also state peasants after 1775 and

former serfs after 1864) to staff local institutions (in particular, the lower levels

of courts) because it lacked the trained manpower and the ﬁnancial resources

to ﬁll these posts with a professional bureaucracy appointed from the centre.

At the same time it feared the independence of these ofﬁcials and attempted

to co-opt them to carry out government policies and subordinated them to

appointed representatives of the government and to ministries in the capital.

These dilemmas of the central government can be seen both in the general

scope of local government legislation and in relation to the functions given to

particular institutions and individuals. The centre determined the boundaries

of units of local administration (and re-drew them at various times either to

increase efﬁciency or to incorporate new territorial acquisitions, often with a

deliberate neglect of historical territorial division), deﬁned, created and abol-

ished towns (and designed their coats of arms and determined the layouts of

1 M. Raeff, The Well-Ordered Police State: Social and Institutional Change through Law in the

Germanies and Russia, 1600–1800 (New Haven: Yale University Press), p. 206.

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