The Timid Path

On December 12, 1801, 23-year-old Tsar Alexander I, who had been on the throne only since March of that year, issued an ukaz. This particular decree was not something historians have considered extremely significant in the scheme of Alexander’s reign, but it merits attention for a few reasons.

First of all, December 12 was Alexander’s birthday (according to the Old-Style Julian calendar; according to today’s Gregorian calendar he was born on December 23). The fact that he issued this ukaz on his own birthday would seem to suggest it was related to a heartfelt goal.

So what was in this document?

The decree extended the right to own land to three classes of people: merchants, state peasants, and members of the meshchanstvo (a social estate often translated as “the bourgeoisie” that encompassed townspeople and artisans). Why was this important? For one thing, up to that point, only the nobility − dvoryanye − had such a right. Now, non-nobles − even peasants! (albeit, only those owned by the state rather than by the nobility) − could own land. Unlike the nobility, however, they were not allowed to buy serfs, which was also significant: it meant that these new categories of landowners would have to pay laborers to help them farm their lands. This was presumably intended to trigger a process that would significantly alter socioeconomic relationships within Russia.

The idea was that noble landowners would quickly see that people who were paid to work would be much more productive than their enslaved counterparts. Surely this would make the nobility more amenable to ending serfdom and hiring their former serfs as free people. The whole system of serfdom would naturally collapse, receding peacefully and gradually into history without turmoil or bloodshed.

Such was the young emperor’s aspiration, brought up as he was on the works of Enlightenment philosophers proclaiming “liberty, equality, fraternity.” This desire to do good was also driven by a guilty conscience, since Alexander came to power after the overthrow and murder of his father. He himself had not participated in the assassination plot, but he knew about it ahead of time and approved of the conspirators’ actions. Of course, he believed (or at least tried to convince himself) that his father would simply be deposed rather than killed, but now, after Paul’s murder, Alexander knew he had blood on his hands.

How could he make up for the role he played in his father’s death? There was no way, but perhaps he could somewhat assuage his conscience if he resolved that, as tsar, he would cure some of his country’s ills. That was what he set out to do, but his journey down this path was made in tiny, faltering steps.

Historians’ reactions to the decisions Alexander made during the first year of his reign largely range from bewilderment to downright derision. For example, Alexander banned the publication of advertisements selling people separately from the land they lived on. Selling serfs separately − not as part of a “package deal” with their village − took serfdom to a higher level of cruelty. On the other hand, if a village was sold to one family by another, the peasants’ lives were likely to change very little. By the late eighteenth century, however, landowners were able to simply sell their serfs, or give them away, or lose them at cards. Little thought was given to the fact that human beings were being torn from their families, their homes, their communities.

Why wouldn’t Alexander just ban such a barbarous practice? Alas, he was afraid, haunted by the knowledge that his father and grandfather (Peter III) had both died as a result of palace coups. He was reluctant to rock the boat. This timid step proved ineffective, since the ads may have been banned, but serf-owners quickly found workarounds. Now advertisements just used different wording: when a newspaper notice appeared stating that a cook or a serf girl was “available for service,” everyone knew that this really meant they were for sale.

His approach may look a bit silly, but Alexander did make his position clear: he did not approve of the sale of people. The tsar’s opinion carried weight and surely discouraged some, but not all.

And young Alexander did not stop with regulating advertisements. He also prohibited the transfer of state lands to private individuals, a favorite pastime of Catherine the Great, who liked to reward her favorites with lands inhabited by thousands of people, who as a result became serfs.

Two years later, in 1803, there was another ukaz, “Concerning Free Farmers,” which spelled out the exact procedure by which the nobility could (but was not obliged to) liberate their peasants and allot them plots of land.

Taken together, these steps start to show a pattern in the policies Alexander implemented during the first years of his reign. At the time, it seemed to him that these incremental steps, combined with ongoing support for education − including the creation of new universities and grammar schools − would be enough to bring about a new climate in Russia and ultimately put an end to the despised institution of serfdom.

Alas, although Alexander’s ukazes did have some effect, the general situation in the country did not change. Serfdom persisted, since most landowning nobles did not have the slightest inclination to relinquish such a convenient and cost-free workforce and start to run their estates like normal businesses − that would be too much trouble. Even after the abolition of serfdom in 1861, most noble families did not make sensible use of the money they received to compensate them for the lands handed over to peasants. Government reformers designed the reforms with the idea that landowners would use that money to transform their estates, but most of it was squandered at card tables and on other frivolities.

Alexander I did not live to see emancipation. He died in 1825, depressed, disillusioned, and upset by what he was hearing about the secret societies being formed by young nobles who basically wanted the same things that had been his goal from the outset: the abolition of serfdom and placing limitations on autocracy. But in the final years of his reign, few believed that he could change anything in the country, and his would-be allies in the younger generation had turned into his implacable foes.

The tragedy is that Alexander spent his entire reign thinking about reforms and taking steps that seemed important to him, just as his December 12, 1801, ukaz seemed to him a step that was vital to move Russia forward. He did succeed in liberating the serfs in the empire’s Baltic provinces, but that was an area poorly suited to agriculture in any event, and where the nobility did not particularly care about having serfs.

There is an urge to yell at Alexander back through time: “Don’t be timid, be bold! If you liberate the serfs, you could completely change the course of Russian history and help it avert bloody revolutions and wars!”

From our twenty-first century perspective, it certainly seems that things would have been easier for Russia today if Alexander (and his grandmother Catherine) had followed their Enlightenment-inspired impulses and forced reforms on a reluctant nobility. But in the aftermath of the French Revolution, this was not a simple matter for a European monarch. To Alexander, his incremental reforms must have felt like the only prudent approach. 

Maybe someday the art of modeling alternative historical scenarios will develop to the point that we can learn how Russian history would have played out had Alexander boldly pursued his youthful aspirations.