Lesley Chamberlain - Ministry of Darkness: How Sergei Uvarov Created Conservative Modern Russia

Ministry of Darkness

his work would have put us back fifty years into bondage

Joseph Conrad

Ministry of Darkness

How Sergei Uvarov Created Conservative Modern Russia

LESLEY CHAMBERLAIN

Contents

Archive material

Encyclopedias

Collected works

At first some Russians were delighted by the French Revolution. When news of the fall of the Bastille reached St Petersburg, the French ambassador, the Comte de Sgur, saw people embracing in the streets. The teenage royal princes, Alexander and Constantine, who had received a liberal education, rushed up to congratulate him on the Nevsky Prospect. But their grandmother Catherine, already a woman of sixty, in her twenty-eighth year on the throne, was less impressed.

The French Enlightenment had intrigued her. It was an intellectual reform movement that championed materialism and natural rights. What it stood for, the power of reason to construct a modern civilization, free from superstition and prejudice and based on a vision of equality, entertained her through endless dreary days in the Venice of the North and provided an antidote to the superficiality of the court. The Enlightenment also did more than entertain the German-born Russian empress. Montesquieus Esprit des Lois had informed the Nakaz, the Great Instruction of 1767, in which she reviewed the laws of her empire and set out the principles on which she wanted her reign to rest. But, having learnt the hard way the business of governing an unruly empire, seeing it through the eyes of a woman born in Europe, she knew emancipatory thinking was not a practical possibility for Russia. That distant admiration for Enlightenment liberalism, in tension with learning the hard way about Russia, will stalk the narrative of this book.

The bigger the hold Enlightenment thought gained, the more the empress who would become known as Catherine the Great felt the need to distance herself from her earlier enthusiasms. Repelled by events in France, she found her eye guided towards England, her future ally against Napoleon. In March 1790, her ambassador in London, Semyon Romanovich Vorontsov, reported Burke, however, rejected the compliment. Conservative he might be, but he was quite sure he and the empress of Russia did not stand in defence of the same cause.

Burke appealed to the power of tradition and the complexity of human nature in action. He argued that no theory of how to govern or how to live should be founded on a mere idea, but on the wisdom of practice. He disdained what happened in France as irresponsible speculation. It was intellectual Jacobinism. Yet at the same time he could clearly envisage a situation where revolution might be justified in the face of real political repression, such as the oppression his Irish kin suffered at the hands of the English. So he was a conservative, but out of a philosophical conviction that had little to do with preserving the interests of the landed and ruling class in England. He was a communitarian who felt that the stability of society was in everyones interest and of a higher priority than any individual concern. He is perhaps best seen as a topdown utilitarian, with the idea of the common good providing the justification for social and legal constraint. He wrote,

Government is a contrivance of human wisdom to provide for human wants. Men have a right that these wants should be provided for by this wisdom. Among these wants is to be reckoned the want, out of civil society, of a sufficient restraint upon their passions. Society requires not only that the passions of individuals should be subjected, but that even in the mass and body as well as in the individuals, the inclinations of men should frequently be thwarted, their will controlled, and their passions brought into subjection. This can only be done by a power outside of themselves.

Any reader of Burke would have to decide how, given the endlessly diverse wants of individuals, freedom can be managed in an enlightened society.

In 1791 Burke was right Russia was not thinking of how to mould the passions of individuals to the common good. It was conservative through the dominant mentality of the nobility, which served the tsar and accepted autocracy as Russias Orthodox Christian heritage. But what made the Russian situation peculiar was the way Peter the Great had instrumentalized the nobility as the class to modernize Russia through travel and learning. Their task was to put themselves in contact with the West in order to bring the most innovatory ideas back home. They would help Russian science progress, and in this they would loyally serve their tsar. Their mission was thus twin-headed: to modernize Russia through the spread of knowledge, but not to allow, or encourage, loss of political control.

Though the image of the nobility, after the nobility was freed from obligatory civil and military service in 1762, was of an increasingly indolent class, there were enough hereditary nobles who continued to take the Westernizing task to heart. They wanted to serve Russia out of moral sentiment, and here a certain seriousness took root, encouraged by Catherine IIs own great interest in education. Catherine effectively continued Peter the Greats policy of wanting to make Russia more European in the level of its learning, and into that tradition the subject of this book, Sergei Uvarov, was born, in 1786. Was he a Burkean? Perhaps more than most. But his achievement would be to define a unique Russian conservatism that eased the tension between scientific ambition, and hence national prestige, and domestic order.

Psychologically the task would never be easy, for two main reasons. One was the sense of being pulled in contradictory directions that just couldnt be reconciled, as if at once reversing the French Revolution and benefiting from the intellectual advances the Enlightenment brought. The other reason was that like the nobility in Louis XIVs France more than a century earlier the Russian nobility served the monarch herself, or himself, and the confusion of state interests with the personal interests of the sovereign often tended to lead to a sense of unreality and confusion: a feeling that the country couldnt move forward because even its most loyal servants couldnt get their bearings.

The writer, historian, dramatist and traveller Nikolai Karamzin defined the late-eighteenth-century Russian conservatism that Burke objected to when he insisted that, for better, for worse, autocracy was Russias traditional form of government and should only be tampered with at great risk. Autocracy is the Palladium of Russia; on its integrity depends Russias happiness. and that defensiveness against what counted as progress in the West became another feature of the Russian desire to resist change to autocratic rule.