Ilya Lepikhov. According to scripture

According to scripture - 8
Ilya Lepikhov

Publication date: November 21, 2000

The policy of Alexander III today is presented by part of the Russian establishment as almost a model, and he himself is perhaps the greatest Russian sovereign after Peter the Great and Catherine . But, no matter what Nikita Mikhalkov and his associates said, he was truly a great figure in Russian politics, whose underestimation had a detrimental effect on our perception of the pre-revolutionary historical process. After his weak-willed and capricious father, who had already, it would seem, lifted his foot into the future, and was still frozen with horror and laziness, after his son, who lived as if rural views, entirely taken from Dutch Yuletide albums, were running outside the window of the Tall Train, after them and against their background, Alexander truly appears as a colossus, either a fabulous hero or a holy fool.

Completely devoid of the noble aplomb of Nikolai Pavlovich , the only sovereign with whom Alexander should, in truth, be compared, he (as before he was presented as a mad switchman waving a lit handkerchief in front of the nose of an express flying into the abyss) seems to us today a prophet, a biblical forefather, the embodiment of all those ideas, hopes and hopes that could invalidate the Russian Catastrophe of the 20th century.

Alexander Alexandrovich was distinguished from all other Russian sovereigns by his amazing sense of reality, pragmatism and ability to manage. Its first property kept Russia from military clashes. The second ultimately led to the creation of the Triple Entente, the Entente, not just an invincible, but an absolutely victorious military alliance, which was demonstrated by the entire course of the world war. The third quality allowed him to raise a class of new Russian state managers and, above all, financiers (N. Bunge, I. Vyshnegradsky, S. Witte), who carried out such serious and deep institutional reforms that their fruits were still enjoyed by the Order of the October Revolution factories and factories named after It's scary to think about who.

The Russian revival, which flourished so magnificently during the era of his reign, was, as already mentioned, a direct consequence of getting rid of the liberal hobbies of the previous era. Russia's return to itself in the current conditions was not an absolute step, but natural and wise. Alexander seemed to be drawing a line under the list of new dispensations established by Peter the Great, and made it clear that from now on Russia is a European country like some Switzerland or France, no worse, but richer, younger and more victorious.

Even if this was not the case, even if the smell of rot was already hanging in the air, even if the drugs prescribed for sick Russia were not suitable: go and kill the stench with leaven and birch spirit, as they often tried to do under Alexander. The bathhouse is not the best remedy for gangrene, national renewal is not the most effective vaccine against diseases of the musculoskeletal system - what else is the state related to the nation indirectly? - but this is some kind of medicine, a means that leaves hope, and it is from this point of view that, in our opinion, the main events of Alexander’s reign, including the so-called “Russian style,” should be perceived.

In contrast to the intellectual Slavism of the 30s and the hysterical pan-Slavism of the 70s, the Russian-Byzantine aesthetics of the 80s was based on fundamentally different and much more complex foundations. Its basis in the ideal sense was Orthodox authenticity, its political basis was the new European self-awareness that arose in Russian society during the foreign policy trials of the two previous reigns, but its purely practical basis was not all these beautiful and somewhat abstract objects, but things that were much simpler and mundane - managerial nationalism, distrust of people of other faiths and foreigners.

Today, when we have fully experienced all the temptations of extremes - from Nazism to universal cynicism - it is easy to approach the policies of Alexander III with a ready-made standard. He united the Finnish post office with the imperial one - a tyrant and a tyrant; he tightened the legislation regarding persons of the Jewish faith - a tyrant, a tyrant, a despot. He abolished the Polish Bank, making it the Warsaw office of the St. Petersburg Bank - a tyrant, a despot, a bourbon... And he abolished the autonomy of Poland, that's it... Not a good person.

At the same time, one important circumstance is somehow missed. The same Poles, the spoiled stepchildren of the Russian Empire, took up arms every time a cloud appeared on the horizon that had darkened their national horizon: whether it was a sidelong glance, or competition for the heart of a beautiful lady, or the governor’s new britzka.

The disturbances of the early 30s and early 60s left a deep mark on the history and culture of both peoples. Since then, the Russians have been glorified as oppressors and suppressors, while the Poles, no matter what they did next, were guaranteed a martyr's crown in the eyes of the simple-minded and prudent Europeans. At the same time, one could only imagine what a storm Alexander’s abolition of national autonomy, the Kingdom of Poland, and the proclamation in its place of the Vistula region, a territorial entity, which, in particular, would be subject to all the features of the administrative management of the internal provinces, would cause.

What would you think? Nothing.

Nope... Nope.

Or, even better, N-I-C-E-G-O. Not a single serious performance. Nothing that could be compared with the clashes of thirty years ago. That is, bourbon is bourbon, but on you...

Since the time of the Kosciuszko uprising (1794), the Russian government knew how to defeat the gentry freemen. The Polish nobility is ready at every minute to call for action against the hated Asian regime. It’s another matter that for some time others had to fight: it’s not an aristocratic thing to die for freedom. Obviously, in this state of affairs, the tasks of any administration boiled down to providing all possible support to the average person in the street, so that he, who had sufficient human resources and capital, remained loyal to the power of the Russian Tsar for as long as possible.

The Russians tried to literally impose a capitalist order in Poland in the hope that the new masters of life: textile magnates and shipyard owners - would turn out to be much more accommodating partners and would be able, if not to appreciate, then to come to terms with the rules of the game that the officials sent from St. Petersburg were trying to adhere to. . The relative calm in the Vistula region demonstrated better than other evidence that Russia was on the right path.

The administrative task facing the government of Alexander Alexandrovich was the same in Poland, the Caucasus, and the Olonets province - throughout the entire Empire. Equally difficult. The difficulty gave rise to problems of understanding, and, of course, it was easier for contemporaries. From the point of view of a modern “civilized” person, some orders and actions of the then bureaucracy seem absolutely irrational, not dictated by anything other than self-will and xenophobia. Was it really worth establishing an unspoken qualification for foreigners to occupy leadership positions? Was it really necessary to determine a quota (1887) for admission to higher educational institutions for persons of the Jewish faith (3% in the capitals, 5% in the Pale of Settlement)? And the decree of 1889 banning the admission of Jews to the position of sworn attorneys looks absolutely wild, which actually closed such a profitable legal field for them.

Yes, Emperor Alexander Alexandrovich did not favor foreigners - as well as foreigners (he was a consistent man, flint, granite, block!) - but it was at least stupid and short-sighted, firstly, to deny him the right to be himself in pre-politically correct era (he simply did not know that a century later it would not be accepted to do so), and secondly, to recognize the possibility of the existence of certain - albeit seemingly barbaric to us - rational grounds that substantiated such a position.

The distrust of foreign nationalities in the Alexander era can be explained in at least two ways. It is clear that the main enemy that the Russian Tsar tried to defeat was bribery, which accompanies, like a hammerhead fish, any reform, as we now know. And what kind of bribery and embezzlement accompany the Great Reform - we would only have to guess about this if we didn’t have a chance to experience it on our own skin. Apparently, the non-Russian population of the empire in this sense represented, from the point of view of the then administration, a much greater danger than its indigenous inhabitants. In relation to the inhabitants of the western provinces, this is understandable: the new type of economic relations that triumphed there gave them certain advantages over the Great Russians: in management experience, mobility, the habit of avoiding proper taxation, etc. If not theft and quiet robbery, then at least economic cunning, the relative impossibility of monitoring the entrepreneurial activities of foreigners with due care - this is what, in all likelihood, haunted the managers of Alexander’s reign.

But there were much stronger reasons for, if not completely isolating, then at least making it as difficult as possible for national minorities to gain access to government and, as a consequence, to education. These reasons are administrative modernization, which was consistently carried out during the 80s. What is commonly called “counter-reforms” was in fact a set of complexly interconnected stabilizing measures designed, on the one hand, to prevent the erosion of the class boundaries of Russian society, and on the other, to determine the direction of development of each class in the sense and way how it was beneficial to the state.

Electoral and property legislation was changed in the sense that no one other than the nobles could have a significant influence on the management process, be it the zemstvo or anything else. The number of persons who had the right to vote in elections of local government bodies was steadily declining (for example, in Moscow it amounted to no more than seven-tenths of a percent of the total number of residents), the number of nobles in various kinds of public institutions was steadily increasing. Coupled with the famous decree of 1887 on “cook’s children”, which prohibited the admission of children of servants (coachmen, maids, footmen) into higher educational institutions, that is, to some extent it also hit the nobles, who were hardly able to refuse protection to their faithful people, the initial conditions were created in order to transform class differences into purely administrative differences. Russian nobles, people for the most part with principles and small fortunes, were faced with the need, in the words of the poet, to “provide both independence and honor” with their labors, that is, to go into the sovereign’s service, which, in fact, was what Alexander III and his employees.

The Russian nobles were bound by a common origin, by corporate ethics, by cultural identity, in the end - from the point of view of the model of public administration, a situation close to ideal. The rich semi-nobility of the 60s, all these “gentlemen of Tashkent” and “gentlemen of the silent ones”, were to be replaced by a new, relatively modest and relatively honest bureaucrat - an idyll and nothing more.

At the same time, it would be wrong, as was often done before, to interpret the measures of the Alexander era as purely protective and aimed exclusively at maintaining the existing status quo. The peasant question was resolved in the 80s, if not liberally - in a manner favorable to farming - then, without any doubt, quite sensibly. The establishment of a peasant land bank (1882), the abolition of the poll tax (1887), coupled with measures indispensable for the Russian government after 1861 to strengthen the community, marked a fundamentally new approach to the future structure of the Russian state. The empire could and, in all likelihood, should have become not quite an empire, but something else, perhaps even a national state .

But, if you allow, we will continue talking about this next week.