The Emergence of Russian Liberalism: Alexander Kunitsyn in Context, 1783-1840 (Palgrave Studies in Cultural and Intellectual History)

PALGRAVE STUDIES IN CULTURAL AND INTELLECTUAL HISTORY Series Editors Anthony J. La Vopa, North Carolina State Universit...

Author: Julia Berest

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PALGRAVE STUDIES IN CULTURAL AND INTELLECTUAL HISTORY Series Editors Anthony J. La Vopa, North Carolina State University. Suzanne Marchand, Louisiana State University. Javed Majeed, Queen Mary, University of London. The Palgrave Studies in Cultural and Intellectual History series has three primary aims: to close divides between intellectual and cultural approaches, thus bringing them into mutually enriching interactions; to encourage interdisciplinarity in intellectual and cultural history; and to globalize the field, both in geographical scope and in subjects and methods. This series is open to work on a range of modes of intellectual inquiry, including social theory and the social sciences; the natural sciences; economic thought; literature; religion; gender and sexuality; philosophy; political and legal thought; psychology; and music and the arts. It encompasses not just North America but Africa, Asia, Eurasia, Europe, Latin America, and the Middle East. It includes both nationally focused studies and studies of intellectual and cultural exchanges between different nations and regions of the world, and encompasses research monographs, synthetic studies, edited collections, and broad works of reinterpretation. Regardless of methodology or geography, all books in the series are historical in the fundamental sense of undertaking rigorous contextual analysis. Published by Palgrave Macmillan: Indian Mobilities in the West, 1900–1947: Gender, Performance, Embodiment By Shompa Lahiri The Shelley-Byron Circle and the Idea of Europe By Paul Stock Culture and Hegemony in the Colonial Middle East By Yaseen Noorani Recovering Bishop Berkeley: Virtue and Society in the Anglo-Irish Context By Scott Breuninger The Reading of Russian Literature in China: A Moral Example and Manual of Practice By Mark Gamsa Rammohun Roy and the Making of Victorian Britain By Lynn Zastoupil

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Carl Gustav Jung: Avant-Garde Conservative By Jay Sherry Law and Politics in British Colonial Thought: Transpositions of Empire By Shaunnagh Dorsett and Ian Hunter, eds. Sir John Malcolm and the Creation of British India By Jack Harrington The American Bourgeoisie: Distinction and Identity in the Nineteenth Century By Sven Beckert and Julia B. Rosenbaum, eds. Benjamin Constant and the Birth of French Liberalism By K. Steven Vincent The Emergence of Russian Liberalism: Alexander Kunitsyn in Context, 1783–1840 By Julia Berest The Gospel of Beauty in the Progressive Era: Reforming American Verse and Values By Lisa Szefel Knowledge Production, Pedagogy, and Institutions in Colonial India By Indra Sengupta and Daud Ali, eds. Character, Self, and Sociability in the Scottish Enlightenment (forthcoming) By Thomas Ahnert and Susan Manning, eds. Nature Engaged: Science in Practice from the Renaissance to the Present (forthcoming) By Jessica Riskin and Mario Biagioli, eds.

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The Emergence of Russian Liberalism Alexander Kunitsyn in Context, 1783–1840 Julia Berest

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THE EMERGENCE OF RUSSIAN LIBERALISM

Copyright © Julia Berest, 2011. All rights reserved. First published in 2011 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN® in the United States—a division of St. Martin’s Press LLC, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010. Where this book is distributed in the UK, Europe and the rest of the world, this is by Palgrave Macmillan, a division of Macmillan Publishers Limited, registered in England, company number 785998, of Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS. Palgrave Macmillan is the global academic imprint of the above companies and has companies and representatives throughout the world. Palgrave® and Macmillan® are registered trademarks in the United States, the United Kingdom, Europe and other countries. ISBN: 978–0–230–11173–8 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Berest, Julia, 1976– The emergence of Russian liberalism : Alexander Kunitsyn in context, 1783–1840 / by Julia Berest. p. cm.—(Palgrave studies in cultural and intellectual history) Includes bibliographical references. ISBN 978–0–230–11173–8 (hardback) 1. Kunitsyn, Aleksandr Petrovich, 1783–1840. 2. Kunitsyn, Aleksandr Petrovich, 1783–1840—Political and social views. 3. Intellectuals— Russia—Biography. 4. Law teachers—Russia—Biography. 5. Philosophers—Russia—Biography. 6. Liberalism—Russia—History— 19th century. 7. Natural law—History—19th century. 8. Russia— Intellectual life—1801–1917. 9. Russia—Politics and government—1801–1917. 10. Russia—History—Alexander I, 1801–1825. I. Title. CT1218.K827B47 2011 947⬘.07092—dc22 [B]

2010045410

A catalogue record of the book is available from the British Library. Design by Newgen Imaging Systems (P) Ltd., Chennai, India. First edition: May 2011 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 Printed in the United States of America.

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Contents Acknowledgments

vii

Introduction

1

1 Formative Years

13

2

Years in the Tsarskoe Selo Lyceum

31

3

Kunitsyn in the Son of Fatherland

59

4

Kunitsyn and Nicholas Turgenev: “The Society of the Year 1819”

85

5

The Natural Law Tradition in Russia

105

6

Kunitsyn on Natural Law

143

7

In the Midst of Conservative Reaction

161

Epilogue

185

Conclusion

193

Notes

199

Bibliography

245

Index

259

v

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Acknowledgments I would like to express my deepest gratitude to Professor Charles Ruud from the University of Western Ontario, whose guidance during my years as a graduate student made this book possible. He generously spent his time helping me, an immigrant scholar from Eastern Europe, to adjust to the English-speaking academic culture. I am also extremely grateful to Professor Eli Nathans, who provided many valuable and insightful comments on selected parts of my work. His knowledge and enthusiasm for intellectual history have been a source of inspiration for me. Among my graduate teachers, Professor Neville Thompson showed much support and kindness to me. To David Murphy, Library Assistant at the Weldon Library (UWO), I owe my debt of gratitude for helping me locate rare Russian books in the libraries of the United States and Canada. Without his help this book would have been much shorter. Ekaterina Budagova from the Russian National Library at St. Petersburg also assisted me with obtaining some pre-revolutionary Russian publications. I also wish to thank Professor László Kontler from Central European University, whose stimulating classes on comparative intellectual history awakened my interest in Russian and European thought. Last but not least, I am grateful to my parents and my husband, who have supported me throughout the years of research and writing. Their love is precious to me.

vii

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Introduction

As a law professor and philosopher, Alexander Petrovich Kunitsyn had an unusual career, which mirrored major progressive and conservative policies of the Russian government under Alexander I (1801–25). A person of obscure social origin from a small provincial town, he was one of the few Russian students selected to study at state cost at St. Petersburg Pedagogical Institute and later Göttingen University as part of the government project for creating the cadres of native teachers in Russia. Upon graduation in 1811 Kunitsyn was appointed to the position of professor in the elite Tsarskoe Selo Lyceum, where he earned a reputation as a talented educator and a favorite teacher of Alexander Pushkin, the greatest poet of Russia’s romantic age. Taking advantage of the improved publishing opportunities, Kunitsyn made himself known as a liberal-minded publicist and an author of one of the first Russian works on natural law, which, alas, appeared at a time when Alexander I’s liberal era was already drawing to an end. The first signs of the impending change began to appear shortly after the Napoleonic Wars, but to Kunitsyn, a beneficiary of the government’s educational policies, they did not become obvious until much later. Kunitsyn’s intention to present his Natural Law to Alexander I was indicative of the reformist hopes created by the tsar’s liberal pronouncements during the early nineteenth century. The government’s interest in promoting legal education in Russian universities must have further encouraged Kunitsyn’s expectations. Courses in natural law were first established in Russia by Peter the Great, who sought to borrow from the West not only technical knowledge but also the ideology useful for building a modernized version of the autocratic state. German natural law in its Wolffian tradition, which emphasized the ethos of public duties over individual rights, appeared more suitable for the tsar’s purposes than any other variants of natural law.1 The ambition to improve legal education was 1

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The Emergence of Russian Liberalism

intermittently kept alive by the Russian monarchs throughout the eighteenth century, but it was not until the early years of Alexander’s reign that the authorities made a concerted effort to seek out qualified teachers and textbooks to meet the growing need for trained government servants. Almost a dozen teaching manuals on natural law, written mostly by German visiting professors, were published during the first two decades of the nineteenth century—more than in the whole period since the introduction of natural law in Russia. A decision of the government to entrust universities with the function of self- censorship in matters of academic writing was an important liberal gesture, which spurred the development of the book market and, with it, the interest in serious philosophical literature among the reading public. The fact that the Ministry of Education recruited some of the well-known German Kantians to teach in the newly established Russian universities must have strengthened the impression that the government was in a liberal mood. Yet, the authorities never intended natural law classes to become a training ground for liberal thinking. By choosing German rather than French or English professors, the government followed Peter the Great’s tradition, hoping to bring Russian education up to the modern standards without, at the same time, exposing Russian students to undesirable ideas. Indeed, German teachers in Russia, despite their self-professed Kantianism, approached Kant in a selective manner, which diluted much of his liberal thought. Kant’s most provocative ideas, including his rejection of hereditary privileges and paternalistic government as incompatible with the notion of personal autonomy, were invariably ignored and often replaced with the principles going back to the Wolffian tradition of absolutist ethics and politics. It was Kunitsyn’s interpretation of natural law, with its emphasis on liberal individualism, that changed the government’s attitude toward the discipline of natural law and the principles of university autonomy. Based largely on the synthesis of Kantian and Smithian ideas, Kunitsyn’s Natural Law was more liberal than any other book on this subject approved for use in Russian universities. In 1821 it became to the Russian conservatives a standard of political unreliability by which censors would come to judge other works on this subject available in Russia. The same year the authorities banned Kunitsyn from teaching, removed his book from all the libraries, and put the discipline of natural law under intense scrutiny. Kunitsyn’s “case” marked the eclipse of Alexander’s liberal era in education, but it proved difficult to suppress altogether the spread

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Introduction 3

of liberal ideas in Russia. Toward the mid-1820s formal education and self-taught knowledge acquired a greater importance for the members of the privileged classes, many of whom came to appreciate learning not only for career purposes but also for its own sake. By the mid- century this development fostered the formation of the Russian intelligentsia, which by virtue of the value they placed on independent and critical thinking, found themselves in opposition to autocracy.2 During Nicholas I’s reactionary regime, faculties of law and history continued to provide some form of outlet for intellectual liberalism, however modest and disguised.3 Without a doubt, the beginnings of this tradition should be sought in the early decades of the nineteenth century, when legal education and especially courses in natural law awoke many Russians to the notions of civil and political rights. The authorities, it appears, never fully anticipated that their effort to improve the training of future state officials by following the model of German education would shortly lead to the spread of liberal thinking in Russia. Although Kunitsyn was unable to resume philosophical writing, his dismissal did not spell a disaster for his career. In another twist of fate, Kunitsyn was appointed in 1826 a member of the codification committee, while his main accuser, Dmitrii Runich, who happened to incur the displeasure of Nicholas I, was fired from his post and left to languish in oblivion for the rest of his life. After serving for two decades as a government official, Kunitsyn ended his days at the rank of Actual State Counselor (Deistvitel’nyi Statskii Sovetnik)—the fifth top rank in Russia, which gave him a status of hereditary nobleman. He left, however, no children who might have inherited his status, and one can wonder how Kunitsyn would have felt about it given his idea that social privileges should be earned rather than received as a birth right. Very few thinkers in the history of Russian thought were such strong advocates of individual autonomy, legal guarantees of civil rights, equality of opportunity, and a free-market economy—all those principles that constitute the core of liberal individualism in the West.4 In Russia, each of these principles, if taken separately, could be found in the writings of many intellectuals, but they rarely converged in the thought of individual thinkers. The notion of personal dignity and freedom, for instance, was central to the writings of Slavophiles and Westernizers during the 1840s, but the means of securing these values advocated by both groups, were not necessarily conducive to individual freedom, as understood by the ideology of liberal individualism. Most Westernizers recognized the importance of legality

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for securing the rights of the individual, but they felt apprehensive about the social cost of unbridled competition and tended to place too much emphasis on the rational state in the manner influenced by Hegelian philosophy. The more radical of them, such as Belinskii and Herzen, came to accept socialist solutions to the problem of freedom. Slavophiles, by contrast, decried the strong state as an instrument of coercion, but they also rejected economic individualism and legalist culture for their depersonalizing and antisocial tendencies, as they saw them.5 The reasons for this reluctance to uphold individualist values have much to do with the conditions of Russia’s historical development— the persistence of serfdom, which accustomed peasants to collectivist thinking; Russia’s economic backwardness, which, to some extent, justified the need for a regulated economy and protectionist measures; and most importantly, the absence of civil freedoms, which hampered individual self-expression.6 Although the Table of Ranks made some room for social mobility, the notion of legal opportunities had a limited relevance to Russia where economic privileges and legal rights were class- defined, making it difficult for low-born individuals to climb up the social ladder.7 Given the predominance of anti-individualist thinking in Russian tradition, it is all the more interesting to examine the ideas of those intellectuals who stood out as an exception to this trend. Kunitsyn was one of them and, probably, the earliest one. Even among Russian liberals Kunitsyn was unusual for his unqualified acceptance of the laissez-faire philosophy with its underlying principles of private property, self-regulating economy, competition, and entrepreneurial freedom for everyone. Kunitsyn’s main focus was negative freedom—the right of the individual to act freely within his private domain, the right to choose his occupation, and, ultimately the right to shape his life within the limits set by the law and the moral principles embodied in Kantian categorical imperative. Kunitsyn rightly understood Kant’s concept of dignity as applying to all human beings without regard to their social status or economic situation. He was convinced that serfdom, and not any inherent backwardness, was responsible for keeping peasants from becoming their own masters in both moral and economic sense. The democratic implications of this claim set Kunitsyn apart from the gentry liberals, who tended to look down on the peasantry, despite being advocates for the abolition of serfdom.8 Nor did Kunitsyn share a paternalistic attitude toward the

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Introduction 5

lower classes common among the well-meaning Russian landlords. As a true Kantian, he rejected the idea that virtue or happiness can be imposed upon individuals, even for their own good. This principle, he argued, contradicted the very essence of individual well-being, which required the exercise of free will and reason. At the same time, Kunitsyn’s views betray a certain naiveté of an academician who had too much faith in a free-market economy as a panacea to all the maladies associated with economic backwardness. Behind his defense of private property there loomed an unresolved question of how to reconcile peasants’ need for land with the principle of the inviolability of private ownership. Clearly, in a country where for centuries land belonged almost exclusively to the nobility as one of their social privileges, the unqualified application of economic laissez-faire would not be as easy as Kunitsyn implied. Kunitsyn did not embrace these views right from the start of his teaching career. It took him several years to develop a deeper understanding of the implications inherent in Kantian and Smithian liberal ideas. The habit of independent reading that Kunitsyn acquired in Göttingen University set him on a path to liberal thinking. While abroad, he simply ignored the admonitions of his Russian supervisors not to plunge into philosophical reading without proper guidance from his teachers. Kunitsyn’s life experience might have also had some impact on his philosophical outlook. As a person who worked his way up to the respectable life of an academic, Kunitsyn lived by the ideals that he preached in his teaching. It does not mean, of course, that each social upstart in Russia would be inclined towards individualistic values, but in Kunitsyn’s case, his life was a perfect illustration of how an individual could advance his private interests while at same time contributing to the common good. Despite Kunitsyn’s importance as a liberal thinker and prominent teacher, his intellectual legacy is a marginal topic in Western and Russian scholarship. In Soviet historiography Kunitsyn frequently appeared in connection with his influence upon Pushkin and several of the future Decembrists, who were students in his courses on natural law and political economy. However, Soviet accounts of his work suffer from the ideological bias typical of Marxist scholarship. In two unpublished dissertations, written in 1953 and 1967, A. Zaitsev and F. Smirnov judged Kunitsyn’s accomplishments as a writer by the degree of his radicalism and materialism, which they naturally found wanting.9 Both Smirnov and Zaitsev minimized Western influences

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upon Kunitsyn, trying, instead, to present his work as a continuation of Alexander Radishchev’s thought in keeping with the theory, then dominant in Soviet scholarship, according to which Russian revolutionary thinking developed uninterruptedly and in a progressive fashion from the time of the Enlightenment to the Decembrist uprising and beyond, culminating with the thought of Lenin.10 Another Soviet authority on intellectual history—Z. A. Kamenskii—praised Kunitsyn as a principled opponent of serfdom but criticized his failure to go beyond the notion of legal equality to embrace a more democratic view of socioeconomic justice.11 In the late- and post-Soviet periods, when Russian scholars felt less constrained by rigid ideological schemes, they acknowledged Kunitsyn’s creative borrowings from the Western thinkers and gave credit to his attempt to popularize liberal natural law in Russia, but his intellectual legacy still remained a secondary topic in the studies on Alexander I’s period.12 Western historians, in turn, bypassed Kunitsyn for the more vocal and publicly visible liberals of the mid- and late nineteenth century, whom they identified as pioneers of the Russian liberal movement.13 In fact, none of the liberal-minded intellectuals of the early nineteenth century (with the exception of Michael Speranskii) has received sufficient attention in Western scholarship.14 Nor is this period recognized as the beginning of the Russian liberal tradition even though contemporaries commonly viewed the early years of Alexander I’s reign as “liberal spring” and many Russian intellectuals used the term “liberal” to identify their ideas. Recent Western studies on educational reforms in nineteenthcentury Russia invariably mention Kunitsyn but only inasmuch as his expulsion from the university illustrates the character of the educational policies toward the end of Alexander I’s reign.15 A short article written in 1964 by Barry Hollingsworth still stands as the only source of Kunitsyn’s intellectual biography for English-speaking readers.16 While an interesting subject in itself, Kunitsyn’s intellectual life helps illuminate the origins and the nature of the Russian liberal tradition—a topic that has generated a lot of controversy and no definitive answers. Most historians, both in Russia and the West, tend to associate liberalism with political movements and programmatic demands rather than a set of values and philosophical ideas.17 From this perspective, Russian liberalism was a belated and fragile phenomenon, which did not emerge until the mid-nineteenth century or, by some accounts, the post-1905 era, when the autocratic government

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Introduction 7

finally allowed the creation of political parties and a parliament. Underlying this approach is the tendency to measure the success of Russian liberalism by the standards of Western political history. Marc Raeff, for instance, argued that the development of “individual theoretical elements of liberalism” in Russia did not amount to much because they failed to develop into a political and social program. “What matters,” he wrote “is not the individual concept or idea but the dynamic relationship in which it finds itself to other ideas and its historical environment . . . in Russia, at least until the 1880s, the relationship between liberal ideas and historical circumstances was an inert one.”18 Similarly, William Chamberlin asserted that liberalism can only develop if both institutional conditions (such as freedom of speech and “a freely elected parliament”) and social foundations (a strong middle class) are present. In Imperial Russia, none of them could be found.19 Although a comparative approach is useful in explaining why liberalism in Russia remained politically weak, it often prevents historians from viewing the development of the Russian liberal tradition in its own context and on its own terms. In the West, liberal ideas grew out of the thinking influenced by the tradition of feudal liberties; it took some time before these ideas transformed into a political program and a course of action.20 In Russia, where feudal tradition was absent and native philosophical discourse remained limited (until the end of the eighteenth century), liberal principles were adopted from Western thought but they remained in the form of a philosophical outlook and value system for much longer than in the West, mostly because Russian autocracy held control over the public means of expression and was in a position to suppress any political dissent.21 Yet, this fact should not diminish the importance of liberal tradition in Russia. As an ideological stance and philosophy of life, liberalism was espoused by many educated Russians, who succeeded in creating the elements of a civil society despite the pressures of a paternalistic monarchy. Their moral independence and critical attitude toward the government could not but undermine the autocracy’s power. For Russia, it was not a small achievement.22 Some historians have doubts that the terms “liberal” and “liberalism” apply to Russia of the nineteenth century because none of the Russian intellectuals accepted the liberal creed in toto. Daniel Field has argued that a “liberal” would be a person who favored civil equality, legality, the security of the citizen’s rights, economic freedom,

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and “would constrain the autocrat and the bureaucracy while providing for some public participation in the work of government”; a liberal would also be opposed to “caste privileges.” Not one among the Russian “liberals,” in Field’s opinion, espoused all of these principles.23 Indeed, different individuals who identified themselves as liberals tended to favor some aspects of the liberal creed more than the others, but instead of discarding the term altogether, we may try to understand what it meant for those who used it in self-identification or as a pejorative label against their opponents.24 It is an important fact that the designation “liberal” appeared frequently in both official and private documents of the time; it applied equally to the highranking officials who tried to push the government for reforms, and to the university students whose liberalism mainly involved reading and spreading political verses in an attempt to assert their right to freedom of thought. It is anachronistic to reject the validity of the term simply because its meaning and use in nineteenthcentury Russia were more fluid than today. Very few historians have challenged the idea that liberalism necessarily implies political programs and movements. In his 1967 unpublished doctoral dissertation “Russian liberalism: The Years of Promise: 1842–1855” Anthony Netting adopted a broad definition of liberalism—as “a pattern of behavior impelling men, without their full awareness, to think and speak and act in a similar way.”25 At the core of liberalism, according to Netting, was the conviction that “the individual and his unique personality mattered more than anything else”; that equality of opportunity had to be open to everyone because birthright privileges were less important than personal talents; and finally, that custom and tradition should not obstruct the development of one’s personality. A liberal, then, is “one whose views are variations, however distorted, of these themes, or more realistically, whose behavior presumes such views.”26 Although Netting may have gone too far in extending the boundaries of liberalism, he made a valuable point that in Russia, where autocracy effectively controlled any political sentiments and pronouncements, liberalism found expression in artistic, literary, and scholarly forms that exalted the idea of human dignity and individuality. A similar idea runs through Derek Offord’s study of the leading Russian liberals whose creative careers commenced during the years of political stagnation under Nicholas I. All of them spoke to the

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Introduction 9

public through nonpolitical media, ranging from historical scholarship to literary criticism, and their use of the term “liberal” was rather vague, implying not much more than the spirit of opposition to Russian autocracy.27 Yet, their intellectual endeavors, if politically ineffectual, helped establish in Russia “a humane culture” that sustained the ideal of creative individuality despite the persistence of autocracy. The works of Netting and Offord filled a large gap in our knowledge of mid-nineteenthcentury liberalism in Russia, but liberals of the earlier period remain largely neglected.28 Kunitsyn’s intellectual life provides a convenient case study to begin reexamining the dominant view of the chronological frameworks and the nature of early liberalism in Russia. Although the intellectuals who identified themselves as liberals did not get together into a formal group (much like the recognized liberals of the later period), they were united by their commitment to a liberal cause—a unity that rested on the bonds of personal friendship and trust. Foremost among them were the brothers Turgenev, Prince Viazemskii, and Pushkin. All of them were hereditary nobles by origin and public servants by occupation; all were well educated and driven by the desire to persuade the government to undertake further reforms and promote “civic enlightenment” in Russia, by which they meant public awareness of the individual’s entitlement to liberal rights. Awakening the general public from its apathy, timorousness, and traditionalist thinking was no less difficult an enterprise than reaching out to the government through reform proposals. In a way, liberals of this period are easier to define than their successors in the mid- century, when Russia’s growing political and economic backwardness generated a set of conflicting responses ranging from the Slavophile’s patriarchal utopia, to socialist visions of Russia’s future and more moderate legalist approaches, the elements of which could be mixed in the thought of individual thinkers. By contrast, until the last years of Alexander’s reign, the leading liberals tended to see themselves as a small but important minority standing in opposition to all those who resisted reforms in the liberal direction. Their use of the term “liberal” was rather broad but hardly complicated. They desired to see in Russia the abolition of serfdom and the introduction of a constitution that would enact the rule of law, civil freedoms, especially the freedom of speech, and a representative government, at least in the form of an advisory parliament. Resentful of the autocracy’s paternalistic policies, which obliterated

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any distinctions between public and private realms, they longed for negative freedom even more than they did for the right to participate in political decision making. At the same time, their stance was one of loyal opposition, of which they made no secret from the tsar. Like liberals in the West,29 they hoped to see these reforms implemented in a peaceful and gradual way—through government measures and the public’s acceptance of liberal values. Certainly there were some variations in views even within this small group of intellectuals, but they were spared many difficult questions that would later divide the ranks of Russian liberals. Such issues as the social cost of capitalism or Russia’s deteriorating image in the West would often drive the intellectuals of the 1840s and 1850s to choose a precarious position between liberal and socialist pathways, effectively blurring their political identity. By contrast, early Russian liberals lived during the period when socialist ideas were yet unknown and Russia still enjoyed the reputation of being Europe’s savior from Napoleonic oppression. Compared to the Nicholaevan period, the liberals of the early nineteenth century also had more opportunities to speak their mind—through reform proposals, journalistic publications, scholarly works, and manuscript articles intended for the audience of the like-minded. The formation of the Northern Society in 1821, which brought about the ill-fated Decembrist uprising four years later, was a turning point in the history of early liberalism. Even though the Decembrists aspired to liberal constitutional order in Russia (with the exception of a republicanist minority headed by Pavel Pestel), they were ready to employ the revolutionary means that were fundamentally alien to the liberals. Nicholas Turgenev’s departure from the Decembrist movement illuminates the choice the early liberals had to make under the circumstances of the autocracy’s growing resistance to reforms. Kunitsyn had much in common with the leading gentry liberals of this period: he was good friends with Nicholas Turgenev and his erstwhile student Pushkin, whose appreciation of Kunitsyn’s inspirational role earned him a place in history, probably more than anything else; he aspired to the same ideal of legal order and civil rights, but by virtue of his background and lifestyle Kunitsyn differed from the aristocratic liberals in a number of ways. While he was not in a position to affect the work of the government, his attempts at spreading liberal thought in Russia were a significant endeavor for a

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Introduction 11

country that lacked legal consciousness and the knowledge of natural human rights. He was not, of course, an original thinker, relying for the most part on the works of Kant and Smith, but he tended to fuse and adapt their ideas in a creative way and in a language that made them accessible to the novice Russian reader. Understanding the distinctiveness of Kunitsyn’s views, the limitations he faced as a thinker in autocratic Russia, and the government’s response to his Natural Law requires a detailed contextual analysis that inevitably leads far beyond Kunitsyn himself toward such related topics as the emergence of Russian political journalism and civil society; the establishment in Russia of natural law discipline and the public response to it; the relations of Kunitsyn to other leading intellectuals of his time and their activities together. A comprehensive picture of the early liberalism in Russia still waits to be written, but Kunitsyn’s intellectual biography clearly illustrates that the Russian liberal tradition had developed earlier than is commonly believed. For the purpose of contextual analysis, the book follows both chronological and thematic approaches. Chapters One through Three treat Kunitsyn’s life from his childhood to the late 1810s, including the period of his journalistic activity. Chapter Four describes the circle to which Kunitsyn belonged, with a special emphasis on Nicholas Turgenev, who collaborated with Kunitsyn on the project of publishing a political journal. The similarities and differences between them help illuminate Kunitsyn’s identity as a liberal. Chapter Five surveys the establishment of legal philosophy as an academic discipline in Russian universities and provides a comparative analysis of major works on natural law published in early-nineteenthcentury Russia. This discussion sets the stage for the subsequent analysis of Kunitsyn’s legal thought during his mature period. A concluding chapter examines the official policy toward the teaching of natural law in Russian educational institutions in the years following Kunitsyn’s dismissal from St. Petersburg University. Surviving archival material documents Kunitsyn’s life somewhat unevenly and should be blended with published sources. The documents available in the Central State Historical Archive of St. Petersburg (TsGIA) cover primarily the first part of his life, up to the year of his expulsion from St. Petersburg University. These collections contain papers concerning Kunitsyn’s studies in the St. Petersburg Pedagogical Institute, his trip abroad, and teaching activity in

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12 The Emergence of Russian Liberalism

Tsarskoe Selo Lyceum. Another important group of documents, preserved in the Institute of Russian Literature (IRLI), includes official memos and records of the Main School Administration, which undertook a review of Kunitsyn’s book and other works on natural law in Russia. Some of these documents have been known but little or unsystematically explored in the literature, while others will be introduced for the first time. Kunitsyn’s life after the expulsion from St. Petersburg University in 1821 is the least documented segment of his biography. Much of what we know about his further career comes from a detailed necrology published in the St. Petersburg newspaper Russkii Invalid and his official service record, which lists his activities in chronological order. Apart from archival collections, the diary and letters of his friend Nicholas Turgenev supplement the biographical evidence on Kunitsyn and provide a valuable context to his life within the realities of autocratic Russia. The paucity of documents pertaining to Kunitsyn’s life outside the public realm might also be the reason why scholars so far have overlooked Kunitsyn as an object of study. However, Kunitsyn’s writings and service record reveal a lot about his mind and personal qualities. Moreover, Kunitsyn’s significance lies not so much in his personality as in his contribution to Russian intellectual life during the crucial period when the intelligentsia was coming of age.

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1 Formative Years

Alexander Petrovich Kunitsyn was born in 1783, one of four children, in the small village of Koi in Tver’ province into the family of a parish sexton (d’iachek). In 1797, he entered a district church gymnasium (dukhovnoe uchilishche) in Kashyn, from where he proceeded to the Ecclesiastical Tver’ seminary, which constituted the upper level of the theological training in a triad of provincial church schools.1 Kunitsyn’s education was apparently determined by his background and a desire to achieve a more secure social status. Families of sextons occupied a precarious position between the serf population and ordained clergy (archpriests, priests, and deacons) who enjoyed the status of a free estate and were exempt from conscription service, corporal punishment, and poll tax. Along with sacristans (ponomar’) sextons belonged to the lower category of churchmen (tserkovnosluzhyteli) responsible for cleaning the church and assisting the priest with minor liturgical duties. The sextons’ position within the church hierarchy entitled them to material support from the local parish— usually a half or quarter of a priest’s income—but did not protect their sons, if unemployed in the church, from being inscribed on the poll tax registries or, worse, conscripted into the army.2 The path to higher social status lay through seminary training, which starting from 1770 became a strict prerequisite for receiving ordination and a position of parish priest.3 Despite the financial burden that years of schooling placed on the family of churchmen, social incentives were strong enough to make fathers enthusiastic about sending their sons to a seminary. If local church funds were available, the neediest students could receive a stipend, but most seminarians had to pay tuition and provide for their living expenses.4 The fact that two of Kunitsyn’s brothers also received education in the district school and the provincial seminary

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indicates not only their father’s desire to protect his sons from conscription, but also his secure, if perhaps modest, income.5 Material provision for clergy and churchmen largely came from fees for liturgical services, donations in kind, and income from the land attached to the parish church. Because the first two sources yielded the biggest share, the clergy’s income greatly depended on the size of the local parish. Tver’ province belonged to the Upper Volga black soil region with a proportionately dense peasant population, which was able to provide a decent livelihood for its clergy.6 Clergymen in more sparsely populated areas were far less fortunate. Seminaries offered a six-year program of instruction subdivided into four levels—a preparatory school (for studying Church Slavonic), elementary school (devoted to Latin), advanced Latin school (which included courses in poesy and rhetoric), and the school of philosophy and theology. Because of the heavy emphasis on Latin studies at the expense of Church Slavonic and preaching in vernacular Russian, seminaries provided education that was less purely ecclesiastical and more humanistic, quite suitable for nonclerical careers. From the 1770s, a provision for offering instruction in history, geography, and arithmetic, initially made by the Spiritual Regulation of 1721, came to be more strictly enforced, although seminaries still showed little interest in these subjects. The secular component in seminarian education became more pronounced when seminaries added French and German classes to their curriculum in the late 1760s, which happened to be a popular choice because of their practical utility.7 Despite the growing demand for an ecclesiastical education, seminaries routinely suffered from financial problems and poor- quality instruction. Funding, which came from various sources—fixed government allowances, student fees, and occasional grants from the tsars or church hierarchs—was still insufficient to entice talented teachers and provide students with decent study conditions. Teaching in seminaries carried with it little social respect but required hard work in an embarrassingly poor and frequently unsanitary environment. In most seminaries, the same premises were used for studying, eating, and sleeping. As a result, they were properly cleaned and ventilated only during vacations.8 Another recurrent problem was heating: both students and their teachers had to endure numbing cold in shabby, badly heated buildings used for classrooms. The quality

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Formative Years 15

of instruction also suffered from the odd arrangement according to which teachers (with some few exceptions) had to start from the lowest level of the curriculum, moving gradually up toward more advanced subjects.9 Tver’ seminary, however, was more successful in raising money and attracting qualified teaching staff. Because Tver’ occupied a convenient geographic position between Moscow and St. Petersburg, Catherine the Great frequently visited the seminary on her way to the old capital. On such occasions, the seminary arranged for recitations and public disputes among its best students to show the institution’s high standards. Catherine’s personal grants and attention assured Tver’ Ecclesiastical seminary a better quality of instruction than any other provincial institution of this kind.10 It took pride in sending one of its graduates to study at Oxford University in 1765, and aimed at modernizing its curriculum to include courses in French in response to the increased demand for this language.11 For Kunitsyn, a knowledge of Latin, French, and German was the most important benefit of his seminarian education that proved useful in his further studies and early teaching career.12 As for philosophy courses, Kunitsyn received a standard training in the Wolffian system, which he would later reject in favor of Kant’s principles. Wolff was known in Russia mostly through the textbooks of his disciple Christian Baumeister, which came to be used in Russian seminaries in the 1760s and, judging by the number of editions, achieved the status of a canonical manual by the early nineteenth century.13 The attraction of Baumeister’s Moral Philosophy for Russian educators lay, apparently, in its compactness and political prudence. In about 320 pages it presented the essentials of Wolffian natural law, economy, metaphysics, moral and political philosophy, each of which otherwise constituted separate voluminous works.14 As a teaching manual, this textbook employed a somewhat simplified form of the Wolffian deductive method based on the mathematical model of “connected knowledge”: like Wolff, Baumeister proceeded through definitions and classifications of ideas, but he tended to avoid long verbal constructions and syllogistic arguments, providing instead more illustrative examples from ancient history and everyday life.15 His moral philosophy was premised on the view of man as a rational being capable of free choice between good and evil through the exercise of reason. The highest good and the duty

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of man dictated by natural law is to seek self-perfection, by which Baumeister meant not a platonic notion of intellectual advancement but the moral goodness that stems from the virtues of love, charity, moderation, prudence, fortitude, and healthy lifestyle. Mental perfection is necessary only inasmuch as it enables an individual to utilize his faculty of reason in understanding the rules of natural law. What Baumeister called “natural law” and “social contract” pertained to the social rather than political arrangements conducive to the common good and individual well-being. Politics was defined as “science explaining the rules of prudence (blagorazumie),” which he ultimately reduced to self-perfection and harmonious coexistence of individuals within society at large. In the same manner, Baumeister identified the social contract as a product of human desire for sociability and assistance for survival, leaving aside the discussion of political implications associated with a contractual order. While elaborating on the ends of society, he wrote that “social well-being should be preferred to the well-being of the individuals.”16 Given its moral ethos and politically neutral exposition of the social contract, no wonder this textbook survived in the Russian academic environment well into the nineteenth century. Kunitsyn would adopt the essentials of the Wolffian discursive method, while rejecting his concept of perfection as the ultimate good. He would not accept the divine theory of natural law, turning instead toward purely secular interpretations of the origin and the purpose of natural jurisprudence. It is, indeed, quite remarkable, that after six years in an ecclesiastical milieu, of which two years were spent studying Baumeister’s textbooks, Kunitsyn (a son of a churchman!) imbibed so little religious zeal and readily embarked on a secular career once the opportunity presented itself. Kunitsyn’s graduation from the seminary in 1803 coincided with the time of Alexander I’s educational reforms that brought about the expansion and modernization of secular education in Russia. Preliminary Regulations of 1803 announced a creation of a fourtier system of educational institutions, which started at the level of village schools and culminated with the network of universities. Two more universities—in Khar’kov and Kazan’—were added to the existing ones in Moscow, Dorpat, and Vilna, each of which was to maintain its own Teachers’ Institute to supply instructors for the lower-level schools. There were also plans to establish a university in St. Petersburg in the near future; meanwhile, the Teachers’

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Formative Years 17

Gymnasium (founded by Catherine II but largely neglected during Paul I’s reign) was revived to serve as the highest educational institution in the capital district.17 Given the low appeal of the teaching profession among the Russian nobility, the state had to draw students for the Teachers’ Institutes from the ecclesiastical seminaries and subsidize their study in return for the obligatory six-year service upon graduation. Seminarians’ free but low social status, combined with the required knowledge of Latin, made them ideal candidates for the role of gymnasium and school teachers. The church, understandably, was extremely reluctant to part with its best students, especially given the small number of seminarians who were able to reach the upper level of training. Dioceses invested their limited resources into these students and expected to obtain from them intellectual dividends in the form of improved pastoral and clerical service. Seminarians wishing to enter the civil service or even continue education in secular institutions often had difficulty obtaining local bishops’ permission, but the church could not resist direct calls from the government.18 In 1803 Kunitsyn found himself among the students selected to study in the Teachers’ Gymnasium, which was established in 1725 as the first pedagogical institution in Russia. After many years of stagnation, when it sometimes existed in name only, it was thoroughly reorganized in 1803 by the minister of public education, Petr Zavadovskii, with the approval of the tsar. Its capacity was increased to 100 students, all of whom were recruited from the ecclesiastical seminaries and settled in the newly reconstructed dormitory. The following year the Teachers’ Gymnasium received a new name—St. Petersburg Pedagogical Institute—to serve as a teachers’ institute of the projected university.19 In conformity with the Enlightenment’s pedagogical ideas, still dominant in the nineteenth century, the Institute was organized as a boarding school to provide both education and proper upbringing for the students. The funding, however, was insufficient. Inspection records compiled by the teaching staff of the Institute feature students’ complaints about poor quality of food and clothing, dirty and badly ventilated living premises, lack of candles, and frequent cases of theft.20 Although incidents of officially authorized whipping were rare,21 students routinely suffered from maltreatment at the hands of their dormitory stewards.22 A serious punishment—being sent to the army—awaited those who were found guilty of “depraved behavior”

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(razvratnoe povedenie), which in most cases meant proclivity for drinking.23 Meticulous regimentation and close supervision of students’ lives were the means for preventing moral vices. The students’ day began and ended with prayers; their contacts with visitors were to be approved, as were their occasional departures from the Institute’s premises. Other than that, only a half an hour walk in the fresh air would interrupt students’ study routine. This strict approach to discipline reflected the idea that students were, in a way, servants of the state, trained to become “government tools” for “disseminating [the Enlightenment] among all social stations” in Russia.24 On a brighter side, the Regulations for the Pedagogical Institute strongly recommended humane treatment, good example, and moral rebuke rather than physical punishment as methods of teaching the discipline. To strengthen students’ motivation, the Institute introduced a number of incentives ranging from monetary rewards to the honorary appointments of the selected students as peer supervisors. More importantly, the students’ academic performance and moral behavior were to determine their future teaching career: distinguished students were expected to take up positions in provincial gymnasia, while the less industrious had to content themselves with the destiny of district school teachers.25 That this prospect had no appeal to the students is shown in the Institute’s report with a characteristic title: “About the students’ unwillingness to take up teaching positions in district gymnasiums.”26 In each case, the selection process was conducted in a democratic manner by means of voting and open deliberations among the teaching staff.27 As far as academic and administrative affairs were concerned, the Pedagogical Institute stood below the autonomous universities but above the gymnasia. The universities’ autonomy, modeled after the Göttingen system, was embodied in the institution of Konferentsiia—a faculty council that elected among its members rector and deans, established an internal court for disciplinary issues, and, most importantly, enjoyed the right of censorship over the academic publications of its members.28 The choice of teaching manuals for courses also belonged to the university council. In the Pedagogical Institute, by contrast, the faculty council (also called Konferentsiia) had more restricted functions: it met regularly to discuss academic and administrative concerns, but the Institute’s director was appointed, not elected, and the faculty were expected to construct their courses according to detailed guidelines issued by the Ministry of Education.

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Formative Years 19

The Regulations prescribed methods of teaching, specific textbooks, and the general content of the courses in each social science discipline. For the most part, the assigned course literature was quite adequate by the scholarly standards of the early nineteenth century. It listed, for instance, works by Adam Smith and eighteenth-century physiocrats as manuals for the political economy course and the textbook by August Schlözer for instruction in history—all of which were still widely used in German universities. Kant’s works could be used for teaching logic, but courses in philosophy were to follow Christian Baumeister’s textbooks, which was a far less satisfactory choice.29 The Pedagogical Institute’s curriculum, which required three years to complete, was designed to prepare instructors in all disciplines offered in Russian gymnasia.30 It reflected the government’s intention to provide gymnasium students with an education based on both academic and utilitarian subjects, which would equip students for further university studies or an occupational career.31 The list of courses included mathematics, logics, metaphysics, moral philosophy, natural history, world and Russian history, chemistry, applied physics, political economy, commercial studies, agriculture, aesthetics, Latin, French, German, and drawing.32 Until the end of the second year, when final examinations determined students’ specialization, they were expected to take all courses without an exception—apparently not an easy task for former seminarians who lacked a background in the sciences. Students’ ability to cope with this academic load depended, in large part, on their command of German, French, and Latin—languages that the (predominantly) foreign faculty used in their courses. Their mastery of the Russian language was, at best, mediocre. The curator of the St. Petersburg educational district, N. Novosil’tsev, tried to solve this problem by giving preference to professors from the AustroHungarian Empire over the German teachers as more willing to and capable of learning Russian.33 One of them, Professor Balug’ianskii from Vienna University, whose course in political economy left an important mark on Kunitsyn’s intellectual outlook, became something of a mentor to Kunitsyn. Balug’ianskii’s course introduced Kunitsyn to the major currents of Western economic thought (including Adam Smith’s ideas), but it also imparted to him the fundamentals of the cameralist science with its emphasis on the regulatory activity of the government,

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which Kunitsyn would come to renounce in the later years. The way the Ministry of Education designed this course—by selecting specific manuals—betrays an intention to steer students away from any ideas inconsistent with the foundations of the Russian political order. The government required professors in political economy to teach “the essence of national wealth and the sources of such according to the rules of Smith” and French physiocrats, but “the foundations of political, civil and criminal laws and [the nature of] public well-being” were to be presented following the works of Joseph Sonnenfels, Vienna professor of Polizei- and Cameral-Wissenschaften, who advocated absolute monarchy bound by law but unconstrained by any representative body or the formal separation of powers.34 This selective approach was indicative of the limited reception Smith’s teaching found among Russian officials. His ideas of free trade and private economic initiative sounded appealing (and were often interpreted as applying primarily to the nobility), but his liberal political ideology underlying the free market arrangement and his critique of serf labor were left out as irrelevant to the Russian case.35 Even so, Balug’ianskii found ways to express provocative ideas about the economic deficiencies of serfdom.36 He defined it in terms similar to those Smith applied to slavery—as a system in which “land, surplus, and tools are property of the lord (jure domini).” “A serf,” according to Balug’ianskii, “does not have any property, Nor does he own the house where he lives, the livestock which he maintains; the clothing which he wears; bread which he eats; even his own person does not belong to him.”37 This part of Balug’ianskii’s lectures Kunitsyn would reproduce almost verbatim in his own lectures when he started teaching. Students also learned from this course that capitalist farming had economic advantages over unfree labor in the countries where the economy had reached an advanced stage, such as England, and that the rule of law was an important component of the state’s well-being.38 More importantly, Balug’ianskii drew to the students’ attention, albeit in cautious terms, a plan for economic policy that would benefit Russia’s development. It included, among other things, a free market economy, improvement of the legal system, accumulation of capital in agriculture, and “freedom of peasants” by which he apparently meant the abolition of serfdom.39 It remained up to the thoughtful students to make a clear connection between the rule of law, individual freedom, and national well-being. Apart from Kunitsyn, many of Balug’ianskii’s students were inspired by his

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Formative Years 21

course on political economy, including Arsen’ev, who became a firm abolitionist and as a teacher influenced the views of future Alexander II on the peasant question.40 In contrast to political economy, instruction in philosophy brought Kunitsyn little beyond what he had already learned in the seminary. The Ministry of Education recognized that Baumeister’s system was already “inadequate by the standards of today’s philosophy” and allowed professors “to make their own additions to [it],” but there is no evidence that Peter Lodii, who taught the course, took advantage of this permission in those years.41 Lodii came to Russia from L’vov University (then a part of the Austrian Empire), where he also lectured on moral philosophy using his own translation of Baumeister’s textbook. Cautious and traditional-minded, he was slow to renounce the Wolffian teaching. He was more willing to utilize Kant’s ideas in his course on logic, as specified by the ministry, but his poor lecturing skills made it difficult for students to learn from his courses. One of his students remembered Lodii as “kind but limited in his knowledge,”42 while another one—Kunitsyn’s classmate Alexander Galich—recalled that Lodii’s monotonous two-hour reading from his notes “interrupted only by the rustle of huge pages bored students to death and unwittingly plunged those of them sitting at the last rows into peaceful healthy sleep.”43 It appears that students’ sophistication in matters of philosophy advanced in spite of rather than due to the Institute’s instruction. For the interested, the books by Hume, Ferguson, Robertson, and a selection of classical authors available in the library of the Institute became a more important source of knowledge than the lectures of Professor Lodii.44 In 1806 the Pedagogical Institute introduced a course on natural law, which Lodii was directed to teach according to the textbooks by the Kantian follower Franz von Zeiller (1751–1828) and his predecessor in Austrian academic philosophy—Karl von Martini (1726–1800), a Wolffian whose ideas provided the basis for cameralist sciences in Austria.45 In the absence of lecture notes, it is difficult to determine the content of the course and the way Lodii combined their ideas, but some evidence suggests that in his legal philosophy he also remained loyal to the Wolffian tradition, giving preference to Martini over Zeiller.46 Despite Lodii’s poor teaching skills, Kunitsyn showed much interest in natural law, choosing it as his major field of specialization. His diligence and abilities did not go unnoticed. In April 1807, Kunitsyn

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received a grant of 500 rubles—a large sum of money by the standards of the time—for his outstanding academic performance and impeccable behavior.47 The selection process was arranged in such a way that both faculty and students were actively involved in decision making. Teachers compiled a list of ten candidates eligible for the award, but the final decision was made on the basis of voting by the students. Judging from the total number of votes, not all students of the Institute had the right to vote; apparently, it was a privilege granted to students according to their academic standing.48 The same year, Kunitsyn, along with eleven other students of the Institute, qualified for three years of study abroad sponsored by the Ministry of Education.49 With this program, the ministry revived the eighteenth- century tradition of state-supported training abroad intermittently practiced by the Russian rulers for the purpose of cultivating native scholars.50 That the program applied to the students of relatively low social origin signaled the ministry’s open-minded attitude toward the opportunities for upward mobility through education during the early years of Alexander I. It was also an indication of the Institute’s special status compared to its provincial counterparts, which allowed the curator of St. Petersburg educational district, Novosil’tsev, to introduce changes in the Institute’s original goals by giving students a chance to become university professors. For some of them, the prospect of studying abroad served as a strong motivation to excel academically.51 The number of students selected in 1808 and their designated specialization corresponded to the twelve main disciplines to be offered in the future St. Petersburg University. In addition to the General Instruction, which set the goals and the budget of the program, each student received an individual itinerary and study plan with specific directives.52 Kunitsyn, assigned to study diplomacy, was instructed to take courses on the political history of Europe over the last three centuries, diplomacy, European international law, political science, and the positive law of major powers. Among auxiliary disciplines the Instruction listed (1) philosophy of law, natural and Roman law, statistics, political economy, and cameralist sciences; (2) military history of the last three centuries and history of commerce; and (3) “some knowledge of military science.”53 Such a wide range of mandatory subjects was justified by the idea that although “state sciences” (which included diplomacy) had recently become “independent” disciplines, they were still closely

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Formative Years 23

related to history as understood from a philosophical point of view. Considering how broadly the subject matter of history itself was defined in the early nineteenth century, the intended program could conveniently produce a specialist knowledgeable in the arts and social sciences. Over three years, the students were expected to divide their time between studies in the universities of Göttingen and Heidelberg and, “should the political situation in Europe allow it,” a trip to France and England. In France, apart from visiting the Academy of Jurisprudence, students could find institutions, peoples, and many other “things worthy of [their] attention,” while England was worth visiting due to its “mixed parliaments, courts,” and “miracles of human art,” by which the ministry apparently meant its thriving agriculture and industry.54 The final year of the program was designed to round out the students’ education with the European tour conventionally made by the aristocratic sons, albeit on a much smaller scale. This component of the program reflected the liberal educational policy during the early years of Alexander I’s reign, which had its roots in the Enlightenment concept of education as cultural advancement and which contrasted markedly with the utilitarian attitude adopted under Nicholas I when study trips were aimed at purely professional training.55 In retrospect, the program was a big success. Upon their return, most of the students passed examinations qualifying them for doctoral degrees and took up various teaching posts.56 On the other hand, taken from the official viewpoint, the program produced some ambivalent and unintended results. Now German- educated, the students were eager to spread the Enlightenment in Russia, but not necessarily in the way the state directed them; three of the twelve students, including Kunitsyn, eventually ran into trouble with the Ministry of Education and were dismissed or forced to resign their academic posts. Not incidentally, the fields of their specialization were natural law, philosophy, and political economy—the subjects that became increasingly controversial as Russia began to turn away from the liberal course in the second decade of Alexander’s reign.57 Kunitsyn’s Göttingen period is, unfortunately, a poorly documented segment of his biography. He never kept a diary, nor, unlike many of his contemporaries who were taken by the vogue for sentimental attachments, did he write elaborate letters to his family or friends. It might be plausibly assumed that his constant immersion in study along with

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the lack of a literary component in his education and, perhaps, a somewhat pragmatic set of mind typical of the former seminarians, did not predispose him to epistolary outpouring of thoughts and feelings. The dearth of information on this period of his life is partly compensated by the reminiscences of his friend Nicholas Turgenev, who joined the group of “pedagogues” in summer of 1808 and carefully penned his impressions of the Göttingen University and life in Germany in his diary and private correspondence.58 Turgenev was destined to become one of the first Russian political émigrés after the Decembrist uprising, but before that happened Kunitsyn and Turgenev would cross paths several times. For both of them, study abroad came to be a crucial period of intellectual maturation. Turgenev left an interesting description of their journey from St. Petersburg to Göttingen, which took almost two months and presented the young men with the changing picture of customs and lifestyles in Russia’s Western provinces. They were struck by the extreme poverty and backwardness among the Chukhontsy—the indigenous tribe from the Narva region in Estonia whom the Russian government tried to civilize by turning them into state serfs. But as students moved further westward toward the Latvian territory influenced by the German lifestyle and culture, the scene began to change. The contrast was even more noticeable in German-speaking Riga, where people, according to Turgenev’s impressions, appeared happy and polite. He especially noted their useful practice of house insurance—something that he heard was common in European capitals but absent in Russia.59 For Kunitsyn and Turgenev, study in Germany was their first taste of life abroad, and although both of them came to appreciate the stimulating intellectual atmosphere of Göttingen University, the two friends perceived their life away from Russia somewhat differently. For Kunitsyn, who left his tiny and closely supervised world of the Institute, the trip to Germany had become a liberating and joyful experience despite the financial difficulties caused by the insufficient funding and the falling value of Russian currency in pre-war years.60 When the exchange rate hit its lowest in 1810, Kunitsyn and other students petitioned for an increase in allowance, which was promptly granted but was still not enough to relieve the students from financial concerns.61 By contrast, Turgenev, a son of a nobleman, was spared such worries, but he frequently suffered from acute homesickness that made

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him feel bitter about Germany and the Germans.62 Apart from his studies, everything in his surroundings appeared to Nicholas as “distasteful”: “Not only people themselves became repulsive to me,” he wrote to his brother Alexander, “but I even began to look at each thing with repugnance.”63 Even considering Nicholas’s predilection for melancholic philosophizing quite characteristic of the Romantic age, his expressions of sadness over parting from his fatherland were genuine and intense.64 “Russia!” he wrote in his diary, “with awe and love do I pronounce Your sacred Name . . . if my meaningless life could promote Your good, with joy would I sacrifice it. A thousand times would I die for my fatherland, for Russia.”65 But toward the end of his sojourn, quite to his own surprise, Nicholas changed his mind about Göttingen. Vaguely apprehensive of his future in Russia, he wished to prolong this “quiet, carefree” life of reading and contemplation which in the beginning appeared to him so monotonous and joyless.66 His anti- German prejudices, however, persisted. Nicholas’s dislike of Germans was not entirely unprovoked. In 1803, his older brother Alexander, then also a student in Göttingen, proudly noted high respect toward Russia among the Germans. Göttingen professors, grateful for the honorable and financial rewards bestowed on them by the Russian tsar, commented favorably on Alexander I’s wisdom and the quality of Russian students in Göttingen.67 He took it as a compliment when the vice-rector advised him to keep away from the company of less disciplined Germans in the university.68 By the time Nicholas and Kunitsyn arrived in Göttingen, Russian international standing had diminished as French power and influence rose. In one passage, Nicholas alluded to Germans’ unflattering comments on Russia, which he indignantly attributed to their mean spirit and total ignorance of his country.69 Turgenev’s overtly negative view of Germany appears to originate from offended patriotic pride and the cultural xenophobia increasingly displayed by the Russian aristocracy in the nineteenth century.70 But Nicholas’s attitude toward his own compatriots in Göttingen, all of whom were far beneath his social status, was also somewhat negative and condescending. Of all the St. Petersburg “pedagogues,” as he frequently referred to them, he found Kunitsyn alone to be an interesting person.71 Yet, despite their close coexistence as roommates and Turgenev’s appreciation of Kunitsyn, as evident in his remarks scattered throughout his diary, they did not become close friends, if only because they were so different in temperament.72 On occasion Turgenev mentioned

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that Kunitsyn “cheered him up,” but other than that Turgenev often experienced a sense of loneliness and melancholy unrelieved even by the company of his compatriots.73 By the end of the Göttingen period, however, Turgenev grew more ambivalent about Russia and his own future in it.74 The news about Russia, which his younger brother Sergei brought him in 1810, only confirmed his apprehensions.75 By contrast, Kunitsyn, a beneficiary of the state educational program, who was less in touch with Russian political reality in his student years, remained optimistic and focused on the more immediate task of studying.76 The Göttingen period undoubtedly had a significant impact on the intellectual makeup of both men, but it is an issue of controversy whether Kunitsyn’s and Turgenev’s liberal inclinations developed under the immediate influence of Göttingen professors. According to Wischnitzer, Göttingen University, especially the lectures and works of Georg Sartorius, Gustav Hugo, and Arnold Heeren, exercised a significant, if not decisive, influence on the formation of Russian liberalism in the early nineteenth century.77 Both the premises and the conclusion of this study were challenged by Russian prerevolutionary historian E. Tarasov, who argued that the number of native Russian students in Göttingen was too small to justify generalizations of this sort. Of the thirty-five students who attended the university in the years 1801–25 only five or six contributed to the liberal cause in Russia. Even so, Tarasov did not attribute the students’ liberal views to the influence of Göttingen teachers, none of whom, in his opinion, could be classified as liberals, including Smith’s follower Sartorius, who subscribed to the ideas of economic freedom but shunned political liberalism.78 It would be tempting to side with Wischnitzer’s argument, especially given the fact that all three students from the Pedagogical Institute assigned to study under those teachers eventually emerged as liberal-minded scholars eager to disseminate critical thinking and new ideas in their academic courses. Instruction in the Pedagogical Institute, as we have seen, did not necessarily predispose students toward this path. Nevertheless, one should be careful about using this circumstantial evidence. A closer look at the intellectual makeup and the teachings of Göttingen professors might shed some light on their possible influence over the Russian students. Georg Sartorius, professor of political economy, was the first German academic in the eighteenth century to produce a textbook

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on Smith’s teaching. Far from being an obscure teaching manual, his textbook, published in 1796, marked a new chapter in the German reception of Smith’s ideas. Until then, despite the availability of the German translation of Wealth of Nations, it had been either disregarded altogether or treated as little more than a supplement to cameralist thought. Sartorius’s popularization of Smithian ideas in his textbook and academic courses in Göttingen University facilitated the shift from cameralist tradition, with its emphasis on the regulatory state, to the new science of national economy (Nationalökonomie), which clearly distinguished between society and the state, taking as its starting point the interests of self-motivated individual subjects rather than of the state as a collective entity.79 Sartorius’s textbook, however, was not an uncritical treatment of Smith’s ideas, showing a peculiar amalgam of traditional and novel thinking. He tried to steer a middle way between the principle of state-regulated economy and its opposite, the concept of the invisible hand. He argued, for instance, that Smith’s theory of labor cannot be applied to all European countries, given the diversity of their economic conditions, and that unfettered accumulation of wealth in the hands of the few, in fact, inhibits economic competition. This latter principle, he thought, was true as much of private individuals as of the whole countries. If some countries, through their wealth and technology, acquire too much control over international trade and export production, their competitors are justified in protecting themselves through tariffs. Without disputing the benefits of private initiative, Sartorius quite correctly pointed out that in countries with weak economies and infrastructure, the government should play an active role in promoting education, big construction projects, and relief programs in times of crop failure.80 For Kunitsyn, Sartorius’s more extended and critical treatment of Smithian views was a valuable addition to what he already learned in Balug’ianskii’s course. For Turgenev, Sartorius’s lectures became a source of inspiration, which eventually led him to write a book on taxation—one of the first of its kind in Russia. Time and again Turgenev praised Sartorius in his diary, comparing him favorably to the teachers of political economy in Moscow University.81 Yet, Sartorius stopped short of political liberalism. Tarasov’s excerpts from his lectures point to the influence of Burke’s conservatism on Sartorius’s political thinking. “In his lectures on politics,” one of his German students recalled, “he saved his audience from

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any revolutionary ideas . . . he argued that in any state only those things take root which grew out of its past . . . which have a foundation in positive historical law and not in theory . . . he considered new constitutional projects as harmful as the old absolutism.”82 Modern historians’ opinion of Sartorius confirms Tarasov’s assessment.83 A similar philosophy informed Arnold Heeren’s (1762–1842) lectures on the history of the major European powers.84 Turgenev was fascinated by his lectures, putting them next in importance only to his political science course, but nothing in his recollections about Heeren’s lectures indicates a possible liberal influence on the part of his teacher. Rather, Turgenev’s appreciation of Heeren was due to the latter’s attempt to go beyond immediate facts and events to the underlying historical patterns and their causes.85 Heeren always preceded an account of major chronological periods with a brief exposition of ideas and general principles of politics that affected the history of a given epoch, but unlike the older generation of history teachers in Göttingen, Heeren was more interested in the diplomatic and trade relationship among the leading powers than in the European political systems. To the extent that he treated the English constitution, for instance, he emphasized its weaknesses rather than strengths: he saw seeds of corruption and instability in the principle of parliamentary politicking, suspecting prime ministers of unscrupulous manipulations for the sake of securing a party majority.86 Indicative of Heeren’s political disposition was his overtly negative attitude toward the French philosophes, especially Rousseau, whom he blamed for spreading ideas that had shaken the foundations of the existing order.87 Principles of legitimacy and historical continuity were the main criteria by which Heeren measured success or failure of European countries. Not surprisingly, his picture of the French Revolution was uncompromisingly negative, so much so that Turgenev came out of his lecture filled with a sense of disgust toward “these beasts” who “attack their fellows.”88 Kunitsyn, too, came to consider the French Revolution as a horrendous episode in European history, although he would later embrace the idea of legitimate resistance to a tyrannical ruler. To some extent, Heeren’s conception of European history reflected political sentiments in Germany during the era of the Napoleonic Wars. By that time, the initial enthusiasm about the French Revolution had given way to skepticism or outright rejection of both revolutionary methods and the notions of enlightened rationalism,

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progress, and natural rights that underlay revolutionary ethos.89 This shift explains why Heeren’s predecessors in Göttingen were more unequivocal in their praise of English constitutional order and, like August Ludwig von Schlözer (1735–1809), were more outspoken in denouncing unlimited absolutism.90 In his time, Alexander Turgenev was much impressed by Schlözer’s lectures on political science, even though he did not fail to notice (not without a touch of disappointment) that Schlözer’s justification of popular resistance in the case of tyranny was accompanied by mitigating remarks meant to set at ease the minds of sensitive students.91 However, by the time Nicholas Turgenev and Kunitsyn arrived in Göttingen, Schlözer had retired as a teacher of history and political science on account of his age. While Heeren paved the way for an anti-Enlightenment intellectual current in the field of history, which culminated with the establishment of the historicist tradition, Gustav Hugo (1744–1844) did so in the field of jurisprudence by renouncing the concept of natural law as a universal and rationally discoverable standard of justice. The title of his textbook—Lehrbuch des Naturrechts als einer Philosophie des Positives Rechts—conveyed the semantic shift in the term “natural law,” which inaugurated a historical conception of law as a product of unique national spirit and institutions.92 Given Kunitsyn’s adherence to the older notion of natural law, as we will see later, it is difficult to agree with Wischnitzer that Hugo exercised an important influence on Kunitsyn’s legal thinking.93 Far from being a spokesman for liberal values, Hugo represented a conservative reaction not only to the liberal concept of natural law but also to the very idea of rationalistic framing of law, triggered by the attempt of Napoleonic France to impose its Code Civil (based on the natural law tradition) upon the conquered territories. Hugo’s historicist approach essentially meant a rejection of the Kantian legal philosophy, which Kunitsyn did not find very convincing, if only because Hugo was not a skillful lecturer, as one can judge from Turgenev’s reminiscences.94 More progressive was the teaching of Anton Thibaut, professor of law in Heidelberg University under whom Kunitsyn was instructed to study in the second year.95 However, for reasons that remain unknown, this part of Kunitsyn’s program did not materialize; from Göttingen he went directly to Paris. The trip to England, as the officials predicted, could not be undertaken for diplomatic reasons. Although Wischnitzer significantly overestimated the Göttingen professors’ disposition to liberalism and their influence on Russian

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students, study in Göttingen University did play an important role in stimulating a spirit of critical thinking in Kunitsyn and Turgenev.96 It came not so much from the formal lectures as from the students’ acquaintance with European thought through self-study uninhibited by any supervision from above. Their zeal for study was greatly aided by the lack of diversions in a small student town. “Here in Göttingen,” Turgenev recalled, “whether you want it or not, you have to study because there are absolutely no other things to do . . . in this sense, Göttingen cannot be compared to our Moscow University . . . everything here, as it were, breathes with learning.97 The rich and accessible Göttingen library, which Turgenev became especially fond of, greatly stimulated their intellectual curiosity. Besides, inasmuch as their finances allowed, both Kunitsyn and Turgenev bought books unavailable in Russia.98 Upon returning, Kunitsyn sold part of his collection to the library of the Pedagogical Institute.99 In late March 1811 Kunitsyn, along with his former classmate Kaidanov, visited Turgenev in Göttingen for the last time on their way from Paris to St. Petersburg. Turgenev bid them farewell with mixed feelings: after listening to Kunitsyn’s enthusiastic talk about Bentham and Beccaria, he wrote in his diary, “What an Enlightenment will spread in Russia!” but he added sadly, “on the other hand, one feels sorry for them.”100 Turgenev’s premonition that their enthusiasm for European legal and political thought might not be welcome in Russia was destined to be fulfilled, but in 1811 Kunitsyn hardly shared his friend’s skepticism. After three years of study, penniless but full of ideas, Kunitsyn was returning to Russia in an optimistic mood. The most fruitful part of his life was about to begin.

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2 Years in the Tsarskoe Selo Lyceum

Kunitsyn’s return to St. Petersburg was propitious. In summer 1811, the Ministry of Education began to look for candidates suitable to teach in the Tsarskoe Selo Lyceum scheduled to open in October. In July, Kunitsyn successfully passed examinations qualifying him for the degree of adjunct professor (ad’iunkt) of philosophical and political sciences, which were conducted jointly by the Councils of the Pedagogical Institute and the Academy of Sciences. Based on the results of the examinations, Kunitsyn (along with two other graduates trained in Germany) was assigned to the Lyceum with a decent salary of 800 rubles and a separate allowance for lodging.1 Given the Lyceum’s exclusive status as the institution patronized by the tsar himself and its high requirements for the faculty’s professional and moral qualities, this appointment was an important indicator of the meritocratic policy practiced by the Ministry of Education in those years.2 The ministry made another graceful gesture toward its foreign-trained students: in the period before their arrival and the commencement of the new academic year, it granted a subsidy calculated on their future salary, which helped Kunitsyn’s finances depleted by the costly sojourn in France.3 The opening of the Lyceum was surrounded by the controversy over the social composition of its prospective students and the curriculum best suited for educating “youth meant for higher civil positions.”4 At issue was the lingering question of weighing the benefits of a broad encyclopedic education against the practical advantages of a more goal- oriented professional training. The initial plan, composed by Michael Speranskii—the tsar’s closest advisor and progressive reformer—presupposed a classless principle of admission and a wide spectrum of academic subjects ranging from chemistry, astronomy, and mathematics to Greek, natural history, and philosophy. The Minister

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of Education Count Razumovskii, who was entrusted with preparing the final statute in early 1810, found the selection of subjects too broad for a six-year program and, more importantly, incongruent with the practical goals of the Lyceum. Neither astronomy nor natural history, in his opinion, would be of use for the state officials of high ranking.5 Discussed in detail with the tsar, the final statute proved to be something of a compromise between Razumovskii’s and Speranskii’s projects. It included a provision for the noble origin of prospective students but placed a strong emphasis on their high intellectual and moral standards, which would ensure the operation of the meritocratic principle envisaged in Speranskii’s plan. At the same time, social connections were also instrumental in getting young men on the list of the admission candidates. Alexander Pushkin, for instance, owed his chance for admission to Alexander Turgenev. However, students who failed examinations were not admitted, their high social status notwithstanding. Of the thirty- eight applicants, only thirty entered the Lyceum in 1811. Later, E. Engel’gardt, the second director of the Lyceum, declined the minister’s request to make an exception for Count Sheremet’ev’s son, who could not meet the entrance requirements.6 Apart from “perfect health” and “a certificate about excellent moral standing,” the prospective students were expected to demonstrate at the examinations their knowledge of Russian and French or German and fundamentals of arithmetic, physics, geography, and history. The age of the entrants was to be ten to twelve years old.7 As far as the second issue of contention was concerned, the Regulation listed a number of gentlemanly subjects (such as fencing, dancing, drawing, swimming, and riding) and the liberal arts (Russian, Latin, German, French, “moral sciences,” history, geography, philology, and rhetoric) supplemented with some elements of geometry, physics, and algebra. Of these subjects, the school placed particular emphasis on foreign languages, especially in the first three years of study, which comprised a so- called junior course (mladshii kurs). Students were asked to practice their language skills not only in class but also in their leisure time by conversing in French and German among themselves.8 In the senior course, also lasting for three years, “moral sciences,” which related to “the man’s moral place in society,” stood foremost. Students were expected to learn the subject by proceeding from “simple notions of rights” to various systems of law, including public, private, and Russian law.9

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Eventually, Razumovskii’s doubts about the need for more specific technical and scholarly subjects proved justified: despite the initial zeal of the teacher of physical and mathematical sciences, these classes remained the least popular ones among the lyceists who displayed a much greater predilection for literary and poetic pursuits. Alexander Pushkin was the most talented poet but not the only one in the first Lyceum admission.10 His father wrote later that it was due to the spirit of literary competition among the lyceists that Pushkin’s talent developed.11 Until the establishment of the Lyceum, the Noble Pension (boarding school) run by the Jesuit missionaries was the only elite institution in the capital where admission was restricted to the nobility.12 For those noblemen who loathed Catholic influence, the Lyceum became a desirable place to educate their sons. Its opening ceremony in October 1811 became a memorable day for the students and an occasion of social importance attended by the tsar, members of his family, and high-ranking officials. Parents were not allowed into the ceremony, apparently in order to get students accustomed to their new life away from parental care. Along with the director of the Lyceum Vasilii Malinovskii, Kunitsyn was accorded the honor of delivering a speech, which proved a big success and another boost to his career.13 As lyceist Pushchin would later recall in his memoirs, Kunitsyn’s enthusiastic and clear speaking contrasted markedly with the weak and halting voice of Malinovskii, who was visibly uncomfortable and quickly bored his audience.14 The ideas featured in Kunitsyn’s speech—the importance of the rule of law and meritocratic order—gave an early indication of some of the major themes he would later develop in his journalistic and scholarly writings. Most intriguing about Kunitsyn’s speech was the omission of laudatory phrases about the tsar’s benevolence commonly employed in such ceremonies. Instead of the tsar-benefactor, he referred to the “fatherland” that took upon itself the duty to care for students’ education.15 More than merely acquiring knowledge necessary for a civil servant and a soldier, students were urged to seek “true education of mind and heart” and cultivate “the spirit of community” (dukh obshchezhitiia). He compared society to a “complex edifice” (mnogoslozhnoe zdanie) that depends on mutual responsibility for one’s social duties: society prospers if “citizens” (grazhdane) serve honestly and “subjects” (poddanye) obey dutifully. In enumerating the qualities of the statesman, Kunitsyn put a special emphasis on the respect for law, which by implication applied

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as much to the civil servants as to the ruler himself. “Law violated by its guardian,” he stated, “does not have sacredness in the eyes of the people.”16 But the rule of law should be reinforced by the civic virtue of those who serve the public. Kunitsyn tried to impress on his well-born students the image of a statesman who achieves public respect and rewards through education and personal accomplishments rather than renowned ancestry: “Honors without accomplishments, distinction without talent, insignia without virtue fill a noble heart with sorrow.” He warned students that a high position always entails high responsibilities. “The words and deeds” of the statesman are an example for his people. “If his morality is pure he can improve people’s morals by his example rather than through his power. But if vicious inclinations seized his heart he will weaken public virtues.”17 But cultivating regard for the public good did not preclude a pursuit of individual ambitions. Being himself a beneficiary of the meritocratic system, Kunitsyn encouraged students to seek personal distinctions. “Would you like to mingle with the crowd of the ordinary people living in obscurity?” he asked rhetorically. Yet, he also reminded them that in pursuing this goal they should preserve the virtues of modesty, innocence, and “simple heartedness” (prostoserdechie) that “win out over cunning and craftiness.”18 Although Kunitsyn boldly exalted the rule of law that was still remote from Russian reality, he did not go beyond the ideas that Alexander I himself endorsed in his early years.19 Despite the omission of conventional dithyrambs to the emperor, or perhaps, because of that, Alexander I was so impressed by the speech that he immediately rewarded Kunitsyn with the St. Vladimir Cross of the Fourth Degree—the first of the four signs of distinction that Kunitsyn received in his lifetime.20 The same year, this speech was published as a separate brochure and later in the official journal of the Ministry of Education.21 Kunitsyn’s speech and his unwillingness to fawn before his superiors (a quality that he retained for the rest of his life) earned him repute among students. As Pushchin put it in his memoirs, “He was the only black sheep in the family.”22 In a cartoon produced by one of the lyceists, Kunitsyn is depicted standing intentionally apart from the professors scrambling to gain Minister Razumovskii’s attention. They climb up the slippery slope presided over by the minister, who observes their efforts with pleasure.23

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The Lyceum lived up to its reputation as an elite institution. It occupied the four-story wing of the imperial palace with access to the royal garden.24 The students followed a program that was beneficial for their mental, moral, and physical development. Time spent in a classroom was punctuated by three breaks for meals and recreation in the fresh air so that each study session did not last longer than two hours.25 A three- course dinner, two- course supper, and two servings of tea were deemed appropriate to the students’ noble status, while a choice of a menu a week in advance was meant to satisfy their individual preferences. Holiday meals were even more generous.26 The director and professors residing in Tsarskoe Selo shared the students’ table.27 For Kunitsyn, who lived through the years of poverty in the seminary and the Pedagogical Institute, the comforts of the Lyceum were a big change. At the same time, Kunitsyn had to share with students the limitations of life outside the world of the capital where all the social and intellectual excitement occurred. A few years later, when his reputation as a teacher was firmly established, Kunitsyn began to loathe his privileged but restricted existence in the Lyceum.28 In contrast to the Jesuit boarding institution in St. Petersburg, the Lyceum never practiced corporal punishments or constant surveillance humiliating to the students’ dignity.29 Tutors directed and supervised but did not spy on the lyceists. Disciplinary measures primarily relied on the sense of shame that students experienced when separated from their peers during the meal or placed on the list of “the lazy ones.” For serious misdemeanors (of which the memoir literature is silent), the director could authorize a bread-and-water diet for up to two days and isolation in a student’s room.30 In the long run, behavior marks could also negatively affect the graduation rank of a student. Otherwise, the incentive of receiving honorary rewards, the proximity to the royal family, and the very idea of their high calling were held effective enough to ensure students’ discipline.31 Although students varied in the degree of their noble status (among them were scions of titled aristocrats, such as Prince Gorchakov), the opportunity for ostentatious display of their wealth was reduced to a minimum due to the limitations placed on students’ contacts with their families and because of the uniform dress code, which included every item of clothing, from overcoats to nightcaps.32 Life in a restricted environment also fostered a sense of camaraderie strengthened by their common interests in literature and poetry.33

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Whatever signs of distinction were allowed, these were invariably determined by students’ intellectual accomplishments and moral behavior rather than their social luster. In conformity with this meritocratic principle, the students received graduation ranks ranging from fourteen to nine. In its rights and privileges, the Lyceum was made equal to the universities and, as a token of special favor, was subordinated directly to the Minister of Education and the tsar.34 Malinovskii, the liberal-minded first director of the Lyceum, played an important role in establishing a relationship of trust and respect between students and teachers, which distinguished the Lyceum.35 Malinovskii was the author of Discourse about Peace and War, published in 1803, in which he passionately condemned war on moral and economic grounds, rejecting all pro-war arguments current in eighteenth- century thought—from Malthusian to geopolitical ones. In the early years of Alexander I’s reign, when reform expectations ran high, he also penned and submitted to the tsar’s Unofficial Committee a project of serfdom reform that offered to turn serfs into tenants by legally fixing their obligations to former owners.36 Still more remarkable were Malinovskii’s diary contemplations about Russian political and social ailments. He wrote about corruption, the lack of “good laws,” and the Russian mentality, which, in his view, combined the inclinations for “blind obedience” and “license” (samovol’stvo)—both the consequences of a flawed political establishment. Unlike many of his contemporaries, who believed that the introduction of a representative assembly should be preceded by a long preparatory period when Russians would learn how to deal with constitutional rights, Malinovskii thought that the best school of freedom would be the assembly itself. “It is a great offense,” he complained, “to consider Russians unable to create their own laws! . . . in order to ennoble Russian people . . . it is necessary to give them the work of lawmaking.” Meanwhile, he thought, Russian government remained “a despotic aristocracy.”37 Malinovskii, however, was too cautious to disseminate political liberalism in Tsarskoe Selo.38 Rather, students warmly remembered him as a committed pedagogue who sought to instill in them the love for God and virtue that guided his own life. To their first director students owed that warm atmosphere, which helped them overcome initial loneliness and homesickness. He appears to have found in his new duties as pedagogue a consolation for the

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political disillusionment so strongly expressed in his diary already in Alexander’s early years, when he realized that expected reforms were not forthcoming. After Malinovskii’ premature death in 1813, lyceist Sergei Komovskii noted in his diary that students were on Malinovskii’s mind until the last moment of his life.39 A year after the Lyceum’s opening, Russia saw the invasion of the Napoleonic armies, which left a lasting emotional and political impact on many patriotic-minded Russians, including the young lyceists who happened to witness Russian troops passing by Tsarskoe Selo on their way to the front. Every weekend students eagerly awaited the latest news from St. Petersburg visitors and, whenever they were free from classes, they gathered together in a reading room, browsing Russian and foreign papers, “talking and arguing endlessly” about the war proceedings.40 In September 1812, General Kutuzov’s strategy of retreat and the abandonment of Moscow sparked heated debates among the educated Russians, who grieved over the burning of the ancient capital and still more so over the symbolic humiliation that Russia suffered as a result of this event. Kunitsyn’s response to these debates came in the form of the two essays published in Son of Fatherland (Syn Otechestva), which marked his debut as a journalist. Founded in 1812 with the main purpose to cover the Napoleonic Wars in Russia, the journal quickly turned to the postwar agenda in the following years, becoming one of the most readable and lasting papers in the first quarter of the nineteenth century, at a time when most journals were notoriously short-lived because of small subscriptions. Syn Otechestva’s distinctly liberal flavor during the first few years of its existence (which much diminished in the later period), as well as its attentiveness to the political issues neglected by the literaryoriented journals, appealed to the progressive intelligentsia.41 In contrast to other Russian journals, which invariably presented the monarch as the object of patriotic feelings for Russians and made a great effort to glorify Alexander I even at the most critical periods of the war, Syn Otechestva rarely invoked his name in this context. In most articles, it was the image of the fatherland personified by its courageous individuals that inspired the Russian people to resist the enemy. The word “freedom” (svoboda) in some of its articles was occasionally given an equivocal ring: in one sense it referred to freedom from foreign oppression; in another, it implied liberty in a wider meaning.42 Occasionally Syn Otechestva resorted to outright mockery

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of Napoleon’s ambitious character and political strategy, but, more frequently, it focused on the themes of the stamina and courage of the Russian nation. That the journal named the whole people rather than the army alone as the defenders of the country was also an indication of its liberal tone. Kunitsyn must have found the journal’s political outlook congenial to his own. His first article, entitled “Message to the Russians,” was written in October 1812, after Russian troops had surrendered Moscow, continuing their retreat into the interior of the country. The effect of Moscow’s surrender was all the more devastating because the news about the Battle of Borodino, presented in official papers in an optimistic light, had lulled the Russian public.43 Strategically, the outcome of war was far from clear, but for tactical reasons of keeping the morale high and, certainly because of his unshaken faith in the Russian people, Kunitsyn took great pains to assure his readers that “everything augurs death to our enemy.” Even by the standards of nineteenth-century literary style, the article was framed in strikingly flowery language, full of allegoric comparisons and colorful allusions. Kunitsyn depicted Napoleon as a “many-head dragon,” a “bloodthirsty beast,” and, in another place, a “tiger” who kills one victim after another, unmoved by their “involuntary loyalty.”44 Victory, he warned his compatriots, would come at a cost of great sacrifices, for this was the only way to avoid the fate of other European countries suffering under Napoleon’s power. If Kunitsyn’s high-spirited language was not unusual for the liberal Syn Otechestva, his disparaging remarks on the qualities of the French soldiers were more associated with the propagandistic style of conservative-minded Count Fedor Rostopchin, the governorgeneral of Moscow, known for his feverish anti-French pamphlets.45 “But let not anyone think,” Kunitsyn wrote, “that Frenchmen are as courageous as they are depraved, they are more audacious than brave . . . Success makes them violent and inhuman and this is the true sign of their base cowardice.”46 Kunitsyn’s messianic conclusion was much in keeping with the tone of patriotic wrath expressed elsewhere in the article. “Providence,” he assured the public, “sent them to us for inflicting long deserved death.”47 When Kunitsyn published his second article, entitled, “Some observations about the current war,” Napoleon was already retreating toward the Western borders of Russia, with his army starving and suffering from guerrilla raids. Yet, it was not the outcome Alexander I anticipated. Disregarding the tsar’s unconcealed displeasure and the

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opposition among his own military staff, General Kutuzov continued with his tactic of wearing down the enemy, without provoking Napoleon to a decisive battle. Alexander I’s dislike of Kutuzov dated back to the days of the Austerlitz campaign, when Kutuzov failed to convince the then-inexperienced tsar to avoid the battle. This time, there was more to their rivalry. Alexander desired revenge and total destruction of the French army, while Kutuzov’s primary purpose was to oust them from Russia with minimal losses for the Russian army. The Russian public, indignant at the surrender of Moscow, also frowned upon Kutuzov’s prolonged inactivity.48 With this article, Kunitsyn hoped to change public opinion of Kutuzov by explaining the tactical reasons behind his retreat. Although the burning of Moscow caused a great sorrow to Russians, the Russian army, he argued, preserved strategic advantages and was able now to block Napoleon’s troops from advancing to the Russian blacksoil provinces. The rationale for Kutuzov’s outflanking maneuver had now become clear: it would be too dangerous to attack the French army from the front, but by turning his army toward the enemy’s rear, he made it possible to carry out successful raids from behind.49 Although most of the article maintained a casual and practical tone, its conclusion, expressed in vivid allegorical language, was in keeping with the patriotic outburst Kunitsyn exhibited in his previous article. He compared Napoleon with the biblical Samson and Russia with a huge lion whose jaws stretch from Moscow to the Grand Duchy of Warsaw. Napoleon dared to repeat the biblical feat but instead of tearing apart the lion as Samson did, the French invader foolishly threw himself right in the middle of the lion’s jaws only to find no escape from them.50 There was a short step between this war-inspired hatred toward the French soldiers and the rejection of everything Western, which many Russian conservatives came to see as a remedy for the French ideological menace in the years following the war. Kunitsyn never took this step, but his wartime articles show the degree to which even liberal and Western-minded Russians were affected by patriotic anger and overwhelmed by pride over Russia’s victory. As the threat of war and evacuation of St. Petersburg subsided, the Lyceum’s life resumed its normal course, but a year later it was interrupted by Malinovskii’s premature death. The two years that followed became known as years of “interregnum,” called so by Pushchin

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because they divided two renowned directorships. E. Engel’gardt, appointed in 1816, continued Malinovskii’s enlightened pedagogy, which sought to promote students’ sense of personal worth and independence and which ultimately contributed to the establishment of the Lyceum’s reputation as a hotbed of liberalism. Students became frequent guests in Engel’gardt’s family and, in a way, substituted for the children he never had. His friendship with many of them lasted long after their graduation and survived all the vicissitudes of the ensuing years. Not only did he try to intercede for Pushkin, who had incurred the tsar’s anger for his liberal verses, but he also had the courage to maintain correspondence with Kiukhel’beker and Pushchin, convicted Decembrists, showing them much needed support and sympathy.51 Although Engel’gardt had to comply with the established restrictions on students’ home leaves, he met their craving for social intercourse by allowing more visitors into the Lyceum. He hoped to accustom students to good manners and polite sociability, so important for men of their background. These visits brought many students their first romantic experience, inspiring young Pushkin’s sentimental lyrics,52 but at the same time, they opened up the Lyceum to a liberal spirit carried by some of the students’ relatives and family friends close to the progressive literary and Decembrist circles. Pushchin wrote in his memoirs that while still a student, he became close to the Murav’ev brothers through his relative Pavel Koloshin, also a member of the secret “Union of Salvation” in St. Petersburg. As Pushchin recalled, “by my opinions and convictions which I formed in the Lyceum . . . I was ready for the cause.”53 Vil’gel’m Kiukhel’beker also found his way into the world of liberal ideas with the assistance of his relative G. A. Glinka, a brother of the Decembrist.54 Ironically, the first admission class, which received more attention from the imperial family than any other class, earned a reputation for dangerous freethinking and aspiration for self-realization beyond what the government intended. Certainly, among its twentynine graduates55 there were perfectly loyal and obedient subjects, but contemporaries better remembered the defiant Pushkin or radically minded Pushchin and Kiukhel’beker who eventually joined the Decembrist uprising and languished in Siberia for two decades. Six other former lyceists were arrested in connection with the revolt but released without a sentence. Their oppositional ideas were all the more surprising to their contemporaries, because lyceists lived a

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relatively isolated life in a refined environment far removed from the unpleasant realities of autocratic Russia. The Lyceum’s drift toward liberalism first came to the authorities’ attention in 1820 when Nicholas Karazin, a founder of Khar’kov University and a vocal defender of the Russian autocracy, submitted an (unsolicited) report to the Minister of the Interior, Count Kochubei. Apart from the emotional lamentations about “the spirit of depraved liberty” (dukh razvratnoi vol’nosti), which supposedly began “infecting all social estates,” Karazin’s report gave the government a specific warning that “in the Lyceum itself the sovereign is educating men ill- disposed to him and the fatherland . . . as is proved by virtually all those who graduated from it. People say that one of them, Pushkin, was secretly punished by an imperial order. But among its [Lyceum’s] charges each one resembles Pushkin and all of them are linked by some suspicious union.”56 Five years later, this opinion, expressed in a more alarmist language, resurfaced in the anonymous memo “Something about the Tsarskoe Selo Lyceum.” It was addressed to the Third Division of His Majesty’s Chancellery and presumably written by Faddei Bulgarin, an editor of the journal Northern Bee (Severnaia Pchela).57 The article also appeared in French and German press, much to the dismay of the Lyceum’s director. The memo is remarkable not only by its distorted picture of the lyceists’ behavior (which suggests the inflated conservative fears in the aftermath of the Decembrist revolt), but also by its tendency to link freethinking with what came to be later known as nihilism. “What is the Lyceum’s spirit?” the author asked rhetorically, It is when a young man does not have respect for the senior, treats his superiors with familiarity, his equals with arrogance and his inferiors with condescension except for those cases when for the sake of fanfaronade he needs to appear as a lover of equality. This young flibbertigibbet has to mock all the deeds of the people occupying high positions, all government acts, [he has to] remember by heart or be an author of the epigrams, lampoons and reprehensible songs . . . [to know] the most defiant and outrageous excerpts from the most revolutionary treatises. Above all, he has to talk about constitutions . . . to seem skeptical of Christian dogmas. . . . to be loyal to the throne (vernopoddannyi) means a reproach in their language, to be a citizen of Europe and liberal is the honorable thing.58

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Somewhat surprisingly, Bulgarin ascribed this outcome not to the Lyceum’s liberal education, but to the corrupted “spirit of the time” (which he traced to N. Novikov’s Masonic activity) and, more importantly, to the neglect of moral instruction in the Lyceum as well as in Russian society in general. On this point Nicholas I fully concurred with the conservatives. On the day of announcing a sentence to the Decembrists, he issued a manifesto urging parents to “pay all their attention to the moral education of their children.”59 In the Lyceum this principle found implementation in a rather bizarre requirement according to which students were obliged to write their parents at least three times a year, while the director reserved for himself a right to check their letters occasionally. Certainly, “the spirit of the time” often described by contemporaries as “the fermentation of the minds” that occurred as a result of the political relaxation under Alexander I and the impact of the Napoleonic Wars had much to do with fostering liberal aspirations among many students, especially during their last years in the Lyceum when more contacts with the outside world were allowed. The cavalry officers (hussars) who were stationed in Tsarskoe Selo after their return from the European campaign in 1815 shared with the students their impressions about life abroad and the freethinking ideas that these observations provoked.60 Even more than that, the liberal arts education established in the Lyceum was responsible for stimulating students’ critical thinking and quest for selffulfillment that ultimately led some of them toward the path of political dissent. History, law, and political science, which introduced students to the rights and duties appropriate to the people in a civil society, were deemed to be the most important subjects for future statesmen, while moral philosophy was to instruct them in the notions of civic spirit and human dignity. According to Kobeko, a pre-revolutionary historian of the Lyceum, educators thought it useful to acquaint the elite youth not only with the glorious but also the regrettable aspects of the Russian juridical system with the purpose of preparing them for future public careers.61 What the government did not anticipate was that the nobility educated in this spirit would ever identify their patriotism with anything other than autocracy. Kunitsyn’s classes undoubtedly contributed to opening the minds of his students to liberal ideas. The textbooks he selected for preparing lecture notes were to be approved by the Council of the

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Lyceum, which had full academic freedom, limited only by selfcensoring of its members. In 1815, when Kunitsyn proceeded to teach natural law and political economy, the council approved his choice of authors whose works he used to prepare the lectures. The list included the names of Smith, Kant, and lesser-known German philosophers.62 During the first three years, which comprised the junior course in the Lyceum, Kunitsyn taught moral philosophy, logic, and for some time, Latin and French.63 The first of these subjects was the most favored among his students, who appreciated Kunitsyn’s lively lectures and early enthusiasm for teaching. One of them, future historian Baron Korf, wrote: “Kunitsyn was, certainly, more talented than his colleagues; in particular, he lectured more clearly, albeit without much eloquence, moreover he had a vivid imagination and was full of stories, comparisons, and the like.”64 In addition to the ancient authors that served as a didactic reading, for the course in moral philosophy, Kunitsyn made use of the textbook by Ludwig von Jakob, Halle- educated professor of law and philosophy, which introduced students to the basic concepts of Kantian ethics. Most likely Kunitsyn became familiar with Jakob’s works while in Göttingen, where Jakob had his followers among the philosophy teachers. In 1813 Kunitsyn reported to the authorities that he intended to publish his own teaching manual on ethics, but he dropped the idea, probably because the next year Jakob’s Moral Philosophy became available in Russian.65 When Kunitsyn moved on to teach natural law and political economy in 1815, some students noted a change in his teaching style, which they took as a loss of his initial pedagogical zeal. Having found no suitable textbook, Kunitsyn used for this course his own notes and required students to copy them out during their spare time without relying on their ability to follow his lectures in class. Baron Korf was much annoyed by this requirement to “memorize his notes without changing a word” instead of “encouraging the students’ independent thought.”66 In fairness to Kunitsyn, however, this method of teaching was common in Russia in the early nineteenth century.67 Kunitsyn himself benefited from this practice during his student years by compiling detailed notes of Balug’ianskii’s course on political economy, which he now used for his own lectures and hoped to pass on to his students. Apparently for this reason, and also because he might have been apprehensive of students’ immature

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judgment on politically sensitive subjects, he refrained from introducing a more interactive form of instruction in the courses on law and economy. Given the circumstances, Korf’s criticism was perhaps too harsh and, incidentally, quite in keeping with his sarcastic disposition, for which he earned the nickname “mordan,” from the French word “acid.” Kunitsyn was held in high esteem by his students and colleagues at the Lyceum, who voted in 1816 to promote him to the position of professor, which also qualified Kunitsyn for the status of hereditary nobleman corresponding to Rank Eight in the Table of Ranks.68 Yet, there was a grain of truth to Korf’s impression that Kunitsyn’s teaching enthusiasm faded somewhat during the later years in the Lyceum. His academic load doubled with the opening of the Lyceum’s junior boarding school (Pension) in 1814, leaving him little time for writing and research.69 In 1816 Kunitsyn was also put in charge of administrative matters and elected a secretary of the Lyceum’s council, a position next in seniority to the director.70 His increased work load was at least one of the reasons for his failure to complete his manuscript on the history of Russian jurisprudence—a project that would have to wait for another decade. Moreover, teaching in the Lyceum and especially in the Pension, where students were much younger and less prepared, appeared to Kunitsyn not as intellectually challenging as he would wish. He petitioned the Minister about increasing the difficulty of the course on political science, but found his proposal declined on the ground that future state officials, unlike university students, only needed a general understanding of the subject matter.71 Not all students, however, felt the same way about Kunitsyn’s classes as Korf did. Pushkin, for instance, simply ignored the requirement to copy out the lectures, relying instead on his memory and impressions. As Pushchin, his closest friend, recalled later, “Most willingly Pushkin studied in Kunitsyn’s class and then, in his own way: [he] never reviewed his lessons and wrote down little . . . ”72 By contrast, Prince Gorchakov, future diplomat and top state official, studiously copied out Kunitsyn’s notes without paying the slightest attention to his classmates’ teasing.73 It is due to his diligence that historians now have an accurate copy of Kunitsyn’s lectures on “State economy,” “System of political sciences,” and “Encyclopedia of rights.”74

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Lyceum Lectures In its content and structure, Kunitsyn’s course on state economy closely resembled that of his institute teacher Balug’ianskii, to the point of repeating some of his statements verbatim.75 But unlike Balug’ianskii, who tended to present different economic systems in an impartial and descriptive manner, Kunitsyn felt freer to express his enthusiasm for the economic model of Adam Smith. He championed his view that a self-regulating economy, propelled by the mechanism of free competition and the interests of the private individuals, ensures higher economic growth than a state-regulated protectionist economy. Far from being beneficial, setting high prices on imported goods, Kunitsyn argued, hurts the interests of agricultural producers, who have to sell more of their product at a cheaper price to buy expensive foreign manufactures. As a rule, according to Kunitsyn, the attempts to promote the development of one industry over another would always bring economic misbalance: for instance, by stimulating domestic manufacturing with various incentives and price monopoly, the government makes agriculture less attractive for the investors, thereby (unintentionally) depreciating the value of agricultural product. “So the introduction of complete equality [of economic sectors] and freedom with respect to economic activities,” Kunitsyn maintained “is the best means of bringing all classes to the highest degree of well-being.”76 What appealed to Kunitsyn in this model was the underlying idea that people are capable of knowing and following their interests without state guidance, provided there are no obstacles to their lawful pursuits. In agriculture, he argued, this principle of selfsustaining economic incentive is best fulfilled through the system of small-scale farming, whereby wealthy peasants paid fixed rent to the proprietors and disposed of the remaining surplus as they wished. Kunitsyn saw this arrangement as equally advantageous to the farmers and the landowners, who were assured of a steady income and spared the need to personally engage in agricultural business. On the same principle, serfdom is the least efficient system, since it deprives immediate producers of the incentive to seek higher productivity and land improvement but requires a great deal of personal involvement and control on the part of the landowner. Like Balug’ianskii, Kunitsyn hinted that serfdom, besides its low productivity, is a system that degraded the dignity of peasants, turning them into the

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living property of their masters. “A serf,” he told the students, “has no property of his own, for he does not belong to himself; nor does the house where he lives, the livestock he grows, the clothes he wears, the bread he eats.”77 Between these two opposite models of production, he pointed out, there is one based on the labor of free (landless) peasants who work for fixed payment. Although Kunitsyn admitted that the life of agricultural laborers could be more precarious than that of serfs, their personal freedom, he argued, was a greater advantage: “Payment [they earn] belongs to them, for they belong to themselves. It can be sometimes smaller than the food allowance provided to serfs but they have an incentive to save something from it, for accumulated income belongs to them as private property. They can use it for improving their work.”78 Although none of Kunitsyn’s lectures on economy contained any explicit references to the Russian economy, his Lyceum colleagues and students rightly took these ideas as pointing to Russia’s social and economic injustices. Many years later, Engel’gardt would nostalgically recall those years as the time when Kunitsyn “spoke openly against slavery and in favor of freedom.”79 Kunitsyn’s enthusiasm for the concept of laissez-faire was not something unusual in Russia of this period. Smith’s unabridged Wealth of Nations appeared in a Russian translation in a four-volume edition between 1803 and 1806 and was well known to many educated Russians, including reform-minded top officials in the government of Alexander I such as Michael Speranskii and Nicholas Mordvinov. Empress Maria Fedorovna made this book required reading for her sons, who studied political economy under the supervision of Balug’ianskii. Even provincial landowners with an eye on innovative methods of management busied themselves with reading Smith and his European interpreters. Yet, like many Western fashions imported to Russia, it was rather a superficial fascination, which changed little in the social and political outlook of those self-proclaimed Smithians. Russian landowners interpreted Smith’s ideas in a self-serving manner, taking the laissez-faire concept to be a call for freedom from any government restrictions on their economic pursuits, including, most importantly, their treatment of serfs. The most progressive and wealthy nobility embraced the need for technological innovations and division of labor as a means of higher productivity, but the idea of providing serfs with more freedom and economic incentives remained alien to them.80 Some landlords were disturbed by the

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moral implications of owning someone as property, but their concern had more to do with religious or humanitarian sensitivity than with self-conscious liberalism. Other serfowners took it for granted that Russian peasants, if left unsupervised, would give themselves up to idleness, drinking, and crime. For this reason, the system of labor dues (barshchina) was more widespread in Russia (especially in the fertile central zone) than money payment (obrok), which allowed serfs to save whatever remained after the payment of fixed dues and by Smith’s logic was more productive.81 Even Smith’s arguments in favor of free foreign trade found few supporters in Russia, where protectionist policies became part of the economic tradition since the time of Peter the Great and were reinforced during the early nineteenth century in response to the growing international competition.82 Against this background, Kunitsyn’s advocacy of private property rights and economic freedom for all social classes, including the peasantry, was a strong liberal statement, as was his view that all people, and not just the nobility, were capable of pursuing their economic interests, provided they had sufficient material incentives. Even compared to such self-professed economic liberals as Mordvinov, who later became president of the Free Economic Society, Kunitsyn went much further in his defense of laissez-faire and property rights. At the same time, Kunitsyn’s economic views were those of a philosopher rather than an economist arguing on the basis of empirical facts. In Russia of the early nineteenth century, where manufacturing was still in its infancy and the country was losing in competition to the industrialized countries, the officials’ lack of enthusiasm for free trade and nonregulatory economy was not entirely unjustified.83 In a way, the same limitation was evident in Kunitsyn’s treatment of serfdom. As a person of non-noble origin who had never owned serfs, Kunitsyn approached this subject from the perspective shaped by philosophical and economic literature, whereas most serfowners, including those sympathetic to liberal and humanitarian ideas, tended to view serfdom in light of their personal experience and financial situation. Embarrassed as some of them were about Russian slavery, they remained unwilling to give up their social privileges and economic interests in the name of liberal ideals.84 The value of Kunitsyn’s criticism of serfdom is diminished by the fact that he never took up the tough question of how the model of economic freedom could be established in the countries where the nobility’s income and social status had long depended on serf labor.

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When Kunitsyn proceeded to teach the “Encyclopedia of rights” and the “System of political sciences,” he found the requirement of copying his lengthy lectures increasingly burdensome for his students. In 1816 Kunitsyn petitioned the Council of the Lyceum about a subsidy for publishing his notes, which he obtained the same year.85 In the curriculum, the law course preceded the one on political science, as dealing with more general philosophical issues pertaining to the origin and the nature of civil society, but Kunitsyn chose to publish them in reverse order, taking almost two years to prepare a manuscript on natural law. Intellectually, those years marked his drift away from the cameralist teaching he learned as a student toward more consistently Kantian and Smithian philosophy. This shift would be evident in Kunitsyn’s Natural Law, which appeared in 1818–20, whereas his Lyceum course on law and his textbook on political science (based as it was on the unaltered version of his lecture notes) still showed some influence of the cameralist thinking, albeit much diluted by the ideas associated with the noninterventionist model of the state authority. The two sets of ideas were not easily compatible. While cameralist science defended the principles of regulatory economy and the idea that people’s well-being should be a proper concern of the ruler, Smith’s concept of laissez-faire and Kantian theory of moral autonomy suggested the ideas of a self-regulating economic mechanism premised on the interests of private individuals rather than the state. Kunitsyn’s attempt to find a balance between the two approaches reflected the tendency common to the German philosophers in the late eighteenth century. Many of them found Smith’s economic ideas appealing but were unwilling to dispense with the whole cameralist science of governing that was still useful in teaching the fundamentals of “good order” and public security.86 Kunitsyn, too, tried to combine the Kantian concept of individual freedom and Smith’s liberal economics with the cameralist notion of public well-being. According to the council report for the year 1815, Kunitsyn used for his law course “the newest works of Kant, Schmalz, Hufeland and Klein.”87 Of these, the large share came from Theodor Schmalz (1760–1831), a Prussian jurist and professor of cameralist science and natural law, who formed the link between Wolffian and Kantian traditions in German academic philosophy.88 The choice was apparently dictated by the expectations of political correctness appropriate for the Lyceum. More cautious than Kant but not as absolutist-minded

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as other German cameralists, Schmalz presented such sensible topics as the social contract and forms of government in a manner that was safe to teach to the audience of future government officials.89 In his lectures Kunitsyn (similar to Schmalz) eschewed Kantian arguments for the benefits of the representative government and power separation, employing instead a nonprescriptive account of monarchical, aristocratic, and “republican” forms. By implication, the criteria of legitimate state power and the scope of the people’s rights in a civil society, which he described under the heading “Pure state law,” applied to any type of polity. The deviations from his generic model were treated as an example of tyranny.90 Kunitsyn’s sensitivity to the political implications of the subject matter was evident in his use of legal terminology. He put, for instance, his account of state forms under the heading “Conditional state law” (Uslovnoe gosudarstvennoe pravo) and not “Constitutional state law,” as in Schmalz, even though Schmalz’s term “constitution” was Aristotelian, standing for “the sum of political and legal arrangements as well as historical traditions of a state” rather than any institutional restrictions on the power of the ruler, which the modern use of the term conveyed.91 Kunitsyn communicated this old meaning of the term through its original Latin designation “constitutio” and, alternatively, the Russian word “postanovleniia” (regulations), which became something of a euphemism for “konstitutsia” (constitution) in Russian political vocabulary during the early nineteenth century, apparently as a way to remove any associations with the French revolutionary constitutions.92 More modern and distinctly Kantian in spirit was Kunitsyn’s treatment of the foundations of natural law and the nature of individual autonomy. As its title suggested, the course on the encyclopedia of rights focused on the innate and acquired rights of private individuals vis-à-vis society and the state. It presented a purely secular and, in contrast to the Wolffian tradition, a nonteleological account of natural law that made no mention of perfection as the ultimate end of morality and politics, and tried to distinguish the former from the latter. Characteristically, Kunitsyn chose to omit any references to man’s evil nature that in the work of Schmalz served to buttress the sovereign’s coercive power.93 At the core of the course was the Kantian idea that law and ethics are concerned with two distinct forms of law. Juridical laws (pravo) regulate only “man’s external behavior” and “require that people do

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not treat other individuals merely as means to their ends”; as long as this principle is observed, man’s internal motivation is of no concern to the law. Ethics (nravouchenie), on the other hand, is concerned with man’s inner morality and prescribes positive duties toward other individuals.94 Underlying this distinction was another Kantian principle, namely, the principle of moral autonomy, which attributed to each individual the ability for and the right to moral self-guidance. Kunitsyn taught his students that man’s primary natural right is the right to one’s person, by virtue of which “every individual can demand from others that they treat him not as a mere tool to their ends but as a person endowed with reason and free will.” This right presupposes the freedom “to act according to one’s will,” “to set one’s goals,” the freedom to preserve and cultivate one’s physical and moral abilities, as well as the freedom “to acquire material goods necessary for one’s sustenance and enjoyment.” To achieve his goals, an individual has “the right to demand from others” that they respect his freedom of acting at his discretion. “Whoever tries to manipulate a person violates his right to freedom. Equally, whoever imposes his opinion on an individual, does not respect this person’s rights,” for such an act amounts to taking away his independence. Innate rights, Kunitsyn asserted, belong to everyone, including children and mentally challenged people, who also possess reason but are limited in using it. The equality of natural rights, however, does not entail actual material or political equality within civil society.95 Kunitsyn grounded the authority of the ruler in the idea of contract and insisted that people retain their natural rights both before and after they form the civil society, but his view of the state of nature as a historical phase, which he borrowed from Schmalz, somewhat detracted from his own argument that the state emerged as an artificial creation on the basis of people’s consent.96 In his published work on natural law a few years later, Kunitsyn would substantially alter his concept of the state of nature to make it more consistent with the Kantian principles of right; in the lectures, by contrast, the elements of consensual theory were fused with a modified (Schmalz’s) version of Smithian four-stage theory of human history, with the result that the creation of the civil society and the state appeared as both a gradual historical process of social coalescence and as a product of people’s conscious agreement. Following Schmalz, Kunitsyn argued that prior to forming the political society people went through several stages of civilization, each of which

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reflected corresponding changes in social interaction and subsistence patterns. Solitary existence sustained by individual hunting and fishing comprised the first stage. With the gradual emergence of property, people felt the need for mutual defense and unification, which became stronger when they learned the skills of pasturage and created individual families. He termed this stage a “patriarchal pastoral society”—a society that was held together by the familial bonds and the authority of the patriarchs, some of whom united into larger communities for the purpose of defense but preserved their internal independence. Within this society, the relationships of obedience and authority were based on the possession of property. “Family folk who do not have herds cannot be considered members of the pastoral society, for they are tied to their master and not to the society.”97 The introduction of landed property and the need to protect the fruits of labor necessitated the establishment of a more reliable mechanism of protection—the civil state. It also marked the emergence of social divisions based on landed property and unequal enjoyment of rights. The owners of the land became “proprietors,” while the landless population living off their labor turned into “inhabitants” (zhyteli) whose economic status put them in the “unfree” category. “Proprietors” concluded a “pact of subjection” among themselves and determined the future form of government in the civil state. The sovereign then formed a separate “contract of inclusion” (dogovor vkliucheniia) with the inhabitants, who had no say in the establishment of political power but were free either to accept it unconditionally or leave the society for good.98 The contract of subjection, according to Kunitsyn, may establish any form of government. His implication was that all forms of government are legitimate as long as the supreme authority (be it a monarch or a popular assembly) is effective in protecting the freedom and safety of people.99 If, however, the ruler “uses state resources not for the end of [common security] or deprives the people of their original and acquired rights for the protection of which the society was established, then the government is called despotic.”100 The right to alienate certain territories of the state (common in the patrimonial monarchies) is also contrary to the ends of society, as the sovereign’s patrimonial rights “make the people the monarch’s property and put the whole state in danger.” For this reason, patrimonial monarchy (a system of government that was known in Medieval Russia) is the only type of polity that, in Kunitsyn’s view, holds no legitimacy. Although

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the ruler may be vested with supreme legislative, executive, and judicial power, the form of government, once established by the contract of subjection and defined by the fundamental laws, may not be changed other than with the mutual consent of the ruler and (the propertied) citizens; however, Kunitsyn did not explain how this change may be affected in polities where people have no representation. The idea that the state is instituted for the purpose of securing people’s innate rights defined for Kunitsyn the essence of the common good. Already in the lecture course (and more explicitly in his Natural Law) he treated public good as a set of arrangements aimed at the provision of security and justice rather than maximization of state power by means of imposing “the good order,” as was common in the cameralist tradition. The most important components of the common good, according to Kunitsyn, are legal equality, publicity of the law, and the strict observance of the legal order that ensures the rights of everyone. Legal equality does not preclude the right to special privileges for some individuals, but this right may only be earned through special contribution to public service. In the sphere of public finances, the interests of the people require that the government dispose of tax money “as frugally as possible.” And whereas Kunitsyn granted to the sovereign the right to decide on the means to public ends, he sought to set the boundaries beyond which the state may not extend its power. “Laws,” he asserted “may not make prescriptions regarding the ends that do not concern the public end.”101 The same principle of the primacy of people’s rights sets the limits on the “external power of ruler”—the prerogatives pertaining to the realm of international relationships. Implied was the idea that the government should not provide military assistance to other states for the purposes that have no direct relevance to the public interests. “The ruler,” Kunitsyn argued, “may not use his subjects and their property for the benefit of other states.” If, however, people’s external security is in serious danger, the ruler may use his discretion to employ any means of protection, including an aggressive war and territorial expansion or, by contrast, the alienation of some territories of his state, provided “this concession is made for the sake of saving the country.”102 The influence of cameralist philosophy in Kunitsyn’s lecture course was most discernable in the way he explained the regulatory and policing authority of the state. Like Kant, Kunitsyn distinguished between the two functions, calling them, accordingly, “the power of

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inspection” (potestas inspectiva or vlast bliustitel’naia) and “the right of police” (jus politiae or pravo politsii), but in his account, the scope of both powers was broader and potentially more intrusive. In Kant, the right of inspection (justified by the need for the state’s preservation) allowed the government to guard “public well-being” against “association[s] of political or religious fanatics.” However, Kantian right of inspection was circumscribed by the requirements of strict legality so that if the government, for instance, suspected some religious or political association of activities that could harm the public well-being, the police needed a warrant issued by “a higher authority” to conduct the search of “anyone’s private residence.”103 In Kunitsyn, by contrast, the “power of inspection” (potestas inspectiva) presupposed the obligation on the part of the subjects to inform the state about everything that had to do with the safety of the state and the public, whereas the limits on the power of inspection were not clearly defined. Likewise, if in Kant, the police were supposed to maintain “public security, convenience and decency,” including the prevention of “begging, uproar on the streets, stenches and public prostitution,”104 in Kunitsyn, similar to Schmalz, the definition of police power implied the idea that the state was responsible for instilling certain virtues in its subjects, rather than merely preventing private vices dangerous to the public, although in Russia, all the measures he described would indeed benefit the public well-being. The police power, according to Kunitsyn, maintained law, “quiet and order in the cities and villages,” as well as the measures that “increase populace and popular education. For this purpose it [the government] establishes medical facilities, encourages marriages and tries to eradicate lewdness and bachelorhood, [it] promotes migrations from one province to another [and] establishes educational institutions.” To this Kunitsyn added one more function—“the prevention of obstacles to producing, improving and exchanging products.”105 Kunitsyn’s course on political science was shorter and more practical- oriented than his course on law. Its published version, which appeared in 1817, contained the same material that Kunitsyn delivered to the Lyceum students, except for the title of the book. The title—Izobrazhenie vzaimnoi sviazi gosudarstvennykh svedenii— does not easily lend itself to English translation; most accurately but somewhat awkwardly, it could be rendered as A Sketch of the Relationship among Various Branches of State Science.

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As the title suggests, Kunitsyn saw human society in cameralist terms—as a complex mechanism that required coordinated management of its various components for the purpose of ensuring public well-being. The art of governing, he argued, developed as human society advanced along the lines of social and economic progress, making it imperative to study and regulate multiple social needs. The science of the state, which any public servant was to know, “embraced various branches of the state administration” and offered “general rules extracted from practical experience.”106 At the same time, Kunitsyn adopted the Kantian idea that the science of state administration as an empirical discipline based on contingent historical practices was not meant to articulate the ends of the civil society.107 “State sciences,” he argued, “are nothing more than the study of the means to the ends. To know the ends one would have to consult the general foundations of law without taking into consideration positive laws, for the former originates in the common source—human reason . . . while the latter depends on contingency, circumstances and, infrequently, the private will.”108 Repeating the ideas he taught in his law course, Kunitsyn wrote that primitive people shared the understanding of the common social goals but were unable to agree on the means to achieve them. The many inconveniences of their existence propelled them to establish a supreme power “under certain conditions, for it is not in man’s nature to entrust himself blindly to the will of others and let himself become a tool of someone’s whims by neglecting his own wellbeing.”109 These conditions (which he defines as security, well-being, and freedom within the limitations of law) determine the duties and the scope of the supreme power. As in his lectures on law, the range of matters subject to the ruler’s discretion is reduced in the Sketch to the preservation of law and safety rather than the pursuit of moral ends, but cameralist influence was still apparent in Kunitsyn’s use of the term “blagoustroennoe obshchestvo” (“well- ordered society”), which denotes public safety, comfort, and spread of education. The first two tasks belong to the purview of the police that serve the public by preventing the crime and protecting people from natural disasters and epidemics. Education, although a private matter, requires government

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assistance, for “it strengthens the country’s potential.” The government, Kunitsyn argued, should establish educational institutions and “select individuals who . . . would act upon people’s morals and public opinion in a beneficial way.”110 This paternalistic element, however, was balanced by the inclusion of some Smithian ideas that presupposed freedom from government supervision in matters of production. “Production,” he asserted, “is a matter of private business. The government only observes its development and removes obstacles hampering the success of private enterprises. Therefore it promotes national wealth in a negative rather than positive manner.”111 Far from focusing on a single source of national wealth, as did many Russian economists, Kunitsyn saw “urban industry” and trade as supplementing the benefits of agriculture. Economic freedom, however, would not entirely obliterate the need for government assistance. In keeping with cameralist ideas of resource management, he viewed an abundant population as an important condition for a prosperous economy. He wrote: “Although with the increase in food production population should grow, certain public prejudices often . . . pose obstacles to [this process]. It is the duty of the government to prevent them and encourage the growth of population.”112

Kunitsyn and Pushkin Of all Kunitsyn’s students in the Lyceum, Pushkin was the most famous and outspoken one. It is in part because of Pushkin’s appreciation of his teacher expressed in the celebrated verse “October 19th” that Kunitsyn became known to historians: To Kunitsyn—the tribute of the heart and wine! He created us, he sparked our fire, He laid the foundations, He lit the light . . . 113 Beside the laudatory quatrain, Pushkin’s liberal verses and sharp political epigrams, which express the ideals of individual freedom and the rule of law, eloquently attest to Kunitsyn’s influence on the poet. The first poem that earned Pushkin a reputation as a liberal appeared in 1817, the year of his graduation from the Lyceum. Although “Ode. Liberty” was not published in Russia until 1906, numerous manuscript versions circulated among the liberal-minded

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public during Pushkin’s lifetime and long after his death, inspiring new generations of liberals.114 The poem tells a story of a poet who wants to turn away from his lyrical muse to become a voice of freedom on behalf of all “fallen slaves.” Wherever he looks, he finds “shackles,” “helpless tears,” and “infamy of law.” His message to the “tyrants of the world” is that only law-abiding monarchies, which preserve “sacred liberty” of the subjects, are safe from violent revolutions. The punishment for the tyrant is often death at the hands of the revolutionaries, but the poet, although sympathetic with the oppressed, does not approve of violence. Rebellious nations, he says, are also guilty of forgetting the law. The poem’s ending was a stern advice to the rulers “to bow [their] head / beneath the solid canopy of law.”115 Another of Pushkin’s famous political verses, “The Village,” was a passionate indictment of serfdom as a system that abused the labor and the dignity of peasants. Pushkin wrote it in 1819 after visiting his family estate in Mikhailovskoe for the first time since his graduation. The toilsome life of serfs in the poem appears all the more miserable in that it contrasts with the serenity of nature in the countryside and the carefree existence of the poet who visits the village to find inspiration in “oaks’ peaceful whisper and quiet of the fields”—perhaps a hint of Pushkin’s personal guilt for belonging to the class of serfowners.116 His depiction of serfs as people whose property, labor, and time belong entirely to their masters was similar to the way Kunitsyn characterized serfdom in his lectures. The poet’s only hope for the abolition of serfdom lies with the tsar, but he seems doubtful that this hope will be realized during his lifetime. He ends the poem with a rhetorical question: “Oh friends, will I ever see the people unoppressed / And slavery fallen by the tsar’s wish / And on a fatherland of the enlightened freedom / Will ever arise a magnificent dawn?”117 “The Village” became known to Alexander I in 1819, but the tsar, who once flirted with the idea of emancipation, reacted with leniency. Upon reading it, he reportedly said to the General Vasil’chikov: “Thank Pushkin for the noble sentiments which this verse inspires.”118 Alexander’s comment was quite in keeping with his liberal posturing that he liked to assume on occasion. This was one of such occasions—after all, the poem put the blame for the inhumanity of serfdom on the landlords, while the tsar was shown as a beacon of hope. When Alexander I found out that he himself

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was a target of Pushkin’s unflattering verses, he felt less inclined toward leniency. The poem “Noel” was one of the reasons Pushkin was exiled to the Caucasus in 1820. It alluded to Alexander’s early image as the “Savior of Europe” after the Napoleonic Wars and his promise to grant Russia a constitution and civil freedoms (once the conditions allowed), which he made in his speech to the Polish Seim in 1818.119 Although Pushkin had expected and hoped for reforms from above, “Noel,” probably like “The Village,” expressed his bitterness over the fact that the nation could receive civil freedom only as the tsar’s favor. He doubted, though, that Alexander would carry out his promise. Unlike many liberals from the nobility (and much like Kunitsyn), Pushkin was immune to Alexander’s famous charm. Hurrah! Nomadic despot Is riding to Russia ... The Tsar walks in proclaiming ... Rejoice, oh people: I’m sated, healthy and stout And name of mine the newsman glorified . . . I ate and drank and promised And work was never a distress. And listen, in addition ... I will put the law instead of you, Gorgoli And people’s rights to people shall I give Out of my free will and by My royal mercy.120 There is some evidence that Pushkin, while still a student, wanted to write a philosophical novel, a part of which was to be a chapter on man’s rights and natural law. According to his diary, Pushkin read the draft of the chapter to some of his classmates in 1815 but the novel remained unfinished and the chapter is not extant.121 Kunitsyn certainly was not the only influence on Pushkin in his youthful years. Pushkin’s observations of serfdom and social injustice in Russia, the friendship with the liberal-minded brothers Turgenev, and his personal experience of living under paternalistic regime—all disposed him to champion liberal reforms. But it was

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Kunitsyn who woke up Pushkin’s critical spirit and a sense of social mission. In 1835, when Pushkin published his History of the Pugachev Revolt, he presented his teacher with a copy of the book that contained the inscription “as a sign of the author’s deep respect and gratitude.”122 Kunitsyn, on his part, became an admirer of Pushkin’s liberal verses.123 The graduation of Pushkin’s class in 1817 marked the beginning of a new period in Kunitsyn’s life and teaching career. He continued to serve in the Lyceum, now in the senior classes, but he moved to St. Petersburg to take up a position of law professor in the Main Pedagogical Institute—his alma mater, which had been upgraded in 1817 (as reflected in its title) to perform functions close to those of the university. After its reorganization, the Main Pedagogical Institute acquired extended academic autonomy and formal division into departments. Along with pedagogical training, the institute now offered public courses for self-supported students.124 One such course on political economy was entrusted to Kunitsyn in addition to his regular classes on natural law. Most of the students enrolled in these courses were public officials preparing for the examinations required for obtaining the ranks of College Assessor (Kollezhskii Assessor) and State Counselor (Statskii Sovetnik).125 Officials were not obliged to enroll in a preparatory study program, but many opted for it to meet high qualification standards set by the state. Along with this audience, the public courses attracted progressive nobility and military officers eager to enhance their intellectual level. Among the latter there were some future Decembrists who also approached Kunitsyn about setting a private course on political economy in the apartment of the Preobrazhenskii regiment’s officer.126 In these students he found a receptive audience for his ideas. In April 1817 Kunitsyn received a monetary grant for his service in the Lyceum, which followed with a medal of St. Ann several months later on the occasion of the first graduation. In 1819, another honorary award was timed to the graduation of the first Pansion class. The next year, when Kunitsyn left his teaching position in Tsarskoe Selo to become a full-time teacher at the institute, the Minister of Education granted him 4,000 rubles (twice the yearly salary of the university professor) in recognition of his service.127 Financially secure and well established as a teacher, Kunitsyn could now return to journalistic and scholarly writing.

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3 Kunitsyn in the Son of Fatherland

Kunitsyn’s transfer to St. Petersburg in 1817 put him in the midst of the intellectual life of the capital, which was living through the final phase of Alexander I’s liberal epoch. Literary salons and social gatherings with some intellectual pretensions, particularly popular in the two capitals, were the most visible signs of what contemporaries called the “fermentation of minds” during this period. Besides their civilizing and entertaining functions, as well as their role in fostering personal friendships and social networks, salons served as a forum for public opinion, which, to some extent, made up for the absence of more institutionalized forms of national debate.1 The culture of French salons served Russians as a model, although unlike their French counterparts, Russian salons were mostly organized by women from high society aspiring for the social recognition of their talents and education. As one historian pointed out, the charming and well-mannered hostesses were able to nurture in their salons the atmosphere of tolerance and mutual respect that enabled ideological opponents to meet on safe ground and have civilized discussions.2 One can add one more important feature that characterized many salons in the capital, namely, their capacity to cut across social and professional boundaries; if the elite English club in St. Petersburg (regularly visited by Nicholas Turgenev) was a meeting place only for those who could afford it, salons were open to the young aspiring litterateurs as well as professionals from non-noble backgrounds. As the Russian nobility acquired more taste for education and reading, the ability to carry on erudite conversations became a mark of good manners, especially important for the young noblemen seeking admittance to polite society. In the words of Filip Vigel’, who regularly attended social gatherings in the capital, “the notions about civility have somewhat changed. To be an indefatigable dancer, to utter pleasantries to the ladies and stay with them during the whole 59

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evening—all of this was no longer necessary. What [was] needed was intelligence and knowledge. Rhetoric began to replace polite compliments.”3 Most of the social gatherings and associations still had an ostensibly apolitical character and were centered on literary and linguistic issues, although during this period even such an issue as literary style was not devoid of political implications.4 In some salons, however, the talks were focused more on contemporary politics and political philosophy to the degree allowed by the official climate. In these salons and guest rooms there developed a tradition of circulating in a manuscript form liberal poetry and pamphlets that could not be otherwise published. The government, in the opinion of Nicholas Turgenev, was well aware of the spread of liberal sentiments in Russia and by not openly cracking down on them created an impression that “its sympathies lay with the enlightened public.”5 Contemporaries differed in their appraisal of these developments. For conservative-minded Vigel’ they represented a growing but superficial social fashion, a convenient way to “pass for a knowledgeable person,”6 whereas for the Decembrist Sergei Murav’ev-Apostol, it was an important sign of the emerging political conscience in Russia—the trend that in his view gave rise to the Decembrist movement.7 Perhaps closer to the truth was Count V. A. Sollogub when he wrote that the fashion for philosophizing had significant impact on “certain parties” in the capital society but virtually none on the general Russian public, which “religiously adhered to traditions and was entirely indifferent to the fashionable talks.”8 Indeed, in their memoirs and letters many early liberals give the impression that they felt themselves an isolated minority, trying to awaken the public from its political slumber. In addition to salons, private correspondence was another channel for exchanging ideas and political news. Letter writing was fashionable in all civilized countries in the nineteenth century, but in Russia, in the absence of free public forums, it acquired importance beyond its primary purpose. The leading Russian liberals— Prince Viazemskii, the brothers Turgenev, and Pushkin—were all prolific correspondents, whose letters illuminate their political views and attitudes. They often shared their thoughts about serfdom, the nature of the Russian administration and legal system, the state of civil society in Russia, and Russia’s place in European politics.9 Viazemskii, serving in Poland, frequently related to Alexander Turgenev his critical comments about the abuses of Russian administration in Russia’s most Western (geographically and culturally) province, while Turgenev

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kept his friend informed about the important events and behindthe- curtains politics in Russia.10 Especially eagerly, they circulated news about their writings and the liberal initiatives, both private and public, that they undertook.11 Without ever forming a political society, these men were united by the bonds of personal friendship and trust, which enabled them to share oppositional ideas and attitudes. Kunitsyn did not remain aloof from the social life of the capital despite his increased academic load and several writing projects in progress. He frequented the fashionable salon of Sofia Ponomareva, a sister of one of his former Lyceum students, who gathered around herself many young intellectuals with interests in literature and poetry, including Pushkin and Anton Del’vig, both of whom enjoyed a special place of honor as talented poets.12 Occasionally Kunitsyn also paid visits to the brothers Turgenev, whose apartment became a venue for the intellectuals with aspirations for liberal reforms and those who cherished the opportunity to have frank conversations about Russian politics, culture, and morals. Unlike Ponomareva’s literary-oriented soirées governed by the etiquette of salon culture, gatherings in Turgenev’s place were informal and dominated by the male audience. The brothers credited themselves with prompting the young Pushkin—then a new graduate who plunged into a life of entertainment after the years of confinement in the Lyceum—to apply his passion and talent to writing liberal verses. According to Vigel’, Pushkin wrote his famous “Ode. Liberty” in Turgenev’s apartment, having been inspired by the view of the nearby Mikhailovskii castle where Emperor Paul I was assassinated in 1801.13 Yet, behind this lively façade of intellectual awakening and political relaxation, there was still an autocratic edifice unshaken by Alexander I’s attempts to reform its exterior. Despite the establishment of the State Council, which acquired the right to propose and deliberate on legislation, the tsar could stop its deliberations, revoke the decisions made by any judicial or administrative body, or even nullify and change the law as he saw necessary. The observance of existing laws, therefore, was a matter of the autocrat’s personal discretion motivated solely by his own good will and political considerations.14 More often than changing laws, Russian tsars resorted to legal exemptions, all of which were added to the existing corpus of law without in fact carrying a force of law beyond their specific cases. This practice, as one scholar pointed out, ultimately reflected the tsars’ disregard for the fundamental principles of law—its permanence and universality.15 The tsar could also make use of his right to

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issue rasporiazhenie (administrative rulings) and ukaz (decrees), which had legislative force even if they conflicted with earlier legislation. Moreover, in certain circumstances, the tsar did not necessarily have to give his orders a legal form, for his directives expressed to his subordinates already conveyed the force of unconditional command by virtue of the tsar being the ultimate source of law and power. These prerogatives may have allowed tsars to render quick justice in certain situations, but in the long run, the result was a fragmentation of Russian laws, legal confusion, and lack of respect toward law and the legal system on the part of the Russian subjects.16 By establishing in 1801 a legal commission to prepare a unified and updated code of laws, Alexander I implicitly recognized the need for stronger legality in Russia, but as long as the tsar’s unlimited power of legal dispensation remained in place, the rule of law was precarious. Likewise, the creation of ministries and the State Council did not in any way diminish the tsar’s authority or alter the principle of personal power that characterized Russian autocracy. The amount of decision making in which the tsar engaged personally was indeed enormous. In addition to handling petitions, the matters of internal and external security as well as regular legislative proceedings, he acted as a personnel director, approving the awards and appointments in the top five ranks, granting permissions for vacations and extended leaves, mediating between disagreeing officials in his government or at court, and, as the memoir sources suggest, getting involved in numerous other issues that would catch his attention.17 As a result, the functioning of the central government virtually stalled whenever the tsar was away from Russia, which frequently happened during the second half of Alexander’s reign as he became more involved in European politics. Personal power had been crucial for the Russian tsar’s image as a guardian of the nation and a patriarch capable of dispensing justice and mediating between the interests of all social classes and political groups. Tsars, therefore, were careful to sustain this image by granting all subjects, including serfs, the right to petition the tsar. For this reason, the majority of the Russian people did not view his power as excessive or arbitrary.18 The Russian liberals, however, felt deeply ambivalent about the issue. On the one hand, the tsar’s ability to act independently gave them hope that Alexander I would promote liberal changes despite the reluctance of the conservative members in his government, just as Peter the Great imposed westernization by the sheer force of his power against all the resistance of Russian

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traditionalists. On the other hand, the reforms the liberals wished to see in Russia were meant to establish the rule of law and a constitution that would essentially undercut the tsar’s unlimited personal rule— the very tool that could serve to bring about the desirable changes. Alexander’s constant hesitations about the need for further reforms and his propensity to get carried away by different idées fixes, increasingly evident toward the end of the post-Napoleonic decade, showed the liberals the precariousness of relying on the tsar’s good will alone. A telling example of how far the power of an autocrat could extend was his decision to establish on the lands of state peasants military colonies in which soldiers were obliged to engage in agricultural work in addition to their military duties. The idea was to make the army self-sufficient and keep it occupied during the time of peace; the reality, however, was that many peasants on the territories of the colonies were converted into soldiers, and their lives, as well as their family members’ lives, were subjected to meticulous regimentation and control. Colonists resisted and, in the words of one contemporary, “not only liberals but the whole Russia” decried “forceful establishment” of the military colonies. Nevertheless, military colonies remained in place until 1858.19 Having committed himself to liberal changes on his accession, Alexander I felt more comfortable implementing them in foreign countries than at home, all the while nurturing the hopes of liberals for corresponding reforms in Russia. In 1803 he granted representative rule to the Ionian Islands, which were placed under the dual authority of Russia and the Ottoman Empire. In 1809 the annexed Finnish Grand Duchy received a special status within the Russian empire, whereby the Finns continued to live by their own fundamental laws. After the war with Napoleon, Alexander’s support for restoring constitutional order in France and his granting of a constitution to the Kingdom of Poland in 1818 further strengthened his image as a liberal-minded monarch.20 As time went by, however, liberals began to realize that despite all the gestures, Alexander did not wish to reduce his power as an autocrat in Russia nor did he consider Russian subjects ready to enjoy the rights and responsibilities of citizens. The downfall in 1811 of Michael Speranskii, his liberal-minded advisor who drafted a plan for reforms that would strengthen the rule of law and set Russia on a path to representative rule, was a clear indication that the tsar had changed his mind about reforming the empire. Speranskii’s sudden exile also served as a reminder that disgrace was still a powerful weapon in the hands of an autocrat and that the nobility’s privileges

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would never be secure in the absence of redress against the abuses by the tsar or the government. In Russia the nobility’s rights to private property and personal security were perceived as monarchical grant rather than a legal recognition of natural or traditional liberties.21 Although many contemporaries had the impression that the government condoned the spread of liberal ideas in Russia (the impression that was probably retrospectively reinforced in their minds by the memory of the repressive Nicholaevan regime), Alexander I did not shun the means of political surveillance and censorship to control the exchange of ideas and the flow of information in and out of Russia. In 1805, only four years after renouncing the methods of police rule upon his accession to the throne, he authorized the establishment of a domestic surveillance committee.22 Under Alexander I, educated Russians had an opportunity to subscribe to the foreign press, but the censorship often removed the most provocative pages. Alexander Turgenev, eager for the uncensored news, urged Viazemskii to send him foreign papers by mail, or at least keep him informed about the latest political developments in Europe. “Here [in Russia],” Turgenev wrote, “we see Europe with your eyes and hear about it with your ears.”23 Viazemskii, however, had to be cautious, because private correspondence, even that of highranking officials, was also subjected to censorship—a policy that the well-born Russians found both annoying and degrading. Letters that contained objectionable content would be intercepted, causing gaps of information and occasionally misunderstandings between the correspondents.24 The liberal poetry widely circulated in the capitals, but everyone involved did that at risk to themselves. Writing to Viazemskii about Pushkin’s “Liberty,” Alexander Turgenev was concerned that he might put Viazemskii in danger by the mere mention of the ode in their letters. Out of precaution Turgenev abbreviated the title of the verses. He wrote: “I copied for you Pushkin’s verse “L[iberty]” but I am afraid to send it to you, I fear for you and for him.”25 Whenever possible, correspondents tried to dispatch their letters with a trusted person rather than send them by mail.26 An uneasy coexistence of liberal and conservative tendencies in the late 1810s was nowhere more evident than in the domain of Russian journalism. On the one hand, the 1804 statute served as an effective stimulus for the formation of a journalistic profession and, more broadly, the rise of freelance littérateurs who were capable of catering both to a sophisticated literary audience and the fashion- oriented female readership that subscribed to the Women’s Journal. Although many of these enterprises happened to be short-lived because of

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small subscriptions, cumulatively, they contributed to broadening the cultural horizons of the educated Russian public, which was no longer confined to the high society of the capital.27 On the other hand, censorship remained vigilant and the Russian press of this period was still a long way from becoming an outlet for national concerns and interests; nor could it serve as a public forum for the discussion of government policies, as was the case with the British media. In the Russia of Alexander I’s period, political journalism remained negligible in comparison to the literary criticism, travelogues, and historical narratives that dominated the pages of the leading journals. Aside from censorship, the age of romanticism in Russia was not particularly conducive to political journalism in the modern sense of the word. Instead, it was common to express political ideas and concerns (especially those of a conservative character) through the medium of historical and philological studies that were oriented toward the audience knowledgeable in the subjects involved. For the most part, political sections in the Russian periodicals consisted of news from abroad accompanied by some commentaries and, only occasionally, political essays. Most of them were culled from the foreign press (mostly in a modified form) rather than being produced by native writers. In general, the earliest years of Alexander I’s reign was a period of the most fruitful beginnings of political journalism in the first quarter of the nineteenth century, with both liberal- and conservative- oriented journals trying to reach out to the educated public. Messenger of Europe (Vestnik Evropy), founded and edited by the historian Nicholas Karamzin from 1802 to 1804, became the first journal to include a special section on politics separate from “Literature and Miscellaneous.” Besides selected international news and information about laws, decrees, and manifestoes issued by the Russian government, “Politics” carried discursive articles, which were mostly written by the editor himself. Although some of these articles were interpretative translations from the Western press, all of them reflected Karamzin’s political credo—a belief in the need for the political order based on the rule of law within the frameworks of autocracy and traditional social order. For Karamzin, it was a convenient way of trying out his ideas that he would later express in his fundamental historical works.28 In contrast to Karamzin’s enlightened but strictly loyalist stance in the Messenger, the Journal of the Free Society of the Lovers of Literature, Science and Art (1804) assumed a more liberal orientation. It published Vasilii Popugaev’s essay “About political enlightenment in general”

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in which he advocated the need for individual freedom from social constraints and prejudices.29 The same 1804 issue of the Journal featured a provocative article on the fate of the black slaves, also written by Popugaev but judiciously disguised as a reprint from the Spanish press. The political stance adopted by Popugaev was not, however, acceptable to all members of the Society. As a result of internal disagreements among the contributors, the Journal did not survive its first issue. After its closure, the liberal-minded members of the Society sought new opportunities in the Northern Messenger published by the staff director in the Ministry of Education, I. Martynov.30 As a member of Russian government close to the tsar’s inner circle, Martynov presented the ideology of “government liberalism” with its Anglophilia and emphasis on the value of enlightenment, typical of the earliest years of Alexander’s reign. In addition to the articles promoting the tsar’s educational and censorship reforms, Northern Messenger published a number of extensive excerpts from European philosophers unavailable in Russian translation, including an almost complete edition of Holbach’s Natural Politics.31 With the beginning of the Napoleonic Wars in Europe, and especially after 1812, as the tsar was losing interest in liberal reforms, the Russian press began to display the signs of renewed stagnation and conservatism. Typifying this change was the Moscow-based Russian Messenger, which sought to counteract Western influences in Russia by popularizing nationalistic images of cultural self-sufficiency and uniqueness. It stood close to the Readings in the Symposium of the Lovers of the Russian Word published by A. Shishkov, who became famous for his outlandish conservative idea of reviving Church Slavonic and purging modern Russian of all Western borrowings. The only journal to counterbalance the conservative press in the second decade of the nineteenth century was Syn Otechestva, which attracted many liberal-minded littérateurs, including a number of future Decembrists.32 In this journalistic niche Kunitsyn saw for himself an opportunity as a publicist. By 1817 when Kunitsyn resumed his journalistic work, Syn Otechestva had already lost some of its initial liberal spirit, although it still carried more articles on social and political issues than its main competitor, Vestnik Evropy, or any other Russian journal. If anything, Syn Otechestva’s liberalism took the form of more extended coverage of British parliamentary proceedings and political developments in the countries aspiring to constitutional order. Vestnik Evropy, too, had a political news section, but it was shorter, more selective, and occasionally, negatively disposed

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toward European constitutional developments. On one occasion, for instance, Syn Otechestva boldly quoted a speech of a liberal British MP defending freedom of the press as a guarantor of the nation’s liberties and a medium for the articulation of its interests. The MP’s statement to the effect that “[the press] shows the rulers and bureaucrats their duties,” sounded rather provocative in Russia.33 Vestnik Evropy, by contrast, focused more on the antigovernment plotting uncovered in Britain in 1817, which triggered parliamentary debates on the freedom of press and the suspension of habeas corpus.34 But Syn Otechestva, too, weighed in with critical articles about Great Britain. In 1817 it published a long anonymous review of British postwar economic development with a special focus on the social implications of the ongoing crisis. The author seems to have taken a special pleasure in reporting that life in Britain was getting more and more difficult for all people, except for the most fortunate few who could still receive substantial income without applying themselves to hard work.35 These circumstances, according to the author, had a negative cultural effect on Englishmen. The land of the great Francis Bacon was no longer as much interested in reading as before because the English have no spare time or money to buy expensive books.36 Russia, by contrast, presented quite a different scene. In its review of political life in 1817, Syn Otechestva pictured the Russian Empire as a prosperous and peaceful country: “The Russian Emperor,” the reporter wrote, “observed the middle and southern regions of his empire and saw everywhere growing industry, contentment [and] enlightenment.”37 Certainly, the journal’s stance was not determined by the contributors alone. Censorship, relaxed as it was in comparison to Nicholas I’s period, was ever present and, by Alexander Turgenev’s account, was often arbitrary rather than consistently harsh.38 Unlike Vestnik Evropy’s political news column, Syn Otechestva’s corresponding section was closely monitored by the censors, with each issue featuring the censor’s name and the date his permission was secured. Too often, Syn Otechestva’s section “Contemporary Politics and History” was filled with travel accounts and politically neutral essays on Russian history instead of political news and debates as the heading promised. Even knowing censorship constraints, some readers blamed the editor for his political timorousness. In a letter to Alexander Turgenev, Viazemskii vented his frustration: “ . . . isn’t Grech’ ashamed not to familiarize Russia with what is being written in Europe, at least by excerpts? Instead, he keeps talking about Kamchatka.”39

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As a member of the Russian administration in Poland, Viazemskii was one of the few Russian officials who had access to the foreign liberal press and could compare firsthand the results of Western freedom of expression with the deficiencies of Russian journalism. Time and again, Viazemskii bemoaned the low quality of the Russian press, which he ascribed not only to the limitations imposed by the censorship, but also to the “torpor” and “political ignorance” of the Russian public.40 While in Warsaw, he contemplated sending French journals to his friend Alexander Turgenev, but had to drop this idea knowing the way customs censorship removed “the most interesting pages” from the imported press. Even so, Turgenev called Viazemskii “my dormer-window to Europe” for occasionally providing him with uncensored European news.41 Given this dearth of political journalism, Kunitsyn’s articles on serfdom and constitutionalism were bound to stir the reading public in the capitals. One of these articles was his response to Alexander I’s famous speech at the reinstated Polish Seim in March 1818, where the tsar publicly committed himself to constitutional principles and expressed the hope that Russia, too, would enjoy the fruits of Enlightenment when the conditions were ripe.42 The speech was as much a beacon of hope for many liberals (perhaps the last time in Alexander’s reign) as it was a cause of alarm for those who resented any reformist experiments. The reaction of Russian provincial landowners was well captured by the words of Speranskii, then an exiled statesman in distant Penza. He wrote to his friend two months after the speech was published in Russia: You are certainly aware of all the fits of fears and gloom, which afflicted the minds of the Muscovites as a result of the speech. These fears, exacerbated by the distance, appeared even here [in Penza]. And although it is still very calm here, I cannot guarantee this calmness . . . If the landowners, the class of people, no doubt, the most enlightened, see in this speech nothing more than the freedom for peasants, how then can one demand that simple people see in it something else.43 Even liberals, who applauded Alexander’s professed constitutionalism, took his preferential treatment of Poles as an insult to Russian dignity; after all, the Russians had liberated Europe, while the Poles fought on the side of Napoleon.44 When news about the tsar’s speech

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reached the army, General Michael Orlov, well known for his liberal views and respectful treatment of soldiers, tried to rally high-ranking officers to sign a letter to the tsar protesting his decision—an act that Nicholas Turgenev called a manifestation of “the narrow patriotism.” Turgenev thought, however, that their indignation was caused not so much by the tsar’s liberal reforms in Poland as by his earlier pronouncements about the possibility of returning the Kingdom of Poland its former territories, which became part of the Russian Empire in the eighteenth century.45 With these public concerns in mind, Kunitsyn wrote the article “About Constitution,” seeking to endorse the tsar’s actions and defend the idea of the constitution against those who came to associate it with “riots, overthrow of lawful government and all kinds of disorders” as a result of “France’s unfortunate experiments.”46 These misfortunes, he asserted, occurred not because France strove for a “free polity” but because “seduced by the freedom of the ancient republic,” it attempted to establish the form of government “no longer convenient” (udobnyi) to the European peoples. After twenty-five years of alternating between lawlessness and slavery, the French Revolution, he wrote, “gave us a salutary lesson not to seek freedom . . . which in fact is slavery.”47 Kunitsyn’s ensuing discussion of the distinction between political and civil freedoms closely echoed Benjamin Constant’s conception of the ancient and modern liberty, which he first intimated in his Spirit of Conquest and Usurpation published in 1814 and then developed in more detail four years later in his famous public lecture “The liberty of the ancients compared with that of the moderns.”48 Similar to Constant, Kunitsyn argued that ancient republican liberty, which embodied direct democracy, had its foundation in the institutions and attitudes that no longer exist in modern society—slavery, small size of polities, and a contemptuous attitude toward industry and commerce. In the ancient city-states sustained by the slave economy, free citizens with plenty of leisure time had the opportunity to engage in legislative and judicial proceedings on a regular basis, viewing this lifestyle as the most suitable to their interests. “Ancient republics,” he wrote, “present us with a strange contrast of values and customs . . . Their inhabitants were divided into free men and slaves: the former enjoyed freedom and equality among themselves, taking it as a necessary law, while the latter were treated like [inanimate] things . . .”49 In view of their strong prejudices against work, the ancient citizens were willing and able to devote their entire time

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to politics and law making. By contrast, Kunitsyn argued, in modern times “urban and rural industries, as essential for the public well being, acquired due respect. [so] People of free estates consider lucrative activities as praiseworthy while idleness and neglect of one’s economic affairs are [deemed to be] shameful.”50 If “citizens of the ancient republics saw freedom in obeying only those laws which they themselves decreed, modern peoples do not wish this right, which is extremely burdensome” because it takes them away from their private pursuits.51 While the right of political participation lost its importance for modern peoples preoccupied with their private affairs, enjoyment of civil rights became the primary expression of modern freedom. “Presently,” Kunitsyn wrote, “the peaceful citizen wishes only that laws were just to him, that no force could oppress his person with impunity, that nobody take his property without compensation and that nobody, except the law itself, dare to stop his activities and make his efforts fruitless and expectations futile.”52 While direct exercise of sovereignty best suited the spirit of the ancient republicans, modern peoples, in Kunitsyn’s opinion, “only want to have their representatives . . . that would inform the ruler about the public needs and beg him to introduce measures necessary to rectify social evils.”53 Kunitsyn saw these principles of representative monarchy, legality, and protection of civil rights as the pillars of viable constitutions. He upheld the French constitution of Louis XVIII as an embodiment of modern freedom and the king himself as an example of a benevolent ruler who forgave his people their “sins.” The same referred to Alexander I, although Kunitsyn, true to his dislike of open flattery to the tsar, omitted to mention him by name. “Sovereign-Victor,” he wrote, “keeping his generous promise, gave a free Constitution to the people he himself conquered . . . in order to better their destiny.”54 Kunitsyn’s image of a representative assembly with limited legislative capacity was certainly a big departure from Constant, as was his view of political rights as a burden for the average citizen. In Constant’s constitutional theory, political rights granted to a relatively wide electorate on the basis of income served as the very safeguard of people’s civil liberties. Moreover, he thought it imperative to maintain participatory politics in order to prevent modern society from “the dangers of destructive individualism.”55 Unlike Constant, however, Kunitsyn did not sound concerned about the atomistic tendencies of the modern lifestyle. On the contrary, his optimistic tone conveyed sincere

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confidence in the benefits of private autonomy protected by civil rights. This must have been the reason why he understated the importance of political freedoms in modern polities, although the reasons of censorship might also have played the role. In Russian conditions it was still an act of courage to publicize the advantages of a written constitution, the individual’s freedom to pursue private interests, and the need for an elected (rather than appointed) advisory institution. The novelty of the constitutional theme in the press was noted by the conservative Karamzin. With a sense of surprise and resignation, he wrote: “[The emperor’s] Warsaw speeches strongly echoed in the hearts of youth. They sleep and dream about constitutions . . . they even began to write about it. Let the young people enthuse, we smile . . . everything depends on the Providence of God.”56 Kunitsyn’s attempt to open up these themes in the press was all the more remarkable because in early-nineteenthcentury Russia, all constitutional projects touching upon the issue of civil rights, both modest and more far-reaching ones, remained confined to the narrow circle of top bureaucrats and the tsar himself. This referred equally to the Unofficial Committee’s Principles of Government Reform drafted in 1802 and Speranskii’s Plan of Reform eight years later, to name the most important.57 The Decembrist programs, known to the still more exclusive group of the “initiated,” played no role in educating Russians on the notions of liberty. Even the text of the Polish constitution had not been published in Russia, and the public was left to surmise its content from the emperor’s speech alone.58 Kunitsyn’s next contribution to Syn Otechestva was a critical review of the speech that Count Uvarov, then a superintendent of the St. Petersburg Educational District, gave in the Main Pedagogical Institute on the occasion of establishing chairs in world history and Oriental studies in March 1818. Uvarov’s lifelong ambition to strengthen the study of Oriental languages in Russia derived from his conviction that Arabic and Asian cultures were the original wellsprings of world culture with a potential to revitalize decadent contemporary civilization infected with “dangerous” materialism and a “revolutionary” ethos.59 Implementation of this project in the Pedagogical Institute presented Uvarov with a convenient opportunity to acquaint the Russian public with his views on the evolution of world civilization and the place of Russia in it. Kunitsyn was much impressed with Uvarov’s scholarly qualifications and his ability to talk in a sophisticated manner—a rare case for

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a Russian official of his rank and social position. Most of Kunitsyn’s article, therefore, conveyed a summary of Uvarov’s speech about the civilizing effect of studying languages and history. Some of his points, however, provoked Kunitsyn’s critical comments. Well aware of his subordinate position to Uvarov, Kunitsyn justified his criticism by claiming the right to an independent opinion, which, as he argued (with little validity) had recently established itself in Russia. “The age of the lie and flattery is coming to an end,” he wrote, “today even the rulers of the world like the truth . . . the circle of people truly educated and independent . . . would reject it [flattery] indignantly.”60 To Uvarov’s credit, he did belong to those “truly educated” bureaucrats who tolerated a measure of journalistic freedom; yet the very fact that Kunitsyn had to precede his criticism (politically innocent as it was) with the justificatory note illuminates the delicate position of journalists in the late 1810s. Moreover, despite his own optimistic assurance that freedom of opinion was taking root in Russia, much in his article remained understated or disguised by florid language.61 Kunitsyn had no objection to Uvarov’s view of the Orient as the “cradle of civilization,” but if Uvarov focused on its contribution to the treasures of “enlightenment,”62 Kunitsyn grimly reminded the readers that Asian countries also revealed an example of peoples with no “private and public freedom.” They “lost [it] so long ago,” he wrote, “that even history does not remember their calamity, lost it so irretrievably that they expect improvement of their fate only through supernatural transformation.” “Perhaps,” he added, “the inhabitants of the misty Albion are destined to revive . . . Asians by letting them feel both the sweetness of civil freedom, the benefits of the benign form of government and the fruits of the enlightenment which grew from the Asian seeds under the misty sky of Britain.”63 Uvarov, too, welcomed the British presence in India, but what he meant by the “shrewd” British policy was the preservation of the Indian languages and laws rather than the establishment of civil freedoms and the spread of enlightenment. And while Uvarov projected Russia’s role in Asia as a protector and cultural leader, Kunitsyn expressed his concern about the policy of the “secret surveillance” exercised with respect to the Asian countries at a time when they no longer posed a military threat to Europe.64 In explaining why the Oriental languages are worth studying, Uvarov argued that not all languages have equal value to humanity: only some of them are “root languages” that gave rise to other tongues and

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“strongly affected the enlightenment of the whole world.” To illustrate his thought Uvarov compared the hierarchy of the world languages to that of humans. “Not all people,” he argued, “comprise humanity; not all languages belong to philology.”65 Taken in its context, Uvarov’s analogy was not meant to be a remark on people’s nature as humans. Yet, Kunitsyn either misunderstood Uvarov or, more likely, simply seized on the opportunity to talk about the equality of men as human beings. As if trying to explain away Uvarov’s statement, Kunitsyn wrote: “We understand this phrase in a sense that not all people live as human beings—in accordance with the dignity of their [human] nature and mission; however, all people are equal by nature.”66 Kunitsyn’s most provocative comment concerned Uvarov’s theory that history gradually but inexorably moves in the direction of freedom and progress, with each country following its own path determined by its specific circumstances. According to Uvarov’s estimation, Russia still lagged behind other countries because of the impact of the Mongol Yoke, yet “following the example of Europe, we [Russians] have started thinking about the idea of freedom.”67 While accepting the premises of Uvarov’s historical scheme, Kunitsyn disagreed with his conclusions as to the Russian experience of freedom: “They [notions of freedom] have never been alien to the Russian people. The people’s council (veche), boyar’s council (Boyar Duma), court of arbitration, trial by jury . . . were an essential part of our form of government back in ancient times . . . enactment of laws, election of the deserving generation to the Russian throne were usually the subject of deliberation and unanimous decision of all social estates.”68 It mattered little to Kunitsyn that all of these examples belonged to pre-Petrine history and had long been out of practice in autocratic imperial Russia. It was more important for him to remind the public that the notions of legality and participatory politics had their roots in the Russian past. Clearly, the implication of Kunitsyn’s excursion into legal history was that Russia had already matured to enjoy freedom. Kunitsyn’s next public statement on the issue of freedom was his response to the provocative article published in the Spirit of Journals (Dukh Zhurnalov). The author, writing under the pseudonym “Russian nobleman Pravdin” (Russkoi dvorianin Pravdin), attempted to disprove the opinion of some “superficial observers” that the position of the free foreign peasants was “enviable” in contrast to the life of Russian serfs. The reality, Pravdin argued, was entirely the opposite: Russian serfs enjoyed a happy life due to their masters’ protection, while

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foreign peasants, left to their own devices, were exposed to all the dangers of economic instability and uncertainty.69 Pravdin’s didactic yet defensive tone was indicative of the paradoxical situation surrounding the issue of serfdom in the first quarter of the nineteenth century: while most of the Russian landowners were uncompromisingly in support of the status quo, explicit public defense of human bondage became increasingly rare, especially in the post-Napoleonic years when the progressive public became conscious of Russian peasants’ patriotic contribution to the war effort.70 The dissemination in Russia of Smith’s economic philosophy further undermined the logic of traditional pro-serfdom arguments.71 The author’s choice of pseudonym, which derived from the word pravda (truth), was defiant, yet the fact that he chose to hide his true identity behind a pseudonym suggested how sensitive the issue had become. Given the circumstances, it would no longer be proper to defend serfdom by depicting serfs as inherently lazy, prone to heavy drinking, and therefore in need of paternal guidance, as did, for instance, Karamzin on the pages of Vestnik Evropy a decade earlier.72 To make his case, Pravdin had to refurbish traditional paternalistic rhetoric with arguments based on economic and humanitarian considerations purged, for most part, from the negative clichés about serfs’ behavior. He sought to achieve that by emphasizing the inhumanity and economic volatility inherent in the Western system of agriculture, in which peasants are free but deprived of external help and forced to search on their own for work or land available for rent. Although the argument about the social cost of unfettered competition was, in itself, a valid criticism, the force of Pravdin’s claim rested not on objective analysis of rural pauperization in capitalist economies, but on anecdotal evidence and fancy analogies that drew a one-sided and biased picture of foreign peasantry. Rooted in the anti-Western attitudes so ardently propagated by conservative patriots during the post-war decade, the article heralded an intellectual controversy over capitalism that would involve in the 1830s and 1840s both conservative and socialist-minded Russian thinkers.73 Pravdin argued, for instance, that unless a foreign peasant was fortunate enough to inherit a plot of land, he was forced to rent it, moving from one landowner to another “like a gypsy,” always uncertain of what the future held in store. Should he get sick, greedy doctors would drive him to misery; the same would happen if poor harvest or natural calamities struck his region. The Russian serf, by contrast, live with

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the certainty that his access to land was always assured and in case of emergency, his landlord’s assistance would be ready at hand. Whereas Russian serfs had no property rights and, despite the government’s admonitions, were routinely sold without land, individually or as families, Pravdin essentially implied otherwise.74 The Russian serf, he wrote, cultivates the landlord’s land, using it “as, in a way, his own, being sure that it will never be taken away from him.”75 The serfs’ attachment to one place had, according to Pravdin, an important political consequence—they were more orderly and patriotic than foreign peasants who “wandered around their country” without developing any feeling of attachment to it. He saw foreign settlements in Russia as another proof that peasants abroad were neither economically secure nor loyal to their country of origin. That serfs normally preferred money payment (obrok) to the labor on the landlord’s fields (barshchina) was a well-known fact in the nineteenth century. Obrok released them from the immediate supervision of the often-hated stewards and allowed more freedom of entrepreneurship.76 In Pravdin’s words, however, barshchina, with its close relations between peasants and the landlord, was more economically advantageous to both parties. Worst off, in Pravdin’s scheme of peasant hierarchy (but in actual reality best off), were state peasants because they were “deprived of” the landlord’s protection and guidance. But what if, Pravdin asked rhetorically, Russian serfs were placed in the same position as foreign peasants? In no time, he assured his reader, they would find themselves in the same misery, because landowners, no longer tied to them by paternal bonds, would become as greedy as their foreign counterparts, trying to extort from peasants high rents regardless of the economic conditions. Unlike earlier defenders of serfdom, who were primarily concerned with the issue of material loss for the nobility in case of emancipation (which would make them compete for peasants’ labor and degrade their lifestyle as a result of the diminished number of the domestic servants), Pravdin tended to pose as a spokesman for the peasants’ economic interests, arguing that it was peasants, not noblemen, who had much to lose. In conclusion, citing peasants’ patriotic outburst during the Napoleonic invasion, Pravdin pointed out that peasants did not succumb to the enemy’s promises of “false freedom,” which only proved their attachment to the Russian way of life.77 Peasants defended their homeland, standing side by side with their landlords. “Why,” Pravdin wondered, “sever this social bond and make everyone an egoist?”78

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The article’s self-serving message, if carefully disguised, provoked Kunitsyn to respond. He was especially offended by Pravdin’s aggressive and admonitory tone, which, as he suspected with good reason, was meant to scare off potential opponents. By responding critically to Pravdin’s argument, Kunitsyn ran the risk of being labeled unpatriotic, given Pravdin’s presumptuous claim that nobody truly loving his Russian fatherland would disagree with his opinion. The challenge was all the more difficult, because officially, the subject of serfdom reform was not open for discussion in public, despite the tsar’s widely known interest in this matter. In these circumstances Kunitsyn felt compelled to assume the pseudonymous identity N. N., refraining for the most part from direct censure of Russian serfdom and focusing instead on the position of peasants in Western Europe. Even so, his exaltation of the freedom enjoyed by farmers and agricultural workers in the West implicitly invoked the contrasting images of oppression and poverty associated with serfdom. Contrary to Pravdin’s assertions, Kunitsyn argued that freedom is not “an empty word” for foreign peasants, still less an invitation for license. “Freedom,” he wrote, “is the right of each person to act according to his will in all matters that do not harm other people.” The right to “be his own master” is “the first most important right of a foreign peasant.” “If someone would want to appropriate and sell at the auction Pravdin himself,” Kunitsyn sarcastically commented, “he would certainly not agree on this change of social status, even if the buyer would equal him in the degree of humanity.”79 Nobody, he went on, turns a foreign peasant’s children into domestic servants at will or forces an unwanted arranged marriage on them, as it is often the case with serfs. For peasants abroad, freedom also meant the liberty to engage in economic activity “as they choose” (“po sobstvennomu usmotreniiu”). Hence, the strong incentive to work hard and be frugal. Pravdin’s argument about the nomadic lifestyle of foreign peasants, Kunitsyn argued, is based on the false assumption that peasants’ contracts with the landowners last for short periods only, while in reality, German, French, and English landlords prefer to keep their tenants for nine to thirty years, often renewing contracts with those who already proved to be honest and productive.80 The benefits of this arrangement for the landlords is that peasants have an incentive to improve the quality of the land, which ultimately raises its market value. Kunitsyn did concede that it could be rather difficult for a newcomer to rent a plot of land; yet he remained convinced that for

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hard-working peasants, competition is not an obstacle. In any case, he wrote, “these poor peasants and wandering laborers are not as common in foreign lands, as the author believes.”81 Whereas Pravdin considered lack of economic protection as a disastrous and immoral effect of impersonal market relations, Kunitsyn saw it as another spur for frugality, independence, and the spirit of entrepreneurship. Those assured of ready assistance, he maintained, would be more inclined toward laziness and wastefulness than those accustomed to relying on their own resources. Alluding to the serf’s legal disabilities (which Pravdin passed over in total silence), Kunitsyn went on to argue that peasants work diligently only if they are guaranteed the fruits of their labor, whereas peasants whose property is insecure would be more likely to give themselves over to prodigality and “similar pleasures.” Kunitsyn also disagreed with Pravdin that landlords in developed countries are in a position to charge rents as high as they please. The price of the land, he argued, depends “not on the will of the landlord alone” but also on the market value of the land and peasants’ willingness to pay this price. A peasant’s payment is, therefore, defined by the mutual agreement between the two parties and “protected by the force of law.” “There must be many among the [foreign] landlords who would want to empty the purse of the peasants but they have no means to do so.”82 Clearly, Kunitsyn viewed legal protection and the mechanism of supply and demand (although he did not use the term itself) as better safeguards against the greed of the landlords than the paternalistic considerations exalted by Pravdin. Kunitsyn also took issue with Pravdin’s argument that many of those oppressed peasants from German lands ended up seeking a better fortune in Russia, to which he retorted that they try to escape the Bavarian feudal system and not go back to serfdom. Besides, he added, they are driven out of their country by the religious disabilities inflicted on Lutherans in Catholic Bavaria. One only needs to consult the Russian government’s manifestoes to foreign settlers to understand what constitutes their well-being in Russia. “If they, as the author asserts, fled from freedom, why did they not petition to being assigned to some landowner? Some colonies exist in Russia for thirty and forty years and nobody as yet has become convinced that bondage is more advantageous than freedom.”83 “Let the author,” Kunitsyn went on sarcastically, “place an advertisement in the foreign press about his intention to acquire several souls for himself and

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invite volunteers to avail themselves of the opportunity to become his property . . . we will see if many volunteers will arrive.”84 The rest of Pravdin’s augments about foreign lifestyle met a similar rebuttal. The picture that Kunitsyn drew was one of a prosperous, orderly, and healthy life in the countries where peasants live as free individuals, in contrast to Pravdin’s opinion of foreign farmers as poor, economically vulnerable and disrespectful of authorities. This defiant tone notwithstanding, the article ended on a mitigating note. At issue here was the meaning of the word vol’nost, which in Russian can stand both for license and liberty. The vol’nost that Pravdin describes, Kunitsyn argued, is the license displayed by the French Revolution. No reasonable man would welcome this sort of freedom. Even so, he added, during the French Revolution, peasants were spectators, then tools, and, finally, victims of the Parisians’ rage. The author, according to Kunitsyn, “conflated civil with political liberty. The first can exist quite comfortably without the second, as it does in Austria, Prussia, Denmark and other countries. Besides, the author confuses the right to freedom with the abuse [of such].”85 In support of his statement, Kunitsyn quoted Alexander I’s speech in the Polish Seim where he referred to civil liberty under the name of “zakonnosvobodnye postanovleniia”—a neologism in the Russian political lexicon that somewhat awkwardly combined the words “legal” and “free” to convey the notion of legally recognized liberties without explicitly using the word “constitutional.” Although Kunitsyn refrained from elaborating on this point, an attentive reader could easily surmise from his description of foreign farmers that social prosperity and order are inconceivable without personal freedom, security of property, and entrepreneurial liberty. About a decade earlier, a public declaration of one’s admiration for English-style institutions would not have been something odious, given the well-known Anglophilia among some of Alexander’s top advisors.86 It was Britain’s “remarkable customs,” one might recall, that students of the Pedagogical Institute were advised to observe on their study trips. However, as the economic competition between the two countries intensified in the early nineteenth century, AngloRussian mutual distrust grew proportionately.87 The Napoleonic Wars and the economic crisis that followed strengthened the emerging anti-Western sentiments among the Russian conservatives, so much so that the exaltation of a foreign lifestyle and political systems could be easily interpreted as a lack of patriotic commitment, if not

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a spirit of freethinking. The image of Western prosperity implicit in Kunitsyn’s article was indeed likely to make some readers ponder the contrasting realities of serfdom-based Russia and the motives behind Pravdin’s tirade. Despite the growing evidence of Russia’s economic backwardness, the overwhelming majority of Russian serfowners in the early nineteenth century could not even imagine their life without the labor of serfs. Yet, for all the purity of his intentions, Kunitsyn’s view of the English-style farming (and in general, of laissez-faire economy) was somewhat idealized and one-sided. In his devotion to the principle of individual liberty, Kunitsyn appeared oblivious to the fact that the advent of capitalism in the West did not occur without a price, and the price was enclosure and the poverty of rural laborers. By many accounts, in the 1820s and 1830s, the material conditions of Irish free laborers were worse than those of most African American slaves; Even American abolitionists conceded that slaveholders had “much truth for comfort on their side of the argument.”88 It is possible, however, that Kunitsyn was not fully aware of this other reality of capitalist economy. He treated the issue from the theoretical point of view shaped largely by the ideas of Smith, who found many advantages in free labor and none in the labor of serfs. Had Kunitsyn gone to England in those years, he probably would have felt more ambivalent about the virtues of capitalism, as did, for instance, Herzen or Belinskii after their first visit to the industrialized West in the 1840s.89 There was yet another dilemma lurking behind Kunitsyn’s economic liberalism. As a liberal, he placed equal value on individual liberty and security of private property, but in the context of Russia, securing both principles would essentially mean emancipating serfs without providing them with land, which belonged to the nobility as private property.90 Although Kunitsyn never explained how he imagined the process of emancipation, his reply to Pravdin, placed in the larger context of his philosophy of natural rights and economic freedom, suggests that he thought it would be enough to grant peasants full legal rights, the right to move freely around the country and acquire property, to set the mechanism of Western-style agriculture in motion. The acquisition of land by peasants would thus occur in a natural way, through the working of the free market. Far from condemning economic differentiation in the countryside, Kunitsyn, as he stated in his Lyceum lectures, believed that free rural laborers,

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even very poor ones, were still happier than serfs because they had freedom to seek material improvement. Underlying this vision was his belief that peasants are entitled to be treated as capable of discipline, self-guidance, and productive economic effort—a liberal idea par excellence. The main problem with this solution was that peasants did not want freedom without land. Kunitsyn, incidentally, was far from the only abolitionist in Russia to think along those lines. Iakushkin, one of the future Decembrists, attempted to liberate his serfs for no charge but without land, only to find out that they did not see his proposition as an act of generosity. Having no intention to part with his hereditary property, Iakushkin had to leave things as they were.91 The option of landless emancipation was also favored by some of the entrepreneurial serfowners, but for reasons quite remote from those Kunitsyn had in mind. Convinced by their own observations and Smith’s arguments, they concluded that free labor was more efficient and that liberating serfs without the land would ensure plenty of productive labor readily available for low wages. Driven exclusively by the desire to save the nobility from economic and social decline, the nobles of this sort cared little about the peasants.92 Throughout 1816–18 the Baltic provinces implemented the emancipation projects according to which liberated peasants had the right to lease land from a proprietor, but they were not accorded full civil liberties, including the right to travel or live wherever they wished. The liberal landlords in the Baltic region expected the compromise to be satisfactory for peasants, but the ensuing rural disturbances proved otherwise.93 Incidentally, Nicholas Turgenev, the most vocal opponent of serfdom in those years, remained convinced that even landless emancipation would be beneficial in Russia, because “freedom, even if accompanied by inconvenient institutions and conditions is still freedom.”94 It is easy to understand why many economic historians tend to view projects for landless emancipation as examples of conservative or selfish thinking on the part of the privileged. If in England the landlords’ freedom to dispose of their land as they found fit produced changes in the mode of production, as a result of which “excess” population was steadily but gradually forced out of the countryside into the industrial cities, in Russia, allowing serfowners to drive peasants from the land would have likely led to sudden and mass rural pauperization, with no industry to absorb the released labor force. On the other hand, as Kunitsyn’s article illustrates, a vision

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of capitalist reforms in agriculture stemmed from the core liberal notions of freedom and economic progress through competition. What distinguished Kunitsyn’s position from that of self-serving Russian Smithians was his assertion that full civil rights should be granted to emancipated peasants. Kunitsyn’s unbounded enthusiasm for economic liberalism was rather unusual for its time, as was his attitude toward peasants. In his refusal to attribute the peasantry’s backwardness and moral vices to anything other than their enslavement, Kunitsyn differed not only from conservatives but also from such liberals as Nicholas Turgenev and Prince Viazemskii, who, despite their abolitionist stance, tended to think of peasants as ignorant and backward.95 Yet, one cannot help wondering how much Kunitsyn, a philosopher living in the capital, knew about the character and the real world of Russian peasants. The Russian public’s reaction to Kunitsyn’s article was described by Alexander Turgenev in his letter to his younger brother Sergei: “Here, and especially in Moscow, the article in the Syn Otechestva caused a sensation. Everybody ascribes it to Nicholas [Turgenev] . . . but the author is Kunitsyn.”96 Suspicion of Nicholas’s involvement was, however, not unjustified. As Nicholas proudly confessed to Sergei, “It [the article] was written by my friend but at my request . . . Scoundrels scold me but decent people thank me, although the first are in the majority.”97 The government’s response was also quick and predictably negative. A ban was issued on “writing pro and contra” on the freedom of either Russian or foreign peasants.98 Impressed by Kunitsyn’s boldness, Alexander Turgenev recommended the article to Prince Viazemskii, but the latter’s reaction proved to be unexpectedly reserved. “I read it with pleasure,” he replied to Turgenev, “but I must confess I am not surprised at the measures introduced by the government. Children should not be allowed to play with knives; first teach them what to cut and then, God bless them . . . That is why the government should always go ahead of public opinion without waiting until it will run and knock it [the government] off its feet.”99 Viazemskii’s call for caution in discussing the issues of serfdom appears at odds with his own complaint to Turgenev, voiced just a month earlier, that while Poles were about to taste the fruits of freedom, Russians “have no right to speak about hateful slavery; they do not dare expose all its meanness and lawlessness.”100 Nor does Viazemskii’s reaction seem to be consistent with his concern for educating public opinion in Russia that he expressed in his private

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correspondence time and again. Behind Viazemskii’s muted reception of Kunitsyn’s article was, perhaps, his aristocratic prejudice against the writer of obscure social origin who aspired to carry out a mission that Viazemskii reserved for the liberal-minded nobility and highranking officials like himself and the brothers Turgenev.101 To some extent, Viazemskii’s limited image of the Russian liberal stemmed from his conviction that reforms in Russia would ultimately come from above. It was, thus, the moral duty of those close to the government to keep the discussion of the reforms alive. In contrast to his friend, Alexander Turgenev was far less affected by aristocratic snobbery. For him, the government response to Kunitsyn’s article was another sign of rising conservatism. “Just recently,” he wrote, “the words ‘English liberty’ have been removed from my speech for the Bible society. It is quite likely that this word [liberty] will soon disappear even from our vocabulary.”102 Kunitsyn remained undeterred (and was perhaps even encouraged) by the stir he created with his journalistic essays. His next article, “Some thoughts concerning the need for external security and safety of the states,” went beyond the immediate practical issues into the sphere of political theory—something that Russian readers would rarely find in the literary-oriented periodicals. It examined the principles underlying modern international politics by drawing an analogy between the behavior of men in the state of nature and the relationship among the independent states in the international arena. The concept of the natural state Kunitsyn presented here was much different from that he had employed in his Lyceum lectures.103 Instead of an anthropological account of primitive people, Kunitsyn saw the state of nature as “an abstraction from civil conditions, a philosophical assumption necessary to explain the purposes of the civil state.”104 The natural state, he argued, is neither “the happiest state of the human race,” nor a condition entirely devoid of social order: “Freedom of one sentient being is limited by the freedom of all . . . rights and duties are already present but these rights are not defined with precision.”105 The same principle applies to the relationship among the individual states that remain in the condition of natural coexistence vis-à-vis each other. However, if individuals can escape the inconveniences of the state of nature by agreeing to obey “the supreme power,” no such agreement is possible among the independent states. Just as in the state of nature, where mutual consent among people is never sufficiently secure, alliances and treaties among the sovereign states are precarious conventions as long as there is no external authority above them.

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Kunitsyn admitted that this situation “causes continuous dangers and feeds constant fear, envy and suspicion,” which is itself a “great evil.” Yet contrary to what one would expect of a liberal thinker, he did not advocate the departure from this state of nature. Uniting the states into a single “universal monarchy” as “some writers suggest,” would in his view, entail the loss of political sovereignty and with it, “national pride . . . love for one’s fatherland, originality of the [national] character and, in general, everything that constitutes the peculiarity of the given nation.”106 Nor would it be feasible to establish a union of sovereign states under the authority of a permanent congress. It would require a degree of consensus that is never found among the independent states. Along with these schemes, Kunitsyn rejected as unrealistic Kant’s idea that the spread of republicanism would gradually lead to the establishment of permanent international peace. Rivalry, he argued, is a natural phenomenon caused by the law of self- defense and expansion. Since it cannot be eliminated other than by jeopardizing national existence, each state should seek to obstruct the success of its “natural enemies” and to increase its own might “by all means possible.”107 Given the inherent hostility among the states, he asserted, war appears to be the natural means of survival, while the threat of war serves to maintain the spirit of patriotism and military vigilance. It does not mean that war is necessary, Kunitsyn assured his readers, but “people should never forget that there is a greater evil than warfare—the loss of political freedom and national identity.”108 The politics of power balance, sustained by skillful alliances among the European states, was ultimately the only solution to the problem of international hostility.109 Kunitsyn’s belief in the invigorating effect of just wars was inspired as much by his extensive reading of the classical authors (attested by Kunitsyn’s predilection for Latin quotes in his articles) as by his observation of the impact the Napoleonic invasion had on the morale of the Russian people. Contrary to the widespread fears that Russian serfs might rebel en mass, taking advantage of the war situation, illiterate peasants proved no less loyal and devoted to their country than officers from the nobility educated on the ideals of public service. Many of the commoners who were not conscripted to the army participated in guerrilla raids, which had a significant impact on the outcome of the war.110 For Kunitsyn, it was a testimony that civic virtues always come alive during the time of national threat. Yet, in light of Russia’s foreign policy in the postwar decade, Kunitsyn’s enthusiasm for martial spirit was somewhat surprising. By

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the end of the 1810s, the liberal public’s initial rapture over Russia’s war glory was giving way to a bitter disappointment over Alexander’s excessive interest in foreign affairs, parades, and military discipline, which increasingly diverted his attention from the internal reforms. “We are still delighted at our Paris laurels but they are fading on us,” Viazemskii wrote in 1819.111 Some of Kunitsyn’s liberal-minded contemporaries noticed that Russia was emerging as a leader of conservative Europe and that the era of liberal relaxation was coming to an end. In 1819 Nicholas Turgenev shared his thoughts about Russia with his younger brother: “From the very beginning of its history Russia never enjoyed the civil wellbeing (grazhdanskoe blagopoluchie). She often covered herself with glory but happiness had always been alien to her . . . Russians got used to all kinds of calamities and endurance became natural to them. There was a glimpse of the better future at the beginning of this reign but what now?”112 Even Viazemskii, separated from Russia by hundreds of miles, sensed this shift unmistakably. His correspondence with Alexander Turgenev grew more pessimistic and critical by the day. He was particularly saddened and annoyed by the government’s attempts to interfere in what he thought was the private realm of the people. In 1819 he indignantly wrote to Alexander Turgenev about the incidence in the Warsaw theater that caused much uproar among the educated public in Poland. The matter was about a recent ban on booing bad acting in the public theater—the practice that was acceptable, in the words of Viazemskii, in all “civilized countries.”113 The scandal ended with the closure of the newspaper that dared to protest the measure. Viazemskii could well understand why the Poles tolerated the abuse of political freedoms in their country but refused to cope with such a seemingly trivial issue as the prohibition to make noise in the theater. In spite of their frustration, it was not easy for people like Viazemskii and the brothers Turgenev to give up their liberal hopes. “We should do what is possible,” Nicholas Turgenev wrote.114 Seeking to awaken the Russian public from its political apathy and ignorance, they nurtured projects for political journals within the limits allowed by the official censorship. As a writer who already made his way into political journalism, Kunitsyn also found himself involved in one such project.

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4 Kunitsyn and Nicholas Turgenev: “The Society of the Year 1819”

While in St. Petersburg, Kunitsyn renewed his relationship with Nicholas Turgenev, then a government official with a well-known reputation for liberal leanings. The two men had much in common: their memories of Göttingen, the liberal ideas they learned abroad, and their youthful zeal for putting these ideas to good use in Russia. Yet their backgrounds, lifestyle, and the ways they tried to contribute to the cause of Russian liberalism ultimately set them apart. Turgenev was a hereditary nobleman who enjoyed proximity to the tsar’s top advisors and lived off his serfs in addition to the handsome salary he received as a state official. Kunitsyn, by contrast, was a hard-working academician who made his living by teaching and whose service ennoblement, while a well- deserved reward, did not put him on par with the hereditary nobility that in the early nineteenth century claimed intellectual and cultural leadership in Russian society. Kunitsyn was a liberal academician with an ambition to educate youth and bring progressive ideas closer to the public, while Turgenev typified the aspirations of the liberal service nobility, who wanted more than that and were better positioned to assume the role of reform advocates. Turgenev’s effort to unite the two tasks by teaming up with Kunitsyn and other liberal-minded individuals was an important, if largely unsuccessful, attempt to rally wider support for Russia’s liberal causes. Their activity together and a contrast between the two men serve to illuminate the place Kunitsyn occupied among the Russian liberals. Turgenev remained abroad much longer than Kunitsyn. In 1813, a year after Turgenev returned from Göttingen, he was appointed a Russian representative to the Allied Political Commission created to administer the German territories liberated from Napoleon’s rule. He served under a former Prussian minister, Friedrich Stein, whose reformist ideas (many of which were implemented during his tenure 85

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in 1807) made a lasting impression on young Nicholas.1 In 1816 he returned to St. Petersburg with the hope that reforms were also forthcoming in Russia—a hope that was reinforced by the tsar’s wellpublicized support for the restoration of the constitutional order in France.2 Acquaintance with Stein might have inspired Turgenev in 1816 to write a project for reforms in Russia. According to Turgenev’s plan, reforms were to be implemented over twenty-five years, with each five years devoted to specific measures. At the first stage, codification of the laws and administrative reorganization were to be the main objectives. The second five years would be a trial period to test the effectiveness of these reforms. For the third stage, Turgenev suggested the formation of a peerage—a new social class and political institution “that would only support the Government and never oppose it.”3 Peerage was to be as much a social and political category as an honorary title, for it would be conferred on those landlords who were willing to free their serfs and “assist the Government with the task of emancipation,” which Turgenev envisaged at the fourth stage. He left the introduction of the “people’s representation” (narodopredstavlenie) for the last stage, without, however, specifying its prerogatives vis-à-vis the emperor, except for noting that it should not restrict the autocratic power in the same way as English or French systems limited their monarchy. “In Russia,” he concluded, “it [monarchical power] should always be stronger.”4 Yet, Turgenev’s first year back in St. Petersburg gave him a chilling realization that his hopes for the government initiative were premature. Time and again Nicholas confided to his diary his frustration with the condition of the Russian economy, administration, and people’s morals affected by the “despotic mode of government.”5 Nicholas’s critical stance quickly earned him a reputation as a liberal—not necessarily a flattering label at that time, even in the eyes of his own older brother Alexander, who tried to restrain Nicholas’s zeal. In 1816 Alexander wrote to their younger brother Sergei: “He [Nicholas] came back [from abroad] . . . with liberal ideas, which he would like to implement immediately for the benefit of the fatherland but it [the fatherland] had already been subject to so many surgeries of all sorts that one should be more cautious lest one harms a sore spot.”6 On the advice of his older brother, Turgenev entered government service as the state-secretary of the Economic Department, which

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constituted one of the divisions of the State Council, the highest executive organ in Russia. Turgenev’s work, however, proved neither sufficiently meaningful nor challenging enough to satisfy his need for self-realization.7 At times he took consolation in his honest and conscientious attitude toward his duties, but more frequently he was disheartened by the futility of his efforts facing the atmosphere of ignorance and obscurantism displayed by the top state officials. No wonder Turgenev soon found himself torn between a desire to serve his country and a sense that his service would not make any difference. Already in 1816, he started thinking of emigrating from Russia to avert his eyes from the reality he was unable to change.8 Searching for a proper outlet for his ideas, Turgenev joined the Arzamas circle, which then included some publicly prominent individuals known for their progressive views, including Count Uvarov, Prince Viazemskii, and his own brother Alexander Turgenev. Yet, unlike the more cautious Alexander, Nicholas found himself dissatisfied with their literary debates far removed from Russian social realities. He admitted that the peasant issue was not entirely alien to the Arzamasians but their passive stance on serfdom was not to his taste. “They say,” he wrote, “that they love what I do. But I do not believe in this love . . . They wish the goal but not the means. [They] postpone everything to the future.”9 For Turgenev, one of the paths to this future led through the education of the public about serfdom. After all, it was in the power of individual landlords to free their peasants without waiting for the general emancipation. In 1817, under the influence of Turgenev and General Michael Orlov, another new member of the Arzamas who pushed for political agenda, the society considered publishing a journal to meet the need for public enlightenment. The prospectus, written by Viazemskii, presupposed three sections in the journal—Morals, Literature, and Politics: The first one should declare the uncompromising war to all prejudices, vices and absurdity that reign in our society. Attacking them is in itself an active contribution to the good . . . The section on Politics should be limited to the exposition of useful measures adopted by other governments for the achievement of the great goal—the strength and the well-being of the nations . . . [it should] deliver political news . . . making thereby a small hole in

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the Chinese wall separating us from Europe, not a big breach that would be open to all revolutionary torrents but at least an opening through which rays of sun could penetrate.10 Following these guidelines, Orlov wrote four articles, including the one that encapsulated in its title the essence of his liberal creed— reforms and progress without revolutionary changes. The title read: “The propagation of those ideas of freedom, becoming to Russia in its present state and compatible with the degree of its education, which will not destroy the present, but are capable of preparing a better future.” Turgenev, on his part, contributed an article, “The services to Europe of England and France,” in which he argued that “England has made Europe love liberty, [while] France has made her hate it.”11 The project, however, proved short-lived, and Arzamas itself began to disintegrate in 1818 when several of its active members went abroad for service assignments.12 Disappointed but determined to pursue the cause of public enlightenment, Nicholas published in 1818 his thesis The Essay on the Theory of Taxation (Opyt Teorii Nalogov), which he wrote during his last year in Göttingen University. Not without critical insight, Opyt made no claim for theoretical novelty, aspiring mainly “to eradicate false opinions and spread the true ones.”13 Turgenev agreed with Bentham that all legal coercion, including taxation, is a necessary evil, but it is possible to make taxes a lesser evil if the following criteria are consistently applied: taxes should be imposed on all subjects without exception; their amount, the form, and the time of payment should be clearly defined and known to taxpayers; the collection of taxes should be inexpensive and convenient in terms of timing; and finally, taxes should be imposed on the actual income and not the capital. Although Turgenev made few explicit references to the Russian economy, his positive appraisal of Smith’s economic theory and the English system of taxation by consent implicitly cast Russia in an unfavorable light. For Turgenev, the most appealing aspect of Smithian theory was its principles of individual freedom and government noninterference in private pursuits. “Everything that is good,” he wrote, “is based on freedom, while evil happens when some people . . . take upon themselves the audacious duty to think for others, to act for others and to put them under the most meticulous guardianship.” Taxation by consent was one of the civil freedoms

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that ensured an agreement between the people and the government. “Englishmen,” Turgenev asserted, “have long been proud of this advantage of freedom, and rightly so.”14 Despite all the negative implications for Russia, Turgenev was too patriotic to criticize his country in a work that was initially written for the foreign reader. He equally disagreed with those who associated Russian serfdom with slavery (although he himself often used this term) and with those who viewed serfdom as a form of paternalistic bond between the landlord and the peasants. Serfdom, he wrote, was much regrettable, for “the oppression of one class by the other cannot be a means of well-being for the great and kind nation,” but he hoped that “the spirit of the time” and the demands of the modern economy would bring about the abolition of serfdom. He contrasted Russia and England as young and aging civilizations. Both countries, he asserted, are successful, but “Russia’s success is stronger because England has not stopped to thrive for several centuries . . . with time its success will diminish.”15 He went even further by arguing that Russia, as a young country, is more economically successful and has better prospects than England, which is bound to decline by virtue of its historical age. Kunitsyn responded to Nicholas’s book with a long, favorable review that was published in Syn Otechestva in two parts.16 To emphasize the importance of the book’s subject for the cause of political enlightenment, Kunitsyn opened his article with an overview of the educational developments in Russia, starting with the time of Peter the Great, when Russians began to take an interest in sciences. The establishment of political economy as an academic discipline was, in his view, an important hallmark of Russia’s enlightenment. The issue of taxation, he asserted, is no longer an exclusive purview of “some one class of people” but a subject of interest for everyone.17 This was, of course, an overstatement, for in Russia even the propertied classes had no say in matters of taxation that remained an exclusive purview of the government. Yet, Kunitsyn was right that political economy grew in popularity among the reading public, of which quick sales and a subsequent reprint of Turgenev’s book the next year was an unmistakable sign.18 Hoping to attract neophyte readers to Nicholas’s book, Kunitsyn advertised Opyt as a work with a subject matter that was broader and more engaging than the title suggested. He wrote that the book would be of great use not only to individuals with a special

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interest in the field of economics but also to the wider public. What Kunitsyn praised in Turgenev’s work were precisely the principles of social justice and economic freedom that made Opyt a statement in economic liberalism. He also proudly mentioned that Turgenev intended to spend the proceeds from the book to pay his peasants’ tax debts to the state. Among the passages that Kunitsyn singled out were those where Turgenev presented taxation by consent, government frugality, and assessment of taxes in proportion to one’s income as prerequisites for national prosperity. He agreed with the author that an abolition of tax exemption for the privileged classes—a measure that Michael Speranskii unavailingly tried to introduce in Russia in 1811—would ensure more social justice.19 In antiquity, Kunitsyn argued, it was the richest who bore the burden of taxes, taking it as their honor and duty. Given the popularity of the Syn Otechestva in those years, Kunitsyn’s review ensured good publicity for his friend. A month after Opyt came out, Nicholas’s brother Alexander wrote to Viazemskii with a mixture of pride and concern: “Nicholas’s book became quite a sensation and almost led to . . . ”20 He circumspectly left the phrase unfinished, knowing that their correspondence was occasionally checked by the government agents. Turgenev, however, was undaunted by the possible implications of such publicity for his career, and kept searching for new ways to speak his mind. A sense of mission and sincere love for Russia, which he expressed time and again in his diary, were no doubt a primary reason behind Turgenev’s urge for civic activism, but a feeling of guilt over his double identity as a liberal and serfowner (a guilt that Kunitsyn, who never owned serfs, was spared) might also have played a role. Turgenev was deeply ashamed of having more than 600 serfs in his possession, but for financial reasons was reluctant to part with them, despite the opportunity provided by the law of 1803, which allowed for voluntary emancipation. In 1818 he wrote in his diary: “The most important thing is the abolition of slavery. I would die in peace if I knew that there was not a single serf in Russia . . . Slavery can be and must be abolished, although gradually.”21 Yet, when Turgenev visited his family estate the same year, he found their serfs oppressed by the steward and overburdened with labor dues. In his diary Turgenev was frank enough to acknowledge that children working at the estate factory were being beaten, women looked pale

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and exhausted, and “everyone was complaining” about the factory work.22 His solution to the problem did not amount to much more than closing the factory and transferring his serfs to fixed money payments, which reduced his income by about one-tenth. Peasants were grateful for these changes, but not as much as he expected. To his surprise, instead of showing their gratitude, they asked for another reduction of the first payment.23 Even so, Turgenev took a great comfort in this liberal gesture, considering his financial losses as a noble sacrifice, although the sense of guilt for failing to liberate his serfs continued to torment him for many years to come.24 In fairness to Turgenev, he was not the only liberal to experience this predicament. Viazemskii, for instance, was well known for his liberal views expressed in political verses, many of which were secretly circulated among his trusted friends; but he, too, remained a big serfowner, whose prodigality and weakness for gambling occasionally forced him to sell his peasants, despite all his qualms about transactions involving human beings. As he once confessed to Alexander Turgenev: “My poetry is one thing but my two thousand souls is another one. I can speak out . . . but I am unable to preach with deeds.”25 Serfdom was not the only dilemma facing Turgenev and other liberals from the nobility. Turgenev often found it difficult to reconcile his desire to see in Russia a more politically minded and independent public and the idea that the government should ultimately be the main agent of political reforms and initiatives. He wrote: “Everything in Russia should be done by the Government and nothing by the people. If the government does nothing, everything should be left to the working of time.”26 He seemed to find a way out of these dilemmas by talking and writing about serfdom in the hope that one day the government would order the emancipation of peasants, thus sparing the nobility the painful choice between their liberal principles and material interests.27 In 1818 Turgenev came up with the idea of uniting the liberalminded intellectuals in the society to publish a journal featuring political articles. Despite the earlier setback with Arzamas’s similar project, Turgenev was convinced that in Russia there was no lack of “active and patriotic-minded” writers full of progressive ideas who remained silent in the absence of a public tribune. Once brought together, these people would generate the “ideas of truth” that sooner or later will have a practical effect in Russia.28 “Inasmuch as possible,

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we will write about slavery,” he explained to his brother Sergei. To avoid the pitfalls of censorship, Turgenev intended to veil some of their articles in a garb of theoretical discussions.29 In a more formal way Turgenev expressed his thoughts about the purpose and organizing principles for the prospective “Society of the year 1819” in a short but passionate essay-proposal that was intended for potential participants. Among them were Kunitsyn, Prince Alexander Shakhovskoi, Pushkin, Fedor Glinka, Pavel Koloshin, Ivan Burtsov, Nikita Murav’ev, and Mikhail Gribovskii, all but the first three then already members of the Union of Welfare—an early organization of future Decembrists in St. Petersburg. These names were listed on the title page of Turgenev’s proposal, and a few other members joined the project in 1819.30 In his memoirs Pushchin describes the episode of Pushkin’s first encounter with the Society’s members, which testifies that Pushchin himself and another former lyceist, Maslov, were also invited to write for the journal. Pushkin, in fact, found himself in this company by mere chance. He was taking a walk in the park near Turgenev’s apartment and when he stopped by to pay a visit to Turgenev he found there a meeting in progress that discussed Maslov’s article on statistics. Pushkin was much intrigued. He had long suspected (with good reason) that Pushchin had attended some political gatherings but kept secret about it. Indeed, by that time, Pushchin had joined the Decembrist circles but decided against revealing his membership to Pushkin, whose friendship with many high-ranking aristocrats might have put them in danger. Turgenev’s gatherings, however, were quite innocent, and Pushkin was invited to participate.31 Altogether, more than a dozen people were expected to join Turgenev. In a letter to his brother Sergei, Turgenev added the name of the poet V. A. Zhukovskii as a contributor to the literary section of the journal. He also hoped to establish connections with a number of progressive-minded Russians abroad. His younger brother Sergei, then serving in France, and Prince Viazemskii were expected to provide articles as well.32 If not a cofounder, Kunitsyn was apparently Turgenev’s closest collaborator in this enterprise, for his name appears on the title page of the proposal next to the name of Turgenev himself as the first members who accepted these principles. It is notable that among the future participants Kunitsyn alone came from an academic background; the rest belonged to service and military officials, or as Zhukovskii and Pushkin, the literary establishment.

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Turgenev’s proposal gives testimony to the continued importance of the term “enlightenment” in the Russian political vocabulary but with a meaning that was different from the one current in the previous century. Turgenev referred to the new “civic enlightenment” as opposed to the old academic one, using it, in effect, as a substitute for the word “liberal,” which was implied but nowhere explicitly invoked in this document. In this meaning, enlightenment stood for “the knowledge of one’s rights and duties” as well as “the ability to form an opinion about the civic conditions in one’s fatherland.” But where, Turgenev wondered, would the Russians learn about these “principles of civicism” (pravila grazhdanstvennosti)? Russian poetry and imaginative literature, with their remoteness from political issues, did not supply Russians with the “moral food” suitable to the spirit of the time. If, in the last century, mysticism and Masonry satisfied people’s intellectual quest, at present, especially since the last Napoleonic War which brought Russia closer to Europe, “Russians want to partake in the life of enlightened Europe.”33 Turgenev’s implicit recognition that Russia did not as yet share in the European “civic enlightenment” betrays a momentous shift from the arrogant patriotism so characteristic of the Russian progressive-minded elite in the immediate post-Napoleonic years to the peculiar kind of wounded and bittersweet patriotism of the later period. According to Turgenev’s plan, members of the Society were to contribute articles to the journal and help recruit new members. However, his initial expectations proved to be unrealistic. His diary entry describing their first meeting on January 21, 1819, is too short to surmise all details, but it appears that Turgenev did not encounter the degree of enthusiasm he had anticipated. In the absence of other volunteers, Turgenev and Kunitsyn were charged with editing most sections of the prospective journal even though Turgenev hoped for a more specialized team of editors.34 The next meeting was set for early February, but judging from his diary’s silence, it did not take place as scheduled. Nevertheless, Turgenev continued working on the project. The next document he produced for the consideration of his collaborators was an extended prospectus of the journal, which was supposed to bear the title An Archive of Political Science and Russian Literature. The prospectus was marked by the same conflicting feelings of national pride and embarrassment that were evident in Turgenev’s earlier work. Aside from the old argument that Russia saved Europe

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during the Napoleonic Wars and then selflessly established the independence of European peoples, there was little more to say to Russia’s credit. He sought to excuse Russian civic backwardness by the impact of the 200-year Tatar yoke, which, according to his interpretation, suppressed but not entirely eradicated Russia’s “aspirations for civicism.” In a tone simultaneously apologetic and defiant, he wrote: The best that we can do is to preserve what good we still have in our national character. And with these remnants of the truly Russian spirit we will be richer in comparison to other European peoples . . . we have to distinguish between the indigenous Russian spirit from those unfortunate [qualities] . . . which were brought about by the barbaric yoke. We have to know what Russians were like before the calamities of political slavery . . . let us hope . . . that [this spirit] is not lost forever and will come back to us in a new form.35 Turgenev saw Catherine II’s reign as a period when Russia rid herself of many “harmful superstitions” due to the impact of satirical literature. Now, when people’s minds are prepared, the argument went on, it is the time to “disseminate political sciences.” To attain these purposes, the prospective journal was to include eight sections: political science and state administration, political economy, finances, jurisprudence, history, statistics; philosophy (which would include articles on education), and, finally, miscellaneous. Turgenev’s prospectus concluded with the assurance of the moderation and loyalty of the project’s initiators, who intended to present this journal for the government’s approval in the nearest future. The only thing that went unexplained in this document, or elsewhere, is how they were planning to finance the journal and which publishing house would have the courage to commit itself to the proclaimed principles. In April 1819 Turgenev began to write an article entitled “Theory of Politics,” which sought to educate the Russian public on fundamental political notions, such as the division of powers, the concept of law, the duties of state officials, definitions of war and peace, and, most importantly, the concept of justice (pravosudie). To circumvent the censorship, Turgenev wrote “Theory of Politics” in an academic rather than polemical or prescriptive manner. He described the structures and the function of the state without making any explicit references to the Russian political establishment, but to an

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educated reader, Turgenev’s ostensibly theoretical account clearly communicated reformist ideas. He wrote, for instance, that social justice presupposes “the protection of private property and personal freedom” as “the most sacred rights of man- citizen”36 and that all social classes should be subject to conscription duty but that the term of military service should be substantially reduced. The issue of conscription was a particularly sensitive one in autocratic Russia where the twenty-five-year service term was considered to be bondage worse than the serfdom, “virtually a life sentence.”37 Turgenev’s proposition in this article essentially anticipated the liberal military reform of 1874, which extended conscription to all social classes and reduced the term of military service to six years. Turgenev’s enthusiasm for political writing, however, faded away before the article was finished. Despite his proclaimed desire to speak his mind, he did not find the process of writing enjoyable.38 Turgenev never thought of himself as a writer, often complaining about the difficulty of expressing his thoughts clearly and coherently. Nor did other members of the society prove more productive. Their next meeting was a disappointment for Turgenev. “If things keep going this way, there will be not much to hope for,” he wrote in April 1819.39 After a long period of inactivity, the society met one more time in October 1819, just to find out that they could not start publishing the journal in the near future. During this period, as we recall, Kunitsyn wrote an article on the philosophical principles underlying international relationships40 but he published it in the popular Syn Otechestva without waiting for Turgenev’s journal to establish itself. It appears that neither the society itself nor its prospective journal passed the stage of preliminary deliberations. The question of whether Turgenev’s proposed Society of the Year 1819 was an offspring of the Union of Welfare, which was active in St. Petersburg at that time, remains a subject of debate in Russian scholarship. The Union had been established in 1818 and had as its major goal the strengthening of moral virtues and “love for the common good” in Russian society. Its members sought to achieve this end through “publication of periodicals . . . the writing and translation of books specifically dealing with man’s duties” as well as by means of “the personal example of the Union’s members.” Despite its politically innocent goals, the Union maintained secrecy “to avoid the censure of malice and jealousy” but was intent on spreading its message through other learned societies in Russia that functioned

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openly. In 1821 it was replaced by the more radical and tightly organized Northern Society that would bring about the Decembrist uprising four years later.41 To Soviet historians, Turgenev’s project appeared to be one of such legal offshoots of the Union and proof that the early Decembrists successfully carried out their plans, penetrating wide circles of the Russian public.42 This view also fits the image of Turgenev as an active “Decembrist” that persists to this day, despite the fact that Turgenev did not take part in the uprising of 1825 and tried hard to dissociate himself from radical post-1821 Decembrism. After the uprising, Turgenev wrote two justificatory letters to Tsar Nicholas I (in April and October 1825), followed by the memoirs published abroad in 1847 under the title Russia and Russians (Rossiia i Russkie), where he admitted that he was a member of the Union of Welfare but claimed that he withdrew from it in 1821 before it transformed itself into the Northern Society, which grew more secret and radical.43 Moreover, Turgenev was unable to recall the exact date of his admission, naming three possible dates—early 1818, late 1818, and early 1819. Historians of the Decembrism do not agree on this date either. Semevskii believed April 1819 to be a likely date, while Zhitomirskaia accepted early 1818 as a more plausible date.44 According to Hollingsworth, “Turgenev’s attempts at self-justification led him to give an inaccurate and at times deliberately untruthful account of his activities in the secret societies.”45 Based on some circumstantial evidence Hollingsworth further argues that Turgenev most likely “joined the Union between August and December 1818,” and thus his efforts in organizing a legal society and a journal were part of the Union’s plans. Yet, no evidence exists to prove that Turgenev was assigned to this activity by the Union, and Hollingsworth admits that the material pertaining to Turgenev’s participation in the Decembrists’ organizations “contains many statements which are difficult to reconcile and occasionally self- contradictory.”46 It is likely that Turgenev’s cooperation with the Decembrists Glinka and Murav’ev for the purposes of the prospective journal brought him into contact with the Union, of which he subsequently became a member. This sequence of events can be glimpsed from his diary. In October 1818, apparently under the impression of the Arzamas’s failure to proceed with the plans for the journal, he complained in the diary: “There is nobody to share [my] feelings about the Fatherland; nobody’s heart echoes what I feel.”47 Three months later, when Turgenev came up with the publication project,

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he wrote to his brother Sergei in a different mood: “The thought about the journal cheered me up. My monotonous life until now had made me also monotonous. I had nothing to do.”48 Yet, even teaming with the Decembrists did not save his project from failure. In May 1821 Mikhail Gribovskii, a member of the Union of Welfare, denounced their activity in his report to Alexander I. He wrote: Turgenev who gave [the society] main direction, along with Prof. Kunitsyn, undertook to publish a journal for a very cheap price for greater circulation . . . In one of the distant villages of one of the members they intended to establish a printing house . . . Glinka and Turgenev planned to . . . lithograph in Paris caricatures and spread them among the people on the market, in the army and through the provinces.49 Alexander I, however, preferred to disregard this warning for reasons that remain subject to speculation. Some contemporaries familiar with the case believed that Alexander underrated its importance. He was loath to suppress the liberal ideas that he himself had once encouraged.50 According to Soviet historians, however, the tsar was more concerned with preserving the image of Russia as the country of calm and order and his own reputation as a liberal peacemaker.51 The bizarre idea about spreading caricatures might also have convinced the tsar not to take this denunciation at face value. The government, however, did become more alert, and Benkendorf began to collect information on public opinion in Russia; but despite his warnings, Alexander I never made a move against the secret organizations. In any case, Turgenev continued to serve in the government undisturbed, while Kunitsyn’s dismissal from the university happened a month before Alexander I received Gribovskii’s report. What was the reason for the project’s failure? Fomin, a prerevolutionary Russian historian, attributed this outcome to Turgenev’s and Kunitsyn’s scholarly makeup and quiet temperament, which set them apart both from their less sophisticated contemporaries and more passionate Decembrists skilled in political demagoguery.52 Indeed, both of them stood in the middle of the political spectrum: while teaching public courses in St. Petersburg University, Kunitsyn became familiar with some Decembrists and responded in 1819 to their request to deliver private lectures for the officers from the Preobrazhenskii regiment in the apartment of one

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of them. Yet, even the government, which later became aware of this fact, never suspected Kunitsyn to be a Decembrist. Turgenev, for his part, identified himself as a liberal and a patriot whose critical stance on serfdom in Russia distinguished him from most of the high-ranking nobility that were content with the existing order. At the same time, unlike the Decembrists, he meant to advocate reforms in a legal and open manner. A feeling of awed love for the tsar, which Turgenev retained despite all his pain over the Russian realities, made him an odd figure in the company of the more critical and radical Decembrists. He wrote in 1816: “Why do we still see the scourge of arbitrariness (svoevol’stva) and cruelty keeping in fear and poverty our kind and intelligent people? But I cannot think that our Sovereign would wish this and I love him heartily for the past and, as it were, for the future . . . because I still hope.”53 Turgenev was well aware of Alexander’s faults, grieving, for instance, over his decisions to establish military colonies, yet he could not bring himself to blame the tsar personally. As he once confessed: “I have some special feeling of faithfulness to him. If I don’t like his actions I try to justify him.”54 It is interesting that Nicholas’s brother Alexander, who was otherwise more politically cautious and passive, proved less immune to monarchist sentiments. Several years after Alexander I’s death he wrote: “The bravest and the kindest of all the tsars—he was afraid of everything and everybody and used cunning where he could act bonna fide with magnanimity and upon conviction that his intentions are in accord with Russia’s well being.”55 Nicholas, too, virtually lost any hope for reforms by the end of Alexander’s reign; however, he continued to spare the tsar a word of criticism. It was hardly a coincidence that his decision to withdraw from the Decembrist movement came at a time when the newly created Northern Society started contemplating an uprising and regicide.56 There is no doubt that censorship restrictions and the lack of a receptive audience, of which he frequently complained, crippled Turgenev’s spirit of writing, but the want of determination and writing discipline necessary to publish a journal also account for his failure to carry out the project.57 In 1816 Turgenev censured Arzamas’s inability to act on their convictions; three years later, he made the same reproach to himself: “We are lost in our dreams and phraseology. Act, act if possible—and then only will you get the right to speak. But do we have the spirit or enthusiasm?”58

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Despite a flagging spirit, Turgenev continued to agitate for reforms over the next two years, this time using his position as a member of the State Council. In 1819 he submitted to the tsar the memo entitled “Nechto o krepostnom sostoianii v Rossii” (“Thoughts about serfdom in Russia”), which painted a sad picture of the serfs’ miseries and the practical difficulty of bringing the cases of abuse to justice. He asked: “Where is justice if a suffering person has to wait patiently for the Government to intercede for him? And which Government is capable of rendering justice where one side has all the rights while the other side has all the obligations?”59 It is remarkable that in the paper intended for the tsar Turgenev dared to criticize “authorities” (“nachal’stvo”) established by the government without a fear of being accused in political disloyalty. Apparently it was possible because the tsar, in Turgenev’s mind, stood above and beyond his own government. Knowing the tsar’s cautious attitude toward the peasant issue, Turgenev did not presume to call for emancipation as such, restricting his recommendations to a number of palliative measures that would put an end to the landlords’ arbitrary power over their peasants. Although Turgenev was well aware of the recent ban on writing about serfdom in the Russian press, he added: “It would be necessary and useful to allow discussions concerning the improvement of serfdom in the journals and books, making sure, however, that these discourses are in line with our censorship statute and are presented with moderation.”60 Nothing, however, came of this project. The same year, Turgenev participated in other reform initiatives. He and his brother Alexander joined a small group of state officials who submitted a petition to the tsar asking to authorize a society that would include large and influential serfowners “seeking the means of improving the conditions of the peasants and gradually emancipating them from slavery.”61 Although this project sought only a modest goal—to place the initiative of the reform in the hands of those who had firsthand experience with serfdom and thus prevent other social groups from pressuring the government—the initiative did not find support among the majority of the State Councilors. Alexander I, who had liked the idea at first, reversed his position after he learned about the Council’s negative reaction to it.62 Instead of authorizing the proposed society, the tsar offered the petitioners the opportunity to work individually at their own projects of reforms, which they could later submit to the Minister of Internal Affairs.63

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In September 1820 Turgenev was included in a commission that was to prepare a report on Russian laws pertaining to the selling and purchasing of serfs. This inquiry had been prompted by a complaint submitted to the tsar by some Pskov peasants who were sold for work at an iron foundry. Turgenev hoped that the report would convince Alexander I to put an end to the practice of removing peasants from the land. Indeed, the committee confirmed the absence of any unambiguous law authorizing landless selling, but the Council resolved to postpone the final decision for an indefinite period.64 These failures made Turgenev increasingly pessimistic about Russia and his own future in the country. As the political climate in Russia grew more restrictive, it became increasingly difficult for Turgenev to play the role of loyal opposition without falling under the government’s suspicion. When Alexander I expressed his displeasure with Turgenev’s liberal talks in St. Petersburg social clubs, Turgenev hurried to assure the emperor of his complete loyalty and political moderation. In 1821, he wrote to the tsar: Some people charge me with excessive liberalism. I deserved this charge by my opinion about serfdom. I spoke, wrote and published . . . against serfdom . . . But that time is gone . . . Yet, having stopped speaking out about serfdom I have not stopped thinking about it, because while accepting that one cannot always talk about what one holds as a truth, I do not believe that one would be ever prohibited to think about these truths . . . I admit that having in mind the public well-being I always saw in the government the only source of good for my fatherland.65 More and more frequently Turgenev’s thoughts turned to the idea of emigration or taking a prolonged trip to Europe. Finally, in 1824 he left Russia, as it would turn out, for good. He had come to realize that in Russia there was yet no place for the kind of liberal movement he envisaged—the one carried out by progressive-minded patriots who would act as a public voice without undermining the government. A similar realization occurred to other liberals from the service nobility and some of the early Decembrists, who chose either to withdraw from the movement, like Turgenev, or move on toward more radical goals and means. With the creation of the strictly conspiratorial Northern and Southern Societies, the remaining Decembrists distanced themselves from the liberals, who continued to espouse the

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notions of gradualism and reforms from above, even when they lost any hope that Alexander I would implement necessary reforms.66 For Viazemskii, the turning point came in 1820 after he failed to secure the tsar’s permission to publish in Syn Otechestva the protocols of the Polish Seim. His bitter comments about Alexander I’s hypocritical liberalism became known to the authorities, and in 1821 during his vacation he was dismissed from his post and placed under secret surveillance. Although Viazemskii, indignant of the autocratic abuses in Poland, had long contemplated resignation as a gesture of moral protest, such sudden dismissal was a painful blow to his dignity as an aristocrat. He vented his pain in the verse characteristically entitled “Indignation,” which Alexander Turgenev thought to be the best piece Viazemskii had ever written. He wrote to Viazemskii: “People come to my house to listen to your ‘Indignation,’ I learned it by heart.”67 Yet, in 1830, after a few years out of service, Viazemskii felt ready to approach the tsar. He wrote a self-justifying letter to Nicholas I, saying that all the denunciations against him are nothing but slander, and although he “might be accused in holding independent views (svoevolie mnenii),” he had “never done anything to put them into practice.”68 The letter was received “favorably” and Viazemskii obtained a high position with the Ministry of Finances, but, having learned the lesson in obedience, he was no longer willing to speak out for reforms.69 Unlike Viazemskii, Alexander Turgenev resigned in 1825 of his own will—officially for reasons of health, but in truth because he was unwilling to serve the government that did not serve its people.70 He bemoaned the absence of civil society and the government’s “fear of private activity” in Russia, which he correctly ascribed not so much to “the personality of a monarch as to the form of government” in his country. In his view, it was “utter despotism (verkh despotizma) to suppress the participation of private individuals and private societies in improvements and developments pertaining to the sphere of general public [interest].” Even the Arzamas society, which he thought to some extent embodied the idea of a public association independent of the state, no longer existed in Russia.71 Turgenev spent the remaining years travelling, collecting rare historical documents (which were published in Russia in 1841–2), and, as was always his way, helping numerous people in need.72 Having lost faith in government service, Turgenev never ceased to believe in the service to humanity. As he confessed to Viazemskii in 1833, “My soul and my mind aspire to the

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most sublime ideas—the well-being of the people and . . . even of the whole human race.”73 Pushkin, too, joined the ranks of disillusioned liberals. His retreat from liberal opposition began during his first exile in 1820. That year, he made a promise to Karamzin not to write anything against the state for two years.74 The life in the south, away from the cultured diversions of the capital and the intellectual company of his friends, had a depressing effect on the poet. “I am freezing under the Southern sun,” he wrote to Viazemskii.75 Pushkin confessed to his friends that he craved a return to St. Petersburg, even at a price of political silence. Financial considerations also played a role in his decision to refrain from oppositional acts. With sadness and embarrassment, he declined to support Viazemskii’s initiative in 1823 to submit a formal complaint against the latest censorship constraints, fearing that this protest might affect his chances to get censors’ approval for new publications. His poetry, as he put it, was his “trade.” “I sell for profit . . . I am the loser.”76 Unlike Viazemskii and the brothers Turgenev, Pushkin did not have the luxury of landed income. He begged his father for a share of revenue from their family estate, but Lev Pushkin, much embarrassed by his son’s exile, refused to help.77 Pushkin’s pessimistic verse “Deserted Sower of Freedom,” written in 1823, revealed his disillusionment with the cause of active opposition: Deserted sower of Freedom I stepped out early, before the dawn With innocent and pure hand Into enslaved furrows I cast life-giving seed But only wasted I time, My thoughts and efforts . . . 78 This feeling became more pronounced after the Decembrist uprising, whose futility and the cruelty of the ensuing punishment deeply affected the poet. Pushkin’s sense of resignation throughout his remaining years was accompanied by the renewed hope for reforms from above,79 and strengthened by the elitist tendencies in his political outlook. Always very proud of his ancient ancestry, Pushkin became increasingly concerned about the decline of the hereditary nobility, which, in his view, was losing its status in competition

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with the service noblemen. He thought that cultured and economically independent nobility of blood might serve as a counterweight to Russian autocracy.80 Pushkin did not seem to understand that this idea was a contradiction in terms, because in order to cultivate their independence vis-à-vis monarchy, the aristocracy depended on the tsar for protection of their privileges. Eventually, his hope that Nicholas I (for whom he had higher regard than for his late brother) would restore the aristocracy to their proper position proved ephemeral.81 In 1834, when Pushkin found out that his private letters to his wife Natalia were intercepted and read by the secret police and the tsar himself, he once again realized how little respect the Russian government showed for the dignity and privacy of an individual in Russia. For Pushkin, like Viazemskii, it was an even greater evil than the absence of political freedoms. As he later confided to Natalia, “The thought that anybody is eavesdropping on you and me a la lettre is driving me mad. It is quite possible to live without political liberty; without family inviolability it is impossible: penal servitude is a better lot.”82 And yet, he remained lenient to the tsar: “I am no longer angry with him,” Pushkin wrote the same month, “he is not to blame for the swinishness that surrounds him.”83 The disillusioned “sower of freedom,” Pushkin continued to believe in human dignity and the right for self-realization. His poem “The Gypsy” became, in the words of Sandler, the expression of “a kind of liberal individualism in which respect for the person is valued above everything else, in which the dignity of the individual is fundamental.”84 The failure of the liberal officials to reach out to the wider public and push Alexander I for reforms put an end to the early developments of political liberalism in Russia. However, liberal ideas and aspirations survived among the Russian intelligentsia to ensure the revival of liberal activism, with the beginning of the Great Reform era under Alexander II. To a large extent it was an unintended result of the educational reforms introduced by Alexander I, especially the establishment of natural law as an academic subject mandatory for all government officials aspiring for upper service ranks. In this sense, Kunitsyn’s contribution as a law teacher had a lasting, if not tangible, effect on the history of intellectual liberalism in Russia, even though his teaching career was cut short by educational obscurantists. As a way of understanding the roots of this development and Kunitsyn’s role in disseminating liberal thought, it is important to examine the history of teaching natural law in Russian universities.

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5 The Natural Law Tradition in Russia

Unlike Western European countries where natural law was a part of the long intellectual tradition, in Russia it emerged only in the eighteenth century as an academic discipline introduced by the government, primarily for the purpose of training government officials. This utilitarian approach, quite typical of the autocratic state, had important implications not only for the nature of academic philosophy in Russia but also for Russian liberalism as a political ideology. Lacking a native tradition of legal philosophy, the government fostered the establishment of natural law studies by inviting foreign academicians to teach in Russia and, later, by sending Russian students to selected European universities. The majority of the teachers came from Germany, whose political culture and ideology were the most congruent with Russian autocracy. This trend emerged under Peter the Great and continued even when France superseded Germany as a source of cultural borrowings for Russia, following the fashion established by Catherine II. By consistently giving preference to German professors over their English or French colleagues, the government thus ensured the prolonged influence in Russian universities of German Enlightenment thought, which until the end of the eighteenth century was dominated by the absolutist philosophy of Christian Wolff.1 Kant’s ideas reached Russian students only in the early nineteenth century and then, mostly through the textbooks of German professors rather than through Kant’s original writings. This time coincided with liberal relaxation and expansion of the university network in Russia. More books on natural law were published during this period than ever before, mostly because the universities, empowered by the rights of academic autonomy, encouraged the publications of their faculty. 2 However, it was not the intention of the government to introduce Russian students to Kantian liberalism. It appears that the 105

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authorities did not know much about Kant’s ideas beyond the fact of their popularity in Germany. By inviting German Kantians, the Russian Ministry of Education acted on the traditional assumption that their teaching would be suitable to training enlightened bureaucrats, for which German universities were famous. The authorities often relied on the advice and assistance of German public figures and well-known scholars in order to secure for Russian universities professors “with the name” and teaching experience.3 Indeed, in the form German professors presented Kantian philosophy, it provoked no objections from the government, except for those cases when the interpretation of his religious thought was involved. Behind the gloss of Kant’s philosophical language, the German textbooks on natural law contained a great deal of traditional morality and political ideas that harkened back to Wolffian thought.4 However, when Kunitsyn turned to explore the individualistic implications of Kant’s moral philosophy, the authorities became suspicious not only of Kantianism but also of the very discipline of natural law, which now appeared as ill suited for the government’s educational purposes. Unwittingly, Kunitsyn’s book proved to be a catalyst for the conservative reaction in Russia. Natural Law, moderate as it might appear by the standards of English liberalism of the same period, was bolder than anything that had been published earlier on the subject of legal philosophy in Russia. It alerted the authorities to the need to censor academic teaching and publications from “above” instead of relying on the university self- censorship granted by the statute of 1804, which too, came under conservative attacks. After that point, many of the textbooks on natural law and philosophy, which previously seemed quite innocuous, came to be scrutinized and, in some cases, forbidden for use as teaching manuals. To counteract the influence of Kantian ideas, the ministry reinstated in the early 1820s the long- outdated Wolffian philosophy, which lasted for another decade until natural law as an academic discipline was replaced with courses on Russian and Roman law. One can explain this important development by reviewing the teaching of natural law in Russian institutions and the textbooks on this subject available to the Russian public prior to Kunitsyn’s work, starting briefly with the eighteenth century. As a way of introduction, a brief summary of the natural law tradition in European thought will serve to illuminate the intellectual alternatives facing Russia in the eighteenth century.

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Natural law was not a uniform theory in early modern Europe. Depending on how it interpreted a state of nature and subsequent establishment of civil society, natural law theory could justify either absolutist or liberal order; it could also alternatively uphold communitarian and individualistic values.5 Political context played a critical role in shaping the character of natural law doctrines in different European countries. In Germany, natural jurisprudence developed along the absolutist and “anti-privatist” lines,6 which proved more appealing to Russian autocrats than the English liberal- oriented and individualistic tradition of natural law. The process of state building in Germany significantly differed from that of other European countries. In the late seventeenth century, Germany consisted of small principalities that owed their allegiance to the Holy Roman Empire but were increasingly eager to consolidate their jurisdictional and fiscal independence vis-àvis the emperor, whose authority was sanctioned by Roman law. The ideological justification for this process took the form of natural law theory; it was based on the idea that there exist timeless innate standards of law that precede any historical legal tradition and that can be deduced by human reason. German theorists used this notion to defend territorial princes’ right to interpret the precepts of natural law for the purpose of creating fundamental laws independent of the imperial code. Natural law, thus, became a tool for imposing checks on the emperor’s authority over the German states, while at the same time defending the absolutist power of the territorial princes. The only limitation on the princely power admitted by German thinkers throughout the seventeenth century was the ruler’s self-imposed moral obligation to honor divinely inspired natural law. Both religious and pragmatic considerations were thought sufficient to ensure the effectiveness of royal selflimitation.7 In the 1720s and 1730s Christian Wolff consolidated the absolutist interpretation of natural law into the theory that lasted in Germany until the 1790s.8 At its core was the notion of a preestablished harmonious order underlying all facets of cosmic and human reality. For Wolff, princely power was instrumental in helping people pursue the perfectibility of their nature, which constitutes the basic command of natural law and thus the ultimate happiness of human beings. Since each individual is part of the universal rational world, he is obliged to assist others in their pursuit of perfection. Seen in

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this light, natural law justified regulatory and paternalistic order as defined by the prince in the name of common welfare. Although the ruler is expected to abide by natural law and the fundamental laws established by the original contract, he retains an exclusive right to translate the precepts of natural jurisprudence into positive laws. The Wolffian theory of the social contract was also meant to strengthen rather than limit the power of the ruler. According to Wolff, people left the state of nature upon recognition that civil society would provide better means for pursuing individual and collective perfection. In doing so, they agreed to obey the ruler and place the interests of society above their own. By the time Wolff wrote his major works, natural law had already become an established discipline in German universities; Wolffian philosophy, conveniently available in vernacular German and disseminated by Wolff’s disciples through accessible teaching manuals, helped transform natural law into a science suitable for training future state officials.9 In Wolff’s native Prussia, his ideas proved particularly useful to Frederick the Great, who sought to create the wellordered state with its ideal of the common good achievable through government regulations and reforms.10 The same need to justify intrusive reformist activity by the autocrat explains the appeal of Wolffian philosophy in eighteenth- century Russia. By contrast, in Britain, where monarchical sovereignty was safe from any external supremacy and parliament was an established institution, natural law paved the way for modern constitutionalism and the liberal theory of individual rights. This process was accompanied by the growing awareness that public and private spheres could be more clearly demarcated without any danger to the general good.11 Thomas Hobbes’s idea that men are always motivated by their private interests rather than a sense of duty became a starting point in the development of the modern theory of rights, even though Hobbes, frightened by the experience of the civil war in England, used this argument to justify people’s obedience to the absolutist ruler.12 John Locke remedied Hobbesian conclusions while at the same time accepting his individualistic premises. With Locke, the list of inalienable rights (stemming from man’s basic interests) grew from mere self-preservation to the enjoyment of property and personal liberty, which people entrust to the protection of a representative government through the creation of a social contract. A systematic breach of contract, in Locke’s view, justifies civil resistance and the

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dissolution of government. The Lockean theory of popular sovereignty thus laid the foundations for the liberal view of civil society as a community living under the law to which people give their explicit or tacit consent. By the last quarter of the eighteenth century German political thought also saw first attempts at modifying absolutist theory,13 but the mainstream academic philosophy in Germany remained predominantly Wolffian until it was challenged by Kant and the German followers of Adam Smith’s economic liberalism.14 According to Kant’s central postulate, human beings are endowed with the capacity for rational self-legislation and moral autonomy in the sense that they can act from pure respect for self-prescribed moral maxims rather than on the basis of expected utility from their actions. Whereas Wolff saw universal rational order as divinely established and accessible to man’s reason through the analysis of human nature, Kant argued that moral order is something human beings themselves impose upon the universe through a priori (nonexperiential) judgments. Moral laws cannot be sought in the empirical world because experience only tells us what things are and not what they ought to be. In order to have the force of law moral maxims must be intrinsically valuable, universal, and detached from the motives of pleasure or pain. For this reason, the source of morality is not happiness but what Kant called the a priori categorical imperative, which he expressed in two ways. The first formula prescribes people to “act only in accordance with that maxim through which you can at the same time will that it become a universal law”15; the second (also known as the practical imperative) is concerned with the mutual respect for human dignity and freedom: it thus enjoins people to “use humanity whether in your own person or in the person of any other, always at the same time as an end, never merely as a means.”16 Dignity and the innate right of freedom, in Kant’s view, belong to every individual “by virtue of his humanity” and provide a foundation for man’s rights in civil society—the right of lawful freedom, of civil equality, and of independence. A republican polity with a representative assembly and a strict division of powers is the most suitable form of government to ensure legal protection of individual freedoms, although Kant also accepted the historical legitimacy of the absolutist monarchy, which is willing to rule “in the spirit of” republican order. And while Kant rejected the idea of resistance as contradictory to the very purpose of establishing supreme civil

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power, he saw the need for a means of preventing and remedying political abuse, mainly through the mechanism of the division of power and the right of public criticism. The individualistic implications of Kant’s moral and political ideas were profound. When Kant argued that individual autonomy presupposed the right to the private realm of ethics free from any external tutelage, he essentially dispensed with the claim for moral guidance traditionally attributed to the enlightened ruler. Along with the paternalistic state, Kant rejected the hallowed notions of hereditary privileges and class-based ethics as incompatible with the principles of human dignity and legal equality. Not all of these ideas found their way into the works of Kant’s German followers despite their self-proclaimed Kantianism. When Kantian philosophy reached Russia through the textbooks of German professors in the early nineteenth century, it was already significantly abridged and supplemented with more conservative ideas going back to the Wolffian tradition. Nonetheless, even in its diluted form, the Kantian-inspired theory of natural law played an important role in acquainting the Russian audience with the notions of political legitimacy, the rule of law, and civil rights. Natural law courses first appeared in Russia with the opening of the Academy of Science in 1725 through the assistance of Leibnitz and Wolff—Peter the Great’s illustrious advisors on educational policy—who recruited some of their followers on behalf of the Russian tsar. German philosophy was a natural choice for Peter I, who aspired to reforming Russia along the lines of the well- ordered police state.17 During the first decades following the opening of the Academy, courses in natural law were somewhat irregular due to the lack of qualified professors and students able to absorb lectures in Latin and German. Long interruptions occasionally occurred before new professors could be recruited from Germany to fill the chairs left by their colleagues who found Russia an inhospitable place.18 Nevertheless, the Academy’s courses marked the beginning of natural jurisprudence in Russia. From 1726 until 1730, Professor Christian Friedrich Gross taught courses in philosophy, including one based on Pufendorf’s On the Duties of Man and Citizen. This book, along with Pufendorf’s historical writings, was also available in Russian translation.19 In 1738 the academy invited Strube de Piermont, a graduate of Halle University, to take over the teaching of natural law. De Piermont was a follower of Grotius and Thomasius, but in

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his lectures he also made use of the wide range of ancient, scholastic, and modern philosophers, including Hobbes, Descartes, and Locke. Observing the Russian students’ indifference to legal studies, de Piermont advertised his subject in a speech entitled “The Equal Benefit of the Legal and Military Science” and published a book on natural law written in French (rather than Latin), which made it more accessible to his students.20 Under Catherine the Great, the teaching of natural law acquired a more systematic character due to the empress’s concern for the legal education of her noble subjects. Natural law as a part of the course in philosophy or legal theory was offered in the elite Cadet Corps and Moscow University, which opened in 1755.21 Most of the foreign professors at Moscow University tended to favor Wolffian philosophy and used in their lectures his pupils’ textbooks, which presented Wolff’s ideas in a more concise and simplified form. Among them was the Systema elementare universae jurisprudential naturalis written by Daniel Nettlebladt (1717–1791), “one of the most faithful” of Wolffian disciples, who taught natural law in Marburg University and helped popularize the philosophy of his teacher in Germany through this successful textbook that remained in print for many years.22 His work was known in Russia in its original Latin form and in a translation made in 1770.23 Nettlebladt drew a distinction between the state of nature and civil society, arguing that in the latter state people retain only those natural rights the ruler permits.24 Heinrich Philip Dilthey (1723–81), who taught courses in natural law and practical jurisprudence in Moscow University from 1756 until 1781, used in his lectures the textbook by Nettlebladt, which he supplemented with Pufendorf’s writings. Dilthey took advantage of the publishing opportunities available in Russia to produce his own textbooks on Russian juridical practice and commercial law.25 His successor in this post, Professor Karl Langer, who served in Russia until 1774, also relied on Nettelbladt’s textbook. In one of his public lectures, published as a separate book in 1766, Langer asserted the importance of studying legal philosophy for understanding the nature of the law. Positive laws, he argued, are framed by the sovereign but derive from natural law.26 The authority of Wolffian natural law in Moscow University was briefly challenged by the English- educated Semen Desnitskii, who taught law courses from 1768 to 1773 and is known as the father of Russian jurisprudence. Desnitskii held German philosophy in

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rather low esteem and greatly resented the foreign domination of the Russian academic establishment. He deserves a great deal of credit for popularizing the legal philosophy of Adam Smith and John Millar in Russia through his lectures and public speeches during his tenure as professor of law, but his efforts did not change the direction of Russian academic philosophy.27 As an alternative, students could avail themselves of the ancient writings, including Cicero, Aristotle, and Seneca, which were available in Russian. During this period, Catherine the Great encouraged publication of some of the contemporary English and French philosophers, but their ideas did not find their way into university courses.28 A great portion of the translations, moreover, was concerned with moral and pedagogic philosophy that was relevant to Russia’s educational reforms in the last quarter of the eighteenth century. Locke, for instance, was known as the authority on children’s education. His work O Vospitanii Detei (On Children’s Education) underwent three editions within less than one decade,29 while his Treatise on the Government was not available in Russian.30 Nor did Catherine’s interest in the legal ideas of Montesquieu and Beccaria change the orientation of academic philosophy in Russia. For its time and in the context of autocratic Russia, where notions of the common good and legal order were still new, Wolffian natural law did have an enlightening influence upon some of the young nobility studying in Moscow University. They found in the natural law tradition the ideal of a law-abiding benevolent monarch, which led them to question Russia’s arbitrary legal and administrative practices.31 However, in the long run, Wolffian philosophy was destined to play the role of an official antidote against more liberal philosophical ideas that would find their way into Russia in the early nineteenth century, only to fall under suspicion about a decade later. Toward the end of the eighteenth century, Wolffian philosophy in German universities began to give way to new ideas. German academicians’ departure from the Wolffian tradition toward a more individual- oriented theory and liberal natural law began with the absorption of the ideas of Adam Smith and French physiocrats during the last decades of the eighteenth century. As a result, cameralist philosophy, with its emphasis on social obligations and paternalistic order, was gradually transformed into the science of Nationalökonomie that preached economic freedom and individual initiative.32

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Liberal economic ideas carried over into legal philosophy. J. S. Pütter, a professor of law in Göttingen University, attempted to reformulate the ends of the ruler’s regulatory power as security and legality rather than “good order.” He pointed the way to delineate the private sphere beyond which the ruler’s authority could not extend. He also rejected Wolffian natural law, arguing that the study of German positive law and its history was of greater practical value than speculative jurisprudence.33 Pütter laid the foundations for the new genre of legal literature—the so- called encyclopedia of rights— which explicated the general principles of positive law. In Russia, Pütter’s ideas found followers in Moscow University. Professor Fedor (Theodore) Bause (1752–1812), a native of Saxony and graduate of Leipzig who made a career in Russia first as a private tutor and from 1782 as professor of jurisprudence, chose Pütter’s writings for his lecture course on Roman law and legal theory. Bause was one of those few foreigners who identified himself with his new fatherland and promoted teaching in the Russian language when he became the dean of the Moral and Political Faculty in 1805.34 Bause’s departure from Wolffian philosophy did not, however, signify a larger change in the philosophical orientation of Moscow University. From this time on, academic philosophy in Russia, including natural jurisprudence, became highly eclectic, reflecting the stage of transition from the philosophy of Wolff and Pufendorf to the ideas of Kant, Smith, Fichte, and their interpreters.35 Mixed in various proportions, the elements of all these philosophical schools were present simultaneously in law and philosophy courses in Moscow University and even in the lectures of individual teachers. Alongside Bause’s course based on Pütter’s ideas, students in the Law Faculty took the course in natural law offered by Professor Johan Schaden (1731–97), who chose for his lectures the textbook of Wolffian disciple Gottfried Achenwall (1719–72), Jus Naturae.36 But in his course on moral philosophy he referred to Kant’s Metaphysics and Critique of Pure Reason along with the ideas of Montesquieu, Hobbes, Rousseau, and many other contemporary philosophers.37 When Schaden died, in the absence of a suitable law professor, the university entrusted the teaching of natural law to M. I. Skiadan (ab. 1740–1802), professor of medicine, who preferred the writings of Pufendorf for his course.38 Schaden’s attempt to introduce students to Kant’s moral concepts raised no objections on the part of the Russian authorities,

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but Ludwig Mellman, a Göttingen- educated professor who began to teach in Moscow University in 1792, quickly ran into trouble when he included some of Kant’s religious ideas in his course. Feofilakt, the archbishop of Kaluga, found in his lectures the seeds of atheism and declared Mellman mentally ill. He was promptly removed from the university and banished from Russia.39 Similar charges were leveled against Ignaz Fessler, who became professor of oriental languages in St. Petersburg Theological Academy. When he submitted his teaching notes on the proposed course in philosophy, the archbishop of Riazan’, teaching in the Academy, argued that grounding philosophy on reason alone undermined the importance of God. Without delay, the Academy dismissed Fessler from his post but allowed him to stay in Russia.40 In spite of these cases, the official attitude toward Kant during this period was quite welcoming. In 1794 the Academy of Science singled him out for election as a foreign associate.41 The first translation of Kant’s Foundations of the Metaphysics of Morals appeared in 1803, followed by his Observations on the Feeling of the Beautiful and Sublime the next year. In the note appended to the Foundations, the translator characterized Kantian work as “important and one of its kind, in which thoughtful Kant presented to the world the foundations of morals based on the notions of duty and will . . . hitherto hidden in the darkness of ignorance.”42 Perhaps, knowing about Kant’s undeserved reputation as an atheist, the official organ of the Ministry of Education, Santktpeterburgskii Zhurnal, published in 1804 an article by Charles Villers, the French follower and translator of Kantian critical philosophy, which provided biographical facts and a summary of Kant’s major ideas. Villers viewed Kant as a “great philosopher” whose teaching was opposed to that of “materialists, fatalists and atheists.”43 An editorial note appended to the article agreed with Villers’s assessment and pointed out that Russians were still unfamiliar with Kant’s ideas.44 With the expansion of the university network in the early nineteenth century, a new wave of German- educated professors helped popularize Kant’s name in Russia. Many of these professors accepted positions in far-away unknown Russia because they had to flee their home country, now under French occupation. Partly for this reason and partly due to the efforts of the university procurators, Russia obtained more able and renowned professors than ever before,45 although the language barrier put a limit on their

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influence upon the Russian audience.46 Latin was still difficult for the students from the nobility, while German was often a problem for students who entered universities from the ecclesiastical seminaries.47 Some of the German professors sought to overcome this obstacle by having their textbooks translated and published in Russia. It was mostly through these textbooks rather than from Kant’s original works, which were not suitable as teaching manuals, that Russian students acquired their knowledge of Kantian philosophy.48 A closer look at these works reveals, however, that alongside the basic Kantian ideas they preserved a great deal of Wolffian moral and political theory. These tensions were most evident in the lectures of Christian F. Reinhard (1764–1812), who taught moral philosophy and natural law at Moscow University from 1803 until his death.49 Soviet historians argued that his teaching influenced the thinking of Chaadaev, Nicholas Turgenev, and a number of future Decembrists who studied in Moscow University, although no specific evidence has ever been presented to support this argument.50 In any case, Reinhard enjoyed the company of his students and, according to the recollections of one Moscow student, often invited them for scholarly discussions in his St. Petersburg apartment.51 To make his Latin lectures understandable to a wider student audience, Reinhard published them in Russian in 1807 and 1816 under the titles System of Moral Philosophy (Sistema Moral’noi Filosofii) and Natural Law (Estestvennoe Pravo). Reinhard’s reputation as a Kantian was based upon his own claim that “the whole moral system explained in [my] work has foundations in the idea of moral law and . . . human legislative capacity.”52 In contrast to “the old systems of morality,” which treated virtue “not as an end in itself but as a means to the well-being,” Kant’s idea of moral self-legislation, in Reinhard’s view, makes respect for moral law an inherent value for human beings without at the same time placing “excessive demands” on their behavior “in the manner of Stoics.”53 Indeed, Reinhard gave the Kantian categorical imperative a prominent place in his work, but alongside Kant’s moral ideas there was a layer of arguments favoring absolutist political theory and traditional social order. Whereas in Kant, for instance, the universal law of freedom entailed the right of legal equality, in Reinhard, it required no such principle. For Reinhard, legal justice was the arrangement in which “each was rendered his own.”54

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In some cases, Reinhard employed Kantian vocabulary and logical constructions to support ideas that were quite different from what Kant had in mind. For instance, in Kant, the transition from the state of nature to a civil society is presented as an a priori idea—a command of reason rather than a historical or imaginary fact of empirical necessity, but the concept of contract played an important role in his political philosophy as a means of defining the ideal of the state in accordance with the principles of justice.55 Reinhard, by contrast, vehemently rejected the theory of social contract on the very ground that obedience to the civil authority is authorized by practical reason and not by a voluntary act of consent.56 It is interesting that Reinhard did not mention Kant among the proponents of the social contract theory, blaming, instead, Locke and especially Rousseau for spreading a theory that “had a pernicious effect” on the minds of Frenchmen in the end of the eighteenth century.57 And whereas Kant used the tripartite syllogism to demonstrate the logic of the division of powers in the state—one of the central points in his political liberalism—Reinhard invoked the same logical construction to prove that the monarch must hold an undivided legislative, executive, and judicial power in order to ensure the unity of the state.58 Reinhard also backed the idea of monarchical sovereignty by the psychological facts of human moral weakness and ignorance—the type of argument Kant employed in his early works but minimized in The Metaphysics of Morals.59 The ambiguity of Reinhard’s political theory and his use of Kantian language for justifying absolutist ideas were evident in his definition of the supreme power: It is not true that the supreme power resides in people. In the strictest sense, this power derives exclusively from moral law, from practical reason . . . it governs all our actions and institutions. From this it follows that supreme power cannot reside in any one person except for the one who represents the law, that is in the ruler.60 Reinhard here gave a twist to Kant’s argument that supreme power resides in people and finds representation in the legislative assembly, which constitutes collective reason and will. At the same time, he stressed that “rulers get their power over the subjects not in order to make them their slaves or tools of their vanity and whims but in

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order to ensure the conditions agreeable with the ends of nature and reason.”61 By the latter he meant natural entitlements to one’s person and property, which translated into such civil freedoms as the right to “pay only lawful taxes,” the right to have legal disputes judged according to the established and well-defined laws, and the right to be protected from foreign aggression.62 In the final analysis, however, the ruler’s power to interpret natural law is checked neither by any institutional bodies nor by the force of public opinion as in Kant, while the subjects’ obedience is presented as “a source of all benefits.”63 Reinhard’s German colleague in Moscow University was Johann Gottlieb Buhle (1763–1821) from Göttingen University, who came to the Russian capital in 1804 and was able to offer the students (as private and public courses) a wide range of philosophical and philological subjects, from natural law, the history of philosophy and logic to classics and psychology. He left the university in 1807 after the death of its curator Murav’ev, to whose invitation he owed his presence in Russia. For three years he served as director of the St. Petersburg Pedagogical Institute, continuing to offer private lectures until he caught the attention of Alexander I’s favorite sister, the Grand Duchess Ekaterina Pavlovna. In 1811 Buhle was appointed her private librarian and, according to Wes, an advisor to the tsar with a handsome salary of 7,000 rubles. In 1814 during the duchess’s trip to Lübek, he decided to resign and return to his native city Braunschweig.64 For the lectures on natural law, Buhle used his Lehrbuch des Naturrechts published in Göttingen in 1798, parts of which were later used by the first Russian professor of natural law in Moscow University, Lev Tsvetaev, for his own lectures and textbook on legal philosophy. For some Russian historians, Buhle “was a Kantian of the primitive kind relying more on the letter than on the spirit of Kant’s theory”; others, however, saw him as a scholar with high credentials and a lot of zeal for spreading enlightenment in Russia, which found expression in his activities devoted to publishing two periodicals throughout 1805–7.65 According to yet another view, Buhle’s lectures “were rather difficult for his students who did not possess the needed preparation.”66 Although his lecture notes are not extant, Buhle’s Lehrbuch provides a clear idea of his philosophical and methodological positions. Of all the German textbooks on natural law employed in Russian universities, Lehrbuch des Naturrecht showed the greatest influence

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of cameralist philosophy, which Buhle tried to modernize by sprinkling it with ideas in the Kantian spirit. Buhle repeatedly asserted that the ruler must secure the ends of the state, but in keeping with the absolutist tradition of natural law, he viewed the ruler as the only authority to determine the means to the public ends. Underlying Buhle’s concept of the state was the assumption (also typical of enlightened absolutism) that the ruler has a natural interest in keeping his country orderly and prosperous. The need to ensure the best means for promoting public interests justified, in Buhle’s treatment, the unitary and unlimited power of the ruler, which includes “supervisory,” legislative, judiciary, and executive power. The sovereign may “repeal laws, issue new ones, restrict or take away certain provisions of the law.”67 His prerogatives allow the ruler to inquire about the actions of the subjects that “are of interest to the state” and “to use their assets for the purpose of the state.” “In this sense the ruler has superior property rights over the assets of his subjects,” although under the normal circumstances “the existence of private property is not due to the mercy of the state.”68 The ruler’s duty “to preserve and increase the assets of his subjects” (as part of his “Police power”), while justified in the name of the common good and potentially useful in maximizing the resources of the country, leaves little room for individual initiative and virtually no boundaries between private and public realms. It entails, according to Buhle, the state’s right to facilitate marriages, build orphanages, preserve public health, promote sciences, industry, and art, establish and supervise schools, as well as oversee public morals, discipline, and customs.69 Whatever liberal ideas students could find in Buhle’s book, they were invariably accompanied by such provisions that virtually vitiated the initial assertions. For instance, he argued that although subjects do not have any rights of force against the sovereign, “they are still allowed to tell the ruler about his errors.” Since the published word is the easiest means of having the voice of the people heard, it is helpful to have freedom of speech “as long as it does not harm the ends of the state.” This condition, however, could be interpreted by the ruler the way he finds fit: “Because state interests can be harmed by political authors even when their intentions are good [and] the inoffensiveness of political freedom is impossible to prove, the sovereign can restrict the freedom of speech. How far these restrictions may extend is left to the sovereign.”70 In the same manner Buhle explained the principle of legal equality. All subjects, he asserted,

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are equal before the law. Laws should be publicly known and “must aim at preserving the rights of subjects, so that a subject does not have his rights arbitrarily taken from him for the benefit of another person.” At the same time, the principle of legality is subject to the ruler’s dispensatory power in judicial matters. “How the law is used,” Buhle wrote, “is all in the discretion of the ruler”; he “is allowed to make exceptions concerning the use and the binding force of the law either in regards to specific things or certain individuals.”71 Similar ambiguity was evident in his attempts to define the limits of legal constraints on the ruler. “The sovereign,” according to Buhle, “is only subject to fundamental laws of the state” established by the original contract, “but not to the laws he himself issued,” with the exception when “breaking those laws would harm the purpose of the state.”72 What constitutes the best means to the ends of the state was, of course, the purview of the ruler alone. To complicate the argument even further, Buhle tried to introduce a distinction between the ruler as a private person and a public office holder: “Whenever the sovereign is considered as a citizen (bürger) of the state, he is subject to laws he created. And it only depends on how the person of the sovereign is differentiated from that of a citizen. This differentiation is clearly defined in aristocracy or democracy but it is less [clear] or nonexistent in a monarchy.”73 In monarchies, therefore, this distinction is virtually null because, as Buhle further explained, although the monarch can be viewed as a citizen, “in his person he also represents the ruler and as such can always change laws or exclude his own acts from them.”74 In keeping with Wolffian tradition, Buhle did not explicitly identify which form of government he thought to be the most suitable to achieve the ends of the state; however, from everything he said about the ruler’s power in general, it is clear that he favored unlimited monarchy on account of its extensive power of legal dispensation and discretion. More explicitly Kantian but not consistently liberal was the textbook of Halle-trained Ludwig Jakob (1759–1827), who came to Russia in 1806 to teach philosophy and law at Khar’kov University. Jakob’s established reputation as a prolific writer and successful teacher of a Kantian bent was to enhance the prestige of the newly founded Khar’kov University, which attracted an insufficient number of students during the first decade of its existence, partly because Khar’kov was still a small provincial town with a reputation for poor hygiene

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and dearth of cultural life. In his early years as a philosopher, Jakob was known in Germany for his defense of the representative principle of government, free labor, and (in disagreement with Kant) the right of popular resistance against extreme despotism. In his Natural Law published in 1795, he cited the English revolution of 1688 as an example of justified resistance to the king, who failed to adhere to the law. However, the shock of the French Rrevolution and possibly prudential considerations for his career in the years of Napoleonic rule caused Jakob to abandon the most radical of his ideas. The contrast between the first and the second editions of his Natural Law published in Germany in 1795 and 1802 signaled Jakob’s drift toward political conservatism, although his economic ideas remained liberal.75 Jakob’s teaching career at Khar’kov University lasted for a mere two years before he accepted a more prestigious and apparently more lucrative position in the Ministry of Finance in 1809, where he enjoyed the patronage of Speranskii.76 However, he continued his scholarly work and wrote books, one of which was a textbook for the Russian gymnasia, translated and published throughout 1811–17. The textbook consisted of eight volumes that conveniently covered all social sciences taught in the gymnasia.77 All parts were logically connected to each other and structured according to the hierarchy of philosophical subjects offered in a curriculum, from logic to political economy and theory of law (natural and international). Jakob’s Moral Philosophy was more detailed than any other translated German textbook in explicating Kant’s complex arguments about the possibility of a priori moral knowledge and man’s capacity for ethical self-legislation. At the center of his work was Kant’s idea that man as a rational being is entitled to inner and outer freedom, including the right to set one’s goals and act upon them within the limits set by other people’s corresponding rights.78 However, discussed in abstracto, out of a sociopolitical context, the Kantian concept of autonomy sounded in Jakob more like a stoic precept for self- discipline and exercise of reason than an argument against the state’s moral tutelage.79 As part of their duties to others, Jakob argued, people must obey the state, which was created to ensure the moral life of all, “even if we know that there could be a better law, or when it is oppressive for us.”80 The only exception to this rule would be if the law commands something immoral, but the details of this condition Jakob left unexplained.

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His view of social ethics was also more conventional than Kant’s. For instance, among the primary virtues eliciting other people’s respect and affection Jakob listed “complaisance” (usluzhlivost’)—a moral disposition that in Kantian ethics would be considered contrary to the requirement of self- esteem.81 Jakob’s Natural Law presented Russian students with a similar amalgam of liberal and conservative ideas. He made extensive use of Kant’s Metaphysics, but, as his bibliography suggests, Jakob also consulted the works of Wolff, Hobbes, Grotius, Schmalz, Burlamaqui, Achenwall, and Fichte. He repeated Kant’s idea that “people are free moral agents, so reason commands that we respect their moral nature in the utmost way.”82 “Freedom of one should limit the freedom of all and the other way around” in conformity with the “supreme principle of natural law.” As long as the individual does not harm other people, he is free to act, “even if his actions are immoral.”83 According to Jakob, “man’s nature as a moral and rational being” requires that each individual be treated as “an end in itself,” equal to others and free to exercise his will. He calls these rights “essential.”84 Because man’s moral attributes are inseparable from his existence as a physical being, man also possesses innate rights to life, to material goods necessary for sustaining life, and to the free use of his “mental abilities” (dukhovnye sily), which in turn implies freedom of thought, of expression, and of self-improvement. Jakob’s mention of the individual’s “right to achieve inner goals . . . in accordance with his own views” was an important, if not sufficiently emphasized, argument in the spirit of Kant.85 At the same time, in contrast to Kant, he thought that “it is possible to alienate the right to one’s will, that is to give others the right to make their will the law for our will.”86 As in Kant, civil society is based “on the idea of contract” and is intended to promote the common end—“the security of man’s essential rights and the rule of law.” The form of government and the means of exercising power are defined by a constitution, also called “fundamental laws.”87 However, Jakob did not specify which form of government would be the most suitable for this end. Similar to Schmalz, he discussed the two types of polities—“equal and unequal”—in a descriptive rather than evaluative manner. In “equal society,” laws are enacted unanimously by all members, by virtue of which such society has no single authority; whereas in “unequal polity,” “the supreme ruler has the right to prescribe laws” and command the subjects’ obedience. The ruler is (morally) obliged “to use

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his power only for society’s well-being.” The supreme power is “despotic if the ruler commands everything he wishes and the way he wishes.” “Subjects subordinated to the despot are called slaves.” If, on the other hand, “the will of the ruler is limited by the known laws his power is moderate.”88 There are, Jakob argued, many types of polities, depending on “the holder of the power” (such as monarchy, aristocracy, and democracy) and on “the means by which it [the power] is entrusted to the holder” (that is, limited and unlimited forms). “In an unlimited monarchy the ruler holds all the rights of majesty and is empowered to use them according to his conscience. In a limited monarchy the will of the ruler is acknowledged as supreme only when certain other persons agree with it. Such mysterious persons influencing the will of the monarch are called Imperial dignitaries (imperskie chiny), social estates (gosudarstvennye sosloviia) and Parliaments (parlamenty).”89 Jakob tried to avoid prescriptive statements by discussing the relationship between the ruler and the subjects “in general” (otnosheniia voobshche) without framing them within a specific form of government. As in the Wolffian tradition, the implication was that any form of government, with the apparent exception of despotic, is capable of promoting public ends. “The highest” end of the state is to establish the rule of law; the “necessary end” is “to maintain the rights of all”; the last in this hierarchy of public ends is the need to promote “general well-being, morality and the nation’s skills (iskussnost’ natsii).” In addition to their “essential” rights, people in the civil state possess the right to “establish private societies for lawful purposes.”90 This impressive range of liberal freedoms, however, did not imply the right to public scrutiny of government policies, as it did in Kant. The supreme ruler is endowed with full legislative, executive, and judicial power, which allows him to “enact new laws, annul or alter the old ones.” The subjects, Jakob asserted, obey the ruler on assumption that his power is limited by natural law and is directed toward the promotion of the common ends, but if someone finds his rights violated, petitioning would be the only resort, for a subject “cannot suppose that the state wants to do injustice to him.” If the petition is denied, the subject is nevertheless obliged to obey, unless it goes against his conscience, although Jakob did not specify what would follow in such case. The only way in which the form of government could be changed legally is by mutual agreement between the people

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and the supreme power; otherwise, the change amounts to the revolution which is all the more subversive when it occurs “by the will of some of the people.”91 The most important departure from Kant concerned Jakob’s view of legal inequality in a civil society. Although, according to Jakob, “people are equal in a sense that they all live under law . . . there might be great inequality among the subjects regarding the content of their rights; one person can be more obligated by law than the other.” The ruler, moreover, retains a prerogative to “make legal exemptions for some of the subjects.”92 In other words, all people are bound by the law but law is not equal for all. Despite Jakob’s reluctance to specify the best form of government, the reader could surmise his political preferences from the following argument: although, he stated, “there is less political freedom in a monarchical (edinoderzhavnoe) state compared to a democratic one, there is more civil freedom in a monarchy than in any other type of government because the latter has to impose numerous limitations on its citizens in order to prevent abuses and perversion, which are encouraged by democracy, while in a monarchical state people are the least inclined towards them.”93 It is notable that Jakob’s idea of the institutionally unlimited rule is rendered throughout the text with the word “edinoderzhvie” (literally, “single rule”) whose connotation in Russian approximated “autocracy” rather than law-bound monarchy. Given the fact that the book was intended for the gymnasium students, Jakob also refrained from any critical comments about serfdom. His main argument in this regard was that a landlord should not lay claims to what his serf produces during his spare time, because serfdom, unlike slavery, is based on the principles of contract.94 More of Jakob’s economic liberalism survived in his Political Principles published in 1809 and intended for a more mature audience. Here Jakob criticized serf labor as economically unproductive and morally degrading. The government, he asserted, should specify the amount of work required of serfs and the scope of the landlords’ power of punishment over their peasants. Serfs should be allowed to accumulate their own property and be protected by the law from the practice of landless selling and breaking up of families. Similar ideas were featured in his 1814 prize-winning essay for the Russian economic society entitled “Concerning the Labor of Servile and Free Peasants.” In it he argued that emancipation would bring

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economic benefits to both sides but it should be done in a gradual manner with proper compensation for the landlords.95 In addition to the textbooks written by visiting German professors for their Russian audience, some German works on natural law were translated on the initiative of the Russian professors who needed comprehensive teaching manuals for their academic courses. The textbook by Friedrich Snell, translated by Professors Lubkin and Kondyrev and published at the Kazan’ University press in 1813, was another multivolume manual, which resembled Jakob’s book not only in its format but also in its limited treatment of Kantian ethics. Aside from Natural and People’s Law (Narodnoe Pravo), Snell’s textbook included sections on logic, metaphysics, aesthetics, and moral philosophy—each of them the size of a monographic work. Without limiting himself to the task of translation, Lubkin interspersed Snell’s book with his critical notes, which present an early critique of Kant’s ideas in Russia. As Lubkin explained in his preface, Snell’s textbook was selected because its brevity and clarity were useful for “beginners,” although Lubkin’s extensive comments on Snell’s Moral Philosophy made this part of the book rather long and confusing to the readers. Lubkin had no argument with the idea that reason is an internal legislator operating upon human will, but he could not accept Snell’s (Kantian) claim that man is capable of acting without any regard for the consequences of his behavior, exclusively motivated by respect for moral law. He saw this principle untenable on the grounds of human psychological characteristics: “ ‘To follow laws of reason for their own sake’—This is the thought more sublime and beautiful than true . . . Is it possible that the feeling of duty arises without a picture of the good or evil resulting from our free actions?”96 Kant’s categorical imperative to act according to the “maxim that you would make a law for all human beings” was also rejected as idealistic and inadequate. “And what will happen,” Lubkin wrote, “if every mentally deficient and depraved individual based his morality upon this [law]? Then he would be able to say that he wants other people to follow his example!”97 Given Lubkin’s rejection of Kantian metaphysics of morals, it might appear rather strange that he undertook the project of translating Snell’s work. The textbook was intended for “beginners,” but the section on moral philosophy required, in effect, a good deal of analytical skill to judge between Kantian ideas and their critique by Lubkin. Yet, it was only the theoretical part of the moral philosophy

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that aroused most of Lubkin’s objections. The reason was that Snell’s practical moral philosophy had little in common with Kantian moral epistemology. In this section Snell presented prudential maxims that aimed to promote traditional Christian virtues and the virtues appropriate in a polite society, such as the ability to be witty or reserved and respectful whenever the circumstances require. The very manner of presenting man’s duties as a set of threefold obligation—to oneself, to others, and to God—harkened back to the philosophy of Pufendorf and Wolff. Moreover, specifying moral objectives and rules of behavior in such detail was contrary to Kant’s concept of autonomy, which freed an individual from any external authority in matters of moral pursuits and obligations. The notion of moral autonomy itself was thoroughly downplayed in Snell’s textbook, despite his own argument that man is capable of moral self-legislation. At the same time, in his Natural Law Snell (like Jakob) upheld the notion of legal order and civil rights as rooted in man’s natural entitlements. He maintained that “positive laws should only provide exact specifications of the natural law and its application for specific cases. Never should they contradict the law of nature and they should also be known to everyone whom they oblige.”98 More importantly, an individual has the right to “demand” the protection of his rights “so that his disagreements with others would be judged not by mercy but according to the law.”99 For Russia, this was a progressive idea, given the essentially patriarchal and personal nature of the autocratic style of governing where the tsar’s word could override any written or customary law. Yet, Snell was careful to remind his readers that complaints should be submitted to the government respectfully and “in no case, even when he is sure that injustice has been done to him, can an individual resist the government.”100 Civil freedom consists in the legal protection of natural rights—the right for one’s person, the right for external freedom, and the right “to use things freely.”101 Any form of government, he argued, is capable of maintaining civil freedom, but monarchy is more suitable for this end than democracy or aristocracy.102 Snell shared much in common with Jakob and Reinhard. All of them advocated the rule of law, which presupposed legal guarantees of people’s civil rights, due process, and the transparency of the law. What they all took from Kant were the themes of human dignity, capacity for reason, and a corresponding requirement to treat man as an end and never as a means. These were, of course, the most

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famous of Kant’s ideas, which made anyone who subscribed to them sound like a Kantian. But in Kant, these premises served to justify the demand for intellectual tolerance, freedom from social tutelage, and the right “to make public use of one’s reason in all matters”103 — none of which featured explicitly in the works of German professors. Nor did they embrace Kant’s demand for the equality of opportunity and his critique of social ethics based on the principles of hereditary privileges.104 Taken in a rather abstract form, the Kantian categorical imperative appeared in their works as something of a modern rendering of the traditional Christian precept to treat other people as you yourself would want to be treated. Given this limited embrace of Kant’s notion of autonomy, it is natural that the German professors also bypassed his ideas of representative government and division of powers, which Kant pictured as an institutional setting required to fulfill the rights of an autonomous individual.105 In their stress on the monarch’s exclusive legislative prerogative limited only by his own respect for the common good, they were much closer to the cameralist than to the Kantian political philosophy. Close to this group of German academicians stood the Moscow professor Lev Tsvetaev (1777–1835), whose textbook A Short Theory of Laws showed a debt to the German natural law tradition. Tsvetaev was one of the first native Russian professors of law to receive training at the universities of Göttingen and Paris. Upon returning to Russia in 1805, he took up the position of professor of law at Moscow University (his alma mater), which he held until his death in 1835.106 As Tsvetaev explained in an introduction, he tailored his textbook to the needs of Russian students, who would be practitioners rather than theorists of the law. All of the existing works on legal theory were, in his view, either too long (such as Montesquieu) or too abstract (Bentham, in particular) to serve as a suitable study manual. But a précis of a variety of legal literature and sources, including the Code Napoleon, was to provide students with the knowledge of the theoretical foundations and applications of law in juridical practice. Rather surprisingly, Tsvetaev did not mention Kant among his sources, although the theoretical part of his work displayed a heavy debt to Kantian moral and legal theory. He argued, for instance, that man is capable of knowing good and evil through his “practical reason,” which also makes him aware of his own being as a moral individual. Once man recognized his own human dignity, he was obliged to respect another’s humanity. As Tsvetaev put it, “It is in his

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practical reason and free will that man finds a source of all laws and their obligatory force.”107 Tsvetaev cited Kant’s categorical imperative to subject all our actions to the test of a universal law and argued that the virtue of following practical reason comprises the primary end of human existence. Next in importance come well-being, security of one’s person and property, and finally, happiness. Positive laws should be framed in such a way as to make these objectives possible. Laws should also be in harmony with a nation’s religion, form of government, customs, and geographic and economic characteristics.108 In this, Tsvetaev believed, consists the “internal goodness” of laws, while their external goodness is ensured through publicity, clarity, and comprehensiveness of the law.109 Although Tsvetaev accepted the notion of dignity as an inherently human quality, in his treatment it did not fully apply to “slaves.” He conceded to them the right to be treated humanely and be protected by the law from life-threatening abuse, but in other respects, he argued, slaves “belong to [their masters] as things, as their property.”110 In explaining the origin of slavery in Russia and elsewhere, he mentioned the “tsar’s will” as one of the means of enslavement, which by implication carried as much historical legitimacy as turning war captives into slaves or assigning orphans to this social category (also a custom in Russia, as he pointed out).111 Owning slaves, Tsvetaev wrote, should be a privilege reserved for those distinguished by their service to the fatherland. It was rather unusual that he did not distinguish between Russian slavery and other historical forms of slave labor—the point upon which many advocates of Russian serfdom insisted. In 1816 Tsvetaev published another work on legal theory—The Foundations of Natural Law—this time concerned specifically with the exposition of natural law and political theory flowing from it.112 It was a compilation of the ideas drawn from the works of Theodor Schmalz and Johann Buhle “with some additions and changes.” As a study based on the secondary literature, the book presented Kantian ideas in a much diluted version, in which Tsvetaev adopted the categorical imperative and Kant’s view of the origin of natural law without accepting Kant’s political conclusions. Tsvetaev presented natural law as “a science drawn from reason and its attributes,” which provides human beings with the general moral maxim—“not to treat other people as means to an end but always as ends in

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themselves.”113 Natural rights, he went on, are innate, inalienable, and belong to all people on an equal basis by virtue of their “natural equality.” “No one can deprive a person of his [natural] rights even with his own consent.”114 Of these rights he singled out three fundamental ones: “the right to one’s person” (i.e., the right of self-preservation), i.e. the right of self-preservation), “the right to acquire things necessary for life” and the right to act freely, which does not, however, extend as far as the right to disobey laws or civil authorities.115 As in Schmalz, these liberal natural law premises were followed by a political theory dominated by the absolutist ideas. The office of the ruler, Tsvetaev wrote, is a product of historical development that goes back to the era of primitive human society. The development of human society proceeded from hunting to an agricultural stage characterized by landed property and social differentiation between the “landowners” and “inhabitants.” The need to protect property gave rise to rudimentary authority and eventually the political state in the form of monarchy, aristocracy, democracy, or a mixed polity. The state is thus a product of agreement among the proprietors, who include the rest of the population into the pact of subjection as passive participants.116 In Tsvetaev’s view, “Subjection is not contrary to human freedom because it depends on people’s will and is based on their common goal.” However, this consensual element in his theory does not translate into any limitations upon the supreme power or the right of resistance. “The sovereign and the rulers (gosudar’ i praviteli) are absolutely independent and their will replaces that of the people. It is not permitted for a subject to disobey the ruler, even if some injustice was done to him.”117 Aside from his unlimited legislative and administrative prerogatives, the ruler is invested with “supervisory” power (nadziratel’naia vlast’), which leaves little room for individual autonomy. At the same time, these political features are balanced by the idea that laws must be publicly known and applied to everyone on an equal basis “under equal circumstances.”118 Of all the textbooks on legal theory that appeared before Kunitsyn’s work, the book by Franz Zeiller presented the most consistently liberal (Kantian-inspired) variant of natural law. It contained an emphasis on the noninterventionist concept of the state and the individual’s right to private pursuits in line with the laissez-faire philosophy. This book might have been singled out among many similar ones because of Zeiller’s reputation as a jurist and a leading member of

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the legislative committee at the Vienna court, which carried out the project of codification similar to the one Speranskii advocated in Russia. Zeiller’s innovative approach consisted in applying Kantian legal ideas to the task of codification. The Austrian Civil Code that was published in 1811 embodied the concepts of the rule of law, legal equality, and distinction between the juridical and ethical spheres. Happiness and good moral order were no longer seen as the ends of the government’s legislative activity, which was narrowed down to the function of maintaining legality and justice in conformity with the principle of mutually compatible freedom of all.119 Zeiller’s Das Natürliche Privatrecht, originally published in Vienna in 1802, was translated into Russian in 1809 by Peter Lodii following the recommendations of the Ministry of Education to use it as a teaching manual in the Main Pedagogical Institute. Although we do not know whether it actually formed the basis for his lectures, the textbook itself was available in the library of the Institute.120 The textbook explicated Kantian notions of ethical selflegislation, human dignity, and the principles of justice mainly as abstract philosophical categories without making a reference to the specific political order suited to uphold them. Yet, Zeiller’s liberal standpoint was clearly evident in his focus upon individual rights taken as natural entitlements rather than concessions granted by the ruler. He argued that man is subject to the authority of reason, which “requires that we perform our obligations not through compulsion or from selfish motives but from respect for law, rooted in pure good will.”121 The highest obligation for human beings is to respect other people’s legitimate freedom and to take them as ends but never as means. Leaving behind the theological underpinnings of the natural law theory, Zeiller maintained that “innate rights derive solely from nature and belong to us as sensible-reasonable beings.” From the basic innate right, which he identified with “the right to one’s person, i.e. the right to assert the dignity of a reasonable, freely acting being,” there followed a number of more specific freedoms. These were the right to preserve one’s life, “to take care of one’s well being and morality,” “to seek perfection of one’s body and health,” “ to educate one’s mind,” and finally “the right to one’s good name,” by which Zeiller essentially meant the immunity from being accused “without a reason.”122 By virtue of their innateness, these rights are also “timeless, inalienable and absolutely equal.” He cautioned,

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however, against a too literal understanding of this principle. In a civil society, rights deducible from natural freedoms are not distributed on an equal basis, but the very idea of original equality of rights “teaches us to respect humanity in each person, however low his status in a civil life would be.”123 Although Zeiller did not elaborate on the individualist implications of Kant’s notion of autonomy, he did point to the limits of society’s power over its members. Individual freedom, he argued, “consists in being under no other obligation except the one we could and wanted to impose upon ourselves by means of agreement . . . therefore, that each member has the right to promote his own private well being . . . ”124 Enjoyment of property rights was for Zeiller the most important aspect of autonomous existence and the very raison d’etre of civil union. The purpose of the state, therefore, was to maintain civil rights and create conditions necessary for individual pursuit of economic interests, rather than to regulate these pursuits in the name of public well-being. This reinterpretation of the state’s rationale entailed an important liberal idea, namely that the state does not create the law but translates the precepts of the natural law into legal practice. In this context, natural jurisprudence and “politics” relate to one another as theory and practice; the former “deduces its laws from pure reason” while the latter possesses means of implementing them.125 Despite the publication of modern textbooks on natural law, Wolffian philosophy in Russian universities never entirely displaced the Kantian teaching (abridged as it was in the works of his German and Russian interpreters). Baumeister’s textbooks continued to be published alongside the works of a more modern orientation. A fourth edition of Baumeister’s Metaphysics came out in 1808, and a third edition of his Moral Philosophy followed in 1815.126 In some universities, instructors taught metaphysics according to Wolffian principles and natural law following one of those newer textbooks. By the mid-1810s many of those German professors who arrived in Russia in the early nineteenth century were already gone, and their Russian replacements often reverted to Wolffian teaching. Thus, in Moscow University, after Reinhard’s premature death in 1812, his courses in philosophy were entrusted to Professor Briantsev, who adhered to Wolff’s ideas and, according to one of his students, belonged to “the times long gone,” “being unable to overcome the dry scholasticism of

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his lecture style.”127 However, in the same university, Tsvetaev, whose lectures in his early years were popular among the students, taught the course in natural law using his new textbook. On the whole, the older generation of Russian teachers educated on Wolffian ideas tended to be less responsive to the new philosophical teachings than those who received training abroad or studied under German teachers in Russia. To meet these professors’ needs, universities continued to publish textbooks on Wolffian philosophy, at the same time as they supported the publications of their more progressive faculty. A year before Tsvetaev published his Short Theory of Law, his colleague at Moscow University, Ivan Naumov, produced a very different interpretation of natural law theory. This work is worth mentioning in more detail as an example of the most conservative textbook on this subject in early-nineteenthcentury Russia. Naumov’s book was remarkable for its insistence on the divine origin of natural law and its discussion of human nature in eschatological terms. He saw man as subject to two opposing forces—“the spirit of conscience” and “the spirit of darkness.” The former is the light of divine wisdom, which directs man toward God-given natural law, while the latter is a devilish hand that tempts man to follow the wrong path. “The spirit of conscience” is prior and superior to reason, which Naumov treats as a mere faculty of acquiring practical knowledge rather than an avenue to understanding natural law (as, for instance, in Wolff) or a foundation of natural law, as in Kantian philosophy.128 Naumov equated natural law with the duty to seek selfpreservation, which in turn entails the right to enjoy one’s property and “well-being in general.” In the natural state, he argued, people lived according to the “right of freedom,” using everything that was available in nature for their sustenance while protecting themselves by their own means. “Natural love” propelled people to form individual families and share the fruits of their labor with the members of the family. With time, attacks of some families against others propelled people to embrace the idea of common authority and law. Naumov explained the formation of the state using the analogy of trusteeship. “Humanity,” he wrote, “gladly entrusts itself to the Wisest . . . This power has its beginning in people’s trust and its attribute is to dispose of the popular trust according to the rules of wisdom.”129

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Within the civil community, a person has duties to himself, to others, to the fatherland, and to the monarch. The first two kinds of duties are based upon the fundamental precept drawn from the Scripture: “whatever you do not wish for yourself you should not wish to others.”130 Naumov expounded this injunction by means of discussing human virtues and their corresponding vices, with “love” and “despair” being at the top of the lists. His language here was a peculiar mixture of the Christian ethics and the ideology of the public good. He enjoined readers to “measure your behavior by the common good” but also “honor your superiors and be kind to inferiors”131—a piece of advice that echoed the language of the Russian Domostroi (Household Manual) written in the sixteenth century. With respect to their public duties, Naumov expected people “to prefer common good to their private benefit” but above all, to obey the orders of the ruler “with passion and ardor.”132 The legitimacy of the monarch’s power derives from his divine mandate: “Whatever the sovereign wills, God himself wills.” Thus, “by serving him from all your heart you are serving God.”133 In practical terms this precept translated into a long list of obligations, including unquestionable obedience and the prayers for the sovereign’s well-being. He wrote: “Have trust in the tsar’s justice and mercifulness. Whenever you are dissatisfied with him, attribute his will to the will of God.”134 Similar reasons are provided for justifying the superiority of autocracy over democracy and aristocratic forms of government. “Autocratic ruling,” Naumov asserted, “is the best one, since it is supported by God himself; it is only under autocracy that humankind can achieve well being.”135 If Naumov presented a specifically Russian rendering of absolutist natural law, the textbook by Karl Anton von Martini was a classic of German absolutist thought that also found its way into Russia. Positiones de lege naturali, first published in Vienna in 1762 and initially employed only in the Pedagogical Institute and Khar’kov University, proved sufficiently innocuous to survive the book purges of 1821.136 Martini was a well-known professor of natural law and jurist who enjoyed four decades of a successful career first as a tutor to the children of Empress Maria Teresa and later as a top government official and reform advisor under her successors. His textbook combined the traditional absolutist principles of the well- ordered state with ideas of religious toleration (justified from an ecumenical standpoint), property rights, and humane treatment of criminals,

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some of which were implemented in Austria as part of the enlightened reforms and codification projects during the last quarter of the eighteenth century.137 In keeping with Wolffian tradition, Martini’s philosophy of natural law was based on the concept of perfection as the highest moral principle, which motivates an individual to fulfill his duties to God, to himself, and to others. God’s plan for humanity is evident through the underlying harmony of the world, and is made clear to man through natural law, which provides objective criteria for evaluating human morality and customs, criminal and civil laws, and the rights of the church.138 Actions are either good or bad, depending on whether they promote or impede the process of man’s perfection. Since human beings are equal by their nature, “the amount of [innate] rights has to be the same for everyone.” Any actual “inequality . . . is either conditional (bedingt) or merely physical.”139 The innate rights include personal security (“the right not to suffer from others”) and property rights, which Martini defined in a broad sense as pertaining to both the individual’s material possessions and the powers of his body and soul.140 The right to property, therefore, predates the civil state. The duties to others are rooted in man’s innate sociability and in the idea that the individual pursuit of perfection is enhanced through man’s connection with others. As part of his perfect duties to others, therefore, an individual is obligated to abstain from lying and causing harm to other individuals’ bodies, soul, or property. Complementing these negative duties (that is, the duties prohibiting certain actions) are those that enjoin the cultivation of “honesty, courtesy, compassion and gratitude,” which help an individual foster “love for oneself and others.”141 The ability to recognize one’s obligations necessitates mental self-improvement as the major duty to oneself along with the duty of self-preservation. Equanimity, moderation in “external goods,” and prohibition against idleness were all to enhance man’s perfection and, ultimately, happiness. It was typical of the Wolffian tradition that Martini presented man’s well-being as one of his selfduties (motivated by the idea of perfectibility) rather than liberties. Everyone, he maintained, must “choose a profession that is best for him,” but in making the choice, it is important to take into account not only one’s “physical and intellectual power,” but also “the will of one’s superior.”142 To develop his powers and skills, man is obliged to work, as he is to rest from work in order to recover his strength.143

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It is notable that Martini employed the same argument from duty to support the idea of religious toleration—the idea that Locke famously justified by the argument from personal freedoms. According to Martini, “acts which depend on the worship of God are not subject to external force” because man’s duties to God are established by the higher law—the law of nature. By virtue of this law, people already belong to the universal church of believers, which Martini defines as “the society united for the goal of worshiping God.” “Nobody,” he added “can exclude himself from that, nobody can be excluded.”144 Men, therefore, do not need external authority to recognize and fulfill God-given law. The idea of men’s equality as human beings shaped Martini’s views on slavery and conjugal society. He argued that “there is no original natural servitude.” Slavery is either a form of punishment for prisoners of war (when a prisoner is unable to buy himself out) or a voluntary condition based on a contract. Against Pufendorf, therefore, Martini argued that a child born from a slave does not become the lord’s property because “such a child never submitted to servitude on its own, nor did it do anything to lose its freedom . . . The only way that the lord can get rights over this child is by demanding that he works off what he lived off and no more.” A master may punish his slaves but only in a humane way.145 Similar to Wolffian philosophy, the ideas of man’s innate rights and social contract serve in Martini not to limit but to uphold the ruler’s authority because the ruler, according to Martini, has the right (which is also his obligation) to choose the best means for securing the ends of society. “The power of the law is based on the ruler’s unlimited will (Willkühr). He can change [laws], dissolve them and he is not bound by them.”146 Only if the power of the ruler extends to the property of his subjects and commands the actions which are not required for the common end, it is called “despotic” because, in this case, the subjects are treated as mere property of the overlord. Otherwise, the rulership is considered “limited.” “There is,” Martini insisted “a big difference between the right of rulership and property right (Eigenthumsrecht),” for the concept of property ownership essentially implies the right to dispose of one’s possessions in any way one wished; whereas in a limited polity, the supreme authority abides by the terms of the original contract of submission concluded in the interests of the common good.147 As in all theories of enlightened absolutism, the ruler is supposed to decree only what is good

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for society and “the members of every society have to have the same will and strive for the same end.”148 The last German textbook to be translated and published in Russia before the discipline of natural law fell under official scrutiny was the textbook by Theodor Schmalz, Handbuch der Rechtsphilosophie, originally published in Halle in 1807. In Russia it came out in 1820 from the press of the Imperial Pansion (Imperatorskii Vospitatel’nii dom); the censor’s permission was dated the end of April—only two months before Kunitsyn’s Natural Law came to the attention of the conservatives in the Ministry of Education. The textbook differed from other translated manuals in two ways: first, it contained a detailed and helpful introduction on the history of natural law from antiquity to modern times, which was written by the translator, Petr Sergeev; second, the translation included not only the literature consulted by the author of the introduction but also a comprehensive list of works on natural law written by European philosophers in the last two centuries. Schmalz’s Handbuch, comprising Part Two of the textbook, was abridged and interspersed with Sergeev’s comments and notes, some of which referred readers to Kunitsyn’s Natural Law.149 The translator justified his choice of Schmalz’s work and the need for another textbook on natural jurisprudence by the fact that Schmalz presented his subject “with clarity and the strictness of the mathematical method” but without long-winded theorizing, which is useless for “officials who are required to have knowledge in the field of [natural law].” The readers, moreover, were assured that Schmalz’s book would “safeguard them from false and alien ideas.”150 The textbook, thus, was intended more as a self-study guide than a teaching manual. In reviewing the history of natural jurisprudence, Sergeev judged the validity of various theories on natural law by the degree of their detachment from theology and their ability to discover and explicate “pure foundations of justice” (chistye nachala spravedlivosti)—those based on “pure reason” rather than experience.151 By these criteria, the ancient thinkers were the most remote from the truth, whereas Kant—“the great reformer of philosophy”—represented the highest achievement in the field of natural law. Schmalz, then, was praised for explicating in his works Kantian foundations of justice.152 The exaltation of Kant’s name sounded promising, but Schmalz’s textbook, contrary to the opinion of the translator, did not quite do justice to Kantian philosophy. According to his recent biographer,

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there always remained in Schmalz’s works a measure of contradiction between the liberal foundations of the natural law theory he adopted from Kant and the traditionalist ideas that underlay his concept of the state.153 Like other German Kantians, he focused on the philosophical principles of right, leaving aside, for the most part, the discussion of the civil conditions necessary for their realization. The most valuable part of his book concerned the exposition of Kant’s notions of inner freedom, moral necessity, and the distinction between ethics and law. He defined freedom as the “ability to act . . . in conformity with laws prescribed by our reason” based on motives detached from immediate experience.154 Accordingly, “the goodness and badness of an act can be judged not by its consequences but by the maxims from which it flows.” Following Kant, he argued that man’s moral duty “to subordinate sensual desires to the mind” belongs to the sphere of man’s inner freedom, which “cannot be judged by others” because it has no bearing on the lives of other people, whereas juridical duties pertain to man’s outer freedom, which “is limited only by the external freedom of others.”155 For further discussion of the “principle of Right,” the translator suggested consulting Kunitsyn’s textbook on natural law.156 Schmalz’s exposition of the innate natural rights was more discreet than in Kant, although it did contain in a basic form the idea that man, as a reasoning being, is entitled to independence rather than mere self-preservation. Innate rights, he argued are those that belong to us by our nature as opposed to those we acquire through our efforts. On this principle, the right to one’s person is the only innate right because all that nature has given to a man is his body and reason. And “since the notion of person implies freedom inherent in [the faculty] of reason, those who try to govern other people’s actions as they wish act against the person and his freedom.” From this basic right follows “the right to use things” and “the right to act freely.”157 The innate rights equally belong to everyone. By contrast, “acquired rights,” of which he only mentioned property rights, are “diverse and unequal.” Unlike Kant, however, Schmalz was ambivalent whether he meant by this the inequality in actual possession or the inequality with regard to the right to acquire property.158 The least Kantian in spirit was Schmalz’s concept of the state. In his Handbuch Schmalz abandoned the anthropological theory of the social contract that he employed in his 1792 Das Natürliche Staatsrecht,

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but the changes he introduced did not imply a fundamentally different concept of the state.159 He contended himself with the claim that “the whole society” (rather than property owners only) constitute a party to the contract of submission and that “the power of the ruler . . . is considered as if established by the general agreement of all.” “Although the members of the society are obliged to unconditionally obey the ruler in public matters, their freedom remains intact.” This freedom, however, consists in the mere awareness that they agreed to submit to the ruler of their own will, so “their obedience is not forced but voluntary, even if they don’t like some of the ruler’s commands.”160 Twisting Kant’s logic, Schmalz then used the notions of reason and will to construct an analogy that supported the concept of unlimited and undivided authority of the ruler. He wrote: “Just as man’s will governs his mind, so does the will of the ruler govern the society. There is, therefore, some similarity between the civil power and man’s reason.” Similar to the way a person needs to collect information in order to make rational decisions, the ruler has to have “supervisory” (also called “police”) power in order to find out what is necessary for the public good. And just as a person is able to create moral maxims for himself, the ruler should possess legislative power to create laws for the benefit of the whole society.161 This analogy served as a premise for Schmalz’s argument that the ruler’s power should include undivided supervisory, legislative, and executive power.162 The publication and continued use of the Wolfian and Kantian textbooks in the university courses suggest the eclectic character of Russian academic philosophy in the early nineteenth century. On the one hand, the persistence of Wolffian thought belies intellectual traditionalism on the part of some university teachers unable or unwilling to respond to the new philosophical ideas. On the other hand, in the Russian context, a coexistence of liberal and conservative currents in university teaching signified intellectual pluralism fostered by the introduction of academic autonomy rights in 1804. Until the conservative reaction of the early 1820s, Russian professors were able to choose their teaching manuals in accordance with their own political views, scholarly sophistication, and teaching purposes—in a fashion fairly consonant with the idea of academic freedom. Although the Ministry of Education issued specific recommendations for the Main Pedagogical Institute (which did not enjoy the rights of autonomy granted to the universities), no such instructions

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existed for the university courses. This explains why so many philosophical textbooks were published during a period of less than two decades and none of them became a standard teaching manual for university courses. This boom might also have to do with the fact that academic books were published in relatively small numbers, usually no more than a thousand copies, most of which were sold to private individuals. Snell’s book, for instance, was purchased by Kazan’ University and some gymnasia and ecclesiastical seminaries outside Kazan’ region, but no other university featured among the subscribers, at least at the time of its publication. In the absence of academic journals and societies that would provide a medium for the exchange of intellectual ideas, it is likely that university teachers were unaware of the recent publications in their field. One gets this impression by reading prefaces to the philosophical textbooks published during this period, virtually all of which refer to the lack of literature on the subjects of natural law and philosophy in Russia. But even during this liberal period, the teaching of philosophy and natural law was not entirely safe from state intrusion. The case of Johann Schad (1758–1834), a visiting professor who found himself dismissed from Khar’kov University in 1816 on the grounds of his philosophical views, serves well to illustrate the point. As many other foreign professors, Schad was chosen upon a recommendation by a well-known German literary figure (Goethe, in this case), while the Education Ministry was unaware of the nature of his ideas. Schad was a former Benedictine monk who became disenchanted with monastic life and Catholic theory, which he replaced with Kantian philosophy and later Fichte’s moral religion.163 Before the Russian authorities banished Schad from Russia, those of his students who had sufficient knowledge of Latin learned from Schad’s lectures that human rights derive from the single innate and inalienable right “to live according to man’s nature.” “In virtue of his reason,” Schad explained, “man is absolutely free and is a law unto himself; he therefore accepts only that law which agrees with reason and, although he can by his own will accept the law that is contrary to reason, in this case he loses the dignity of a reasonable being.”164 Man’s goals—pursuit of “wisdom” and well-being—are only realizable within the framework of civil life, which, however, did not imply any paternalistic control over an individual life. “There is nothing more nonsensical than imposing these goals upon an individual, or

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making him choose the means for them and restricting him . . . freedom guided by reason belongs to us . . . ”165 Based on this principle of freedom, Schad rejected “slavery,” praised religious tolerance and freedom of expression, especially with respect to university teaching intended for the educated public. And following his own recommendations on freedom of thought, he mused on the importance of love in marriage, which he compared with the union of two opposite but complementary poles.166 Schad hoped to make these ideas more available to students by publishing a book on natural law, which he dedicated to Alexander I as a “liberator of Russia, Europe and the whole world.” In 1814 Schad published the book entitled Institutiones Juris Naturae and sent it to some of the gymnasium libraries. Two years later, the most “subversive” parts of this book were brought to the attention of the Minister of Education A. Golitsyn. He judged Schad’s work unsuitable as a textbook for Russian students on several counts: for being too vague in some places and overstuffed with long quotations; for its immoderate discussion of marriage; for making inappropriate hints about contemporary political events; but, most importantly, for including ideas “that were not compatible with the fundamental notions accepted in our state.”167 To Golitsyn these faults were serious enough to authorize confiscation of Schad’s book from all public libraries without further compensation for his publishing expenses. Schad himself was banished from Russia despite his numerous selfjustifying petitions, which he continued to write from abroad.168 Schad’s unceremonious dismissal was already symptomatic of the imminent conservative reaction, especially of its methods—through the orders of Minister Golitsyn, who proved to be particularly concerned with issues of religion and morals. Yet, it was still an isolated case, which also had much to do with Schad’s weakness for alcohol, disrespect for traditional religion, and frequent quarrels with his colleagues. The authorities, quite understandably, could not tolerate a teacher who had a habit of mingling with students and mocking monastic morals. Schad’s case did not trigger a reexamination of the policy pertaining to the teaching of natural law in Russia (as would be the case with Kunitsyn’s textbook) and was little known outside Khar’kov University. For another four years, the teaching of natural law continued unimpeded. Gymnasium and university students were the primary but not the only readers of the philosophical textbooks that became available

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in Russia during the first two decades of the nineteenth century. An insight into the social composition of the Russian readership can be gained from the list of individuals who subscribed to Snell’s Natural Law at a time of its publication. The list, attached to the book itself, included subscribers from all free social ranks, ranging from the high officials to merchants and students coming from various Russian provinces, including a number of obscure and small towns in distant Ural areas. For each province the list begins with the names of the top clerics (traditionally the most educated segment of the population), but their number is everywhere exceeded by the number of secular persons, mostly from the nobility and state officials. The number of subscribers alone (the list runs through eight densely printed pages) and their geographic location suggest a greater interest in philosophical subjects among the Russian public than one would expect for a country where the nobility was known for its indifference to higher education. Not all of the subscribers necessarily read and absorbed the book, but the fact of subscription proves at least a certain fashion attached to the writings of a philosophical and legal nature, and at most the wider public’s interest in self- education. This impression is confirmed by the similar list of subscribers appended to Schmalz’s translated textbook. Although much shorter (possibly because by 1820 the demand for the literature on natural law was already satiated), it was notable for its inclusion of a few leading Decembrists, such as Pavel Koloshin, Nicholas Bestuzhev, and Fedor Glinka. Some of the subscribers ordered more than one copy (for instance, Glinka needed three, and one teacher from Smolensk Gymnasium purchased five copies). The list also included well-known university professors, with Kunitsyn’s name at the top of the list. And, similar to Snell’s subscribers, about one-third of the prospective readers belonged to Ranks III–IV, judging from the title “Your Superiority” (Vashe Vysokoprevoshoditel’stvo) attached to their names.169 What, then, was the impact of the German Kantians in Russia? It has long been argued that the Germans “attempted to sow on barren earth,” that “there was little serious attention to Kant’s arguments in early 19th- century Russia . . . and in fact the only thing learned from Kant’s ethical position was the bare statement of the categorical imperative.”170 Although it is true that the categorical imperative came to be the best known of Kant’s ideas, the main reason for this was the selectivity which marked all the textbooks of Kantian German interpreters that appeared in Russia. All of them found

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inspiration in Kant’s conceptions of reason and human dignity, but they ignored not only most of his liberal political ideas but also the social implications inherent in his concept of individual autonomy. Kant’s brilliant essay “What Is Enlightenment?” where he pointed to the external conditions necessary for individual freedom predated his Metaphysics of Morals, yet, it was the latter work (and then, only selected parts of it) that found its way into the textbooks of German philosophy teachers. While political considerations might account for their selectivity toward Kantian political ideas, it is more difficult to explain their unwillingness to embrace Kant’s call for the liberation of the individual from the society’s moral and intellectual tutelage. Had they done otherwise, they could have changed the character of the nascent philosophical tradition in Russia, which began to develop in a direction of collective (and later, socialist) rather than individualistic ethos. Nevertheless, they had their share in educating Russian readers on the basic notions of civil rights, the rule of law, and human dignity. It is hardly coincidental that many of the future Decembrists studied in Moscow University at a time when German professors taught their courses in philosophy and law.171 Outside the classroom, the books of German Kantians, as we have seen, also found ready subscribers among a wide spectrum of readers in Russia. For those unable to purchase academic books, which were not cheap, the libraries of the universities provided an opportunity to acquaint themselves with Kantian teaching. All the collections of the university libraries in Russia were opened to the general public.172 Many readers apparently preferred works of Kant’s interpreters to his original writings as easier to comprehend, but Kant’s works were also in demand. The report of the St. Petersburg Public Library for the year 1816 indicates that Kant was among the three most frequently read modern philosophers.173 In assessing the impact of Kant’s legal philosophy in Russia, one should also keep in mind that natural law and Kantianism itself did not enjoy official acceptance long enough to generate a body of interpretative works. Censorship was relaxed but vigilant even before Kunitsyn’s “trial,” whereas after 1821 it became virtually impossible to publish academic works on natural law in the Kantian tradition. Under these circumstances, private discussions and reading became the main media through which Kantianism continued to exist. His ideas, for instance, were discussed in the meetings of the Society of the Lovers of Wisdom.174 Some members of the Petrashevtsy circle

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active in the 1840s referred to Kant in their philosophical essays.175 Kant’s name figures in the memoirs of some Decembrists and the precursor of Russian socialism, Nicholas Ogarev.176 This is not to say that they knew Kant in depth, but the frequency with which his name and ideas are mentioned in the memoir literature, as well as the fact of active subscription to the works of German Kantians, suggest a greater interest in Kant and natural law than is common to believe.

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6 Kunitsyn on Natural Law

Kunitsyn conceived a publication of his lectures on natural law in 1816 while still teaching in the Lyceum. With the assistance of Engel’gardt, permission from the Minister of Education was secured the same year, but the manuscript Kunitsyn actually submitted for publication in 1818 was not identical to his lecture course despite the similarities in structure and titles of the chapters. If the lectures relied heavily on Schmalz, the published version drew more on Kant’s original writings, leaving behind the cameralist concept of “the well-ordered state” and showing a much greater influence of Kantian liberal individualism. It was Kunitsyn’s focus on the concept of moral autonomy, freedom of private pursuits, and individual self-expression that set his book apart from other texts on natural law published in Russia. With many sections presented in a more detailed and discursive manner, the published version was broader in scope than the corresponding part on natural law in Kunitsyn’s lectures. An extensive glossary attached to the book was an important addition, given the lack of philosophical vocabulary in the Russian language of the nineteenth century. The changes to the content of the lecture version reflected not only his ambition to make the book suitable for both Lyceum and university level, but also Kunitsyn’s own growth as a thinker.1 From the methodological point of view, the textbook was a step closer to Kant’s epistemology, although Kunitsyn’s rendering of some of the Kantian moral principles still betrayed the empiricist mode of thinking. And while Kant was the most important source of inspiration for Kunitsyn, he was indebted to more than one thinker in constructing his theory of natural law. This must be the reason why Kunitsyn preferred the traditional term “natural law” instead of “metaphysics of law,” which Kant introduced to distinguish his legal theory based on a priori concepts of right from the previous tradition where natural rights and laws were deduced from the empirical facts of human nature.2 143

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Kunitsyn’s method of discourse still had much in common with the Wolffian tradition that he absorbed from Baumeister’s works.3 He treated the philosophy of law as a systematic science where all “postulates comprise a connected chain and one explains the other.”4 In keeping with this approach, Kunitsyn unfolded key ideas through formal definitions and subsequent discussion of their meaning, implications, and related ideas, which inevitably involved some repetition, especially when complex notions were being broken down into smaller components. To the modern reader, this mode of reasoning might appear somewhat formalistic and lacking in discursiveness, but it was, in fact, an accepted approach in Russian university philosophy at that time. Kunitsyn himself justified this method of systematic and detailed exposition by pointing to the Russian readers’ unfamiliarity with the subject of natural law. Despite its textbook format, Natural Law provided few explicit references to European thinkers (and then mostly for the purpose of disproving their ideas), which complicates the task of identifying the sources of Kunitsyn’s ideas. For this reason, his book has been at once characterized as an elaboration of Kantian principles of moral philosophy5 and as a work that was devoid of Kantian influence.6 Some Western scholars also noted his debt to Rousseau (mostly on the basis of terminological similarities taken out of the larger context),7 while Kunitsyn’s Soviet biographer Smirnov asserted a close connection between his ideas and those of Alexander Radishchev without, however, providing any textual evidence for this contention.8 Smirnov’s interpretation reflected the Soviet view of Russian intellectual thought, according to which freethinking in Russia developed uninterruptedly and in a progressively radical fashion, starting with the Enlightenment and culminating with the ideology of socialism in the late nineteenth century.9 Although there is some affinity between the ideas of Kunitsyn and Radishchev in a sense that both of them defended individual rights and liberties, no evidence exists that Kunitsyn was immediately inspired by (or even familiar with) the latter’s works. Smirnov’s denial of the Western borrowings in Kunitsyn’s work was also in keeping with the Marxist definition of political ideology as a reflection of the class struggle and socioeconomic conditions.10 Kunitsyn’s eclectic approach to the Western sources left many historians with the impression that he lacked originality, much like other Russian intellectuals in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.11 Although the argument is not entirely groundless, it is based upon a superficial reading of his work, constrained, moreover by the space

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limit of the journal articles in which Kunitsyn’s writings have been examined until now. In fact, far from merely systematizing or borrowing wholesale the conceptual constructions of the European thinkers, Kunitsyn sought to modify and combine their ideas in an innovative, often rather unexpected, way that to some extent justifies his unwillingness to reveal his Western sources. Establishing the degree of Kunitsyn’s intellectual originality requires, therefore, a detailed textual analysis cross-referenced to the works of Kant and other philosophers. The two parts of Natural Law published as separate volumes were complementary and structured around the typology of the law. Part One, subtitled “Pure Law,” argues for the existence of universally valid natural law and man’s innate rights, which are presented here as abstract concepts without regard to specific political arrangements that are necessary to sustain natural rights. In Part Two, Kunitsyn explains the origin of the state through the contractual theory and discusses the way people’s natural rights and common interests find application in a political society. By adopting this structure, Kunitsyn was able to emphasize the idea that man’s innate rights hold validity both before and after the emergence of the political state and irrespective of the specific mode of government. In Natural Law (as in the lectures), monarchical, aristocratic, or democratic states are all grounded in the same principles of natural right and differ only by the method of exercising the supreme power (or, as he more frequently refers to it, by the method of achieving the common goals of the civil society).12 Natural Law opens with a discussion of the motives governing the conduct of men as beings endowed with reason and will. Man, according to Kunitsyn, has “a double nature”: his sensuous nature is guided by the desire for the good and the aversion to evil. “The ‘good’ signifies whatever corresponds to his pursuit of well-being and satisfies his desires, producing a pleasant feeling.”13 However, if man were subject to his sensuous nature alone, the pursuit of pleasures would be the only guiding principle for him. Instead, “man also possesses reason, which . . . prescribes . . . a certain course of action, irrespective of whether it is in conformity with sensuous desires or not.”14 Like Kant, he defined the moral dimension of freedom as “independence of will from sensual drives” and man’s “ability to follow the precepts of reason.”15 From this followed another fundamental Kantian characteristic of freedom: being a free agent, “man wishes to be under the laws of his own reason; he accepts other laws [only] if they derive from the general precepts of reason.”16 Laws of ethics prescribe “the laws of inner freedom” and “incline man for virtue” by commanding to treat other men as free

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agents, whereas juridical laws regulate “the external actions” and legal justice by prohibiting to use other people as means to one’s ends.17 In the textbook, Kunitsyn went into long details trying to demonstrate the idea that “the main foundation of law” (glavnoe nachalo prava) rests on pure reason and has as its goal the “external freedom of men.”18 His way of doing so was to review and refute the alternative concepts of law.19 In the implicit reference to the German historical school of law, he rejected the idea that “the mode of government, education and customs serve as the foundation for the ideas of justice,” for the empirical reality, being as it is contingent and “infinitely variable,” does not provide the universal standard of justice. Nor can the “moral feeling” or the principle of pleasure maximization yield an immutable criterion of law. Pleasure is unique to each individual and is often deceitful, concealing pain behind apparent enjoyment. Similarly, a sense of justice springing from the moral feeling is an unreliable principle, for it is based on individual emotional experience.20 Kunitsyn’s rejection of the Wolffian concept of perfection as a foundation of law and morality was in line with Kantian ethics, but his mode of argument was only in part Kantian. For Kant, the theory of perfection is objectionable because it presupposes acting with a view of a certain end, which makes this act purely instrumental, while true goodness is acting from respect for the moral law, regardless of one’s personal wishes.21 For Kunitsyn, however, the main problem with the concept of perfection is its elusiveness: before we make perfection our goal, we need to know what “perfect” means with regard to human beings. This argument must have sounded rather unorthodox to those of his Russian readers who were educated on the Wolffian concept of moral perfection as a guide to man’s duties to God, oneself, and other people. Even more daring was Kunitsyn’s assertion that “divine will” cannot serve as the foundation of law because we “need another criterion through which we could distinguish what is agreeable and what is disagreeable with divine will.”22 To be immutable and accessible to everyone, the standard of justice should be “deduced from formal reason” innate to all human beings. Kunitsyn then rendered Kant’s categorical imperative as follows: “Whenever a person takes some maxim as rightful, he asserts that every other man would accept its rightfulness if . . . he judges impartially.” Applied to the subject of “people’s external freedom,” “this formal principle” entails “the individual’s right to all acts and conditions which let other people preserve their freedom.”23 In common with Kant,

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Kunitsyn did not entertain the illusion that people always act rationally toward each other, but he hoped that having this ideal in mind would encourage in people respect for universal justice. Unlike Kant, however, Kunitsyn nowhere mentioned the role of faith in strengthening man’s sense of duty.24 For Kunitsyn, the concept of human freedom appears to have been a self-sufficient moral guide making individuals respect other people’s rights. His implication was that treating people as ends rather than means is rational because it accords with human nature but it is also reasonable because people hope to be treated the same way. Kunitsyn’s discussion of innate individual rights in the textbook was more elaborate and forceful than the corresponding section in his lecture course. Man’s original rights, according to Kunitsyn, derive from attributes innate to human beings—reason, will, and physical body. The most fundamental natural right is “the right to one’s person” (pravo lichnosti) premised upon moral autonomy and natural equality of men. “Each man,” he wrote, “necessarily thinks of himself as an autonomous (samostoiatel’nyi) being. This fact underlies an indisputable law, according to which we necessarily imagine other people to be independent agents like us . . . Therefore, whoever treats other people as things, goes against the maxims of his own reason.” The right to one’s person, in turn, presupposes “the right to exist,” “the right to act,” and “the right to achieve well-being”—all of which require free disposal of one’s physical and mental faculties within the limits set by other people’s corresponding rights. All three rights are closely intertwined. Aside from the purely physical aspect of life preservation, the first right involves man’s ability to set personal goals according to his own preferences and intellectual capacities. The second right sanctions man’s acting upon the established goals through lawful means. The third right is something of an extension of the first one that has to do with a more specific private goal—the pursuit of happiness.25 As in the lectures, Kunitsyn emphasized that individual thoughts and desires constitute man’s internal domain and should remain free from other people’s interferences. What he added was the assertion that an individual has a right to hold and publicly express his views even if they go against the accepted opinions: “For a person to become convinced of some truth requires that he reach it through his own reasoning . . . a person cannot be forced to accept something as a truth against his own opinion. To err against the common opinion is not a crime.” “An assumption that a person can mislead others,” he added, “cannot be a reason for banning the free communication of thoughts.”26

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The right to pursue private interests is based on the same principle of individual autonomy and freedom. Given the diversity of human desires and tastes, Kunitsyn asserted, there can be no single recipe for individual well-being, nor can it be imposed upon the individual, even for his own good. This act would violate the freedom of choice, which itself is an important component of human happiness. “Therefore a person alone can determine what promotes and what impedes his well-being. Although he may err in choosing the means for maintaining and enjoying life, no one can regulate his acts, for it would mean depriving a person of his freedom, without which any good would mean nothing.” From this Kunitsyn concluded that “each person has a right to choose the way of life and occupation which he finds conducive for his well-being.”27 The recognition that the right to enjoy “honor” (which consists in “other people’s good opinion of us”) belongs to everyone as a natural right and constitutes an essential component of individual wellbeing led Kunitsyn to censure the tradition of hierarchical privileges that accorded honor on the basis of social origin rather than personal accomplishments. “The right for special honor,” he wrote, “is not an innate right but an acquired one. No one by nature has a right to demand special honor [sic] or expect that others praise him and humiliate themselves before him.”28 Kunitsyn was adamant on the point that all people, as equal by nature, are entitled to be treated with dignity. Even those who possess superior “bodily and mental qualities have no right to humiliate those who do not have such virtues because this right . . . would not be in accord with the law of reason.”29 Taken together, these ideas implied the principle of equal opportunity for everyone—the principle that permeated all of Kunitsyn’s works. And just as one’s social station should not prevent an individual from pursuing one’s private ambitions, ethnic affiliation, too, cannot be a ground for limiting individual freedom. To say that “encroachments on the freedom of nomadic tribes are groundless” was another unusual argument for the multiethnic Russian Empire where indigenous tribal peoples were treated as a subordinate population.30 Kunitsyn’s view of individual well-being was clearly much indebted to Kantian philosophy of freedom and autonomy, yet in many respects, Kunitsyn departed from Kant in the direction of the modern individualistic conception of happiness. His argument for the freedom of thought and expression resembled Kant’s demand that individuals should be able to think independently in “addressing the entire reading public”; but Kunitsyn’s insistence on the individual’s right to

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voice erroneous (and, by implication, possibly irrational) views was a more permissive interpretation of the Kantian point. In Kant, moreover, the idea of individual emancipation had appeared either in ethical or political contexts. His main concern was the tendency of “paternal government” to impose on its subjects a specific view of well-being and morality.31 Hence, Kant’s insistence that the state must create the conditions of freedom and justice (including, among other things, the elimination of hereditary barriers), which would allow people to cultivate their capacity for independent use of reason.32 In Kunitsyn’s work, political implications of autonomy were present too, but his bigger concern seems to have been the freedom of private individuals against society as a whole. In another sense, Kunitsyn differed from Kant in his understanding of what constitutes individual well-being. For Kant, happiness equated with the life of virtue—the disposition of the will to act from the pure respect for the moral law, whereas material goods could only be useful as means to this end.33 Although Kant admitted that happiness as the life of comfort and gratification of desires is the end suggested by human nature itself, his own concept of happiness was grounded in nonhedonistic philosophy. For Kunitsyn, intellectual and moral self-perfection was also an important component of human well-being, but he never thought of it as the highest duty to oneself. Nor did he share Kant’s implicit concern over men’s desire for external goods. Far from that, being a person of low social origin who made his way into the world of service elite through his own hard work and talent, Kunitsyn appears to have been guided by the notion of happiness that encouraged both intellectual cultivation and material well-being. Religious tolerance and the rationalistic attitude toward the issues of faith was another set of principles that followed from the concept of autonomy. Kunitsyn argued that neither inner religious beliefs nor external forms of worship should be imposed upon the individual as a matter of obligation. The value of religion consists in its ability to strengthen people’s morals but “the degree of its influence is determined by each person individually . . . therefore religious persecution is an act of violence contrary to the law.”34 This argument left little place for the church as an institution of social and moral discipline, for it implied the idea that religious doctrines, far from being a matter of pure faith, were to be subject to individual scrutiny in keeping with the principle of moral autonomy. For Kunitsyn, freedom of religious beliefs was also a logical extension of the law of universal freedom. He wrote: “Since a person has a right to everything that does not infringe on the external rights of other people, everyone can freely practice his religion.”35

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In arguing so, Kunitsyn could hardly be unaware of the fact that Russian Old Believers, although tolerated out of political expediency, were not officially recognized as a religious sect and were subjected to numerous civil disabilities, despite their great number in central and northern Russia. It is true that Alexander I’s reign saw a brief period of religious tolerance associated with the activity of the Bible Society and Catholic missionaries, which had some success among the Russian elite. But this policy was exercised mostly toward the foreign creeds, while Russian sectarians were still forbidden to worship publicly.36 In any case, by the time Kunitsyn published his book, the Jesuit society had been expelled from Moscow and St. Petersburg while foreign missionaries were no longer allowed to proselytize among Russians.37 Kunitsyn’s argument that faith was a matter of personal conviction was clearly out of line with the official effort to inculcate Russian students with correct religious creed as a way of counteracting foreign influences in the domain of religion and morality. A lot of space in Kunitsyn’s book was devoted to the justification of the individual right to own property. Kunitsyn here drew on Locke’s theory of labor and Kant’s doctrine of right, but it appears that he discussed the principles regulating the initial acquisition of natural objects as if they were fully applicable not only in the state of nature but also in a civil society. The impression might be due to the fact that Russia in the nineteenth century still had a lot of land and natural resources that remained unclaimed. An ownerless thing (beskhoznaia veshch), he argued, becomes someone’s possession by means of the claimant’s effort to change its nature through his labor and “artificial signs” of ownership. This physical act should then be recognized through the law, obliging other people to respect individual property rights. To Kunitsyn, in common with Kant, the right to own property was one of the attributes of human freedom and dignity; therefore, its violation had consequences larger than the material loss itself. He wrote: “Any use of the property against the will of its owner is a violation of his freedom. It is not the amount of damage caused to the property but a violation of the owner’s freedom that creates offense.”38 The right to acquire property cannot extend as far as the objects of nature that belong to all people in common, such as “the whole sea,” without violating other people’s rights. Nor can the right of ownership be acquired over another person “whether with his consent or against it, for the right of person . . . is inalienable.”39 For this reason, Kunitsyn argued, neither consent nor contract would justify voluntary slavery, which is “against human nature.” “Therefore slavery (kholopstvo) was

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justly abolished by the decrees of 1775, 1781, 1783–85, 1788.”40 This passage was the only explicit reference to Russian realities in his book. It struck one modern historian as an inaccurate statement about “serfdom,” which he thought Kunitsyn made in an attempt (so uncharacteristic of him) to “avert official condemnation of his views.”41 However, what Kunitsyn meant was not serfdom (krepostnoe pravo) but “kholopstvo”—the institution of voluntary (or contractual) slavery that originated in the Kievan Rus’ and was indeed abolished in Russia. The word kholopstvo did have an association with serfdom, because by the nineteenth century serfdom had ceased to be a limited bondage. Given the censorship constraints, Kunitsyn might have used the statement as an Aesopian device. It led readers to a conclusion that if slavery was rightly abolished as contrary to human dignity, the same measure must be applied to the custom of owning people as serfs. Implicit in Kunitsyn’s concept of property was the idea that any individual (rather than members of some privileged social group) has a right to acquire private property. However, he made it clear that no requirement for economic equality follows from this principle. “To argue for this kind of equality,” he wrote, “would mean annihilation of any notion of the law, . . . to forbid people acquiring more than others have or to prohibit anyone to give away his surplus to those who are poorer amounts to destroying any notion of private property and justice.” With respect to property rights, according to Kunitsyn, equality means equal rights to acquire property so that the same opportunities would be open to everyone.42 Arguing that private property constitutes an individual right, limited only by the laws based on the principle of mutual freedom was an audacious statement in a country where the amount of property rights depended on one’s status in the hierarchical social order. The right to landed property, for instance, was a privilege reserved exclusively to the members of the nobility, which remained in place despite the new demands of the emerging capitalist economy. The same notions of human dignity and freedom lay behind Kunitsyn’s view of marital and parental relationships. This whole chapter on the rights of spouses and children was an addition to the earlier version. Kunitsyn presented the institution of marriage as a voluntary union akin to the contract between two equals with mutual rights and duties. It is only monogamy, he insisted (similar to Kant) that meets the requirement of equality, for in polygamous marriages, a husband demands of his wives fidelity to him alone—more than he himself offers to each of them. In such marriages, women are treated as a means to an

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end rather than an end in itself.43 Polygamy is also repugnant on moral grounds, for women who live in humiliation and confinement become incapable of any feelings other than jealousy or bodily pleasure. It is notable that for Kunitsyn the purpose of marriage is not only raising children (as for Kant) but also emotional enjoyment. He wrote: “Love is the first and foremost obligation of spouses.”44 Kunitsyn admitted that women are naturally weaker than men—the fact that in the nineteenth century was usually employed to justify male dominance in marriage and society as a whole; on Kunitsyn’s interpretation, by contrast, the same fact of nature puts men in a position of higher responsibility rather than superiority. “Monogamous love,” he contended, “requires mutual support, especially on the part of a husband, for he concludes the union with the weak being that needs his help.” On analogy with the freedom of an individual within society, “spouses retain their right of freedom to everything that is not contrary to marital contract,” including the right to their premarital property, “unless specified in the contract.” Both spouses, moreover, have the right to seek a divorce for such reasons as infidelity or physical incapacity that prevents one of the spouses from fulfilling his or her marital duties. In Russia, one should say, the argument for women’s property rights did not sound out of the ordinary, as women retained their legal identity and private property upon concluding a marriage. But Kunitsyn’s justification of the right to divorce on the ground of infidelity was an unorthodox argument, despite his attempt to mitigate its effect by commenting that divorces are still “contrary to the well-being of the family and therefore are forbidden by positive law.”45 Applied to children, the principle of freedom requires that they not be treated as parents’ property; instead, parental authority is determined and delimited by parents’ duties toward their children, which include not only nourishment but also physical and mental development. Both mother and father have equal parental power, which diminishes as children approach maturity. Without relying on parents’ discretion alone, Kunitsyn also made a provision that “the state should protect children against the abuse of parental power.”46 Kunitsyn’s model of social order was the most forceful and coherent part of his work, which unquestionably makes him a pioneer of the liberal individualism in Russia. Less satisfactory was his discussion of the political arrangements that would sustain the proclaimed principle of individual autonomy. In the textbook subsidized by the Ministry of Education Kunitsyn, understandably, could not explicitly endorse the idea of representative monarchy. Despite some political relaxation,

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Russian censorship remained vigilant and the issue of constitutional changes was not officially open to public debates. Once Alexander I reestablished the Polish parliament and his speech appeared in the Russian press (which happened a few months after Kunitsyn submitted his book for publication), Kunitsyn was the first among Russian intellectuals to defend the advantages of the public representation on the pages of Syn Otechestva.47 By contrast, in the textbook, as in the lectures, his overview of the democratic, aristocratic, and monarchical types of government had the form of a descriptive account, similar to the one students could find in Jakob’s manual.48 At the same time, compared to the lecture course, Natural Law contained a lengthier discourse on the theoretical principles underlying the relationship between the ruler and the subjects, which, in Kunitsyn’s view, should serve as a “foundation” for any form of government but which, in fact, closely resembled some of Kant’s republican notions. Kunitsyn’s picture of the state of nature in the textbook was much different from the one he presented in the lectures. In the textbook Kunitsyn abandoned the four-stage theory of human civilization in favor of the more abstract account that allowed him to emphasize the idea of natural equality of men prior to civil society. His starting point was a critical analysis of Rousseau’s and Pufendorf’s theories of the state of nature (also termed as “conditions outside society”— “vneobshchestvennoe sostoianie”), both of which, in Kunitsyn’s opinion, went to extremes in their view of what man’s original moral character could be like. Rousseau, in Kunitsyn’s view, was mistaken in depicting savages as living a solitary life free from any moral relationships and having no notions of right and wrong. Far from being morally neutral, Kunitsyn objected, men had always had some, albeit imperfect, understanding of moral qualities.49 On the other hand, man’s moral capacity was not as developed as Pufendorf maintained. “This philosopher,” Kunitsyn wrote, “depicted man outside of society as he should be, rather than as he was in a savage state.”50 It was Hobbes’s view of the natural state that, in Kunitsyn’s opinion, most closely approximated the truth, although he admitted that Hobbes exaggerated human vices because he was influenced by the political turmoil in England at the time of writing his work. Kunitsyn’s own version of the natural state was a middle way between these two theories. He argued that men had an “inclination” toward sociability, moral goodness, and justice, but this feeling was often jeopardized by the harsh living conditions, which made people act unjustly toward each other for the sake of their survival. The latter argument

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was clearly Hobbesian; however, men’s vices in the state of nature as depicted in Kunitsyn are subtler and in a way, more vicious than in Hobbes’s theory. While Hobbesian men were motivated by fear and competitiveness rather than vengeance, Kunitsyn asserted that men, being more sophisticated creatures than animals, might be driven by and even derive pleasure from revenge. “Only a human being,” he concluded, “can enjoy the [view] of another human being’s suffering.”51 Although Kunitsyn borrowed from Hobbes the idea that experience (rather than an insight of reason as in Kant52) led men out of natural misery, the implications he ultimately drew from his postulates were markedly different. Whereas Hobbes presented the purpose of the social covenant in minimalist terms—as common security—in order to justify absolute obedience to the supreme power, Kunitsyn accepted this minimal purpose to support his idea (inspired by Kant) that the state has no right to regulate individuals beyond what is necessary to maintain peace and lawfulness. An important corollary of this view (which contrasted sharply with Hobbesian theory) was that individual freedom and its specific expression in the form of innate personal rights persisted in both the state of nature and civil society, with the difference being that civil arrangements made the enjoyment of these rights stable and secure. Kunitsyn presented the formation of the state as a two-stage process, similar to the one described by Pufendorf in his Natural Law. First, a unanimous “contract of unification” (“dogovor soedineniia” or “pactum unionis” in his Latin glossary) brought into existence the civil state, which he also termed a “moral person,” with its own rights and duties determined by the people contracting among themselves. All members of the union, he insisted, remain free unless they specify otherwise in the agreement. In keeping with this principle, people must unanimously agree on the terms of the second contract—the “contract of subjection” (“dogovor poddanstva”), which establishes the political state with its supreme power, either in the form of a collective body or a single ruler. The second contract is necessitated by the fact that people, while in agreement about the general purpose of their union—common security—tend to disagree about the specific means of achieving it because this knowledge comes from experience rather than pure reason. Kunitsyn’s insistence on the unanimity of the second agreement is rather unusual. Kant, for instance, allowed the individual the right to coerce others into a civil state not only because the idea of the juridical state is dictated by pure reason but also because in the state

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of nature there is no institutionalized justice, so by exercising this sort of coercion, the individual commits no offense.53 In Locke, a majority decision is sufficient for establishing the government, while the dissenting minority is expected to comply. Kunitsyn, by contrast, explicitly rejected the idea of coercion or majority action in this case without, however, explaining how people (who, by his own admission, tend to disagree on specific means of achieving well-being) would still be able to come to unanimous agreement on the nature of supreme power. Composed of disparate ideas, some of which were originally formulated in opposition to each other, Kunitsyn’s theory of the social contract was typical of his creative eclecticism. He rejected Pufendorf’s idea of human innate goodness and accepted instead the Hobbesian psychology of human nature, only to proceed with the concept of the two-stage pactum along the lines drawn by Pufendorf.54 However, his individualistic and liberal inferences from the idea of contract stood in sharp contrast to Pufendorf’s regulatory state but were in line with the Kantian concept of moral autonomy and an antipaternalistic stance. He made the Kantian law of freedom a foundation of natural right embodied in the principles of the social contract; however, unlike Kant, who thought of the original contract as a product of a priori reason rather than the outcome of the empirical considerations, Kunitsyn relied on the more traditional argument from human prudence and utility, albeit interpreted along the lines consistent with a liberal theory of human rights. To explain how subsequent generations of people become obliged by the original contract, Kunitsyn employed Locke’s idea of tacit consent, but he was adamant on the point that only unanimous agreement establishes the supreme authority in its specific form.55 Kunitsyn’s emphasis on unanimity underlying the social contract and his use of the term “general will” (“obshchaia volia”) left some historians with the impression that he was influenced by Rousseau’s Social Contract to the degree that he showed the same difficulty in finding a balance between individual liberty and “the absolute supremacy of the community” that plagued the theory of his renowned predecessor.56 Indeed, Kunitsyn’s language often resembled that of Rousseau, but the similarity was more terminological than conceptual. Constrained by the lack of Russian philosophical vocabulary, Kunitsyn freely borrowed one from the European thinkers without necessarily adopting the original concept behind it. His account of the general will was an example of such selective borrowing. Whatever use he made of this

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concept, it resembled the Kantian interpretation of Rousseau’s “general will,” rather than Rousseau’s original concept. Kant was much inspired by Rousseau’s idea that people can only be free if they live under the law they prescribe for themselves. Yet, Kant used the term “the general will” in a metaphorical sense to argue that the ruler has a duty to legislate “as if” his law could have emanated from the will of all people.57 In Kunitsyn, too, “the general will” acts only at the stage of the social unification, after which it becomes represented by the will of the ruler. In other words, once the state comes into existence, the general will turns from the actual agent into collective reason, which finds its practical realization in the acts of the supreme power. “Each member of society” he wrote, “obliged himself to wish what is necessary according to the general law of reason.” The ruler (vlastitel’) interprets the common ends and thus his will represents the general will.58 Once civil society is formed, people’s life and property become means for achieving the common goals. “There is no contradiction that people have to sacrifice life for saving life; by entering society, a man chooses freely between constant danger of losing his life outside society and the benefit of preserving it within society.”59 However, in several places of his work, Kunitsyn stressed that men’s commitment to the common good is neither unconditional nor unlimited. “Society,” he argued, “has no right to use its members as simple tools for achieving its ends, for the right to freedom is innate and inalienable. Even as part of society, each person remains an end in itself . . . society has no right to limit the freedom of its members more than they consented . . . ”60 Individual sacrifices might be necessary for the sake of the common safety (presumably in case of war or other extraordinary danger), but this service must be compensated with “special reward.”61 Kunitsyn everywhere referred to the rights of individuals as overlapping but not limited to the interests of the civil community. For Kunitsyn, society was a sum of the individuals united by common interest rather than a collective aggregate where individual interest is shaped or subsumed by the public will. Given these important qualifications and his earlier insistence on people’s right to follow their own philosophy of personal well-being, there is little, if any, resemblance between Kunitsyn and Rousseau regarding their views on the relationship between the individual and society. As the embodiment of the common will, the ruler is expected to respect individual rights to freedom and autonomy. This point and its corollary—the idea that a boundary should exist between the private and public realms—were more explicit in the textbook than in the

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lecture notes. Kunitsyn asserted that the state’s goal should be restricted to the provision of common security and justice, leaving the individuals the right to act feely on their private ends. He wrote: “the subjects agree to obey the supreme power only for the sake of the safety; therefore in all their private matters they remain free.”62 Kunitsyn denied that the government should play a role in shaping people’s notion of well-being on the same ground that he criticized social prejudices and constraints in matters of individual self-realization. “Improvement of intellectual abilities or morality,” he argued, “is possible only when man enjoys his freedom; therefore, by prescribing certain means to achieving this goal, people would be deprived of this very freedom.”63 In keeping with his new emphasis on the freedom of private pursuits, Kunitsyn no longer mentioned his earlier arguments about the state’s role in encouraging marriages and moral decency as well as the idea that the government has to support the development of education. As subjects of the state, people retain their innate rights to possess property and achieve well-being. The latter category of rights is based on the liberal principle that people should be allowed to do “everything that does not cause harm to society.” “Therefore,” Kunitsyn concluded, “each person has the right to inner thoughts and feelings, no matter how moral or immoral they are. The ruler does not possess the right to punish [his subjects] for the mere act of thinking unless it was followed by a harmful act” toward other individuals.64 Personal liberties also include the freedom of assembly, the presumption of innocence, and freedom from arbitrary punishment. Kunitsyn then reiterated his earlier position that people’s rights and duties vis-à-vis the state should be written into clear and unambiguous law; they should be publicly known and equally binding. As in Kant, legal equality is premised upon men’s equality as human beings and requires that “all laws be universal, that is . . . under the same circumstances people have the same rights and duties.” This condition, he conceded, does not preclude the ruler’s prerogative to confer certain lifelong privileges upon some of his subjects, provided they performed special services for the sake of public security.65 Privileges, therefore, come with service, not the birthright. Despite Kunitsyn’s strong advocacy of legality and nonpaternalistic political rule, he did not include in Natural Law the principle of power division that in Kant serves as the main guarantee of the rule of law. According to Kunitsyn’s argument in the textbook, by concluding the contract of subjection, people vested the ruler with all legislative, executive, and judicial power in order to ensure a convenient way of

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implementing the means for the public ends. “Individual freedom,” he assured the readers, “is compatible with the subjecthood (poddanstvo); only the choice of means for achieving its [society’s] ends is entrusted to the ruler; therefore, as long as a subject is directed only towards the common purpose, he is not used against his will as a simple tool.”66 With respect to the judicial power, Kunitsyn made the important stipulation that the ruler in his capacity as a judge cannot change the law to suit the particular case, for he is bound by the norms of the existing law. From a practical point of view, he argued, judicial abuse is precluded by the requirement of publicity of the law: people are subject to the legally promulgated and publicly known law; extemporary law issued after the crime had been committed is not valid for the case involved. Thus, legislative and judicial functions, although lodged in the same person, would not overlap in legal practice.67 Compared to the earlier version, in the textbook, the range of functions designated as the ruler’s “guarding power” (bliustitelnaia vlast’) was limited strictly to public security and hedged around with more restrictions regarding the individual liberties. Similar to the way Kant defined the “right of Inspection,” Kunitsyn granted to the authorities the right to prevent the emergence of subversive societies or dangerous criminals by “gathering information about the subjects’ property, capacities, actions as well as the way of thinking, private life and morals.”68 He insisted, however, that “the ruler is not allowed to use for this purpose the means that are incompatible with the freedom and dignity of the subjects,”69 although it is not clear from Kunitsyn’s account which means of surveillance would meet the criterion of legality if, understandably, he found “eavesdropping to be contrary to the freedom of private individuals.”70 A provision for presumption of innocence and prohibition to use torture as part of an investigation process should protect individual rights against the ruler’s guarding power. “The very suspicion,” he declared, “should be a legal act, authorized by the judge, for according to the contract of subjection, everyone is subject to the law and not to the arbitrary private power.”71 Freedom of association can only be restricted if “clear and unambiguous signs” of evil- doing or intentions are discovered.72 As long as the ruler’s policy has the common good and liberty of its subjects as its goal, people are under obligation to obey. If, however, his “law violates the rights that it is supposed to protect, . . . it is nil.” “Civil obedience,” Kunitsyn maintained, “has its limits set by the rights and duties of the subjects.”73 Kunitsyn’s discussion of the limits to civil obedience was, at first sight, an unexpected twist to his

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otherwise cautious political stance in Natural Law. However, his final conclusions were ultimately consistent with the liberal principle of legality he advocated elsewhere. Kunitsyn argued that the ruler possesses two distinct identities— one as the representative of people’s united will and another one as a private individual. The united will is infallible and therefore not subject to resistance, but “If he [the ruler] wants to fulfill his private will under the disguise of the public one” his subjects are released from obedience. Whenever people’s rights are violated and people are used as means to the ends that are contrary to the public good, the ruler’s actions reflect his private and not the general will. Sometimes, moreover, the abuse of power might be disguised through the skillful rhetoric of state interests. “Raison d’état, which in reality often masks unjust actions is contrary to the principle of natural law. These vague expressions tend to be used in order to prevent the temptation which naturally occurs among the people when they witness injustice caused by the public authority.”74 Each individual, therefore, “has the right to judge whether the will, which he has to obey, constitutes the general will or the ruler’s private will. This right cannot be denied even to the most insignificant subject, for he is obliged to know what does and does not comprise his duty.”75 This idea resembled Kant’s view of public opinion as a “safeguard” of people’s right. The ability to make an informed decision about the ruler’s judgment requires, according to Kunitsyn, that people know and understand their rights and duties. “Civil obedience,” he thought, “should not be blind and mechanical but rational and prudential, stemming not from fear or pusillanimity but from freedom and appreciation of everything that is lawful.”76 The individual right to scrutinize the policies of the ruler does not entail the right to active opposition. “In the well-ordered civil society,” Kunitsyn wrote, “there should exist lawful means for the subjects to seek protection and redress their grievances.”77 However, he did not elaborate on this point except noting that the form of government cannot be changed other than by mutual agreement between the ruler and his subjects, “provided neither party suffers from violence.”78 The dissatisfaction of one or few individuals does not constitute a good reason for changing the type of polity. This provision against violence was in keeping with Kunitsyn’s aversion to bloody revolutions, as was his remark that even a guilty ruler should not be subjected to punishment. In the final analysis Kunitsyn left open the question of how the unjust ruler would be brought to justice, but his argument that the mode of

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government can be altered by peaceful legal means implied the belief (common among the Russian liberals) that constitutional changes were possible with the goodwill of the enlightened monarch. In this he was also close to Kant, who preferred gradual reforming of the absolutist rule to the turmoil and lawlessness of the revolutions.

Nations’ Law (Narodnoe Pravo) Kunitsyn’s work concluded with a brief chapter on international law, which also shows a Kantian influence. He took from Kant the idea that the relationship among the states within the international community should be governed on the same principle of right that applies to the individuals as members of civil society. “By the right of freedom,” he wrote, “each state is an end in itself and no other people can use it as a means to its ends.”79 On the analogy of the individual autonomy, each nation (narod) has the right to determine its own goals and means to them; no other state “can decide what does and does not constitute its well being.”80 An offense inflicted by one state on another is a legitimate cause of war, but Kunitsyn emphasized that such an offense or an intention for it should clearly manifest itself through actions or other “unambiguous signs” on the part of the hostile state. Increase in the military force, he asserted, is not a sufficient sign of such intention. In seeking redress for offense, one should distinguish between private individuals and the state as a moral agent; it is the latter that afflicts an offense and not the people taken in their private capacity. Therefore, unarmed civilians cannot be killed or “treated arbitrarily,” nor can plundering be allowed, as it violates the rights of private individuals. In the event of occupation, “the power of the belligerent state over the subjects of the conquered territory cannot exceed the power of the [native] supreme ruler.”81 By this principle, a conqueror can collect taxes established by the native ruler and impose new ones but cannot violate the rights of private property. Kunitsyn also mentioned that aggressive military alliances or unsolicited interference in other countries’ conflicts are contrary to the principle of right, but he did not go as far as accepting Kant’s call for world peace through the establishment of a federation of states. It would be, perhaps, an unpopular idea in post-Napoleonic Russia, where nationalist ideology was on the rise and the tsar aspired to political leadership and not merely parity with other European states.

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7 In the Midst of Conservative Reaction

Russia’s shift from “liberal spring” to reaction had been in the making for over a decade since the beginning of the Napoleonic Wars in Europe. Almost from the first years of Alexander I’s reign, his liberal reforms met with suspicion among the traditional-minded nobility—a sentiment that gradually grew into a vocal opposition to both liberal innovations and Western influences in Russia. Conservatism was far from a homogeneous movement; it included those concerned about the purity of the Russian language, like A. Shishkov, who advocated a revival of Church Slavonic, and those, like Nicholas Karamzin, who remained receptive to Western cultural influences but strongly opposed Alexander I’s constitutional leanings. The center of the conservative opposition was Moscow, which was always more aristocratic and traditional than St. Petersburg, populated by the Westernized service bureaucracy. It did not take long, however, before the government conservatives took up the lead. An important milestone in this process was the religious “awakening” that the tsar and his close friend Alexander Golitsyn experienced toward the end of the Napoleonic Wars. Stimulated by German pietism and the activities of the British Bible Society, religious revival in Russia initially produced an atmosphere of acceptance toward non- Orthodox creeds and new spiritual experiences. Its immediate effect was the opening in 1813 of the Russian Bible Society, which began the translation of the Bible into the Russian language and carried out charitable works; but what began as a foreign-inspired, nondenominational movement for religious regeneration ended as a reinstatement of traditional Orthodox dogmatism and conservative policies in the field of education.1 However, because this process took more than a decade, the shift in government policies was gradual and almost imperceptible to the general public until the end of the 1810s. Perhaps somewhat surprisingly for an autocratic country, the 161

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shift in educational policy was initiated not by the tsar himself but by conservative-minded officials in his government, who succeeded in undermining the principle of university autonomy in matters of academic writing and teaching. Professor Schad’s dismissal from Khar’kov University in 1816 was one of the earliest omens of the upcoming changes, although this incident itself had no immediate consequences for other teachers of philosophy and natural law. Nor did it become public knowledge, for Golitsyn, newly appointed to the Ministry of Education, was still cautious in publicizing his conservative attitudes beyond the narrow circle of like-minded people. In a letter to Uvarov, written not long before the creation of the Dual Ministry of Education and Religious Affairs in 1817, Golitsyn grieved that “the destructive spirit of the past century spread a harmful idea about the irreconcilable enmity between religion and knowledge. For this Europe paid with rivers of blood and tears.”2 The remedy for this illness, as Golitsyn saw it, was to be a reunification between the two sources of knowledge, with religion becoming again a “foundation of the true enlightenment.”3 As Golitsyn proceeded to implement this idea through the means of the Bible Society and the number of his allies among the influential people continued to grow, his mission—hitherto a self-assigned one—turned into an official policy. It was this idea of reuniting faith and education that provided a justification for the subsequent merge of the Ministry of Education with the Ministry of Spiritual Affairs and the reason for attacking books and teachings that tried to keep religion and secular knowledge apart. Implementing this policy fell upon the Main School Administration and its Academic Committee, which in 1818 enlisted an able and energetic advocate of the spiritual revival in the person of Alexander Sturdza—a Russian diplomat of Greek origin and the tsar’s analyst of foreign affairs. He was already well known for his “Memorandum on Present Conditions in Germany” published in 1818 in Germany, where he ascribed recent student movements to the “pernicious” impact of university autonomy and teachings upon the minds of youth. His diagnosis of the German ailment pointed to the measures Russia should take in order to prevent similar dangers. Sturdza recommended not only tighter government control over university teaching and the students’ behavior, but also a reduction in the number of students and the curtailment of relaxed censorship. The reaction of the German liberals to the “Memorandum” was predictably

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negative, reflecting badly on Russia’s image abroad. The tsar was displeased with Sturdza and ordered him to retreat from the public eye for a while, but when a year later a German student murdered August von Kotzebue—a paid “literary agent” who provided favorable coverage for Russia abroad—Sturdza’s predictions no longer seemed so exaggerated.4 Once a member of the Academic Committee, Sturdza expressed his practical recommendations as to the educational policy in the Instruction that became an official guide for the committee in August 1818. According to the Instruction, the goal of “establishing in Russia . . . the harmony between Christian piety, intellectual enlightenment and the duties of citizenship” was to be achieved through the revision of the academic curriculum and closer censorship of all textbooks used in the Russian institutions and public libraries.5 In the field of philosophy and the theory of law, only those books should be allowed that “do not separate morality from faith” and present divine will, rather than human volition, as the source of the supreme power. The teaching of natural law was to be reduced to a critique of the existing theories of the state of nature and social contract. As for textbooks on history, Sturdza intended to select those that taught about the unity and providential character of historical development, with an emphasis on the wisdom of God and references to the Scriptures.6 Kazan’ University became the first victim of this policy.7 In January 1819, M. Magnitskii, a member of the Academic Committee and the Bible Society, found the university deficient beyond improvement. He faulted professors’ lack of attention to the “main science—the Law of God” and pointed to the dangers posed by the teaching of philosophy and natural law.8 Although Magnitskii’s proposition to “destroy” the university did not receive the emperor’s approval, his report on Kazan’s alleged failures put the teaching of natural law under further scrutiny. In his Instruction to Kazan’ University, written in January 1820 and clearly inspired by Sturdza’s ideas, Magnitskii outlined the purposes and the methods of university teaching, paying particular attention to philosophical subjects. The teacher of philosophy, he declared, should keep in mind that philosophical ideas are true only inasmuch as they are compatible with the Christian faith and never as an alternative to it. The instructor of law should teach his students the notion that “monarchical government is the most ancient and divinely established institution . . . and the legislation arranged

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in this [monarchical] spirit is the expression of God’s will.”9 Among the secular theorists, Plato and Aristotle, with their emphasis on social duties, could be included in the course, while Hobbes and Machiavelli did not qualify on moral grounds.10 Two months after Magnitskii completed his inspection, the subjects of natural law and philosophy were removed from the gymnasium curriculum in Russia.11 The idea to change gymnasium study plans originally came from Uvarov, who might not have had any political reasons in mind back in 1811, when he argued against the encyclopedic mode of gymnasium studies, which included multiple academic subjects and provided students, as he believed, with a rather superficial education. As an experiment, his plan calling for the strengthening of classical languages at the expense of political economy, philosophy, and commercial science was implemented in the St. Petersburg district, while all other gymnasia continued to function according to the original statute of 1804.12 In 1819, however, political considerations clearly played a role in the reform of gymnasium education. Uvarov’s arrangements were extended to all Russian gymnasia and by the initiative of Filaret, archbishop of Tver’, the book The Duties of Man and Citizen, once approved by Catherine the Great for secondary education, was replaced by daily reading from the Scriptures.13 Whatever the philological benefits of studying classical languages, some contemporaries were quick to discern the government’s political motives behind this policy, interpreting it as an attempt to reimpose dead scholasticism. With sarcasm and bitterness, A. Nikitenko, philology professor at St. Petersburg University, wrote in his diary: “Reinstating classical scholarship in Russia is an important measure. We will study ancient writers, will write comments on them, will imitate them and little by little our independent creative spirit will deaden, we will then learn to obey, if not to be slaves . . . ”14 Another conservative initiative promoted by the Main School Administration in April 1820 was a prohibition of Russian students’ starting an education in any foreign university, followed by a prolonged discussion as to whether Russians could study abroad once they graduated from a Russian institution. At stake was one of the fundamental principles of the original educational reform, according to which study abroad was to complement students’ domestic training and expand their intellectual and cultural horizons. Eventually, the authorities decided that only four universities—Heidelberg,

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Hessen, Jena, and Würzburg—would be excluded from the range of institutions open to the Russian graduates wishing to round off their education abroad.15 All these measures, however, were still ad hoc conservative moves rather than a concerted state policy in matters of education. From its onset, the Dual Ministry was made up “of very diverse elements,” which inevitably led to internal disagreements and prolonged debates among the moderate and conservative members of the ministry.16 It took, for instance, six years for the ministry to make up a new comprehensive censorship statute that replaced the liberal regulations of 1804. According to the Statute of 1804, Russian universities served as censors in their own educational districts and where the universities were nonexistent, district censorship committees fulfilled this function, as, for instance, in St. Petersburg.17 No formal changes were made to the statute until 1826, but with the creation of the Main School Administration, the Academic Committee began to function as a censoring institution alongside the existing system.18 The initiative for censorship reform came from Magnitskii, who was concerned that censorship in Russia lacked a “single foundation” and was “dispersed” among various agencies within the Ministry of Education. In June 1820 he submitted to the newly created committee for censorship reform his “Opinion” where he warned that “recent European turmoil” and “the pernicious spirit of our times” warranted a stricter screening of all books published or translated in Russia. He singled out as particularly dangerous works that attempt to explain faith through reason; those that “reject or cast doubt on Revelation” and writings that undermine political authority “or even weaken respect towards [it] in some way.”19 In fact, Magnitskii spotted the loophole that allowed books such as Kunitsyn’s to obtain censorship approval. As a teaching manual, his Natural Law should have been submitted to the Academic Committee, but, as Magnitskii had pointed out, there was little coordination between the existing censoring agencies, and Kunitsyn’s book was published based on the approval of the district censor. Natural Law might have long remained beyond any suspicion had it not been for Kunitsyn’s wish to present it to the emperor. In this, he was apparently encouraged by the recent example of his colleague and former classmate Kaidanov, whose book on ancient history dedicated to Alexander I was marked by the tsar’s special gift and monetary

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reward.20 The procedure in such cases required that the books be submitted to the Academic Committee, which decided whether they were worthy of the tsar’s attention.21 In June 1820, when the book came before the Academic Committee, Sturdza was away from St. Petersburg and the two other members— the mathematician Nicholas Fuss and the former Postal Director of St. Petersburg Dmitrii Runich—remained in charge. Fuss provided a prompt and positive review of Kunitsyn’s work, noting (not correctly, though) that “it was the first of its kind in the Russian language” and “in contrast to the foreign books on natural law, which often contain principles contrary to our system of government, Kunitsyn’s [book] preserved due caution.”22 Runich, however, did not share his colleague’s opinion. By some contemporary accounts, Runich was Magnitskii’s friend and collaborator in matters of educational policy, eager to make a name for himself as a protector of conservative religious values.23 For all the similarities between these men, Runich appears to have been a more consistent conservative and sincere believer, as his personal archive testifies. Long before academic philosophy came under suspicion, he tried his pen in philosophy, presenting the subject matter from a religious point of view that broadly coincided with Magnitskii’s and Sturdza’s later views.24 Now, encouraged by Sturdza’s Instruction and Magnitskii’s purges at Kazan’, Runich could reveal his long-harbored conservative views. Runich judged Kunitsyn’s book to be entirely contrary to the guidelines provided by Sturdza’s Instruction and thus, “dangerous, harmful and completely incompatible with the purposes of Christian government.”25 Far from presenting natural law in the form of a hypothesis and subject to refutation, the book, in his view, postulated its existence based on “some infallible reason, which alone governs human motives and actions,” while drawing the principles of civil society from the same “false foundations.” By the former he meant the concept of social contract and the idea that “no one can force the other to do whatever he wishes.”26 Runich was quick to spot the arguments in Kunitsyn’s book that revealed his individualistic views and lack of regard for traditional religious morality. He could not agree with Kunitsyn’s argument that parents’ authority over their children diminishes as they come of age and still more so, that human beings share this characteristic with the animal world. He found it blasphemous to treat the institution of marriage as a contract between two

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people instead of as a “sacred and mysterious union” established by God himself. He was particularly appalled by Kunitsyn’s statement that there exist no absolute notions of good and evil. These citations, Runich claimed, were just a few examples he brought up to prove the “sacrilegious” nature of Kunitsyn’s philosophy. He added: “I would have to copy out the whole book to show all the places in it which are as much appalling as they are poisonous.”27 Runich traced Kunitsyn’s views of natural rights and social contract to the philosophy of Rousseau, which, he believed, inspired revolutionary Marat and continued “to excite hot minds” in the current century. What Kunitsyn did was “explicating and applying [this philosophy] to civil order” with a result that “the whole book was nothing else but an extended code of rights and notions attributed to some natural man and entirely contrary to the Holy Scripture.”28 Of all the accusations Runich heaped on Kunitsyn, the only one that made some sense concerned his treatment of sources. Although the notion of intellectual property was still rather vague in earlynineteenth- century Russian scholarship, the list of works consulted was becoming a common feature of university textbooks—a component that was, indeed, missing in Kunitsyn’s book. Taken together, these faults warranted, in Runich’s view, banning and confiscating Kunitsyn’s book and all other textbooks on natural law theory that espoused similar ideas. Like Magnitskii, Runich came to the conclusion that natural law as an academic subject was decidedly harmful to Russian students on account of its godless and subversive teaching. Unfortunately for Kunitsyn, this momentous meeting occurred just two weeks after the notorious mutiny in the Semenovskii regiment, which intensified conservative fears.29 It was well known at that time that the soldiers simply demanded a removal of one of the officers who had treated them unjustly, but despite the public sympathy toward the solders’ case, the tsar interpreted their actions as a sign of subversive spirit in the army and ordered the regiment out of the capital. All this gave more credibility to Runich’s statements.30 Even before its final decision on Kunitsyn’s book, the committee directed Sturdza to compose an outline of what the new university textbook on natural law must include. The outline, readily submitted by Sturdza, included in a more elaborate form many of the ideas he had already sketched in his Instruction to the committee. It required

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that an author refute every major component of natural law theory with arguments from the Scripture. The intended textbook was to contain two parts: refuting (oblichitel’naia) and explanatory ones. The first part, as its heading suggested, was to lay out and refute major postulates of natural law theory. The idea of the presocial condition of mankind was to be counteracted with the arguments drawn from historical and linguistic evidence corroborated with “commonsense” reasoning. The book, moreover, was to emphasize that “the source of [political] authority is God and not human will” and that “natural law is inadequate to explain all social truths and laws.” Part two would essentially complement historical evidence with the biblical explication of the history of mankind and the origin of political authority. At the core of this revised natural law theory there was to be a concept of the Fall and its corollary that “the law of Revelation is the only measure of man’s needs, rights and duties.” Sturdza was also careful to instruct against any individualistic interpretation of natural law theory. A man, he argued, “has no individual rights, duties or needs outside the social community.”31 Count I. S. Laval, another member of the Academic Committee, who also presented his thoughts on teaching natural law, had some reservations about rewriting natural law from a theological perspective. Instead, he suggested avoiding inconvenient arguments of the existing theories by simply restricting the content of the natural law courses primarily to the exposition of man’s rights and duties toward oneself, God, and other people.32 Yet, Sturdza’s version prevailed and served as a frame of reference for the final decision on Kunitsyn’s book. In February 1821 at an extended meeting, the Main School Administration declared Kunitsyn’s Natural Law to be “based on ideas contrary to the truths of Christianity and tending toward overthrowing all family and state ties.”33 The teaching of natural law following Kunitsyn’s textbook was strictly prohibited, and the textbook itself was to be removed both from educational institutions and public sale. Neither moderate Laval nor I. Martynov, the director of the Department of Education, once known for his liberal views, nor Fuss, who gave a positive review of Kunitsyn’s book just several months earlier, dared to challenge this verdict. Most difficult was the position of Balug’ianskii, who was required to attend this meeting and give his opinion on the work of his former pupil and colleague. Balug’ianskii admitted that the book contained some inconvenient

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places but tried to shift the blame from Kunitsyn to the German theorists of natural law who had served as his sources.34 Apparently as a form of atonement for overlooking the development of dangerous thinking among his faculty, Balug’ianskii received a commission to write a new textbook on natural law according to Sturdza’s Outline, which he eventually preferred to quietly ignore.35 Following the meeting, in March 1821, Kunitsyn was dismissed from St. Petersburg University. However, locating and collecting all the copies of his textbook proved more difficult than the committee expected. Both volumes of Natural Law were published in 1,000 copies. Most of them went to the Lyceum, St. Petersburg University, and their Noble Pansion. After Kunitsyn ceded what remained in his possession and the textbook was removed from the libraries and a bookstore in St. Petersburg, 233 copies of volume one and 257 copies of volume two were still missing. In a report Kunitsyn submitted at Golitsyn’s request, he testified that he sold and gifted some of his copies to private individuals (without listing their names). True to his moral principles, he remained unapologetic. He wrote: “ . . . having published my book according to the established laws and with my pure conscience, I did not restrain myself in giving it away.”36 Moreover, it soon turned out that many lyceists took the book with them when they graduated. Golitsyn gave Engel’gardt a strict reprimand for allowing into the Lyceum a textbook that encouraged “the spirit of license and freethinking” but he stopped short of trying to confiscate the copies from the graduates.37 Copies sold in the bookstores were also irretrievable. In 1828 Natural Law resurfaced in a private collection of Alexander Smirdin, a well-known Russian bookseller, and in 1881 it was catalogued in the library of the Semenovskii regiment.38 A few copies eventually made their way into Russian libraries, but when and how this happened remains unclear. Golitsyn might have been unwilling to pursue the search for missing books in order to avoid unnecessary publicity and rancor, especially given some of his top associates’ negative attitude toward Kunitsyn’s dismissal. Alexander Turgenev, then Director of the Department of Religious Affairs in Golitsyn’s ministry, was not invited to the meeting that decided the fate of Kunitsyn’s book, but he received a firsthand account of its proceedings from Laval, who visited the ailing Turgenev at his house the same evening. Several years later this episode was still fresh in his memory. He recalled that

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the argument with Laval over the issue of natural law that evening “only made my illness worse.”39 Even the conservative Karamzin, who witnessed their argument, took Turgenev’s side. As Golitsyn’s subordinate, Turgenev could do little to affect his chief’s attitude, but he hoped that Uvarov would intercede for Kunitsyn and protect the principle of academic autonomy. In a letter to his brother Sergei, Turgenev wrote: “[Uvarov] must not only save Kunitsyn but scholarship itself from the attacks of the Magnitskiis and Runiches.”40 Indeed, when Uvarov learned about Kunitsyn’s case, he attempted to protest in writing but his own standing in the ministry had already been undermined as a result of his disagreement with Golitsyn over the statute of St. Petersburg University. A student riot that occurred in the university pansion the same month did not help his case and Uvarov resigned, much to the satisfaction of Runich, who secured his position as a Curator of St. Petersburg district.41 Kunitsyn’s scandalous dismissal at the height of his career became widely known in the capital. Pushkin responded to the news with a memorable satire, “A Message to the Censor,” ridiculing Magnitskii’s effort to denounce Kunitsyn as “Marat.”42 Viazemskii’s reaction, however, was more equivocal. He sounded bitter about the growing obscurantism in Russia, but he doubted (without ever reading Natural Law) that the book was really that significant or dangerous to warrant all the fuss. In his typical arrogant manner he wrote: “I am sure that there are in Kunitsyn’s book only two or three vulgar ideas (poshlye istiny) which surprised our statesmen.”43 To conservatives, however, the banning of Kunitsyn’s book gave a hope for more permanent changes in Russian education, although they were somewhat skeptical that after two decades of a relaxed censorship, the government would succeed in restoring “proper” supervision. The comment of E. Bolkhovitinov, Pskov archbishop, well illustrates this attitude: “Our censorship is still confused about its own regulations and after so many statutes censorship rules are still wanting. We will see what a new statute will be like. If Kunitsyn’s Natural Law results in some new censorship precautions, other Kunitsyns will come up with new ways around these rules.”44 The banning of Kunitsyn’s book had once again put the issue of teaching natural law on the agenda in the Main School Administration. A decision was taken to review all the textbooks on natural law in use at Russian institutions. Evidently, the Main School Administration tried to find a suitable book among the available

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ones as a temporary solution before a new textbook was ready.45 The task was entrusted to Runich and his subordinates, most of whom had a limited knowledge of the subject matter but much zeal in finding faults with every book they reviewed. They made little effort to assess the books’ strengths or even support their critique with specific examples, for the verdict was apparent beforehand. Snell’s textbook, for instance, was judged to be tending toward “materialism” and “some harmful ideas” that encouraged students to engage in “misleading philosophizing.” Using this book for teaching purposes appeared to the reviewers “dangerous because beginners are not able to separate the true ideas from the false ones.”46 More qualified reviewers objected to the contract theories, even where the idea of the social contract was counterbalanced with the monarch’s unlimited power. This referred to Tsvetaev’s work as much as to the textbook on philosophy written by Davydov, professor from Moscow University. The latter was accused of “trying to combine the madness of [Friedrich] Schelling’s philosophy with ideas of loyalty to the government.” The same reader also disapprovingly noted Davydov’s argument to the effect that social well-being is based on respect for an individual as a moral person.47 Zeiller’s book, too, was subjected to a close scrutiny, despite its author’s renown as an Austrian reformer and state official. “For all Zeiller’s political reliability and the Austrian government’s vigilance,” the reviewer wrote, “some false opinions crept into the book . . . ”48 Then followed a long list of paragraphs containing objectionable ideas, including those concerning the foundations of natural law, man’s innate rights to own property, and Zeiller’s praise of Kant and Hobbes. The reviewer drew special attention to those parts of the book where Zeiller emphasized the limits beyond which society could not coerce an individual without violating the contractual nature of an organized society. To this review Runich added his own, written in his typical didactic manner and alarmist tone. He noticed a close conceptual proximity between Zeiller’s and Kunitsyn’s theories of natural law, arguing that “the latter is nothing else but an abridged version of the former” and both of them aim at “rendering divine revelation useless . . . by proclaiming pure reason and natural law as self-sufficient . . . ”49 Aside from dispensing with religion as a moral guidance, this type of natural law, Runich went on, was based on a false premise, for “fallen man has neither pure reason nor correct understanding of good and

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evil.”50 Echoing Sturdza’s ideas, he conceded that natural law could only hold before the advent of Christianity, when humankind lived unenlightened by God’s law. Also reviewed was the textbook by Martini, but the extended report submitted to Runich sounded descriptive rather than critical.51 Clearly, it was not easy to criticize the book, which traced natural law to divine will and ascribed to the ruler the unlimited sovereignty in the name of public well-being. Unlike Zeiller’s, Martini’s textbook passed the test of reliability as a teaching manual, although the absence of the Russian translation apparently made it difficult for some teachers to use it in their courses.52 In 1821, once Runich became curator of the St. Petersburg educational district, he proceeded to review lecture notes of university professors hitherto unsuspected of any subversive thinking. It turned out that not only courses in philosophy but also history and statistics could be screened on the basis on Sturdza’s Instruction. The result was a notorious trial of professors Galich, Arsen’ev, Hermann, and Raupach, which resulted in their dismissal from the St. Petersburg University on charges of promoting atheism and rebellious ideas.53 Balug’ianskii was not on the list of the accused, but he resigned in protest when it became obvious that his attempts to defend the accused professors were futile. Certainly, Runich greatly exaggerated the professors’ guilt, especially as far as religious ideas were concerned, but certain statements in their lectures could indeed lead students to reflect critically on the Russian government. Hermann, a professor of statistics, for instance, mentioned that the monarch should not be both the lawgiver and the judge (a division of powers that had never existed in Russia) and that monarchy’s greatest advantage—an unlimited rule by a single person—is also its disadvantage, for monarchs “are humans, not angels.”54 He also taught students that political society is based on the principle of “fundamental agreement,” which does not cease to exist with the formation of society but continues to function as a tacit agreement of obedience. “The act by which political society came into being,” he argued, “was concluded exclusively for the purpose of achieving a common goal and not for enslaving the majority of the members of society or establishing the unlimited power of the minority, comprising the government.”55 In his memoirs Runich recalled with pride that he proceeded with the trial despite the displeasure of the Grand Duke Nicholas and the Empress-Mother whose intercession the professors tried to secure.56

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Eventually, Runich’s lack of regard for the opinion of the Grand Duke cost him his post. Like all Russians, save the tsar’s closest advisors, Runich was unaware that Alexander I had made Nicholas his heir to the throne over his older brother Konstantin, who secretly renounced his accession right in 1822 when he married a woman of nonroyal origin. Partly out of his dislike of Runich and certainly because Nicholas appreciated the professors’ legal expertise, he invited Arsen’ev and Balug’ianskii to join the codification committee, which he chaired prior to his accession.57 Runich, however, remained convinced in his righteousness. Even stripped of his post in the ministry, he wrote in his memoirs many years later: “Russian people are still children. One should not talk to them about liberty . . . People are not asparagus and public education is not a hothouse, it can be a dangerous bomb that might explode the whole building. Russian universities, lyceums and private homes all taught harmful theories of contemporary philosophy. German systems of natural law, adopted by Russian and foreign professors, presented something monstrous and waged an open war against all moral principles.”58 It seems ironic that help for the accused professors came from the Grand Duke Nicholas, who would prove one of the most reactionary tsars in modern Russian history. If the trial had happened a few years later, after the Decembrist uprising, Nicholas might have agreed with Runich and proceeded accordingly, but in 1821 the future tsar thought different. Not satisfied with the banning of specific books, Magnitskii and Runich began a campaign to exclude the subjects of natural law and philosophy from Russian educational institutions altogether. As a result, in 1821 the teaching of natural law was suspended in the St. Petersburg Noble Pansion and Tsarskoe Selo Lyceum.59 In 1823 it was excluded from the curriculum of the Russian gymnasia, but the Main School Administration hesitated to extend this measure to the universities.60 Seeing the lack of responsiveness among the moderates in the Main School Administration, Magnitskii submitted in 1823 a memo to the tsar asking him to banish philosophy (along with natural law) from all Russian educational institutions, for “there is no way to teach it in accordance with religious creed.”61 In support of his argument he pointed out that Austria and Prussia introduced restrictions on the teaching of philosophy, while “Paris University suspended not only philosophy but also modern history— this school of turmoil and frenzy . . . ”62 In Magnitskii’s view, recent revolutions in southern Europe grew out of the spirit of freethinking

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stimulated by academic philosophy. He wrote: “It took God’s enemies only three years to bring Kunitsyn’s cause to Naples, Turin, Madrid and Lisbon.”63 Despite this forceful rhetoric, the tsar had some doubts about Magnitskii’s claims and assigned Laval to inquire about the methods of teaching philosophy in other European countries. In his report a year later, Laval agreed with Magnitskii on the danger of uncontrolled teaching of academic philosophy and fully endorsed his condemnation of Kant’s ideas as leading toward materialism and political dissent, but he found no evidence of the total exclusion of philosophy from the curriculum of French institutions.64 What he observed in France was a “cautious and wise” policy of supervision, with occasional removals of individual professors and reviews of lecture notes. He recommended the same judicious approach for Russia, instead of banning philosophy altogether, which he thought would be a provocative step at a time when the country was politically divided. If written “in a monarchical spirit” and with due attention to religious truths, philosophy, he argued, could be useful in fostering a high regard for social interests and loyalty to the throne.65 Opinions of other members of the Main School Administration were divided. Novosil’tsev, a curator of Vilna district, and his colleague in Moscow district, General Pisarev, suggested solutions along the line of Laval’s but with stronger emphasis on religious content of revised courses in philosophy; in contrast, Prince Karl Lieven, then a curator of Dorpat district, mercilessly ridiculed Magnitskii’s posture as self-appointed defender of the throne and altar.66 Golitsyn, too, found himself under fire. His methods of promoting religion through the Bible Society were not to the taste of Orthodox dignitaries. They resented the rivalry the Society posed to the established church and, in their traditional way, feared the growing presence of other religious sects in Russia. The church now had a powerful spokesman for its cause in the person of fanatical monk Fotii, who greatly impressed the religious tsar with his image of a living saint. In one of the audiences with the tsar, Fotii brought Alexander into a state of spiritual awe by simply exposing the heavy chains hanging on his body, which was exhausted as a result of the constant fasting. Among Fotii’s followers there were some impressionable aristocratic women with social connections, and there were others who used Fotii’s influence for building public opinion against Golitsyn.67 Alexander I was displeased with Golitsyn for causing a

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public uproar, which cast a shadow on the tsar himself. In 1824 he dismissed Golitsyn and divided the Dual Ministry into its two original Ministries of Education and Religious Affairs . Golitsyn’s dismissal and growing resentment against his protégée Magnitskii changed the tone of deliberations over the issue of natural law teaching. Professor Lodii, who was then teaching natural law in St. Petersburg University, sent to the Main School Administration his comments on Magnitskii’s proposal, where he accused the Kazan’ curator of nothing less than “undermining the intentions of the monarch himself,” for it was the tsar who made law courses an educational requirement for civil servants.68 He derided Magnitskii’s effort to forbid the book On the Duties of Man and Citizen by pointing out that, according to Magnitskii’s logic, Catherine the Great authorized the work threatening her own power. Presented in this light, it was Magnitskii who appeared as a menace to the throne by spreading doubts about Alexander I’s wisdom through his audacious criticism of the existing educational policy. This letter must have had some effect on the members of the Main School Administration; in 1826, it was decided that “philosophical courses freed from the nonsense of modern philosophers and based on the truths of Christian teaching as well as consonant with the principles of monarchical government are necessary in our institutions of higher education.”69 In 1827 the repercussions of the battle around the proper way of teaching natural law occurred in the Nezhin Gymnasium in Ukraine, which had a special status, similar to that of Tsarskoe Selo Lyceum, and still retained natural law on its curriculum.70 “The case of freethinking,” as it came to be known to the authorities, had all the familiar features of the academic investigation in the style of Runich and Magnitskii. The accuser was professor of political science Mikhail Bilevich, who dutifully reported to the gymnasium council that Professor Belousov used for his lectures the proscribed books by Schad and Kant instead of the approved Martini’s manual. After student notes had been examined, a second report determined that his lectures “contain no mention of the duties to God, to oneself, to the fellow humans . . . which comprise the essence of natural law, and [they] abound in statements and views that might mislead the inexperienced youth.” According to some oral testimonies, Belousov spoke for the legitimacy of the regicide in cases of tyranny. The archpriest Volynskii,

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who was asked to provide his opinion, found that “if human reason is viewed as the source of natural law without the reference to the higher law which is the will of God, then such teaching might be harmful for the young minds.”71 Belousov denied the accusations of dangerous freethinking, arguing that his words were taken out of context, but he refused to reveal the sources of his lectures. In September 1827 the teaching of natural law was terminated in Nezhin Gymnasium, and in 1830 Belousov was discharged “for the harmful influence on the youth” with no right to ever serve as a teacher. Two years later the Gymnasium itself was transformed into the Lyceum for the study of physical and mathematical sciences.72 At about the same time the question about the classless principle of education came to be considered by the government. The instruction of Nicholas I to the Minister Shishkov in 1827 speaks clearly about the tsar’s concern. He thought it imperative that “everywhere academic subjects and methods of education conform to the future calling of students, so that each of them . . . coming from their respective station would not strive to rise above the position he is destined to stay.”73 On the one hand, this attitude encouraged more practical- oriented education for the lower classes through the newly created network of specialized schools teaching agriculture, crafts, gardening, and other subjects useful for peasants. On the other hand, the fear that education might upset the existing status quo is unmistakable.74 Throughout these years of uncertainty and hesitations following Magnitskii’s purge of Kazan’, each university struggled to preserve its academic traditions and faculty with different degrees of success. Some universities were more fortunate than others in retaining natural law and philosophy in their curriculum, but on the whole, the quality of education in the moral-political science departments declined and the content of courses underwent substantial changes reflecting the stifling of natural law teaching. Wolffian philosophy, which was never entirely displaced in Russia by Kant’s teaching, made its way back to the university classrooms in the 1820s. However, as numerous memoirs from this period testify, Russian students had not perceived this kind of philosophy as anything but outdated scholasticism. What students witnessed was a failing policy of ensuring modern education while adhering to outdated but politically

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innocuous teachings. The government much needed well-trained cadres, but it faced the dilemma of how to educate subjects without turning them into independent and critically thinking intellectuals. As Nikitenko aptly put it, “they demand . . . that we teach as well as possible but that students not think. They require from students that they study hard and not just mechanically but that they not read books and think . . . ”75 This daunting task, moreover, was made even more difficult by the lack of qualified but ideologically reliable teachers who would be able to replace the dismissed professors. To solve the problem, universities resorted to frequent reassignments and reshufflings among the faculty, which often compelled talented philosophy professors to switch to subjects far removed from their interests and expertise. In St. Petersburg University, for instance, Galich’s course in moral philosophy was entrusted in 1825 to a much less talented professor, M. Pal’min, who used outdated textbooks by Baumeister and the more recent Kantian opponent Franz Karpe that Magnitskii had earlier recommended for Kazan’ University.76 Overburdened by a large family, Pal’min tried hard to please Magnitskii and Runich, but his lack of expertise and teaching abilities contrasted sharply with Galich’s lively manner of lecturing, which did not escape students’ attention. He was dismissed in 1832 by Uvarov’s order as “little qualified.”77 The same destiny awaited Iakov Tolmachev, who dutifully followed Baumeister in his lectures on metaphysics and logic but found himself dismissed for lack of ability.78 Despite Runich’s personal aversion to natural law, Lodii continued to teach this subject (until his death in 1829) using his own notes, which he transformed into a textbook in 1828. This work illustrates quite well the kind of natural law teaching that was allowed in Russian academic philosophy after Kunitsyn’s case. With Sturdza’s Instruction in mind, Lodii based his book on the absolutist tradition of natural law (selecting Martini as his main source), which he supplemented with the concept of divine right. As required, he presented contractual theories in the form of philosophical hypotheses, none of which, he argued, explained the origin of the secular power more convincingly than the Scripture.79 Yet, in justifying obedience to the law, Lodii himself found it difficult to do away with the logic of contractual theory. He wrote: “The immediate reason [for obedience to the law] . . . is the will of the ruler itself, a distant reason is . . . the pledge people gave when entering the state. The last

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reason . . . is the general [good] and finally, private well-being and security of each subject.”80 A strongly absolutist interpretation of monarchical authority was combined in Lodii’s book with the cameralist conception of the paternalist state and a stress upon social values. He taught that the subjects should prefer public interests to their private ones and place trust in the goodwill and wisdom of the ruler. The latter stands beyond any public scrutiny or institutional limitations and exercises extensive regulatory prerogatives, including the right of censorship and the duty to direct citizens toward social virtues. Lodii used both the traditional divine right arguments and the analogy of the body parts to prove the absolute power of the ruler: “ . . . the supreme rulers (verkhovnye praviteli) depend on God alone, for their power comes from God; therefore nobody can obstruct them in using this power . . . as in each physical body the limbs obey the head, in the political body every family and every individual must obey its authority . . . ”81 Although Lodii acknowledged the existence of innate human rights (such as “personal security,” “well being,” and “the right for moral cultivation”), he argued that in a civil society people’s rights were determined by their service record and social station. Quite understandably, neither legal equality nor freedom of speech (even for the privileged classes) featured in Lodii’s account, whereas trial by jury was rejected as superfluous based on the fact that the courts operate under the laws of the sovereign, who thereby represents the interests of both sides.82 In Moscow University, Tsvetaev avoided trouble with the authorities by switching from courses in natural law to those in Roman law, although he continued to offer private lectures in natural jurisprudence.83 Once a popular teacher, Tsvetaev no longer commanded students’ respect: “When he was young,” one student recalled, “Professor Tsvetaev had a reputation of being a progressive scholar; he was among those professors who . . . studied in German universities and brought to Russian scholarship the newest European ideas. But I listened to Tsvetaev’s lectures in his concluding years when there were no traces of the once brilliant professor.”84 Students were disappointed that Tsvetaev showed too much caution in his interpretation of law. Iakov Kostenetskii, future Zemstvo activist, recalled that Tsvetaev lectured “without providing philosophical analysis of human rights, without any critical examination of Roman laws. This is why he could not get his audience to love this subject.”85 Over the

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next decade, the teaching of natural law in Moscow University came to be gradually displaced by the study of international law, diplomacy, and Russian jurisprudence, which grew in importance as the disciplines with greater practical application.86 Courses in philosophy in Moscow University were also suspended until 1835 after Professor Davydov was accused by Runich of spreading Schelling’s ideas. In 1821 he was transferred to the chair of mathematics and then philology, neither of which corresponded to his scholarly interests and training. Students sarcastically called his philology lectures “something about nothing or the theory of eloquence.”87 The university council repeatedly petitioned the ministry about reopening the philosophy chair; finally in 1826 permission was granted. However, Davydov’s introductory public lecture caused displeasure among the educational authorities because it “contained many inconvenient places and . . . philosophizing (mudrstvovaniia) of the newest thinkers Schelling and Fichte.”88 The chair was abolished again before classes even resumed.89 This story had a huge demoralizing effect on Davydov, who turned into a proverbial sycophant and a zealous supporter of the government’s educational policy. Nikitenko wrote in his diary: “I spent evening with I. I. Davydov, professor of Moscow University. He has a spacious mind and wealth of knowledge but what of it? He is accused of being too evasive . . . but everyone who knew him earlier believes that he became so after that unfortunate story, when he was looked at as an enemy of faith, throne and so forth.”90 Official pronouncements on the teaching of natural law and philosophy became a litmus test of the growing conservative tendencies in Nicholaevan Russia. The tsar showed much interest in improving legal education in Russia, but to his practical autocratic mind, this meant the study of the existing laws, not of natural law, which he had held in deep disdain since the time of his own schooling. He recalled those lessons as a time of torment when Professor Kukol’nik “talked about some sort of imaginary ‘natural’ law.”91 Given his ignorance of the subject matter, he might not initially have understood all the political implications of allowing Russian students to study natural law, simply taking it as a theoretical science with little practical relevance, but his highly educated and loyal servant Uvarov (who returned from retirement to become a Minister of Education in 1833) hurried to advise the tsar on the potential dangers involved. The decree signed by the tsar in 1833 and published in the Journal

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of the Ministry of Education the next year announced the following: “The Minister of Public Education . . . brought it to the Academic Committee’s attention that the teaching of natural law is hardly possible until the government provides our university with the appropriate manual . . . Until then, district curators should suspend the teaching of natural law by the end of the year, lest something incompatible with the present order of things in our state creeps into this subject, so important both in a political and philosophical sense.”92 The same decree announced that a committee of professors chaired by Balug’ianskii was to compose a new manual on natural law, to be then reviewed by Speranskii, but there is no evidence that this work was ever started. The teaching of natural law was thereby de facto abolished. In 1835, the new university statute substituted for courses in natural law those in “Encyclopedia of Jurisprudence,” which confirmed the universities’ reorientation toward practical legal training. Although the same statute reaffirmed the teaching of philosophy in Russian universities, Uvarov insisted that philosophy was to be taught within the limits set by the “Orthodoxy, autocracy and nationality” paradigm. He used the Journal of the Ministry of Public Education as a medium to guide philosophy teachers in the required direction.93 However, after the European revolutions of 1848, even this censored philosophy appeared too dangerous to the Russian government. Philosophy chairs were closed in 1850. Among the subjects that then belonged to the philosophical disciplines only psychology and logic remained part of the curriculum and were now entrusted to the professors of theology.94 The Russian government’s restrictions against philosophy and concern for the moral content of public education, although extreme, were not without parallels in Europe in the 1820s and 1830s. For instance, in constitutional France until the Revolution of 1830, courses in philosophy were taught in Latin only, and the content of the lectures was subject to close supervision.95 The rejection of natural law philosophy was also a European phenomenon caused by the post-Napoleonic disillusionment with the Enlightenment’s universalistic ideals and rationalist ethos. In its place came romantic and historicist ideas that stressed the organic and evolutional development of national legal and political traditions.96 In Russia, however, natural law disappeared from the university curriculum not as a result of spontaneous shifts in Russian thought but as a consequence

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of government interference. The Russian authorities thus suspended the teaching of natural law as abruptly as they once introduced it because it no longer served the purpose of instilling in students the desirable ideas and values.

Russian Universities and Liberal Youth in the Decade after the Decembrist Uprising Despite the decline in the quality of teaching during the 1820s, university education grew in importance in Russian society. In contrast to the first decade of the nineteenth century, more self-supporting students were willing to work toward university degrees, taking it not only as a means of career advancement but also as a mark of civility and intellectual achievement. “Our university in Moscow,” one student wrote, “was a sanctuary for our students, their families and even the whole society . . . [At the university] the spirit of a young man rose . . . his horizons widened . . . the new scholarly prospects opened . . . and with them came true freedom—freedom of scholarship.” And then he added: “This is not, of course, to say that this freedom was unobstructed . . . ”97 Indeed, many students noted the increase in surveillance and control after 1825, but for all the regimentation of student life inside and outside the university, students often found creative ways to get around official restrictions. When philosophy was banished from Moscow University, some students resorted to self-study and socializing in intellectual circles, taking their discussions from the classroom setting to private apartments— further away from the watchful eye of the university authorities. Books that were unavailable at the university library were borrowed from friends, relatives, and, sometimes, even professors themselves. A fashion for collecting private libraries made unsupervised reading all the more possible. In this way the students of the 1830s became familiar with the philosophy of Hegel and Schelling, which officially was not allowed into the university courses because they “opposed” religion.98 Suspecting that students living in rented apartments eluded the inspectors’ control, the authorities in Moscow University tried to establish a special dormitory for self-supporting students but the project fell through.99 Some professors also provided private lectures for small groups of students, where they felt freer to express their ideas. Tsvetaev, for instance, taught natural law as a private course when he no

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longer could do so at the university, and Galich, who was forbidden to teach in St. Petersburg University, continued to give private lectures until 1828 when someone reported to the authorities that he was spreading dangerous ideas.100 To the students from well- off families, a trip abroad provided a chance to get acquainted with the latest currents in European philosophy and economic science. Much as the government feared, such trips often exposed students to the liberal ideas, which they then brought to Russia. Alexander Koshelev, a member of the Society of the Lovers of Wisdom, recalled that the lectures of Alessandro Rossi, a liberal-minded political economist, made a lasting impact on his worldview. He wrote: “This man instilled in me many new thoughts and true liberalism [to which] . . . I owe my activities concerning the liberation of our serfs.”101 By the second half of the 1830s, most of the Russian universities began to recover due to the efforts of the new generation of teachers. As in Kunitsyn’s time twenty years earlier, many of them were trained in Germany where, along with the knowledge of European philosophy they acquired a taste for intellectual independence that continued to trouble the authorities. In Moscow University the rector Count Stroganov, seeking to improve the university’s scholarly standing, hired twelve new teachers, including Granovskii, Solov’ev, and Kavelin in history and Red’kin in law studies—all of them trained in Germany and, much to Stroganov’s regret, steeped in Hegelianism. Despite his warning that he would “oppose Hegelianism and German philosophy by all means possible,” the professors popularized Hegel by weaving his ideas into the content of their courses. For them Hegel seemed to answer the difficult question of how to reconcile the needs of the free individual with the demands of the autocratic state.102 Compared to its Moscow counterpart, St. Petersburg University became more conservative with the return of Uvarov as Minister of Education in 1833. After the Decembrist uprising, he came to believe that “it is not scholarly knowledge (uchenost’) but virtue and morality that makes a person a loyal subject.”103 This idea was behind his notorious concept of “Autocracy, Orthodoxy, Nationality,” which he zealously promoted during his tenure as minister. His appointees at the university were all people with conservative views, but unlike Runich, Uvarov at least tried to make sure that they were able teachers and scholars.104

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For many students, university years brought about their first exposure to the freethinking ideas and with them the awareness that they lived in a country with no freedom of expression. During this period, it was not so much the content of the courses as the “exchange of thoughts,” to use the words of one memoirist, that set students on a path to liberalism.105 The sources of freethinking were many. The authorities were right in suspecting the lack of reverence toward traditional religion among youth. Ironically, it was graduates from ecclesiastical seminaries studying at the universities who turned many students into religious skeptics by their talk about the clergy’s lifestyle and morals.106 On another level, the civic poetry of Pushkin and the Decembrists continued to stir young minds. Many memoirists recalled that all proscribed verses circulated among students and were read and discussed “with avidity . . . ”107 For most part, student freethinking was a form of a moral protest against the oppression of individual freedom, political backwardness, and lack of justice in Russia; it did not amount to a specific program and still less to any antigovernment activity, but the very fact of overt dissatisfaction and ideological dissent among students posed a challenge to the power of the autocracy. The authorities took no chances with defiant students. In 1826 A. Polezhaev, a student of noble origin, was imprisoned and later exiled to the Caucasus as a soldier for his oppositional verses. The arrest was triggered by the anonymous report that denounced Moscow University as a seedbed of “atheism and liberalism.” Polezhaev’s sudden disappearance in the middle of the night made a strong impression on his fellow students.108 The same destiny awaited another defiant poet, student B. Zubov, who spent a few months in a psychiatric hospital before being sent to the army. Even those who read and had copies of his verses, including V. Shishkov, the nephew of the arch- conservative Admiral Shishkov, were subjected to various punishments. Despite the increased surveillance and control, or perhaps because of that, in 1827 the secret police discovered in Moscow University the circle of the brothers Kritskii who confessed that the civic poetry of Pushkin and Ryleev and the selfless death of the Decembrists inspired them to dream about a Russian constitution and of the reforms.109 In view of these discoveries, the head of the secret police Count Benkendorf warned Nicholas I about widespread “liberalism” in the universities. In his 1827 report he wrote: “The youth— the petty nobles (dvorianchiki) between the ages seventeen and

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twenty-five—comprise the most gangrenous part of the empire. Among these pranks we find the germs of Jacobinism, revolutionary and reformist spirit . . . Having no idea about Russia’s conditions, the youth dream about a Russian constitution, the abolition of ranks . . . and freedom which they don’t comprehend and take as the absence of subjection . . . already we see the emergence of some secret groups . . . Of course, there are among the youth good people but at least two thirds of them are liberals.”110 Benkendorf then complained that some of these liberal-minded students had protectors among the powerful officials who identified themselves as patriots and dared to criticize the government. By designating this group of top bureaucrats as the “party of patriots” rallying around Mordvinov, Benkendorf sought to emphasize that this group only aspired for ameliorative reforms within the frameworks of the existing political order while young liberals wanted to see the political order changed. To the liberalism of the educated youth and the grudge of the high bureaucracy Benkendorf counterpoised the loyalty of the “trading classes,” “bourgeoisie” and “the common people.” He had no doubt that they “sincerely loved the tsar” and “would never disturb the order.”111 These observations were an early indication that in Russia, unlike Western Europe, liberalism was developing without the participation of the middle class. Incidentally, the Russian trading class was the only class among the propertied who continued to shelter their sons from higher education for fear that it would take them away from their profession.112 Despite its tendency to generalize, Benkendorf’s account echoes much of what student memoirs tell us about the university milieu during the early years of the Nicholaevan reign. Benkendorf was right in hoping that the age and the time would “cure” at least some of these young liberals. Indeed, in some students their liberalism amounted to nothing more than youthful rebelliousness against any sort of subjection and control; it faded away once they graduated and settled down into their professions. Yet for others, years at the university became a lesson in liberalism, which they long remembered and turned into action once the reformist era of Alexander II arrived. Without doubt, universities had become a fertile ground in which the seeds of future political liberalism in Russia were germinating during the first half of the nineteenth century.

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Epilogue

Kunitsyn lived his remaining years trying to find new applications for his education and skills. It was, perhaps, the biggest irony of Kunitsyn’s life that his social standing and financial situation greatly improved over the years following his dismissal, while his accusers Magnitskii and Runich were soon demoted and ended their lives in disgrace and obscurity.1 In his new capacity as a state official, Kunitsyn provided a much-needed legal service for which he was amply rewarded, but the price for this was the end of his career as a philosopher. Kunitsyn’s dismissal from the University of St. Petersburg came to him as a shock, especially because just several months earlier, Golitsyn recognized his “honest service” with a monetary reward that helped Kunitsyn to settle in the capital. After his dismissal, he thought of writing a “justificatory letter” to the tsar—the form of appeal common in autocratic Russia where the tsar alone could override any laws and regulations; yet, unable to bring himself to apologize, he dropped the idea before the final draft was ready. Nicholas Turgenev, who read the draft, commented that the letter “was written badly but in a noble spirit”—apparently not good enough for its purpose.2 In July 1821, due to Turgenev’s persistent help, Kunitsyn obtained a post in the chancellery of the Ministry of Finances in addition to his administrative position in a Cadet Corps.3 Virtually nothing is known about his work in the chancellery except for the fact of his service promotions, which occurred regularly throughout the ensuing years and culminated in 1830 with the rank of the Actual State Counselor (Deistvitelnyi Statskii Sovetnik) corresponding to Rank Five in the Table of Ranks. With no hope to publish any philosophical writings again, Kunitsyn tried to resume his journalistic work. In 1822 he wrote for the Syn Otechestva an article published in two installments, in which he provided a review of European political developments in the past 185

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year. This essay turned out to be his last political writing and served to highlight the eclipse of liberal expectations in Russia. Three years earlier he had written optimistically about constitutional beginnings and prospects in Europe;4 now he focused on the violent revolutions that swept Greece, Italy, Spain, Portugal, and overseas colonies. Except for Greece, which fought for the cause of national independence from the Ottoman Empire, revolutions in Southern Europe were attempts at imposing liberal reforms upon traditional monarchical governments restored after Napoleon’s fall. In Spain a revolution broke out in 1820 after King Ferdinand VII had broken his promise to maintain the constitution of 1812 drawn up by the Cortes in Cadiz—a region that had remained free from Napoleon’s occupation. Portuguese liberals followed the example by designing a constitution on the Spanish model, which they established while the king, who fled Napoleon to Brazil, was still out of country. In Naples, by contrast, French institutions introduced under Napoleon presented a more liberal model than the traditional Austrian monarchy. A revolution erupted when the reinstated King Ferdinand I abolished Napoleon’s reforms. Despite Britain’s official protest, Austrian intervention in Italy in January 1821 and a French military expedition to the Iberian Peninsula later that year sealed the fate of the revolutions. Ferdinand VII, humiliated by the concessions he had previously made to the revolutionaries, retaliated with persecutions that eliminated the remnants of the liberal movement in Spain.5 Kunitsyn might have chosen to make a public statement on the subject of revolutions as a way of dissociating himself from the radical ideology that Magnitskii and Runich tried so hard to impute to him. Yet, Kunitsyn’s disapproval of the revolutionary disturbances was motivated by considerations very different from those conservatives had in mind. What troubled him the most was not the threat to legitimate monarchs but the violence and chaos that invariably accompanied revolutionary upheavals. Kunitsyn observed with sadness that armed resistance “always brings either anarchy or iron despotism” and constitutions extorted from monarchs prove to be fragile because of the circumstances surrounding their enacting.6 He sympathized with the causes of national independence and constitutional order pursued by the rebels in Spain and Italy, but was concerned that the revolutions were the work of small elitist groups who drew into their ranks the army and common people by taking advantage of their ignorance and subservience. Kunitsyn agreed

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with many of his compatriots, who saw the Greek rebellion against the Ottoman Empire as a fight for a righteous cause, but he was horrified by the atrocities the Greeks committed against ordinary Turks and the retaliation against the Greeks that followed.7 Kunitsyn’s article was published under the rubric “Contemporary History,” which all the more frequently replaced the once-popular section of political reviews in Syn Otechestva and signaled further evolution of the journal toward a literary orientation. In 1825, political coverage was taken over by Polevoi’s Moscow Telegraph, a commercially successful and sophisticated journal, which succeeded in surviving censorship pitfalls for six years.8 Moscow Telegraph could have been a proper media for Kunitsyn’s journalistic writings but he dropped this idea, in large part because of the new dangers that threatened his career after the Decembrist uprising. His name resurfaced during the investigation of the uprising when in response to questions about the ideological sources of their ideas several members of the St. Petersburg Northern Society testified that they had taken Kunitsyn’s private or public courses in natural law and political economy. Prince E. Obolenskii, for instance, wrote in his testimony: “ . . . having noticed my lack of knowledge in political sciences which became a subject of general talk upon the return of the army in 1814, I first studied modern and ancient history, political economy and law by myself; in 1819 [I] listened to Professor Kunitsyn’s lectures on political economy.”9 Another Decembrist, A. Podzhio, recalled that “ . . . in 1820, when my passion for study revived I went to the university to listen to Professor Kunitsyn’s public lectures on natural law.”10 According to Decembrist Koloshin, Kunitsyn also delivered private lectures in the apartment of an officer of the Preobrazhenskii regiment in 1817.11 Yet, Kunitsyn’s career suffered no setbacks as a result of this implication. The prosecutors must have understood that the Decembrists’ education was not much different from that of many loyal Russian subjects, including top state officials, who came from the same background as the unfortunate revolutionaries. After all, courses in natural law and political economy were still on the official curriculum at the universities and were required for state officials without university diplomas seeking to pass qualifying exams for the rank of Kollezhskii Assessor. Far from being prosecuted or demoted, Kunitsyn received a new promotion. In 1826 Kunitsyn was invited to join the Codification

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Committee, then already transformed into His Majesty’s Own Second Chancellery, where he found a better application for his legal expertise.12 The committee had existed since 1801 but had made little progress over the past two decades, partly due to Alexander I’s lack of interest in its work and partly due to Speranskii’s political disgrace and departure from the capital in 1812. His fall from favor was perhaps the earliest public sign of the changing political climate in Russia. It came as a result of brewing conservative opposition to Speranskii, which gradually began to influence the tsar’s attitude toward the idea of liberal reforms. Speranskii’s plans for introducing in Russia constitutional reforms and firm legal order appeared to conservatives as an “evil” imitation of French practices alien to the traditional paternalistic nature of the Russian autocracy. His decree of 1809 that required qualifying examinations for the Rank of Collegiate Assessor made Speranskii still more unpopular among the nobility.13 With Speranskii in exile, the Committee of Codification was entrusted to Baron Gustav Rosenkampf who was not inclined to exceed the tsar’s orders. Even before his appointment to the committee, Kunitsyn was fully familiar with its proceedings. In 1819 he had written two articles criticizing The systematic survey of active laws of the Russian Empire with the foundations of law derived from them, which the committee published between 1815 and 1822 under Rosenkampf’s direction.14 In fact, Rosenkampf planned a publication of a Critical Journal of Russian Legislation as a forum for a discussion of the committee’s work; however, the journal had been discontinued after only one issue, perhaps for reasons that had to do with Kunitsyn’s feedback. Rosenkampf addressed Kunitsyn’s critique in his own article, also published in Syn Otechestva, where he rebuked Kunitsyn for initiating the discussion before it was officially open in the Critical Journal. More importantly, he was incensed that some of Kunitsyn’s criticisms could elicit unnecessary “speculations” on such a sensitive issue as the nature of monarchical power in Russia.15 What Rosenkampf had in mind was Kunitsyn’s comment concerning the definition of the Russian autocracy, which codifiers extracted from the most recent legal document pertaining to the Holy Alliance instead of going back to the more ancient Russian sources. In his view, the committee should have made use of such historical documents as the charter on the election of the first Romanov tsar dated 1613 and the legal definitions provided by Catherine the Great’s Instruction

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(Nakaz) of 1767.16 This argument, as Rosenkampf rightly sensed, pointed to the embarrassing fact that Russia lacked fundamental laws on the nature and the scope of the monarch’s authority—the very foundation for the civil order in any law-bound state. It also implied the lack of legal criteria for the selection of laws and legal sources, which undermined the value of the Systematic Survey. Some of the articles in the Survey, Kunitsyn wrote, contained internal contradictions resulting from uncritical compilation of the old and new legal norms, while others were deficient because they omitted important pieces of past legislation. As his examples demonstrated, these technical deficiencies had important political implications for interpreting the relationship between the monarch and the government in Russia. He noted, for instance, the absence of Peter the Great’s decree concerning the Senate’s right to present to the emperor outdated or conflicting laws for further modification, which touched upon the sensitive issue of the division of power in Russia. In the civil legislation he found missing the clause stating that laws “should be applied according to their exact meaning, impartially and without regard for the rank [of the litigants].”17 Behind this criticism was Kunitsyn’s hope that some of the sound legal and political practices that had fallen into abeyance or misuse could be restored by simply codifying and making them public. Yet in Russia the codification project was not meant to introduce any political or social reforms, nor did it amount to the establishment of the rule of law, contrary to the appearance it created in the minds of some jurists. Kunitsyn’s suggestions, as Rosenkampf noticed, led in a direction of interpreting the old and framing the new law—an endeavor that was far beyond the committee’s modest task of “presenting the Russian law in its current state, with all its strengths and weaknesses.”18 By 1826, however, Kunitsyn was no longer inclined to voice any criticism of the committee’s work, even though it showed the same shortcomings that he had identified in the previous plans for codification: the lack of criteria for establishing legal norms and the arbitrary classification of the articles of legislation. He now worked under the watchful eye of Nicholas I and in close cooperation with Balug’ianskii, an official head of the project, to whose recommendation Kunitsyn owed his place in the Second Chancellery.19 Moreover, as a member of the committee, he became aware that Speranskii, who returned from exile in 1821, failed to secure the tsar’s approval

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for drawing up a new legal code based on the compiled material.20 The tsar had ordered nothing more than collecting Russian laws and making some mechanical adjustments to eliminate repetitions or outdated norms. Speranskii’s attempt to find more trained jurists for the Chancellery provided Kunitsyn with the opportunity to get back to teaching, although not to the academic subject he formerly taught and with little freedom to determine the content of his courses. A special internship program was set within the Chancellery for a group of young men who were preparing for a government-sponsored study trip to the University of Berlin. Kunitsyn was entrusted to instruct them in Russian civil law while supervising their work on compiling the alphabetical catalogue of Russian laws.21 Among the students, all of whom were the graduates of ecclesiastical academies, there was Kunitsyn’s nephew Aleksei (who carried the same last name). He later taught courses in Russian and Roman law in Khar’kov University.22 Nicholas I’s government chose the University of Berlin because of its reputation as a center for the historical school of jurisprudence headed by its founder Friedrich Carl von Savigny. In contrast to positivist jurisprudence that held law to be a product of the ruler’s will, and in sharp opposition to the natural law schools, which treated law as having universal attributes deducible from human nature, Savigny argued that law was determined by historical circumstances peculiar to each nation and thus, presented an expression of the nation’s unique spirit. Attempts at codification, in his view, should be preceded by a thorough study of the national legal norms. At the core of this theory was a fear of any reformist codification based on the abstract notions of justice as exemplified, for instance, by the Code Napoleon. Although in Russia the work of codification was, in effect, fulfilled before historical investigation of the Russian law, Savigny’s school of historical jurisprudence presented a suitable alternative to the teaching of natural law.23 Ironically, while this study program was meant to instruct students in conservative legal theory, it also exposed them to the teaching of Schelling, who lectured in Berlin University at the time and whose philosophy was considered by many Russian conservatives no less dangerous than natural law itself. Nikitenko, who personally knew these students, recalled that Schelling’s ideas became a subject of philosophical debates among the young Russians, despite Runich’s well-known pronouncements against the German philosophy of

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idealism.24 There was another interesting observation about their German experience in Nikitenko’s diary that contrasts with what Kunitsyn and his friends from the Pedagogical Institute experienced twenty years earlier during their study abroad. This time, the students noted Germans’ strong dislike of the Russians and the Russian government, so much so that students “ . . . often had to conceal that they were Russians in order to receive a friendly welcome from foreigners.”25 The Polish rebellion of 1830, crushed by the Russian government, added to already the unflattering image of Russia as an “oppressor” of European liberty. Even so, some students were nostalgic about their life abroad and depressed upon their return to Russia—“the tsardom of slavery,” as Nikitenko put it.26 Alongside his teaching duties, Kunitsyn was commissioned in 1835 to compile ecclesiastical laws issued by the Holy Synod since the time of its creation under Peter the Great. He completed the assignment within one year and was rewarded for it with a lavish personal gift from the emperor27 but Nicholas I ordered postponement of the publication of this collection based on the Synod’s opinion. The church authorities reasoned that “it would not be convenient to make public different laws of the old times, some of which do not serve to strengthen respect for the church . . . ”28 It was not until 1865 that the Synod changed its opinion, finding it necessary to fulfill the task of compiling ecclesiastical laws. Kunitsyn’s work, discovered in the Synod’s archive, served as one of the sources for the collection.29 A similar fate awaited Kunitsyn’s Historical Study of Ancient Russian Jurisprudence, which he completed sometime in the early 1820s. Kunitsyn received the censor’s approval in 1825 but did not see it published during his lifetime. This is somewhat surprising given the book’s apolitical nature and the need for such studies in Russia, where historical jurisprudence was still in its infancy. Incidentally, Speranskii had long advocated the writing of a complete history of the Russian law as a way to understand the roots and principles of the legal tradition in Russia. He tried to initiate a publication of historical studies within the framework of the codification project but these plans did not materialize during his tenure.30 The book was published three years after Kunitsyn’s death, when his brother-in-law discovered among his papers a completed manuscript and brought it to Balug’ianskii’s attention.31 Despite its title, the Historical Study presented little historical context and virtually no attempt at philosophical analysis of the

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underlying principles of Russian law, but it was a pioneering work in its field that contained interesting comparisons to the Varangian and Anglo- Saxon laws and was supported with careful quotations from the original sources. As one can surmise from the plentiful margin notes left by the nineteenthcentury readers on some of the extant copies, the book attracted the attention of both jurists and historians, especially those parts of it that deal with the Novgorodian Public Assembly (Veche). Parallel to his public service, Kunitsyn found employment as a legal and economic advisor to the Stroganov family, which owned about 34,000 serfs and ranked among the wealthiest serfowners in Russia.32 Along with Sofia Stroganov he drafted a law code for her estates, which presupposed a measure of peasants’ self-administration and material incentives for those serfs who found new ways to make profits. Instructions of this sort were not uncommon among the wealthy landlords, who sought to practice what one researcher called “enlightened seigniorialism” inspired by the idea of the well- ordered state.33 Most of them appeared in Russia between 1750 and 1830, Stroganov’s being the last one in 1837. For its time it was a progressive code, although as an embodiment of the paternalistic type of seigniorial rule that aimed at keeping serfs obedient and productive, the code reflected the interests and attitudes of the landlord rather than Kunitsyn’s own views. Here, as in his public service, Kunitsyn had to follow the superior’s will, putting aside his own convictions.34 If Melton is correct in his appraisal of enlightened seigniorialism, Kunitsyn must have seen little benefit from implementing the Instruction. Without the removal of managerial supervision and traditional communal practices, the law codes proved largely ineffective as tools of economic stimulation. Although Kunitsyn never returned to university teaching, he lived to enjoy the moment of academic rehabilitation. In 1838 St. Petersburg University made Kunitsyn an honorable member of the faculty “in grateful remembrance of his accomplishments and in respect for his present activities.”35 Finally, a completion of Kunitsyn’s “excellent service” in the Second Chancellery was marked in 1839 with a reward of hereditary land ownership and 4,000 rubles (about twice the yearly salary of a university teacher).36 The next year he was appointed director of the Department of Foreign Confessions, but he died unexpectedly in July 1840, apparently from a stroke, at the age of fifty-seven.37

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Conclusion

In many respects Kunitsyn was an odd figure among the liberals of his time. As a law professor in prestigious institutions and intermittently a journalist, he had a public voice that could be heard by a wide audience but not by the government circles where the course of reforms was decided. He shared the liberal bureaucrats’ aspiration for constitutionalism and the abolition of serfdom, but Kunitsyn, a son of a sexton, never truly became a part of the liberal group that formed around the brothers Turgenev, who sought to use their social connections and proximity to the tsar to advance liberal causes. It is hardly coincidental that Kunitsyn was the only academician in the company of the government officials and army officers whom Nicholas Turgenev gathered in his short-lived “Society of the Year 1819.” On the other hand, Kunitsyn’s academism was a safer ground from which he was able to preach liberal values. For this reason, Kunitsyn came out of his academic “trial” relatively unharmed, while Nicholas Turgenev, aspiring for a more activist stance, ended up under a death sentence for his relatively brief and uneventful affiliation with the Decembrist societies. Kunitsyn’s courses and writings on natural law marked an important watershed in Russian academic philosophy. He started teaching at a time when the Wolffian tradition of absolutist natural law, long established in Russia, began to give way to Kantian philosophy in the courses of visiting German professors, who still dominated Russian universities in the early nineteenth century. The publication of their academic textbooks improved the quality of legal training in Russia and helped spread the idea of the rule of law among the educated public; however, German Kantians tended to dilute Kant’s philosophy with the ideas that harked back to the cameralist and absolutist traditions. They accepted the concept of reason as a capacity for self-governing in human beings but 193

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overlooked its social and political implications; they proclaimed Kant’s categorical imperative but not his demand for the equality of opportunity and the abolition of hereditary privileges. It was Kunitsyn who brought out the individualistic implications of Kantian philosophy in his Natural Law. Leaving behind the cameralist notion of the common good, which he learned as a student, Kunitsyn embraced the idea that the rights and interests of autonomous individuals set boundaries on the power of the state and society as a whole. In fact, Kunitsyn took Kant’s concept of moral autonomy a step further when he argued that the individual’s freedom of expression should stretch as far as the right to voice erroneous or unconventional views, provided that this behavior does not harm other people. To our knowledge, he was the first thinker in Russia to raise a concern about the constraints on individual freedom posed by social traditions and expectations. It was a remarkable stance for a person who came from a family of a churchman and was initially trained to preach traditional norms of social and religious morality. A person of obscure social origin who made his way into the upper ranks of the Russian society through his own talents and hard work, Kunitsyn must have found the philosophy of liberal individualism congenial to his own life experience. It was his good fortune that the government, seeking to raise cadres of native teachers, provided educational opportunities for talented students from the lower orders. The rationale of those behind this policy was mainly to improve the quality of education in Russia rather than provide an avenue for social advancement to the people from non-noble classes, but for Kunitsyn the principles of equal opportunity and freedom to choose one’s profession came to be associated with man’s natural rights—the rights that he claimed for everyone. His dislike of flattery and any form of kowtowing, which struck his students as unusual, was also in keeping with the notions of human dignity and moral autonomy that Kunitsyn preached in his works. Toward the end of Alexander I’s reign the idea of educating people from low classes, especially the freed serfs, came increasingly under attack by the conservatives. This shift in attitude and fears about rising liberalism in Europe made Kunitsyn’s views on natural equality look subversive. Yet, he remained true to his convictions even when an apologetic letter could have helped his teaching career after the expulsion from the university.

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Kunitsyn’s critique of serfdom and the regulatory economy stemmed from the same concern for the individual’s right to shape his destiny. He was a convinced Smithian, believing that security of private property, the spirit of competition, and entrepreneurial liberty for all social classes would enhance individual well-being while benefiting society in general. His ideal was a society of selfmotivated independent individuals enjoying equal opportunities for material betterment—a far cry from the serfdom-based economy in Russia where economic privileges and activities depended on one’s social status. Writing as he did in the early nineteenth century when the workers’ movement in Western Europe was still in its infancy, Kunitsyn had not yet envisaged any harmful effects of the free market economy that would trouble some of the liberals in the later period. During the years he was active as a writer, the anti- capitalist arguments came mainly from the camp of conservative serfowners, who maintained that the patriarchal bonds between the landlords and the peasants would save Russia from social upheavals and economic instability. Kunitsyn’s position, by contrast, was grounded in individualistic values and firmly opposed to any paternalistic theories. He was convinced that peasants’ enforced dependency on the landlords was responsible not only for low economic productivity but also for poor morals and laziness among the peasants. On the other hand, his faith in the benefits of the free market was somewhat naïve, albeit not surprising for an academician who had little exposure to the realities of serfdom. Although Kunitsyn was not a reformist—a role traditionally reserved to the nobility close to the tsar—he did attempt to spread liberal ideas beyond the classroom to a wider Russian audience. His articles in the Syn Otechestva sought to create public support for the idea of constitutional reforms, the rule of law, and the abolition of serfdom against the rising voice of conservative opinion in Russia. In 1818 he hailed Alexander I’s liberal policy in Poland as another sign of his reformist intentions, despite the widespread nationalistic resentment among Russians against Napoleon’s erstwhile ally. At the same time, unlike many of his liberal-minded contemporaries, Kunitsyn had always been reluctant to praise the tsar personally, even when Alexander I enjoyed the reputation of a liberal monarch. There was a strong sense in his works that written constitutions should come as recognition of people’s entitlements and not as a favor on the part of a monarch.

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Quite understandably, Kunitsyn’s journalistic statements about the desirable political reforms in Russia were more cautious than the ideas implied by his social thought. At the same time, given the censorship constraints, it is difficult to determine how much of what Kunitsyn wrote in the Syn Otechestva reflected his political self-moderation and how much was simply modified by the censors without his wish. It appears that he was content to see in Russia a representative assembly with an advisory rather than legislative function, viewing civil rights as more important than political freedoms. He accepted the principle of property qualification with respect to political rights but firmly rejected the view, expressed by many conservatives, that the Russian people were not ready to enjoy the benefits of the constitutional order. His articles also made clear that all individuals, irrespective of their social origin, should be entitled to civil freedoms, including the right to own property. Kunitsyn was not against the principle of social distinctions and privileges but he thought that they should be granted for individual accomplishments rather than because of ancient ancestry. In this he was more straightforward than the liberals of noble background, who often had difficulty reconciling their liberal ideas with their hereditary privileges. Even if Kunitsyn had to exercise some caution when writing about constitutional reforms, his emphasis on the priority of civil over political rights was quite in keeping with his liberal individualism, which rested on the assumption that modern society valued negative freedom above the right to participate in political affairs. For other liberals too, civil rights, including the freedom of private pursuits, were a higher priority than the right to have a representative government. In their correspondence, both Viazemskii and Alexander Turgenev lamented the government’s refusal to put a distinction between private and public domains, rightly viewing the absence of civil society and respect for the individual as the most despotic feature of the Russian autocracy. They were indignant that nothing and nobody in Russia could escape the omnipresent eye of the government. Their concern, however, was more about the educated upper class, whereas Kunitsyn tended to view the problem from a non-partisan universalist standpoint. For him the right of individual autonomy was a necessary extension of the natural human right for personal dignity and the use of one’s mental and physical capacities.

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Conclusion 197

Kunitsyn, it appears, never anticipated that his career as a philosopher and university professor would end so abruptly. In publishing Natural Law he was encouraged by the liberal changes, especially the principle of academic autonomy for the universities, proclaimed in 1804. Even after his expulsion from the university, Kunitsyn refused to believe that he had done something wrong, nor could he bring himself to apologize, as was the custom with disgraced public servants. The reaction against his book and natural law as an academic discipline illustrated how little the principle of university autonomy came to be respected in practice. Nevertheless, within the short period in which Kunitsyn was active as a writer and teacher, he contributed to the development of liberal consciousness in Russia by disseminating the notions of legal equality, civil rights, individual autonomy and economic freedom. Some of his students came to interpret these ideas in different ways, in line with their own temperament and political expectations, but the enlightening impact of Kunitsyn’s teaching undoubtedly played its role in their political education. Among his students were such loyal government officials as Prince Gorchakov and, at the other end of the spectrum, some of the Decembrists, who took his ideas to the level of revolutionary theory and practice. His most famous student—defiant but unrevolutionary Pushkin—came to occupy a middle ground typifying the aspirations of the reform-minded liberals, much like Kunitsyn himself. The changes introduced in the disciplines of natural law and philosophy after Kunitsyn’s “trial” significantly affected the quality of philosophical education in Russian universities. For about ten years the long- outdated Wolffian philosophy made its way back to university classrooms. However, it was too late to undo what was in the making for almost two decades. With a better knowledge of foreign languages and the growing fashion for private reading and intellectual socializing, many students found ways to learn the ideas of European thinkers and discuss them in the privacy of their homes. If not formal courses, the informal exchange of ideas continued to create at the universities a milieu that was conducive for the spread of liberal attitudes among a wide sector of the educated public in Russia. By the mid-1830s history began to repeat itself: the government realized that resuming the program

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of training abroad was necessary in order to arrest the decline of higher education in Russia; yet, as in Kunitsyn’s early years, this policy once again inadvertently stimulated the flow of Western ideas into Russia.

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Notes Introduction 1. Marc Raeff, “Les Slavs; Les Allemands et les ‘Lumières,” Canadian Slavic Studies 1, no. 4 (1967): 521–51. See also idem, “The Well- Ordered Police State and the Development of Modernity in Seventeenth-and Eighteenth Century Europe,” in Mark Raeff, Political Ideas and Institutions in Imperial Russia (Oxford: Westview Press, 1994), 317–22; On natural law in Russia, see also Thomas Nemeth, “Kant in Russia: The Initial Phase,” Studies in Soviet Thought 36, no. 1 (1988): 79–110; “Kant in Russia: The Initial Phrase (Cont’d),” Studies in Soviet Thought 40 (Dec 1990): 293–338; A. N. Kruglov, Filosofiia Kanta v Rossii v kontse XVIII–pervoi polovine XIX vekov (Moscow, 2009). 2. See Derek Offord, Portraits of Early Russian Liberals: A Study of the Thought of T. N. Granovsky, V. P. Botkin, P .V. Annenkov, A. V. Druzhinin and K. D. Kavelin (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985), 3; Laura Engelstein, Slavophile Empire: Imperial Russia’s Illiberal Path (Cornell University Press: Ithaca, 2009), 4. 3. See, for instance, the biographies of Timofei Granovskii and Boris Chicherin, Offord, Portraits of Early Russian Liberals, 45–105; Priscilla Roosevelt, Apostle of Russian Liberalism: Timofei Granovsky (Newtonville, Mass.: Oriental Research Partners, 1986); G. M. Hamburg, Boris Chicherin and Early Russian Liberalism, 1828–1866 (Stanford University Press, 1992). 4. On the lack of interest in the bourgeois values among the Russian liberals, see Derek Offord, “ ‘Lichnost’: Notions of Individual Identity,” in Constructing Russian Culture in the Age of Revolution: 1881–1940, eds. Catriona Kelly and David Shepherd (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), 15; Frances Nethercott, “Russian Liberalism and the Philosophy of Law,” in A History of Russian Philosophy, 1830–1930, G. M. Hamburg and Randall Pool, eds. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 256; Richard Wortman, “Property Rights, Populism, and Political Culture,” in Civil Rights in Imperial Russia, eds. Olga Crisp and Linda Edmondson (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989), 14. It is, however, an exaggeration to say, as Szamuely did, that “Russian political literature, from Radishchev to Lenin, contains not a single work on legal theory, constitutionalism, the rights of man, the natural law or kindred subjects.” See T. Szamuely, The Russian Tradition (London: McGraw-Hill, 1974), 171. Andrzej Walicki convincingly argued that among the mid-to-late-nineteenthcentury thinkers there were a number of legal philosophers who made the defense of law and property right central to their writings. See Andrzej Walicki, Legal Philosophies of Russian Liberalism (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1987). On the philosophy of individualism in the West, see Steven Lukes, Individualism (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1973). 5. On the dichotomies on the Slavophiles’ and Westernizers’ thought, see G. M. Hamburg and Randall Poole, “The Humanist Tradition in Russian Philosophy,” in A History of Russian Philosophy, 11–13; Offord, “Alexander Herzen,” in ibid., 52–68; idem, “ ‘Lichnost’,” 20; Leonard Schapiro, “Liberalism in Russia,” in

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6. 7. 8. 9.

10. 11.

12.

13.

14.

Notes to Pages 4–6 idem, Russian Studies, ed. Ellen Darrendorf with an introduction by Harry Willetts (London: Collins, 1986), 47. See Offord, “ ‘Lichnost’,” 15. For Russia’s social history, see Elise Kimberling Wirtschafter, Social Identity in Imperial Russia (Dekalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 1997). For the gentry’s attitude toward serfs, see Esther Kingston-Mann, In Search of True West (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999), 51, 83–5. F. N. Smirnov, “Obshchestvenno-politicheskie i pravovye vzgliady A. P. Kunitsyna” (Kandidat. Diss., Moscow, 1966), 19. See also idem, “Delo russkogo prosvetitelia pravoveda A. P. Kunitsyna,” Vestnik Moskovskogo Universiteta, 1964, no. 1:63–5; idem, “A. P. Kunitsyn i dekabristy,” Vestnik Moskovskogo Universiteta, 1961, no. 5:60–9; idem, “Mirovozzrenie A. P. Kunitsyna,” Vestnik Moskovskogo Universiteta, 1963, no. 5:74–85. A. F. Zaitsev, Mirovozzrenie A. P. Kunitsyna. Avtoreferat dissertatsii (Moscow, 1951), 3, 9. Z. A. Kamenskii, Filosofskie idei russkogo prosveshcheniia (Moscow, 1971), 44, 46, 49. 55. For similar remarks, see I. Ia. Shchipanov, Filosofiia russkogo prosveshcheniia (Moscow, 1977), 247, 250, 252. Other Soviet historians of the 1960s and 1970s tried to avoid such labels, but their articles on Kunitsyn, treating as they are only selected aspects of his work, do not amount to a comprehensive examination of his ideas. See V. N. Speranskii, “Sotsial’no-politicheskie vzgliady A. P. Kunitsyna,” Uchenye zapiski Gor’kovskogo gosudarstvennogo Universiteta 72 (1964): 823–88; I. I. Solodkin “Ugolovno-pravovye vozzreniia A. P. Kunitsyna,” Vestnik Leningradskogo Universiteta, 1966, no. 11:122–7; N. M. Mikhailovskaia, “A. P. Kunitsyn v zhurnale Syn Otechestva,” Voprosy istorii i teorii literatury, 1966, no. 11:165–70; N. Iu. Kalitkina, “A. P. Kunitsyn—professor Peterburgskogo universiteta,” Vestnik Leningradskogo Universiteta, Seriia Ekonomika, Filosofiia, Pravo, 1969, no. 5:147–9; N. Ia. Kuprits, “A. P. Kunitsyn—uchitel’ Pushkina i pravoved,” Sovetskoe gosudarstvo i pravo, 1978, no. 3:106–12. The best biography of Kunitsyn in Russian is an article-length study by M. A. Liubavin, Litseiskie uchitelia Pushkina i ikh knigi (St. Petersburg, 1997), 25–71; See also Iu. D. Margolis and G. A. Tishkin, Edinym vdokhnoveniem. Ocherki istorii universitetskogo obrazovaniia v Peterburge v kontse XVIII-pervoi polovine XIX veka (St. Petersburg, 2000), 133–49; O. A. Iatsenko “A. P. Kunitsyn: nevostrebovannoe nasledie,” Veche, 1995, no. 2:25–41. The term “early liberalism” is now often applied to the era of Nicholas I. See Anthony Netting, “Russian Liberalism: The Years of Promise: 1842–1855” (PhD diss., Columbia University, 1967); Derek Offord, Portraits of Early Russian Liberals. By contrast, Hamburg associates the same period with protoliberalism. He argues that “Russian liberalism in the programmatic sense did not exist before 1855. Earlier, the leading doctrines of Russian social thought were Westernism and Slavophilism.” See G. M. Hamburg, Boris Chicherin,11. Leaving aside a contentious issue of the chronology of Russian liberalism, these are excellent studies that reveal the richness and complexity of Russian intellectual life in the mid-nineteenth century. In his recent review of Russian and Anglophone historiography of Russian liberalism, Konstantin Shneider also identifies mid 1850s as “the early stage in the development of Russian liberalism.” See, Konstantin Shneider, “Was There an “Early Russian Liberalism”? Perspectives from Russian and Anglo-American Historiography,” Kritika 7, no. 4 (2006): 825–41. On Speranskii’s liberalism see John Gooding, “The Liberalism of Michael Speransky,” The Slavonic and East European Review 64, no. 3 (1986): 401-24.

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Notes to Pages 6–9

15.

16.

17.

18. 19. 20.

21.

22.

23.

24. 25. 26. 27. 28.

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Leontovitch in his pioneering work on Russian liberalism was primarily interested in the enlightened monarchs and reforming bureaucrats. See V. V. Leontovitch, Geschichte des Liberalismus in Russland (Frankfurt-am-Main, 1957), also published in Russian, Istoriia liberalizma v Rossii 1762–1914 (Paris, 1980). See James Flynn, The University Reform of Tsar Alexander I 1802–1835 (Washington: The Catholic University Academic Press, 1988), 110; Cynthia Whittaker, The Origins of Modern Russian Education: An Intellectual Biography of Count Sergei Uvarov, 1786–1855 (Dekalb, Ill: Northern Illinois University Press, 1984), 78, 81. Barry Hollingsworth, “A. P. Kunitsyn and the Social Movement in Russia under Alexander I,” Slavonic and East European Review 43, no. 100 (1964): 116–28. Marc Raeff, “Some Reflections on Russian liberalism,” Russian Review 18, no. 3 (1959); William H. Chamberlin, “The Short Life of Russia Liberalism,” Russian Review 26, no. 2 (1967); As Medushevskii put it, “it is much more interesting to study the history of liberalism than the history of liberals, that is the real contribution of liberal ideology into creating a new society and its political institutions.” See A. N. Medushevskii, Istoriia Russkoi sotsiologii (Moscow, 1993), 110–111. In Russian scholarship, the ideology of liberalism is often associated with the capitalist phase of Russian economy. See, for instance, V. Pustarnakov, Liberalizm v Rossii (Kazan’, 2002), 20–1. For a detailed review of Russian scholarship on the history of liberalism, see V. Shelokhaev, “Russian Liberalism in Terms of Historiography and Historiosophy,” Social Sciences 30 (June 1999) online via CIAO www.ciaonet.org. Marc Raeff, “Some Reflections on Russian liberalism,” 226. Chamberlin, “The Short Life of Russia Liberalism,” 144. My understanding of Western liberalism is shaped by the works of Willson H. Coates and Hayden V. White, The Ordeal of Liberal Humanism: An Intellectual History (New York: McGraw-Hill Book Company, 1970), 3–51; and John Gray, Liberalism (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1995). For similar views, see V. Shelokhaev, “Russian Liberalism in Terms of Historiography and Historiosophy,” Social Sciences 30, no. 2 (1999) online via CIAO www.ciaonet.org. The idea that liberal-minded intellectuals in Russia were able to “implicitly challenge the official obscurantism” was developed by Derek Offord. See Offord, xi. Based on these criteria, he classified K. Kavelin as a Westernizer rather than liberal. See Daniel Field, “Kavelin and Russian Liberalism,” Slavic Review 32, no. 1 (1973): 59–78. Field also proposed a destriptive approach, while rejecting the validity of the term “liberal.” See Ibid. Netting, 10. Ibid., 12. Offord, xiii. Some steps in this direction were made in Russian scholarship. See E. L. Rudnitskaia, “Aleksander Ivanovich Turgenev,” in Rossiiskie liberaly, eds. B. S. Itenberg and V. V. Shelokhaev (Moscow, 2001), 15–52; P. V. Akulshin, P. A. Viazemskii: Vlast’ i obschestvo v dorevolutsionnoi Rossii (Moscow, 2001); D. Osipov, Filosofiia russkogo liberalizma XIX–nachalo XX v. (St. Petersburg, 1996); A. V. Gogolevskii, Ocherki istorii russkogo liberalisma XIX–n.XX v. (St. Petersburg, 1996); The fact that Walicki in his pioneering study of legal philosophers omitted to mention any thinkers of the early nineteenth century inadvertently strengthened the current view of the lateness of Russian liberal tradition.

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29. See Coates and White 2:6.

1 Formative Years 1. P. A. Nikolaev, ed., Russkie pisateli 1800–1917. Biograficheskii slovar’ (Moscow, 1994), 3:229. 2. Gregory L. Freeze, The Russian Levities: Parish Clergy in the Eighteenth Century (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1977), 22, 34, 37; P. V. Znamenskii, Dukhovnye shkoly v Rossii do reformi 1808 (St. Petersburg, 2001), 550–1, 555. 3. Freeze, The Russian Levities, 89. 4. P. V. Znamenskii, 567, 563–4. 5. M. A. Liubavin, 26. 6. On the clergy’s income and living status, see V. A. Fedorov, Ruskaia pravoslavnaia tserkov’ i gosudarstvo v sinodal’nyi period (1700–1917) (Moscow, 2003), 40–1. 7. Znamenskii, 761, 753–4; Freeze, The Russian Levities, 95, 110. 8. Freeze, The Russian Levities, 90–4. In the eighteenth century, the average salary of the upper-level teacher was sixty rubles; of the lower level, twenty to thirty rubles; Znamenskii, 663, 268–30. Even in the early nineteenth century, when allowance was substantially increased, living and study conditions in many seminaries were shockingly poor. See, for instance, the memoirs of the village priest Ivan Beliustin in Fedorov, 351–68. 9. Znamenskii, 677. 10. Znamenskii, 471–601. 11. V. Kolosov, Istoria Tverskoi dukhovnoi seminarii (Tver’, 1889), 144, 240. 12. The reminiscences of Konstantin Arsen’ev, Kunitsyn’s future colleague in the Pedagogical Institute, who went through the years of study in Kostroma Ecclesiastical Seminary in the early nineteenth century, provide a good illustration of the level of teaching in provincial seminaries. He wrote, “Teachers were favorable to me but I acquired little knowledge. The reason for that was ignorance and inability of the teachers. They . . . taught what they themselves had learned in twenty, thirty years . . . used old textbooks and forced us to memorize everything by heart . . . only frequent exercises in composition and knowledge of the German language were of benefit to me in the later years.” See P. Pekarskii, Istoricheskie bumagi K. I. Arsen’eva (St. Petersburg, 1872), 2. 13. A. F. Abramov, “Khristian Vol’f v russkoi dukhovno-akademicheskoi filosofii,” in Khristian Vol’f i filosofiia v Rossii, ed. A. V. Zhuchkov (St. Petersburg, 2001), 190, 198; [Ch. Baumeister] Kh. Baumaistera metafizika (Moscow, 1764). It was republished in 1789 and 1894. A revised edition appeared in 1809. [idem.] Nravouchitel’naia filosofiia, soderzhashchaia estestvennoe pravo, etiku, politiku, ekonomiiu i drugie veshchi, dlia znaniia nuzhnye i poleznye, trans. D. Sin’kovskii (Moscow, 1788); [idem] Khristiana Baumeistera nravouchitel’naia filosofiia v pol’zu blagorodnogo iunoshestva (Moscow, 1788). 14. Similarly, Baumeister’s textbook on metaphysics contained in a condensed form Wolffian Ontology, Cosmology, Psychology and Natural Theology. Unlike Wolff’s other disciples in the eighteenth century, Baumeister was rather an uncritical Wolffian, whose major objection concerned Wolff’s idea of preestablished harmony, which Baumeister tended to treat as no more than a hypothesis. See Abramov, 200, 197.

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Notes to Pages 15–19 203 15. For an analysis of Wolffian philosophy, see Lewis W. Beck, Early German Philosophy: Kant and His Predecessors (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1969), 256–75; Ian Hunter, Rival Enlightenments: Civil and Metaphysical Philosophy in Early Modern Germany (Cambridge University Press, 2001), 266–70; Charles A. Corr, “Christian Wolff and Leibniz,” Journal of the History of Ideas 36, no. 2 (1975): 241–62. 16. [Ch. Baumeister] Nravouchitel’naia filosofiia (Moscow, 1788), 245, 292. 17. On educational reforms, see James T. Flynn, The University Reform of Tsar Alexander I 1802–1835 (Washington: The Catholic University Academic Press, 1988), 20–8; William H. Johnson, Russia’s Educational Heritage (New York: Octagon, 1969), 63–87, 109–33. 18. Znamenskii, 585. 19. [Rossiia. Ministerstvo narodnogo prosveshcheniia] Sbornik postanovlenii po ministerstvu narodnogo prosveshcheniia (St. Petersburg, 1864), 2:187 (henceforth cited as Sbornik postanovlenii). The Institute accepted one class every three years and, starting from 1806, every four years. By the fourth admission, students’ social background became more heterogeneous. On the Teacher’s Gymnasium and Institute, see M. F. Shabaeva, Ocherki istorii shkoly i pedagogicheskoi mysli narodov SSSR XVIII–pervaia polovina XIX v (Moscow, 1973), 275–6; Johnson, 109–33; Iu. D. Margolis and G. A. Tishkin, Otechestvu na pol’zu, a Rossianam na slavu. Iz istorii universitetskogo obrazovaniia v Peterburge v XVIII–nachale XIX v (Leningrad, 1988), 3–4. 20. TsGIA(SPb), f. 13, op.1, d. 86, ll. 1–4; d. 145, ll. 1–11; d. 115, ll. 1–10. 21. TsGIA(SPb), f. 13, op. 1, d. 189, l. 1. 22. One of such complaints was met with an explicit prohibition of beating the students issued to the steward (econom). See TsGIA(SPb), f. 13, op. 1, d. 184, ll. 1–1ob. 23. TsGIA(SPb), f. 13, op. 1. d. 147, l. 1. The case is dated by 1806 when Russia entered the fourth anti-Napoleonic coalition, which increased the need for recruits. In 1811 the Ministry of Education officially announced that this measure could be applied to state-supported students in any Russian institution. See Sbornik postanovlenii 1:632. 24. Sbornik postanovlenii 1:222, 223–4. 25. Ibid. 224. 26. TsGIA(SPb), f. 14, op. 1, d. 71, 1. 1. 27. TsGIA(SPb) f. 13, op. 1, d. 260, ll. 1–4. 28. M. I. Sukhomlinov, Issledovaniia i stat’i po russkoi literature i prosveshcheniu, 2 vols. (St. Petersburg, 1889), 1:60–1; Flynn, The University Reform, 122. 29. Sbornik postanovlenii 1:215–19. 30. Ibid., 206. 31. David Edwards, “Count Joseph de Maistre and Russian Educational Policy, 1803–1828,” Slavic Review 36, no. 1 (1977): 55. 32. Sbornik postanovlennii 1:206–7. 33. Kosachevskaia’s statement that professors of “Karpato-Ruthinian” origin were able to teach in Russian needs to be qualified. See E. M. Kosachevskaia, M. A. Balug’ianskii i Peterburgskii universitet pervoi chetverti XIX veka (Leningrad, 1971), 73. Indeed, professor of philosophy from L’vov University Petr Lodii and professor of law Kukol’nik from Zamost’e Lyceum had no difficulty teaching in Russian, but Balug’ianskii’s Russian in those years was far from satisfactory, as attested by Alexander Turgenev. See Arkhiv brat’ev Turgenevykh,

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34.

35.

36.

37.

38. 39. 40. 41.

42.

Notes to Pages 20–21 ed. E. Tarasov, 6 vols. (St. Petersburg, 1911–1921), 2:404. The Iinstitute also had French- and German-speaking professors who taught in their native languages. The archive of the institute contains many documents penned by foreign faculty at one time or another, all of which were written in French or German. For a biography of P. Lodii and V. Kukol’nik, see T. Baitsura, Zakarpatoukrainskaia intelligentsia v Rossii v pervoi polovine XIX veka (Priashev, 1971), 27–54. Sbornik postanovlenii 1:216. On Sonnenfels, see Robert A. Kann, A Study in Austrian Intellectual History (London: Thames and Hudson, 1960), 146–258. For cameralist ideas in Russia, see Marc Raeff, “The Well- Ordered Police State,” 319–21. Esther Kingston-Mann, “In the Light and Shadow of the West: The Impact of Western Economics in Pre-Emancipation Russia,” Comparative Studies in Society and History 33, no. 1 (1991): 95–6. For reception of Smith’s ideas in nineteenthcentury Russia, see also Susan P. McCaffray, “What Should Russia Be? Patriotism and Political Economy in the Thought of N. S. Mordvinov,” Slavic Review 59, no. 3 ( 2000): 575–82; Roderick McGrew, “Dilemmas of Development: Baron Heinrich Friedrich Storch (1766–1835) on the Growth of Imperial Russia,” in Adam Smith Across the Nations Translations and Perceptions of Wealth of Nations, ed. Cheng- chung Lai (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 288–9; Andrei Anikin, “Adam Smith in Russia” in Adam Smith: International Perspectives, ed. Hiroshi Mizuta and Chunei Sugiyama (New York: St. Martin Press, 1993), 252–4. Balug’ianskii published some of his lecture material in The Journal of Statistics (Statisticheskii Zhurnal). These articles contain his lectures on the ideas of mercantilists, physiocrats, and Smith. The (unpublished) lectures of his student Arsen’ev also provide some information about the nature of Balug’ianskii’s course. See M. Balug’ianskii, “O natsional’nom bogatstve,” “Stat’ia teoreticheskaia o razdelenii i oborote bogatstva,” Statisticheskii Zhurnal, Vol. 1–2 (St. Petersburg, 1806–1807). For Balug’ianskii’s biography and analysis of Arsen’ev’s lecture notes, see E. M. Kosachevskaia, M. A. Balug’ianskii i Peterburgskii universitet,; idem, “M. A. Balug’ianskii v Peterburgskom universitete,” in Ocherki po istorii Leningradskogo universiteta, ed. N. G. Sladkevich (Leningrad, 1962), 39–67. Statisticheskii zhurnal 1, pt. 2:38. Cf. Smith’s definition of slavery, which he applied to Russia and other parts of Eastern Europe: “Whatever cultivation and improvement could be carried on by means of such slaves, was property carried on by their master . . . The seed, the cattle, and the instruments of husbandry were all his . . . such slaves could acquire nothing but their daily sustenance.” Adam Smith, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, ed. R. Campbell and A. S. Skinner, 2 vols (Indianapolis: Liberty Classics, 1979), 1:387. Statisticheskii zhurnal 1, pt. 1:33–5, 76. Kosachevskaia, “M. A. Balugianskii,” 46–8. Ibid., 51; Susan Smith-Peter, “Defining the Russia People: Konstantin Arsen’ev and Russian Statistics before 1861,” History of Science 45, no. 1 (2007): 47–64. See A. Nikitenko, “Alexander Ivanovich Galich byvshii professor filosofii v Peterburgskom universitete,” Zhurnal Ministerstva Narodnogo Prosveshcheniia CXLI (1869): 5. Istoricheskie bumagi, 6.

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Notes to Pages 21–24 205 43. Nikitenko, “Alexander Ivanovich Galich,” 4–5. 44. Istoricheskie bumagi, 5; TsGIA (SPb), f. 13, op.1, d. 249, ll.1–17. 45. TsGIA(SPb), f. 13, op. 1, d, 577, l. 1. The titles of the textbooks, which Lodii was supposed to use, were not specified in the instructions. According to Fel’dshtein, it was Martini, De Lege naturali Positiones (Vienna, 1782) and [F. Zeiller] F. Tseiler, Chastnoe Estestvennoe pravo (St. Petersburg, 1809). See G. S. Fel’dshtein, “Glavnye techeniia v istorii prava Rossii,” Vremennik Demidovskogo Iuridicheskogo litseia 103 (Yaroslavl’, 1910), 492. See also Baitsura, 130. On Martini, see Michael Hebeis, Karl Anton von Martini (1726–1800), Leben und Werk (Frankfurt-am-Mein, 1996), 54–63, 69–107; Mathew W. Finkin, “Menschenbild: The Concept of the Employee as a Person in Western Law,” Comparative Labor Law and Policy Journal 23, no. 4 (2002): 611; Paul Silverman, “The Cameralist Roots of Menger’s Achievement,” in Carl Menger in His Legacy in Economics, ed. Bruce Caldwell (Durham: Duke University Press, 1990), 79. On Martini’s textbook in Russia, see Chapter 5. 46. See V. V. Grigor’ev, S. Peterburgskii universitet v techenie pervykh piatidesiati let ego sushchestvovaniia (St. Petersburg, 1870), 12–13. Lodii’s own textbook on natural law published in 1828 relied heavily on Martini’s textbook. For more on Martini and Zeiller in Russia, see Chapters 5 and 7. 47. To compare, the annual salary of a full professor at the university was 2,000 rubles. 48. TsGIA(SPb) f. 13, op. 1, d. 260, l. 1–3. 49. TsGIA(SPb), f.13, op. 1, d. 231, l, 4. 50. Semen Desnitskii and Ivan Tret’iakov were among the most famous beneficiaries of this program in the second half of the eighteenth century. Both became professors of Moscow University and early disseminators of A. Smith’s ideas in Russia. See Norman W. Taylor, “Adam Smith’s First Russian Disciple,” in Adam Smith Across Nations, 248–61; A. N. Brown, “The Father of Russian Jurisprudence: The Legal Thought of S. E. Desnitskii,” in Russian Law in Historical Perspective, ed. E. Butler (Leyden: A. W. Sijthoff, 1977), 117–42. 51. One student wrote: “Since that time the thought of going abroad entered my mind. This thought was my favorite dream throughout all my student years. It stimulated my diligence. I made every effort to excel my classmates.” This student was selected to study abroad in 1810, but the trip was cancelled because of the financial difficulties prior to the Napoleonic Wars. See Pekarskii, 4, 8. 52. Sbornik postanovlenii 1:461. 53. TsGIA(SPb) f. 13, op. 1, d. 231, ll. 91–5. 54. Ibid. l. 93. 55. P. M. Maikov, Vtoroe otdelenie sobstevennoi ego Imperatorskogo Velichestva kantseliarii 1826–1882 (St. Petersburg, 1906), 60; P. M. Maikov, “Speranskii i studenty zakonovedeniia,” Russkii Vestnik 263 (August 1899), 680. 56. Shabaeva, 275. 57. On the fate of M. Plisov, professor of political economy, and A. Galich, professor of philosophy, see Flynn, The University Reform, 112. 58. The only book-long study of N. Turgenev in Western scholarship is the unpublished doctoral dissertation written more than forty years ago by B. Hollingsworth. See B. Hollingsworth, “Nicholas Turgenev: His Life and Works” (Ph.D. Diss., Cambridge University, 1966). Russian scholarship on Turgenev dates back to the early Soviet period and is considerably flawed in a typical

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59. 60. 61.

62. 63. 64.

65. 66. 67. 68.

69. 70.

71. 72.

Notes to Pages 24–25 Marxist manner. See E. Tarasov, Dekabrist N. I. Turgenev v Aleksandrovskuu epokhu (Samara, 1924); A. N. Shebunin, N. I. Turgenev (Moscow, 1925); A. N. Shebunin, “Brat’ia Turgenevy i dvorianskoe obshchestvo Aleksandrovskoi epokhi,” in Dekabrist N. I. Turgenev Pis’ma, ed. N. G. Svirin (Moscow, 1936), 5–86. See Arkhiv brat’ev Turgenevykh 1:132–3, 139. Ibid. 325, 333. See TsGIA(SPb), f. 13, d. 623, l.1–3. Despite his own financial difficulties, Kunitsyn asked Alexander Turgenev, Nicholas’s older brother, to establish a monthly allowance of ten rubles for his brother in St. Petersburg, which Kunitsyn was to repay to Nicholas to avoid losses in sending money from abroad. Arkhiv brat’ev Turgenvykh contains Kunitsyn’s letter to Alexander Turgenev where he thanked him for news about his brother (of whom he heard nothing for two years and already considered him deceased), and asked Alexander to “alleviate the fate of the unfortunate young man.” Kunitsyn’s brother studied in the seminary but was conscripted into the army for his hot temper and lack of diligence. Nevertheless, Kunitsyn wrote warmly about his brother, trying to justify his behavior. See Arkhiv brat’ev Turgenevykh 1:328–9. Alexander helped to find for Kunitsyn’s brother (who could no longer serve in the army because of his injuries) a small position in A. Arakcheev’s chancellery and provided the monthly allowance, but Nicholas refused to accept Kunitsyn’s money, knowing that he himself “has very little to live on.” See Arkhiv brat’ev Turgenevykh 1:394, 361, 364, 368, 370, 376. Ibid. 267, 298, 392, 272, 331. Ibid. 267; and similar statements, ibid. 203, 208. N. Turgenev recorded his recurring feelings of boredom, anguish (toska), and suffering ever since he began his diary in 1806 (that is, two years before his departure for Germany) and long after his return. Far from being an objective description of his otherwise comfortable life punctuated with regular social diversions, this experience was an expression of the sublime sensibility, which presupposed an element of purifying and enlightening moral suffering. “It is only through sufferings,” he wrote, “that a man can learn the value of future life and the emptiness of present [existence]. Having accustomed to endure and suffer, he necessarily learns to despise Fortuna’s inconstancy, [he] learns to philosophize and through that, finds consolation for his misfortunes and becomes happier.” See Arkhiv brat’ev Turgenevikh 1:6. Ibid. 213. Ibid. 305. Arkhiv brat’ev Turgenevykh 2:25–6; 29, 42. Ibid. 42. The vice-rector’s unflattering opinion of German students was not unwarranted. Both Alexander and Nicholas (several years later) indignantly noted that many students used to sleep even at the interesting lectures. See Arkhiv brat’ev Turgenevykh 1:372; 2:29. Ibid., 1:267. His brother Alexander was less affected by this prejudice. In one of his letters to Alexander, Nicholas, speaking of Germans in his usual tone, wrote: “You seem to have lived long enough in Germany but still love this people.” Ibid. 331. Ibid. 337. Ibid. 334.

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73. Ibid. 296–7. 74. Ibid. 270, 279, 305. 75. “Last Sunday Sergei arrived and my desert bloomed. I asked him a lot of questions about Russia and from all [he said] I can see that . . . everything humiliated itself (sic) and is humiliated, everything is in awful and most strange disarray.” See Arkhiv brat’ev Turgenevykh 1:270. 76. Ibid. 296. 77. M. L. Wischnitzer, Die Universität Göttingen und die Entwicklung der liberalen Ideen in Russland im ersten Viertel des 19. Jahrhunderts (Berlin, 1907), 17–39. 78. E. Tarasov, “Russkie Gettingentsy v pervoi chetveti XIX veka i ikh vliianie na razvitie liberalizma v Rossii,” Golos Minuvshego (July 1914): 195–209. 79. Keith Tribe, Governing Economy: the Reformation of German Economic Discourse 1750–1840 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), 133–182. 80. David Lindenfeld, The Practical Imagination: the German Sciences of State in the Nineteenth Century (Chicago: University of Chicago, 1997), 61–2. 81. Arkhiv brat’ev Turgenevykh 1:361, 362, 379, 396. See also Dekabrist N. I. Turgenev. Pis’ma, 238–43. 82. Quoted from Tarasov, “Russkie Gettingetsy,” 208. 83. Lindenfeld, 61. 84. For Heeren’s treatment of English history, see Charles E. McClelland, The German Historians and England: A Study in Nineteenth Century Views (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1971), 35–7. 85. Arkhiv brat’ev Turgenevykh 1:362; Heeren’s lectures “on the history of last three centuries” were published as a textbook. In the introductory chapter, which impressed Turgenev so much, Heeren elaborated on the subject of history as he understood it, his methods of historical investigation, and major principles governing the history of “states-system.” A. H. L. Heeren, A Manual of the History of the Political System of Europe and Its Colonies, 5th ed. (London, 1833), 5–12. 86. “No doubt the temptation is great for a minister to obtain a majority by any means in his power; but what must that nation at last have become, whose representatives were nothing more than a herd of men for sale!” Ibid., 266. 87. Ibid., 252. 88. Arkhiv brat’ev Turgenevykh 1:207–8. 89. For a shift in political sentiments, see James Sheehan, German History 1770– 1866 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989), 211–18, 360–1; Charles E. McClelland, 28–9. 90. According to Peter Reill, it was during his stay in Russia in the years 1761–7 that he developed a critical stance toward absolute monarchy. Upon returning, in addition to his teaching activity, he engaged in a publication of the political journal, Staatsanzeigen, which contributed to the emergence of “a public mind” in Germany. The journal fell prey to the preventative policy of suppression undertaken by German governments in 1794. See Peter H. Reill, The German Enlightenment and the Rise of Historicism (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1975), 139–40. See also Frederick Hertz, The Development of German Public Mind (New York: Macmillan Company, 1962), 409–14; Sheehan, 199. 91. Alexander Turgenev described his impressions of Schlözer’s lecture on tyranny in his diary. He wrote, “After he ascribed rights and duties to both the ruler and the subjects, after he admitted rebellions in case of tyranny, [and]

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208 Notes to Pages 29–32

92.

93. 94.

95. 96.

97. 98. 99.

100.

2

even allowed people to punish their ruler, after that, following common sense . . . he assuaged his meek students by saying that . . . this action is always accompanied by such a danger that it is better to endure [the tyranny] until Providence itself wishes to free people from the iron scepter.” Arkhiv brat’ev Turgenevykh 2:240. On historical school of jurisprudence, see J. M. Kelly, A Short History of Western Legal Theory (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992), 320–3; N. M. Korkunov, General Theory of Law (New York: A. M. Kelley, 1968), 143–52. Wischnitzer, 35. In addition to having some personal animosity toward Hugo for his treatment of students (the details of which Turgenev left out of his account), he was deeply disappointed by the quality of Hugo’s lectures on natural and Roman law and rarely spared him an abusive word in his diary. Arkhiv brat’ev Turgenevykh 1:226, 239, 284, 292. On Hugo, see G. P. Gooch, History and Historians in the Nineteenth Century (London, 1952), 39. Korkunov, 148–50. Contrary to Wischnitzer’s argument, Turgenev’s sense of justice, which ultimately led him to advocate abolition of serfdom, did not originate from his studies in Göttingen. Entries made by Turgenev in his diary a year before his departure for Germany unmistakably show that he was deeply concerned about the ignorance of the Russian people, social injustice, poverty, and even maltreatment of animals (a sensitivity uncommon in Russia at that time). Arkhiv brat’ev Turgenevykh 1:31–2, 61, 74. Arkhiv brat’ev Turgenevykh 1:327. Turgenev frequented auctions to buy secondhand books. Arkhiv brat’ev Turgenevykh, 2:484. TsGIA(SPb), f. 13, op. 1, d. 970, l. 1. In a letter to his brother Nicholas, Alexander Turgenev mentioned that “Kunitsyn gave me to read Flasson, whose book is now impossible to buy here, equally so in Paris.” Arkhiv brat’ev Turgenevykh 2:484. Turgenev apparently meant the book by Gatton de Ranis de Flasson, Histoire générale et raisonnée de la diplomatie française; ou de la politique de la France depuis la fondation de la monarchie jusqu’a la fin du regne de Lois XVI (Paris, 1811). Arkhiv brat’ev Turgenevykh 2:296.

Years in the Tsarskoe Selo Lyceum 1. TsGIA(SPb), f.13, op.1, d. 934, ll. 1–3ob. 2. The requirements were set up in the “Regulations concerning the Lyceum (in Tsarskoe Selo)”: “In appointing teachers and other staff, a great caution should be exercised concerning their morality in addition to the required professional qualities, so that they guided youth by their examples and instruction . . . ” See Sbornik postanovlenii 1:558. 3. TsGIA(SPb), f.13, op. 1, d. 886, l. 2. On his way to Russia, Kunitsyn wrote Turgenev a letter in which he mentioned, albeit in a rather light tone, that he was broke. Arkhiv brat’ev Turgenevykh 1:415. 4. Sbornik postanovlenii 1:557. 5. B. Meilakh, Pushkin i ego epokha (Moscow, 1958), 25–6. Razumovskii was influenced by the ideas of conservative-minded Count Joseph de

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Notes to Pages 32–35 209

6.

7. 8. 9.

Maistre, who came to Russia as the Sardinian envoy and succeeded in spreading Catholicism and the fashion for Jesuit education among the Russian elite in St. Petersburg. According to Edwards, Maistre’s activity marked the beginning of the drift toward a more conservative political line, which, among other causes, resulted in Speranskii’s fall. Edwards, 68–9. On the Lyceum’s curriculum, see also M. Raeff, Michael Speransky: Statesman of Imperial Russia, 1772–1839 (The Hague, Martinus Nijhoff, 1957) 59–64; A. Sinel, “The Socialization of the Russian Elite, 1811–1917. Life at the Tsarskoe Selo Lyceum and the School of Jurisprudence,” In Russian History 3 (1976): 26–7. See K. Ia. Grot, Pushkinskii Litsei (St. Petersburg, 1998), 137; Meilakh, 46; P. Ferretti, A Russian Advocate of Peace: Vasilii Malinovskii (1765–1814) (London: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1999), 84. Sbornik postanovlenii 1:557–8. Sbornik postanovlenii 1:560–1. Ibid. 567.

10. P. V. Annenkov, Pushkin v Aleksandrovskuu epokhu (1874; reprint, Minsk, 1998), 37–8; Sinel, 20–1. Among those whose poesy was published in contemporary journals were A. Del’vig, V. Kiukhel’beker, and A. Illichevskii. For their biographies, see M. Rudenskaia and S. Rudenskaia, Oni uchilis’ s Pushkinym (Leningrad, 1976). Many other students tried composing verses, which they presented in the Lyceum’s handwritten journals edited by students themselves. Their literary output is available in Grot, Pushkinskii litsei, 187–401. 11. The letter of S. L. Pushkin to Prince Viazemskii is published in Grot, Pushkinskii litsei, 137. 12. D. L. Schlafly, “True to the Ratio Studiorum? Jesuit Colleges in St. Petersburg,” History of Education Quarterly 37, no. 4 (1997): 428. 13. Kunitsyn, Nastavlenie vospitannikam chitannoe pri otkrytii Imperatorskogo Tsarskosel’skogo litseia (SPb., 1811). Reprinted in Antologiia pedagogicheskoi mysli Rossii pervoi poloviny XIX v., ed. M. I. Kondakov (Moscow, 1987), 147–53. 14. I. I. Pushchin, Zapiski o Pushkine (Moscow, 1979), 36. 15. Antologiia pedagogicheskoi mysli, 141. 16. Ibid., 141. 17. Ibid. 18. Ibid., 142. 19. Liubavin, 29. On Alexander’s liberal views in the early part of his reign, see E. E. Roach, “The Origin of Alexander I’s Unofficial Committee,” Russian Review 28, no. 3 (1969): 315–26. 20. TsGIA(SPb), f. 3727, d.11, op.1, l. 3. 21. Liubavin, 29. 22. Pushchin, 37. 23. L. N. Maikov and B. L. Modzalevskii (eds), Al’bom Pushkinskoi iubileinoi vystavki (Moscow, 1899), 19. 24. According to the undocumented words of the future tsar Nicholas I cited by Seleznev, the Lyceum owed its privileged status to the idea of educating Alexander I’s brothers in some formal institution rather than by means of traditional private tutoring. However, according to one explanation, in 1811, as the relations with Napoleon worsened, the tsar’s thoughts turned in a different direction. According to another version, the plan did not materialize because of the empress’s unwillingness to allow grand dukes

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25.

26. 27. 28. 29.

30.

31. 32.

33. 34. 35. 36.

37. 38.

Notes to Pages 35–36 to mingle with young people of lower social origin. I. Seleznev, Istoricheskii ocherk imperatorskago byvshego tsarskosel’skogo nyne aleksandrovskago litseia za pervoe ego piatidesiatiletie s 1811 po 1861 god (St. Petersburg, 1861), 16; D. Kobeko, Imperatorskii Tsarskosel’skii litsei, nastavniki i pitomtsy 1811–1843 (St. Petersburg, 1911), 2. Postanovlenie o Litsee (St. Petersburg, 1810), 34. With the encouragement of E. Engel’gardt, students developed an interest in gardening, which served both as a recreational and educational activity. See I. Seleznev, 174. Pushchin, 42. Seleznev, 177. Tsarskoe Selo is located some sixteen miles south of St. Petersburg. In the Jesuit College, students had individual rooms, which were equipped with a special peeping hole for surveillance. In the words of one of the students, “every minute a searching eye of the tutor appeared in the door opening, making even the most modest and diligent student tremble.” See Annenkov, 45. The recollections of lyceist A. Illichevskii contrast markedly with the experience of the Jesuit students: “Thank God! At least liberty reigns here (and liberty is a golden thing!), there is no boring requirement to sit a ses places . . . we associate with our superiors without fear, [we] joke and laugh with them.” For Illichevskii’s letters, see Grot, Pushkinskii litsei, 74. How lenient the authorities were to the students could be judged from the episode described by I. Pushchin in his memoirs. Along with Pushkin and Malinovskii (a son of the first director), Pushchin procured a bottle of liquor, which they shared with other students. Their excessively cheerful behavior did not go unnoticed. The three of them took all blame on themselves, and although the news about this misdeed reached the Minister of Education, students received a mild punishment. They were obliged to kneel during the morning and evening prayers; during the meal they were moved to the farthest end of the table, and, finally, their names were put on the “black record.” However, due to the intercession of Engel’gardt, this episode did not result in lower graduation rank. See Pushchin, 47–50. Sinel, 8–9, 13, 15. Sinel, 11. For a full list of items that students received, see Seleznev, 178–9. Friendship formed by many of the lyceists lasted a lifetime. As their correspondence testifies, they continued to support each other morally and, whenever necessary, materially. In 1852, lyceist Matiushkin, by that time a well-known marine explorer, collected money to buy a piano for Pushchin’s daughter. Deeply touched, Pushchin wrote in reply that it was the first piano in their distant Siberian town. See M. Rudenskaia and S. Rudenskaia, 110. Pushchin, 44. Sbornik postvanovlenii 1:558. Meilakh, 36; Ferretti, 199. A. G. Bolebrukh, Kritika feodal’no-krepostnicheskogo stroia v trudakh russkikh i ukrainskikh prosvetitelei XVIII–nach XIX v. (Dnepropetrovsk, 1988), 39–48; Ferretti, 145–77. V. F. Malinovskii, “Iz dnevnika,” in Russkie prosvetiteli ot Radishcheva do dekabristov, ed. I. Shchipanov (Moscow, 1966), 1:260–1. Malinovskii’s recent biographer believes otherwise, seeing the appointment of Kunitsyn and other liberal-minded professors as proof of Malinovskii’s liberalism. See Ferretti, 186, 199. However, the right to recruit faculty belonged to minister Razumovskii, who chose Kunitsyn upon the recommendation of

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39. 40. 41.

42.

43.

44. 45. 46. 47. 48. 49. 50.

51.

52. 53.

54. 55. 56. 57. 58. 59. 60. 61.

the Pedagogical Institute at about the same time as Malinovskii was offered his position. Students’ memoirs are also silent about Malinovskii’s political liberalism. See TsGIA(SPb), f. 13, op. 1, d. 934, ll.1–3. See Grot, Pushkinskii litsei, 50. Pushchin, 44. Four hundred to six hundred copies of it appeared weekly from 1812 to 1829. See L. N. Stepanov, “Kritika i zhurnalistika dekabristskogo dvizheniia,” in Ocherki po istorii russkoi zhurnalistiki i kritiki, ed. P. N. Berkov et al. (Leningrad, 1950), 1:199–210. “Who are the allies of Russian people,” one author asked, “the first is God . . . the second are freedom, Fatherland and honor . . . the third are courage, anger and revenge, the fourth allies are quiet players . . . ” See Syn Otechestva 1, no. I (1812): 10. Kutuzov’s report about substantial Russian losses and the impossibility of holding the Borodino area had been intentionally removed from the official announcement. See A. G. Tartakovskii, Voennaia publitsistika 1812 goda (Moscow, 1967), 58–61; Eugene Tarle, Napoleon’s Invasion of Russia 1812 (London, 1942), 97–8. A. Kunitsyn, “Poslanie k russkim,” Syn Otechestva 1, no. V (1812): 174, 175. On Rostopchin, see Tartakovskii, 156–7. A. Kunitsyn, “Poslanie k russkim,” 179. Ibid., 181. Tarle, 182, 214–218, 235. A. P. Kunitsyn, “Zamechaniia na nyneshniuiu voinu,” Syn Otechestva 2, no. VIII (1812): 51–2. Kunitsyn, moreover, twisted the allegory for his purposes. Comparison with the lion is hardly appropriate, since according to the biblical story, Samson killed the lion in self- defense when the beast attacked him. In reply to Engel’gardt’s first letter to Siberia, Pushchin wrote: “I am so grateful to you for your attention to my poor sisters after my misfortunes, news about your visit to them was of great consolation to me and a proof of your friendship . . . I often recall your words that it is easy to live when life is good but one has to be content when life is hard.” See Pushchin, 90. Ibid., 57; T. J. Binyon, Pushkin: A Biography (London: Harper Collins Publishers, 2002), 22–3. Ibid., 62. Pushchin specifically mentions that he was their “frequent guest.” Evidently, students of the upper year were allowed occasional leaves from the Lyceum. On Koloshin, see S. V. Mironenko (ed). Dekabristy: Biograficheskii spravochnik (Moscow, 1988), 82–3. M. Rudenskaia and S. Rudenskaia, 67. One student was expelled in 1813 on suspicion of homosexuality. See Binyon, 20 n. Lengthy excerpts of this report are available in B. Bazanov, Vol’noe obschestvo liubitelei rosskiiskoi slovestnosti (Petrozavodsk, 1949), 176. Modzalevskii discovered the identity of the writer by his handwriting. See B. L. Modzalevskii, Pushkin i ego sovremenniki (St. Petersburg, 1999), 87. For the full text of the memo, see Modzalevskii, 88–96. Kobeko, 262–6. Pushkin’s acquaintance with hussars found expression in a number of his early verses. See V. Tomashevskii, Pushkin, 2 vols (Moscow, 1990), 1:85. Kobeko, 100–1.

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62. TsGIA(SPb), f. 13, op.1, d. 59, l. 2. The report did not specify titles of the books, only the names of the authors. It included, among others, the names of Jakob, Schmalz, Hufeland, and Klein. 63. TsGIA(SPb), f. 11, op. 1, d. 2a, ll.14, 30. 64. K. Ia. Grot, Pushkin, ego litseiskie tovarishchi i nastavniki (St. Petersburg, 1899), 228. 65. TsGIA(SPb), f.11, op. 1, d. 3727, l. 18; On Jakob, see Franklin A. Walker, “The conservative face of a radical Kantian in Prussia and Russia: the case of Ludwig Heirich von Jakob (1759–1827),” Germano- Slavica (2002): 3–15. For more on Jakob’s publications in Russia, see Chapter 5. 66. Annenkov, 33. 67. “Our professors,” one student recalled, “assigned much . . . copying out by itself took much time and was most boring.” See K. Ia. Grot, Pushkinskii litsei, 45. 68. TsGIA(SPb), f. 11, op.1, d. 3727, l. 4. 69. TsGIA(SPb), f.11, op.1, d. 59, l.2. 70. TsGIA SPb, f. 11, op. 1, d, 3727, l. 6. 71. Liubavin, 30. 72. Pushchin, 52. 73. His classmate Illichevskii wrote an epigram hinting that a well-born prince does not need to study so hard. “Have fun, mon Prince, why study? / run away from books like from trouble / why must you struggle with the book / the hell with it, you are your excellency / diamonds and money you have / isn’t it enough to get the ranks . . . ” Another anonymous epigram said: “O, vanity of vanities! / O, when you lose your pen, you, first scribbler of the Lyceum! / You will lose your sight, what then will happen to you.” Quoted from B. Meilakh, “Introduction,” in “Litseiskie lektsii po zapisiam A. M. Gorchakova,” Krasnyi akrhiv 80, no. 1 (1937), 74–5. Translation is mine. 74. These lectures were first published in a slightly abridged form in 1937. See “Litseiskie lektsii (po zapisiam A. M. Gorchakova),” Krasnyi arkhiv 80, no. 1 (1937), 75–129. “Encyclopedia of rights” was also published in Izbrannye sotsial’no-politicheskie i filosofskie proizvedeniia dekabristov, ed. I. Shchipanov (Moscow, 1951), 1:591–654. 75. See, for instance, Balug’ianskii, “O natsional’nom bogatstve,” in Statisticheskii Zhurnal, Vol. 1, pt. II, 38. 76. “Litseiskie lektsii,” 124. 77. Ibid., 121. 78. “Litseiskie lektsii,” 121. 79. Meilakh, 43. 80. Esther Kingston-Mann, In Search of True West (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999), 46, 65–6; Kingston-Mann, “In the Light and Shadow of the West,” 95–6. See also Susan P. McCaffray, 581–5. 81. On barshchina and obrok, see Jerome Blum, Lord and Peasant in Russia from the Ninth to the Nineteenth Century (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1961), 394, 572. 82. McCaffray, 591–4. 83. For the attitude toward protectionism and Russia’s economic conditions, see Pustarnakov, Liberalism v Rossii, 44. 84. Brothers Turgenev and Prince Viazemskii serve as an example. See Chapter 4.

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Notes to Pages 48–51 213 85. 86. 87. 88.

89. 90.

91. 92.

93. 94. 95. 96. 97. 98. 99.

100.

TsGIA(SPb), f. 11, op. 1, d. 64, l. 1. See Tribe, 28–34, 119–49; Lindenfeld, 55–66. TsGIA(SPb), f. 13, op.1, d. 59, l. 2. Schmalz served at the University of Königsberg (1789–1803), University of Halle (1803–6), and the University of Berlin (1807–10). He was one of the first in Germany to incorporate Kantian ideas into his textbooks and courses, but his acceptance of Kant, although more evident in his later works, remained limited due to his political caution. He was initially reform-minded, supporting the emancipation of serfs and efforts at economic modernization undertaken by the government of Stein. However, after the Napoleonic Wars, he took up a conservative position in the controversy over the course of the reform program, rejecting the need for further liberalization of Prussia’s political order. On Schmalz’s reception of Kant, see Hans- Christof Kraus, Theodor Anton Heinrich Schmalz (1760–1831) (Frankfurt-am-Main: Vittorio Klostermann, 1999), 305, 331; See also Tribe, 160; Marlon W. Grey, “Prussia in Transition: Society and Politics under the Stein Reform Ministry of 1808,” Transactions of the American Philosophical Society 76, no. 1 (1986): 38. Kunitsyn must have used Schmalz’s, Das Natürliche Staatsrecht (Königsberg, 1794). Further references will be to this edition. This mode of discourse originated from Wolffian works. According to Knud Haakonssen, “Wolff presents the three basic forms of state as if they all in principle can be morally legitimate under natural law. This points to the formalism of the Latin work in which the fundamental question is not one of moral goodness or badness of state forms but of juridical fact, namely what can parties in a given form of state be said to have ‘agreed’ in a ‘contract’?” See K. Haakonssen, “German natural law,” in The Cambridge History of Eighteenth Century Political Thought, eds. Mark Goldie and Robert Wokler (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 1:275. Quoted from Kraus, 400. “Litseiskie lektsii,” 109. The term “postanovleniia” appeared, for instance, in Alexander I’s famous speech in the Polish Seim. See N. N. “O sostoianii inostrannykh krest’ian,” Syn Otechestva 45, no. XVII (1818): 184. See also Chapter 3. Schmalz, Das Natürliche Staatsrecht, 115. It was the distinction between morality and law that the German critics of Schmalz found lacking in his works. See Kraus, 309. “Litseiskie lektsii,” 91–2. See Schmalz, Das Natürliche Staatsrecht, 19–39. “Litseiskie lektsii,” 93. Ibid., 102. This part bears close resemblance to Schmalz’s chapter “Hypothetical State Law”; however, they are not identical. For instance, if Schmalz identifies the end of the state in general terms—as “security of the people,” Kunitsyn is more explicit about the duty of the sovereign to respect people’s rights. See Schmalz, Das Natürliche Staatsrecht, 63. “Litseiskie lektsii,” 110. Compare Schmalz’s definition of tyranny: “The sovereign has the duty to provide the security of the state and each individual subject.” “If somebody becomes a sovereign for the purposes that are not the ends of the state, this constitutes the highest abuse—a tyranny.” Schmalz, Das Natürliche Staatsrecht, 63.

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101. “Litseiskie lektsii,” 108, 103. The provision about the right to social privileges as conditioned by the service to the state is borrowed from Schmalz. The segments about legal equality and publicity of the law are similar in both works. See Schmalz, Das Natürliche Staatsrecht, 80–3. 102. Ibid., 107. 103. Kant, The Metaphysics of Morals, 100. 104. Ibid. 105. “Litseiskie lektsii,”108; Cf. Schmalz, Das Natürliche Staatsrecht, 106–7. 106. Kunitsyn, “Izobrazhenie vzaimnoi sviazi,” in Russkie prosvetiteli 2:177. 107. On Kant’s view of the sciences of state, see Lindenfeld, 56–7. 108. Kunitsyn, “Izobrazhenie,” 178. 109. Ibid., 180. 110. Ibid. To compare, Kant argued that “a state has only a negative right to prevent public teachers from exercising an influence on the visible political commonwealth that might be prejudicial to public peace.” See Kant, The Metaphysics of Morals, 102. 111. Ibid., 187–8. 112. Ibid. 113. A. Pushkin, “19 Oktiabria,” in A. Pushkin, Polnoe sobranie sochinenii (Moscow, 1994), 2, pt. 2, 918. Translation is mine. 114. On Pushkin’s political views, see S. L. Frank, Etiudy o Pushkine (Munich, 1957), 28–57; Leonard Schapiro, Rationalism and Nationalism in Russian Nineteenth- Century Political Thought (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1967), 53–8; J. Thomas Shaw, “Introduction,” in The Letters of Alexander Pushkin Three Volumes in One, trans. J. T. Shaw (Madison: The University of Wisconsin Press, 1967), 37–40; C. Whittaker, Introduction to Alexander Pushkin, Epigrams and Satirical Verse, ed. Cynthia Whittaker (Ann Arbor: Ardis Publishers, 1984), 1–7; Stephenie Sandler provides insightful literary analysis of Pushkin’s exile poetry. In deconstructing his use of rhetorical devices, she also makes some comments on his understanding of the poet’s civic responsibility. See Stephanie Sandler, Distant Pleasures: Alexander Pushkin and the Writing of Exile (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1989). 115. Pushkin, Polnoe sobranie sochinenii 2, pt. 1, 43–4. Translation is mine. 116. Ibid., 82. Translation is mine. Sandler argues that in “The Village” and some of his later verses Pushkin explores the question of the poet’s civic responsibility and his chances of affecting political cause. According to Sandler, “The Village” (which she translates as “The Countryside”) “introduces the poetics of Pushkin’s verse . . . where the questions of oppression and expression are posed so distantly that, despite the clarity of Pushkin’s political vision, the resulting verse can sound provocative, fine and persuasive, yet safe.” See Sandler, 25. Although “The Village” did not occasion the tsar’s displeasure (see later), it was not safe enough to be published in Russia. Given the government’s ban on public discussion of serfdom (See Chapter 3), Pushkins’s “Village” was an act of conscious opposition. 117. Ibid., 83. 118. Quoted from Binyon, 55. 119. See Whittaker, Introduction to Alexander Pushkin, 24. In the verse, Pushkin mentions Ivan Gorgoli, chief of St. Petersburg police. See Ibid. 120. Pushkin, Polnoe sobranie sochinenii 2, pt. 1, 66. Translation is mine. 121. Tomashevskii, 1:35.

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Notes to Pages 58–60 215 122. Robin Edmonds, Pushkin The Man and His Age (London: Macmillan, 1994), 46. 123. Two notebooks recently discovered in Per’m and identified (by the handwriting) as Kunitsyn’s contained Pushkin’s “The Village” and “Ode. Liberty” along with the verses of other liberal-minded poets. The last entry in these notebooks was made in 1825. A historian who discovered and identified them believes that after the Decembrist uprising Kunitsyn removed them from his St. Petersburg apartment out of precaution. See A. G. Nikitin, Sekretnaia rukopis’ Pushkina (Moscow, 1992), 219–37. 124. Sbornik postanovlenii 1:829–74. 125. According to the decree of 1809, those officials who were entitled to these ranks by the seniority of their service and “perfect recommendations of his superior” had to pass university examinations in four disciplines—philology; law, including natural, roman, and private civil law; history, both national and European; and mathematical and physical sciences. See Sbornik postanovlenii 1:510–17. 126. M. Nechkina, ed., Vosstanie dekabristov (Moscow, 1984), 18:164. 127. TsGIA, f. 11, op.1, d. 3727, l.l., 6–7.

3

Kunitsyn in the Son of Fatherland 1. See Alexander Martin, Romantics, Reformers, Reactionaries. Russian Conservative Thought and Politics in the Reign of Alexander I (Dekalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 1997), 8–10; Joseph Bradley, “Subjects into Citizens, Civil Society, and Autocracy in Tsarist Russia,” The American Historical Review 107, no. 4 (2002): 1095–6. 2. Lina Bernstein, “Women on the verge of a new language: Russian salon hostess in the first half of the nineteenth century,” in Russia—Women—Culture, eds. E. Goscilo and B. Holmgren (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1996), 223. 3. F. F. Vigel’, Zapiski (Moscow, 1928), 2:157. 4. For instance, behind the controversy over the Russian literary style that raged between Alexander Shishkov and Nicholas Karamzin there was the thorny question of Russia’s national identity and her relation to European enlightenment. See Martin, 15–38. 5. N. Turgenev, “V tainom obshchestve,” in Izbrannye sotsial’no-politicheskie i filosofskie proizvedeniia dekabristov 1:224. 6. Vigel’, 154. 7. S. I. Murav’ev-Apostol, “Pokazaniia,” in Izbrannye sotsial’no-politicheskie i filosofskie proizvedeniia dekabristov, 2:199. 8. V. A. Sollogub, Vospominaniia (Moscow, 1999), 37. 9. The correspondence between Viazemskii and Alexander Turgenev, which they kept from 1812 to 1845, fills four thick volumes. Pushkin left a collection of more than 600 letters, a large part of which was addressed to Viazemskii and Alexander Turgenev. The letters of Nicholas Turgenev to his brothers Alexander and Sergei comprise three volumes. See Ostaf’evskii arkhiv kniazei Viazemskikh, ed. V. I. Santov. Vols. 1–4 (St. Petersburg, 1899– 1913); Dekabrist N. I. Turgenev. Pis’ma k bratu S. I. Turgenevu, ed. N. G. Svirin (Moscow, 1936); Arkhiv brat’ev Turgenevykh, Vols. 1, 3, 5., also reprinted in

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216

10. 11.

12. 13. 14. 15. 16.

17. 18.

19.

20. 21.

22. 23. 24. 25.

26.

Notes to Pages 61–64 Dnevniki i pis’ma Nikolaia Ivanovicha Turgeneva, ed. E. Tarasov, 3 vols. (Leipzig, 1976); The Letters of Alexander Pushkin Three Volumes in One, trans. J. T. Shaw (Madison: The University of Wisconsin Press, 1967). See, for instance, Ostaf’evskii arkhiv 1:102–3, 105–7, 137, 169, 222. For instance, when Viazemskii approached the tsar with a proposition to authorize a society for discussing the issue of emancipation, Nicholas Turgenev received the news about it from his brother Alexander. He then wrote to Viazemskii: “We all read your wonderful letter to my brother with great pleasure . . . your thoughts about emancipation of serfs are in full agreement with the opinion of those people who think about this issue here [in Russia].” See Ostaf’evskii arkhiv 2:21. For similar exchanges, see ibid. 1:117, 121, 170, 180; Pushkin, The Letters, 65, 87, 104, 107, 109. L. N. Brodskii, Literaturnye salony i kruzhki n.n. XIX v (Moscow, 1951), 92–6; Kobeko, 255; on Ponomareva’s salon, see also Bernstein, 211. See Tomashevskii, 1:130. Elise Kimberling Wirtschafter, “Russian Legal Culture and the Rule of Law,” Kritika: Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History 7, no. 1 (2006): 62. Andrew Verner, The Crisis of Russian Autocracy: Nicholas II and the 1905 Revolution (Princeton University Press: New Jersey, 1990), 49. See Richard Wortman, The Development of a Russian Legal Consciousness (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1976), 15–16; George Yaney, “Law, Society and the Domestic Regime in Russia, in Historical Perspective,” The American Political Science Review 59, no. 2 (1965): 386–7. Verner, 53. The impression of the tsar’s omnipotence is strongly conveyed by the memoirs of Viazemskii and Nicholas Turgenev. Yaney argues that the same approach was practiced at all levels of the government, with personal connections or bribes being a better means of achieving justice than proceeding through regular legal practices. See Yaney, 380, 383, 385. M. A. Fonvizin, “Iz zapisok,” in Izbrannye sotsial’no-politicheskie i filosofskie proizvedeniia dekabristov 1:372. On the military colonies, see David Saunders, Russia in the Age of Reaction and Reform 1801–1881 (Longman: London, 1992), 80–1, 246. Saunders, 59–61, 70–1. Elise Kimberling Wirtschafter, Social Identity in Imperial Russia (Dekalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 1997), 30; Yaney, 384. In his letters to Dmitriev, Karamzin mentioned the story of one noblewoman who was accused of tax evasion and sentenced to hard labor contrary to the conditions of the Charter to the Nobility. Her sentence was revoked only after Karamzin had solicited the tsar about her case. See N. Karamzin, Pis’ma k I .I. Dmitrievu (St. Petersburg, 1866), 261–2. Saunders, 59. Ostaf’evskii arkhiv 2:56; also, 73. Ibid. 1:350; Ibid. 2:65; Pushkin often complained about lost letters. See for instance, Pushkin, The Letters, 82, 107. To this Viazemskii replied: “Send me the verses. Why are you such a coward? I am not afraid of anything or anyone . . . It is all right that the walls might not only see and hear but talk.” See Ostaf’evskii arkhiv 1:335, 342. Thomas Shaw, Introduction, 36. See, for instance, The Letters of Alexander Pushkin, 82, 89, 147.

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Notes to Pages 65–69 217 27. On the 1804 censorship statute, see Charles A. Ruud, Fighting Words: Imperial Censorship and the Russian Press, 1804–1906 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1982), 26–30. The literature on Russian journalism in the early nineteenth century, both in English and Russian, is scarce. Far more attention has been paid to the later periods, when Russian journalism became more mature and professional. See A. I. Komarov, “Zhurnalistika i kritika 1800–1810x godov,” in Ocherki po istorii russkoi zhurnalistiki 1:155–74; William Mills Todd III, “Periodicals in literary life of the early nineteenth century,” in Literary Journals in Imperial Russia, ed. Deborah A. Martinsen (Cambridge University Press, 1997), 37–41. 28. On Karamzin’s journalism, see A. Cross, “N. M. Karamzin’s ‘Messenger of Europe’ (Vestnik Yevropy), 1802–3,” Forum for Modern Language Studies 5, no. 1 (1969): 1–22. 29. Samuel Ramer, “Vasilii Popugaev, the Free Society of Lovers of Literature, Sciences and the Arts, and the Enlightenment Tradition in Russia,” CanadianAmerican Slavic Studies 16, no. 16 (1982): 506–8; Allison Blakely, “American Influences on Russian Reformist Thought in the Era of the French Revolution,” Russian Review 52, no. 4 (1993): 465–6. 30. A. V. Zapadov, ed., Istoriia Russkoi zhurnalistiki XVIII–XIX vekov (Moscow, 1963), 109–12. 31. Ibid., 112. 32. Ibid., 116, 127. On Shishkov, see Martin, 26–27, 116–17. 33. Syn Otechestva 35, no. IX (1817): 2–3. 34. Vestnik Evropy 92, no. 7 (1817): 229; ibid., 96, no. 6 (1817): 74–6. In 1817 Syn Otechestva enthusiastically welcomed the upcoming establishment of the constitutional monarchy in Württemberg, where Alexander’s sister reigned as the consort of the king. It offered its readers a detailed account of the Württemberg constitution, which listed many civil freedoms unknown in Russia. See Syn Otechestva 35, no. I (1817): 28; ibid., 36, no. 12 (1817): 2; ibid., 36; ibid., no. 21 (1817): 2–3. 35. Syn Otechestva 41 (1817): 259. 36. Syn Otechestva 41 (1817): 260. 37. “Vzgliad na 1817 god,” Syn Otechestva 43, no. I (1818): 43. 38. Ostaf’evskii arkhiv 2:53. 39. Ibid., 28. Kamchatka is a region in the Russian Far East. 40. Ibid. 1:107–8; For similar remarks, see Ibid. 2:26, 148. 41. Ibid. 2:56, 73. 42. The speech is available in Ostaf’evskii arkhiv 1:472-75. Viazemskii was officially commissioned to translate it from French into Russian. 43. Ibid. 1:476. 44. Allen McConnel, Tsar Alexander I Paternalistic Reformer (Illinois: Harlan Davidson, Inc., 1970), 153. 45. Turgenev, “V tainom obshchestve,” in Izbrannye sotsial’no- politicheskie i filosofskie proizvedeniia dekabristov 1:225. One of the future Decembrists, Sergei Murav’ev- Apostol, confessed during the investigation that Alexander’s intentions regarding the enlargement of Poland caused the members of the “Union of Welfare” to contemplate for the first time the idea of killing the tsar. See Sergei Murav’ev- Apostol, “Pokazaniia,” Izbrannye sotsial’no- politicheskie i filosofskie proizvedeniia dekabristov 2:194, 203.

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46. A. Kunitsyn, “O Konstitutsii,” Syn Otechestva 45, No. XVIII (1818): 202. The title page features both Kunitsyn’s name and his academic title. 47. Ibid., 202–3. 48. See B. Fontana, Introduction to Political Writings, by B. Constant (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), 20–2, 40–1. Kunitsyn was a perceptive reader to discern Constant’s theory of modern liberty from his early writings before Constant expressed it in a more coherent form. 49. Kunitsyn, “O Konstitutsii,” 204. 50. Ibid., 205. 51. Ibid. 52. Ibid., 205–6. 53. Ibid. 54. Ibid., 210. 55. Quoted from Fontana, Introduction, 40. 56. Karamzin, Pis’ma, 236. 57. On the fate of the constitutional projects in Alexander I’s reign, see Raeff, Michael Speransky, 35–8; 137–67. 58. On the Polish constitution, see Frank W. Thackeray, Antecedents of Revolution Alexander I and the Polish Kingdom, 1815–1825 (New York: Boulder, 1980), 17–18. 59. On Uvarov’s political views, see Cynthia Whittaker, The Origins of Modern Russian Education, 34–56. 60. Kunitsyn, “Rassmotrenie rechi G. Prezidenta Akademii Nauk i Popechitelia Sanktpeterburgskogo Uchebnogo okruga, proiznesennoi im na publichnom torzhestvennom sobranii Glavnogo Pedagogicheskogo Institute 22 marta 1818 goda,” Syn Otechestva 46, no. XXIII (1818): 137. 61. Nicholas Turgenev, who read the early draft of this article, later commented in his letter to Sergei that “censorship distorted a lot” in it. See Turgenev, Pis’ma, 263. 62. S. Uvarov, Rech’ prezidenta Imperatorskoi Akademii nauk [S. S. Uvarova] popechitelia Sanktpeterburgskogo uchebnogo okruga v torzhestvennom sobranii Glavnogo Pedagogicheskogo instituta, 22 marta 1818 g. (St. Petersburg, 1818), 3. 63. [Kunitsyn], “Rassmotrenie rechi,” 139. 64. Ibid., 146. 65. Uvarov, 5. 66. [Kunitsyn], “Rassmotrenie rechi, (okonchanie),” 174–5. 67. S. Uvarov, Rech’ prezidenta Imperatorskoi Akademii nauk [S. S. Uvarova] popechitelia Sanktpeterburgskogo uchebnogo okruga (St. Petersburg, 1818), 39. 68. Kunitsyn, “Rassmotreniie rechi G. Prezidenta Akademii Nauk i Popechitelia Sanktpeterburgskogo Uchebnogo okruga, proiznesennoi im na publichnom torzhestvennom sobranii Glavnogo Pedagogicheskogo Institute 22 marta 1818 goda (okonchanie),” Syn Otechestva 46, no. XXIV (1818): 189–90. 69. Ruskoi dvorianin Pravdin “Sravnenie Russkih Krest’ian s inozemnymi,” Dukh Zhurnalov 24, book 49 (1817): 343–70 (981–1109). The article has double pagination. 70. Marc Raeff, “At the Origins of a Russian National Consciousness: Eighteenth Century Roots and Napoleonic Wars,” The History Teacher 25, no. 1 (1991): 12–13. Peter Kolchin makes an interesting comparison between Russian serfdom and American slavery, pointing out that public defense of serfdom was disappearing precisely at a time when American pro-slavery ideologists became ever more vocal. See Peter Kolchin, Unfree Labor American and Russian Serfdom (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1987), 178–9.

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Notes to Pages 74–80 219 71. On Smith in Russia, see Chapter 2. 72. See A. Cross, “N. M. Karamzin’s ‘Messenger of Europe,” 15–16. 73. On the controversy over capitalism, see Walicki, The Slavophile Controversy (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975), 431–55; Walicki, The Controversy over Capitalism: Studies in the Social Philosophy of the Russian Populists (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1969); Esther Kingston-Mann, In Search of the True West (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999), 69–91; Pustarnakov, Liberalism v Rossii, 57, 69. 74. See Blum, 424–5, 434. 75. Russkoi dvorianin Pravdin, 356. 76. On the obrok system, see Edgar Melton, “Enlightened Seigniorialism and Its Dilemmas in Serf Russia, 1750–1830,” The Journal of Modern History 62, no. 4 (1990): 682. Nicholas Turgenev associated the obrok system with the lighter form of serfdom exploitation. See N. Turgenev, Pis’ma, 263; Arkhiv brat’ev Turgenevykh 3:131. 77. Here Pravdin alluded to widespread fear prior to the war that peasants might revolt against their landlords, taking advantage of the war situation. 78. Russkoi dvorianin Pravdin, 370. 79. N. N. “O sostoianii inostrannykh krest’ian,” Syn Otechestva 45, no. XVII (1818): 63–4. 80. Ibid., 165–6. 81. Ibid., 168. 82. Ibid., 172–3. 83. Ibid., 180. 84. Ibid., 180. 85. Ibid., 184. 86. On Russian Anglophilia, see A. Cross, Anglo-Russia Aspects of Cultural Relations Between Great Britain and Russia in the Eighteenth and Early Nineteenth Century (Oxford: Berg, 1993), 93–112. 87. John H. Gleason, The Genesis of Russophobia in Great Britain A Study of the Interaction of Policy and Opinion (New York: Octagon Books, 1972), 1–9. 88. Quoted from E. Kingston-Mann, In Search of the True West, 69. 89. On the views of Herzen and Belinskii, see Walicki, The Slavophile Controversy, 431–9. 90. Under Peter the Great the distinction between lands granted in exchange for service and patrimonial landed possessions was abolished because service became compulsory for all noblemen. In 1762 the nobility received freedom from mandatory service, followed by Catherine II’s Charter to the Nobility in 1785, which granted them full property rights over their estates. See Wirtschafter, Social Identity in Russia, 25–6. 91. Arkhiv brat’ev Turgenevykh 3:225. On Iakushkin, see Bokova, 337. Nicholas I, while viewing serfdom as evil, did not abolish it because he equally feared to emancipate serfs without the land and to take away the nobility’s land, which he thought would be a violation of their property rights. See Leontovitch, Istoria liberalisma v Rossii, 137. 92. See Blum, 571–3. Two decades later, in 1842, when Minister Kiselev proposed to emancipate peasants without the land but with the right to acquire property and certain guarantees that they would not be evicted from the landlord’s land, many nobles thought it was some sort of conspiracy. The landlords, moreover, were to retain extensive police and administrative authority over their tenants. See ibid., 548–9; Kingston-Mann, In Search of the True West, 87, 222, n.51. 93. Blum, 543–4.

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220 Notes to Pages 80–88 94. Quoted from V. I. Semevskii, Politicheskie i obshchestvennye idei Dekabristov (St. Peterburg, 1909), 607. See also S. S. Landa, Dukh Revolutsionnykh preobrazovanii Iz istorii formirovaniya ideologii i politicheskoi organizatstii dekabristov 1816–1825 (Moscow, 1975), 115. 95. This attitude is implicit in their epistolary writings. 96. Quoted from Speranskii, 830. 97. Pis’ma, 261. 98. Ostaf’evskii arkhiv 1:137. 99. Ibid., 105. 100. Ibid., 103. 101. Akulshin came to the same conclusion about Viazemskii’s aristocratic limitations while examining his Arzamas projects. See P. V. Akulshin, P. A. Viazemskii, 37–8, 84–6. 102. Ostaf’evskii arkhiv 1:137. 103. See Chapter 6. 104. Kunitsyn, “Nekotorye mysli o neobkhodimosti mogushchestvennoi vneshnei zashchity bezopasnosti i spokoistviia gosudarstv,” Syn Otechestva 51, no. II (1818): 50. 105. Kunitsyn, “Nekotorye mysli,” 51–2. 106. Ibid., 58. 107. Kunitsyn, “Nekotorye mysli,” 64. 108. Kunitsyn, “Nekotorye mysli (okonchanie),” 105. 109. Ibid., 101. 110. See Raeff, “At the Origins of a Russian National Consciousness,” 12–13. 111. Ostaf’evskii arkhiv 1:348. 112. Dekabrist N. I. Turgenev Pis’ma, 287. 113. Ostaf’evskii arkhiv 1:230. Viazemskii suspected, it appears, that the actress who caused spectators’ displeasure in the theater enjoyed the special favor of someone in the Russian administration in Poland. 114. Dekabrist N. I. Turgenev Pis’ma, 287.

4 Kunitsyn and Nicholas Turgenev: “The Society of the Year 1819” 1. Stein abolished serfdom and all class distinctions affecting occupations and the tenure of land. The principle of free trade in land established in 1807 also served to remove the vestiges of the Prussian feudal system. 2. Arkhiv brat’ev Turgenevykh 2:332. 3. Ibid., 333. 4. Arkhiv brat’ev Turgenevykh 2:334. 5. Ibid., 3:9. 6. A. Turgenev, Politicheskaia proza, ed. A. L. Osipovata (Moscow, 1990), 161. 7. Arkhiv brat’ev Turgenevykh 3:22, 25, 180, 190, 209. 8. Ibid., 5. 9. Ibid. 3:7. See also Ibid., 93. 10. Arzamas i arzamasskie protokoly, ed. M. S. Borovkova-Maikova (Leningrad, 1933), 240–1. 11. Quoted from B. Hollingsworth, “Arzamas: Portrait of a Literary Society,” The Slavonic and East European Review 44, no. 103 (July 1966): 323–4. 12. Soviet historians argued that the society ceased to exist because more conservative members could not accept the changes and initiatives proposed

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13. 14. 15. 16.

17. 18. 19.

20. 21. 22. 23. 24.

25. 26. 27. 28. 29. 30. 31. 32. 33. 34. 35. 36.

37. 38. 39. 40. 41.

by the new liberal Arzamasians. In contrast to this view, Hollingsworth believed that the plan for the journal did not cause any objections from other members and the main reason for the society’s disintegration was the departure of some members from Russia. At the same time, Hollingsworth admitted that the views of some Arzamasians were conservative. See B. Hollingsworth, “Arzamas,” 306–26. N. Turgenev, “Opyt teorii nalogov,” in U istokov finansovogo prava, ed. A. N. Kozyrin (Moscow, 1998), 121. Ibid., 123, 129. Ibid., 177, 229. Kunitsyn, “Rassmotrenie knigi: Opyt Teorii Nalogov, sochinennoi Nikolaem Turgenevym,” Syn Otechestva 51, no. IV (1818): 207–24; Kunitsyn, “Rassmotrenie knigi: Opyt Teorii Nalogov, sochinennoi Nikolaem Turgenevym (okonchanie),” Syn Otechestva 51, no. V (1818): 258–71. Kunitsyn, “Rassmotrenie,” 209–10. Second edition, also published in the private typography, came out in 1819. See Raeff, Michael Speransky, 104. Speranskii planned to impose a temporary income tax on the landowners. The latter considered this measure to be a violation of their class privileges. Ostaf’evskii arkhiv 1:171. Arkhiv brat’ev Turgenevykh 3:236. Ibid., 140. Ibid., 150. In 1828, when peasants found themselves unable to pay the agreed sum as a result of the economic crisis, Turgenev allowed his steward to revert to the system of labor dues. The same year, Alexander Turgenev made a decision to sell their serfs and lands to the treasury, whereby the serfs acquired a status of state peasants. This decision, it appears, was dictated not only by the longcherished desire to give serfs personal freedom but also by the increased difficulties in managing the estate and the need to collect a large sum of money for Nicholas, who was going to get married in France. See Shebunin, “Brat’ia Turgenevy,” 83–6. Ostaf’evskii arkhiv 1:310. Arkhiv brat’ev Turgenevykh 2:333. Ibid., 3:142. Arkhiv brat’ev Turgenevykh 3:181. Dekabrist N. I. Turgenev Pis’ma, 282. Arkhiv brat’ev Turgenevykh 3:367. Pushchin, 66–7. Dekabrist N. I. Turgenev Pis’ma, 274. Arkhiv brat’ev Turgenevykh 3:370. Ibid., 185. Ibid., 379. Ibid., 397. In his diary Turgenev mentioned that he wrote a section on serfdom, which would apparently explain how this provision of rights was to be applied to serfs, but this section has not survived. See Melton, 696. Arkhiv Brat’ev Turgenevykh, 3:187. Ibid., 191. See Chapter 3. Quoted from Marc Raeff, The Decembrist Movement (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1966), 67–99.

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222 Notes to Pages 96–99 42. See Landa, 203. 43. S. V. Zhitomirskaia, “Kniga Nikolaiia Turgeneva ‘Rossiia i russkie’ i ee sudba,” in Nicholai Turgenev, Rossiia i russkie, ed. S. V. Zhitomirskaia (Moscow, 2001), 625. 44. V. I. Semevskii, Politicheskie i obshchestvennie idei Dekabristov (St. Petersburg, 1909), 441; Zhitomirskaia, 636–7. 45. Hollingsworth, “Nicholas Turgenev,” 128. 46. Ibid., 112. 47. Arkhiv brat’ev Turgenevykh 3:160. 48. Dekabrist N. I. Turgenev Pis’ma, 274. In his diary he recorded the moment when the thought of organizing a journal occurred to him. The entry is dated December 31, 1818. See Arkhiv brat’ev Turgenevykh 3:181. 49. Iu. G. Oksman, ed., Dekabristy: Otryvki iz istochnikov (Moscow, 1926), 118. 50. See V. M. Bokova, Epokha Tainykh obshchestv: Russkie obshchestvennie ob’edineniia pervoi treti XIX v. (Moscow, 2003), 383–4; A. N. Pypin, Religioznye dvizheniia pri Aleksandre I (Petrograd, 1916), 448. 51. M. Nechkina, Dvizhenie dekabristov, 2 vols. (Moscow, 1955), 1:350. Following the Soviet historians, it has long been believed that Alexander I refrained from open repressions against the society (to avoid unnecessary publicity) but found an opportunity to dismiss the army officers mentioned by Gribovskii. However, Bokova convincingly showed that these officers left the army for personal reasons, while others received career promotions. See Bokova, 358–90. 52. A. Fomin, K istorii voprosa o razvitii v Rossii obshchestvennih idei v nachale XIX veka (Petrograd, 1915), 36. Fomin tended to accept Turgenev’s self-justification as a true statement of his political moderation. He classified Turgenev as a liberal—a designation that Soviet historians rejected. The latter, however, could never satisfactorily explain why supposedly radically minded Turgenev withdrew from the Decembrist movement precisely at a time when it grew more radical. See, for instance, M. Nechkina, Dvizhenie dekabristov, 2 vols (Moscow, 1955). 53. Arkhiv brat’ev Turgenevykh 2:332. 54. Ibid. 3:103. 55. Quoted from Rudnitskaia, “Aleksandr Ivanovich Turgenev,” 30. 56. Hollingsworth concluded that Turgenev was neither “the moderate liberal” as pre-revolutionary scholars portrayed him, nor a radical as Soviet historians argued. Rather, “in the period 1816–1824 he oscillated between the moderate and essentially practical demands, sketched in his diary, and more conspiratorial and revolutionary ideas.” See Hollingsworth, “Nicholas Turgenev,” 474. It is a fairly accurate characterization of Turgenev’s political views, although Hollingsworth understates the main reason for Turgenev’s hesitations—his love for the tsar that remained steadfast even when Turgenev despaired over the conditions of Russian life. Hollingsworth’s general characterization of Turgenev as “Decembrist” also needs to be qualified in view of Turgenev’s retreat from the movement. 57. See Arkhiv brat’ev Turgenevykh 3:253; 188, 190–3. 58. Ibid., 211. 59. Ibid., 421. 60. Arkhiv brat’ev Turgenevykh 3:430. 61. Quoted from V. I. Semevskii, Krest’ianskii vopros v Rossii v XVIII i pervoi polovine XIX veka (St. Petersburg, 1888), 1:454.

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Notes to Pages 99–102 223 62. Ostaf’evskii arkhiv 2:14–45; Arkhiv brat’ev Turgenevykh 3:231–232; See also A. V. Predtechenskii, Ocherki obschestvenno-politicheskoi istorii Rossii v p.p. XIX veka (Moscow-Leningrad, 1957), 350–1. 63. N. Turgenev, Rossiia i Russkie, ed. S. V. Zhitomirskaia (Moscow, 2000), 253. 64. Arkhiv brat’ev Turgenevykh 3:303; Semevskii, Krest’ianskii vopros v Rossii 1:468–75. 65. Quoted from Landa, 96–7. 66. It is an issue of contention in the historiography of Russia whether the Decembrists were liberals or revolutionaries. John Gooding has correctly argued that contrary to the Soviet interpretation, the Decembrism was not a uniform ideology. The distinction between the ideas of Pestel’ and those of Murav’ev, the two leading Decembrists, points to the existence of radicalJacobin and liberal currents within the Decembrist movement. Gooding thus believes that until the moment of its demise the movement combined liberal and radical currents whose corresponding ideals were not easily reconcilable. See John Gooding, “The Decembrists in the Soviet Union,” Soviet Studies XL, no. 2 (1998): 196–209. Similar interpretation was adopted by Schapiro. See Schapiro, 24. However, Gooding’s proposed term “liberal Decembrist” obscures the fact that even those Decembrists who advocated the idea of representative monarchy rather than republican order were willing to go as far as the revolution to see it established in Russia, whereas liberals advocated the same idea without ever contemplating the revolutionary tactics. It is notable that some of the early Decembrists defined their movement in terms of its phases rather than currents. The creation of the Northern Society, which sifted away “unreliable” members of the Union of Welfare, served as a dividing line between liberal and revolutionary Decembrism. As General Orlov saw it, the members of “the Union of Welfare were under the influence of strictly liberal ideas, no revolutionary ideas had yet entered their minds.” Only in its early stages, therefore, can Decembrism be associated with the liberal movement. See M. F. Orlov, “Zapiska o tainykh oshchestvakh,” in Izbrannye sotsial’no- politicheskie proizvedeniia dekabristov 2:310. 67. Ostaf’evskii arkhiv 2:153. 68. Ibid., 191. 69. Akulshin, 58–60, 131–2. 70. Arkhiv brat’ev Turgenevykh 6:221. 71. A. Turgenev, Politicheskaia proza, 149. 72. On Turgenev’s remaining years, see Gleb Struve, “Alexander Turgenev, Ambassador of Russian Culture in Partibus Infidelium,” Slavic Review 29, no. 3 (1970): 444–59. 73. Arkhiv brat’ev Turgenevykh 6:268. His letters abound with solicitations for various people in need. See Alexander Turgenev, Pis’ma Alexandra Turgeneva Bulgakovym, ed. I. K. Luppol (Moscow, 1939). 74. The Letters of Alexander Pushkin, 146. This promise saved him from a harsher punishment. When the two years expired, Pushkin wrote a caustic epigram on the tsar. See Binyon, 103, 175. The main reason for Pushkin’s second exile in 1824 was religious rather than political pronouncement. In a private letter, which became known to the authorities, Pushkin carelessly revealed his fascination with the atheistic ideas of the English philosopher William Hutchinson. In Russia, where Orthodox religion was part of the official ideology embodied in the principle “Autocracy, Orthodoxy and Nationality,” atheistic beliefs were taken seriously. See Binyon, 175.

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224 Notes to Pages 102–105 75. Pushkin, The Letters, 138, 171, 145. Sandler provides an insightful analysis of how Pushkin expressed his loneliness in the poem “To Ovid” written during his first exile. See Sandler, 39–56. 76. Pushkin, The Letters, 111; For a different interpretation of this period in Pushkin’s life, see Sam Driver, “Puškin and Politics: The Later Works,” Slavic and East European Journal, vol. 25, no. 3 (1981), 7. 77. Ibid., 136. It was not until Pushkin decided to marry and settle down into his new life that his father made him a gift of 200 serfs, whom Pushkin mortgaged in 1831 for 11,428.58 silver rubles; Ibid., 410, 461. 78. Pushkin, Polnoe sobranie sochinenii, Vol. 2, pt. 1, 269. 79. See Whittaker, Introduction to Alexander Pushkin, Epigrams and Satirical Verse, 5. 80. See S. L. Frank, Etiudy o Pushkine (Munich, 1957), 28–57; Schapiro, 53–8; J. Thomas Shaw, Introduction to The Letters of Alexander Pushkin, 36–40. On Pushkin’s attitude toward aristocracy of blood, see also Binyon, 185. 81. Whittaker, Introduction, 5. 82. Pushkin, The Letters, 655. 83. Ibid., 660. 84. Sandler, 189.

5


1. Teaching of natural law in Russia has not been a subject of special study so far, despite its direct bearing upon the issue of liberalism. Marc Raeff maintained in a number of his interpretative articles that German natural law, transmitted via German visiting teachers, had dominated the Russian philosophical curriculum in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries and had important implications for Russian intellectual development. However, Raeff focused on the larger picture rather than a detailed treatment of individual professors and their works. See Marc Raeff, “Les Slavs; Les Allemands, 521–51; idem, “The Well- Ordered Police State,” 317–22. Walter Gleason adopted Raeff’s argument in his study of the group of eighteenth- century Russian enlighteners, but the lack of empirical evidence in his work prompted some of his critics to doubt the direct impact of the German professors upon the Russian students. See Walter Gleason, Moral Idealists, Bureaucracy and Catherine the Great (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1981), 58; Max J. Okenfuss, review of Moral Idealists, Bureaucracy and Catherine the Great by Walter Gleason, The American Historical Review 88, no. 4 (1983): 1025–6. A few specific facts regarding the government’s changing attitude toward the teaching of natural law in Russia were provided in Wortman’s innovative work on Russian “legal consciousness.” See Wortman, The Development, 33–2, 38–42; Thomas Nemeth, in his pioneering study on the reception of Kantian ideas in Russia, made an important contribution to this topic by systematizing the relevant historical evidence. However, Nemeth did not examine nonKantian natural law and, more importantly, his review of the Kant-inspired theories of law in Russia was based on the secondary literature that was only available to him. The fragmentary quotations that he could cull from Soviet studies led him to characterize these professors as more consistent Kantians than was the case. The difficulty of obtaining the textbooks on natural law published in Russia (most of which are extremely rare) may account for the

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2. 3.

4.

5. 6. 7. 8.

225

lack of studies in this field. See Thomas Nemeth, “Kant in Russia: The Initial Phase,” 79–110; idem “Kant in Russia: The Initial Phase (Cont’d),” 293–338. See also Introduction, n. 1. More recently, James Warhola examined the reasons why natural law did not develop in Russia in the same way it did in the West. His article, however, leaves the reader with the impression that natural law theories were entirely absent in Russia. See James W. Warhola, “Revisiting the Russian ‘Constrained Autocracy’: ‘Absolutism’ and Natural Rights Theories in Russia and the West,” in Civil Society and the Search for Justice in Russia, eds. Christopher Marsh and Nicholas K. Gvozdev (Oxford: Lexington Books, 2002), 33. The latest work on natural law in Russian scholarship, Filosofiia Kanta v Rossii, presents many new facts about the dissemination and reception of Kantian ideas, especially his critical philosophy, in Russia, but its analysis of individual Kantians is rather sketchy. See A. N. Kruglov, 270. Filosofiia Kanta v Rossii v kontse XVIII – pervoi polovine XIX vekov (Moscow, 2009). Each university had its own typography, according to the Statute of 1804. See Sbornik postanovlenii 1:257; See also, Petrov, Formirovanie 1:294. See Petrov, Formirovanie 1:147, 151. The objectives of law teachers were spelled out, for instance, in the Regulations for the Dorpat University. They were expected to “show [a student] his political relations with the government, different social orders and private individuals”—the task that was in keeping with the general objective of educating loyal civil servants and patriotic citizens. See Sbornik postanovlenii 1:106. In 1810 Count de Maistre tried to warn Minister of Education Razumovskii that the government was making a mistake in inviting German teachers from Protestant universities to Russia and that Kant (much like all philosophy stemming from Protestant roots) was a threat to established political order. Despite Razumovskii’s favorable attitude toward de Maistre, he had to be cautious about the advice of the count, who pushed his own agenda of spreading Jesuit religion and system of education in Orthodox Russia. Eventually, their friendship undermined Razumovskii’s position in the government. In any case, de Maistre’s warning came after the principles of the education reform had been established. N. Murav’ev, a member of Alexander I’s unofficial committee who played a leading role in the reform, held Protestant universities and especially Göttingen in high regard, recruiting many of the professors through Christopher Meiners, a well-known historian from Göttingen University. On Razumovskii’s correspondence with de Maistre, see, A. A. Vasil’chikov, Semeistvo Razumovskikh, Vol. 2 (St. Petersburg, 1880), 102, 276–7. Maistre’s letters to Razumovskii are published in the appendix (248–87). On Murav’ev, see Petrov, Formirovanie 1:147; Flynn, 118–19. In his work on the German sciences of state, Lindenfeld mentions that many Kantian German followers who initially belonged to the cameralist tradition used his ideas in a deliberately selective manner. See Lindenfeld, 58. The same is certainly true of the Kantians who came to Russia. F. Neumann, “Types of Natural Law,” in idem, The Democratic and Authoritarian State (Free Press, New York, 1957), 70. The term was coined by Chris Thornhill in his German Political Philosophy: The Metaphysics of Law (London: Routledge Press, 2007), 7. See Thornhill, 72–5; Haakonssen, “German natural law,” 251–60. The corpus of Wolffian writing comprises more than twenty-six works. Seeking to make his philosophy available to the wider reading audience, Wolff

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9.

10. 11. 12.

13.

14.

15. 16. 17.

18.

19.

Notes to Pages 108–110 wrote his works in both German and Latin. On Wolff, see Thornhill, 89–92; Haakonssen, “German natural law,” 268–78; J. B. Schneewind, The Invention of Autonomy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 432–44. Wolff’s Vernünftige Gedanken von dem gesellschaftlichen Leben der Menschen, und insonderheit dem gemeinen Wesen (Rational Thoughts on the Social Life of Man and in Particular on Society) underwent five editions between 1721 and 1740. Haakonssen, “German Natural Law,” 275–77. Thornhill, 58. See Paul E. Sigmund, Natural Law in Political Thought (Cambridge: Wintrop Publishers, 1971), 65; Leo Strauss, Natural Right and History (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1953), 166–86; Diethelm Klippel, “The True Concept of Liberty: Political Theory in Germany in the Second Half of the Eighteenth Century,” in The Transformation of Political Culture. England and Germany in the Late Eighteenth Century, ed. Eckhart Hellmuth (London: Oxford University Press, 1990), 447–66; Tribe, 28–31; Wolfe traces this development to the thought of Locke rather than Hobbes. See Christopher Wolfe, Natural Law Liberalism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 162–3. Johann Jacob Moser and Justus Möser, for instance, defended the liberties of the estates (such as freedom of conscience and religion as well as the rights of territorial parliaments) against royal absolutism, but their ideas did not amount to liberal constitutionalism. Instead of natural law arguments, both thinkers justified their claims by reference to the traditional legal order of the Habsburg Empire, which presupposed a balance between the emperor, the imperial estates, and the territorial princes. (Their discourses marked a departure from naturalist to positivist jurisprudence in Germany—a tendency that would be temporarily halted by Kant’s revitalized interpretation of natural law.) More explicitly liberal were the ideas of August Ludwig Schlözer, who argued that human beings possess social rights rooted in their natural inclinations, which the state is obliged to respect and that the power of the monarch should be legally delimited. See Thornhill, 94–5; and Klippel, 455–6. For a good analytical summary of Kant’s ideas, see Thornhill, 98–110, 279–90; Christine M. Korsgaard, Introduction to Kant, Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals, ed. and trans. Mary Gregor (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), vii–xxx; Roger Sullivan, Introduction to The Metaphysics of Morals by I. Kant, ed. and trans. Mary Gregor (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), vii–xxvi. Kant, Groundwork, 31. Ibid., 38. Marc Raeff, “The Enlightenment in Russia and Russian Thought in the Enlightenment,” 26–47; idem, arc Raeff, “The Well- Ordered Police State,” 309–27. On Peter’s plans for the Academy of Science, see James McClelland, Autocrats and Academics. Education, Culture and Society in Tsarist Russia (Chicago, The University of Chicago Press, 1979), 21–3. Samuel Pufendorf, O dolzhnosti cheloveka i grazhdanina po zakonu estestvennomu (St. Petersburg, 1726); idem, Vvedenie v Istoriiu Evropeiskuiu (St. Petersburg, 1718). Second edition came out in 1723. Idem, Vvedenie v Istoriiu znatneishikh evropeiskikh gosudarstv (St. Petersburg, 1767); second edition was published 1777. In the early nineteenth century, Pufendorf’s works were still deemed useful for the Russian reader. His Politicheskoe rassuzhdenie Samuila Pufendorfa o soglasii politiki istinnoi s religieiu khristianskoiu was published in St. Petersburg in 1815.

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Notes to Pages 111–113 227 20. Introduction à la jurisprundence naturelle. (St. Petersburg, 1767). He left the Academy in 1757. See V. F. Pustarnakov, Universitetskaia filosofiia v Rossii. Idei, personalii, osnovnie tsentry (Moscow, 2003), 711–712; Wortman, The Development, 25; Pekarskii, 172. 21. Wortman, The Development, 25. 22. Haakonssen, “German natural law,” 277, 763. 23. Daniel Nettelbladt, Nacha’lnoe osnovanie vseobshchei estestvennoi iurisprudentsii prinorovlennoe k upotrebleniu osnovanii polozhitel’noi iurisprudentsii (Moscow, 1770). 24. Merio Scattola, “Before and After Natural Law. Models of Natural Law in Ancient and Modern Times,” in Natural Law Theories in the Early Enlightenment: Context and Strategies, eds. Tim Hochstrasser and P. Schröder (Kluwer: Dordrecht, 2003), 21. 25. A historian of Moscow University, Shevyrev had a very low opinion of Dilthey’s works, considering them immature from a scholarly point of view. See S. Shevyrev, Istoriia Imperatorskogo Moskovskogo Universiteta (Moscow, 1855), 92; A. Kapustin, who wrote a long entry on Dilthey in the biographical dictionary, also considered Dilthey’s juridical works rather superficial and unsystematic, which he ascribed to Dilthey’s insufficient knowledge of Russian laws and morals, as well as his attempt to apply Roman legal categories to Russian law. See Biograficheskii slovar’ professorov i prepodavatelei Moskovskogo Imperatorskogo universiteta 1755–1833, 2 vols. (Moscow, 1855), 1:305–8. Nevertheless, Dilthey’s work on commercial law was one of the first of its kind and underwent three editions. F. G. Dil’tei, Nachal’nye osnovaniia vekse’lnogo prava (Moscow, 1787). Second and third editions appeared in 1794 and 1801. 26. Shevyrev, 129, 146, 187; Pustarnakov, Universitetskaia filosofiia, 454. Langer’s work was entitled Slovo o nachale i rasprostranenii polozhitel’nykh zakonov i o nerazryvnom soiuze filosofii s ih ucheniem. (Moscow, 1766). 27. In one of the speeches, he regretted the fact that the works of such English philosophers as Hobbes, Locke, Sidney, and Harrington are published in Britain but “are not being taken note in any other state.” Quoted from A. H. Brown, “The Father of Russian Jurisprudence: The Legal Thought of S. E. Desnitskii,” in Russian Law in Historical and Political Perspectives, ed. Willia Butler (Leyden, A. W. Sijthoff, 1977), 124. 28. On Catherine’s attitude toward and borrowing from the European thought, see Isabel de Madariaga, Politics and Culture in Eighteenth- Century Russia (Longman, 1998), 195–296. 29. [John Locke] Lokk, O vospitanii detei (Moscow, 1759). Second and third editions appeared in 1760 and 1769, respectively. 30. For a list of translations, see Pustarnakov, Universitetskaia filosofiia, 747–844; I. P. Kondakov, ed., Svodnyi katalog russkoi knigi grazhdanskoi pechati XVIII veka, 5 vols. (Moscow, 1964); N. N. Mel’nikova, Izdaniia Moskovskogo universiteta 1756–1779 ( Moscow, 1955). 31. See Gleason, Moral Idealists, 5–6. 32. Tribe, 119–82. 33. Lindenfeld, 40–1. 34. Hugh James Rose, A New General Biographical Dictionary (London, 1857), 3:387; Pustarnakov, Universitetskaia filosofiia, 303. 35. Fel’dshtein, 474. 36. Shevyrev, 228–9.

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37. Pustarnakov, Universitetskaia filosofiia, 691. Shevyrev also mentions that Schaden introduced students to the fundamentals of Kantian moral philosophy. See Shevyrev, 229. 38. Shevyrev, 297, 322; I. Ia. Shchipanov, ed., Istoriia filososofskoi mysli v Moscovskom universitete (Moscow, 1982), 19. 39. Z. A. Kamenskii “I. Kant v russkoi filosofii nachala 19 veka,” Vestnik istorii mirovoi kul’tury 19, no. 1 (1960), 52. 40. Franklin A. Walker, “ ‘Renegade’ Monks and Cultural Conflict in Early Nineteenth- Century Russia: The Russia of I. A. Fessler and J. B. Shad,” Religion, State and Society 28, no. 4 (2000): 350. 41. [Kant] Kantovo osnovanie dlia metafiziki nravov (Moscow, 1803); [Idem] Nabliudeniia ob oshchushchenii prekrasnogo i vozvyshennogo (St. Petersburg, 1804); [Idem] Kantova Filosofiia, perevod s frantsuzskogo P. Petrovym. pt. 1. (St. Petersburg, 1807). The last edition was a translation of Charles Villers’ Philosophie de Kant, ou Principles Fondamentaux de La Philosophie Transcendentale. Only Part One of this book was published in Russia. 42. Quoted from Kruglov, 114. 43. Quoted from Kamenskii, “I. Kant v russkoi filosofii nachala 19 veka,” 53, n. 9. See also Kruglov, 121. 44. Ibid.; See also Kruglov, 121. 45. Biograficheskii slovar’ professorov i prepodavatelei Moskovskogo universiteta, 1:126–7; Iu. A. Andreev, Moskovskii Universitet v obshchestvennoi i kul’turnoi zhizni Rossii nachala XIX veka (Moscow, 2000), 99. 46. As Karamzin once put it, “Many of these scholars are prominent, few are useful; for the students being unable to understand these foreign instructors and are so few in number that the latter lose all desire to appear in class.” Quoted from James McClelland, 23. Some foreign professors left similar observations about the quality of the Russian students. See Andreev, Moskovskii Universitet, 100. 47. D. I. Bagalei, Opyt istorii Khar’kovskogo universiteta, 2 vols. (Khar’kov, 1893), 1:582. 48. Even students sent to Germany for further training were directed to consult with their teachers before reading any original writings in philosophy. See Sbornik postanovlenii 1:463–5. 49. On Reinhard, see Biograficheskii slovar professorov i prepodavatelei Imperatorskogo Moskovskogo universiteta 2:328–9; Pustarnakov, 558; A. Iu. Andreev, Lektsii po istorii Moskovskogo Universitet. 1755–1855 (Moscow, 2001), 164–5. 50. Andreev, Lektsii, 165; Nechkina, Griboedov i dekabristy (Moscow, 1951), 83. 51. Andreev, Lektsii, 165. 52. [Ch. Reinhard] Khristian Filip Reingard, Sistema moral’noi filosofii (Moscow, 1807), xvi. 53. Ibid., xv–xvi. In his Natural Law Reinhard also commented that Kant’s definition of original moral law “somewhat suffers from the ambiguity of the word freedom.” See Reingard, Estestvennoe pravo, 20. 54. Reingard, Estestvennoe pravo, xxiv. 55. See W. Kersting, “Politics, freedom, and order: Kant’s political philosophy,” in The Cambridge Companion to Kant, ed., Paul Guyer (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 353–4. According to Kant “The act by which a people forms itself into a state is the original contract. Properly speaking, the original contract is only the idea of this act, in terms of which alone we can think of

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56.

57. 58.

59. 60.

61. 62. 63. 64.

65.

66. 67. 68. 69. 70.

the legitimacy of a state.” “The idea of a social contract . . . would not exist as a fact . . . but only as a rational principle for judging any lawful public constitution.” See Kant, The Metaphysics of Morals, 92; Kant’s Political Writings, 83. “Civil society cannot be based on a contract; for practical reason obliges us to live under the government . . . the power of the government is based not on a contract but on a prescription of reason or on a moral law . . . ” See Reingard, Sistema, 298–9. Ibid., 297. According to Kant, “Every state contains three powers, i.e. the universally united will is made up of three separate persons. These are the ruling power (or sovereignty) in the person of the legislator . . . the executive power . . . and the judicial power . . . They can be likened to the three propositions in a practical operation of reason: the major premise, which contains the law of the sovereign will, the minor premise, which contains the command to act in accordance with the law . . . and the conclusion which contains the legal decision.” See Kant’s Political Writings, 138. For Kant, the division of power is a necessary component of representative government, which alone fulfills the requirement of individual freedom. “For any form of government which is not representative is essentially an anomaly, because one and the same person cannot be the legislator and the executor of his own will, just as the general proposition in logical reasoning cannot at the same time be a secondary proposition subsuming the particular within the general.” See Ibid., 101. Reinhard, by contrast, uses the analogy of a syllogistic argument to prove the interdependence of three powers and the need to keep them united in one hand. See Reingard, Sistema, 216. Separation of powers in his view produces confusion and internal disagreements between the holders of the power: “We call mixed government the one in which all power is divided in some way among different heads, so that it does not have any unity and thus no true head . . . it seems impossible that the mixed government would be capable of preserving its own unity, public peace and security.” Reinhard further proves the need for maintaining all three powers in one hand by comparing them to the components of a syllogistic structure. See Ibid., 210. Roger J. Sullivan, xiv–xv. Reingard, Sistema, 300. In Kant, by contrast, “The legislative power can belong only to the united will of the people.” See Kant, The Metaphysics of Morals, 91. Reingard, Sistema, 291. Reingard, Sistema, 281. See also Reingard, Estestevnnoe pravo, 44–5. Reingard, Sistema, 114. On Buhle, see Marinus Wes, Classics in Russia 1700–1855 (New York: E. J. Brill, 1992), 97–104. Pustarnakov only mentions that Buhle “was presented to the Emperor.” See Pustarnakov, Universitetskaia filosofiia, 235–326. See Gustav Shpet, Ocherk razvitiia russkoi filosofii (Petrograd, 1922), 89; V. V. Zenkovskii, A History of Russian Philosophy, 2 vols. (Routledge: London, 1953), 1:115. Quoted from Nemeth, “Kant in Russia: The Initial Phase,” 89. Nemeth quotes French historian Koyré. Johann Gottlieb Buhle, Lehrbuch des Naturrechts (Göttingen, 1798), 237–8. Ibid., 235, 251–2. Ibid., 277–9. Ibid., 290–1.

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71. Ibid., 238- 41. To give another example, speaking of serfs, Buhle argued that “the children of serfs are themselves not serfs” (by birth), but he added that “in order to protect their rights, the state may require them to become serfs.” See Ibid., 290. 72. Ibid., 241–2. 73. Ibid., 242–3. 74. Ibid., 305. 75. Walker, “The conservative face of a radical Kantian in Prussia,” 3–15; See also Lindenfeld, 64–6. 76. In 1808 Jakob petitioned the curator of Khar’kov educational district about an increase of his salary, referring to the fact that Königsberg University offered him better remuneration. Although the Main School Administration acknowledged that “according to persons knowledgeable in German scholarship, professor Jakob enjoys almost the top status among the scholars of his field,” his petition was declined. See [Rossiia. Ministerstvo narodnogo prosveshcheniia] Sbornik rasporiazhenii po ministerstvu narodnogo prosveshcheniia, 16 vols. (St. Petersburg, 1866–1907), 1:151–2 (henceforth cited as Sbornik rasporiazhenii). 77. [L. Jakob] Liudvig Iakob, Kurs filosofii dlia gimnazii Rossiiskoi Imperii, 6 vols. (St. Petersburg, 1811–14). The first six volumes included logic, grammar, psychology, moral philosophy, esthetics, and literary theory. Each part of this edition also came out as separate books in 1815–16. Parts Seven and Eight (Public Economy and Natural and International People’s Law) were published in 1817. 78. [L. Jakob] Liudvig Genrikh Iakob, Kurs filosofii dlia gimnazii Rossiiskoi Imperii. Chast chetvertaia soderzhaschaia nravouchitel’nuu filosofiiu (St. Petersburg, 1816), 5–11, 45–6. 79. Walker also noted this tendency in Jakob. As Walker remarked: “He applied Kant’s principle of the autonomy of the reason not to question of political authority, but to urge control over sensual passions.” See Walker, “The Conservative Face of a Radical Kantian,” 6. 80. Iakob, Nravouchitel’naia Filosofiia, 124. 81. Ibid., 83, 79. Cf. in Kant: “Be no man’s lackey.” See Kant, The Metaphysics of Morals, 188. 82. Iakob, Estestvennoe i narodnoe pravo, 9. 83. Ibid., 9–10, 15. 84. Jakob specifies these rights in the following way: “he [an individual] is a person (litso) that is a being which has an end in itself and should not serve others as a mere means”; “he is entitled to freedom and should not serve others as a mere means”; “he is entitled to freedom, that is to the independence of his will from the will of others”; and lastly, since “his rights are as valid as the rights of others, all people regarding their rights are perfectly equal.” Ibid., 14–15. 85. Ibid., 21–2. 86. Ibid., 28. 87. Ibid., 117. Walker noted that the Russian translation of Jakob’s psychology replaced the word “constitution” for “enactment” (postanovlenie), apparently for reasons of Jakob’s political sensitivity. See Walker, “The Conservative Face,” 9. The text of Natural Law does include the Russian term “constitution,”(konstitutsiia), although its meaning does not necessarily imply the idea of institutional limitations on the monarch’s will. As is clear

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88. 89. 90. 91. 92. 93. 94. 95. 96. 97. 98. 99. 100. 101. 102. 103. 104.

105.

106.

107. 108. 109. 110. 111. 112. 113. 114. 115. 116. 117. 118.

from Jakob’s further explanations, a constitution simply codifies the existing arrangement of power; a state in which an unlimited ruler obeys laws and promotes public good only out of his own goodwill would also have a constitution. Ibid., 78–83. Ibid., 118–19. Ibid., 103–4, 115, 73. Ibid., 108, 114, 118. Ibid., 108, 116. Ibid., 126. Ibid., 63. Semevskii, Krest’ianskii vopros v Rossii, 1:313–15; Walker, “The Conservative Face,” 8. [F. Snell] Nachal’nogo kursa filosofii chast’ chetvertaia. Nravouchenie i Estesvennoe pravo. Sochinenie g. Snellia. (Kazan’, 1814), 13. Ibid., 29. Ibid., 133. Ibid. Ibid. Ibid., 120. Ibid., 132. Kant, “What Is Enlightenment?” in Kant’s Political Writings, 55. Kant expressed this idea in his Theory and Practice: “Every member of the commonwealth must be entitled to reach any degree of rank which a subject can earn through his talent, his industry and his good fortune. And his fellow-subjects may not stand in his way by hereditary prerogatives or privileges of rank.” See Kant’s Political Writings, 75. Kant wrote, “A public law which defines for everyone that which is permitted and prohibited by right, is the act of a public will, from which all right proceeds . . . and this requires no less than the will of the entire people (since all men decide for all and each decides for himself). For only towards oneself can one never act unjustly . . . thus an individual will cannot legislate for a commonwealth.” See Kant’s Political Writings, 77. “If the mode of government is in accord with the concept of right, it must be based on the representative system.” See Ibid., 102. Tsvetaev retired in 1831, but was asked to return in 1833 to teach Roman law. See F. A. Petrov, Formirovanie sistemy universitetskogo obrazovaniia v Rossii, 4 vols (Moscow, 2002), 2:280–3; Pustarnakov, Universitetskaia filosofiia, 677. Lev Tsvetaev, Kratkaia teoriia zakonov (Moscow, 1810), 7. Ibid., 8–12. Ibid., 17. Ibid., 29. Ibid., 30. Lev Tsvetaev, Pervye nachala prava estestvenogo (Moscow, 1816). Ibid., 1. Ibid., 13. Ibid., 10–12. Ibid., 27–47. Ibid., 49. Ibid., 53.

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232 Notes to Pages 129–134 119. Henry E. Strakosch, State Absolutism and the Rule of Law: The Struggle for the Codification of Civil Law in Austria 1753–1811 (Sydney: University Press, 1967), 206–15. 120. TsGIA(SPb), f. 13, op. 1, d, 577, l. 1. On Lodii, see also Chapter 1. 121. [F. Zeiller] Tseiler, Estestvennnoe chastnoe pravo sochinennoe Fransua fon Tseilerom professorom v universitete Venskom i chlenom zakonopolozhennoi komissii (St. Petersburg, 1809), 13. 122. Ibid., 72. 123. Ibid., 84. 124. Ibid., 221. 125. Ibid., 34. 126. Three earlier editions of Metaphysics were published in 1764, 1789, and 1794. Moral Philosophy came out in 1783 and 1788. See Chapter 1. See also E. A. Ovchinnikova, T. V. Chumakova, “Filosophiia v Sankt-Peterburgskom universitete (pervaia polovina XIX veka),” in Peterburg na filosofskoi karte mira, ed. T. V. Artem’eva (St. Petersburg, 2002), 71. 127. I. M. Solov’ev, ed., Russkie universitety v ikh ustavakh i vospominaniiakh sovremennikov (St. Petersburg, 1914), 85 (henceforth, Russkie universitety). See also A. Iu. Andreev, Lektsii, 166. 128. Ivan Naumov, Estestvennoe pravo, 2 vols. (Moscow, 1808–1809), 1:35–7, 54–6. 129. Ibid., 22. 130. Ibid., 54. 131. Ibid., 57. 132. Ibid., 60. 133. Ibid., 69. 134. Ibid., 70. 135. Ibid., 2:3. 136. The German edition of this book was published in 1799 and was based on the Latin edition of 1770. See Gregor Lässer, “Martinis Naturrechtslehre als Haupquelle für Privatrecht,” in Karl Anton von Martini, ed. Heinz Barta (Vienna, 2007), 136. According to Grigor’ev, Lodii used the 1782 Latin edition. See Grigor’ev, 49. In Khar’kov University Prof. B. Reit used it during the 1814 academic year. See Fel’dshtein, 471. 137. He was the author of West- Galician Code of 1797, which served as a model for the Austrian General Code of 1811 created in large part by his student Franz von Zeiller. On Martini as a reformer, see Hebeis, 54–63, 69–107. See also Mathew W. Finkin “Menschenbild: The Concept of the Employee as a Person in Western Law,” Comparative Labor Law and Policy Journal 23, no. 4 (2002): 611; Paul Silverman, “The Cameralist Roots of Menger’s Achievement,” in Bruce Caldwell, ed., Carl Menger in His Legacy in Economics (Duke University Press, 1990), 79. 138. Hebeis, 139, 154. 139. Karl Anton von Martini, Lehrbegriff des Naturrechts (Vienn, 1799), 43–4. 140. Ibid., 44–5. 141. Ibid., “von den unfollcommenen Pflichten gegen Undere,”128–36; Hebeis, 157. 142. Martini,122. 143. Hebeis, 157. 144. Martini, 115–16.

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Notes to Pages 134–141 145. 146. 147. 148. 149.

150. 151. 152. 153.

154. 155. 156. 157.

158. 159. 160. 161. 162. 163. 164. 165. 166. 167. 168. 169. 170. 171.

233

Martini, 296–9. Martini, 269. Ibid., 271. Ibid., 269, 262. [T. Schmalz] Fedor, Shmal’ts, Pravo estestvennoe (St. Petersburg, 1820). Judging from the fact that the textbook was dedicated to Balug’ianskii, the translator was probably his former student, knowledgeable enough to produce the interpretative translation of this sort. Ibid., vii. Ibid., 7, 21. Ibid., 10. This argument suggests that Sergeev himself did not fully understand his concept of a priori natural law. See Kraus, 396; Already in the early nineteenth century, and especially after 1815 when Prussian liberals demanded to deepen political reforms, Schmalz assumed a conservative position, advocating an unlimited monarchy against the Kantian vision of the representative state. See Ibid. Shmal’ts, 39–42. Ibid., 59–63. Ibid., 50. Ibid., 65–9. Schmalz rarely seems to have used Kant’s own formulations. Compare, for instance, Schmalz’s explanation of the innate rights with that of Kant: “Freedom (independence from being constrained by another’s choice), insofar as it can coexist with the freedom of every other in accordance with a universal law, is the only original right belonging to every man by virtue of his humanity. This principle already involves the following authorizations . . . innate equality, that is independence from being bound by others to more than one can in turn bind them; hence a human being’s quality of being his own master, as well as being a human being beyond reproach . . . ” See Kant, The Metaphysics of Morals, 30. Shmal’ts, 78–9. See Chapter 2. Ibid., 106–7. Ibid., 107–8. Ibid., 110. See Walker, “ ‘Renegade’ Monks,” 351–2. Quoted from Bagalei, Opyt istorii 1:659. Ibid., 660. N. A. Lavrovskii, “Epizod iz istorii Kharkovskogo universiteta,” Chteniia v Obschestve Istorii i Drevnostei Rossiiskikh (April–June 1873), bk. 2, pt. 2:49–51. Quoted from D. I. Bagalei, Udalenie professora Shada iz Khar’kovskogo universiteta (Khar’kov, 1899), 20–1. Walker, “ ‘Renegade’ Monks,” 353. The price of the book was five or seven rubles, depending on the quality of paper. Nemeth, “Kant in Russia: The Initial Phase (Cont’d),” 321. For reading interests in early nineteenth-century Russia see also Miranda Beaven, “Readership in Early Nineteenth-Century Russia: Recent Soviet Research,” Slavic Review 43, no. 2 (1984): 276–80. Twenty-five Decembrists studied in Moscow University at that time. See Z. A. Kamenskii, “Kant in Rossii (kon. XVIII–p.chetv. XIX v.),” in Filosofiia Kanta i sovremennost’, ed. T. I. Oizerman (Moscow, 1974), 302.

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172. This rule had been established by the Statute of 1804. See Petrov, Formirovanie 1:297. 173. Kamenskii, “Kant in Russia,” 294. Alexander Turgenev recorded his impression of Kant’s philosophy: “I listened [a lecture about] Kant’s system. It is difficult but I am impressed.” See A. Turgenev, Politicheskaia proza, 164. 174. Koshelev also mentions that sometimes meetings were devoted to critiquing philosophical essays written by the members of the society, but for most part they focused on discussing their readings in German philosophy. See A. Koshelev, Zapiski Aleksandra Ivanovicha Kosheleva (Berlin, 1884), 12. 175. See V. E. Evgrafova ed., Filosofskie i obshchestvenno-politicheskie proizvedeniia Petrashevtsev (Moscow, 1953), 113, 188, 189, 288, 289, 408, 590, 658. 176. N. I. Lorer, Zapiski Dekabrista (Irkutsk, 1984), 267; N. P. Ogarev, Izbrannye sotsial’no- politicheskie i filosofskie proizvedeniia, ed., M. Iovchuk (Moscow, 1956), 2:46; Kruglov also found plenty of evidence to argue that Kantian critical philosophy was more familiar to Russians than it was previously believed. They did not appreciate it as much as they did Kant’s ethics, but, as Kruglov points out, in other European countries during the early nineteenth century, with the exception of Germany itself, the reception of Kant was not much different. See Kruglov, 488–91.

6

Kunitsyn on Natural Law 1. The textbook was originally published in two parts in 1818 and 1820. Kunitsyn, Pravo estestvennoe, 2 vols (St. Petersburg, 1818–20). It was republished in Russkie prosvetiteli 2:204–359. All references in this chapter are made to this later edition. 2. On Kant’s reinterpretation of the epistemological foundations of the natural law tradition, see Haakonssen, “German natural law,” 283; Mary Gregor, “Kant on Natural Rights,” in Kant and Political Philosophy, eds. Ronald Breiner and William Booth (New Haven, Yale University Press: 1993), 52–3; Leonard Krieger, “Kant and the Crisis of Natural Law,” Journal of the History of Ideas 26, no. 2 (1965): 191–210. 3. See Chapter 1. 4. Kunitsyn, Pravo Estestvennoe, 204. 5. Marc Raeff, “Filling the Gaps between Radishchev and the Decembrists,” Slavic Review 26, no. 3 (1967): 410; Fel’dshtein, 471; Hollingsworth took a more cautious position by arguing that on various points Kunitsyn departed from Kant. However, Hollingsworth was unable to expand on this argument within the frameworks of his short introductory article. Hollingsworth, “A. P. Kunitsyn,”127. 6. B. S. Osherovich, Ocherki po istorii russkoi ugolovno-pravovoi mysli (Moscow, 1946), 130. 7. Hollingsworth, “A. P. Kunitsyn,” 127; Schapiro, 49. 8. Smirnov, “Obshchestvenno-politicheskie i pravovye vzgliady Kunitsyna,” 19. 9. Soviet historians saw Kunitsyn as a “linking chain between enlighteners and the noble revolutionaries.” See I. Ia. Shchipanov, “Prosvetitel’skie doktriny v Rossii v kontse XVIII–nachale XIX veka,” in Russkie prosvetiteli 1:12; A. P. Kuprits, 107.

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Notes to Pages 144–149 235 10. Smirnov, “Obshchestvenno-politicheskie i pravovye vzgliady Kunitsyna,” 19. 11. Korkunov, 348. Raeff’s introductory analysis also implies this view. See Raeff, “Between Radishchev and the Decembrists,” 410. 12. Kunitsyn, Pravo, 279, 292, 328. 13. Ibid., 206. 14. Ibid., 206. 15. Ibid., 207. Compare to Kant: “Freedom of choice is this independence from being determined by sensible impulses.” See Kant, The Metaphysics of Morals, 13. 16. Kunitsyn, Pravo, 207. 17. Ibid., 209. 18. Ibid., 222. 19. For this section Kunitsyn might have used the textbook by Gotlieb Hufeland, Versuch Über den Grundsatz des Naturrechts (Jena, 1785), where Hufeland surveyed natural law theories from Grotius to Kant and came to the conclusion that Kant was the most convincing in explaining the foundations of moral freedom and obligation. Hufeland studied in Leipzig and Göttingen, after which he taught the course of natural law in Jena, Würzburg, and Landshut until 1808, when he left the profession to assume the office of Bürgermeister of Danzig. The English-speaking literature on German theorists of natural law is extremely scarce. Some comments can be found in T. J. Hochstrasser, Natural Law Theories in the Early Enlightenment (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 206; Tribe, 159; Steven Lestition, “Kant and the End of Enlightenment in Prussia,” Journal of Modern History 65, no. 1 (1993): 71. 20. Kunitsyn, Pravo, 219–20. 21. See J. B. Schneewind, “Autonomy, Obligation and Virtue: An Overview of Kant’s Moral Philosophy,” in The Cambridge Companion to Kant, 316. 22. Kunitsyn, Pravo, 219. 23. Ibid., 222. 24. For Kant’s religious thought, see Schneewind, “Autonomy, Obligation and Virtue,” 331–2; Paul Guyer, “Kant’s Deductions of the Principles of Right,” in Kant’s Metaphysics of Morals. Interpretative Essays, ed. Mark Timmons (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002), 37. 25. Kunitsyn, Pravo, 231–3. 26. Ibid., 235–6. 27. Ibid., 238–9. 28. Kunitsyn, Pravo, 239–40. 29. Ibid. 30. Ibid., 240. 31. “Man’s freedom as a human being, as a principle for the constitution of a commonwealth, can be expressed in the following formula. No- one can compel me to be happy in accordance with his conception of the welfare of others, for each man may seek his happiness in whatever way he sees fit . . . Under . . . paternal government, the subjects, as immature children cannot distinguish what is truly useful or harmful to themselves . . . Such a government is the greatest conceivable despotism.” See Kant, “Theory and Practice,” in Kant’s Political Writings, 74. 32. Cf. Kant, “Every member of the commonwealth must be entitled to reach any degree of rank which a subject can earn through his talent . . . no member

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33.

34. 35. 36.

37.

38. 39. 40. 41. 42. 43.

44. 45. 46. 47. 48.

49. 50. 51.

52.

Notes to Pages 149–154 of the commonwealth can have hereditary privileges as against his fellowsubjects” Ibid., 76. “To seek prosperity for its own sake is not directly a duty, but indirectly it can be seen as a duty, that of warding off poverty insofar as this is a great temptation to vice. But it is not my happiness but the preservation of my moral integrity that is my end and also my duty.” Kant, The Metaphysics of Morals, 152. Ibid., 237. Ibid., 237. Gregory L. Freeze, “Russian Orthodoxy: Church, People and Politics in Imperial Russia,” in The Cambridge History of Russia, vol. 2, Imperial Russia, 1689–1917, ed., Dominic Lieven (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), 296. On the Bible Society in Russia, see Judith Zacek, “The Russian Bible Society and the Russian Orthodox Church,” Church History 35, no. 4 (1966): 411–37; Raffaella Faggionato, “From a Society of the Enlightened to the Enlightenment of Society: The Russian Bible Society and Rosicrucianism in the Age of Alexander I,” Slavonic and East European Review 79, no. 3 (2001): 479. Jesuits were expelled from the two capitals in 1815 and from the Russian Empire in 1820. On Jesuits in Russia, see James T. Flynn, “The Role of Jesuits in the Politics of Russian Education, 1801–1820,” The Catholic Historical Review 56, no. 2 (1970): 249–65. Kunitsyn, Pravo, 251. Kunitsyn, Pravo, 246. Kunitsyn, Pravo, 260. Nemeth, “Kant in Russia: The Initial Phase (Cont’d),” 337. Kunitsyn, Pravo, 241–2, 324. Ibid., 287. Cf. in Kant: “ . . . the relation of the married persons to each other is a relation of Equality in regards to the mutual possession of their Persons . . . consequently marriage is only truly realized in Monogamy; for in the relation of polygamy the person who is given away on the one side gains only a part of the one to who that person is given up and therefore becomes a mere res.” Kant, The Philosophy of Law, ed. W. Hastie (Edinburgh, 1887), 1. Kunitsyn, Pravo, 289; Cf. in Kant, The Philosophy of Law, 12. Ibid., 290. Ibid., 299. See Chapter 3. In the textbook, Kunitsyn termed “democratic form” what in lectures he described as “republican form.” Despite the change in terms, the content of these two segments is the same. Ibid., 293. Ibid., 294. Ibid., 295. Kunitsyn might have drawn this idea from Spinoza, whose theory of natural law he otherwise explicitly rejected. He wrote: “Although it is a great nonsense to postulate force as the foundation of law, this opinion had its proponents, one of whom was Spinoza . . . ” Ibid., 221. On Spinoza, see J. W. Gough, The Social Contract (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1957), 113. Compare to Kant: “It is not experience or any kind of factual knowledge which makes public legal coercion necessary. On the contrary, even if we imagine men to be as benevolent and law-abiding as we please, the a priori

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53.

54. 55.

56. 57.

58.

59. 60. 61. 62. 63. 64. 65. 66. 67. 68. 69.

70. 71.

72. 73. 74.

rational idea of a non-lawful state will still tell us that before a public and legal state is established, individual men, peoples and states can never be secure against acts of violence from one another . . . thus the first decision the individual is obliged to make, if he does not want to renounce all concepts of right . . . ” Kant’s Political Writings, 137. On Kantian nonvoluntaristic interpretation of the idea of contract, see Kersting, 353–8. “The state of nature [is] . . . a state of society in which justice is absent . . . for this reason, everyone may use violent means to compel another to enter into a juridical state of society.” Kant, The Metaphysical Elements of Justice, 76. On Pufendorf, see Gough, 119–24. In the Natural Law Kunitsyn was ambiguous whether the state of nature should be understood as a historical fact, or, as in Kant, a purely hypothetical assumption, not to be taken literally. In writing about the natural conditions and the contracts that follow, he always employs present rather than past tense, which might indicate the Kantian use of this concept; at the same time, unlike Kant, Kunitsyn nowhere explicitly denies its historicity. Barry Hollingsworth, “A. P. Kunitsyn,” 128. On Kant’s use of the term “general will” and Rousseau’s influence on Kant, see also Kersting, 355; Williams, 165; Frederick C. Beiser, “Kant’s Intellectual Development 1746–81,” in The Cambridge Companion to Kant, 43–4. Kunitsyn, Pravo, 317–18. It is notable that Kunitsyn used the neutral term “vlastitel” rather than “svoevlastitel,” which connoted the idea of autocratic rule, as was the case with the works of Jakob, for instance. Kunitsyn, Pravo, 299. Ibid., 276. Ibid., 306. Ibid., 306. Ibid., 297. Ibid., 320. Ibid., 306–7. Kunitsyn, Pravo, 303. Ibid., 308. He might have borrowed the idea from Schmalz. See Schmalz, Das Natürliche Staatsrecht, 88–90. Kunitsyn, Pravo, 314. Ibid., 314. In Kant this right “ . . . entitles the public authority to see that no secret society, political or religious exists among the people that can exert a prejudicial influence upon the public Weal.” See Kant, The Philosophy of Law, 185. Kunitsyn, Pravo, 314. Ibid., 315. Cf. Kant: “when it is required by the Police, no such secret society may refuse to lay open its constitution. But visitation and search of private houses by the Police, can only be justified in a case of Necessity; and in every particular instance, it must be authorized by a higher authority.” Kant, Philosophy of Law, 185–6. Kunitsyn, Pravo, 317. Ibid., 218–219. Ibid., 316. Schmalz makes a similar point that the ruler might misuse his power under the guise of protecting public good. However, he conceded no possibility of resistance or public scrutiny of the ruler as a way to counteract the abuse because the subjects, according to Schmalz (both as a community

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75. 76. 77. 78. 79. 80. 81.

and private individuals), relinquished their power of the judgment through the contract of submission. See Schmalz, 59–6, 77. Kraus, 388, 400. Ibid., 318. Ibid., 317. Ibid., 321. Kunitsyn, Pravo, 328. Ibid., 338. Ibid., 340. Ibid., 349.

7

In the Midst of Conservative Reaction

1. On Russian nationalist and religious conservatism, see the excellent study by Martin, 15–143; Zacek, 411–37. The most detailed account in Russian can be found in Pypin, 1–144. 2. Quoted from F. Petrov, Rossiiskie universitety v pervoi polovine. XIX veka, Vol. 2, pt. 3 (Moscow, 1999), 70. 3. Ibid., 71. 4. Martin, 156, 170–84; Whittaker, “From Promise to Purge: The First Years of St. Petersburg University,” Paedagogica Historica 18 (1978): 158. 5. Sbornik rasporiazhenii 1:321. 6. Ibid., 322–31. 7. See Flynn, The University Reform, 84–103. 8. Quoted from Flynn, The University Reform, 94. 9. Zhurnal Ministerstva Narodnago Prosveshcheniia (May 1821), 42. 10. Ibid., 45. 11. IRLI, f. 263, op 3, d. 6, l. 62. 12. On Uvarov’s attitude toward secondary education, see Whittaker, The Origins, 62–5. 13. I. Aleshintsev, Istoriia gimnazicheskogo obrazovaniia v Rossii (St. Petersburg, 1912), 61–6. 14. A. Nikitenko, Dnevnik, 3 vols. (Moscow, 1955), 1:34. Alexander Nikitenko was a former serf of Count Sheremet’ev, who gained personal emancipation due to the intercession of Prince Golitsyn and later, Ryleev, who noticed his zeal for study. Nikitenko graduated from St. Petersburg University where he then served as professor of philology in addition to his duties as a district censor. His diary provides some insightful observations and comments on the conditions of Russian education, censorship, and society in the Russia of Nicholas I and Alexander II. 15. S. V. Rozhdestvenskii, Istoricheskii obzor deiatel’nosti ministerstva narodnago prosveshcheniia 1802–1902 (St. Petersburg, 1902), 118. 16. D. Runich “Iz zapisok D. P. Runicha,” Russkaia Starina (May 1901), 377–8. 17. Main Pedagogical Institution did not qualify for these privileges, and by the time it received the official statute, the system of university censorship was abolished. 18. “O poruchenii Uchenomu Komitetu nadzora za izdaniem uchenykh knig,” Sbornik rasporiazhenii 1:319–20. 19. Quoted from Sukhomlinov 1:469. For an extended discussion of the censorship reform, see Ruud, 43–55. 20. Liubavin, 20–4.

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Notes to Pages 166–172 239 21. This requirement was introduced in April 1817. See Sbornik postanovlenii 1:896. 22. Quoted from Liubavin, 37. 23. Historians tend to take at face value Grech’s characterization of Runich as nothing more but “Magnitskii’s caricature.” See Whittaker, “From Promise to Purge,” 156. 24. This work is preserved in a manuscript form in Runich’s personal archive in IRLI, f. 263. 25. IRLI, F. 263, op. 3, d. 12, l. 25. 26. Ibid., l.27 ob, 28. 27. Ibid., l.29. 28. Ibid., l.27, 27ob. 29. Liubavin, 38–9. 30. Whittaker, “From Promise to Purge,” 160. See also Turgenev’s impression of Semenovskii regime’s uprising. Arkhiv brat’ev Turgenevykh 3:244. 31. IRLI, f. 288, op. 1, d. 8, ll. 5–16ob. 32. Sukhomlinov, 1:215. 33. Quoted from Liubavin, 46. 34. Ibid. 35. IRLI, f. 263, op 3, d. 6, l. 61. 36. Quoted from Liubavin, 53. 37. TsGIA, f. 11, op. 1, d. 148, l. 10. 38. Liubavin, 56, 58. The archive of the journal Russian Antiquity (Russkaia Starina), which was published from 1870 to 1918, contains a set of notes taken on Kunitsyn’s Natural Law. Interestingly, the author (whose name is not known) only selected the paragraphs containing the discussion of human natural rights and the notion of autonomy. The exact date of the document is also not known. However, judging from the quality of the paper, it was written in the nineteenth century. See IRLI, f. 265, op. 2, d. 1379, ll. 1–4. 39. A. Turgenev, Khronika Russkogo. Dnevniki (Moscow-Leningrad, 1964), 435. 40. Dekabrist N. Turgenev, 65. 41. This episode is described in Whittaker, The Origins, 83; and Flynn, The University Reform, 110. 42. Meilakh, 70. 43. Ostaf’evskii arkhiv 2:176. 44. Quoted from Liubavin, 38. 45. Petrov, Rossiiskie universitety 2, pt. 3:101; Rozhdestvenskii, 126. 46. IRLI, f. 263, op. 3, d. 28, l. 1ob. 47. Ibid., d.9., l. 4. IRLI, f.263, op.3, d. 47, l. 25; d. 9, l. 3 ob., 4. 48. ILRI, f. 263, op.3, d. 25, l. 1–l ob. 49. IRLI, f. 263, op. 3, d. 27, l. 67. 50. Ibid., l. 68 ob. 51. TsGIA(SPb), f. 263, op. 3, d. 27, l. 72–83. 52. TsGIA(SPb), f. 263, op. 3, d. 25, l.1–2ob. Sukhomlinov mentions that it was used in Kazan’ University in the early 1820s. (Sukhomlinov, 1:235.) Also, when Nezhin Gymnasium (founded in 1820) obtained permission to introduce a course on natural law in 1823, its council received a directive to use Martini’s Positiones. See Mashinskii, 45. Lodii employed it in his courses until he produced in 1828 his own textbook, using Martini as his main source. According to Grigor’ev, in 1821 Lodii reported to the council of St. Petersburg

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53. 54. 55. 56. 57. 58. 59. 60. 61. 62. 63. 64.

65. 66. 67.

68. 69. 70.

71. 72. 73. 74. 75. 76.

77.

Notes to Pages 172–177 University that “all Austrian universities use Martini for teaching natural law.” See Grigor’ev, 12. Flynn, The University Reform, 111–12. Documents on trial proceedings are printed in Sukhomlinov, 1:271–337. Quoted from Sukhomlinov, 1:283. Runich, 385. S. V. Rozhdestvenskii, ed. Materialy dlia istorii uchebnykh reform v Rossii v XVIII–XIX vekakh (St. Petersburg, 1810), lxxvii. Runich, 626–7. This tirade, for all its unflattering conservative fanaticism, suggests that Runich had always remained sincere in his convictions. IRLI, f. 263, op 3, d. 6. A. Voronov, Istoriko-statisticheskoe obozrenie uchebnykh zavedenii SanktPeterburgskogo uchebnogo okruga (St. Petersburg, 1899), 216–17. IRLI, f. 263, op 3, d. 6, l. 4; IRLI, f. 263, op 3, d. 6, l. 4. Ibid., 6. He wrote: “Kantian philosophy . . . does not allow any principles of loyalty other than the one based on pure reason, that is enthusiasm which always leads towards criticism of all institutions of social order and praise for democratic undertakings.” Ibid., 41. Ibid., 38. E. M. Feoktistov, Magnitskii (St. Petersburg, 1865), 182–97. Photius’s religious fanaticism was indeed remarkable (although Nicholas I remained unimpressed and was quite irritated by Photius’s posture as a saint). Removed from the court, Photius died from excessive fasting. On Photius, see Joseph L. Wieczynski, “Apostle of Obscurantism: The Archimandrite Photius of Russia (1792–1838),” Journal of Ecclesiastical History 22 (1971): 319–31. IRLI, f. 263, op 3, d. 6, l. 38. Feoktistov, 200. See S. Mashinskii, Gogol’ i ‘delo o vol’nodumstve,’ (Moscow, 1959), 85–210; All the archival documents pertaining to the “case of freethinking” in Nezhin were published in D. Iofanov, N. V. Gogol’: detskie i iunosheskie gody (Kiev, 1951), 263–418. Quoted from Mashinskii, 93, 107. See Mashinskii, 180–210. Petrov, Formirovanie 3:64–5. On the foundation of new types of schools for peasants, see Ibid., 65. Nikitenko, Dnevnik 1:128–9. Pustarnakov, Universitetskaia filosofiia, 527. Franz Samuel Karpe taught philosophy in Vienna from 1786 to 1806. In Austria his Compediaria Philosophiae moralis institutio (Vienna 1804) was among the textbooks approved by the court censors for teaching purposes. See Rudolf Haller “On the Historiography of Austrian Philosophy,” in Rediscovering the Forgotten Vienna Circle, ed. Thomas Uebe (Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1991), 44. Pal’min started his teaching career in Kazan’ University. During the university purges he took Magnitsky’s side against his colleges but was unable to continue in Kazan’ in view of his poor reputation among the faculty. Due to Runich’s assistance he obtained a teaching position at St. Petersburg University. See Pustarnakov, Universitetskaia filosofiia, 527; Nikitenko, Dnevnik 1:11–12, 117. Incidentally, Pal’min was listed among the subscribers

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78. 79. 80. 81. 82. 83.

84. 85.

86. 87. 88.

89.

90. 91.

92. 93.

to Schmalz’s book, but he apparently did not dare using even this cautious book for his courses. Pustarnakov, 634. P. Lodii, Teoriia obschih prav soderzhaschaia v sebe filosofskie ucheniia o estestvennom vseobschem gosudarstvennom prave (St. Petersburg, 1828), 17–25. Ibid., 88. Ibid., 37. Ibid., 106. In his academic publications during the 1820s he focused on the study of private and Roman law: Lev Tsvetaev, Pervye nachala prav chastnogo i obshchego, s prisovokuplenie osnovanii narodnogo prava (Moscow, 1823); Uchebnaia kniga rimskgogo grazhdanskogo prava (Moscow, 1834); Osnovaniia prava chastnogo grazhdanskogo (Moscow, 1825); Pevye nachala politicheskoi ekonomii (Moscow, 1823). D. Miliutin, Vospominaniia general-fel’dmarshala D. A. Miliutina (Moscow, 1997), 1:93. Iakov Kostenetskii, “Vospominaniia iz moei studencheskoi zhizni,” Russkii Arkhiv 25, book 1 (1887): 232. Kostenetskii belonged to those critically thinking students who aroused the government’s suspicion. In 1833 he was expelled from the university, deprived of his noble title, and sent to Caucasus as a simple soldier. He showed himself to be a brave soldier during the Turkish War and was rewarded with a promotion to the officer’s rank. He retired in 1839 to devote himself to writing and, later, zemstvo activity. Petrov, Formirovanie 2:127–8. On the development of legal training in Russia, see also Wortman, The Development, 42–5. Quoted from L. I. Nasonkina, Moskovskii universitet posle vosstaniia dekabristov (Moscow, 1972), 66. Quoted from Petrov, Formirovanie 2:135. This episode is described in some detail in the memoirs of A. D. Galakhov (1807–1892), a now almost forgotten literary figure who studied in Moscow University at that time. See A. D. Galakhov, Zapiski cheloveka (Moscow 1999), 90–2. On Davydov, see Pustarnakov, Universitetskaia filosofiia v Rossii, 376–8; Nasonkina, 63–6; Petrov, Formirovanie, 2:129–38. Using an outdated Soviet source on the history of Moscow University, Flynn mistakenly argued that Moscow University was spared any trouble with the authorities because Obolenskii protected the faculty from ideological purges by using his social connections. “Kunitsyn’s book,” he argues, “was condemned as evidence of ‘evil’ at work at St. Petersburg University, because Runich said it was. Davydov’s very similar book was not evidence of evil at Moscow . . . because Obolenskii said it was not.” This argument supports Flynn’s thesis that purges in Kazan’ and St. Petersburg were acts of individual obscurantists that had no significant consequences for other universities. See Flynn, The University Reform, 144, 155–6, 159. Nikitenko, Dnevnik 1:242. His flattery of Uvarov became an object of V. Belinskii’s public derision. Ibid., 506. n. 199. Quoted from W. B. Lincoln, Nicholas I: Emperor and Autocrat of All Russians (DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 1989), 57. See also Wortman, The Development, 44–6. ZhMNP, 1834, pt. 1:v–vi. In 1834 the Journal published a long article on the ideas of Louis Bautain, a professor of philosophy in Strasburg University who explored in his works

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94. 95. 96. 97. 98. 99. 100. 101. 102. 103. 104. 105. 106. 107. 108.

109. 110. 111. 112.

Notes to Pages 180–186 the relationship between reason and faith. At the core of his philosophy was the idea that Revelation serves as the only source of truth and certitude for mankind. Nikitenko mentions in his diary that Uvarov “ordered that all professors of philosophy and related sciences follow this article in their teaching.” See A. Kraevskii, “Sovremennoe sostoianie filosofii vo Frantsii i novaia sistema sei nauki osnovyvaemaia Botenom,” ZhMNP, 1834, pt. 1:317–77; Nikitenko, Dnevnik 1:144. ZhMNP, part VXXVII (1853): 153. The teaching of philosophy was reinstated in the liberal Statute of 1863. Joseph N. Moody, French Education since Napoleon (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 1978), 27, 211, n. 19. See Thornhill, 130–57; Kelly, 272–4. Russkie university v ikh ustavakh i vospominaniiakh, 122–3. See also Flynn, The University Reform, 205. Koshelev, 8–9; Russkie universitety v ikh ustavakh i vospominaniiakh, 33, 85, 93, 104. Nasonkina, 119. Nikitenko, Dnevnik 1:72, 79. Koshelev, 39. See Hamburg, 46- 66. Quoted from Nasonkina, 115. Flynn, The University Reform, 27–215. Moskovskii universitet v vospominaniiakh sovremennikov, ed. P. A. Zaionchkovskii (Moscow, 1956), 57. Ibid., 22. Ibid., 123, also 22, 26, 53. Nasonkina, 128–51. Most of his liberal verses were about the oppression of individual freedom in Russia. In prison he wrote a short verse that expressed both his despair and defiance. “If there is no means to save oneself / From oppression and chains / Then life is worse than hundred deaths /And free person has to finish his life free. See A. I. Polezhaev, Stikhotvoreniia i poemy (Leningrad, 1957), 66–7. Translation is mine. Nasonkina, 151–5. [A. Benkendorf] “Graf A. Benkendorf o Rossii v 1827–1830 (Ezhegodnye otchety III otdeleniia i politsii zhandarmov,” Krasnyi arkhiv 37 (1929), 149–50. Ibid., 165–9. Moskovskii universitet v vospominaniiakh, 125.

Epilogue 1. Magnitskii was charged with embezzlement of Kazan’ University funds. See Flynn, The University Reform, 165–6. Runich was dismissed in 1826. He lived the rest of his life in retirement and died in 1860. See Martin, 201. 2. Arkhiv brat’ev Turgenevykh 3:260. 3. Ibid., 337; TsGIA, f. 11, op.1, d. 3727, l. 8. 4. See Chapter 3 on Kunitsyn’s article “About Constitution.” 5. Charles Breunig, The Age of Revolution and Reaction, 1789–1850 (New York: Norton Company, 1977), 138–41. 6. Kunitsyn, “Obozrenie 1821 goda,” Syn Otechestva 76, no. XII (1822): 194.

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Notes to Pages 187–191 243 7. Kunitsyn, “Obozrenie 1821 goda. Prodolzhenie,” Syn Otechestva 76, no. XVI (1822): 44–55. 8. On Moscow Telegraph, see William Mills Todd III, “Periodicals in the Early Nineteenth Century,” in Literary Journalism in Imperial Russia, ed. Deborah Martinsen (Cambridge University Press, 1997), 37– 63. 9. Vosstanie dekabristov: materiali i dokumenti, ed. M. N. Pokrovskii (M.-L. 1925), 1:226. 10. Ibid. 11:36. It is not clear why he refers to the Institute as the Academy. 11. Ibid. 18:164. 12. TsGIA(SPb), f. 11, op. 1, d. 3727, l.10. 13. Raeff, Michael Speransky, 174–6. 14. A. Kunitsyn, “Zamechaniia na knigu Osnovaniia Rossiiskago Prava, izdannuiu Komissieu Sostavleniia Zakonov,” Syn Otechestva 51, no. VI (1819): 241–52; “Pribavlenie pervoe k zamechaniiam,” Syn Otechestva 54, no. XXXIII (1819): 281–310. 15. [Gustav] Rosenkampf, “Otvet na zamechaniia na knigu: Osnovaniia Rossiiskogo Prava, napechatannie v shestoi knizhke Syna Otechestva,” Syn Otechestva 52, no. XII (1819): 242–3. 16. A. Kunitsyn, “Zamechaniia,” 242–4. 17. Kunitsyn, “Pribavlenie pervoe (okonchanie),” Syn Otechestva 55, no. XXXIV (1819): 12–13. 18. Baron Rosenkampf, “Otvet na zamechaniia na knigu: Osnovaniia Rossiiskogo Prava, napechatannye v shestoi knishke Syna Otechestva,” Syn Otechestva 52, no. XII (1819): 245. 19. On the committee’s work after 1825, see P. M. Maikov, Vtoroe otdelenie, 102–216; Ruzhitskaia, Zakonodatel’naia deyatel’nost v tsarstvovanie Imperatora Nikolaia I (Moscow, 2005), 210–1. 20. Speranskii became the de facto chair of the project, while Balugianskii—a figure less objectionable to the Russian establishment—held an official title. Raeff, Speransky, 326–7. 21. P. M. Maikov, “Speranskii i studenty zakonovedeniia,” Russkii Vestnik (August 1899), 610–12; Ia. Barshev, Istoricheskaia zapiska o sodeistvii vtorogo otdeleniia sobstvennoi ego imperatorskogo velichestva kantseliarii razvitiiu iuridicheskikh nauk v Rossii (St. Petersburg, 1876), 6–12. 22. P. M. Maikov, Vtoroe otdelenie, 60. After the university purges of the early 1820s, the need for trained jurists was so tangible that various universities petitioned Speranskii and the Minister of Education to assign these students to law chairs. See P. Maikov, “Speranskii i studenty zakonovedeniia,” Russkii Vestnik (October 1899), 680–1; Nikitenko, Dnevnik 1:173. 23. On Savigny, see Karl Mollnau, “Contributions of Savigny to the Theory of Legislation,” The American Journal of Comparative Law 37, no. 1 (1989): 81–93. 24. Nikitenko, Dnevnik 1:146–7. 25. Ibid., 173. 26. Ibid.; Alexander Koshelev, an official from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, who traveled to Europe in 1831, also noted anti-Russian and pro-Polish sentiments among the Frenchmen. See Koshelev, 40. 27. He was presented with the box decorated with diamonds and the emperor’s initials. TsGIA, f. 11, op.1, d. 3727, l.13. 28. P. M. Maikov, O svode zakonov Rosskiiskoi Imperii (Moscow, 2006), 68. Incidentally, it was far from the only case of concealing certain inconvenient

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29. 30. 31. 32. 33. 34. 35. 36. 37.

Notes to Pages 191–192 laws from the public. Speranskii took care to find such laws and consult Nicholas I concerning their publication. Excluded, for instance, was a manifesto of 1826 concerning peasant disturbances, which allowed landlords “to act secretly” (bez oglaski). All other decrees containing this formula were also left unpublished. See P. Maikov, Vtoroe Otdelenie, 165–6. Ibid., 69. Raeff, Michael Speransky, 327. Kunitsyn, Istoricheskoe izobrazhenie drevnego sudoproizvodstva v Rossii (St. Petersburg, 1843); Liubavin, 63. This number included male serfs only, who counted as tax obligated. The actual number, therefore, was significantly higher. See Melton, 682, n. 32. On Instructions, see Ibid., 680–708. Nikitin, 198–211. See his obituary in Russkii Invalid no. 277 (1840): 113. TsGIA, f. 11, op. 1, d. 3727, l.13. Ibid.

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Bibliography 1. Archival Sources TsGIA(SPb) Tsentral’nyi Gosudarstvennyi Arkhiv v Sankt Peterburge f. 11 Archive of A. Kunitsyn f. 13 Archive of Tsarskoe Selo Lyceum f. 14 Archive of St. Petersburg University IRLIInstitut Russkoi Literatury i Iskusstva f. 263 Archive of D. Runich f. 288 Archive of A. Sturdza

2. Works by Kunitsyn Kunitsyn, A. P. Nastavlenie vospitannikam chitannoe pri otkrytii Imperatorskogo tsarskosel’skogo litseia. St. Petersburg, 1811. Reprinted in Kondakov, M. I., ed. Antologiia pedagogicheskoi mysli Rossii pervoi poloviny XIX v. Moscow, 1987, 147–53. ———. “Poslanie k russkim.” Syn Otechestva 1, no. V (1812): 173–81. ———.“Zamechaniia na nyneshniuiu voinu.” Syn Otechestva 2, no. VIII (1812): 45–8. ———. Izobrazhenie vzaimnoi sviazi gosudarstvennykh svedenii. St. Petersburg, 1817. Reprinted in Shchipanov I., ed. Russkie prosvetiteli ot Radishcheva do dekabristov. Vol. 1. Moscow, 1966, 176–88. ———. Pravo estestvennoe. 2 vols. St. Petersburg, 1818–20. Reprinted in Shchipanov I., ed. Russkie prosvetiteli ot Radishcheva do dekabristov. Vol. 2. Moscow, 1966, 204–351. ———. “O sostoianii inostrannykh krest’ian.” Syn Otechestva 45, no. XVII (1818): 162–86. ———. “O konstitutsii,” Syn Otechestva 45, no. XVIII (1818): 202–11. ———. “Rassmotrenie rechi G. Prezidenta Akademii Nauk I Popechitelia Sanktpeterburgskogo Uchebnogo okruga., proiznesennoi im na publichnom torzhestvennom sobranii Glavnogo Pedagogicheskogo Instituta 22 marta 1818 goda,” Syn Otechestva 46, no. XXIII (1818): 136–46. ———. “Rassmotreniie rechi G. Prezidenta Akademii Nauk i Popechitelia Sanktpeterburgskogo Uchebnogo okruga., proiznesennoi im na publichnom torzhestvennom sobranii Glavnogo Pedagogicheskogo Instituta 22 marta 1818 goda (okonchanie).” Syn Otechestva 46, no. XXIV (1818): 174–91. ———. “Nekotorye mysli o neobkhodimosti mogushchestvennoi vneshnei zashchity bezopasnosti i spokoistviia gosudarstv.” Syn Otechestva 51, no. II (1818): 49–66. ———. “Nekotorye mysli o neobkhodimosti mogushchestvennoi vneshnei zashchity bezopasnosti i spokoistviia gosudarstv (okonchanie).” Syn Otechestva 51, no. III (1818): 97–106.

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Index Abramov, A. F., 202 Achenwall, Gottfried, 113, 121 Akulshin, P. V., 201, 220, 223 Aleshintsev, I., 238 Alexander I, 1, 6, 22, 34, 37, 38–9, 42, 56, 59, 61–4, 68, 70, 97, 98, 99–101, 103, 139, 150, 153, 161, 165, 173, 174, 175, 188, 209 n. 42, 217 n. 42, 222 n. 51 Alexander II, 21, 103, 184 Andreev, Iu. A., 228, 232 Anikin, Andrei, 204 Annenkov, P. V., 209, 210, 212 Aristotle, 112 Arsen’ev, Konstantin, 21, 172, 173, 202 n. 12, 204 n. 36 Arzamas society, 87–8, 96, 98, 101, 220 n. 101, 221 n. 12 Bagalei, D. I., 228, 233 Baitsura, T., 204, 205 Balug’ianskii, Mikhail, 19–20, 43, 45, 168, 172, 173, 180, 189 Barshev, Ia., 243 Baumeister, Christian, 15–16, 21, 130, 177, 202 n. 14 Bause, Theodore, 113 Bazanov, B., 211 Beaven, Miranda, 233 Beccaria, Cesare, 30, 112 Beck, Lewis, 203 Beiser, Frederick, 237 Belinskii, Vissarion, 79, 231 n. 90 Benkendorf, Count, 97, 183–4, 242 n. 110 Bentham, Jeremy, 30, 88, 126 Bernstein, Lina, 215 Bestuzhev, Nicholas, 140 Bible Society, in Russia, 150, 161–2, 174, 326 n. 36 Bilevich, Mikhail, 175 Binyon, T. J., 211, 214, 223, 224 Blakely, Allison, 217 Blum, Jerome, 212, 219 n. 92 Bokova, V. M., 219, 220 n. 51 Bolebrukh, A. G., 210 Bradley, Joseph, 215 Breunig, Charles, 242 Briantsev, Professor, 130

Brodskii, L. N. 216 Brown, A. N., 205, 227 Buhle, 117–19, 127, 229 n. 64, 230 n. 71 Bulgarin, Faddei, 41–2 Burlamaquy, Jean-Jacque, 121 Cameralist philosophy, 19–20, 21, 22, 27, 48, 52, 118, 126, 143, 178, 193, 204 n. 34 Catherine the Great, 15, 17, 94, 105, 111, 112, 164, 175, 188, 219 n. 90 Chamberlin, William, 7, 201 Cicero, 112 Civil society, in Russia, 7, 59–61 Coates, Willson, 201, 202 Code Napoleon, 126, 190 Codification project, 62, 173, 189–90 Colonies, military, 64 Conservatism, in Russia, 38, 41–2, 62, 64, 66, 71, 74–5, 80, 82, 84, 99–100, 106, 121, 131, 137, 139, 161–76, 179–81, 187 Constant, Benjamin, 69, 70, 218 n. 48 Crisp, Olga, 199 Cross, Anthony, 217, 219 Davydov, Ivan, 171, 179, 241 n. 89 Decembrists, the, 60, 92, 95–7, 100, 140, 183, 187, 193, 197, 217 n. 45, 222 n. 52, n.56, 223 n. 66 Desnitskii, Semen, 111–12, 205 n. 50 Dilthey, Henrich, 111, 227 n. 25 Driver, sam, 224 Edmonds, Robin., 215 Education system in Russia, 89, 137–8, 176, 182, 194; and courses in natural law, 105–6, 110–11, 114, 138–9, 152, 162, 165, 168, 173–4, 179–80; ecclesiastic, 13–15, 17; importance of, 59, 139–40, 181–4; reforms of, 1–3, 16–23, 31–2, 103, 110, 162–5, 170–2, 176, 194, 197, 225 n. 3 Edwards, David, 203, 209 Engel’gardt, Egor, 32, 40, 46, 143, 169, 210 n. 25, n. 30, 211 n. 51 Engelstein, Laura, 199 Evgrafova, V. E., 234

259

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Faggionato, Raffaella, 236 Fedorov, V. A., 202 Fel’dshtein, G. S., 205, 227, 232, 234 Ferretti, Paola, 209, 210 Fessler, Ignatius, 114 Fichte, Johann, 113, 121, 138, 179 Field, Daniel, 7–8, 201 n. 23, n. 24 Finkin, Mathew, 205 Flynn, James, 201, 203, 205, 225, 236, 238, 239, 240, 241 n. 89, 242 Fomin, Alexander, 97, 222 n. 52 Fotii, 174, 240 n. 67 Frank, S. L., 214, 224 Freeze, Gregory, 202, 236 French Revolution of 1789, 28, 69 Fuss, Nikolai, 166, 168 Galich, Alexander, 21, 172, 177, 182 Gleason, Walter, 224 n. 1, 227 Glinka, Fedor, 92, 96, 97, 130, 140; see also Decembrists Gogolevskii, A. V., 201 Golitsyn, Alexander, 139, 161–2, 169, 170, 174–5, 185, 238 n. 14 Gooch, G. P., 208 Gooding, John, 200, 223 n. 66 Gorchakov, Prince, 35, 44, 197, 212 n. 73 Göttingen University, 1, 5, 18, 23–30, 43, 85, 88, 113, 114, 117, 126, 208 n. 96, 225 n. 3, 235 n. 19 Gough, J. W., 236, 237 Granovskii, Timofei, 182, 199 n. 2, n. 3 Gray, John, 201 Grech, Nikolai, 67, 239 n. 21 Grey, Marlon, 213 Gribovskii, Mikhail, 92, 97, 222 n. 51 Grigor’ev, V. V., 205, 232 n. 136, 239 n. 52, 240 Gross, Christian, 110 Grot, K. Ia., 209, 210, 211, 212 Grotius, 110, 121, 235 n. 19 Guyer, Paul, 228, 235, 248, 251, 255 Haakonssen, Knud, 213, 225, 226, 227, 234 Haller, Rudolf, 240 Hamburg, Gary, 199, 200 n. 13, 242, 249 Hebeis, Michael, 205, 232 Heeren, Arnold, 26, 28–9, 207 Hegel, Georg, 4, 181, 182 Hermann, Karl, 172 Hertz, Frederick, 207 Herzen, Alexander, 4, 79 Historical school of jurisprudence, 29, 190; see also Hugo, Savigny

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Hobbes, Thomas, 108, 111, 113, 121, 153–5, 155, 164, 171, 226 n. 12, 227 n. 17 Hochstrasser, Tim, 227, 235 d’Holbach, Baron, 66 Hollingsworth, Barry, 6, 96, 201 n. 16, 234 n. 5, 237 n. 56 Hufeland, Gottlieb, 48, 212 n. 62 Hugo, Gustav, 26, 29, 208 n. 94 Hunter, Ian, 203 Iatsenko, O. A., 200 Illichevskii, A., 210 n. 29, 212 n. 73 Individualism, philosophy, 3–5, 70, 103, 106, 107, 108–10, 130, 141, 143, 148, 155, 166, 168, 194–5; see also Kunitsyn Intelligentsia, the, 3, 12, 37, 103 Iofanov, D., 240 Itenberg, B. S., 201 Jakob, Ludwig, von., 43, 119–23, 124, 125, 153, 212 n. 62, 230 n. 76, n. 84, n. 87 Johnson, William, 203 Journal of the Free Society of the Lovers of Literature, Science and Art, 65; see also Popugaev Journalism, in Russia, 64–8 Kaidanov, Ivan, 30, 165 Kalitkina, N. Iu., 200 Kamchatka, 67, 217 n. 39 Kamenskii, Z. A., 6, 200, 228, 233, 234 Kann, Robert, 204 Kant, Immanuel, 2, 4, 5, 11, 15, 19, 43, 105–6, 109–10, 113, 114–16, 125–6, 130, 137, 140–2, 155, 214 n. 110, 228 n. 55, 231 n. 104, n. 105, 235 n. 15, n. 19, n. 24, n. 31, n. 32, 236 n. 33, n. 41, n. 43, n. 52, 237 n. 53, n. 55, n. 69, n. 71; and Buhle, G, 117–18; and Feofilakt, archbishop, 114; and Hugo, 29; and Jakob, 43, 119–23; and Lodii, 21; and Lubkin, 124–5; and Mellman, 114; and Reinhard, 115–17; and Schad, 138; and Schaden, 113; and Schmalz, 135–7; and Sergeev, 135; and Snell, 124–5; and Tsvetaev, 126–7; and Villers, 114; and Zeiller, 21, 128–30, 171; see also Kunitsyn, and Kant Karamzin, Nikolai, 65, 71, 102, 161, 170, 215 n. 4, 216 n. 21 Karazin, Nikolai, 41 Karpe, Franz, 177 Kavelin, Konstantin, 182, 199

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Index Kazan’ University, 16, 124, 138, 163, 166, 176–7, 239 n. 52, 240 n. 77, 241 n. 89, 242 n. 1 Kelly, J. M., 208, 242 Kersting, W., 228, 237 Khar’kov University, 16, 41, 119–20, 132, 138, 139, 162, 190, 232 n. 136 Kingston-Mann, Esther, 200, 204, 212, 219 Kiukhel’beker, Vil’gel’m, 40, 209 n. 5 Klein, Ernst, 48, 212 n. 62 Klippel, Diethelm, 226 Kobeko, Dmitrii, 42, 210, 221, 216 Kolchin, Peter, 218 Koloshin, Pavel, 40, 92, 140, 187 Kolosov, V., 202 Komarov, A. I., 217 Kondakov, I. P., 227 Korf, Baron, 43, 44 Korkunov, N. M., 208, 235 Korsgaard, Christine, 226 Kosachevskaia, E. M., 203, 204 Koshelev, Alexander, 182, 234 n. 174, 242, 243 n. 26 Kostenetskii, Iakov, 178, 241 n. 85 Kraevskii, A., 242 Kraus, Hans-Christof, 233, 238 Kruglov, A., 199, 225, 228, 234 n. 176 Kunitsyn, Alexander, 1–5, 10; “About Constitution,” 69–71; as advisor to the Stroganov family, 192; and Alexander I, 33, 70, 78, 97, 153, 195, 213 n. 92; awards, 36, 58, 185, 192; and Beccaria, 30; and Bentham, 30; and cameralist thought, 26–7, 48–9, 52–5, 112, 142–3, 194; on categorical imperative, 146; and codification project, 3, 188–91; on the common will, 155–7; and Constant, 69, 218 n. 48; and the Decembrists, 58, 97–8, 187, 197, 215 n. 123; on distinction between law and ethics, 145–6; early education, 13–16; on equality, human and legal, 145–6, 147, 151, 157; on equality of opportunity, 148, 151; on European revolutions of 1820–21, 185–6; on freedoms, ancient, 69–70; on freedoms, civil, 69–70, 72, 78, 157, 159; on freedoms, modern, 69–70; on freedoms, political, 69–70, 78; on the French revolution of 1789, 69, 78; and Göttingen University, 1, 5, 23–30, 43; Historical Study of Ancient Russian Jurisprudence, 191–2; and Hobbes,

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153–4, 155; and Hufeland, 48, 225 n. 19; and Hugo, 29; on human nature, 145–6, 153; on individual autonomy, 71, 143, 147–8, 155–7; on individual rights, 50, 70, 76, 145, 147–8, 154–8; on individual well-being, 145, 148–9, 156; and Jakob, 43, 153, 212 n. 62; and journalistic writings, 37–8, 69–83, 89–90, 185–7, 188–9; and Kant, 4–5, 11, 15, 43, 48, 49–50, 52–4, 83, 143, 144, 145–6, 148–60; and Klein, 48; and liberal individualism, 5, 70, 106, 143, 148, 155–7, 166, 194–6; and Locke, 150, 155; and Lyceum, 31, 33–5, 42–4, 58; lyceum courses, 42–3, 45–55; and Main School Administration, 167–9; on marriage, 151–2; “Message to the Russians,” 38; on nations’ law, 160; and Polish Constitution of 1818, 68–9, 78, 153; on property rights, 45–7, 51–2, 70, 77–80, 150–2, 156–8, 160, 195, 196; and Pufendorf, 153–4, 155; and Pushkin, 55; and Radishchev, 144; on religious toleration, 149–50; on representative assembly, 70, 73, 152; reputation as a teacher, 34, 43–4; and Rousseau, 144, 153, 155–6; and Runich, 166–8; and salons, 61; and Schmalz, 48, 49–50, 53, 136, 140, 143, 212 n. 62; on serfdom, 45, 47, 73–4, 76–81; service promotions, 185, 192; and Smith, 5, 11, 27, 43, 45, 48, 50, 55, 79, 195 ; on the social contract, 51, 155–6, 158; social origin of, 13; on social privileges, 148, 157; “Some observations about the current war,” 38–9; “Some thoughts concerning the need for external security,” 82–3; speech at the Tsarskoe Selo Lyceum, 33–4; and Spinoza, 236 n. 51; and St. Petersburg Pedagogical Institute, 20–3, 89; and St. Petersburg University, 11, 97, 169, 192; on the state of nature, 50–1, 82, 153–5; study abroad, 22–4, 228 n. 48; on taxation, 89; and Turgenev, A., 9, 81, 169–70; and Turgenev, N., 9, 10, 11, 12, 24–6, 30, 61, 85, 89–90, 92–3, 95, 97, 185, 193, 208 n. 3, 218 n. 61; and Uvarov, 71–3; and Wolff, 144, 146 Kuprits, N. Ia., 200 Kutuzov, Mikhail, 38–9

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Landa, S. S., 220, 222, 223 Langer, Karl, 111 Lässer, Gregor, 232 Laval, Count, 168, 169, 174 Lavrovskii, N. A., 233 Law, in Russia. See Legal system; Natural law; Roman law Legal system, in Russia, 61–2, 216 n. 21 Leibnitz, Gottfried, 110 Leontovitch, V., 200 n. 14, 219 Lestition, Steven, 235 Liberalism, in historiography of Russia, 6–9, 11, 199–201, 207, 210, 220 n. 12, 222 n. 52, n. 56, 223 n. 66; in Russia, 3, 4, 26, 42, 59–61, 62–3, 65, 69, 71, 80–1, 86–7, 93–5, 99–103, 137–8, 182–5, 242 n. 108 Lincoln, W. B., 241 Lindenfeld, David, 207, 213, 214, 225 n. 4, 227, 230 Liubavin, M. A., 200, 202, 209, 212, 238, 239, 244 Locke, John, 108, 112, 116 Lodii, Petr, 21, 129, 175, 177–8 Lorer, N. I., 234 Lubkin, Professor, 124–5 Lukes, Steven, 199 Machiavelli, Niccolo, 164 Magnitskii, Mikhail, 163–5, 166, 173, 175, 185, 186 Maikov, L. N., 209 Maikov, P. M., 205, 243–4 Main School Administration, 12, 162, 164–70, 173–5, 230 n. 76; see also Ministry of Education Maistre, Joseph de, 209 n. 5, 225 n. 3 Malinovskii, Vasilii, 33, 36–7, 39, 210 n. 38 Margolis, Iu. D., 200, 203 Martin, Alexander, 217, 238 Martini, Karl, 21, 132–4, 172, 175, 175, 205 n. 46, 232 n. 137 Martynov, Ivan, 66, 168 Mashinskii, 239, 240 McCaffray, Susan, 204, 212 McClelland, Charles, 207 McClelland, James, 226, 228 McConnel, Allen, 217 McGrew, Roderick, 204 Medushevskii, A. N., 201 Meilakh, B., 208, 209, 210, 212, 239 Mellman, Ludwig, 114

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Mel’nikova, N. N., 227 Melton, Edgar, 192, 219, 221, 244 Mikhailovskaia, N. M., 200 Ministry of Education, 20, 22–3, 31, 129, 137–8, 162, 165; and natural law, 162–8, 170–1, 175, 179–80 Mironenko, S. V., 211 Modzalevskii, B. L., 211 Mollnau, Karl, 243 Montesquieu, Charles-Louis, 112, 126 Moody, Joseph, 242 Mordvinov, Nikolai, 46, 184 Moscow University, 126, 141, 178–9, 181, 182 Moser, Johann Jacob, 226 n. 13 Möser, Justus, 226 n. 13 Murav’ev, Nikolai, 92 Murav’ev-Apostol, Sergei, 60 Napoleonic Wars, 28, 37, 42, 57, 66, 83, 93 Nasonkina, L. I., 241, 242 Natural law, as academic discipline in Russia, 1–4, 21, 58, 103, 105–6, 110–43, 162–5, 170–6, 179–80, 193, 225 n. 3; in Europe, absolutist, 107–8, 115, 118–19, 131–4, 213 n. 90, 225 n. 8, 226 n. 13; in historiography of Russia, 5, 224 n. 1; liberal, 108–10, 226 n. 13 Naumov, Ivan, 131–2, 232 Nechkina, M., 215, 222, 228 Nemeth, Thomas, 199, 224 n. 1, 225, 229, 233, 236 Nethercott, Frances, 199 Netting, Anthony, 8, 9, 200, 201 Nettlebladt, Daniel, 111 Neumann, F., 225 Nezhin gymnasium, 175–6 Nicholas I, 101, 172–3, 183, 190 Nikitenko, Alexander, 164, 177, 179, 190, 191, 204, 205, 238 n. 14, 240, 241, 242 n. 93, 243 Nikitin, A. G., 215 n. 123, 244 Nobility, in Russia, 5, 19, 20, 33, 42, 46–7, 57, 59, 64, 75, 79–80, 82, 83, 85, 91, 98, 100, 102–3, 112, 115, 140, 151, 161, 188, 195, 216 n. 21, 219 n. 90 Northern Messenger, 66 Northern Society, 96, 98, 187, 223 n. 66 Novosil’tsev, Nikolai, 19, 22, 174 Offord, Derek, 8, 199–201 Oizerman, T. I., 233

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Index Oksman, Iu, G., 222 Orlov, Mikhail, 87–8 Osherovich, B. S., 234 Osipov, I. D., 201 Ovchinnikova, E. A., 232 Pal’min, Mikhail, 177 Pekarskii, P., 202, 205, 227 Peter the Great, 47, 62, 89, 189, 191, 219 n. 90; and courses in natural law, 1, 2, 105, 110 Petrov, F. A., 225, 231, 240, 241 Piermont de, Strube, 110 Polezhaev, A. I., 183, 242 n. 108 Polish Constitution of 1818, 57, 68–9, 71, 78, 101, 153, 213 n. 92 Ponomareva, Sofia, 61 Popugaev, Vasilii, 65–6 Pravdin (pseudonym), 73–5, 218–19 Predtechenskii, A. V., 223 Pufendorf, Samuel, 110, 111, 113, 125, 134, 153, 154, 155, 226 Pushchin, Ivan, 33, 34, 39, 40, 44, 45, 92, 209, 210 n. 30, n. 32, 211 n. 51, n. 53, 212, 221 Pushkin, Alexander, 33, 40–1, 44, 55–7, 60–1, 64, 92, 102–3, 113, 170, 183, 209, 210 n. 30, 211 n. 60, 214, 215 n. 123, 223 n. 74 Pustarnakov, V. F., 201, 212, 219, 227, 228, 229, 231, 240, 241 Pütter, J. S., 113 Pypin, A. N., 222, 238 Raeff, Marc, 7, 199, 201, 204, 209, 218, 224, 226, 234, 235, 243, 244 Ramer, Samuel, 217 Raupach, Professor, 172 Razumovskii, Aleksei, 32, 34 Reill, Peter, 207 Reinhard, Christian, 115–17 Roach, E. E., 209 Roman law, in Russia, 22, 106, 113, 178, 190, 231 n. 106, 241 n. 83 Roosevelt, Priscilla, 199 Rosenkampf, Baron, 188–9, 243 Rostopchin, Fedor, 38 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 116, 167; see also Kunitsyn, and Rousseau Rozhdestvenskii, S. V., 238, 239, 240 Rudenskaia, M., 209, 210, 211 Rudnitskaia, E. L., 201, 222

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263

Runich, Dmitrii, 3, 170, 171–3, 175, 177, 179, 185, 186, 190, 238, 239 n. 21, 240, 242 n. 1, 245; see also Kunitsyn, and Runich Russian Messenger, 66 Ruud, Charles, 217, 238 Ryleev, Kondratii, 183 Salons, in Russia, 59–61 Sandler, Stephanie, 103, 214 n. 114, n. 116, 224 Sartorius, Georg, 26–8 Saunders, David, 216 Savigny, Friedrich, 190 Scattola, Merio, 227 Schad, J., 138–9, 175 Schaden, J., 113 Schapiro, Leonard, 199, 214, 223, 224, 234 Schelling, Friedrich, 171, 181, 190 Schlafly, Daniel, 210 Schlözer, August, 19, 29, 207 n. 91 Schmalz, T., 48–9, 121, 127, 128, 135–7, 140, 213 n. 88, 233; see also Kunitsyn, and Schmalz Schneewind, J. B., 226, 235 Seleznev, I., 209, 210 Semevskii, V., 96, 220, 221, 231 Seneca, 112 Sergeev, Petr, 135 Shabaeva, M. F., 203, 205 Shakhovskoi, Alexander, 92 Shaw, Thomas, 214, 216, 224 Shchipanov, I. Ia., 200, 210, 212, 228, 234 Shebunin, A. N., 206, 221 Shelokhaev, V., 201 Shevyrev, S., 227 n. 25, 228 Shishkov, Alexander, 66, 161, 176, 183 Shishkov, V., 183 Shneider, Konstantin, 200 Sigmund, Paul, 226 Silverman, Paul, 205, 232 Sinel, A., 209, 210, 215 n. 4 Skiadan, Mikhail, 113 Slavophiles, 3–4, 9, 199, 200 n. 13 Smirnov, F., 5, 144, 200, 234, 235 Smith, Adam, 109, 204 n. 37; in Russia, 19–20, 26, 46–7, 74, 80–1, 88, 112, 113, 204 n. 34, n. 35; see also Kunitsyn, and Smith Smith-Peter, Susan, 204 Snell, F., 124–6, 140, 171 Solodkin, I. I., 200 Sologub, V. A., 60, 215 Solov’ev, I. M., 232

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264

Index

Solov’ev, Vladimir, 182 Sonnenfels, Joseph, 20 Speranskii, Michael, 6, 31–2, 46, 63, 68, 71, 90, 129, 180, 188, 189–90, 191, 243 n. 20, n. 22, 244 n. 28 Speranskii, V. N., 200 Spirit of Journals (Dukh Zhurnalov), 73–5 St. Petersburg Pedagogical Institute, 17–20, 21, 31, 58, 71, 78, 117, 129, 132, 137, 202 n. 12, 210 n. 38 St. Petersburg University, 22, 164, 170, 172, 175, 177, 182, 240 n. 77, 241 n. 89; see also Kunitsyn, and St. Petersburg University State Council, 61, 62, 87, 99 Stein, Friedrich von, 85, 86, 213 n. 88, 220 n. 1 Stepanov, L. N., 211 Strakosch, Henry, 232 Strauss, Leo, 226 Stroganov, Count, 182 Struve, Gleb, 223 Sturdza, Alexander, 162–3, 167–8 Sukhomlinov, M. I., 203, 238, 239 Sullivan, Roger, 226 Syn Otechestva (Son of Fatherland), 37, 66–7 Szamuely, T., 199 Tarasov, E., 26, 27, 28, 206, 207 Tarle, Eugene, 211 Tartakovskii, A. G., 211 Taylor, Norman, 205 Teachers’ Gymnasium, 16 Thackeray, Frank, 218 Thomasius, Christian, 110 Thornhill, Chris, 225, 226, 242 Todd, William, 217, 243 Tolmachev, Iakov, 177 Tomashevskii, B., 211, 214, 216 Tribe, Keith, 213, 226, 227, 235 Tsarskoe Selo Lyceum, admission requirements, 31–2; curriculum, 32; free thinking in, 40–2; pedagogical principles, 35–6, 209 n. 25, 210 n. 29; see also Engel’gardt; Kunitsyn, and Lyceum; Malinovskii; Pushchin Tsvetaev, Lev, 117, 126–8, 171, 178, 181, 231 n. 106 Turgenev, Alexander, 25, 57, 60–1, 64, 81, 82, 86, 98, 99, 101–2, 169, 196, 208 n. 99, 215 n. 9 Turgenev, Nicholas, 24, 57, 60–1, 80, 81, 82, 84–100, 185, 193, 196, 203 n. 33,

9780230111738_14_ind.indd 264

206 n. 61, 207, 208 n. 94, n. 96, 212 n. 84, 215, 216 n. 11, n. 17, 217 n. 45, 218 n. 61, 219 n. 76, 220–4; see also Kunitsyn, and Turgenev, N. Turgenev, Sergei, 81, 86, 92, 97, 170, 207 n. 75 Union of Welfare, 92, 95 Uvarov, Count, 71–2, 164, 170, 177, 179, 180, 182 Vasil’chikov, A. A., 225 Verner, Anrew, 216 Vestnik Evropy (Messenger of Europe), 65, 66; see also Journalism, in Russia Viazemskii, Prince, 9, 60, 64, 67–8, 81–2, 84, 87, 91, 92, 101, 170, 196, 209, 212, 215, 216 n. 11, n. 17, n. 25, 217 n. 42, 220 n. 113 Vigel’, F., 59, 60 Villers, Charles, 114 Voronov, A., 240 Walicki, Andrzej, 199, 201 n. 28 Walker, Franklin, 212, 228, 230 n. 79, n. 87, 231, 233 Warhola, James, 255 Westernizers, 3–4, 199, 202 n. 13 Whittaker, Cynthia, 201, 214, 218, 224, 238, 239 Wieczynski, Joseph, 240 Williams, Howard, 237 Wirtschafter, Elise, 200, 216, 219 Wischnitzer, M., 26, 29, 207, 208 Wolfe, Christopher, 226, 230 n. 79 Wolff, Christian, 107–8, 213 n. 90; in Russia, 1, 2, 3, 15, 48, 105, 108, 110, 111–12, 115, 121, 122, 130, 133, 137, 176, 197 Wortman, Richard, 199, 216, 224, 227, 234, 241 Yaney, Georg, 216 n. 18 Zacek, Judith, 236, 238 Zaitsev, A. F., 5, 200 Zapadov, A. V., 217 Zeiller, Franz, 21, 128–30, 171 Zenkovskii, V. V., 229 Zhitomirskaia, S., 96, 222, 248 Zhukovskii, Vasilii, 92 Znamenskii, P. V., 202, 203

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