P. V. Dolgorukov's Emigration from RussiaAuthor(s): Daniel FieldSource: The Slavonic and East European Review, Vol. 48, No. 111 (Apr., 1970), pp. 261-265Published by: the Modern Humanities Research Association and University College London, School ofSlavonic and East European StudiesStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/4206202 .

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Marginalia

P. V. Dolgorukov's Emigration from Russia

Daniel Field*

Dr Barry Hollingsworth has recently resurrected from oblivion Prince

Pyotr Vladimirovich Dolgorukov (1816-68) and provided a judicious analysis of his political ideas.1 He makes it clear that this aristocratic

pamphleteer can be described neither as a liberal nor as a conservative in the western sense. As much might be said of almost every other figure in Russian public life during the reform era. It is doubtful, however, whether

Hollingsworth states correctly (on pp. 450-1) the reasons why Dolgorukov left Russia in 1859. Following Lemke and other writers, he considers that 'the republican prince' was disappointed in his aspiration to hold high office. The circumstances in which he emigrated can be clarified by reference to certain unpublished documents2 and to other sources.

The most important of these documents is the memorandum 'O vnutrennem sostoyanii Rossii5, which Hollingsworth presents as primarily a plan for the emancipation of the serfs. This memorandum does indeed include such a plan, in which Dolgorukov called for the redemption of the

serfs, and of allotments of two to three desyatiny of land. The govern? ment would reimburse the proprietors immediately with about 100 roubles in bonds and recover this sum from the peasants at the rate of five roubles per annum. The peasant commune, which Dolgorukov held should be preserved for the time being, would collect these payments for the government. Within these guide-lines, the details for each area should be worked out by provincial committees largely elected by the nobility, which he thought entitled to this role because of the losses it would suffer from the abolition of serfdom.3 Dolgorukov's substantive recommend? ations have many affinities with the emancipation legislation of 19 February 1861, and, by the same token, went much further than the

government's policy at the time when he was writing.4 His recom-

* Lecturer in history at Harvard University and Research Fellow of the Russian Research Center.

1 'The 'Republican Prince': the Reform Projects of Prince P. V. Dolgorukov' (The Slavonic and East European Review, XLVII, 109, 1969, pp. 447-68). 2 I should like to express my gratitude to the Inter-University Committee on Travel Grants, the Russian Research Center of Harvard University, and to Moscow State University for enabling me to consult documents used in the preparation of this note.

3 Zapiska kn. Petra Dolgorukova 'O vnutrennem sostoyanii Rossii', Tsentral'nyy gosudarstvennyy arkhiv Oktyabr'skoy revolyutsii (Moscow), f. 728, op. 1, d. 2571, especially ll. 7 ob., 11-16, io. Provincial committees similar to those advocated by Dolgorukov were established, but no particular credit for this should go to Dolgorukov. K. D. Kavelin and others had advanced similar proposals, as had the Ministry of Internal Affairs in December 1856: see the ministry's report in A. I. Levshin, 'Dostopamyatnyye minuty v moyey zhizni', Russkiy arkhiv, 1885, no. 8, pp. 494-7. 4 Dolgorukov's memorandum is dated 'November 1857' and was presented to the Grand Duke Constantine on 2 December. The government's plan for emancipation was outlined in a rescript and otnosheniye to the governor-general at Vilna, dated November 20 and 21. The text of Dolgorukov's memorandum indicates that these documents had not been issued at the time of writing; however, they were being drafted throughout the

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262 SLAVONIC REVIEW

mendations also anticipate many details of the plans he would seek to

publish in Sovremennik the following year and eventually did publish in

emigration. More important, 'O vnutrennem sostoyanii Rossii' reflects the entire

range of concerns with which Dolgorukov would deal in his emigre writings. Apart from emancipation, to which Dolgorukov attached pri? mary importance, he proposed reforms of the courts, the table of ranks,

budgetary procedures and the granting of titles; he recommended that the corporate institutions of the nobility, renamed zemskiye, be thrown

open to all landowners and given a vastly enhanced role in provincial administration. He also recommended the formation of a committee of ministers to co-ordinate the government's activities. In regard to the

censorship, Dolgorukov argued for glasnost', or latitude for the press; he argued that the existing censorship system was harmful, since it

depended on information provided by self-seeking police spies, and also

pointless, since the government was powerless to stop the influx of Russian publications from England and Germany.5

Apart from some observations on the intellectual and moral character of Count A. A. Zakrevsky, governor-general of Moscow, Dolgorukov refrained from the derisive attacks on prominent officials which would become his speciality. Nor did he voice any republican sentiments,

specifically stating that it was not the political system of the empire but the bureaucratic administration that threatened to provoke a catastrophic revolution. Otherwise, cO vnutrennem sostoyanii Rossii' could serve as a prospectus for Dolgorukov's emigre publications. It is difficult to see, however, how it might be expected to win Dolgorukov a high position in the government. In 1857 and 1858 the tsar and his close advisers were flooded with memoranda from private persons about possible reforms, and there is perhaps no idea in Dolgorukov's memorandum that was unique to himself.

Nor do Dolgorukov's activities in the next eighteen months suggest that he sought a high administrative post. In the summer of 1858 he was offered an appointment as one of the two 'members from the government' on the Tula provincial committee. He refused, and in his letter of refusal reiterated his own plan for redemption and compensation; he insisted that the provincial committees be freed from bureaucratic constraint; they should be 'allowed to act without being constricted by rescripts and the

programmes, in accord with their own knowledge of local conditions and the dictates of conscience.' This was a blanket rejection of the govern? ment's position at the time, and served as a kind of broadside: according to the Third Section (political police), it 'passes from hand to hand in

month of November under the auspices of the Secret Committee on the Peasant Question. Dolgorukov's Verite sur la Russie and other later writings demonstrate his familiarity with the day-to-day operations of this committee in 1857; he may have known many details of the emerging policy when he wrote his memorandum.

5 'O vnutrennem sostoyanii Rossii', especially ll. 17-18, 330b; see also Bakhrushin's introduction to Dolgorukov's Peterburgskiye ocherki, Moscow, 1934, p. 17.

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MARGINALIA 263

large quantities'.6 It was a questionable lever on the doors of preferment; K. D. Kavelin, another author of reform proposals, had recently been dismissed from the tsar's household for a public attack, and an unwitting one at that, on the 'Programme of Activities' for the provincial com?

mittees, 7 which Dolgorukov singled out for criticism in his letter. However, one of Dolgorukov's detractors maintained that the letter was being circulated as an election platform, and that Dolgorukov wanted to serve on the Tula provincial committee as a member elected by the nobility. In

fact, Dolgorukov refused to stand for election because the nobility of his home district insisted that their representative oppose any form of

redemption, even the redemption of household plots required by the

imperial rescripts.8 Dolgorukov continued to press his redemption scheme. Together with

other Tula landlords, 105 in all, he issued a statement endorsing the

redemption of allotments with immediate compensation to the pomesh- chik; this statement was published in the December number oil Sovremennik. He also composed for Sovremennik an article setting forth a more detailed scheme of his own, a modification of the system of redemption and

compensation he had proposed in 1857.9 Using his cousin, the head of the Third Section, as his intermediary, Dolgorukov presented this revised version to the tsar, who turned it over to the Main Committee on peasant affairs. However, by this time official policy had changed course and now favoured the state-sponsored redemption of allotment land, but only as an

option.10 Universal and compulsory redemption of allotments with immediate compensation, as advocated by Dolgorukov and many other

spokesmen for the nobility, was ruled out on fiscal grounds. Dolgorukov's new plan did not move the members of the Main Committee, most of whom were privately opposed to any redemption of allotments, to modify the government's policy still further, but it did move them to action.

They had just established the rule that an article dealing with the peasant reform must be cleared before publication by all the ministries whose

present or potential activities were discussed in the article. This ruling, quite naturally, drastically curtailed discussion of the emancipation in the

press. It also precluded the publication of Dolgorukov's article for

Sovremennik, which apparently had been accepted by the regular censor?

ship. Although the article was brought before the Main Committee for a

6 'Pis'mo tul'skogo pomeshchika Dolgorukova, Petra k tul'skomu gubernatoru. . .', 14 July 1858, with note in an unknown hand; TsGAOR, f. 109, op. 3, d. 2038, ll. 1-3. This letter was intercepted by the Third Section and copied for the tsar.

7 Passages in Kavelin's plan for emancipation, which was written in 1856 but published only in 1858, were interpreted as an attack on the recently-issued 'Programme' and used as a pretext for tightening the censorship; see Levshin, 'Dostopamyatnyye minuty', pp. 540-41. 8 Dolgorukov to N. V. Putyata, 19 September 1858, in Muranovskiy sbornik, fasc. 1, Muranovo, 1928, p. no; compare O. N. Trubetskaya (comp.) Materialy dlya biografii kn. V. A. Cherkasskogo, vol 1, Moscow, 1901, p. 130. 9 Text in S. Chernov, 'K istorii bor' (by N. G. Chernyshevskogo za krest'yanskiye interesy nakanune "voli"' (Katorga i ssylka, 1928, no. 7, pp. 12-17). 10 The new policy was formulated in the journal of the Main Committee of 4 December 1858, ^hurnal Sekretnogo i Glavnogo komitetov po kresVyanskomu delu, vol I, Petrograd, 1915, PP-297-300.

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264 SLAVONIC REVIEW

discussion of its substance, no fewer than three ministers sitting in the committee forbade its publication.11

Dolgorukov was already aware of the intensification of censorship; he had recently lamented that 'literature has passed into the jurisdiction of the Third Section,' while the government policy clearly disclosed 'a deep, inveterate hatred, imbibed with mother's milk, for everything that writes and thinks. Now doubt is as impossible as hope; the present situation is an

impasse and the future is ominous. . . . He had predicted a 'significant increase in Russian literature published abroad and in manuscript literature in Russia'.12 The Main Committee's action confirmed

Dolgorukov's forebodings. Five months after the Main Committee banned his article, Dolgorukov left for western Europe through Odessa, having paused at his Tula estate on the way. On his arrival in Paris he took up his journalistic career.

This chain of circumstances does not indicate that Dolgorukov hoped for high office and left the country because his hopes were disappointed. This allegation was made by Lemke on the basis of a denunciation by a

police spy and Dolgorukov's reference, in his apologia to Nicholas I, to his 'not wholly ordinary . . . intellectual capacities'; both the denunci? ation and the apologia were written in 1843.13 Dolgorukov did, as

Hollingsworth mentions, solicit various favours from Alexander II

shortly after his accession, but these favours served to bolster his position as a man of letters. In 1857 and 1858 Dolgorukov directed plans for reform to the tsar, but so did a variety of journalists, merchants, function?

aries, squires and future radicals, with no apparent hope of political preferment. Dolgorukov had a title and connections at court and in the

administration, but he also had a reputation for eccentricity and scandal-

mongering. He was indeed eccentric, but we have the authoritative testi?

mony of a Third Section doctor that he 'cannot be considered a lunatic' ;14 a rational man in Dolgorukov's position had no basis for expecting an

important government post. These posts were reserved for those who had

grown grey in the service of Nicholas I; the few avowed reformers who did win high positions in the era of reforms, such as A. V. Golovnin and N. A.

Milyutin,15 had served a long apprenticeship in the bureaucracy.

11 V. P. Butkov (executive secretary of the Main Committee) to Dolgorukov, 29 January 1859, TsentraVnyy gosudarstvennyy istoricheskiy arkhiv (Leningrad), f. 1180, op. XV, d? 37, L 139; P. V. Dolgorukov, La Verite sur la Russie, 2nd ed., Leipzig, 1861, vol II, pp. 69n~7on. See the ruling on censorship by ministries, for which the publication of the innocuous declaration on redemption by Dolgorukov and his fellow landlords of Tula was one of the pretexts, in ?hurnal Sekretnogo i Glavnogo komitetov, vol I, pp. 320-2. 12 Dolgorukov to Putyata, 21 December 1858, Muranovskiy sbornik, fasc. 1, pp. 113-14. Compare the bright prospects for the Russian press held out in Dolgorukov's letter to Pogodin of late 1857, cited in N. Barsukov, Zhizn' i trudy M. P. Pogodina, vol XV, St Petersburg, 1901, p. iii.

13 M. K. Lemke, 'Knyaz' P. V. Dolgorukov v Rossii', in his Nikolayevskiye zhandarmy i literatura 1826-1855 gg., 2nd ed., St. Petersburg, 1909, pp. 530, 535-6, passim. Bakhrushin elaborated on Lemke's explanation, citing Tuchkova-Ogareva's recollections of rumours circulating in the 1860s and attributing Dolgorukov's attacks on Milyutin, the Editorial Commission and the table of ranks to envy and frustrated ambition: Bakhrushin, op. cit., pp. 18-23. 14 Quoted by Lemke, op. cit., p. 540.

16 Hollingsworth^ choice of Milyutin's appointment as a symbol of Dolgorukov's

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MARGINALIA 265

Dolgorukov held only the tenth rank in the civil service, the civilian

equivalent of an army lieutenant. On the other hand, the evidence does suggest that Dolgorukov emi?

grated with the deliberate purpose of writing and publishing as he could not do in Russia. This was the explanation he himself offered to the Russian government and to the public.16 While it is doubtful that he acted on an intention of many years standing, as he claimed, the evidence

supports his explanation. The emigre press and its successes were very much on his mind in the two years prior to his departure. During that

time, he held with some consistency to a body of ideas that could not be

publicly expressed in Russia. Soviet commentators have quite rightly em?

phasised the moderation of Dolgorukov's programme and his solicitude for the nobility. From the point of view of the Third Section, however, Dolgorukov's writings put him in company with Herzen, Bakunin, Mazzini and other 'celebrated revolutionaries'.17 Dolgorukov's proposals arose out of a zeal for reform coupled with an antipathy for bureaucratic

methods; as he frequently pointed out, no Russian statesman of his time shared this combination of values. Within Russia there was no prospect of political favour or even literary fame for a stubborn advocate of the views Dolgorukov would express in western Europe. He was resentful of the constraints of censorship even before he had a personal grievance in

1858. He had the means to escape these constraints and he did.

The East European Holdings in the Library of the

Pontifical Oriental Institute, Rome

Jan Krajcar s.j.*

The project of founding in Rome an Institute of Higher Eastern Eccles? iastical Studies was discussed already in the time of Leo XIII. The plan, however, took concrete shape only later, during the pontificate of Bene? dict XV, who by his Motu Proprio of 15 October 1917 caused the Ponti? fical Oriental Institute to be established. This was conceived as an

crushed hopes is unfortunate: Milyutin was appointed as temporary acting deputy minister', and the equivocal formula was intended and interpreted as an expression of the tsar's distrust. 'Iz zapisok Marii Ageevny Milyutinoy', Russkaya starina, vol XGVII, January 1899, p. 63. 16 See his Verite sur la Russie, vol I, Leipzig, 1861, pp. 9-14 and the documents reproduced in Lemke, 'Kn. P. V. Dolgorukov?emigrant' (Byloye, 1907, no. 3, pp. 160-1, passim). Even in his letter of 1867 to his cousin, the former chief of the Third Section, in which he complained that 'in my homeland I was denied the right of participation in those matters to which my tastes inclined me and to which my distinction and my origin gave me the right', Dolgorukov continued to insist that he 'went abroad to seek freedom of action and of thought. . .'; ibid., pp. 190-1. 17 A Third Section agent reported in 1862 on the covert sale of a set of portraits of revolutionaries, among them Dolgorukov's; the agent expressed no surprise at Dolgoru? kov's inclusion but wondered if Ghernyshevsky's portrait was included as a joke. I. V. Porokh (ed.) Delo Chernyshevskogo. Sbornik dokumentov, Saratov, iq68, p. 102. ! Father Krajcar, S.j. works in the Pontifical Oriental Institute.

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