Bringing Order to Chaos with a Flexible Pen: How Speransky Created Laws
Author: Andrey Filimonov
In May 1826, Nicholas I commissioned Privy Councilor Mikhail Speransky to compile the Code of Laws of the Russian Empire. The Tsar chose Speransky because he had experience in similar work. During the reign of Alexander I, he had already rewritten state laws. But by then, the legal reform had ended. scandal, resignation and exile of the reformer.
In 1812, Speransky had so alienated public opinion in St. Petersburg that he was seriously considered an agent of Talleyrand, recruited from Paris to replace Russian laws with the Napoleonic Code.
Alexander, prone to emotional outbursts, allegedly even wanted to shoot the “traitor,” but then changed his mind and exiled Speransky to Nizhny Novgorod.
A few years later, relations between the tsar and the reformer, if not restored, at least improved. Speransky's disgrace was lifted, he returned to power, served as Governor-General of Siberia, and by the end of Alexander's reign, was considered virtually the only surviving liberal at court. This is the source of the rumor that the Decembrists, after their victory, hoped to make Speransky prime minister of the new Russia.
According to the memoirs of Prince Sergei Trubetskoy, during the investigation, Benckendorff came to his cell and persistently asked about what post Speransky was supposed to occupy in the “rebel government.”
This is especially strange, considering that it was Speransky who wrote the manifesto announcing Nicholas I's accession to the throne. And during the Decembrist trial, he played a crucial, albeit technical, role in organizing the proceedings. It is said that he wept while drafting the verdicts. But this had no effect on the fate of the convicted. His personal friend, Gavriil Batenkov, received a 20-year sentence under a grading system that classified the defendants' guilt according to degrees of severity. The system was developed under Speransky's supervision.
“He was born and died a bureaucrat,” Mark Aldanov wrote about him in essay "Speransky and the Decembrists."
The brain of the nation
Hegel called bureaucracy "the reason of the state" and praised bureaucrats as the "brain of the nation" that ensured the stability of the state system. Mikhail Speransky was a man who seemed to have stepped straight from the pages of Hegel's "Philosophy of Right."
Speransky owed his career rise—from seminary teacher to state councilor and ministerial assistant in less than ten years—to his impeccable command of official language. The twenty-year-old teacher was discovered for government service by Prince Kurakin, who was seeking a personal secretary and decided to test Speransky by tasking him with writing six letters on various official matters to various departments.
It was evening, Speransky immediately took up his pen, and by six in the morning the letters were ready. Everything about them was perfect—the logic, the writing style, the handwriting.
In the early biography of Mikhail Speransky there is an anecdote, which he himself later told in exile. To the Tsar (Alexandru – ed.) Once, "it was decided to order a commercial charter to be drawn up within two weeks." To carry out the imperial will, "forty merchants were recruited from the stock exchange" and, along with Speransky, they were locked up in Gatchina. The conditions were almost resort-like: they were treated lavishly, allowed to stroll through the gardens, and feast on fruit from the royal greenhouse. But in return, the "conclave" was expected to produce a completed draft law.
Speransky recounted this to the Perm merchant Popov in his trademark mocking manner: "What could merchants do, who had never even considered writing laws? And are laws even written by entire societies? The days, however, passed, and it was impossible not to fulfill the Tsar's will. I myself was no lawyer, and had no understanding of business matters or the benefits of commerce, but I was young, and my pen was flexible. Who else would take on the task? So I conferred with one merchant after another, and—by the deadline—the statute was ready."
Over the next thirty years, he would rewrite Russian laws twice with his flexible pen. During this time, he would become completely disillusioned with humanity, but he would receive the Star of St. Andrew from Emperor Nicholas, who rewarded the creator of the Imperial Code of Laws, which Speransky had spent seven years working on.
It all started with forty merchants in Gatchina.
The hated priest's son
He was the son of a village priest who didn't even have a surname. Mikhail was given the name "Speransky" (from the Latin spero) in seminary for his outstanding academic abilities. His pedigree, or rather the lack thereof, always led to a somewhat dismissive attitude toward Speransky from high society.
"Speransky was a clever and quick editor and a pleasant, that is, a bright and intelligible speaker." писал Prince Pyotr Vyazemsky.
The aristocracy disliked Speransky for what he did and for who he was. The "priest's son of no kin" became effectively the second-in-command in the state, instructing the proud nobles on how to serve society. Among other things, this included passing exams to obtain rank, understanding finances, and obeying the law. The latter was particularly intolerable.
Under the young Alexander I, Speransky received the unprecedented position of Secretary of State, becoming the chief architect of bureaucratic and legal modernization. The State Council, the reorganization of ministries, and plans for a new legislative system were all part of the project. This wasn't a revolution, but for many in the empire, it seemed like a dangerous attack on the established order.
An intrigue arose against the reformer, centered on Grand Duchess Ekaterina Pavlovna, Alexander's sister. Speransky's flexible pen was countered by the authoritative pen of Nikolai Karamzin, who wrote a manifesto of conservatism, "Notes on Ancient and Modern Russia," which the author presented to the Tsar during a personal meeting in Tver in 1811.
"Is it appropriate to begin the Russian Code with a chapter on civil rights, which in the true sense never existed and do not exist in Russia?" wrote the historian, who demonstrated the necessity of autocracy and the charm of the whip.
Karamzin argued that European institutions should not be transplanted to Russian soil; autocracy should not be weakened for the sake of a "paper" system of law. And, most importantly, one should not trust a man who too obviously admired the French experience—including the Napoleonic Code.
By 1812, the alliance between the two emperors, forged during their meeting in Tilsit, had completely collapsed. War had become inevitable, so the "French accent" on the banks of the Neva sounded treacherous. What had been modernization in 1808 began to look like political unreliability in the spring of 1812. The renowned Russian patriot Fyodor Rostopchin, who would soon burn Moscow to spite the French, claimed that Speransky "sold himself to Napoleon for diamonds and gold." Surprisingly, the people believed Rostopchin and cursed Speransky's name.
He himself wrote to Alexander with bitter irony: "In the course of one year, I was alternately a Martinist, a champion of Freemasonry, a defender of liberty, a persecutor of slavery, and finally became a confirmed Illuminati." "Illuminati" in the nineteenth century sounded as terrible a curse for a monarchist as "Bolshevik" had been in the twentieth.
The denouement came in March 1812. After a nighttime audience with the Emperor, Speransky emerged from the palace and saw the silhouette of Balashov, the Minister of Police, in his office window. It wasn't hard to guess what this meant. A few hours later, he was exiled—first to Nizhny Novgorod, then to Perm under strict surveillance. Letters were to be opened. His nine-year-old daughter, Elizaveta, remained in St. Petersburg with her English grandmother, fatherless.
Coffin and cradle
Elizabeth was born shortly after the only glimpse of family happiness that had ever appeared in Speransky's life.
In November 1798, he married 17-year-old Elizabeth Stevens. A year later, the young woman died of rapid consumption shortly after giving birth to a daughter. Speransky's biographer, Modest Korf describes the This episode is dramatic: a child's cradle next to his mother's coffin. The grief-stricken husband and father cannot stay home. He runs off to an unknown destination, returns the next day, kisses the dead woman, and disappears again. Speransky never married again.
His daughter Elizaveta always remained the most important woman in his life. He could speak to her with a sincere and unpretentious tone, like no one else. For her sake, he became playful and even dressed up in women's clothing at the New Year's carnival. It's hard to believe, looking at official portraits of Speransky dressed in civilian uniform.
He always suffered when separated from his daughter for a long time, as happened during his exile in Perm or later, when Alexander sent Speransky as an inspector to Siberia.
“Amidst the discordant cries of passions and complaints surrounding me here, I read, my dear Elizabeth, your letter and thoughts about misfortune, like the music of Hayden.”
On her name day, he wrote: "So many events, such separation, such distance! But the power of love knows no distance. And in Irkutsk I celebrate this day, the happiest of my life, with thanksgiving to the Almighty Father, who, instead of all the blessings of life, gave me you."
Loskutov as the embodiment of evil
The Perm exile lasted three years. Then Alexander eased the disgrace of his former friend and appointed Speransky civil governor of Penza. Three years later, the emperor ordered him, as Governor-General of Siberia, to conduct a review of the provinces from the Urals to Lake Baikal. This gave the exile an opportunity to rehabilitate himself and convince society that the disgrace of 1812 was a "misunderstanding."
“Otherwise, your summons to St. Petersburg would have seemed like nothing more than a consequence of changes at the court,” Alexander explained vaguely in a personal letter.
The Siberian journey of 1819–1821 proved an instructive excursion for the cabinet official, who had previously encountered little of the reality for which he wrote laws. Now Speransky saw firsthand what the law becomes when governors, police officers, chanceries, greedy officials with their wives, children, and mistresses stand between the ruler and the people; and then there are the thousands of miles of distance.
From Tomsk, he reported to his daughter: "Tomsk could have been one of the best provinces in Russia, but poor governance has turned it into a veritable den of robbers. This contradiction between potential and reality is heartbreaking."
His famous phrase, which has become legendary, can be considered the pinnacle of bureaucratic humor: “If in Tobolsk I would have brought all the officials to trial, then in Tomsk all that was left was to hang them all.”
From the very beginning of the Siberian audit, attempts were made to "placate" the new chief with material favors. In Tyumen, he was presented with bread and salt on a silver platter. Speransky ordered the platter returned to its donors. There, one of his secretaries was offered a "pominnichek"—a thick wad of banknotes, which the secretary rejected. They say that a couple of weeks later, when Speransky and his entourage had run out of money on the road, he smiled in a circle of confidantes and said to his incorruptible subordinate: "It seems we both made a mistake: I didn't take the platter, and you didn't take the money. But it could come in handy now."
But it was laughter through tears. The wild scenes of Siberian life were chilling. In one provincial town, the police chief would harness officials who had offended him to a cart and ride through the streets. Somewhere in the north, natives were dying of hunger because they couldn't get grain delivered—either stolen or simply drowned in the river through carelessness.
In the previous 18th century, Siberians complained to St. Petersburg so often about harassment from local authorities that Catherine the Great even ordered that complaints from Siberia not be accepted, because only “snitches” lived there.
Now Speransky met them face to face. On the banks of the Kan River, two elderly peasants approached the governor-general, bowing deeply, with complaints against Loskutov, the police captain. He was a legendary official of the Irkutsk province. He traveled through villages with a cart full of rods, ordering men and women to be flogged for the slightest offense or simply for "disorder in the hut." After the flogging, the offenders paid the "fine" personally to the police captain. The population trembled, but upon hearing of Speransky's audit, the Irkutsk residents finally decided to file a complaint. To their horror, the petitioners with the letter saw Loskutov himself standing next to the governor-general, having arrived to greet his superiors. The old men fell to their knees. Speransky ordered the complaints read aloud and immediately ordered the police captain's dismissal and arrest.
However, when the peasants were informed of the dismissal of their tormentor, one of them, shaking all over, grabbed Speransky by the hem of his coat and whispered: “Father, it was Loskutov, why are you saying this? May no harm come to you on our account: you certainly don’t know Loskutov.”
This anecdote, recorded by the future Decembrist Batenkov, reflects the real hierarchy of power in the Russian Empire, where the immediate superior is always more fearsome and powerful than the sovereign emperor.
Arriving in Irkutsk, Speransky found a complete absence of social life there. To somehow stir things up, he introduced the tradition of weekly gatherings with dinner and dancing. He wrote to his daughter: "The locals hardly believe that they have any degree of freedom and can gather, dance, or do nothing without asking or permission."
He was an ideological opponent of police order, where everything is forbidden and based on fear. Such a social structure is irrational, therefore ineffective, and harmful to the state. This is completely unacceptable and must be corrected. Speransky, according to Vyazemsky, "was an official of enormous stature." He spent his entire life fine-tuning the state machinery, and everything he touched became orderly.
In just two years of his governorship, he reshaped Siberia, writing several important instructions on how to govern the colony. These included the "Charter on the Governance of Non-Russians," which divided the indigenous population into sedentary, nomadic и stray, in accordance with their way of life. And also "Charter of the Siberian Kirghiz", who with one stroke of the pen liquidated the khan's power in the Middle Zhuz (the territory of today's Kazakhstan), because the existence of this semi-independent semi-state hindered the Asian trade of the Russian Empire.
Speransky explained the need to build Russian fortresses and fortified lines in the Kazakh steppe by the fact that “there can be no protests from the Kazakhs regarding their construction, since they lack international legal norms.”
This is perhaps the shortest and most bureaucratically flawless formulation of the logic of colonialism.
But Siberia was merely a warm-up for Mikhail Mikhailovich's flexible pen. After the death of Alexander I, he was tasked with rewriting all the legislation of the Russian Empire.
Unravel the chaos
The Decembrist trial ended in July with the execution of the five "chief villains." Speransky had been cleared of all charges even earlier, when Nicholas tasked him with codifying the laws of the Russian Empire for nearly 200 years, beginning in 1649.
“Instead of making up new laws, — Nikolai announced. “I ordered that those that exist be collected first and put in order.”
Since the time of Peter the Great, Russia has struggled to navigate the maze of its own legislation. Commissions of officials and scholars have succeeded one another. The most famous, the Catherine Commission of 1767, opened with great fanfare, quietly disappeared after a while, "leaving no useful traces of its existence." The attempt undertaken by the young Speransky in 1810-1812 to take "ready-made" foreign laws and adapt them to Russian realities met with resistance from the ruling class.
Moreover, the Napoleonic Code was based on the concept of civil rights, which no one in Russia enjoyed due to the absence of a unified civil class. Nobles, merchants, townspeople, and peasants were something like Indian castes, with little legal interaction. It was impossible to imagine a peasant suing a landowner. As Karamzin noted, they had nothing in common "except the name Russian."
Speransky took on the task. He had to collect all the laws, beginning with the Cathedral Code of 1649, and verify which were still in effect, which had been repealed, which contradicted each other, and which had been preserved only as historical junk. The result was two distinct works. The Complete Collection of Laws—a chronological archive of power: everything the state had ever decreed. And the Code of Laws—a body of current regulations: what the state intended to guide its actions.
In 1833, the Code was presented to the State Council. Fifteen volumes, 42,298 articles. A triumph of lawmaking. Nicholas, presiding over the meeting, embraced Speransky and placed on his chest the star of St. Andrew, which he had removed from his own uniform. Another symbolic reward was Speransky's appointment as tutor to Tsarevich Alexander, the future Tsar-Liberator, to whom his father had handed over power at the end of the Crimean War with the words, "I surrender the state in disorder."
Alexander II granted his subjects liberties and rights, for which Speransky played a significant role. Although Karamzin, in his own way, was right—liberties fatally undermined autocracy.
French biographer Speransky's Taiandie formulates a precise definition of his hero's merit: "He didn't have the power to create a new world; he tried to unravel chaos." He adds that Speransky the legislator's chief virtue was clarity.
"He cared more about clarity than brevity. In a country where judicial independence was nonexistent, he was obliged to eschew brevity, striving above all to go into detail and provide as many guarantees of justice as possible."
As early as 1815, Speransky wrote from exile that he was "disillusioned with human goodwill." Therefore, he saw his role as a legislator as placing as many obstacles as possible to the abuse of power, to which officials in Russia have always had a particular penchant.
