Abstract
Speranskii’s opinion of the petty bureaucracy as a servile class in need of leadership correlated with his view of the peasantry as a childlike, dependent people. Extrapolating on both ideas, Speranskii believed that beyond administrative restructuring Siberian society needed to be socially engineered. He envisaged the government in a paternal role, guiding the population towards a higher moral and educational level. Treskin had previously assumed a similar role, though it was more particularly that of a stern and punishing father; Speranskii wanted to replace such individuals and their arbitrary rule with executors whose predictable actions stemmed from systematized, codified policies. At the same time, the governing institutions he planned were not only to represent a system of greater and fairer efficiency, but would embody the spiritual benevolence redolent of Alexander I’s reign, during which manifestos and monuments alike expressed a view at once didactic and sanctimonious. Speranskii was no Alexander when it came to mysticism, but nevertheless was, in addition to being a creature of the rational and organizational precepts of the Enlightenment, strongly influenced by the German Romantic philosophy he read while in Perm and elsewhere, and despite believing in some ways that his Irkutsk assignment was an extension of his banishment from Petersburg, he came to envisage while there a glorious future for Siberia and its inhabitants, one that recognized the land’s great natural and geopolitical potential and promised that starozhily and natives could be made to conform to a narodnost (‘nationality-ness’) for the betterment of all Russia.
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Notes
Quoted in Marc Raeff, Michael Speransky: Statesman of Imperial Russia, 1772— 1839 (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1957), 267.
Irina Dameshek, ‘Mikhail Speranskii’, Zemlia irkutskaia 8 (1997): 2–9 [here, p. 6];
I. V. Shcheglov, Khronologicheskii perechen’vazhneishikh dannykh iz istorii Sibiri: 1032–1882 gg. (1883; rpt. Surgut: Severnvi dom, 1993), 251.
Bruce F. Adams, The Politics of Punishment: Prison Reform in Russia, 1863–1917 (DeKalb, IL: Northern Illinois University Press, 1996), 40–5 et passim. Adams gives the name of the society as Popechitel’noe Obshchesvto o Tiur’makh, for which he creates the acronym POoT. In the archival documents I found the society’s name appears as above. Hence the different acronym.
See also V. N. Nikitin, Tiur’ma i ssylka: Istoricheskoe, zakonodatel’noe, administrativnoe i bytovoe polozhenie zakliuchennykh, peresyl’nykh, ikh detei i osvobozhnennykh iz pod strazhi, so vremeni vozniknoveniia russkoi tiur’my, do nashikh dnei, 1560–1880 g. (S.-Peterburg: Tipografiia G. Shparvart, 1880), chs. 2–5 (despite this work’s title it contains almost no discussion of exile and less than ten pages devoted to the period before 1822);
Judith C. Zacek, ‘A Case Study in Russian Philanthropy: The Prison Reform Movement in the Reign of Alexander I’, Canadian Slavic Studies/Revue canadienne d’études slaves 1, no. 2 (1967): 196–211. John Venning continued the work of his brother Walter after the latter’s death in 1821.
See Thulia S. Henderson, ed., Memorials ofJohn Uenning, Esq., with Numerous Notices from His Manuscripts Relative to the Imperial Family of Russia (1862; rpt. Cambridge: Oriental Research Partners, 1975);
Barry Hollingsworth, ‘John Venning and Prison Reform in Russia, 1819–1830’, Slavonic and East European Review 48, no. 113 (1970): 537–56.
M. N. Gernet, Istoriia tsarskoi tiurmy, 5 vols. 3rd edn. (Moskva: Gosudarstvennoe izdatel’stvo iuridicheskoi literatury, 1960–63) 2: 17–35.
Douglas Smith, ‘Freemasonry and the Public in Eighteenth-Century Russia’, in Imperial Russia: New Histories for the Empire, ed. Jane Burbank and David L. Ransel. (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1998), 293.
Cf. A. G. Pshenichnyi, ‘Upravlenie Kolyvano-Voskresenskogo gornogo okruga v kontse 20-kh godov XIX veka’, in Guliaevskie chteniia. Vyp. 1: Materialy pervoi, vtoroi i tretei istoriko-arkhivnykh konferentsii, ed. V. B. Borodaev et al. (Barnaul: Upravlenie arkhivnogo dela administratsii Altaiskogo kraia and Laboratoriia istoricheskogo kraevedeniia Barnaul’skogo gosudarstvennogo pedagogicheskogo universiteta, 1998), 257–62.
This and most of what follows is from [Anon.], ‘O novykh postanovleniiakh dlia upravleniia Sibiri’, Sibirskii vestnik 9 (September 1822): 1–28; Marc Raeff, Siberia and the Reforms of 1822 (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1956), 73ff.;
N. P. Eroshkin, Ocherki istoriigosudarstvennykh uchrezhdenii dorevoliutsionnoi Rossii (Moskva: Gosudarstvennoe Uchebno-Pedagogicheskoe Izdatel’stvo Ministerstva Prosveshcheniia RSFSR, 1960), 240ff.
N. P. Matkhanova, Vysshaia administratsiia Vostochnoi Sibiri v Seredine XIX veka: Problemy Sotsial’noi stratifikatsii (Novosibirsk: sibirskii khronograf, 2002), 37.
George L. Yaney, The Systematization ofRussian Government: Social Evolution in the Domestic Administration of Imperial Russia, 1711–1905 (Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 1973), 218. On the relationship of governor-generalships to the ministries, see ibid., 215ff. The writer to whom Yaney refers would have been either Western Siberia’s governor-general P. D. Gorchakov or his Eastern Siberian counterpart, V. I. Rupert. A. G. Stroganov replaced D. N. Bludov as interior minister sometime during 1839.
N. A. Minenko, ‘Obshchinnyi skhod v Zapadnoi Sibiri XVIII — pervoi poloviny XIX v.’, in Obshchestvennyi byt i kul’tura ntsskogo naseleniia Sibiri (XVIII— nachalo XX v.), ed. L. M. Rusakova (Novosibirsk: Nauka, 1983), 3–19; Ssylka v Sibir’: ocherk eia istorii i sovremennago polozheniia (S.-Peterburg: Tipografiia S.-Peterburgskoi Tiur’my, 1900), 21, 57, 108, 144, 149–50.
N. M. Iadrintsev, Sibir’ kak koloniia v geograficheskom, etnograficheskom i dopolnennoe (S.-Peterburg: Izdanie I.M. Sibiriakova, 1892), 294–5. Iadrintsev gives further examples on the following pages using the variant spelling ‘Olad’in’
On skhoda’s refusal of krugovaia poruka see Ssylka v SibiK, 157–8, 157n. For examples of their extortion of obligations from exiles, see Iadrintsev, Sibir’ kak koloniia (1892), 258. Examples of peasant justice (which Iadrintsev explicitly terms samosud) were found in N. M. Iadrintsev, Russkaia obshchina v tiurme i ssylke (S.-Peterburg: Tipografiia A. Morigerovskago, 1872), 493–4, 499. On samosud generally,
see Stephen Frank, Crime, Cultural Conflict, and Justice in Rural Russia 1856–1914 (Berkeley CA: University of California 1999).
I. Ia. Foinitskii, Uchenie o nakazanii v sviazi s tiur’movedeniem (S.-Peterburg: Tipografiia Ministerstva putei soobshcheniia [A. Benke], 1889), 282.
This confusion renders distinguishing exile to residence as a judicial or administrative punishment difficult. Cf. P. L. Kazarian, Iakutiia v sisteme politicheskoi ssylki Rossii, 1826–1917gg. (Iakutsk: GP NIPK ‘Sakhapoligrafizdat,’ 1998), 155; Ssylka v Sibir’, 109n.
Literally, sudebnye mesta. As used in the regulations, these seem to refer to the various courts created below the guberniia level by the Catherinian reforms. Cf. John P. LeDonne, Ruling Russia: Politics and Administration in the Age of Absolutism, 1762–1796 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1984), 146–65, esp. 158–9.
Both Tolstoi and Kennan note the peasants’ ‘business of furnishing [food]’. George Kennan, Siberia and the Exile System, 2 vols. (New York: The Century Co., 1891) 1: 370;
Leo Tolstoi, Resurrection, trans. Rosemary Edmonds (New York: Penguin Books, 1966), 466–7.
See I. P. Belokonskii (Petrovich), Po tiurmam i etapam: ocherki tiuremnoi zhizni i putevyia zametki ot Moskvy do Krasnoiarska (Orel: Izdanie N. A. Semenovoi, 1887), 157–8, 159.
For some reason the regulation includes the city of Tiumen’ in this list, implying it belonged to either Perm’ or Orenburg guberniia; but this was a gorod-city in Tobol’sk guberniia. (See the taxonomy in V. M. Kabuzan, Narodonaselenie Rossii v XVIII-pervoi polovine XIX v. [Moskva: AN SSSR, 1963], appendix, table, pp. 208, 210, 221.) Although the ‘Regulation on Exiles’ does not include Orenburg in the list of cities in the section referred to, common sense, geography and an article of the ‘Regulation on Exile Transfer within Siberian Gubernii’ (specifically, g. 2) strongly suggest the Siberian Committee intended that exiles from Orenburg guberniia also march to Tobol’sk, and not westward to Kazan’. Because exiles from Orenburg guberniia would have been organized into parties in the capital city Orenburg, I have inserted it into the list above.
G. S. Fel’dstein, Ssylka: eia genezisa, znacheniia, istorii i sovremennogo sostoianiia (Moskva: T-vo skoropechatni A. A. Levenson, 1893), 166.
Donald W. Treadgold, The Great Siberian Migration: Government and Peasant Resettlement from Emancipation to the First World War (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1957), 27. Cf. Ssylka v Sibir’, 17; Raeff, Siberia, 58–9.
Quoted in Vladimir A. Tomsinov, Speranskii (Moskva: Molodaia gvardiia, 2006) 326.
Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: Vintage, 1977), 199, 201 and 195–228.
Andrew A. Gentes, ‘Vagabondage and Exile to Tsarist Siberia’, in Cast Out: A History of Vagrancy in Global Perspective, ed. Lee Beier and Paul Ocobock (Athens, OH: University of Ohio Press, 2008), 165–87.
P. F. Iakubovich, V mire otverzhennykh: zapiski byvshego katorzhnika, 2 vols. (Moskva: Khudozhestvennaia literature, 1964) 1: 81–2.
D. A. Dril’, Ssylka i katorga v Rossii (Iz lichnykh nabliudenii vo vremia poezdki v Priamurskii krai i Sibir ) (S.-Peterburg: Tipografiia Pravitel’stvuiushchago Senata, 1898), 6–7.
V. I. Semevskii, Rabochie na sibirskikh zolotykh promyslakh: istoricheskoe izsledovanie, 2 vols. (S.-Peterburg: Tipografiia M. Stasiulevicha, 1898) 1: xvii-iii. See also Tolstoi’s characterization of Nekhliudov’s perception of a young boy sleeping on a convict’s lap. Resurrection, 523–4.
Cited (ambiguously) in Jerome Blum, Lord and Peasant in Russia: From the Ninth to the Nineteenth Century (Princeton, NT: Princeton University Press, 1961), 430.
G. Peizen, ‘Istoricheskii ocherk kolonizatsii Sibiri’, Sovremennik 77, no. 9 (1859): 9–46 [here, table, pp. 42–3].
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© 2008 Andrew A. Gentes
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Gentes, A.A. (2008). ‘Only Ermak can Compete with Me’. In: Exile to Siberia, 1590–1822. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230583894_6
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