• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 3605 0

and charm on men too. Alexander was sensitive and highly strung. He evaded confrontations, disliked hurting people’s feelings and acted by indirect means to get his way. These elements of Alexander’s personality had a big influence on the way he ran his government and his army. In foreign policy he sometimes received information and operated through private channels unknown to his foreign minister and ambassadors. In the army he used private links to subordinates as a means to watch over his commanding generals. Excessive sensitivity, even an element of moral cowardice, stopped him from pruning the military structure of command of a number of superfluous generals. He was also very inclined to avoid overt responsibility for difficult decisions, operating from behind the backs of his generals to get his way, and distancing himself from them if failures occurred.

Alexander’s personality was of crucial importance in determining how Russia faced up to the challenge of Napoleon in 1807–14. Nevertheless his actions and even his ideas are incomprehensible unless one understands the context and the constraints within which a Russian monarch operated. Not just Alexander’s father but also his grandfather, Peter III, had been overthrown and murdered. So had the previous male monarch, Ivan VI. From his earliest days Alexander had been surrounded by court and political faction and intrigue. As emperor, he was the supreme source of honour, wealth and status. Most people to whom he spoke wanted to use him to advance their own interests or policies. They operated in patron–client networks which hid the truth from him and tried to reduce his independence. These networks spread across court, government and army, which were still essentially one community. The arrogant, ambitious and jealous men who peopled the networks were often very exhausting to manage. But the emperor had to manage them if he was to survive and if the army and bureaucracy were to function effectively. Faced with this Petersburg milieu, an emperor could be forgiven a large degree of suspicion, evasiveness and duplicity. Over the years a world-weary despair about human nature was almost bound to grow. As one of his confidants once remarked, ‘in your position an angel would have developed a suspicious personality’.69

During these years the shrewdest foreign observer in Petersburg was Joseph de Maistre, the envoy of the King of Sardinia, whose mainland territories had been annexed by Napoleon. He commented that it was ‘in the nature of Alexander’s personality and his system of rule that top officials operate only in their own limited sphere. He cheerfully and without repugnance employs simultaneously two mortal enemies, not allowing either of them to swallow the other.’ By this method the chances of conspiracy were reduced. Usually more to the point, the emperor had a better chance of knowing what was really going on behind his ministers’ always deferential and obedient façade. The iron fist was always present and sometimes used but in general Alexander preferred subtler methods. To an extent, secrecy became second nature, almost an end in itself. To do Alexander justice, however, it was usually not just safer but also more efficient for the monarch to operate by manipulation, seduction and bribery. It was also only natural that a monarch sometimes sought advisers who were not part of the Petersburg networks but were entirely dependent on himself. Foreigners were one obvious source of such advice.70

When Alexander looked over the heads of the Petersburg networks he saw a vast Russia administered by a woefully inadequate government bureaucracy. In the countryside, where over 90 per cent of his subjects lived, public order, taxation and conscription depended entirely on the cooperation of the landowners. Alexander disliked serfdom but he could not destroy the foundations on which his entire system of government rested and least of all when faced with the need to mobilize all his empire’s resources against Napoleon. In any case, was not the weakening of the landowners’ power