Central government

Supreme organs (Verkhovnye organy)

From the establishment of the collegiate system to the 1917 February Revolution, the imperial government faced the challenges of co-ordination, unity and supervision of the subordinate organs. Peter founded the Senate on 22 February 1711. His handwritten decree failed to enunciate clearly this supreme organ’s responsibilities, save one. He charged the Senate with administering the empire when he absented himself from the capital to command troops in the field. That same day Russia declared war on the Ottoman Empire. A second decree dated March of that same year to a significant degree delineated the Senate’s duties. In the period before the establishment of the collegiate system, the Senate was charged with increasing the amount of taxes collected, improving tax collecting organs, rooting out corruption, and supervision of the state’s expenditure. It could issue its own directives which all institutions were required to obey. The Senate was indeed governing, exercising the executive, legislative and judicial powers of the monarch.

With the establishment of the collegiate system, the Senate lost administrative duties, such as tax collection, and received the responsibility of a supreme organ – co-ordination and supervision of the subordinate organs, the colleges. The Senate combined this with its role as a higher judicial body which was to provide a degree of conformity in the interpretation of the empire’s laws. The presidents of the colleges were members of the Senate until 1722 when Peter came to the conclusion that having the heads of subordinate organs participate in the supreme organs whose responsibility was oversight of those same subordinate organs was counterproductive and discontinued the practice. The Senate’s performance did not satisfy Peter, who eventually appointed a procurator-general who represented him in the Senate and was responsible to him alone. The procurator-general’s role was supervisory, confirming the Senate’s decrees and ensuring it carried out its duties and the emperor’s will.

In the period between Peter’s death in 1725 and the enthronement of Catherine II in 1762 the supreme organs existed in a state of great flux, reflecting a lack of institutionalisation and dependence on the attitudes of individual monarchs and high servitors. Under Catherine I (r. 1725–7) and Peter II (r. 1727–30) the Senate’s role as a supreme organ diminished with the establishment of the Supreme Privy Council, the intended co-ordinating point of the subordinate organs. Anna Ivanovna (r. 1730–40), suspicious of the Supreme Privy Council given its members’ attempt to limit her autocratic power at the beginning of her reign, in 1731 abolished it. The new focal point of the administration became Her Majesty’s Cabinet. Elizabeth (r. 1741–62) abolished this body and restored

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many powers to the Senate, though real power of co-ordination remained in the hands of those close to the empress herself. Nonetheless, the Senate reviewed and approved most of the legislation of her reign. These changes in the supreme organs reflected a three-way battle for real power. One between the aristocracy and the bureaucratic bodies, one between the aristocracy and the autocracy, and another between the autocrat and the growing bureaucracy.

Catherine II was keen to reorganise the central organs which to her mind sorely lacked co-ordination and efficiency. Her adviser, Nikita Panin, stressed the need to found some form of imperial council capable of co-ordination and to establish an effective relationship between the monarch, the Senate and other governmental institutions. Taking into consideration Panin’s views, the empress subordinated the Senate to the procurator-general once again, believing like Peter the Great before her, that a supervisor of the supervisory body would create the conditions for a more smooth and unified central government. Nevertheless by the end of her reign the continuous need for an effective mechanism capable of co-ordinating government was clear, especially given the growing tendency to see change in society as the responsibility of the government.

Co-ordination of the subordinate organs, the relationship between the supreme organs themselves and more specifically between them and the sovereign, were at the base of Alexander I’s major administrative reforms. His decrees of 1801 and 1802 fundamentally changed the Senate’s role. The body received the right of judicial review and supervision of the highest government organs, including the newly established ministries. Given his fleeting interest in constitutional change, Alexander gave senators the right to make remonstrances to the emperor and stipulated that no bill could become law without its approval. When the Senate exercised this right soon after, Alexander rescinded it. Clearly the supreme organs were to occupy themselves with co-ordination of the subordinate organs, not with infringement on the autocratic power. The founding of ministerial government and of the State Council (1810) led to the sidelining of the Senate in practice. For the remainder of the nineteenth century it was a High Court of Review and along with other institutions exercised a degree of administrative supervision.

Yet the problem of effective supreme organs remained. Count Mikhail M. Speranskii, Alexander’s close adviser and regarded by many as the father of the modern imperial bureaucracy, argued that ‘in the present system of government there is no institution for the general deliberation of governmental affairs from the point of view of their legislative aspect. The absence of such an institution leads to major disorders and confusion in all aspects of the

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administration.’10 Recognising this, Alexander founded the State Council. On the day of its inauguration he drew attention to the reasons for taking this step:

The order and uniformity of state affairs require that there be a single focal point for their general consideration. In the present structure of our administration, we do not have such an institution. In such a vast state as this, how can various parts of the administration function with harmony and success when each moves in its own direction and when these directions nowhere lead to a central focus? Given the great variety of state affairs, the personal activity of the supreme power alone cannot maintain this unity. Beyond this, individuals die and only institutions can survive and, in the course of centuries, preserve the basis of a state . . . The State Council will form the focal point of all affairs of the central administration.11

The intention was that the establishment of the State Council, which should be considered a major development in the history of the central government of the empire, was to end the search for a supreme co-ordinating organ begun some one hundred years previously under Peter I.

The emperor appointed the State Council’s membership which consisted of sitting ministers and other high dignitaries. The body had no right to initiate legislation, which remained the prerogative of the autocrat and ministers, but it could make recommendations on legislation sent to it, which the emperor could accept or reject. In theory no legislative project could be presented to the emperor without the State Council’s approval. Practice proved otherwise. At times the emperor and ministers chose or established alternative ways to push through legislation if the path through the State Council was considered too difficult. Nevertheless, the State Council did provide a forum for the debate, reformulation and preparation of legislation before its delivery to the emperor.

Russia’s elite hoped the founding of the State Council would place the governmental and legislative process on some form of legal basis. With the State Council, Russia was to be an orderly autocratic state fixed on a foundation of law and legal process. But the continued existence of the autocracy undermined in practice this supreme organ. Alexander III (r. 1881–94), by a decree dated 5 November 1885, legalised what had been long going on in practice. According to the decree, all commands of the emperor carried the full force of legality. The State Council’s role in the legislative process was fatally weakened. The upshot was the strengthening of the tendency on the part of ministers

10Quoted in Whelan, Alexander III, p. 39.

11Whelan, Alexander III, pp. 39–40.

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to avoid seeking support amongst members of the supreme organs or fellow ministers and to rely on the emperor’s support alone to obtain passage of legislation.

Alexander I, with two decrees dated 1802 and 1812, founded the Committee of Ministers. Its most important short-term responsibility was to govern the empire while he was at the front fighting Napoleon. The committee was charged with overall co-ordination of administrative issues as they emerged amongst the various subordinate organs and therefore could not become a supreme co-ordinating organ. A chairman headed the committee, a position which by the middle of the nineteenth century carried no great authority. When Sergei Witte was removed from his post as minister of finance in 1903 and made chairman he considered it a demotion. The emperor in theory could attend the committee, but almost never did so until its dissolution in 1906, thereby further weakening the committee’s authority. Ministerial disunity and the committee’s weak institutional authority limited its ability to have any real effect. In any case the available evidence does not show that Alexander even wanted the committee to play a cabinet-style role. On the one hand, he wished that ministers co-ordinate policies and consult each other before presenting bills for his consideration. But his continued practice of meeting in private with individual ministers undermined any moves in that direction. The committee did have the right to draw the monarch’s attention to the need for a particular law or policy.

Alexander I initially showed a fair amount of interest in the Committee of Ministers, which enabled it to enjoy a relatively prominent role. However, in the final years of his reign he showed a decreasing inclination to rule, preferring to give greater authority to favourites. By deciding policy and making laws in meetings with individual ministers, Alexander or his current favourite greatly undercut the authority of the supreme institutions. Despite his intention to establish a degree of legality, routine and institutionalisation, Alexander followed in the footsteps of his illustrious predecessors, Peter I and Catherine II, and succumbed to the desire to rely primarily on personalities and pay less attention to institutions. Peter’s legacy of ‘institutional order as well as one of individual wilfulness’ remained until the end of the empire.12

Nicholas I showed little trust for the supreme and subordinate organs established by Alexander. He preferred to govern the empire through ad hoc committees dedicated to specific issues and through His Majesty’s Own Personal Chancellery which Paul I had founded in 1796. By placing the chancellery above

12 P. Dukes, The Making of Russian Absolutism 1 61 3 –1 801 (Longman: London, 1982). p. 122.

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the supreme and subordinate organs and under his direct control, Nicholas further centralised power in his hands and in practice stripped the State Council, Senate and Committee of Ministers of their more significant functions. In the aftermath of the Decembrist revolt Nicholas believed he was fighting a twofront war. One was against the increasing penetration into Russia of Western ideas dangerous to the autocracy which required greater control over society. The other was against the enemy within the autocracy itself – the bureaucracy. As the bureaucracy increased in size, Russian monarchs struggled to maintain personal control over it and to overcome bureaucratic inertia which seemed increasingly to block the imperial will. Nicholas’s response to this was the promotion of the chancellery, which to his mind provided for greater monarchical control over both the bureaucracy and society.

The chancellery’s First Section prepared documents for the emperor’s review and supervised the bureaucracy’s personnel. The Second Section, under the administration of Speranskii, worked on the codification of the empire’s laws. Between 1828 and 1830 Russia’s laws, broadly defined and with some exceptions, were published. In 1832 a law code was published, which replaced the Law Code of 1 649. At long last the government had written relatively coherent rules. The Fifth Section, established in 1836, studied the living conditions of state peasants and pursued reforms designed to improve them. Its research became a basis for the Emancipation of the Serfs in 1861 during the reign of Alexander II.

The Third Section became most well-known because of its police and supervisory functions that were equivalent to an internal intelligence service. It was a relatively effective state organ for the collection and analysis of information and for the implementation of the emperor’s will. Five subsections handled wide-ranging duties, which included surveillance of society and rooting out of corruption in the state apparatus, censorship, investigation of political crimes and management of relations between landowner and peasant.

The autocracy’s reliance on the chancellery lessened greatly with the start of Alexander II’s reign. The problem of co-ordination of the subordinate organs became more acute with the continued growth in the size, tasks and complexity of the ministries, and once the new emperor decided to pursue the emancipation of the serfs and other reforms. The existing avenues for governing and co-ordination open to Alexander could not provide the mechanism needed for ministerial unity and co-ordination. The State Council was too large and unwieldy a body while the Committee of Ministers, itself also a large body, was bogged down in sorting out administrative detail. In 1857 Alexander founded the Council of Ministers which was to be the supreme

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organ capable of preparing and implementing reforms free of bureaucratic inertia, ensuring co-ordination of ministers and policy-making and thereby increasing the power of the emperor, under whose direct control the body existed.

No provisions were made for the post of a co-ordinating figure such as a first minister or chairman. That vital function the emperor himself was to fill. It was expected that the monarch would frequently himself chair the council’s meetings. The purpose of this was twofold. Firstly, the emperor along with his ministers could consider legislation put forward by individual ministers before its submission to the State Council. This would create the conditions for greater policy co-ordination and coherence. Secondly, by obtaining collective council support for a measure, Alexander hoped to create ministerial unity behind policy decisions.

However, Alexander was not prepared to give up the great personal control afforded by the individual ministerial reports to him in private or to accept a first minister or chairman of the council. The ministers for their part understood that a guarantee of policy success was not obtained by discussion with colleagues in the Council of Ministers, but rather by going after the emperor’s ear. This was the crux of the issue. Neither autocrat nor ministers wished in reality to see the full institutionalisation of the supreme organs which they correctly understood would lead to some limitation of their freedom of action. Consequently the Council of Ministers atrophied.

The Council of Ministers could not become the co-ordinating point of governmental and ministerial activity . . . The unequal status of its members and the presence of the tsar exercising absolute power prevented this. This situation prevented the emergence of a collegiate organ and transformed it into a personal council of the tsar where collective discussion of questions was used to discover the position of the tsar himself. If we take into account that in practice the ministers continued to deliver reports to the tsar individually and privately, which should have been abandoned, it is easy to come to the conclusion that the last attempt before the Revolution of 1905–1906 to create in Russia a supreme collegiate organ failed and the central parts of governmental administration in the country remained disconnected.13

By the 1870s a dangerous political situation faced Alexander. Radicals stepped up their action against the monarchy, even attempting to assassinate the emperor himself. At the same time the government was losing moderate

13S. V. Makarov, Sovet Ministrov Rossisskoi Imperii 1 85 7 –1 91 7 (St Petersburg: Izd. SPbU, 2000), p. 41.

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public opinion due to the slowing pace of reform. Alexander understood that decisive action which required a united and co-ordinated government was needed to deal with the threat posed by the radicals and regain a degree of public support. In February 1880 Alexander made Count Loris-Melikov chief of the newly established Supreme Administrative Commission, a virtual dictator charged with co-ordination of government policies. Loris-Melikov quickly realised that full support of the emperor did not automatically give him the authority and real power to make the bureaucratic machine and its highest servants responsive to his wishes. Less than a month later he requested and received the portfolio of the Third Section. By the summer of 1880 this authority rooted in a bureaucratic entity was clearly not enough. Loris-Melikov disbanded the Supreme Commission and assumed stewardship of the most powerful bureaucratic institution, the Ministry of Internal Affairs. From this base, Loris-Melikov, with the open and full support of Alexander II, conducted a ministerial reshuffle to ensure all members of the Council of Ministers could be counted on for strong support.

During the eighteenth and early nineteenth century favourites had indeed ruled for and in the name of the monarch, but they did not have a political base in a particular bureaucratic institution, such as a ministry. By the second half of the nineteenth century the subordinate organs had become so large and unwieldy that when co-ordination of action and policy-making became necessary, the co-ordinating figure needed to have a base in a subordinate organ which provided real power. Alexander II had accidentally found a relatively effective way for establishing order among the subordinate organs. Alexander III and Nicholas II adopted this modus operandi, commonly alternating between the Ministry of Internal Affairs and the Ministry of Finance as the focal point of co-ordination of domestic policy. There was an additional benefit to this approach. It did not raise sensitivities over threats to the emperor’s authority. A first minister or chairman of a ministerial council could prove a rival to the supreme monarchical power given his mediating role between the monarch and the ministers. The use of one ‘strong’ minister was one response to the recurring problem of co-ordination of the subordinate organs, policy direction and the preservation of the personal power of the autocracy. However, the unofficial status of a ‘strong minister’ combined with the absence of a first minister or chairman created conditions in which if the emperor did not play his designated co-ordinating role, supreme and then subordinate organs lost direction. It also meant that overall government policy could be excessively influenced by the perceptions of one ministry.

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