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another example was the establishment of the police trade unions, the remnants of which led the march to the Winter Palace on Bloody Sunday.

The last emperor was infamous for his suspicion of his ministers. During a meeting over foreign policy in the Far East, Minister of War Aleksei Kuropatkin, worried by Nicholas’s tendency to listen to the counsel of unofficial advisors, complained that, ‘(your) confidence in me would only grow when I ceased to be a minister’. Nicholas responded, ‘It is strange, you know, but perhaps that is psychologically correct.’20 To do Nicholas justice, this was not a unique situation. Louis XV, frustrated by his foreign minister’s failure to share his enthusiasm for Poland and Sweden, conducted a secret policy with these two countries, whilst George II of England sent secret agents to negotiate with Saxony and Austria in contradiction with his own government’s policy.

Post 1905

As a result of the revolution of 1905 Russia became a semi-constitutional monarchy. The now half-elected State Council became the upper house of the parliamentary system. The Duma made up the lower house.21

The major change in the central governing organs was the prominence given to the Council of Ministers as the focal point of the administration and, more importantly, the emergence of the council’s chairman. This figure held the responsibility of co-ordinating policy-making and ministerial activity and ensuring unity in the council. Many figures inside and outside of government came to the conclusion that the causes of the disasters of 1904–6 could be linked to the chaos and disunity of the subordinate organs resulting from faulty supreme organs. Particular blame was placed on Nicholas II who came to be regarded as unable to play the co-ordinating role demanded by the autocratic system. This drive for ministerial unity under the leadership of the chairman of the Council of Ministers predictably raised sensitivities concerning infringement on the emperor’s real power and role. Nicholas II summed up his feeling in a telling comment. ‘He (Peter A. Stolypin, chairman of the Council of Ministers, 1906–1911) dies in my service, true, but he was always so anxious to keep me in the background. Do you suppose that I liked always reading

20‘Dnevnik Kuropatina’, KA 2 (1922): 57–8.

21R. McKean, The Russian Constitutional Monarchy, 1 907 –1 91 7 (London: Macmillan, 1977); W. Mosse, ‘Russian Bureaucracy at the end of the Ancien Regime: The Imperial State Council’, SR (1980): 616–32; D. Macdonald, United Government and Foreign Policy in Russia,

1 900–1 91 4 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1992); R. Sh. Ganelin, Rossiiskoe Samoderzhavie v 1 905 gody (Leningrad: Nauka, 1991); A. P. Borodin, Gosudarstvennii Sovet Rossii, 1 906–1 91 7 (Kirov: Vytka, 1999).

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in the papers that the chairman of the council of ministers had done this . . .

The chairman had done that? Don’t I count? Am I nobody?’22 For the rest of his reign Nicholas worked towards the emasculation of the chairman’s power, which he considered a direct threat to his authority. However, he himself was unable to co-ordinate his government or provide astute political leadership – with disastrous consequences.

Nicholas’s undermining of his own government was owed above all to his personality, though also to his conception of his role as patriarch of his people, and to the suspicion and contempt of bureaucracy widespread in Russian society.23 Even Kaiser Wilhelm II of Germany, let alone Emperor Francis Joseph of Austria never undermined their chief ministers to the degree Nicholas sabotaged Stolypin and after him, Vladimir Kokovtsev. More importantly, the Hohenzollern and Habsburg monarchs did not see a fundamental difference between themselves and the policies followed by their governments.24 Nicholas, however, regarded the Council of Ministers and the bureaucracy as direct threats to his power and worked to undermine them, which lead to paralysis of the central governing organs in the years before and during the First World War.

Modernisation from above

Inseparable from this discussion is the regime’s institutional response to the challenges posed by modernisation from above. Unsurprisingly the achievement and maintenance of great power status, an essential plank in Romanov legitimacy, became a driving force behind the evolution of subordinate and supreme governing organs under Peter the Great and subsequently. Defeat in the Crimean War put on top of the agenda not only the necessity for major socioeconomic reform on a scale not seen since the time of Peter, such as the abolition of serfdom, inculcation of legal principles and industrialisation, but also the enlargement and improvement of the bureaucracy, whose responsibility now was transformation of a society regarded as backward in relation to the advanced powers of Europe.

22V. Kokovtsev, Iz moego proshlego (Paris: priv. pub., 1933), pp. 282–3.

23See e.g. R. Wortman, Scenarios of Power (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000), vol. II, part 3; Lieven, Nicholas II.

24The literature on Wilhelm is immense; for guidance see C. Clark, Kaiser Wilhelm II (Harlow: Longman, 2000), pp. 262–5, J. C. G. Rohl, The Kaiser and his Court: Wilhelm II and the Government of Germany (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987); On Franz Josef, see e.g. S. Beller, Francis Joseph (Harlow: Longman, 1995) and J.-P. Bled, Franz Joseph (Oxford: Blackwell, 1992).

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The Russian bureaucracy undertook one of the first programmes of modernisation from above, having been forced to play many roles which belonged to private groups in the economically advanced countries of Europe. The regime collapsed in 1917, but to deny the positive contributions of the bureaucratic system, despite all its faults, is difficult. Even if we just focus on the period from the Great Reforms to the Revolution the list of achievements is impressive: emancipation of the serfs, establishment of an independent judiciary system and local government (zemstvos), industrialisation, construction of a vast railway network, the beginnings of a constitutional form of government, Stolypin’s land reforms, attempts at a genuine social welfare system and expansion of mass education. All of these required a fairly competent bureaucratic infrastructure as well as expertise and professionalism.25 But the subordinate organs needed direction from above. In the absence of effective supreme organs, many times the ministries handled ‘personal and particular problems, to the obvious detriment of larger, more important issues and unforeseen circumstances’.26 In the end, Russia’s subordinate organs in St Petersburg to a significant extent operated well, while the more serious problems of governing existed elsewhere in the supreme organs and in the modus operandi of the emperors and most especially of Nicholas II.

25 On senior late-imperial officials, see D. Lieven, Russia’s Rulers Under the Old Regime (London: Yale, 1989): chapter 1 surveys the literature on the Russian bureaucracy.

26A. Verner, The Crisis of Russian Autocracy: Nicholas II and the 1 905 Revolution (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990), p. 46.

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