Title: SOME ARCHIVAL SOURCES ON THE MID-NINETEENTH CENTURY
Abstract: Although the Russian Empire's officials produced an incredible quantity of manuscripts and printed documents during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the student of Russia's mid-nineteenth century bureaucracy finds relatively few sources which provide concrete information about such significant problems as the nature of the Russian officials' daily lives, their views about state service, their reactions to major political events such as the revolutions of 1848 and the Crimean War, and their attitudes toward the critical problems of modernization and change during the years preceding the decade of the Great Reforms in Russia. Yet it is precisely these years that are so crucial in the evolution of reform attitudes within the Russian bureaucracy in the nineteenth century. As I have indicated else where, the 1840s and 1850s saw the emergence of a group of 'enlightened' bureau crats in Russia who, although they sought changes which would bring about major alterations in Russia's social, economic, and administrative structure, insisted upon preserving the autocracy as the only institution in Russia with the power necessary to transcend the petty class interests of conflicting groups in the Empire in order to bring about the reforms which Russia so badly needed.1 By the 1850s, there were circles of such 'enlightened' bureaucrats in several of the central state ministries, though the ones we shall emphasize here were those in the Ministries of State Domains and Interior, several of whom emerged in the late 1850s to play an important part in drafting the Emancipation of 1861. Published sources on the views of these 'enlightened' bureaucrats are sparse indeed. To be sure, a small number of memoirs and letters written by 'enlightened' bureaucrats appeared in historical journals in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries,2 but a majority of these published sources emphasize the
Publication Year: 2016
Publication Date: 2016-01-01
Language: en
Type: article
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