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Rh an autocrat was absolutely indispensable to a great realm, but that a national convention was not requisite. "Our tsars," he wrote, "are not representatives of the peoples, but representatives of Him who rules empires." Thus logically did Karazin formulate the theocratic doctrine of cæsaropapism. In another lecture he publicly denounced the constitutionalists as republicans, and expressed his opposition to the theories of the rights of man and of civil rights.

Whilst Alexander thus failed to fulfil his pledges for the establishment of constitutionalism, he showed himself no less feeble and reactionary in the matter of liberating the peasantry. In 1806 he accepted the dedication of Kaisarov's Gettingen dissertation against serfdom, a question which through the writings of Radiščev, Pnin, Novikov, Polénov, and other opponents, had become more and more acute. The tsar could, indeed, appeal to notable names upon the other side, to Sumarokov, Ščerbatov, and Boltin, for instance. Alexander was urged towards reform, not by Russian theorists alone, but by the example of Europe and of his own European territories. In the Baltic provinces the peasants were liberated during the years 1816 to 1819. Among the Russian aristocracy, warm advocates of this humane (and practical) reform were invariably to be found. Prince Vjazemskii, a noted writer who had translated Novosilcev's draft from French into Russian, conceived the idea of founding a society for the liberation of the peasants. In 1820 he sent the tsar a memorial wherein the liberation of the peasants and the domestic serfs was advocated by himself and his friends on grounds of justice and expediency. In 1818, Kankrin, minister for finance, favoured this reform, but without avail.

The opposing views were voiced by Karazin. In the address to which reference has previously been made, the one in which his opposition to constitutionalism was definitely formulated, he expounded also the divine and ethical justification for serfdom. The great landed proprietors, he said, were "almost" as indispensable to the wellbeing of the peasant villagers as was the monarch to that of his subjects in general. The landlord was a hereditary official to whose care the peasants had been entrusted by the supreme authority; vis-à-vis the state, the relationship of landlord to peasant was that of "governor-general in miniature." He wrote: "Russian landlords are nothing other than vice-gerents of their great tsar, each in the