Samoderzhavnoe pravitel´stvo: Komitet ministrov v sisteme vysshego upravleniia Rossiiskoi imperii (vtoraia polovina XIX-nachalo XX veka) (Autocratic Government: The Committee of Ministers in the Russian Empire's System of Higher Administration in the Second Half of the 19th and the Early 20th Centuries) (review)

Abstract

Anatolii Viktorovich Remnev, Samoderzhavnoe pravitel'stvo: Komitet ministrov v sisteme vysshego upravleniia Rossiiskoi imperii (vtoraia polovina XIX-nachalo XX veka) (Autocratic Government: The Committee of Ministers in Russian Empire's System of Higher Administration in Second Half of 19th and Early 20th Centuries). 511 pp. Moscow: ROSSPEN, 2010. ISBN-13 978-5824313925. Samoderzhavnoe pravitel'stvo is an expanded version of author's 1986 candidate's dissertation, which traces history of Committee of Ministers, highest executive institution in tsarist state, from its creation in reign of Alexander I until its dissolution in April 1906. It follows monographic organization of systematic work of institutional history, describing committee's legal bases, or lack thereof, then focusing on reform period. Successive chapters describe its composition and competence, its relations with other supreme institutions--the State Council, de jure legislative body of empire, and Senate, its highest judicial institution--and numerous state committees subordinate to it. The last two chapters are devoted to futile efforts to attain unified from reform era to creation of cabinet headed by prime minister in October 1905. The book ends with dissolution of Committee of Ministers in 1906. Remnev draws on wide array of sources--including secondary works, both Russian and Western, numerous recently published memoirs and diaries, and extensive archival documents. Samoderzhavnoe pravitel 'stvo represents most thorough and informative study of Russian central in last century of monarchy that we have to date. Remnev's dissertation was written in response to what he describes as a type of boom in investigation of history of governmental that had occurred in preceding decades (3). The boom was inspired by P. A. Zaionchkovskii, whose teaching and mentorship brought study of tsarist institutions and officials who directed them into historian's purview. For example, his Pravitel'stvennyi apparat samoderzhavnoi Rossii v XIX v. (The Government Apparatus of 19th-Century Autocratic Russia), published in 1978, provided quantitative data revealing changes in social and economic status of government officials and in size of administration. (1) Meanwhile, study of state system had begun in West with works by Marc Raeff, Hans-Joachim Torke, and Walter M. Pintner, which also focused on changing character of administrative personnel. (2) Zaionchkovskii's students, both Soviet and Western, went on to study government in period of Great Reforms, following example of his own works on administration. (3) They investigated reforms as acts of state directed by enlightened bureaucrats, briefly empowered by crisis following Crimean War, and institutional politics that both enabled them to succeed and established limits to reforms they introduced. The preoccupation with reforms, however, left unanswered questions about nature and functioning of monarchical state once reforms ended. The work of Daniel T. Orlovsky represents partial exception to this pattern, and many of Orlovsky's points adumbrate those made by Remnev in his volume. (4) But Orlovsky's work focuses principally on failures of governmental reforms in 1860s and inability of government to achieve conservative renovation, which proceeded elsewhere in Europe, Japan, and Ottoman Empire. Remnev deals with efforts at reform but places them in framework of functioning system of autocracy from 1801 to 1906. He seeks to examine, citing Mikhail Dolbilov, the history of autocratic power as process of administration (3) in order to show how autocratic government manifested itself both in practice and in mentality of those officials who were both loyal to their sovereign and determined to observe norms of legality fundamental to modern bureaucracy. …