Talking of Reforms that Failed: Some Ideas about Alexander’s “Secret Committee”

Abstract

To decode what Russian reformers meant when borrowing their wording from the West, one should try to immerse oneself into their context. The paper considers an example of Alexander I’s reforms at the very beginning of the nineteenth century. The political struggle and ideas of the Vorontsov brothers’ “Senatorial party” and the “Secret Committee” are studied in two ways. A straightforward “European” interpretation of concepts they all used is found to be misleading. Given the main principle of the Russian political system, autocracy, the Senatorial party understood “despotism” as “ministerial despotism” and fought not for reforms, but for access to the autocrat.