The immediate impact of the French Revolution upon the tsarist state and society is difficult to parse out. News of the events in Paris often happened at a distance, and in a ancien regime society with low levels of literacy and strong divisions between those who were literate, news of the Revolution was akin to game of telephone. The "French Revolution" thus often had a different meaning to different individuals and groups within the Empire. Hostility to the Revolution was also tempered by fascination with French culture, especially among the elite. The net result was there was an ambivalence about the French Revolution that grew over time and was directly related to Russia's increasing entanglement in European affairs because of its military involvement in the Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars.

The response of the Russian executive towards the Revolution illustrates this ambivalence. On one hand, Catherine II and her successor Paul I tacked to an anti-Revolutionary bent in their foreign policies and rhetoric. Catherine II perceived the Revolution as part of a larger process of the Enlightenment going too far, and she tended to lump it in both with the American Revolution and the Pugachev Revolt. The Russian interventions against France came with a larger clamping down on radical ideas and censorship. Likewise, Paul I initiated greater Russian intervention in Central Europe and Italy when the French disbanded the Knights of Malta.

The actions of these two heads might give the impression that a reactionary Russia was hellbent upon strangling the Revolution in its cradle, but the actions and motivations of Catherine II and Paul I were more complex than a knee-jerk reaction to the politics of 1789. Russian intervention against France often meshed with other geopolitical goals and concerns of the Romanovs. Intervention and playing a key role in the various coalitions gave Russia a voice in other matters concerning Europe such as Poland or the status of the German states. This was one of the reasons why the coalitions against the Revolution were so dysfunctional and fell apart in light of French resistance. Austria in particular was leery that Russia would gain at the Habsburg's expense and the dilemma for Austrian diplomats was that a successful French war might leave France in too weak of a state to be of aid against Russia. Clamping down on the press and letters was also logical given that the Romanovs relied upon a large number of non-Russian servitors for the bureaucracy and the army leadership. Tadeusz Kościuszko was not that different in terms of social background and milieu than other servitors of the Romanov state, but he led a revolt in Russian Poland that had to be crushed by the Romanovs in 1794.

The wars against the French did not necessarily mean that the Empire's elite did not see any value in the new course of French politics. The success of French arms and the restoration of order by Napoleon seemed to validate the strength of constitutionalism and Enlightenment ideals of a rational society. The Romanov state structure was still predicated upon the idea of Enlightened despotism and a number of post-1789 theorists sought to square new innovations with the established political culture. Catherine II tended to view the Revolution not as ideas spiraling out of control, but rather as evidence that the Bourbons had failed to contain and contour them. More importantly, during Paul I's reign there were a group of young men around the tsarevich who saw the Revolution as a pretext to get rid of the dead wood that had accumulated in Catherine II's long reign and which her son did little to remove. These reformers built on long-standing calls for a more modernized and European Romanov state, but repacked them to still suit Romanov needs. Alexander I implemented some of these liberal reforms after his father's assassination. His leading advisor on domestic reform, Mikhail Speransky, looked towards French models and examples to streamline and centralize the Russian bureaucracy. In doing so, Speransky was influenced by the example of Napoleon, who took late Enlightenment principles of rational hierarchies and twisted them to suit his own dictatorship. Although Speransky fell afoul of anti-French factions at court, some of his ideas lived on in Congress Poland. This post-1815 entity was in personal union with the Tsar and had a constitution and other facets of French methods to guarantee a degree of moderate loyalty to the Romanovs among the Polish elite.

But threading the needle between Enlightenment ideals and Romanov autocracy was going to be difficult prospect among any imperial reformer, and the French 1812 invasion only compounded these difficulties. French methods soon became associated with French invasion and foreign influence. One of Speransky's great enemies at court, the Governor-General of Moscow Fyodor Rostopchin, accused Speransky of being the leader of a wider Free Mason plot to undo the foundations of the Romanov state. The wider Napoleonic Wars also ensured whole generation of Russian officers came into contact with a wider European world and inculcated among mid-level officers a belief that Russia could achieve a similar result of 1789 without the negatives of the Terror or Napoleon.

These Revolutionary ideas percolated among various secret societies and forms of noble socialization in the years after Waterloo. Especially as Alexander I walked away from liberal ideas and gravitated more towards the reactionary, pro-Russian elements of the state, these societies and network began to envision a kind of Russian 1789. Revolutionary reform's moment seemed to have arrived with the death of Alexander I in December 1825 and the messy transition of power towards his son Nicholas I. Although the revolt of mid-level officers in Saint Petersburg was crushed, the Decembrists became enshrined in both Russian revolutionary circles and within the USSR as an abortive attempt to bring the Revolution into Russia.

Such a mythology surrounding the Decemberists obscures the important and quite real divisions within them and the different paths they saw towards reform. The Decembrists counted among their ranks individuals like Pavel Pestel who envisioned a republic for Russia and an end to the monarchy. But Pastel was something of an outlier for the Decemberists. The Union of Salvation, or of the Faithful and True Sons of the Fatherland, which was a secret society for various disaffected elites, had split along geographic lines into Northern and Southern wings. Members of the Northern Society tended to favor a constitutional monarchy and a more go-slow approach to revolution and change. Their methods tended to hew towards that of a palace coup rather than an immediate change. In contrast, the Southern Society, influenced by Pavel, favored more extreme measures. Pavel himself argued for an immediate regicide, but this was too far for some of his compatriots. Thus the Decemberists entered into 1825 split between a Jacobin/Girondist faction and a Monarchiens wing, while both sides favored Bonapartist tactics in which the Army would act as a praetorian instigator of change and transition.

Such splits in the 1820s should come as no surprise as the events of 1789 had occurred at such a historical remove that would-be revolutionaries could style themselves as successors to various movements of the Revolution. This is one of the ironies of the French Revolution in Russia: its main political impact was not among the masses, but upon a very narrow clique of elites and the privileged. Although there was a persistent fear that Russia's serfs would be infected by Revolutionary ideals and revolt, such fears reflected Russian elites' own misgivings about serfdom than the realities of peasant life. Serfs tended not to participate in eighteenth century revolts like Pugachev's and serf commune was in many ways a world apart from other aspects of Russian political life. Even though the serfs were in human bondage, it was a form of bondage in which they often regulated on a day to day basis. The future Decembrist Ivan Yakushkin offered his serfs the option of renting his land in 1819, but his serfs refused his offer claiming that while "we are yours, but the land is ours." The ideas of human liberty, nationalism, or even meritocratic despotism associated with the Revolution consequently did not register with larger population in a deep way, but instead took root in a very narrow segment of the populace that were already an elite.

Sources

Lincoln, W. Bruce. In the Vanguard of Reform: Russia's Enlightened Bureaucrats, 1825-1861. DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 1982.

Madariaga, Isabel de, Roger P. Bartlett, and Janet M. Hartley. Russia in the Age of the Enlightenment: Essays for Isabel De Madariaga. New York: St. Martin's Press, 1990.

O'Meara, Patrick. The Decembrist Pavel Pestel: Russia's First Republican. Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003.

Stone, Bailey. Reinterpreting the French Revolution: A Global-Historical Perspective. Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 2002.