By stimulating interest in imperial-era conservative values, Russia's statist turn during the past decade has stimulated a biographical cottage industry that reexamines conservative thinkers and statesmen. Some of these biographies are worthwhile, but some are so ideologically driven as to handicap their interpretive value. Unfortunately, the book under review falls into the latter category.
Ivan Dronov is a professor of history and politics at the Timiriazev Russian State Agrarian Institute. A specialist on imperial Russian conservative thought, he makes his monograph's guiding conceptual framework the antithesis between the failed Great Reforms of Tsar Alexander II and the success of Alexander III's restoration of order. With the slogan “Russia for the Russians” as justification for Alexander III's policies, Dronov reduces the complexity of foreign and domestic politics to an existential battle between liberal and conservative ideologies. Dronov defines liberalism as synonymous with chaos and conservatism with stability and development. Liberalism emerges as the greatest threat to the empire, especially when it is supported by Jewish-Masonic-German conspiracies. Emotional and judgmental, the author uses his extensive source base very selectively.
Dronov praises the severe military education that Romanov heirs received for bringing up “soldiers of the empire, not socialite dandies or parliamentary chatterboxes” (17). Young Alexander himself matures as an intellectual battlefield between liberal tutors Prince Nikolai Orlov and Konstantin Kavelin and conservatives Konstantin Pobedonostsev and Sergei Soloviev (141, 143). Exploring the heir's emotional struggle to overcome his love for Maria Meshcherskaia and fulfill his obligation to marry Danish Princess Dagmar, Dronov presents Alexander as a Christ-like figure in the desert who eventually chooses a life of duty over the seduction of “individual rights” in the form of “free love” and “free choice” (141).
Dronov approaches the Great Reforms by tracing the correspondence between Alexander and his close friend and confidant Vladimir Meshcherskii as he toured seventeen provinces in 1867–69 to explore the fate of local self-government. Although initially positive because the zemstvos were “homegrown institutions” not influenced “by French examples” (177–78), Meshcherskii eventually convinced Crown Prince Alexander that the zemstvos functioned poorly due to corruption, embezzlement, bureaucratic foot-dragging, and the tendency to turn demagogues into local satraps (179).
In the wake of the 1878 Congress of Berlin, Dronov argues that it dawned on the heir that besides the “external West,” Russia's “greater danger lay in the ‘domestic West,’ i.e. those forces inside Russia that associated themselves with Western ideology, Western values and way of life” and their names were “political liberalism, social revolution, the philosophy of egotism and atheism, the religion of the Golden Calf and so on” (287). Growing since the days of Peter the Great, Dronov argues, these values climaxed during the Great Reform Era as they began to “wash away and erode the thousand-year-old traditions of Russian civilization” (287).
On the eve of the regicide in 1881, Dronov argues, Russia's liberal ministers, including Mikhail Loris-Melikov, acted as accomplices of the People's Will terrorist organization. The constitutionalists conspired to blackmail the government into granting a constitution under the threat of violence until Alexander III took over as Tsar and cut the Gordian Knot by building an “Empire of Truth” (the title of Chapter 7). Dronov goes into detail about the economic reforms under Alexander III and argues that they aimed to reverse the huge debts and financial chaos that the Great Reforms had created. But for all the praise he heaps on economic reforms, Dronov fails to explore the concept of conservative reformism, which has played such an important role in Russian history.
The chapter on the nationalities policies, “Russia for the Russians,” is a tour de force of xenophobia and antisemitism with numerous quotes from Fedor Dostoevskii and many others who blamed the Jews themselves for being persecuted. The first wave of massive Jewish emigration from Russia, Dronov argues, resulted from the imposition of the state monopoly on alcohol sales in 1894, which interrupted the main source of Jewish profits (544). Alexander's policies towards the periphery stemmed from their instrumentalization in a “battle to the death” with the west (566–67). And if that were not sufficiently impactful, the biography's concluding chapter suggests that the German government was involved in the death of proponents of the Franco-Russian alliance all over Europe and then hypothesizes that Alexander III's own death resulted from a conspiracy among the Jewish doctors treating him. This biography is a shining example of how not to rehabilitate conservative reformism.
