The initial article of the first code of fundamental laws of the Russian Empire stated that ‘the emperor of Russia is an autocratic and unlimited monarch’. It may cause some astonishment, therefore, to learn that one of the most determined tsars of the nineteenth century, Alexander III (1881-1894), continually found his desires blocked by the very institutions of government which were supposed to serve the autocratic principle. This discovery was certainly an unpleasant surprise for Alexander, who railed against the ‘windbag lawyers’ who thwarted his will. The more so, because Alexander found to his chagrin that he could not do without their expertise. Heide W. Whelan explores the strange relationship between Alexander and his own bureaucracy, exemplified by the highest legislative organ of the realm, the State Council.

Alexander's dilemma was tied to the political evolution of the Russian Empire. To function effectively amidst a flood of day-to-day problems, the Empire required a framework of law and legality. This need, in turn, spawned a bureaucracy possessed of a dual loyalty: to the person of the emperor and his autocratic power, and to the abstract ideal of the ‘state’ or the ‘people’. Professor Whelan suggests that there thus arose a fatal schism in the bureaucratic mind between autocracy (or ‘patriarchal power’, as she calls it), and ‘modern principles’. The combination of autocracy and legality, she argues, required a good deal of wishful thinking from tsars and servitors.

Yet was the average chinovnik -to say nothing of the average tsar - really such a schizophrenic as to be unable to see this obvious contradiction? Or did it really exist in such stark terms? No tsar, from the first, Ivan IV, to the last, Nicholas II, was ever as free as the autocratic ideal suggested. The ‘patriarchal’ Russian state placed a number of constraints upon the tsar, in the form of religious norms, traditions and disdain for proizvol, or arbitrariness. While every tsar strayed from the ideals of proper conduct, they were all compelled to pay obeisance to them. This phenomenon in itself was part of the evolution of Russia into a modern state with a modern bureaucratic elite, committed to the rule of law.