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)

Samoderzhavnoe pravitel´stvo is an expanded version of the author's 1986 candidate's dissertation, which traces the history of the Committee of Ministers, the highest executive institution in the tsarist state, from its creation in the reign of Alexander I until its dissolution in April 1906. It follows the monographic organization of a systematic work of institutional history, describing the committee's legal bases, or lack thereof, then focusing on the reform period. Successive chapters describe its composition and competence, its relations with other supreme institutions—the State Council, the de jure legislative body of the empire, and the Senate, its highest judicial institution—and the numerous state committees subordinate to it. The last two chapters are devoted to the futile efforts to attain a "unified government" from the reform era to the creation of a cabinet headed by a prime minister in October 1905. The book ends with the dissolution of the Committee of Ministers in 1906. Remnev draws on a 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 the most thorough and informative study of the Russian central administration in the last century of the monarchy that we have to date.

Remnev's dissertation was written in response to what he describes as "a type of boom in the investigation of the history of governmental institutions" that had occurred in the preceding decades (3). The boom was inspired by P. A. Zaionchkovskii, whose teaching and mentorship brought the study of tsarist institutions and the officials who directed them into the 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 the changes in social and economic status of government officials and in the size of the administration.¹ Meanwhile, the study of the state system had begun in the West with works by Marc Raeff, Hans-Joachim Torke, and Walter M. Pintner, which also focused on the changing character of administrative personnel.² Zaionchkovskii's students, both Soviet and Western, went on to study the government in the period of the Great Reforms, following the example of his own works on the administration.³ They investigated the reforms as acts of state directed by "enlightened bureaucrats," briefly empowered by the crisis following the Crimean War, and the institutional politics that both enabled them to succeed and established the limits to the reforms they introduced. The preoccupation with reforms, however, left unanswered questions about the nature and functioning of the monarchical state once the reforms ended. The work of Daniel T. Orlovsky represents a 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 the failures of governmental reforms in the 1860s and the inability of the government to achieve a "conservative renovation," which proceeded elsewhere in Europe, Japan, and the Ottoman Empire.

Remnev deals with the efforts at reform but places them in the framework of a functioning system of autocracy from 1801 to 1906. He seeks to examine, citing Mikhail Dolbilov, "the history of autocratic power as a process of administration" (3) in order to show how autocratic government manifested itself both in practice and in the mentality of those officials who were both loyal to their sovereign and determined to observe the norms of legality fundamental to a modern bureaucracy.⁵ In...