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Judicial reform proved equally dismaying. In part, contemporaries were deeply alarmed by an apparent explosion in the crime rate, a perception magnified in turn by lurid reporting in the press. Apart from the dissolution of the squire’s police powers over the peasantry, some contemporaries were wont to blame the judicial system itself, especially the purported (but exaggerated) leniency of the jury system. More worrisome for the government was the apparent inability of the judicial system to combat political crime and revolutionary terrorism; as a result, the government transferred crimes against the state to a government body (1872) and erected military tribunals to deal with terrorists (1878). When the revolutionaries used public trials as a political stage, when a jury acquitted a female terrorist who had shot and wounded the governor of St Petersburg, the government became still more disenchanted with its system of Western justice. That disillusionment extended to virtually all the other reforms as well—the liberal censorship that tolerated attacks on the government, the universities that produced so many radical revolutionaries, the church reform that left priests in even worse straits than before, and the emancipation that appeared responsible for the plight of both nobles and peasants.

All this served to erode the reform ethos of the 1860s, even among those who had participated in designing the reforms. A former Minister of Interior, P. A. Valuev, was now more sensitive to the dilemmas of stimulating social initiative from below: ‘The Russian people, for centuries, have been accustomed to strong authority and its uniform application everywhere. Only government authority, balanced in its weight and with equal, forceful influence on all the far-flung parts of our state, will be able to guide society to its further development on a true and lawful path’. Even more radical was the shift in sentiment of K. P. Pobedonostsev, who had helped design the liberal judicial reform of 1864 but within a few years had become the chief spokesman for conservative retrenchment.

Although the government had begun to revise and repair the Great Reforms earlier, the watershed came in the acute political crisis of the late 1870s. The regime found itself now confronted not only by a relentless political terrorism but also by growing restiveness in educated society—at least partly because of yet another débâcle in foreign affairs, the Russo-Turkish war of 1877–8. The conflict had promised to protect Russia’s coreligionists from persecution in the Ottoman Empire, and restore Russia’s place as a great power; despite the high costs incurred, however, all these gains were undone at the congress of Berlin. By 1879 educated society (which included conservative, not just liberal elements in the nobility) were adamantly demanding political reforms like a constitution and a national assembly. Pobedonostsev, the arch-enemy of such demands, wrote to the emperor’s heir that ‘what I hear [in St Petersburg] from high-placed and learned men makes me sick, as if I were in the company of half-wits and perverted apes. I hear everywhere the trite, deceitful, and accursed word—constitution’. Indeed, some of the more liberal segments (headed by nobles from Tver) had even entered into clandestine contact with the revolutionary populists.

When repression alone failed to stifle the revolutionary movement, in February 1880 Alexander II appointed a new Minister of Interior, M. T. Loris-Melikov, to deal with the crisis. His tactic, known as the ‘dictatorship of the heart’, continued the war against revolutionaries but also made a calculated attempt to solicit the support of Russia’s more conservative, propertied elements in society. Although wrongly described as a parliamentary reform, his plan essentially foresaw a series of consultative commissions (not unlike those that preceded emancipation) to help advise the government on the proper course of action. Both the preparatory and general commissions would include regular state officials and members elected by the zemstvo and city councils; their task was to make a systematic review of the Great Reforms. This scheme was not, however, intended as a permanent institution; as Loris-Melikov himself explained, ‘it would be unthinkable for Russia to have any form of popular representation based on Western models’. Reassured, Alexander II approved the proposal on 1 March 1881.