between polizeistaat and cordon sanitaire: epidemics and police reform during russian occupation of...

75

Ab Imperio, 4/2008

Victor taki

between polItzeIstaat and

cordoN saNItaIre:

EpidEmics and policE rEForm

durinG thE russian occupation oF moldavia

and wallachia, 1828-1834*

Russo-Turkish wars of the early nineteenth century represented a con-tinuation of the Russian Empire’s southern expansion of the last third of the eighteenth century. While the territorial acquisitions that they led to were modest in comparison with the creation of the New Russian province and the annexation of Crimea, the wars of 1806-1812 and 1828-1829 constituted an intense Russian involvement in the politics of reform in Moldavia and Wallachia – two vassal polities of the Ottoman Empire. Culminating with the adoption of the Organic Statutes for Moldavia and Wallachia in 1831-1832, this involvement, for various reasons, remained an understudied subject in pre-Soviet, Soviet and post-Soviet historiographies,1 yet it can be revealing

* I would like to thank an anonymous reviewer, whose comments helped me to improve my argument.1 Recent Romanian treatments include Dumitru Vitcu and Gabriel Bădărău. Întroducere // Dumitru Vitcu and Gabriel Bădărău (Eds.). Regulamentul Organic al Moldovei. Iaşi, 2004. Pp. 15-63; Gheorghe Ungureanu. Elaborarea Regulamentului Organic // Ibid. Pp. 95-134.

76

V. Taki, Between Politzeistaat and Cordon Sanitaire

for an understanding of interconnection between imperial discourses and poli-cies, relations between imperial and regional elites, as well as the transfer of technologies of government across imperial borders. The political reforms in Moldavia and Wallachia, carried out in uneasy collaboration between Russian occupation authorities and the Romanian boyars, constitute an as-pect of the continental empires’ struggle for control over the frontier zones. One of the unintended consequences of this struggle was the emergence of a modern Romanian nation-state.

Russian policies on Moldavia and Wallachia are remarkably different from both the empire’s policies in its borderlands and the strategies it adopted to maintain hegemony in buffer-states. Scholars studying the Empire’s bor-derlands point out that the center’s approach consisted of securing political loyalty of the regional elites through their incorporation into the imperial nobility and the preservation of the social status quo. Long after the an-nexation, local administration in these regions retained their own peculiar legal frameworks and/or administrative institutions. Designed to consolidate the Empire’s hegemony in Moldavia and Wallachia, the reforms of 1828-1834 differ remarkably from the means employed to the same end in other buffer-states during the eighteenth century. Whereas in Sweden and Poland Russia defended traditional aristocratic “constitutions” in order to thwart centralizing reforms of the monarchs,2 in the two Romanian principalities it chose to sponsor comprehensive restructuring of the police, military, civil service and judiciary informed by ideals of “rational” government. Russian involvement in the internal administration of Moldavia and Wallachia can

For a recent treatments in English, see Dumitru Vitcu. Pavel D. Kiselev in the Romanian Principalities (1829-1834): The virtues and frustrations of an atypical conqueror // Fla-vius Solomon, Alexandru Zub (Eds.). Ethnic Conflicts and Cultural Exchanges North and West of the Black Sea from Ottoman Conquest to the Present. Iaşi, 2005. Pp. 171-204; Alexander Bitis. Russia and the Eastern Question. Army, Government and Society, 1815-1833. Oxford, 2006. Pp. 426-464. The weakest aspect of Romanian scholarship on the Organic Statutes is their treatment of Russian involvement in their elaboration, which is still largely based on the late nineteenth-century overview of A. P. Zablotskii-Desiatovskii (Graf P. D. Kiselev i ego vremia. St. Petersburg, 1882) by Al. Papadopol-Callimah. Generalul Pavel Kisseleff în Moldavia şi Ţara Românească 1829-1834. După documente ruseşti. Bucureştii, 1887. By contrast, Bitis’s study, based on superb familiarity with the Russian archival materials, does not use Romanian sources. The standard Soviet work is V. Ia. Grosul. Reformy v dunaiskikh kniazhestvakh 1820kh – 1830kh gg. i Ros-sia. Moscow, 1966. It strikes a balance between Russian and Romanian sources, but its methodological framework is outdated.2 See, John LeDonne. The Russian Empire and the World, 1700-1917: the Geopolitics of Expansion and Containment. New York, 1997.

77

Ab Imperio, 4/2008

be compared to a similar engagement in Bulgaria almost half a century later. Both followed a victorious war with the Ottoman Empire and aimed at consolidation of Russia’s dominance in the respective buffer states. In both cases, Russian authorities sponsored some sort of constitution that nevertheless failed to prevent major conflicts between the executive and the legislative authorities. However, here the similarities end. While the Bulgarian case offers an example of an empire consciously participating in the construction of a “nation-state” whose political loyalty to the em-pire seemed to be secured by Pan-Slavist ideology, Russian policy in the Romanian principalities during the heyday of legitimism did not envision their national unification or independence. The reforms were conceived within the mindset of early modern statehood and can be interpreted as application of a policy of “enlightened despotism” to a buffer state (which is precisely what Russia sought to prevent in eighteenth-century Sweden and Poland).

Generated by the Empire’s traditional concerns of expansion and frontier security, the policies of the Russian empire in Moldavia and Wallachia in 1828-1834 were informed by the ideal of the Polizeistaat – a peculiar type of government that originated in the early modern German territorial states. The phenomenon of the Polizeistaat signified first of all the expansion of the traditional scope of authority “from the passive duty of preserving justice to the active task of fostering the productive energies of society and provid-ing the appropriate institutional framework for it.”3 On the practical level, transformation of the nature of government was reflected in increasingly meticulous regulation of all aspects of life and activities of the subjects of a territorial ruler by means of police ordinances (called Landes und Polizeiord-nungen in German speaking areas of Central Europe), embracing such di-verse areas of human life as personal behavior, public order, fire-protection, sanitation, taxation, charity, husbandry and house building. Placed in the care of an increasingly professionalized body of public officials representing the public interest, all these diverse activities composed the domain of the

3 Mark Raeff. The Well-Ordered Police State and the Development of Modernity in Seventeenth- and Eighteenth-Century Europe: An Attempt at a Comparative Approach // American Historical Review. 1975. Vol. 80. No. 5. P. 1226. Alternatively, early political modernity can be characterized as a transition from the essentially juridical power of the right over life and death towards a power that exerted “a positive influence on life that endeavored to administer, optimize and multiply it, subjecting it to precise controls and comprehensive regulations.” Michel Foucault. Right of Death and Power over Life // Paul Rabinow (Ed.). Foucault Reader. New York, 1984. P. 259.

78


police (Polizei),4 which provided the essence of a new type of government called the well-ordered police state (Polizeistaat).5

The all-embracing and regulative character of the Polizeistaat makes it tempting for one to treat it as an early manifestation of what Zygmunt Bau-man called the “crusading, missionary, proselytizing force” of the modern state, “bent on submitting the dominated populations to a thorough once-over in order to transform them into an orderly society, akin to the precepts of reason.” This rationale made the modern state a “gardening state” par excellence, predicated as it was on the ideal of a rationally designed soci-ety. Routed in a set of fundamental oppositions, the most basic of which was the distinction between nature and culture, the project of modernity “delegitimized the present (wild, uncultivated) condition of population” in favor of a “design presumed to be dictated by the supreme and unquestion-able authority of Reason.”6 The gardening enterprise classified individuals or groups into both “useful plants to be encouraged and propagated, and weeds – to be removed and rooted out.” This led to all kinds of social en-gineering ranging from the Jesuit state in seventeenth-century Paraguay to the twentieth-century Soviet and Nazi social experiments.7

The weak point of Bauman’s approach is not only its failure to account for the ability of individuals and groups to both resist and shape the agenda of a modern state, but also the assumption that the latter constituted the only institutional context in which the “gardening” took place. Many of the prac-tices and technologies of government associated with the nineteenth-century state, such as the census, cadastral surveys and other methods of bureaucratic classification of the population were, in fact, practiced in Europe and other regions well before the beginning of the modern era.8 The continental em-

4 Reinhold August Dorwart. Prussian Welfare State before 1740. Cambridge, MA, 1971. Pp. 14-15. The word Polizei originates from the French word polir (“to establish good order”).5 There is disagreement about the correct translation of this term into English. While Raeff and the majority of scholars use the term “well-ordered police state,” other scholars (like Dorwart. Prussian Welfare State. P. 3) indicate the failure of the literal translation of “police state” to account for the important function of public welfare, performed by the government, and insist on translating it as “welfare state.” 6 Zygmunt Bauman. The Ambivalence of Modernity. London, 1995. P. 20.7 For a systematic treatment of modernity from this point of view see James C. Scott. Seeing Like a State. How Certain Schemes to Improve Human Conditions Have Failed. New Haven, 1998.8 Frederick Cooper. Modernity // Idem. Colonialism in Question. Theory Knowledge, History. Berkley&Los Angeles, 2005. Pp. 113-152.

79

Ab Imperio, 4/2008

pires (China, the Habsburg Monarchy, and Russia) adopted these forms of governmentality before the emergence of a Europe of nation-states. In fact, crystallization of the modern nation-state could not have taken place without the deployment of “rational” technologies of government by the continental empires. Instead of being intrinsically characteristic of the homogenizing nation-state, these practices and technologies of government constituted a means of managing diverse and heterogenous populations that empires and emergent nation-states in the nineteenth century used competitively. The apparent failure of the continental empires in this competition should not occlude their crucial impact on the institutional origins of the nation-states that appeared in their wake. Early nineteenth-century political reforms in the Romanian principalities provide a case in point. In what follows, I will demonstrate how the practical necessity to combat epidemics in the context of the on-going war with the Ottoman Empire in 1828-1829 led Russian oc-cupation authorities in Moldavia and Wallachia to embrace a wider reform of police institutions in the principalities, seeking to turn them into a durable foundation of imperial dominance.

Pursuing the ideal of a well-ordered police state in a sprawling conti-nental empire, Russian rulers inevitably confronted the necessity to adopt its institutions and practices in frontier zones.9 The western part of the Eurasian steppe including the regions to the north and west of the Black Sea represented a formidable challenge in this respect with its nomadic and semi-nomadic populations or sedentary societies with rather unconsolidated social structures and elites that survived by virtue of developing multiple, contrasting and shifting loyalties in a space contested by several imperial centers. The closure of what William H. McNeill called “Europe’s steppe frontier” occurred at the price of radical transformations in the ecology of the frontier zone that meant the elimination, sedenatarization or deportation of the nomads, massive agricultural settlement, as well as the emergence of clear territorial demarcation of various sovereignties to control and some-times exclude the trans-border movement of goods, populations and ideas.10 Austrian and Russian authorities of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries made territorial boundaries a factor of increasing importance in the everyday life of people living along the middle and lower Danube and

9 On imperial frontiers see Alfred J. Rieber. Frontiers in History // Neil J. Smelser and Paul B. Bates (Eds.). International Encyclopedia of the Social and Behavioral Sciences. Vol. 9. New York, 2001. Pp. 5812-5818; Idem. Complex Ecology of Eurasian Frontiers // A. I. Miller, Alfred J. Rieber (Eds.). Imperial Rule. Budapest, 2004. Pp. 179-210. 10 William H. McNeill. Europe’s Steppe Frontier, 1500-1800. Chicago, 1964.

80


the northern Black Sea region by creating border patrols, landmarks, sentry boxes, customs houses, sanitary cordons and passport check points.11

moldavia and Wallachia in russian discourse

Transformations in the ecology of the Danubian-Pontic frontier were legitimized by the discourse of a “civilizing mission” that was rooted in the portrayal of these territories as the abode of barbarism and oriental despotism.12 Russian accounts of Moldavia and Wallachia of the late eigh-teenth and early nineteenth century are full of references to the despotic character of local political system and deplorable moral state of the upper classes.13 Sometimes borrowing directly from Western literature about the principalities, Russian authors portrayed the Phanariote princes in Moldavia and Wallachia as tax farmers of the Ottomans, whose short and precarious tenure deprived them of either time or desire to emulate the “enlightened despots” of Eastern and Central Europe.14 The predatory ways of the hospodars were emulated by the boyars, whose culture was reminiscent of Muscovy. In the words of a one-time vice-governor of Bessarbia F. F.

11 On the general process of transformation of medieval frontier into modern state boundar-ies, see Lucien Febvre. Frontière: the Word and the Concept // Peter Burke (Ed.). Economy and Society in Early Modern Europe: Essays from Annales. New York, 1972. Pp. 212-213. For the evolution of the Habsburg Military Frontier in the Balkans, see Gunther E. Rothenberg. The Austrian Military Border in Croatia, 1522-1747. Urbana, 1960; Idem. Military Border in Croatia 1740-1881: A Study of an Imperial Institution. Chicago, IL, 1966; For the perspective of border societies, see Drago Roksandic. Triplex Confinium. International Research Project: Objectives, Approaches and Methods // Drago Roksandic (Ed.). Microhistory of the Triplex Confinium. Budapest, 1998. Pp. 7-27; Mirela Slukan. Cartografic Sources for the History of Triplex Confinium. Zagreb, 1999. Finally, for the emergence of Russian border installations in New Russia, see Charles King. Chernoie More // Idem. The Black Sea: A History. Oxford, 2004. Pp. 137-187.12 For the Austrian variant of the “civilizing mission” discourse that evolved out of the religious rhetoric of “Austrian mission” to save Christendom from the Islamic conquest, see Francois Ruegg. La est, nimic nou. Timişoara, 2002.13 For a more detailed discussion of the Russian perception of Moldavia and Wallachia in this period see my: Moldavia and Wallachia in the Eyes of Russian Observers in the First Half of the 19th Century // East Central Europe/L’Europe Du Centre Est. Eine wis-senschaftliche Zeitschrift. 2005. Vol. 32. Parts I-II. Pp. 199-224. 14 P. Kh. Struve. Travels in the Crimea. A History of the Embassy from Petersburg to Constantinople in 1793 Including their Journey Through Krementschuck, Oczakow, Wallachia and Moldavia. London, 1802. Pp. 90, 265-267; A. F. Langeron. Journal des campagnes faites en service de Russie. Published in Hurmuzaki, Supplement I. Vol. III. Bucureşti, 1889. P. 73.

81

Ab Imperio, 4/2008

Vigel, “[the] similarity between the way of life of the richest Moldavians and our ancestors, however shameful such parallel might be, is striking… Everything takes you to the seventeenth century and makes you realize the importance (tsenu) of the Enlightenment.”15 The corruption and bribery that reigned in the principalities remained, according to Russian authors, completely unchecked by courts that only perpetuated it and by laws that the Russian authors found non-existent.16 The cumulative result in the words of F. F. Vigel, the vice-governor of Bessarbia, was a veritable hierarchy of slaves, whereby the Moldavians were the slaves of the Greeks, who in turn were the slaves of the Turks.17 Such unflattering characteristics served to portray the Moldavian and Wallachian princes and boyars as the “other” of the westernized imperial elite. The only point of sympathetic reference in these accounts were the Romanian peasants, whose suffering, however, made them all but lose their humanity.18 Finally, in a manner typical of all orientalist accounts, Russian descriptions of the principalities treated local populations as part of an “exotic” landscape. A perceived contrast between the climate and nature of the right and left bank of the Dniester that separated the principalities from the Russian Empire at the turn of the century made some authors claim that the river constituted the real boundary between Europe and Asia.19

15 Vigel. Zamechania na nyneshnee sostoianie Bessarabii // Idem. Vospominania. Part VI. Moscow, 1892. P. 30.16 Liprandi. Kratkii ocherk etnograficheskogo, politicheskogo, nravstvennogo i voennogo sostoiania khristianskikh oblastei Turtsii. Dunaiskie kniazhestva. Moscow, 1877. P. 5.17 F. F. Vigel. Zamechania. P. 10.18 Demidov. Puteshestvie v Iuzhnuiu Rossiiu i Krym cherez Vengriiu, Valakhiiu i Mol-daviiu sovershennoie v 1837 godu. Moscow, 1853. P. 97; F. Fonton. Vospominania. Vol. 2. Leipzig, 1862. P. 187. Rather characteristically for an elite discourse, the comparison between the Romanian and the Russian peasants was overshadowed by the implicit and explicit comparison between the Romanian boyars and the Russian nobles. The only moment suggesting an implicit comparison between the Romanian and the Russian peasants that places the former in the negative light is the reference to the superficiality of their Orthodoxy – their attachment to purely external and ritual aspects of it. See, Zhadovskii. Moldavia i Valachia v sovremnnosti // Panteon. 1856. Pp. 1-2, 38. Explicit comparisons that disadvantage Romanian peasants are not those made between them and Russian peasants, but between those who live on the plains (i. e. the majority of the Romanian peasantry) and those who live in the Carpathian Mountains. The meekness, shyness and dumbness of the former is contrasted to the military valor, high morals and perspicacity of the latter. See, Voienno-statisticheskoe obozrenie gosudarstv i zemel’ k Rossiskoi imperii Prilezhaschikh. Kniazhestvo Moldavia. St. Petersburg, 1855. P. 61.19 Iz vospominanii Mikhailovskogo-Danilevskogo. Puteshestvie s imperatorom Alexan-drom I po Iuzhnoi Rossii v 1818m godu // Russkaia starina. 1897. Vol. 91. No. 7-9. P. 76.

82


While “oriental despotism” represented a critical aspect of the discourse of Russia’s “civilizing mission” in Moldavia and Wallachia, the reform of local institutions in accordance with the principles of enlightened govern-ment constituted its positive side. What forced Russian diplomats to proceed beyond mere condemnation was, however, a very pragmatic problem that the Russian army encountered in the principalities during a series of Russo-Turkish wars of the late eighteenth – early nineteenth century. Frustrated in his war efforts by the failure of the principalities to deliver necessary sup-plies, the commander of the Danubian army during the war of 1806-1812, P. I. Bagration, was at the same time unwilling to attribute it to the “ill-will of the people.”20 Instead he claimed that “the real cause of misery and des-peration of the people are the officials” and found it “most offensive” that these misfortunes were explained to the population in the form of demands of the Russian army.21 Like his predecessor A. A. Prozorovskii,22 Bagra-tion insisted on “adopting little by little Russian laws and customs in the governing of the Principalities.”23 In the absence of an effective “Russian model” of local government, “russification” reflected simply an adherence to the principles of rational and orderly government. Setting the guidelines for reform of local administration, Bagration employed the language of late enlightenment political science and argued “that reasonable economy consti-tutes one of the major factors contributing to the well-being of the land and revealing good government.”24 A precise definition of the amount of taxes paid by each taxpayer according to his social status was a precondition for “the security of property as the foremost right (after life and honor) of every

20 This reveals the assumption of a natural attraction between Russians and Romanians rooted in their shared Orthodox faith that served as a background for the affirmation of cultural superiority of Russian nobles over Romanian boyars and, at the same time, provided Russia with the mandate for its “civilizing mission.”21 N. V. Berezniakov, V. A. Bogdanova (Eds.). Bagration v dunaiskikh kniazhestvakh. Chişinău, 1949. P. 78.22 In his instruction to the newly appointed Senator-President of the Moldavian and Wal-lachian Divans, S. S. Kushnikov, the commander of the Danubian army A. A. Prozorovskii advised attention be given to “the customs of the land, and, at the same time, try as far as the situation permits, bring these customs closer to Russian practices and fundamental laws.” A. N. Egunov (Ed.). Materialy dlia noveishei istorii Bessarabii // Zapiski Bessara-bskogo Statisticheskogo Komiteta. Vol. 3. Chişinău, 1868. Pp. 144-145.23 Jewsbury. Russian Annexation of Bessarabia. P. 47.24 Iz predlozhenia P. I. Bagrationa Divanu Valashskogo kniazhestvao podatiakh i povin-nostiakh zhitelei. January 28 1810 // N. V. Berezniakov, V. A. Bogdanova (Eds.). Bagration v dunaiskikh kniazhestvakh. Chişinău, 1949. P. 84.

83

Ab Imperio, 4/2008

citizen living under the protection of benevolent government.”25 Vesting his struggle against abuses in local administration in the language of public good, Bagration insisted that the “revenues of Wallachia” be considered “state property (gosudarstvennoe imushchestvo).”26

Clearly, there was nothing specifically “Russian” about Bagration’s formulas. If anything they were in sharp contrast with Russian institutional realities of the early nineteenth century. Instead, these formulas determine a specific performative scenario followed by Russian officials in the principali-ties in order to legitimize their involvement in local affairs. Such a posture helped them cover the rather “pragmatic” goal of putting local resources at the army’s disposal, but it required a serious effort towards maximiza-tion of these resources and rationalization of their use before they could be meaningfully “exploited.” Thus, even if “public interest” was a rhetorical formula, the logic of the situation forced Russian officials to put some sub-stance into it. Their alleged attachment to common good was contrasted to “patrimonial ideas of government” ostensibly followed by the Phanariote princes and the Romanian boyars.27 They structured the Russian-Romanian imperial encounter in terms of different “degrees of enlightenment” of the two sides and defined the Russian “civilizing mission” as a mandate to bring the Romanians higher up on the “ladder of civilization.”28

This peculiarity of the Russian “mandate” provides an additional di-mension to the status of the principalities as a symbolic frontier. Moldavia and Wallachia represented a symbolic frontier of enlightenment not only in the geographical sense of being located between Europe and Asia, but also historically, insofar as they constituted a particular province of time located between a barbarous past and a civilized future. Indeed, foreign observers were fascinated not only by the “exotics of backwardness,” but also by the fact that the principalities illustrated a specific moment of hu-man evolution, when, in the words of Russian traveler A. Demidov, “there

25 Predlozhenie Bagrationa Divanu. January 28, 1810 // ANRM. Fond 1. Op. 1. File 1418. Ll. 23-23rev.26 Bagration v dunaiskikh kniazhestvakh. P. 87.27 Alexander Bitis. Russia and the Eastern Question. P. 443, with reference to Richard Pipes. Russia under the Old Regime. Pp. 22-24, for the concept of “patrimonial govern-ment.”28 On the classification of all peoples of the Russian Empire according to their “degree of enlightenment,” see Yuri Slezkine. Naturalists vs. Nations: Eighteenth Century Rus-sian Scholars Confront Ethnic Diversity // Daniel Brower and Edward Lazzerini (Eds.). Russia’s Orient. Imperial Borderlands and peoples 1700-1917. Bloomington, 1997. Pp. 27-57.

84


is still a possibility of capturing the last traces of this historical way of life and, at the same time, understanding the way in which this barbarity turned into civilization and how hope for the future developed out of this terrible past.”29 Ever since Catherine the Great’s correspondence with Voltaire at the time of the Russo-Turkish war of 1768-1774, the discourse of Russia’s “civilizing mission” sought to present the empire as the exclusive agency of this miraculous transition.30 Demidov’s “Puteshestvie” represents a typical illustration of this trend. Taking a retrospective look on Kiselev’s reforms from 1837, Demidov compared the Russian President-Plenipotentiary to a demiurge, who “not only transformed the principalities, but also created them anew.”31 This implicit comparison with Peter the Great, who was seen to have created Russia from scratch, served as an argument that “to Russia and only to her do the principalities owe their material and moral rebirth.”32

The construction of Moldavia and Wallachia as a space of Russia’s civilizing mission differed from other territories (e. g. the Caucasus or the lands south of the Danube) that were similarly appropriated within the symbolic geography of the Empire in the first half of the nineteenth cen-tury. Unlike the Caucasus that became a major topos of Russian literature, the principalities attracted little attention from Russian literary figures: the predominant genre of Russian descriptions of Moldavia and Wallachia are either statistical surveys or travelogues. Whereas the appropriation of the Caucasus occurred through literary romanticism, Russian descriptions of the principalities that started to appear in the late eighteenth century are still rooted in an Enlightenment paradigm. The perception of Moldavia and Wal-lachia also differs from the representation of the lands south of the Danube that by the middle of the nineteenth century come to be heavily invested with Pan-Slavic themes. Given the importance of Moldavia and Wallachia

29 Anatole Demidoff. Voyage dans la Russie meridionale et la Crimee par la Hongrie, la Valachie et la Moldavie execute en 1837. Paris, 1840. P. 2.30 Larry Wolff. Izobretaia Vostochnuiu Evropu: karta tsivilizatsii v soznanii epokhi prosveshchenia. Moscow, 2003. Pp. 317-328. While the treaty of Kücük Kaynarca of 1774 stipulated the right of the Russian Empire to intervene on behalf of the Christian subjects of the Muslim Sultan, the “official” religious rhetoric of the diplomatic trea-ties was paralleled by semi-official rhetoric of the “civilizing mission” characteristic of travelogues and statistical descriptions of Moldavia and Wallachia in Russia.31 Demidov. Puteshestvie. P. 152.32 O sostoianii uchebnoi chasti v kniazhestvakh Moldavii i Valakhii // Zhurnal Ministerstva Narodnogo Prosvescheniia. Part XXIX. Section IV. August 1841. P. 58. On the image of Peter the Great in the 19th century Russian literature see Nicholas V. Riasanovsky. The Image of Peter the Great in Russian History and Thought. New York, 1985.

85

Ab Imperio, 4/2008

as sites of Empire’s military glory during its “golden age,” Russian discourse on the principalities can be identified as a survival of the eighteenth-century symbolic geography of Eastern Europe amidst the increasingly “nationalized” representations of other peripheral areas.

the Background of reforms of 1828-1834

Reforms of police institutions in Moldavia and Wallachia in 1828-1834 should thus be seen within the broader context of the closure of “Europe’s steppe frontier” and the discourse of Russia’s “civilizing mission” in the region, although various internal factors, like the political struggle between princes and the boyar aristocracy as well as tensions within the boyar class were also important.33 Against the background of prolonged unclarity as to the goals of Russian policy in the principalities, with references made to Russia’s drive to Constantinople or desire to create a Pan-Slavic utopia, the emphasis put by Alexander Bitis in his recent book Russia and the Eastern Question on the more pragmatic and down-to-earth concerns of the Russian military is salutary.34 The simplicity of “pragmatic” explanation is, however, rather deceptive since it might lead to the confusion of cause and effect. Due to their peculiar status within the Ottoman Empire, the principalities undoubtedly interested Russian diplomats and the military “as more readily detachable from the Sultan’s control.”35 However, “semi-independent status, homogenous population, and defined territorial limits of each principality”36 signify not so much their pre-existing characteristics, as the ideal envisioned by Russian policy-makers. The goal of reforms pursued by Russian occupa-tion authorities in the principalities headed by the President-Plenipotentiary of the Moldavian and Wallachian Divans, General Pavel Kiselev,37 was 33 On this aspect, see Victor Taki. Russia on the Danube: Imperial Expansion and Political Reform in Moldavia and Wallachia, 1812-1834 / Ph.D. Dissertation, Central European University, 2007. Chapter IV.34 Alexander Bitis. Russia and the Eastern Question. Pp. 430-433, 459-460.35 Ibid. P. 426.36 Ibid.37 The office of President-Plenipotentiary of Moldavian and Wallachian Divans was cre-ated immediately after the beginning of the Russo-Turkish War and the occupation of the principalities by Russian troops. See Nicholas I’s rescript to Count F. F. Pahlen of February 10, 1828 in: A. P. Zablotskii-Desiatovskii. Graf P. D. Kiselev i ego vremia. Vol. 4. P. 55. As defined by the instruction, supplying the army was to be the President-Plenipotentiary’s main goal. Count F. F. Pahlen and General S. S. Zheltukhin were the first two incumbents, but were completely overshadowed by Kiselev who was appointed on September 14, 1829. Zablotskii’s book still remains the most important source on Kiselev.

86


precisely to make the principalities more (although not totally) independent from Istanbul (and more dependent on St. Petersburg).

Preparatory studies made by the Chief of Staff of the 2nd Army and P. D. Kiselev on the eve of the 1828-1829 Russo-Turkish War demonstrate desire to avoid the difficulties in delivering supplies that were experienced in 1806-1812 and determination to turn the principalities into a power base for future military operations.38 However, Kiselev’s activities as head of the Russian occupation authority in Moldavia and Walachia in 1829-1834 also reveal a concern with the permeability of imperial frontiers and general political instability of the frontier zone demonstrated by the Greek Etairia rebellion and Tudor Vladimirescu “revolution” of 1821.39 The consolidation of the territorial borders of the principalities was likewise seen as a means of weakening Ottoman control over them and was, therefore, an equally significant motivation behind the reforms.40 In fact, the circumstances of 1828-1829 made it more important. While the war renewed tensions with the local population over the problem of supplies, in contrast to 1806-1812 this did not prevent the Russian army from achieving a relatively quick victory. Instead, the Russian command confronted a problem unencountered during the previous war. The plague epidemics of 1828-1830 made the problem of border-control even more urgent than the problem of supplies. The challenge of dealing with epidemics was similarly integrated within the framework of Russia’s “civilizing mission” and explained by the “viciousness of the local administration” that could be remedied through reform in accordance with the principles of rational and orderly government. The universal character of anti-epidemic measures reduced (although did not eliminate completely) the conflict between the narrow interest of the Empire and its military and 38 Alexander Bitis. Russia and the Eastern Question. Pp. 430-433.39 For the policies of the Governor-General of Odessa and New Russia A. F. Langeron towards the Etairia movement, see George F. Jewsbury. The Greek Question: The View from Odessa, 1815-1822 // Cahiers du Monde Russe. 1999. Vol. 40. No. 4. Pp. 751-762; On the emergence of Etairia see G. L. Arsh. Eteristskoie dvizhenie v Rossii. Moscow, 1970; For the events of 1821 in the Romanian principalities, see Andrei Oţetea. Tudor Vladimirescu, şi revoluitia din anul 1821. Bucureşti, 1972; Dan Berindei. L’Année Révolutionaire 1821 dans les Pays Roumains. Bucarest, 1973.40 This is testified to by the Adrianople treaty of September 2, 1829 that concluded the victorious war with the Ottoman Empire and for the first time set the boundary between the latter and the principalities on the tahlweg of the Danube while allowing the reintegra-tion of Ottoman-controlled enclaves (reaya) on the left bank of the river. See: Otdel’nyi akt otnositel’no kniazhestv Moldavii i Valakhii, podpisannyi upolnomochennymi Rossii i Osmanskoi Imperii. September 2 (14) // Vneshniaia politika Rossii XIX-go i nachala XX-go veka. Moscow, 1994. P. 271.

87

Ab Imperio, 4/2008

the “common good” of the population. References to “public interest” were therefore less of an ideological screen, although, as will be demonstrated, the epidemics proved to be a highly manipulable and politicized issue that could serve the interests of the Empire as much as it would later serve the interests of the nation-state.

The sanitary policies of the Russian occupation authorities in 1828-1834 represented the most immediate instance of the application of contempo-rary European police practices. Facing major epidemic challenges, Russian authorities sought to protect Russian troops, the local population and the demographic security of the Russian Empire itself through the application of principles of medical police.41 Dealing with hygiene, procreation, nutri-tion, food sanitation, prevention of epidemics, as well as the organization of the medical profession, the medical police was part of the “intervention of power in the biological processes of life,” which Michael Foucault called “biopolitics of population.”42 According to Foucault, “biopolitics (nosopoli-tics) of population” regulating procreation, births and mortality, health and life expectancy emerged at the time of eighteenth-century demographic growth and represented both an attempt to make this growth sustainable as well as a means of dealing with the dangers it presented. 43 The former was achieved through the reformulation of the family as a unit of procreation as opposed to its earlier function as a kinship system or a mechanism for the transmission of property. The latter was effected through medical control of the increasingly crowded urban space by means of a program of hygiene and an institution of medical police based on close cooperation between physicians and city authorities.44

While in France this cooperation took place relatively independently from central government, corresponding Central European practices and institu-tions, systematized at the end of the eighteenth century by Johann Peter Frank and Franz Anton Mai, presupposed the central role of princely authority.

41 George Rosen. Cameralism and the Concept of Medical Police // Bulletin of the His-tory of Medicine. 1953. Vol. 27. Pp. 21-41; and Idem. The Fate of Concept of Medical Police 1780-1890 // From Medical Police to Social Medicine: Essays on the History of Health Care. New York, 1974.42 Foucault calls this sphere the “biopolitics of population. “ See his: Right of Death and Power over Life // Paul Rabinow (Ed.). Foucault Reader. Pantheon Books, 1984. Pp. 261-262; Andrea A. Rusnock. Biopolitics: Political arithmetic in the Enlightenment // William Clark, Jan Golinski and Simon Schaffer (Eds.). The Sciences in Enlightened Europe. Chicago, 1977. Pp. 49-69. 43 Foucault. Right of Death and Power over Life. Pp. 261-262.44 Idem. The Politics of Health in the Eighteenth Century. Pp. 171-176.

88


Given the prevalence of Germans among local medical personnel and Rus-sian military physicians, it is only natural that the anti-epidemic measures of Russian occupation authorities were informed by the principles of German medical police.45 Besides Leyden (Europe’s most important medical school), Russia’s physicians received their degrees from the universities of Halle (the center of cameralist sciences) and Gottingen (where they could pick up the principles of medical police elaborated by Johann Peter Frank, who also taught at Vilna in the early nineteenth century and was a one-time personal physician of Alexander I).46 Due to the absence of independent institutions of higher education and the primacy of the army, medical administration was even more centralized and state-controlled than in the German states. The seventeenth-century Apothecary Prikaz was replaced in the first half of the eighteenth by the Medical Chancery, which in turn gave way to the Medical Collegium in 1763 that monopolized medical policy. The reform of local administration and the creation of gubernii provided an institutional framework for the extension of the state medical service to the provinces. However, the shortage of personnel continued to plague the state medical service because of the extreme weakness of professional medical education for which the “importation” of German physicians failed to compensate.

plague experience in russia and the principalities during the eigh-teenth century

Attempts to combat plague and maintain public health and hygiene in the principalities were made long before the arrival of Russian occupation authorities in 1828. A special organization of caretakers (brelsa ciocliilor) in Moldavia existed already in the late seventeenth century. In 1735 Phanariote hospodar Grigorie Ghica I reorganized it to undertake the burial of those killed by plague and created a similar service in Bucharest after he was transferred to rule there in 1752. He also founded hospitals at the monas-teries of St. Pantelemon and St. Vissarion, which were specially destined for those afflicted with the plague, while Moldavian hospodar Grigore Cal-

45 More than 60 percent of Russia’s physicians in 1800 were of German origin (Baltic, Germans, Germans from Germany or russified Germans) and an even greater percentage of them were foreign-educated. See John T. Alexander. Bubonic Plague in Early Modern Russia: Public Health and Urban Disaster. Oxford, 2003. P. 38.46 Franz’s multivolume magnum opus: A Complete System of Medical Policy appeared between 1779 and 1827. See, Johann Peter Frank // Encyclopædia Britannica. Retrieved December 3, 2008, from Encyclopædia Britannica Online: http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/217186/Johann-Peter-Frank

89

Ab Imperio, 4/2008

limah founded a similar one (St. Spiridon) in Iaşi. At the news of the plague outbreak in Silistria in 1784, Wallachian hospodar Mihai Suţu ordered a quarantine and appointed a special official (epistat de ciumă) to command detachments of auxiliaries (sejmeni) and caretakers. In 1786 Vienna-trained Bucharest physician Dumitru Caracaş, on the order of the hospodar Nico-lae Mavrogheni and the Divan, elaborated special instructions to inform the authorities and local population about how to fight the plague. In 1813 hospodar Ion Caragea tried to save the principalities from advancing plague epidemics by establishing a quarantine near the Ottoman reaya Giurgiu and appointed a special official (epistat al lazaretelor) while a boyar commission produced a “Statute for Combating the Plague.”47

Unlike other European countries, Moldavia and Wallachia in the early nineteenth century lacked an organized medical administration that would certify the qualifications of physicians, keep track of their practice or oversee the apothecary shops. At the same time, a few qualified physicians who con-fronted plague outbreaks in the principalities were trained in either Vienna or Italy (Pavia), the two places where Johan Peter Frank taught extensively between 1785 and his death in 1821, where they had an ample opportunity to pick up the elements of Frank’s system of medical police. In addition, Austrian quarantine installations in Transylvania had offered a model to be imitated since the early eighteenth century. Already in 1728 Transylvanian authorities created hospitals functioning as quarantines at the Wallachian border. In 1754 on pretext of new epidemics in the principalities, the Austrian border was closed altogether and in 1760 a permanent quarantine guard was created alongside the borderguard proper. After the Austrian annexation of Bukovina in 1775, the quarantine service was extended there as well.48

What made the struggle against the plague in the principalities ineffective was not the shortage of information or practical models to follow, but the lack of determination and consistency on the part of the authorities. Mea-sures taken by the hospodars of the eighteenth and early nineteenth century to prevent the spread of epidemics remained partial and usually consisted of creating an improvised quarantine around specific places where cases of the plague were reported, such as the Ottoman fortresses along the Danube. The personnel that was supposed to run such stations was poorly trained and largely unpaid. To make matters worse, corrupt local authorities soon turned

47 Ion Nistor. Ravagiile epidemiilor de ciumă şi holerăşi istituirea cordonului carantinal la Dunăre. Bucureşti, 1940. Pp. 12-13.48 Pompei Gheorghe Samarian. Din epidemologia trecutului românesc. Bucureşti, 1932. Pp. 174-176.

90


epidemic-prevention measures into a sources of abuse and extortion. The caretakers (cioclii) plundered the houses of the plagued, placed the dead and the ill in the same cart, and left them in the open field outside the city. The population was terrorized by the officials charged with combating plague.49 The latter not only were interested in the prolongation of the epidemics in order to continue receiving their salaries, but also extorted money by threat-ening to proclaim houses contaminated and take inhabitants to the plague hospital, where death was almost assured. The abuses of authorities during plague epidemics forced the Austrian subjects to create their own caretaker service and hospital. Observing the crimes committed by officials as the plague was ravaging areas nearby, the Prussian consul Ludwig von Kreuchely ascribed it to the “moral and political plague” afflicting the principalities.50 Finally, the population frequently resisted anti-epidemic measures informed by notions of contemporary medical police and clung to religious rituals. Thus, the resistance of Bucharest inhabitants forced Ion Caragea to revoke the “Statute for Combating Plague” less than a month after it was put into practice in January 1814.51 The quarantine measures taken by Iaşi authorities during 1819 epidemics provoked an outright revolt forcing the hospodar to revoke them.52 The deplorable epidemic situation of the principalities in the early nineteenth century made the establishment of a regular quarantine service one of the items on the agenda of reform-minded boyars and quickly became a priority for President-Plenipotentiaries after 1828.

The Russian encounter with the plague in the northern Black sea region was the result of the Empire’s expansion to the south. While the plague was known in Muscovy, the Russo-Turkish wars of the eighteenth century increased Russia’s vulnerability to outbreaks of plague epidemics as troops

49 Felix Iacob. Istoria igienii în România în secolul al XIX lea şi starea ei la începutul secolului al XX lea. [Analele Academiei Române. Memoriile Secţiunii Ştiinţifice. Seria 2]. Vol. 23, 24. Part. 1-2. Pp. 292-293.50 Pompei Gheorghe Samarian. Din epidemologia trecutului românesc. Pp. 394.51 Much of the population’s reaction to anti-plague measures should therefore be explained not by its “obscurantism,” as by the (perceived) arbitrariness of measures that the people viewed as the cause of affliction rather than a remedy from it. It does not really matter whether the arbitrariness in question resulted from self-interest or lack of expertise – in both cases the response of the population in sabotaging the anti-epidemic measures was rational enough even if “objectively” it led to an even greater number of victims. See, Rajnavayan Chandavarkar. Plague Panic and Epidemic Politics in India, 1894-1914 // Terence Ranger and Paul Slack (Eds.). Epidemics and Ideas: Essays on the Historical Perception of Pestilence. Cambridge, 1992. Pp. 203-240.52 Ion Nistor. Ravagiile epidemiilor de ciumă şi holeră. P. 19.

91

Ab Imperio, 4/2008

marched south and supply lines followed. The weight of the epidemics was particularly heavy on Russian troops during the war of 1736-1739. However, due to the energetic measures of Russian commander Munnich, emissaries of the central government in larger towns were spared. After the outbreak of the plague in 1738-1739, Munnich promptly established a cordon along the Dnieper and when this failed to contain the spread of the epidemic ad-ditional cordons were established between Russia and Ukraine as well as between southern and central Russia, with special precautions taken around Moscow and St. Petersburg.53 Russian diplomatic representatives in Con-stantinople, Crimea and Persia constantly informed the government about more frequent plague epidemics in the Balkans, Southern Poland, Crimea, and the Caucasus. Gradually ad hoc cordons gave way to a network of permanent inspection and quarantine stations supplemented by occasional pesthouses or lazarets. Towards the middle of the century a special border physician in charge of quarantines was appointed and special bills of health were required to pass the border. However, shortage of personnel and the conditions of an open steppe frontier populated by semi-autonomous communities (Cossacks, Serbian colonists) made it easy for merchants to circumvent a few permanent quarantine stations. The establishment of the New Serbia colony in Ukraine in 1754 was accompanied by a network of quarantines with field surgeons, lazarets and storage barns, but it remained on paper for decades.54 Although the connection between war in the south and disease did not escape contemporaries, the absence of major outbreaks of the disease during the three decades that separate Munnich’s campaigns in the south from the first Russo-Turkish war of Catherine’s reign might also explain a lack of determination take measures against it.

The destruction caused by the 1768-1774 Russo-Turkish war precipitated a plague, which eventually found its way to Moscow where it took a stag-gering toll and provoked a riot, shaking the political stability of the empire.55 The experience of the 1770-1771 epidemics proved to be paradigmatic since the bulk of its 120,000 victims were from Moscow or the Moscow province, while St. Petersburg and most of the country were spared. Lacking knowledge of the mechanism of transmission of the disease, physicians were divided into those who attributed the disease to a contagion and those who saw it as the result of bad constitution of the air. Yet, all physicians agreed about

53 John T. Alexander. Bubonic Plague in Early Modern Russia: Public Health and Urban Disaster. Oxford, 2003. P. 26.54 Ibid. P. 33.55 Ibid.

92


the Muscovite population’s lack of “enlightenment,” pointing to such “ir-rational” practices as overheating of houses and general filthiness or else to the looting of the possessions of the dead and the kissing of miracle-working icons during the outbreak (the riot broke out as a result of the government seeking to prevent the adoration of icons). Besides a bloody revolt against “enlightened” anti-epidemic measures, the shocking experience of the 1771 Moscow plague riot resulted from the temporary collapse of local authori-ties, with the Governor-General of Moscow Saltykov fleeing the plague stricken city. The epidemic receded as a result of winter advancing and the energetic measures of Catherine’s favorite G. A. Orlov, who established the Plague Commission to oversee strict quarantines, the burning of the deceased and their possessions, and separation of the afflicted in the “pest houses.” Above all, the epidemics strengthened the symbolic tension between “regular” stone-built St. Petersburg and “Asiatic” and wooden Moscow that had structured the symbolic geography of the Russian Empire since the early eighteenth century. It also explains the readiness with which western-ized Russians interpreted the plague in the principalities in 1828-1830 as a consequence of their “Muscovite” traditionalism.

The treaty of Kucuk Kaynaraca of 1774 opened the way for the realiza-tion of the large-scale colonization project in New Russia that the Russian government had launched at mid-century.56 The establishment of seaports and development of trade with the Mediterranean was one of the major priorities for Catherine the Great and G. A. Potemkin. Efforts in this direc-tion bore fruit after the founding of Cherson and, especially, Odessa which provided a major outlet for the Russian grain trade already in the second decade of the nineteenth century.57 However, the establishment of maritime links increased the vulnerability of the empire to the outbreaks of the disease such as the major plague epidemic in Odessa in 1812-1813. Fortunately, the new commercial connection also promised a remedy since it put the new Russian outlets in contact with Mediterranean ports, some of which, espe-cially Marseille had the most advanced quarantine installations in Europe.58 Marseille’s system was adopted in Odessa and later was imitated, however imperfectly, in the principalities.

56 Roger Bartlett. Human Capital: The Settlement of Foreigners in Russia, 1754-1804. Cambridge and New York, 1979. Pp. 109-117, 124-142.57 Patricia Herlihy. Odessa. A History. Cambridge, MA, 1986.58 Charles King. Black Sea: A History. Oxford, 2004. Pp. 169-170.

93

Ab Imperio, 4/2008

the epidemics of 1828-1831 in moldavia and Wallachia

The first practical involvement of the Russian occupation authorities in public hygiene regulation in the principalities took place during the 1806-1812 Russo-Turkish war. Leaving virtually no institutional legacy, this at-tempt demonstrated above all the challenges that imperial officials faced in their attempt to impose rational organization upon the local society. Senator S. S. Kushnikov, appointed to preside at Moldavian and Wallachian Divans in 1808, found the atmosphere of Iaşi “odorous to the highest degree,” at-tributing it to unwholesome customs of the local population. The stuffy air of the Moldavian capital was the result of burials near churches within city limits. Coupled with the insufficient depth of the graves as well as the custom of exhumation of corpses for the performance of repeated funeral services, this was bound to cause “dangerous contagious diseases.” In order to correct the situation, Kushnikov got in touch with church authorities and suggested creating cemeteries beyond city limits. Likewise, he prohibited the custom of burying people who died suddenly on the day of their death and prescribed ispravniks or other local officials to ascertain cases of sudden death and investigate its causes.59 He hardly made any headway before the Moldavian and Wallachian church came to be headed by Metropolitan Gavriil in whom Kushnikov found a willing and capable collaborator.60 Gavriil suggested creating four walled cemeteries near each capital city, assigning each parish to one of them and prohibiting priests from performing burial services in the cities. However, he soon complained that despite Kushnikov’s order to the Divan, the local police (agia) preferred to delay this unpopular measure.61 V. I. Krasno-Miloshevich, who replaced Kushnikov in March 1810, still found Bucharest and Iaşi lacking conventional cemeteries. The resistance of the local population was so tenacious that Krasno-Miloshevich was forced to address the whole boyar estate with a request to admonish the population.62 He considered this custom a superstition in everything but name and argued that change in places of burial “cannot infringe upon the maxims of Christian faith, since both Russians and other enlightened Chris-tian nations have long abandoned the custom of burial in cities.” However, the magnitude of discontent was so great that he postponed the prohibition

59 The representation of Kushnikov to the Moldavian and Wallachian Divans. March 9, 1809 // ANRM. Fond 1. D. 45. Ll. 4-6rev.60 Metropolitan Gavriil to Kushnikov. March 7, 1809 // Ibid. L.3.61 Metropolitan Gavriil to Krasno-Miloshevich. June 13, 1810 // Ibid. Ll. 14-14rev.62 Representation of Krasno-Miloshevich to the Moldavian Divan // Ibid. Ll. 27-27rev.

94


until spring 1811, by which time a church was to be built at each cemetery for the performance of funeral services.63 Meanwhile, the police, the Divan, and all boyars of the principality were called upon to persuade inhabitants about the harmfulness of this custom.

At the same time, the Russian role in prevention of epidemics remained ambiguous. The devastations and famines caused by Russo-Turkish wars constituted the conditions that made epidemics likely. Thus, the evacuation of the Russian troops from the principalities in 1812 was followed by the most devastating plague that had ever before afflicted the principalities, taking ca. 40,000 lives. The disease then lingered in the principalities ac-quiring mass scale in the course of the next Russo-Turkish war. Epidemics recurred in 1819 and 1824-1825 taking victims in the Ottoman fortress of Brăila and nearby Bessarabia. The vulnerability of the Russian borders to the epidemic challenge is testified to by the preservation of the quarantine along the Dniester for eighteen years after the annexation of Bessarabia and the establishment of a new quarantine along the Pruth. In 1826 cases of deadly contagious disease were reported in Bucharest and its environs. Just as in the case of the 1770-1771 epidemic, physicians were divided on the question of the origin of the disease. The “contagionists” believed that the disease in question was the plague (Pestis Orentalis Bubonica) brought by the Ottomans from Egypt and advocated strict observance of quarantine measures. Opposed to them were “miasmatists” who believed that the disease was endemic to the territory and represented a variation of Typhus Australis, produced by “epidemic constitution of the air.”64

With the beginning of the new war in 1828, Russian military physicians joined the debate, which quickly became more than a matter of professional medical concern. Already in the eighteenth century Russian commanders preferred not to speak about the plague as long as the situation was not pressing for fear that the news of the epidemics would produce panic among soldiers and local population.65 In 1828, Russian command faced the same dilemma: admit the existence of the plague and adopt wholesale plague 63 Report of Iaşi commandant to Krasno-Miloshevich. April 16, 1811 // ANRM. Fond 1. Op. 1. D. 45. Ll. 36-36rev.64 Karl Zeidlitz. O chume svirepstvovavshei vo vtoroi russkoi armii vo vremia poslednei voiny v 1828-1829-m gg. St. Petersburg, 1844. P. 19; S. Dobronravov. Mediko-topogra-ficheskoie opisanie kniazhestv Valakhii Moldavii v 1831-m godu. Moscow, 1835. P. 70. On the nineteenth century “pre-Pasteurian” debates between “contagionists” and “mias-matists”, see Charles-Edward Amory Winslow. The Conquest of Epidemic Diseases. A Chapter in the History of Ideas. New York and London, 1967 [1943]. Pp. 236-290.65 Samarian. Din epidemologia trecutului nostru. P. 137.

95

Ab Imperio, 4/2008

prevention measures that might demoralize the soldiers and would definitely hamper military operations; or deny the existence of any epidemics in hope of sustaining the morale and high mobility of the troops, but, at the same time, expose the soldiers to the ravages of the disease. Different prevention measures advocated in 1828-1829 by “contaigionists” and “miasmatists” had implications for the ultimate outcome of the war. Thus, in the course of 1828, the campaigns of Russian troops were seriously constrained by the necessity of observing quarantine regulations imposed by the “Bu-charest Plague Commission” created on the order of Field Marshal P. Kh. Witgenstein. This, as well as a relatively small number of victims (1,608), made new Russian Commander-in-Chief I. I. Diebitch heed the advice of “miasmatists,” who argued that quarantines only stimulated the develop-ment of what essentially was a local fever by keeping soldiers for days in the unhealthy marshlands along the Danube. As a result, at the beginning of the new campaign, a “miasmatist” physician, Chistian Witt, replaced the advocate of the quarantines Khanaev as the Chief Medic of the General Staff. Concomitantly, the “Bucharest Plague Commission” was replaced by the “Main Commission for Elimination of Pestilence” in January 1829.66 The eventual victory of the Russian army due to greater mobility of its troops was purchased at a great price.67 The abolition of the quarantines increased the total number of victims of the disease to 24,560 in 1829, out of which Russian military amounted to one-third.68

Even after experience proved him wrong, Witt remained unconvinced and in defense of his position expressed a number of assumptions which stood behind the medical police measures adopted by Russian authorities. Eager to free himself from implicit accusations of mismanagement in the course of the epidemics, Witt blamed an unhealthy local climate, whose pernicious influence was aggravated by the social habits of the local popu-lation. According to him, “Wallachian pestilence” (iazva) that took many victims among both the military and civilians was produced by the general

66 Zeidlitz. O chume. P. 79.67 The failure of the authorities to admit epidemics of contagious disease because it intervened with its policy interests should not surprise. As the history of cholera epidem-ics in nineteenth-century Europe demonstrates, civil authorities at times were reticent to recognize the incidence of the disease and impose quarantines in cases where trade would be seriously disrupted. See Richard J. Evans. Epidemics and Revolutions: Cholera in Nineteenth-Century Europe // Past and Present. 1988. No. 120. Pp. 140-141. 68 Otchet general-ad’iutanta Kiseleva po upravleniu Moldavieiu i Valakhieiu s 15-go noiabria 1829 po 1 ianvaria 1830 // Zablotskii-Desiatovskii. Graf Kiselev i ego vremia Vol. 4. P. 119.

96


epidemic constitution of the air, resulting from evaporations of numerous marshes, uncultivated fields and graves. The real cause of the disease was the local population itself, which was “steeped in ignorance and wallowed in vice”:

Humiliating laziness deprives them of the basic advantages of life. [Moldavians and Wallachians] want neither to eat good bread nor drink sane water nor breathe fresh air nor have comfortable dwellings. In Moldavia and Wallachia hardly one-sixth of the best land is cultivated. Above that, most of the land has grown wild, covered by wild grass and poisonous plants; the rivers are covered by reed, the marshes by bul-rush, the ponds by silt. The cities and villages are heaped with manure and decaying bodies of various animals. Living in a large cemetery, people are drowning in dirt, dung and marshes… Hence their bodies are so weak and so predisposed to malevolent disease which spreads easily amongst them.69

Witt’s argument was anything but new. Western observers, who have internalized Montesquieu’s thesis about the embeddedness of way of life, customs, public mores and political system of a people in the natural con-ditions of the country, argued about the two-way relationship between the climate of Moldavia and Wallachia and the physical and moral constitution of its population. Thus, J. L. Carra, the author of a well-known eighteenth-century history of Moldavia and Wallachia entitled History of Moldavia and Wallachia with an Examination of the Present State of Both Principalities, found local air lacking the “elastic resiliency” of Western climates and spoke in this connection about the “usual dullness and melancholy” of the peoples populating the region. The laziness and ignorance of the population produced by such a climate further aggravated its effects: the vast areas of uncultivated land covered by rotting foliage, along with unhealthy marshes, were seen as “reasons for the vice, which reigns in the atmosphere of these climates.”70 The unhealthy atmosphere of the Moldavian and Wallachian capitals was seen as the outcome of Oriental despotism, that the Prussian consul in Bucharest, Baron von Kreuchely, called “political and moral plague”. At the beginning of the nineteenth century, British consul in Odessa Thomas

69 Christian Witt. O svoistvakh klimata Wallachii i Moldavii, i o tak nazyvaemoi Valashs-koi iazve. St. Petersburg, 1842. P. 313.70 J. L. Carra. Istoriia Moldavii i Valakhii s rassuzhdeniem o nastoiaschem sostoianii obeikh kniazhestv. St. Petersburg, 1791. Pp. 141-142. The original edition is J. L. Carra. Histoire de la Moldavie et la Valachie avec une dissertation sur l’état present de ces provinces. Jassy, 1777.

97

Ab Imperio, 4/2008

Thornton noticed the prodigal waste of precious timber for the pavement of the streets in Iaşi and Bucharest, attributing the unwillingness of Phanariote hospodars to invest in cobblestone pavement to “shortsightedness of despo-tism, which impoverishes posterity to diminish the expense of the present day and proportions its labor to the short term of its own existence.”71 The regrettable effects of despotism were not limited to the future: the vapor of filth and stagnant waters that collected under such surfacing rendered the air of the capitals “polluted and unwholesome, constantly afflicting the inhabitants with intermittent, bilious and putrid fevers.”72

According to Witt, the failure of Kushnikov and Krasno-Miloshevich to establish medical police in the principalities twenty years prior demon-strated how difficult it was to correct the habits of the people, which “got accustomed to laziness and disorder.” In his account, the medical problem was eventually transformed into a moral one. Reproducing an essentially medieval understanding of disease as the manifestation of sinfulness, Witt completed the description of immorality of local inhabitants by referring to their drunkenness and sexual promiscuity, which made them sickly and prone to various illnesses. Successful elimination of disease, both physical and moral, could be achieved only through enlightenment and re-education of the people. According to Witt, Russians were best suited for the role of enlightened physicians. Adopting figurative language, he argued that “no other people seem to need so much our Russian well-leavened and well-baked rye bread, good kvass, fresh pickled cabbage and other greens.”73 At the same time, like other Russian officials, Witt was first of all concerned with the well-being of Russian provinces. Moldavia and Wallachia served as a negative example of what Bessarabia, Crimea and New Russia had to avoid through colonization and diligent cultivation of land. Admitting the necessity of quarantines for the security of southern provinces of Russia, Witt at the same time argued they should be coupled with elimination of the climatic conditions which make disease endemic to those regions. Writing a decade after Russian troops withdrew from the principalities, he concluded optimistically that the disease is gradually weakened by “yearly progress in enlightenment and correction of mores, the establishment of greater order and benefits for the life of the people, fertilization or cultivation of land, etc.”74

71 Thomas Thornton. The Present State of Turkey together with the Present State of Moldavia and Wallachia. London, 1807. P. 426.72 Ibid.73 Witt. O svoistvakh klimata. P. 314.74 Ibid. P. 320.

98


Yet, whatever Witt could say in his defense about the moral corrup-tion of the population as the cause of the disease, the Russian President-Plenipotentiary had to adopt a more programmatic approach in order to solve the problem. In order to combat the pestilence, Kiselev divided the principalities into special districts, in which the ispravniks and the village heads were charged with reporting all cases of contagion. Special medical administrations created in Bucharest and Iaşi examined the credentials of local physicians in order to assure reliable medical service. In doing this, they had to strike a delicate balance between scarcity of personnel and the necessity to maintain minimal standards of professionalism. A physician was appointed to each district of the capitals with the duty to provide medical service to everyone free of charge twice a week on premises specially lent for that purpose. Alongside the inoculation of the population, the functions of the physicians included the inspection of market places (once a week), hospitals (once a month) and pharmacies (twice a year). On the basis of the data the provided the medial councils of the capitals were supposed to file biweekly reports to the government. The Statute allocated 150,000 lei for the maintenance of three out of six hospitals that existed at that time (founded by hospodars or prominent boyar families). The foundation of new pharmacies required government permission and the owners had to follow the price lists that were in effect in Vienna.75 On Kiselev’s order, the military physicians conducted investigations of the kinds of contagious disease found in the principalities and instructed the population about basic prevention measures.76

These measures were paralleled by the construction of a quarantine line along the Danube. Made possible by the reincorporation of former Ot-toman fortresses on the left bank of the Danube, the establishment of the quarantine was defined as one of the priorities in the ministerial instructions that informed the policies of Russian authorities.77 The main checkpoints were created in the four major entrepots of commerce with the Ottoman Empire: Galaţi, Brăila, Giurgiu and Kalafat. Secondary quarantine stations were created in towns which conducted local trade with adjacent Ottoman provinces on the right bank of the Danube (Calaraş, Zimniţa, Turnovo, Iz-

75 Filitti. Principatele Române in 1828-1834. Ocupaţia Rusească şi Regulamentele Or-ţia Rusească şi Regulamentele Or-ia Rusească şi Regulamentele Or-ganice. Bucureşti, 1934. Pp. 207-208.76 Ibid. P. 121.77 Instructions adressé par le Vice Chancelier (Nesselrode) au Conceiller d’Etat actuel Minciaky // Analele Parlamentare ale României 1. 1890. Pp. 37-38, further cited as Mi-nisterial instructions. These conditions were introduced into the Adrianople treaty.

99

Ab Imperio, 4/2008

vornik, Cereneţ). In order to prevent clandestine barter trade with the right bank, three additional entrepots were established in Piopter, Olteniţa and Bichet. They were subordinated to the inspector residing at Bucharest and vice-inspector at Galaţi. With 1,500 infantry and cavalry militia distributed between 15 piquets aided by water patrols there was a hope of substantially reducing, if not interrupting altogether, unwarranted communication between the two banks of the river. The threat of harsh penalties (hard labor in the mines for those entering the country in avoidance of quarantines and capital punishment for guards who took bribes) had to make up for the deficiencies in supervision.78 Operating from March 1830, the new quarantine line was decisive in the disappearance of the epidemics and the number of victims fell to 133 in that year.79 However, the efficiency of the institution raised doubts both among Russians and foreigners. Thus, Kiselev remained skeptical about the ability of the local quarantine service to inspire respect among the Turks after the evacuation of Russian troops, whereas the Austrians preferred to preserve their quarantine installations on the border with Wallachia long after the Danubian quarantine was put in operation. According to Helmut von Moltke’s testimony from 1835 “the character of quarantine installations was such that any wise traveler would avoid them.”80

Along with the reordering of hospitals and the vaccination of the popu-lation, the establishment of the quarantines was part of the “disciplinary legislation”, which, according to Kiselev, had to become an essential part of the Organic Statutes in order to stop the progress of the plague and other epidemics that decimated the population of the country.81 However, the importance of the quarantine service went beyond purely sanitary consid-erations. According to ministerial instructions that provided the basis of the Organic Statutes, the quarantine would serve to facilitate Russian communi-cations with the principalities by diminishing the quarantine periods at the Pruth line and, at the same time, deprive the Ottomans of the possibility to penetrate the Wallachian and Moldavian territories at will. “Such practices are so contrary to their habits and religious prejudices that one only has to introduce in the southern parts of the principalities a strict observation of the sanitary regulations in order to quell their desire to penetrate here.”82 78 Filitti. Occupaţia Ruseasca si Regulamentele Organice. Pp. 210-212.79 Otchet general-ad’iutanta Kiseleva. P. 122.80 Helmut Von Moltke, Lettres du Mareshal de Moltke sur L’Orient. Traduit par Alfred Marchand. Paris: Sandoz et Fischbacher, 1877.81 Observations sur le project d’un Conceil Administratif pour la Moldavie // AVPRI. F. 331. Op. 716/1. No. 3. F. 125rev.82 Ministerial Instructions. P. 38.

100


Thus, the quarantine line became a means to detach the principalities from the rest of the Ottoman Empire and provide Russia with a well-controlled buffer zone.83 An attempt to make political use of the quarantine was not a Russian invention: long before them, during the Seven Years War of 1757-1763, the Austrians used their Transylvanian quarantines in order to hamper their adversaries, the Prussians, from purchasing wool and cattle in the principalities to supply their army.84

Ironically, as civilization and enlightenment were celebrating the victory over the plague and oriental mores by eliminating the disease within the Danubian quarantine, the principalities fell prey to cholera morbius. Un-like the plague, which periodically appeared in Egypt and Constantinople, cholera morbius was first registered in India in 1817, from where it traveled through Central Asian trade routes hitting Russia in 1830 and descending upon Europe the following year.85 Thus, very soon after he managed to beat the plague back beyond the Danube, Kiselev found it necessary to strengthen the Pruth quarantines, this time barring the principalities from Russian provinces and not vice versa. This was combined with a planned evacuation of the population from the towns.86 Although the disease affected some 33,000 people and carried away the lives of 2,218 of them, Kiselev was proud to report that only one out of 45 people fell ill in the principali-ties and only one out of every 142 died, which in his opinion was not a bad result, compared to neighboring Hungary’s one in 17 ill and one in 42 dead.87 However, Kiselev’s private correspondence compromises the picture of a successful struggle against cholera, which the President-Plenipotentiary drew in the final report on his activities as the head of Russian temporary admin-istration submitted to Nicholas I in 1834. At the high point of the cholera epidemics, the newly created medical service failed. Only one physician out of five continued to render services to the population. Civilians were the worst hit. As disease was carrying away 150-180 people per day in Iaşi alone, it inspired all “from the most opulent boyar to the neediest artisan with such a terror that neither persuasion, nor force could make them perform

83 The new quarantine line along the Danube coupled with the existing line along the Pruth and made the earlier quarantine service on the Dniester unnecessary. Its abolition in the 1830s was yet another factor contributing to the economic and administrative assimilation of Bessarabia. 84 Samarian. Din epidemologia trecutului românesc. P. 9785 Roderick E. McGrew. Russia and the cholera, 1823-1832. Madison, 1965.86 Ibid. P. 54.87 Otchet general-ad’iutanta Kiseleva. P. 123.

101

Ab Imperio, 4/2008

their duties.”88 The courts and administrative bodies stopped functioning, officials fled and Kiselev had to prorogue the Moldavian General Assembly of Revision of the Statutes.89 “All the natural relationships dissolve as honor no longer exists and egoism appears here in all its horror” reported Kiselev to his friend, Governor-General of New Russia M. S. Vorontsov.90 Only after the cholera epidemics abated in early August 1830 was it possible for official bodies to resume operation.

It is quite remarkable that neither plague nor cholera outbreaks of 1829-1830 together with the accompanying anti-epidemic measures provoked active resistance of the local population.91 The situation in Moldavia and Wallachia contrasted with neighboring Hungary, where the cholera epi-demic caused peasants to riot and sack noble estates out of the conviction that the disease had been deliberately inflicted on them by their landlords.92 There was no local equivalent of the famous St. Petersburg cholera riot in the context of which Nicholas I famously intervened personally in order to pacify the crowd, adding an important element to his myth.93 Instead, the

88 Kiselev to Nesselrode, Iaşi. 10 June, 1831 // Zabolotskii-Desiatovskii. Vol. 4. P. 60.89 Minciaky to Nesselrode, Iaşi, June 3, 1831 // RGIA. F. 958. Op. 1. D. 625. Ll. 106-107.90 Kiselev to Vorontsov, Bucharest, July 18, 1831 // Arkhiv Vorontsovykh. Vol. 38. P. 224.91 There was definitely some correlation between cholera epidemics and political unrest in nineteenth-century Europe. Whereas violence provoked by plagues during the Middle Ages and the early modern period targeted outsiders (e. g. the Jews), cholera riots from 1830 onwards were largely oriented against the authorities. This was caused by the intrusiveness with which the European governments deployed essentially anti-plague measures (quarantines, isolation, fulmigation), whose effectiveness against cholera was limited. The lack of knowledge of mechanisms of transmission of either the plague or cholera until the end of the nineteenth century together with the failure of quarantines to contain the spread of cholera explain the credibility of the miasmatic theories of these diseases preached by Witt and quite a number of contemporary physicians. Meanwhile, a successful prevention of cholera required first of all the amelioration of the water sup-ply and sewage systems. See, Richard J. Evans. Epidemics and Revolutions. The link between cholera and riots was particularly pronounced in Russia, where it persisted until the end of the nineteenth century. See, Nancy M. Friedman. The Russian Cholera Epidemics of 1892-1893 and Medical Professionalization // Journal of Social History. 1977. Vol. 10. No. 4. Pp. 538-559; Jeff Sahadeo. Epidemics and Empire: Ethnicity, Class and “Civilization” in 1892 Tashkent cholera Riot // Slavic Review. 2005. Vol. 64. No. 1. Pp. 117-139. 92 Richard J. Evans. Epidemics and Revolutions. P. 137.93 On the St. Petersburg cholera riot of 1831 and Nicholas I’s personal intervention, see, McGrew. Russia and the Cholera. Pp. 112-113; Richard S. Wortman. Scenarios of

102


ravages of the epidemics in the Moldavian capital present the picture of temporal disintegration of public authority, just as it testifies to the failure of measures that earlier helped to check the progress of plague. The most obvious explanation for the absence of plague and cholera riots was the presence of Russian troops in the principalities, whose readiness to quell the rebellion had just been demonstrated in case of the Moldavian peasants’ riot against military conscription (see below). Nevertheless, one wonders what the impact of cholera on the whole process of reform and the standing of Russian occupation authorities would have been had not Bucharest been spared the devastating effects that the epidemic had in Iaşi.94

the reform of police Institutions

Effective or not the quarantines remained suspended in the absence of local personnel trained to operate them after the Russian troops evacuated the principalities. In order to man the quarantine service, ministerial instruc-tions presupposed the creation of a national militia (gendarmerie), which was also charged with maintenance of good order in towns and countryside, collection of taxes and the execution of justice. The policies of the Russian authorities in this domain not only reflected the general development of modern police institutions in Europe, but also built upon local initiative. The necessity to reform different police agencies (agia and spatharia or hatmania in Moldavia) was indicated already in 1821 in a memoir signed by the Wallachian boyar émigrés in Braşov. Adopting a characteristic attitude in the aftermath of the Greek rebellion, the authors tended to attribute the abuses of police authorities to the pernicious influence of the Phanariots, whose Greek relatives monopolized the office of Aga (head of Bucharest city police) and used it to perpetuate injustices and extortions against the population. Likewise, the countryside police headed by Spathar was cor-rupted by the exclusive employment of foreigners acquiring their positions for money and using every opportunity to compensate themselves with a vengeance. The boyars proposed to replace agia and spatharia with, respec-tively, a Bucharest police force headed by an autochthonous boyar and land militia to perform border and garrison service.95

In a more systematic way, the idea of reform of police agencies was articulated by Barbu Ştirbei, who in the given period performed the func-

Power. Myth and Ceremony in Russian Monarchy from Peter the Great to the Abdication of Nicholas II. Abridged One-volume edition. Princeton, 2006. Pp. 144-145.94 McGrew. Russia and the Cholera. P. 99.95 Vîrtosu. 1821. Date si Fapte noi. P. 139.

103

Ab Imperio, 4/2008

tions of Vornik de Poliţie. Characterized by Russian Consul Minciaky as one of the most promising young boyars, Ştirbei closely collaborated with Russian authorities throughout the occupation period and was involved in the reform of police institutions. Back in 1827, he submitted a memoir on the Wallachian administrative system to the attention of the committee of reform established in accordance with the Convention of Akkerman of October 7, 1826. In it, he attributed the failure of the existing main police institution (spatharia) to provide for the “security of persons” to underpayment of its employees, the sale of offices and the use of auxiliaries recruited from among peasants (catanes) instead of professional rank-and-file policemen. The un-derpaid police captains and colonels would demand money from peasants designated to perform police services instead of requiring actual service. The resulting inability of the spatharia to fight with brigandage effectively was exacerbated by instances of cooperation between individual police officials and the robbers. In order to change the situation, Stirbei proposed to aug-ment the salaries of police officials and create a smaller permanent corps of gendarmes, relegating police auxiliaries (catanes) to the category of taxpayers and thereby increasing the number of tax-payers and state revenue.96

Ştirbei’s suggestions were incorporated in the instructions of Russian Ministry of Foreign Affairs written by D. V. Dashkov which served as the basis for the elaboration of the Organic Statutes. The latter envisioned the formation of a new militia as a major law enforcing unit consisting of professional soldiers and officers. Increased expenditure on salaries was to be compensated by increase in revenues made possible by elimination of tax exemptions and abuses associated with the sale of offices.97 Like the quarantine service, the militia served the double goal of securing the gen-eral well-being of Moldavia and Wallachia, and providing an additional tie between the principalities and the protecting power. In a situation when a new war with the Ottomans could never be excluded, Kiselev argued for the necessity to create for the new militia “a solid and, so to say, Russian, character.” In order to achieve this goal, he suggested admitting a hundred young Romanians to the Russian military schools, adding to that number fifty new candidates every year. In Kiselev’s opinion, Russian military

96 Aperçu sur le mode d’administration de la Valachie addresé au Colnsulat General de la Russie en décembre 1827 // Vlad Georgescu. Projets de réforme. Pp. 151-152. In 1832 Ştirbei attached his 1827 memoir to his report on the state of Wallachia. See: Raportul lui Barbu Ştirbei către Kiseleff asupra stării Valachiei în anul 1832 // Convorbiri Literare. Anii XXII si XXIII, 1888, 1889. 97 Ministerial Instructions. Pp. 39-40.

104


schools would function as a breeding ground for good Romanian officers, secure “the formation of troops on the principles of Russian discipline” and contribute to the general consolidation of new institutions. Stressing the importance of the militia as an institution connecting the principalities to Russia, Kiselev at the same time remained skeptical about its ability to inspire respect amongst Turks from the right bank of the Danube. According to him, in order not to become illusive, for the time being the quarantine service had to be performed by Russian troops.98

While the appropriate chapter of the Organic Statutes was adopted by the Committee of Reform and the Assembly of Revision without much con-frontation, the provisional authorities faced some difficulties in the practical implementation of legislation on the militia. Following the emperor’s order of May 1830, Kiselev appointed Major General Starov and Colonel Markov to organize Wallachian and Moldavian troops.99 The new units amounted to 4,500 in Wallachia and 1,500 in Moldavia and were headed respectively by Spathar and Hatman. Soon it became clear that a small and unbalanced Moldavian budget was incapable of supporting even one-third of the Wal-lachian force, which prompted further reduction in the size of the Moldavian militia to 1,000. Since military service in the principalities was traditionally performed by Serbian, Bulgarian and Albanian mercenaries (arnauţi), the imposition of military duty on the population provoked discontent leading to peasant mutinies in the Moldavian districts of Roman and Neamţ. Attempts to pacify peasants by means of a delegation from the Divan failed and the movement increasingly acquired the character of a social revolt. Appre-hending the negative impact that the movement could have on Bessarabian peasants, Kiselev dispatched two Cossack regiments headed by General Begidov to disperse some eight to nine thousand peasants who assembled in the vicinity of Roman.100

Given the “shyness” and “meekness” of the Romanian peasants and their lack of military valor routinely as noted by Russian observers, the peasant

98 Kiselev to Nesselrode. April 14. Bucharest // AVPRI. F. 331. Op. 716/1. D. 7. Ll. 14-15rev.99 On the organization of the Wallachian and Moldavian militias and the complications that the Russians faced with it, see Alexander Bitis. Russia and the Eastern Question. Pp. 449-456. See also Anghel Popa. Renaşterea armatei pămîntene în Moldavia, 1829-1859. Cămpulung-Moldavenesc, 1995; Ion Nistor. Orgnizarea armatei naţionale a Moldovei // Analele Academiei Române. Memoriile Sectiunii Istorice. Seria 3. Vol. 25. Mem. 22. Pp. 885-931; Apostol Stan. Renaşterea armatei naţionale. Craiova, 1979.100 Kiselev to the War Minister Chernyshev. May 6, 1831 // RGVIA. F. 438. Op. 1. D. 85. Ll. 1-2.

105

Ab Imperio, 4/2008

resistance against military conscription requires some explanation. The most obvious reason for it is the introduction of a military service require-ment that was one of the few burdens from which Romanian peasants were spared in the previous centuries. Another explanation is in the abolition of serfdom in the principalities by the Phanariote hospodars in the middle of eighteenth century (because of the impossibility of securing a functioning serf regime in conditions of mass peasant flight). One of the consequences was the characteristic weakness of peasant communes and specifically peasant patriarchs, who greatly helped recruitment in Russia. Finally, the resentment of Romanian peasants towards service in the militia resulted from the desire to lend it “a solid and, so to say, Russian, character.” In contrast to the irregulars (Pandurs) used during the war, the militia was styled after the Russian regular army, wore its uniform, was instructed by Russian of-ficers and subjected to the same rigorous drilling that was characteristic of Nicholavean army.101 Through these measures, Russian authorities sought to instill an ethos of state service that was a basic characteristic of the Polizeistaat among both the peasants and the boyars, who were supposed to assume command positions.

It proved to be equally difficult to disarm the unemployed mercenaries, who continuously created troubles for local authorities in the cities and vil-lages. Although the order to surrender arms was one of the first measures of the Russian administration in 1828, A. I. Mikhailovskii-Danilevskii, passing through the principalities in April 1829, still found many people armed with daggers and pistols. According to Mikhailovskii, this “testified to how little people are protected by law, having to think of their own defense.”102 In March 1830 Kiselev ordered the arnauţi no longer employed in government service to surrender their arms and either enter one of the civil estates of the principalities or leave them altogether.103 The order had to be repeated early in 1831, this time explicitly prohibiting “shooting in the cities between different houses.” The latter clause demonstrates the determination of the authorities to secure a monopoly on physical violence by depriving various socially prominent elements of the right to exercise it at their own discretion. Unable to prohibit altogether the use of the arnauţi in the boyar households, the occupation authorities allowed them to be armed only when accompany-

101 Alexander Bitis. Russia and the Eastern Question. Pp. 454-455. 102 A. I. Mikhailovskii–Danilevskii. Zapiski. 1829 god // Russkaia starina. 1893. No. 8. P. 182.103 Kopia s predlozhenia Kiseleva obshchemu sobraniiu Divanov kniazhesva Valakhii. March 4, 1830 // RGVIA. F. 438. Op. 1. No. 74. F. 2.

106


ing their masters on trips across the country as a protection against robbery. Otherwise, the police authorities were empowered to confiscate illegal arms “regardless of the social status of the person.”104 Depriving the boyars of their private detachments of arnauţi was an important step in the differentiation between social status and political power accompanying the emergence of the modern distinction between private and public spheres.

Closely related to the creation of the militia was the reorganization of the police authorities proper. For the first two years of occupation, the most important police functions were performed by Russian military police. The end of the war and gradual withdrawal of Russian troops from the princi-palities was paralleled by transfer of police functions to local institutions. Along with its former duties such as internal security, public hygiene, gen-eral propriety (blagochinie) and supervision over the commerce in staples, police authorities in the capitals (agia) were given the functions of fire protection, supervision of public health and prevention of epidemics. In order to secure cooperation between agia and Russian military authorities, Kiselev appointed special procurators. With the help of four adjuncts, each procurator supervised public welfare foundations, commerce, fire protection, quarantines and the commission for quartering of Russian troops.105 Next, the functions of agia were progressively differentiated from those of the militia. It soon became clear that the new militia contingents were not nu-merous enough to maintain internal order in cities, garrisons and border guard service and man the quarantine line at the same time. Eventually, agia was given its own law enforcement units (drobanţi), which promised to end the traditional rivalry between agia and spataria (hatmania in Moldavia).106

Alongside the agia, important general police functions remained in the competence of the municipal authorities of the capitals as well as Brăila and Giurgiu – two former Ottoman fortresses and reayas on the left bank of the Danube returned to Wallachia in accordance with the Adrianople treaty. In March 1830, Kiselev appointed Logothete Alexandru Philipesco, Aga Cantacusene, Vornik de Politie Barbu Ştirbei, Russian army engineer Baumern and two physicians to form a commission with the task of cleaning Bucharest of waste and garbage, repairing bridges, creating street lighting,

104 Kopia s predlozhenia Kiseleva obshchemu sobraniiu Divanov kniazhesva Valakhii. January 3, 1831 // RGIVIA. F. 438. Op. 1. No. 74. L. 5.105 Kiselev’s order to Wallachian and Moldavian governments of June 1, 1830 // RGVIA. F. 438. Op. 1. D. 78. Ll. 1-4.106 Zapiska o formirovanii zemskoi strazhi. December, 12, 1831, and Dopolnenie no. 1 k zapiske o formirovanii zemskoi strazhi // RGVIA. F. 438. Op. 1. D. 85. Ll. 4-6.

107

Ab Imperio, 4/2008

instituting fire protection units, improving the provision of prisoners as well as proposing means to fund these institutions and practices. The proposals of the commission for city improvement created by Kiselev were in line with the measures taken by the Russian authorities during the 1808-1812 occupation. The commission drew up the Bucharest City Statute prescrib-ing the delimitation of the boundaries of the city, draining the marshes and lakes, paving the streets at the expense of house owners (landlords), and charging the latter with cleaning of the streets and courtyards. The Statute also prescribed the formation of a gravediggers’ service, creation of four walled cemeteries with chapels beyond the confines of the city for the orthodox population and four cemeteries for representatives of other confessions. Iaşi and Bucharest were divided into four and five districts (arrondissements) respectively headed by commissars, while each district consisted of three quarters supervised by an epistat. The Town Statutes for Brăila and Giurgiu elaborated by the General Assembly of the Wallachian Divans on Kiselev’s order delineated the competence of police as distin-guished from the judicial authorities and the city magistrate. Whereas the latter had to take care of city revenues and expenses, provision of food, protection of trade and commercial arbitrage, the city police was charged with the supervision of the “internal calmness and peacefulness,” preven-tion of crime, public health, weights and measures, the quality of food, construction of houses according to the confirmed plan, general cleanliness and fire protection.107

moldavia and Wallachia as Polizeistaat

It is impossible to address here the larger issues of political reform that paralleled the creation of the Danubian quarantine and the reordering of the police institutions and led to the adoption of the Organic Statutes of Mol-davia and Wallachia of 1831-1832. However, a brief comment on the place of police institutions in the general reform process is in order. The Statutes have sometimes been referred to as the first constitution of modern Romania. However, such a designation can be highly misleading for it presupposes a retrospective reading of the political realities of the late nineteenth century nation-state into a historical period when the Romanian national project was only emerging. Moreover, from the point of view of the constitutional history of the nation-state, the Organic Statutes are seen as instruments of Russian

107 Gorodovoie polozhenie dlia upravlenia gorodov Zhurzhi i Brailova // RGVIA. F. 438. Op 1. D. 74. Ll. 16rev.-20.

108


imperial expansion and hegemony, introducing the salutary principles of the division of powers between the hospodars and the boyar assemblies in order to sow discord amidst the Romanian elite, a Machiavellian divide et impera vested in Montesquieuian political philosophy.108 Such a perspective would probably not be widely off the mark, but it would make it hard to explain, at the same time, why the Organic Statutes, in the words of the doyen of late nineteenth-century Romanian historiography A. D. Xenopol, “introduced for the first time in Romanian political life the idea of public interest” and, ultimately, “the idea of state… in its modern form.”109

Indeed, a comprehensive reordering of the public administration accom-panied by meticulous regulation of office work and procedures constituted another aspect of Polizeistaat policies, alongside anti-epidemic measures and the reform of police institutions. These reforms were a response to the problem of bribery and corruption110 that Russian officials sought to solve in a characteristically bureaucratic fashion of rationalization of local administra-tion. The existing local administration, which was previously characterized by the concentration of virtually all authority in the hands of ispravniks, in accordance with the Organic Statutes was divided between the would-be ministries of Interior and Finances. The former consolidated its control over the ispravniks, who lost their financial and most of their judicial functions, while the latter subordinated the sameşi, who previously used to levy and collect taxes arbitrarily, but now, at least in theory, became simple executors of budget law, fully accountable to the Great Vestiar (Minister of Finance), who in turn reported yearly to the Ordinary Assembly.111 The reforms of the judiciary were based on the principle of separation of administrative and judicial powers and abolished the retroactivity of sentences, the sales of judicial offices as well as the notorious “payments for justice.”112 The Organic Statutes also reorganized the domain of taxation, seeking to limit arbitrary treatment of the peasants by either landlords or local officials in

108 Tudor Drîganu. Începuturile şi dezvoltarea regimului parlamentar în Romînia pînă la 1916. Cluj, 1991. P. 55. 109 A. D. Xenopol. Istoria Romînilor din Dacia Traiană. Vol. 9. Bucureşti, 1928. P. 100.110 Grosul. Reformy v dunaiskikh kniazhestvakh. P. 211.111 See Kiselev. Observations sur le project d’un Conceil Administrative pour la Molda-vie // AVPRI. F. 331. Op. 716/1. D. 3. Ll. 124-124rev.; Grosul. Reformy v dunaiskikh kniazhestvakh. P. 171.112 Ministerial instructions. Pp. 41-43, 45. Kiselev. Observations sur le chapitre VIII (L’ordre judiciaire) // AVPRI. F. 331. Op. 716/1. D. 3. L. 115. Dumitru Vitcu and Gabriel Bădărău (Eds.). Regulamentul Organic al Moldovei. Iaşi, 2004.

109

Ab Imperio, 4/2008

accordance with the precepts of Austrian bauernschutz policy, and in an-ticipation of the reform of lustratsii in the western region of the Russian empire.113 To this end, a fiscal census of the local population was undertaken revealing a substantial number of unregistered taxpayers. The old system of taxation units (ludori) and exempt individuals (scutelnici) was replaced by direct per capita taxation. As a result, the peasants’ obligations to the landlord and the state increased, but, at the same time, they became more precisely defined in the legislation, which, theoretically, was supposed to alleviate their burden.

While there is no indication that either Kiselev or any of his subordinates specifically referred to eighteenth century cameralist literature, the reorgani-zation of public administration and taxation in Moldavia and Walachia that they oversaw bears unmistakable similarity to the administrative practices of Prussian, Austrian and Russian enlightened despotism. The absence of the “collegial principle” characteristic of the eighteenth century constitutes perhaps the only major difference. At the same time, although the attribu-tion of functions to individual officials brings the Organic Statutes closer to nineteenth century “bureaucratic absolutism,” it would be wrong to call it a “bureaucratic” creation par excellence. After all, Kiselev and his subordinates were either military men or diplomats, not professional civil servants. The fact that they were given the task of overseeing the transfor-mation of local institutions was quite in line with the general practice of appointment of military men to civil service functions that characterized the “pre-bureaucratic” stage in Russian institutional development in the eighteenth – early nineteenth centuries. This practice generated “enlight-ened” civil service dilettantes, which explains the peculiarities of transfer of administrative practices and technologies of government in Eastern Europe. In the conditions of a Eurasian empire lacking the personnel and dense infrastructure of small German territorial states, the Polizeistaat was not so much a systematically reproduced “model,” as a specific “culture” shared by the members of the ruling class. It was a peculiar set of assump-tions about rational and orderly government that left its imprint even on the more pragmatic measures adopted by imperial officials in pursuit of “tradi-

113 Charles Ingrao. The Habsburg Monarchy, 1618-1815. Cambridge, 1994. Pp. 94, 171, 185. The reform of lustratsii was related to the reform of state peasants carried out under Kiselev’s guidance in the late 1830s – 1840s. See A. Miller and M. Dolbilov (Eds). Za-padnyie okrainy Rossiskoi Imperii. Moscow, 2006. P. 107. The regularization of peasant obligations to the state and landlords was the most important aspect of the reforms in the Romanian principalities which influenced internal policies in the Russian Empire.

110


tional” interests. The Polizeistaat was thus not so much the manifestation of Russia’s leap into modernity that the Romanian principalities were now supposed to accomplish under its guidance, as it was the marker of cultural difference between the two elites (comprising their self-perception and the perception of the other) that was perhaps the most salient feature of this imperial encounter.

At a more pragmatic level, the ideas of “public interest” and “state” that Xenopol identified as the positive aspects of the Organic Statutes, rather paradoxically, were the outcomes of the pursuit of narrow interests of the empire that sought hegemony in the region and was intent to eliminate potential challenges to it. The most urgent goal was to prevent epidemics that threatened the imperial army, but that proved to be impossible without a large reform of the police institutions. Yet, to make the reordered police institutions functional, it had to relay on an administrative apparatus that was purged of corruption and abusive practices and that necessitated a reform of public service. The general overhaul of the public service was, in turn, impossible without the transformation of the taxation system and redefinition of the relationship between the state, the landlords and the peasants. Although these reforms were influenced by the conflicts within the political elites as well as social tensions between boyar landowners and the peasantry during the 1820s, one should not overlook their functional role within the structure of imperial policy that made the achievement of a narrower and more pragmatic goal conditional on a wider institutional transformation. While the pursuit of the common good postulated by the discourse of Russia’s “civilizing mission” in Moldavia and Wallachia should not be taken at face value, this explains why the imperial officials did not and, in a sense, could not limit themselves to some narrow pragmatic measures in the interests of the army without tackling larger problems that concerned the broader population of the principalities, i. e. the “public interest.” By the same account, the policies that envisioned hegemony of a “traditional” empire ultimately contributed to the institutionalization of a “modern” nation-state.

The reorganization of police institutions addressed in this article pro-vides an alternative entry into the problem of general political reform in Moldavia and Wallachia that constituted its overall context. The legislation regulating the function of police institutions was either directly incorporated into the text of the Statutes (as the quarantine and the militia réglements) or was adopted immediately afterwards (the Bucharest, Iaşi and other city statutes). Therefore, instead of being treated as bizarre constitutions of a

111

Ab Imperio, 4/2008

would-be nation-state114 the Organic Statutes of Moldavia and Wallachia should be seen as the embodiments of a Polizeistaat tradition. The holistic and all-embracing character of the Organic Statutes and the policy of Russian authorities in 1829-1834 make perfect sense when seen as related to the ideal of comprehensive regulation characterizing the eighteenth-century police. In fact, they represent an attempt to utilize the institutions and practices of early modern police for the needs of a continental empire which sought to transform a heterogeneous frontier into a controllable buffer zone.

The conceptual link between political modernity and the nation-state was constituted within national historiographies through retrospective and retroactive incorporation of institutions and practices produced by pre-modern policies that thereupon were viewed as elements of a nation-state avant la lettre. This is precisely the procedure that has to be undone in order to demystify the passage to modernity. The identity and legitimacy of modern nation-states has been sustained through the fantasy of radical rupture with “traditional” society. The obverse of the discovery of “antici-pations” or “symptoms” of modernity in a pre-modern institutional context is the tendency to treat “modern” institutions and practices as proofs of the departure from the past. To claim that both are illusory does not mean that we have remained “traditional.” Rather it is to suggest that we have never yet become “modern.”

summary

В статье рассматривается политика российских оккупационных властей в Молдавии и Валахии накануне Русско-Турецкой войны 1828–1829 гг. Автор начинает с обзора дискурсивного конструирования Молдавии и Валахии как жертв “восточного деспотизма” и простран-ства приложения российской цивилизационной миссии. Условием их “освобождения” объявлялось последовательное применение прин-ципов рационального и системно иерархизированного управления (Polizeistaat). Несмотря на то, что общая реорганизация внутреннего управления княжеств непосредственно мотивировалась необходи-мостью обеспечить снабжение российской армии в будущих войнах, действия временной российской администрации в 1828–1834 гг. также были ответом на реальную угрозу последней в Европе эпидемии чумы.

114 Emerit. Les Paysans Roumains depuis la paix d’Adrianople jusqu’à la liberation des terres. Paris, 1932. Pp. 87; Radu F. Florescu. The Struggle Against Russia in the Romanian Principalities. A Problem of Anglo-Turkish Diplomacy, 1821-1854. Iaşi, 1997.

112


Эпидемия, разворачивавшаяся на фоне войны, стимулировала меди-цинские дискуссии об этиологии заболевания и антиэпидемических мерах. В этих обсуждениях лакуны в научном знании компенсировались моральными и политическими обобщениями, вытекавшими из россий-ского восприятия княжеств. Недостаток просвещения мог рассматри-ваться русскими врачами как непосредственная причина заболевания или как условие, из-за которого Молдавия и Валахия оказывались осо-бенно подверженными эпидемии. Однако существовало согласие в том, что медицинские проблемы были лишь симптомом более серьезного морально-политического разложения. Соответственно, медицинские дискуссии риторически кодировались как обсуждение способов осво-бождения местного общества от пут “деспотизма” и “предрассудков”. В статье рассматриваются проведенные реформы полиции и гражданских институтов, системы налогообложения и отношений крестьян и господ. Проведенный анализ символического конструирования эпидемии чумы и способов ответа на нее позволил автору поместить реформы, про-веденные Российской империей в Молдавии и Валахии, в парадигму “государства-садовода” Зигмунта Бауманна. Однако автор статьи видит здесь лишь начальную точку ревизии отношений “садоводчества” и модерности, поскольку в рассматриваемом случае локусом “садовод-ческих” практик оказывается традиционная континентальная империя. Лишь ретроспективно эти практики апроприировались “модерным” национальным государством.

between polizeistaat and cordon sanitaire: epidemics and police reform during russian occupation of...

Documents