162 PLANS OF REFORMthe Council of State, in no ways restricted this prerogative. Further-
more, the Statute of the Council left to the Emperor's discretion what
problems and affairs were to be submitted to the Council for advisory
opinion. The formula, "the boiars have decided and the Tsar has
ordered," which traditionally accompanied the legislative acts of
Muscovite Russia, had even greater limitative implications, yet very
few - and at any rate, not Karamzin - have questioned the fact that
the Tsar of Moscow w~s an unlimited, autocratic ruler. Moreover, as
Korkunov correctly pointed out, the French formula only indicated the
advisory nature of the opinion of the Conseil d'Etat and did not
prevent the government from over-riding it by appropriate legislation.^1
While the conservatives used the formula to criticize the idea of the
Council, the friends of constitutionalism seized upon another term
found in the Statute of the Council to support their joyful contention
that Speransky had taken the first step towards limiting the autocracy.
The term in question was soslovie, or estate, which Speransky used for
describing the Council. It was inferred that soslovie had a meaning
akin to that of Etat, as found in such expressions as Tiers Etat, Etats
Generaux in Ancien Regime France. The memories of 1789, still very
vivid in the minds of contemporaries, served to draw a parallel between
the Estates General which led to the Assemblee Nationale, and the
Council of State which in its turn might become the nucleus of a
"representative assembly." (For Speransky's contemporaries knew
nothing of his proposal for a State Duma which might have been more
logically a candidate for the role of Assemblee Nationale). Here again
Korkunov's incisive analysis has given convincing historical and jurid-
ical proof for the rejection of this traditional interpretation of the
meaning of soslovie, an interpretation which has been inherited from
the naive understanding of Speransky's defenders. Korkunov has pointed
out that in the vocabulary of Speransky, and of that of his contem-
poraries, soslovie meant a body, group of people who make up the
membership of an administrative institution. Thus, the Cabinet or
Committee of Ministers was also considered a soslovie. Not only does
this meaning of the word appear in the Code of 1840, which embodies
the political phraseology and administrative organization of the preced-
ing generation, but the laws and regulations issued during the first two
decades of the 19th century contain ample illustration of a similar
usage of the term. Speransky himself used the word only in the sense1 See Korkunov, op. cit., II, pp. 75-83 passim for an excellent statement of the
legal technicalities involved in the argument.