GOVERNING RUSSIA'S PROVINCES 237district of Penza had rebelled against their lords. Speransky did not
hesitate to use military force to quell the uprising and to punish the
offenders according to all the rigors of the law. To the local land-
owners it was evident proof that the new governor would preserve
their property rights secure and safe. A short time later, Speransky
himself became a local land and serf owner by acquiring an estate.
From that time on, his solidarity with the landowning nobility became
a matter of personal interest, as he himself admitted in a letter to
Stolypin " ... for to tell the truth I defend no less daringly than others
my Khanenevka [his newly acquired estate], that is 30,000 rubles of
revenue, everything I have and shall be able to have:' 1
But this did not mean that he was going to tolerate abuses on the
part of the nobility either. In all cases where the landlords exceeded
their authority or rights, he took energetic action. This strict justice,
this dispassionate adherence to the law, made him very popular, and he
became the best liked and most respected governor the province of
Penza ever had had. In the words of a contemporary, "Ce qu'il a fait
dans ce gouvernement doit etre marque au coin de la justice et de laprudence, vu la maniere dont il a capte l'opinion generale de toutes
les classes. C'est la premiere fois que je vois produire cet effet par unhomme en place... Monsieur Speransky a ete un des premiers a agir
de rigueur et par Ia il s'est fait adorer de la noblesse." 2
His tenure of office in Penza was not marked by any dramatic events
or important changes. He fulfilled the routine obligations of his posi-
tion quietly, honestly, and efficiently. This was the only outstanding
and somewhat unusu;l feature of his governorship. From the point of
view of his personal career and the development of his political think-
ing, the period in Penza is interesting only in that it was his first direct
contact with the problems of administration on the local level. This
experience did not significantly modify his basic conceptions, but it
mitigated the exclusively centralistic and somewhat doctrinaire orien-
tation of his earlier thinking.
The governor's principal accomplishment was to restore order to
the chaotic state of current affairs. Speransky endeavored, and with
success, to wipe out the arrears in the financial obligations of the
province and to clear away the backlog in the calendar of the courts.
At the time of his arrival, the province owed 1.5 million rabIes in tax
arrears to the Treasury. Within a short time, the figure was brought
1 Letter to Stolypin, 2 May 1818, Russkii Arkhiv (1869), p. 1698.
2 Quoted by Fateev, "Speranskii - gubernator Sibiri:' loco cit., p. 129 (the letter
is from 1817).