LAST YEARS - CONCl..USION 359best factor for success in a big bureaucratic organization, where striking
and strong personalities are distrusted and kept down.
As a successful and prominent official in the large bureaucratic
machine of the Russian government, Speransky was involved in many
things and dealt with most facets of Russian public life. And yet, his
creative imprint is not easily discernible at first glance. Was it due to
his own indeterminate character or to the self-effacing devotion of the
public servant? Probably a little of each. But a further and more'im-
portant reason was that he was never allowed to bring any of his own
ideas and plans to successful and complete implementation. He was not
permitted even to carry through his last major assignment, the codifica-
tion, as he wished, for Nicholas I opposed what should have been its
crowning piece, a new code. As a result, all of Speransky's work is
fragmentary and touches upon widely divergent areas. As though aware
of his special position and of his helplessness in securing adequate
implementation of his ideas, Speransky made his projects and proposals
pretty general, and even at times vague. They allowed of several inter-
pretations and of several methods of implementation. To a large extent,
these features of his work were the result of his omnivorous and syn-
cretic mind and of his talent for combining and ordering logically and
coherently disparate elements by means of a clear style and effective
presentation. Paradoxically, therefore, in the light of his long and
variegated government service, In the final analysis, Speransky left little
direct imprint on the political and social institutions of Russia. His
indirect influence, on the other hand, proved great and lasting.
The areas in which Speransky has left concrete traces of his own work
are not many. The organization of the Ministries, the Council of
State, and of the Siberian administration were in large measure due to
his planning (though he built on an existing situation and the empirical
experience accumulated in the past). In the case of the codification of
laws, his contribution was mainly that of method and procedure. Its
results were not, truly speaking, consciously planned or foreseen by
Speransky. When we examine all these accomplishments of his closely,
we find that he only put the key stone, the last touch, to an edifice that
was in process of construction and had been gotten well under way byhis predecessors. It demonstrates that he knew how to set up and com-
plete in orderly fashion a far-going reorganization of the Empire's
administration. Whether in so doing he introduced new concepts and
gave a new direction to the future development of the institutions he
reorganized, we shall try to see later. For the moment let us note that
in essence, Speransky introduced little that had not been known before.