864 LAST YEARS - CONCLUSION
and economic progress could be guided in a specific direction by the
state.
His negative historicism and his belief in administrative guidance
were particularly strong in the first period of his life, and they often
led him to disregard the particularities of the social and economic
millieu in which he had to operate. In later years, he qualified his
position somewhat, but he never completely renounced his conviction of
the malleability of social conditions under the impact of administrative
means. This conviction has plagued Russia's administration throughout
the imperial regime, as frequently the bureaucracy ordered measures
which could not be profitably applied to Russian circumstances and
conditions.
In a yet more indirect way, Speransky exercised an appreciable in-
fluence on the minds and thoughts of later generations. His ideal of a
Rechtsstaat was interpreted as an advocacy of a truly liberal represent-
ative constitution as in Western Europe. We have seen that this was a
misunderstanding, but a natural one, for his words left room for some
doubt (especially as his proposals were only partially known); and his
complicated blend of romantic evolutionary conservatism and 18th
century rationalistic dogmatism was not easy to disentangle. Interestingly
enough, though, the liberal intelligentsia saw in Speransky the victim
of autocracy. Thus arose the legend of the theoretical, doctrinaire
liberal official who advocated constitutional forms but proved to be too
much in advance of his own times. His fate was one more proof that
no reform could be accomplished through the government. The liberal
intellectuals rejected Speransky's method of bureaucratic implementa-
tion completely and in so doing, unwittingly turned from his program.
The liberals, therefore, completely misunderstood him. His fault, if
any, lay exactly in his too great timidity in suggesting methods of
application, and in his fundamental respect for Russia's autocratic
tradition and for its social system. It did not lie, as the liberals erro-
neously thought, in his actual inability to implement his program.
Often men prove to be influential less by what they actually thought
or did than by what others believed their opinions and acts to have
been. This was the case of Speransky's influence and fame among the
intelligentsia. His name became the symbol of a tradition of moderate
liberalism, and of a constitutional development.It is probably fair to say that Speransky personified the Russian
imperial bureaucratic regime that w.as to last until 1905, and with
some qualifications until 1917. He represented what was best in this