Michael Speransky. Statesman of Imperial Russia, 1772–1839 - Marc Raeff

ADMINISTRATIVE AGfIVITlES 1802-1812 69

in the way described. As he read it, Speransky made the necessary

textual corrections and changes, polished the style, while several clerks

copied the final text as it issued from his' pen. By noon the draft was

completed and Speransky took it to the Council 9f State. Under such

conditions the work progressed !apidly and. by 1812 the first task - the

Civil Code - had been completed and submitted to the Council of

State. But the quality of the final product clearly reflected the speed

and haste of its composition. The members of the Council of State,

afraid of the Emperor's favorite and themselves not too well versed in

law, accepted the Code without much discussion. But Speransky's

enemies soon began to voice their dissatisfaction and indignation. They

asserted that Speransky had foisted upon monarchical, autocratic, and

orthodox Russia a code of laws copied from radical, revolutionary,

atheistic France. In so doing, they said, the State Secretary had prepared

the way for the enslavement of, Russia by the usurper Napoleon

Bonaparte. Speransky's ill wishers, in particular Karamzin, maintained

that his civil code was nothing more than the exact translation - and

a poor one at that - of the French Code Civil. This was certainly an

exaggeration, but modern research has conclusively shown that

Speransky drew very heavily on the Code Napoleon.^1 Speransky

himself admitted some resemblance between his code and the French

one, but he tried to defend himself by pointing out that the similarity

was due to the common source of the two codes - Roman law. 2 It

was a somewhat disingenuous plea; it can be excused only on the
ground that Speransky felt unjustly branded as a French agent and was
defending both his honor and patriotism. The truth remains, though,
that in his Code he pretty much disregarded Russian legal tradition
and history and tried to iritroduce en bloc a civil law worked out for
completely different social and political conditions. The narrow-minded
and formal bureaucrat had,. in this instance, gotten the better of the
able public servant and political adviser to the Emperor.^3

1 The full text of the code is to be found in Arkhiv Gosudarstvennogo Soveta,
vol. IV, St. Pbg. 1874. See the literature on the history of Russian codification in
Chapter XI. I am not convinced by the argument of AI'. Fateev ("K istorii i teorii
kodifikatsii," Russkii narodnyi universitet v Prage, Nauahnye trudy, IV, (1931), p. 6)
who shows that Speransky did not merely translate the Code Napoleon (something
nobody, since Karamzin, has seriously contended); but Fateev offers no convincing
evidence to disprove the fact that Speransky borrowed very heavily from French
(and other European) models.
2 Speranskii, "Pis'mo k Aleksandru I-u iz Permi," January 1813 in Shil'der,
Imperator Aleksandr I, III, p. 520.
3 Speransky admitted later the inapplicability of Roman law to Russian conditions.
Cf. Speranskii. "Mysli grafa M. M. Speranskogo," Arkhiv istor. i praktich. svedenii t
Rossii I-I (1858-1859), pp. 4, 8; Speranskii. "0 zakonakh rimskikh i razlichii ikh ot
zakonov rossiiskikh." Russkaia Starin a, XV, (1876), pp. 592-597.