works in practice. What has it done for Russia in the past, and what is
it doing in the present?

At the present day, when faith in despotic civilisers and paternal
government has been rudely shaken, and the advantages of a free,
spontaneous national development are fully recognised, centralised
bureaucracies have everywhere fallen into bad odour. In Russia the
dislike to them is particularly strong, because it has there something
more than a purely theoretical basis. The recollection of the reign
of Nicholas I., with its stern military regime, and minute, pedantic
formalism, makes many Russians condemn in no measured terms the
administration under which they live, and most Englishmen will feel
inclined to endorse this condemnation. Before passing sentence,
however, we ought to know that the system has at least an historical
justification, and we must not allow our love of constitutional liberty
and local self-government to blind us to the distinction between
theoretical and historical possibility. What seems to political
philosophers abstractly the best possible government may be utterly
inapplicable in certain concrete cases. We need not attempt to decide
whether it is better for humanity that Russia should exist as a
nation, but we may boldly assert that without a strongly centralised
administration Russia would never have become one of the great European
Powers. Until comparatively recent times the part of the world which
is known as the Russian Empire was a conglomeration of independent or
semi-independent political units, animated with centrifugal as well as
centripetal forces; and even at the present day it is far from being
a compact homogeneous State. It was the autocratic power, with the
centralised administration as its necessary complement, that first
created Russia, then saved her from dismemberment and political
annihilation, and ultimately secured for her a place among European
nations by introducing Western civilisation.

Whilst thus recognising clearly that autocracy and a strongly
centralised administration were necessary first for the creation and
afterwards for the preservation of national independence, we must
not shut our eyes to the evil consequences which resulted from
this unfortunate necessity. It was in the nature of things that the
Government, aiming at the realisation of designs which its subjects
neither sympathised with nor clearly understood, should have become
separated from the nation