Arakcheev and the Military Colonies

The austere figure of Count Alexei Andreevich Arakcheev looms over almost the whole reign of the Russian Emperor Alexander I during the first quarter of the nineteenth century. As the Emperor’s principal friend and adviser, he became the most hated and feared man in Russia; and the period of his greatest power was baptised the ‘Arakcheevshchina’ to symbolise the reactionary and oppressive character of the epoch.

For Alexander’s subjects it was a mystery that their young and handsome Tsar, who came to the throne in 1801 on a wave of popularity because of his widely believed liberal ideas and gentle nature, should have chosen this brutish and unimaginative artillery officer as his chief confidant and first Minister. Some thought that Arakcheev, whose face was described as ‘a strange mixture of intelligence and evil’, had acquired by hypnotism or even black magic a commanding hold over the character of Alexander the Blessed.