itical rivalry that persisted in Russia for the majority of the Romanov dynasty and beyond--for more than 100 years.
In the wake of the retreat of Napoleon in Russia in 1815, Tsar Alexander I had a degree of prestige in Russia. However, what today would be called the political and civil infrastructure was defined by rivalries of the land-owning nobility, the imperial military forces, and the peasantry and a lack of a formal constitutional system, complete with political institutions. The result was a tendency toward national or international government policy by imperial fiat on one hand, or enormous discretion of powerful factions on the other. Rivalry between imperial authority and the landowners was a persistent fact, with the issue of the possible emancipation of serfs, who were the basis for the wealth of the nobility, the principal point of contention. Imperial control and financing of a disciplined army was one important matter of dispute; during Alexander's reign the institution of so-called military settlements, which created virtually proprietary, self-sufficient military units and actually empowered various regiments, but some factions experienced military settlements as a rejection of Imperial patronage, which gave rise to petty rebellions, which were quashed by imperial loyalist forces. Alexander appears to have recognized that abolition of serfdom was politically appropriate or at any rate morally expedient. But despite reported emancipations in individual cases, the nobility as a category seems to have wanted to reserve the option of emancipation to itself. Meanwhile, a growing revolutionary intelligentsia was achieving some prominence and exercising a degree of influence on various overlapping or converging factions or secret societies of the military and nobility, which for reasons of their own distrusted Alexander's movement toward accommodation with international rival Austria. The general outline of polit...