THE EPIDEMICS OF 1828-1831 IN MOLDAVIA AND WALLACHIA

The first practical involvement of the Russian occupation authorities in public hygiene regulation in the principalities took place during the 1806-1812 Russo-Turkish war. Leaving virtually no institutional legacy, this attempt demonstrated above all the challenges that imperial officials faced in their attempt to impose rational organization upon the local society. Senator S. S. Kushnikov, appointed to preside at Moldavian and Wallachian Divans in 1808, found the atmosphere of Iaşi “odorous to the highest degree,” attributing it to unwholesome customs of the local population. The stuffy air of the Moldavian capital was the result of burials near churches within city limits. Coupled with the insufficient depth of the graves as well as the custom of exhumation of corpses for the performance of repeated funeral services, this was bound to cause “dangerous contagious diseases.” In order to correct the situation, Kushnikov got in touch with church authorities and suggested creating cemeteries beyond city limits. Likewise, he prohibited the custom of burying people who died suddenly on the day of their death and prescribed ispravniks or other local officials to ascertain cases of sudden death and investigate its causes.^[1] He hardly made any headway before the Moldavian and Wallachian church came to be headed by Metropolitan Gavriil in whom Kushnikov found a willing and capable collaborator.^[2] Gavriil suggested creating four walled cemeteries near each capital city, assigning each parish to one of them and prohibiting priests from performing burial services in the cities. However, he soon complained that despite Kushnikov’s order to the Divan, the local police (agia) preferred to delay this unpopular measure.^[3] V. I. Krasno-Miloshevich, who replaced Kushnikov in March 1810, still found Bucharest and Iaşi lacking conventional cemeteries. The resistance of the local population was so tenacious that Krasno-Miloshevich was forced to address the whole boyar estate with a request to admonish the population.^[4] He considered this custom a superstition in everything but name and argued that change in places of burial “cannot infringe upon the maxims of Christian faith, since both Russians and other enlightened Christian nations have long abandoned the custom of burial in cities.” However, the magnitude of discontent was so great that he postponed the prohibition until spring 1811, by which time a church was to be built at each cemetery for the performance of funeral services.^[5] Meanwhile, the police, the Divan, and all boyars of the principality were called upon to persuade inhabitants about the harmfulness of this custom.
At the same time, the Russian role in prevention of epidemics remained ambiguous. The devastations and famines caused by Russo-Turkish wars constituted the conditions that made epidemics likely. Thus, the evacuation of the Russian troops from the principalities in 1812 was followed by the most devastating plague that had ever before afflicted the principalities, taking ca. 40,000 lives. The disease then lingered in the principalities acquiring mass scale in the course of the next Russo-Turkish war. Epidemics recurred in 1819 and 1824-1825 taking victims in the Ottoman fortress of Brăila and nearby Bessarabia. The vulnerability of the Russian borders to the epidemic challenge is testified to by the preservation of the quarantine along the Dniester for eighteen years after the annexation of Bessarabia and the establishment of a new quarantine along the Pruth. In 1826 cases of deadly contagious disease were reported in Bucharest and its environs. Just as in the case of the 1770-1771 epidemic, physicians were divided on the question of the origin of the disease. The “contagionists” believed that the disease in question was the plague (Pestis Orentalis Bubonica) brought by the Ottomans from Egypt and advocated strict observance of quarantine measures. Opposed to them were “miasmatists” who believed that the disease was endemic to the territory and represented a variation of Typhus Australis, produced by “epidemic constitution of the air.”^[6]
With the beginning of the new war in 1828, Russian military physicians joined the debate, which quickly became more than a matter of professional medical concern. Already in the eighteenth century Russian commanders preferred not to speak about the plague as long as the situation was not pressing for fear that the news of the epidemics would produce panic among soldiers and local population.^[7] In 1828, Russian command faced the same dilemma: admit the existence of the plague and adopt wholesale plague prevention measures that might demoralize the soldiers and would definitely hamper military operations; or deny the existence of any epidemics in hope of sustaining the morale and high mobility of the troops, but, at the same time, expose the soldiers to the ravages of the disease. Different prevention measures advocated in 1828-1829 by “contaigionists” and “miasmatists” had implications for the ultimate outcome of the war. Thus, in the course of 1828, the campaigns of Russian troops were seriously constrained by the necessity of observing quarantine regulations imposed by the “Bucharest Plague Commission” created on the order of Field Marshal P. Kh. Witgenstein. This, as well as a relatively small number of victims (1,608), made new Russian Commander-in-Chief I. I. Diebitch heed the advice of “miasmatists,” who argued that quarantines only stimulated the development of what essentially was a local fever by keeping soldiers for days in the unhealthy marshlands along the Danube. As a result, at the beginning of the new campaign, a “miasmatist” physician, Chistian Witt, replaced the advocate of the quarantines Khanaev as the Chief Medic of the General Staff. Concomitantly, the “Bucharest Plague Commission” was replaced by the “Main Commission for Elimination of Pestilence” in January 1829.^[8] The eventual victory of the Russian army due to greater mobility of its troops was purchased at a great price.^[9] The abolition of the quarantines increased the total number of victims of the disease to 24,560 in 1829, out of which Russian military amounted to one-third.^[10]
Even after experience proved him wrong, Witt remained unconvinced and in defense of his position expressed a number of assumptions which stood behind the medical police measures adopted by Russian authorities. Eager to free himself from implicit accusations of mismanagement in the course of the epidemics, Witt blamed an unhealthy local climate, whose pernicious influence was aggravated by the social habits of the local population. According to him, “Wallachian pestilence” (iazva) that took many victims among both the military and civilians was produced by the general epidemic constitution of the air, resulting from evaporations of numerous marshes, uncultivated fields and graves. The real cause of the disease was the local population itself, which was “steeped in ignorance and wallowed in vice”:

“Humiliating laziness deprives them of the basic advantages of life. [Moldavians and Wallachians] want neither to eat good bread nor drink sane water nor breathe fresh air nor have comfortable dwellings. In Moldavia and Wallachia hardly one-sixth of the best land is cultivated. Above that, most of the land has grown wild, covered by wild grass and poisonous plants; the rivers are covered by reed, the marshes by bulrush, the ponds by silt. The cities and villages are heaped with manure and decaying bodies of various animals. Living in a large cemetery, people are drowning in dirt, dung and marshes… Hence their bodies are so weak and so predisposed to malevolent disease which spreads easily amongst them.”^[11]

Witt’s argument was anything but new. Western observers, who have internalized Montesquieu’s thesis about the embeddedness of way of life, customs, public mores and political system of a people in the natural conditions of the country, argued about the two-way relationship between the climate of Moldavia and Wallachia and the physical and moral constitution of its population. Thus, J. L. Carra, the author of a well-known eighteenth-century history of Moldavia and Wallachia entitled History of Moldavia and Wallachia with an Examination of the Present State of Both Principalities, found local air lacking the “elastic resiliency” of Western climates and spoke in this connection about the “usual dullness and melancholy” of the peoples populating the region. The laziness and ignorance of the population produced by such a climate further aggravated its effects: the vast areas of uncultivated land covered by rotting foliage, along with unhealthy marshes, were seen as “reasons for the vice, which reigns in the atmosphere of these climates.”^[12] The unhealthy atmosphere of the Moldavian and Wallachian capitals was seen as the outcome of Oriental despotism, that the Prussian consul in Bucharest, Baron von Kreuchely, called “political and moral plague”. At the beginning of the nineteenth century, British consul in Odessa Thomas Thornton noticed the prodigal waste of precious timber for the pavement of the streets in Iaşi and Bucharest, attributing the unwillingness of Phanariote hospodars to invest in cobblestone pavement to “shortsightedness of despotism, which impoverishes posterity to diminish the expense of the present day and proportions its labor to the short term of its own existence.”^[13] The regrettable effects of despotism were not limited to the future: the vapor of filth and stagnant waters that collected under such surfacing rendered the air of the capitals “polluted and unwholesome, constantly afflicting the inhabitants with intermittent, bilious and putrid fevers.”^[14]
According to Witt, the failure of Kushnikov and Krasno-Miloshevich to establish medical police in the principalities twenty years prior demonstrated how difficult it was to correct the habits of the people, which “got accustomed to laziness and disorder.” In his account, the medical problem was eventually transformed into a moral one. Reproducing an essentially medieval understanding of disease as the manifestation of sinfulness, Witt completed the description of immorality of local inhabitants by referring to their drunkenness and sexual promiscuity, which made them sickly and prone to various illnesses. Successful elimination of disease, both physical and moral, could be achieved only through enlightenment and re-education of the people. According to Witt, Russians were best suited for the role of enlightened physicians. Adopting figurative language, he argued that “no other people seem to need so much our Russian well-leavened and well-baked rye bread, good kvass, fresh pickled cabbage and other greens.”^[15] At the same time, like other Russian officials, Witt was first of all concerned with the well-being of Russian provinces. Moldavia and Wallachia served as a negative example of what Bessarabia, Crimea and New Russia had to avoid through colonization and diligent cultivation of land. Admitting the necessity of quarantines for the security of southern provinces of Russia, Witt at the same time argued they should be coupled with elimination of the climatic conditions which make disease endemic to those regions. Writing a decade after Russian troops withdrew from the principalities, he concluded optimistically that the disease is gradually weakened by “yearly progress in enlightenment and correction of mores, the establishment of greater order and benefits for the life of the people, fertilization or cultivation of land, etc.”^[16]
Yet, whatever Witt could say in his defense about the moral corruption of the population as the cause of the disease, the Russian President-Plenipotentiary had to adopt a more programmatic approach in order to solve the problem. In order to combat the pestilence, Kiselev divided the principalities into special districts, in which the ispravniks and the village heads were charged with reporting all cases of contagion. Special medical administrations created in Bucharest and Iaşi examined the credentials of local physicians in order to assure reliable medical service. In doing this, they had to strike a delicate balance between scarcity of personnel and the necessity to maintain minimal standards of professionalism. A physician was appointed to each district of the capitals with the duty to provide medical service to everyone free of charge twice a week on premises specially lent for that purpose. Alongside the inoculation of the population, the functions of the physicians included the inspection of market places (once a week), hospitals (once a month) and pharmacies (twice a year). On the basis of the data the provided the medial councils of the capitals were supposed to file biweekly reports to the government. The Statute allocated 150,000 lei for the maintenance of three out of six hospitals that existed at that time (founded by hospodars or prominent boyar families). The foundation of new pharmacies required government permission and the owners had to follow the price lists that were in effect in Vienna.^[17] On Kiselev’s order, the military physicians conducted investigations of the kinds of contagious disease found in the principalities and instructed the population about basic prevention measures.^[18]
These measures were paralleled by the construction of a quarantine line along the Danube. Made possible by the reincorporation of former Ottoman fortresses on the left bank of the Danube, the establishment of the quarantine was defined as one of the priorities in the ministerial instructions that informed the policies of Russian authorities.^[19] The main checkpoints were created in the four major entrepots of commerce with the Ottoman Empire: Galaţi, Brăila, Giurgiu and Kalafat. Secondary quarantine stations were created in towns which conducted local trade with adjacent Ottoman provinces on the right bank of the Danube (Calaraş, Zimniţa, Turnovo, Izvornik, Cereneţ). In order to prevent clandestine barter trade with the right bank, three additional entrepots were established in Piopter, Olteniţa and Bichet. They were subordinated to the inspector residing at Bucharest and vice-inspector at Galaţi. With 1,500 infantry and cavalry militia distributed between 15 piquets aided by water patrols there was a hope of substantially reducing, if not interrupting altogether, unwarranted communication between the two banks of the river. The threat of harsh penalties (hard labor in the mines for those entering the country in avoidance of quarantines and capital punishment for guards who took bribes) had to make up for the deficiencies in supervision.^[20] Operating from March 1830, the new quarantine line was decisive in the disappearance of the epidemics and the number of victims fell to 133 in that year.^[21] However, the efficiency of the institution raised doubts both among Russians and foreigners. Thus, Kiselev remained skeptical about the ability of the local quarantine service to inspire respect among the Turks after the evacuation of Russian troops, whereas the Austrians preferred to preserve their quarantine installations on the border with Wallachia long after the Danubian quarantine was put in operation. According to Helmut von Moltke’s testimony from 1835 “the character of quarantine installations was such that any wise traveler would avoid them.”^[22]
Along with the reordering of hospitals and the vaccination of the population, the establishment of the quarantines was part of the “disciplinary legislation”, which, according to Kiselev, had to become an essential part of the Organic Statutes in order to stop the progress of the plague and other epidemics that decimated the population of the country.^[23] However, the importance of the quarantine service went beyond purely sanitary considerations. According to ministerial instructions that provided the basis of the Organic Statutes, the quarantine would serve to facilitate Russian communications with the principalities by diminishing the quarantine periods at the Pruth line and, at the same time, deprive the Ottomans of the possibility to penetrate the Wallachian and Moldavian territories at will. “Such practices are so contrary to their habits and religious prejudices that one only has to introduce in the southern parts of the principalities a strict observation of the sanitary regulations in order to quell their desire to penetrate here.”^[24] Thus, the quarantine line became a means to detach the principalities from the rest of the Ottoman Empire and provide Russia with a well-controlled buffer zone.^[25] An attempt to make political use of the quarantine was not a Russian invention: long before them, during the Seven Years War of 1757-1763, the Austrians used their Transylvanian quarantines in order to hamper their adversaries, the Prussians, from purchasing wool and cattle in the principalities to supply their army.^[26]
Ironically, as civilization and enlightenment were celebrating the victory over the plague and oriental mores by eliminating the disease within the Danubian quarantine, the principalities fell prey to cholera morbius. Unlike the plague, which periodically appeared in Egypt and Constantinople, cholera morbius was first registered in India in 1817, from where it traveled through Central Asian trade routes hitting Russia in 1830 and descending upon Europe the following year.^[27] Thus, very soon after he managed to beat the plague back beyond the Danube, Kiselev found it necessary to strengthen the Pruth quarantines, this time barring the principalities from Russian provinces and not vice versa. This was combined with a planned evacuation of the population from the towns.^[28] Although the disease affected some 33,000 people and carried away the lives of 2,218 of them, Kiselev was proud to report that only one out of 45 people fell ill in the principalities and only one out of every 142 died, which in his opinion was not a bad result, compared to neighboring Hungary’s one in 17 ill and one in 42 dead.^[29] However, Kiselev’s private correspondence compromises the picture of a successful struggle against cholera, which the President-Plenipotentiary drew in the final report on his activities as the head of Russian temporary administration submitted to Nicholas I in 1834. At the high point of the cholera epidemics, the newly created medical service failed. Only one physician out of five continued to render services to the population. Civilians were the worst hit. As disease was carrying away 150-180 people per day in Iaşi alone, it inspired all “from the most opulent boyar to the neediest artisan with such a terror that neither persuasion, nor force could make them perform their duties.”^[30] The courts and administrative bodies stopped functioning, officials fled and Kiselev had to prorogue the Moldavian General Assembly of Revision of the Statutes.^[31] “All the natural relationships dissolve as honor no longer exists and egoism appears here in all its horror” reported Kiselev to his friend, Governor-General of New Russia M. S. Vorontsov.^[32] Only after the cholera epidemics abated in early August 1830 was it possible for official bodies to resume operation.
It is quite remarkable that neither plague nor cholera outbreaks of 1829-1830 together with the accompanying anti-epidemic measures provoked active resistance of the local population.^[33] The situation in Moldavia and Wallachia contrasted with neighboring Hungary, where the cholera epidemic caused peasants to riot and sack noble estates out of the conviction that the disease had been deliberately inflicted on them by their landlords.^[34] There was no local equivalent of the famous St. Petersburg cholera riot in the context of which Nicholas I famously intervened personally in order to pacify the crowd, adding an important element to his myth.^[35] Instead, the ravages of the epidemics in the Moldavian capital present the picture of temporal disintegration of public authority, just as it testifies to the failure of measures that earlier helped to check the progress of plague. The most obvious explanation for the absence of plague and cholera riots was the presence of Russian troops in the principalities, whose readiness to quell the rebellion had just been demonstrated in case of the Moldavian peasants’ riot against military conscription (see below). Nevertheless, one wonders what the impact of cholera on the whole process of reform and the standing of Russian occupation authorities would have been had not Bucharest been spared the devastating effects that the epidemic had in Iaşi.^[36]

THE REFORM OF POLICE INSTITUTIONS

Effective or not the quarantines remained suspended in the absence of local personnel trained to operate them after the Russian troops evacuated the principalities. In order to man the quarantine service, ministerial instructions presupposed the creation of a national militia (gendarmerie), which was also charged with maintenance of good order in towns and countryside, collection of taxes and the execution of justice. The policies of the Russian authorities in this domain not only reflected the general development of modern police institutions in Europe, but also built upon local initiative. The necessity to reform different police agencies (agia and spatharia or hatmania in Moldavia) was indicated already in 1821 in a memoir signed by the Wallachian boyar émigrés in Braşov. Adopting a characteristic attitude in the aftermath of the Greek rebellion, the authors tended to attribute the abuses of police authorities to the pernicious influence of the Phanariots, whose Greek relatives monopolized the office of Aga (head of Bucharest city police) and used it to perpetuate injustices and extortions against the population. Likewise, the countryside police headed by Spathar was corrupted by the exclusive employment of foreigners acquiring their positions for money and using every opportunity to compensate themselves with a vengeance. The boyars proposed to replace agia and spatharia with, respectively, a Bucharest police force headed by an autochthonous boyar and land militia to perform border and garrison service.^[37]
In a more systematic way, the idea of reform of police agencies was articulated by Barbu Ştirbei, who in the given period performed the functions of Vornik de Poliţie. Characterized by Russian Consul Minciaky as one of the most promising young boyars, Ştirbei closely collaborated with Russian authorities throughout the occupation period and was involved in the reform of police institutions. Back in 1827, he submitted a memoir on the Wallchian administrative system to the attention of the committee of reform established in accordance with the Convention of Akkerman of October 7, 1826. In it, he attributed the failure of the existing main police institution (spatharia) to provide for the “security of persons” to underpayment of its employees, the sale of offices and the use of auxiliaries recruited from among peasants (catanes) instead of professional rank-and-file policemen. The underpaid police captains and colonels would demand money from peasants designated to perform police services instead of requiring actual service. The resulting inability of the spatharia to fight with brigandage effectively was exacerbated by instances of cooperation between individual police officials and the robbers. In order to change the situation, Stirbei proposed to augment the salaries of police officials and create a smaller permanent corps of gendarmes, relegating police auxiliaries (catanes) to the category of taxpayers and thereby increasing the number of tax-payers and state revenue.^[38]
Ştirbei’s suggestions were incorporated in the instructions of Russian Ministry of Foreign Affairs written by D. V. Dashkov which served as the basis for the elaboration of the Organic Statutes. The latter envisioned the formation of a new militia as a major law enforcing unit consisting of professional soldiers and officers. Increased expenditure on salaries was to be compensated by increase in revenues made possible by elimination of tax exemptions and abuses associated with the sale of offices.^[39] Like the quarantine service, the militia served the double goal of securing the general well-being of Moldavia and Wallachia, and providing an additional tie between the principalities and the protecting power. In a situation when a new war with the Ottomans could never be excluded, Kiselev argued for the necessity to create for the new militia “a solid and, so to say, Russian, character.” In order to achieve this goal, he suggested admitting a hundred young Romanians to the Russian military schools, adding to that number fifty new candidates every year. In Kiselev’s opinion, Russian military schools would function as a breeding ground for good Romanian officers, secure “the formation of troops on the principles of Russian discipline” and contribute to the general consolidation of new institutions. Stressing the importance of the militia as an institution connecting the principalities to Russia, Kiselev at the same time, remained skeptical about its ability to inspire respect amongst Turks from the right bank of the Danube. According to him, in order not to become illusive, for the time being the quarantine service had to be performed by Russian troops.^[40]
While the appropriate chapter of the Organic Statutes was adopted by the Committee of Reform and the Assembly of Revision without much confrontation, the provisional authorities faced some difficulties in the practical implementation of legislation on the militia. Following the emperor’s order of May 1830, Kiselev appointed Major General Starov and Colonel Markov to organize Wallachian and Moldavian troops.^[41] The new units amounted to 4,500 in Wallachia and 1,500 in Moldavia and were headed respectively by Spathar and Hatman. Soon it became clear that a small and unbalanced Moldavian budget was incapable of supporting even one-third of the Wallachian force, which prompted further reduction in the size of the Moldavian militia to 1,000. Since military service in the principalities was traditionally performed by Serbian, Bulgarian and Albanian mercenaries (arnauţi), the imposition of military duty on the population provoked discontent leading to peasant mutinies in the Moldavian districts of Roman and Neamţ. Attempts to pacify peasants by means of a delegation from the Divan failed and the movement increasingly acquired the character of a social revolt. Apprehending the negative impact that the movement could have on Bessarabian peasants, Kiselev dispatched two Cossack regiments headed by General Begidov to disperse some eight to nine thousand peasants who assembled in the vicinity of Roman.^[42]
Given the “shyness” and “meekness” of the Romanian peasants and their lack of military valor routinely as noted by Russian observers, the peasant resistance against military conscription requires some explanation. The most obvious reason for it is the introduction of a military service requirement that was one of the few burdens from which Romanian peasants were spared in the previous centuries. Another explanation is in the abolition of serfdom in the principalities by the Phanariote hospodars in the middle of eighteenth century (because of the impossibility of securing a functioning serf regime in conditions of mass peasant flight). One of the consequences was the characteristic weakness of peasant communes and specifically peasant patriarchs, who greatly helped recruitment in Russia. Finally, the resentment of Romanian peasants towards service in the militia resulted from the desire to lend it “a solid and, so to say, Russian, character.” In contrast to the irregulars (Pandurs) used during the war, the militia was styled after the Russian regular army, wore its uniform, was instructed by Russian officers and subjected to the same rigorous drilling that was characteristic of Nicholavean army.^[43] Through these measures, Russian authorities sought to instill an ethos of state service that was a basic characteristic of the Polizeistaat among both the peasants and the boyars, who were supposed to assume command positions.
It proved to be equally difficult to disarm the unemployed mercenaries, who continuously created troubles for local authorities in the cities and villages. Although the order to surrender arms was one of the first measures of the Russian administration in 1828, A. I. Mikhailovskii-Danilevskii, passing through the principalities in April 1829, still found many people armed with daggers and pistols. According to Mikhailovskii, this “testified to how little people are protected by law, having to think of their own defense.”^[44] In March 1830 Kiselev ordered the arnauţi no longer employed in government service to surrender their arms and either enter one of the civil estates of the principalities or leave them altogether.^[45] The order had to be repeated early in 1831, this time explicitly prohibiting “shooting in the cities between different houses.” The latter clause demonstrates the determination of the authorities to secure a monopoly on physical violence by depriving various socially prominent elements of the right to exercise it at their own discretion. Unable to prohibit altogether the use of the arnauţi in the boyar households, the occupation authorities allowed them to be armed only when accompanying their masters on trips across the country as a protection against robbery. Otherwise, the police authorities were empowered to confiscate illegal arms “regardless of the social status of the person.”^[46] Depriving the boyars of their private detachments of arnauţi was an important step in the differentiation between social status and political power accompanying the emergence of the modern distinction between private and public spheres.
Closely related to the creation of the militia was the reorganization of the police authorities proper. For the first two years of occupation, the most important police functions were performed by Russian military police. The end of the war and gradual withdrawal of Russian troops from the principalities was paralleled by transfer of police functions to local institutions. Along with its former duties such as internal security, public hygiene, general propriety (blagochinie) and supervision over the commerce in staples, police authorities in the capitals (agia) were given the functions of fire protection, supervision of public health and prevention of epidemics. In order to secure cooperation between agia and Russian military authorities, Kiselev appointed special procurators. With the help of four adjuncts, each procurator supervised public welfare foundations, commerce, fire protection, quarantines and the commission for quartering of Russian troops.^[47] Next, the functions of agia were progressively differentiated from those of the militia. It soon became clear that the new militia contingents were not numerous enough to maintain internal order in cities, garrisons and border guard service and man the quarantine line at the same time. Eventually, agia was given its own law enforcement units (drobanţi), which promised to end the traditional rivalry between agia and spataria (hatmania in Moldavia).^[48]
Alongside the agia, important general police functions remained in the competence of the municipal authorities of the capitals as well as Brăila and Giurgiu – two former Ottoman fortresses and reayas on the left bank of the Danube returned to Wallachia in accordance with the Adrianople treaty. In March 1830, Kiselev appointed Logothete Alexandru Philipesco, Aga Cantacusene, Vornik de Politie Barbu Ştirbei, Russian army engineer Baumern and two physicians to form a commission with the task of cleaning Bucharest of waste and garbage, repairing bridges, creating street lighting, instituting fire protection units, improving the provision of prisoners as well as proposing means to fund these institutions and practices. The proposals of the commission for city improvement created by Kiselev were in line with the measures taken by the Russian authorities during the 1808-1812 occupation. The commission drew up the Bucharest City Statute prescribing the delimitation of the boundaries of the city, draining the marshes and lakes, paving the streets at the expense of house owners (landlords), and charging the latter with cleaning of the streets and courtyards. The Statute also prescribed the formation of a gravediggers’ service, creation of four walled cemeteries with chapels beyond the confines of the city for the orthodox population and four cemeteries for representatives of other confessions. Iaşi and Bucharest were divided into four and five districts (arrondissements) respectively headed by commissars, while each district consisted of three quarters supervised by an epistat. The Town Statutes for Brăila and Giurgiu elaborated by the General Assembly of the Wallachian Divans on Kiselev’s order delineated the competence of police as distinguished from the judicial authorities and the city magistrate. Whereas the latter had to take care of city revenues and expenses, provision of food, protection of trade and commercial arbitrage, the city police was charged with the supervision of the “internal calmness and peacefulness,” prevention of crime, public health, weights and measures, the quality of food, construction of houses according to the confirmed plan, general cleanliness and fire protection.^[49]

MOLDAVIA AND WALLACHIA AS POLIZEISTAAT

It is impossible to address here the larger issues of political reform that paralleled the creation of the Danubian quarantine and the reordering of the police institutions and led to the adoption of the Organic Statutes of Moldavia and Wallachia of 1831-1832. However, a brief comment on the place of police institutions in the general reform process is in order. The Statutes have sometimes been referred to as the first constitution of modern Romania. However, such a designation can be highly misleading for it presupposes a retrospective reading of the political realities of the late nineteenth century nation-state into a historical period when the Romanian national project was only emerging. Moreover, from the point of view of the constitutional history of the nation-state, the Organic Statutes are seen as instruments of Russian imperial expansion and hegemony, introducing the salutary principles of the division of powers between the hospodars and the boyar assemblies in order to sow discord amidst the Romanian elite, a Machiavellian divide et impera vested in Montesquieuian political philosophy.^[50] Such a perspective would probably not be widely off the mark, but it would make it hard to explain, at the same time, why the Organic Statutes, in the words of the doyen of late nineteenth-century Romanian historiography A. D. Xenopol, “introduced for the first time in Romanian political life the idea of public interest” and, ultimately, “the idea of state… in its modern form.”^[51]
Indeed, a comprehensive reordering of the public administration accompanied by meticulous regulation of office work and procedures constituted another aspect of Polizeistaat policies, alongside anti-epidemic measures and the reform of police institutions. These reforms were a response to the problem of bribery and corruption^[52] that Russian officials sought to solve in a characteristically bureaucratic fashion - rationalization of local administration. The existing local administration, which was previously characterized by the concentration of virtually all authority in the hands of ispravniks, in accordance with the Organic Statutes was divided between the would-be ministries of Interior and Finances. The former consolidated its control over the ispravniks, who lost their financial and most of their judicial functions, while the latter subordinated the sameşi, who previously used to levy and collect taxes arbitrarily, but now, at least in theory, became simple executors of budget law, fully accountable to the Great Vestiar (Minister of Finance), who in turn reported yearly to the Ordinary Assembly.^[53] The reforms of the judiciary were based on the principle of separation of administrative and judicial powers and abolished the retroactivity of sentences, the sales of judicial offices as well as the notorious “payments for justice.”^[54] The Organic Statutes also reorganized the domain of taxation, seeking to limit arbitrary treatment of the peasants by either landlords or local officials in accordance with the precepts of Austrian bauernschutz policy, and in anticipation of the reform of lustratsii in the western region of the Russian empire.^[55] To this end, a fiscal census of the local population was undertaken revealing a substantial number of unregistered taxpayers and the old system of taxation units (ludori) and exempt individuals (scutelnici) was replaced by direct per capita taxation. As a result, the peasants’ obligations to the landlord and the state increased, but, at the same time, they became more precisely defined in the legislation, which, theoretically, was supposed to alleviate their burden.
While there is no indication that either Kiselev or any of his subordinates specifically referred to eighteenth century cameralist literature, the reorganization of public administration and taxation in Moldavia and Walachia that they oversaw bears unmistakable similarity to the administrative practices of Prussian, Austrian and Russian enlightened despotism. The absence of the “collegial principle” characteristic of the eighteenth century constitutes perhaps the only major difference. At the same time, although the attribution of functions to individual officials brings the Organic Statutes closer to nineteenth century “bureaucratic absolutism,” it would be wrong to call it a “bureaucratic” creation par excellence. After all, Kiselev and his subordinates were either military men or diplomats, not professional civil servants. The fact that they were given the task of overseeing the transformation of local institutions was quite in line with the general practice of appointment of military men to civil service functions that characterized the “pre-bureaucratic” stage in Russian institutional development in the eighteenth – early nineteenth centuries. This practice generated “enlightened” civil service dilettantes, which explains the peculiarities of transfer of administrative practices and technologies of government in Eastern Europe. In the conditions of a Eurasian empire lacking the personnel and dense infrastructure of small German territorial states, the Polizeistaat was not so much a systematically reproduced “model,” as a specific “culture” shared by the members of the ruling class. It was a peculiar set of assumptions about rational and orderly government that left its imprint even on the more pragmatic measures adopted by imperial officials in pursuit of “traditional” interests. The Polizeistaat was thus not so much the manifestation of Russia’s leap into modernity that the Romanian principalities were now supposed to accomplish under its guidance, as it was the marker of cultural difference between the two elites (comprising their self-perception and the perception of the other) that was perhaps the most salient feature of this imperial encounter.
At a more pragmatic level, the ideas of “public interest” and “state” that Xenopol identified as the positive aspects of the Organic Statutes, rather paradoxically, were the outcomes of the pursuit of narrow interests of the empire that sought hegemony in the region and was intent to eliminate potential challenges to it. The most urgent goal was to prevent epidemics that threatened the imperial army, but that proved to be impossible without a large reform of the police institutions. Yet, to make the reordered police institutions functional, it had to relay on an administrative apparatus that was purged of corruption and abusive practices and that necessitated a reform of public service. The general overhaul of the public service was, in turn, impossible without the transformation of the taxation system and redefinition of the relationship between the state, the landlords and the peasants. Although these reforms were influenced by the conflicts within the political elites as well as social tensions between boyar landowners and the peasantry during the 1820s, one should not overlook their functional role within the structure of imperial policy that made the achievement of a narrower and more pragmatic goal conditional on a wider institutional transformation. While the pursuit of the common good postulated by the discourse of Russia’s “civilizing mission” in Moldavia and Wallachia should not be taken at face value, this explains why the imperial officials did not and, in a sense, could not limit themselves to some narrow pragmatic measures in the interests of the army without tackling larger problems that concerned the broader population of the principalities, i. e. the “public interest.” By the same account, the policies that envisioned hegemony of a “traditional” empire ultimately contributed to the institutionalization of a “modern” nation-state.
The reorganization of police institutions addressed in this article provides an alternative entry into the problem of general political reform in Moldavia and Wallachia that constituted its overall context. The legislation regulating the function of police institutions was either directly incorporated into the text of the Statutes (as the quarantine and the militia réglements) or was adopted immediately afterwards (the Bucharest, Iaşi and other city statutes). Therefore, instead of being treated as bizarre constitutions of a would-be nation-state^[56] the Organic Statutes of Moldavia and Wallachia should be seen as the embodiments of a Polizeistaat tradition. The holistic and all-embracing character of the Organic Statutes and the policy of Russian authorities in 1829-1834 make perfect sense when seen as related to the ideal of comprehensive regulation characterizing the eighteenth-century police. In fact, they represent an attempt to utilize the institutions and practices of early modern police for the needs of a continental empire which sought to transform a heterogeneous frontier into a controllable buffer zone.
The conceptual link between political modernity and the nation-state was constituted within national historiographies through retrospective and retroactive incorporation of institutions and practices produced by pre-modern policies that thereupon were viewed as elements of a nation-state avant la lettre. This is precisely the procedure that has to be undone in order to demystify the passage to modernity. The identity and legitimacy of modern nation-states has been sustained through the fantasy of radical rupture with “traditional” society. The obverse of the discovery of “anticipations” or “symptoms” of modernity in a pre-modern institutional context is the tendency to treat “modern” institutions and practices as proofs of the departure from the past. To claim that both are illusory does not mean that we have remained “traditional.” Rather it is to suggest that we have never yet become “modern.”