The successful performance of Petro Zavadovsky in the field of education prompted Catherine II to appoint him Chief Director of Public Schools. In 1784 he chaired the commission in charge of building St. Isaac’s Cathedral. It took twelve years to construct the majestic edifice of the cathedral.
In 1786 he became a member of the national road-construction commission. Petro Zavadovsky also pioneered the establishment of a system of state banks in Russia and promoted the centralization and revitalization of the empire’s finances. In 1781 he had become governor of the Saint Petersburg Loan Bank of the Nobility, drew up the charter of the State Loan Bank approved by the empress, and participated in the commission that studied Count Shuvalov’s plan on assignation banks, where he suggested that these be pulled together into the State Assignation Bank with branches in Saint Petersburg and Moscow. Zavadovsky gradually began to again reinforce his prestige and position at court. On August 31, 1786, he was appointed member of the Supreme Royal Court Council. Some royal instructions went to the Senate directly via him. He also processed and forwarded instructions about women’s educational institutions. On August 31, 1787, as war broke out with Turkey, Zavadovsky was appointed member of the Special Council. Our hero’s rapid promotion and growing influence at court began to arouse discontent among his contemporaries. Even the poet Derzhavin ridiculed in his ode For Happiness the intricate speech style of the “upstart” who “replaced his Ukrainian topknot with fashionable French curls.”
At fifty, Zavadovsky married the twenty-year-old beauty, Countess Apraksina, a relative of Kyrylo Razumovsky. This marriage strengthened his clout in circles of the top aristocracy. However, family life was far from happy. Many of the couple’s children died early: only five out of ten survived. As courtly intrigues and circumstance continued to depress him, he began to ask for resignation “for reasons of health,” but Catherine II refused even to listen to this.
Fate again surprised Zavadovsky. As Catherine II passed away, Emperor Paul I showed benevolence toward him, much to the wonder of many, in the very first hours of his reign. On April 5, 1797, the day of his coronation, the emperor bestowed on Zavadovsky the title of Count of the Russian Empire, an Order of St. Andrew, and an Order of Anna, first degree. He continued to sit in the Supreme Royal Court Council, Senate, and the Education Society, and to run the Loan Bank. In 1798 Paul I appointed him chief governor of the Assignation Bank. After the death of his friend and compatriot Prince A. A. Bezborodko, Zavadovsky remained practically alone at court in a state of constant suspense, “not knowing where the thunder will sound from.” Indeed, in November 1799 he fell victim to palace intrigues, following which the emperor dismissed him from office. As the disgraced count was about to leave for his manor, the emperor asked to him to stay behind in the capital. Nevertheless, Zavadovsky did go to Lialychi, where he was placed by the emperor’s order under secret surveillance. Here, far from the metropolitan bustle Zavadovsky spent the remaining years of Paul I’s reign. As life seemed to come to an end, on a March day of 1801 the count received a missive from the new Emperor Alexander I, in which the latter thanked Zavadovsky for impeccable service “to the Fatherland’s benefit” and invited him to the capital. The sixty-three-year-old “hermit” railed against the vagaries of life and his hard lot, but still he was pleased to receive the favors of the sovereign. Zavadovsky hastened to the capital.
Russia was entering the nineteenth century with a system of public administration that did not meet the requirements of the time. Highest on the agenda was streamlining the empire’s legislation. As early as May 1801 Count Petro Zavadovsky was appointed chairman of the legislative commission, which demonstrated Alexander I’s special trust in him. In addition to drafting laws, the commission sought to reshape the highest administrative bodies and draw up a reform of the Senate. However, the tsar rejected the project as too radical.
The young emperor often assumed an extremely unfriendly attitude toward Catherinian statesmen but, at the same time, taking into account political realities and not without pressure of the old guard, he turned over the daily administrative routine to experienced bureaucrats of his grandmother’s age. On September 8, 1802, after protracted debates and disputes, Alexander I signed an ukase on the rights and duties of the Senate and a manifest on the establishment of ministries. On the same day, Zavadovsky became minister of public education. The ministry was in charge of the Academy of Sciences, universities and other educational institutions, printing facilities, censorship, publication of periodicals, public libraries, and museums.
Everybody was free to visit the minister, he had no visiting hours as such; he always listened to visitors benevolently, indulgently, and attentively. Speaking benevolently even to lower-rank bureaucrats, Zavadovsky was especially courteous with his fellow countrymen of all ranks.
The ministry managed to achieve initial successes in a short time. Each of the provincial centers now had a university-controlled school or a gymnasium that was granted full autonomy and the right of censorship. Parish schools emerged everywhere. On November 5, 1804, the Statute of University-Subordinated Educational Institutions was approved, thus establishing a network of secondary and primary schools. To raise the prestige of high-school education, P. V. Zavadovsky enrolled his ten and eleven year-old sons, who were junior chamberlains in a gymnasium, which evoked the criticism of the Petersburg nobility.
May 20, 1803, saw the reestablishment of the Teacher Training Seminary, soon to be transformed into the Pedagogical Institute. It is on the basis of the Kazan Gymnasium, the empire’s only secondary educational institution of the kind, that Kazan University was founded in 1804. A year later, in 1805, a university was established in Kharkiv.
The universities’ academic and administrative setup was based on the 1804 statute drafted by Vasily Karazin, founder of Kharkiv University. The most important principle of this statute was university autonomy, which meant the election of rectors, pro-rectors, and professors by secret ballot, the right of a university to award academic degrees and set up departments, etc. These statutes turned universities into centers for managing all educational institutions of a district. Every university set up a pedagogical institute and a school committee to run high, district, and civil schools.
Zavadovsky’s eight-year tenure as minister of education was marked by the establishment of a long series of public-outreach organizations and literary and philanthropic societies. A new liberal book censorship charter was drawn up and approved on July 9, 1804, under the influence of Enlightenment ideas. Feeble in body but sound in mind, he began to broach the question of resignation in 1809. On April 11, 1810, the office of minister of public education was assigned to the Ukrainian-born Count Aleksei Razumovsky, the son of Ukraine’s last Hetman Kyrylo Razumovsky, until then governor of Moscow University.
The 72-year-old P. V. Zavadovsky assumed the largely ceremonial office of chairman of the State Council Law Department. He held this post until the end of his life. The statesman died on January 10, 1812, at the age of 73. According to the prominent historian of Russian education, Academician M.I.Sukhomlinov, “The time P.V.Zavadovsky headed the Ministry of Public Education will always remain a brilliant epoch in the history of public education in Russia.”
