Russia: People and Empire: 1552–1917

The police as ‘the soul of citizenship’: a conception which seemed less strange, perhaps, in the age of enlightened absolutism than it does now, but one which nevertheless betrays the disjointed nature of Peter’s enterprise. Freedom backed by compulsion; enlightenment bolstered by the convict camp. That was the shadow which hung over not just Peter’s reign, but over Russian civilization throughout most of the next two centuries.

Peter’s own character betrayed this dualism. The most authoritarian of Tsars, he was capable nevertheless of abandoning all the accoutrements of majesty and plunging into an ordinary tavern or workshop, to drink, talk and listen to the gossip and arguments of the common people. An apostle of the latest technology, he also valued popular culture, and would enjoy a folksong and a dance to simple melodies with the meanest of his subjects.

Strangest of all is the element of self-parody and of ritual renunciation in his personality. From time to time, he would solemnly install one of his nobles, Prince Fedor Iurevich Romodanovskii, as Tsar, take an oath of loyalty to him and promise to obey all his orders. One is reminded of Ivan IV renouncing his throne in favour of a Tatar prince. Again, during sviatki, the period between Christmas and New Year, with some of his highest officials, he would enact ‘the most foolish and drunken Synod’. The person chosen as Patriarch would parade with a naked Bacchus on his mitre, ‘his eyes provoking licentiousness’, while all present chanted a mock liturgy: ‘Let Bacchic intoxication be upon you, bring darkness all around you, and let it cause you to tumble and roll, rob you of your reason every day of your life.’

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These and other burlesque entertainments suggest a striking degree of conflict inside Peter’s own personality. His rationalist view of the deity and of his own sovereignty contrasted strongly with the beliefs inculcated in him as a child, and still almost universally held in the society around him. Evidently these contradictions generated within him tensions which he felt able to master only by such paradoxical and at first sight puzzling behaviour.

To change the culture even of an elite is of course more than one ruler can accomplish in his own lifetime. But, however haphazardly, Peter had succeeded in fundamentally redirecting the manners and outlook of what under his shaping had become Russia’s ruling class. At first reluctant converts, they gradually warmed to the new cosmopolitan culture, and even embraced it enthusiastically as a mark of their social status.

In doing so, they distanced themselves from the mass of people, the peasants, townsfolk (except for a very few wealthy merchants) and clergy. In so far as they were not recruited into the army or the construction brigades of St Petersburg, ordinary people were spectators rather than participants in the ‘revolution from above’, and their feelings about it were mixed and often critical. Especially hostile were the Old Believers, already alienated by what they had seen of the secular state under Peter’s more moderate predecessors. Most of his innovations could readily be construed as insults to religion or national tradition or both: the shaving of beards, the instruction to wear ‘German’ or ‘Hungarian’ clothes, the introduction of a new calendar, the encouragement of foreign learning, the admittance of women into social life, the introduction of the ‘soul tax’, the abolition of the Patriarchate, the requirement that priests violate the secrecy of the confessional. His blasphemous orgies seemed to confirm the worst fears. Even his policy of religious toleration, which ostensibly benefited the Old Belief, demonstrated that he was intent on undermining the true faith. The apocalyptically minded decided that he was the Antichrist. Popular woodcuts circulated depicting him with the double-head eagle, the official state insignia, as two horns protruding from his head.

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This was not just popular grumbling and irreverence. As under Ivan IV, many peasants fled from the new burdens. In the summer of 1707, when an armed detachment went under Prince Iu.V. Dolgorukii to look for absconded peasants on the Don, they were waylaid and massacred by some two hundred Cossacks, under their ataman, Kondratii Bulavin. This was the signal for a general campaign against official search parties, in the course of which Bulavin was elected head of all the Don Cossacks and concluded a treaty with the Zaporozhian Cossacks. Claiming the heritage of Sten’ka Razin, he advanced with his troops through the districts of Voronezh, Tambov and Borisoglebsk, gaining support from peasants for his appeal to come to the defence of ‘the house of the Holy Mother of God and the Orthodox Church against the infidel and Greek teachings which the boyars and the Germans wish to impose upon us’.

(#litres_trial_promo) At its height the Bulavin insurrection threatened the fortresses of Azov and Taganrog, and thus the whole precarious Russian position on the Black Sea. Peter had to divert dragoons he could ill afford from the Swedish front in order to put down the revolt.

Confirmation of Peter’s diabolic status seemed to be delivered by his treatment of his son and heir Alexei. A physically frail and pious youth, Alexei was about as unlike his father as could be imagined. His mother, Evdokia, had been suspected of complicity in the strel’tsy revolt of 1698 and banned to a nunnery, something which Alexei never forgave. At the height of his personal conflict with Peter, Alexei fled abroad. He was induced to return by false promises, investigated in the Preobrazhenskii Prikaz (special investigatory chamber), and died under torture. In essence, his father murdered him, leaving the empire without an heir. Peter subsequently compounded this crime with his decree of 1722 stipulating that each ruler should appoint his own successor – something he signally failed to do himself before his sudden death in 1725.

It is no wonder that historians, Russian historians in particular, have been so divided in their opinions of Peter I. On the one hand, he did what was urgently needed if Russia was to remain an empire, which necessarily entailed becoming a European great power. At the same time, the institutions he created brought profound discord into Russian society, or perhaps it would be truer to say, enormously intensified discord which already existed. The cameralist state, imported from Germany and Sweden, with its impersonality, its functionalism, meritocratic hierarchy and strict regulation, differed fundamentally from the inherited kinship structures of Muscovy, with their personalism, informality, patriarchal hierarchy and absence of functional differentiation. His reforms took the first step towards creating a privileged ruling class, based on private landed wealth, and with a culture alien to that of the common people and of the clergy. At a time when, in other European countries, the distance between popular and elite culture was beginning to be reduced, in Russia it was immeasurably widened.

Of course, the revolution which he aimed at was far from complete at his death. Old attitudes persisted for many decades to come, and under his weaker successors aristocratic (the word ‘boyar’ now at last seems inappropriate) clans feuded for domination of the ship of state. All the same, there were enough highly-placed people who had internalized Peter’s attitudes to ensure that his reforms outlasted him. Unlike after the reign of Ivan IV, there was no disintegration, no Time of Troubles. But by the same token, there was no reaching across the great social divide. On the contrary the chasm continued to widen during the eighteenth and first half of the nineteenth century. Peter had set Russia on the road to what the Marquis de Custine a century later prophesied would be ‘the revolt of the bearded against the shaven’.

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3 Assimilating Peter’s Heritage (#ulink_bbcaea26-6588-518e-ada1-0b217b144280)

In spite of the radicalism of Peter the Great’s reforms and the widespread opposition to them in the church and among the common people, there was never any serious question of going back on them, even during the succeeding decades (1725–1762) of relatively weak rulers, disputed successions and attempted coups. Fundamentally, that was because they proved successful at promoting Russia’s great power status, by making it possible to raise, equip and finance an army and navy.

They were also in the interests of the ruling class, the newly consolidated dvorianstvo, which, after some initial foot-dragging, was well aware of the fact. Many of the families which dominated Russia before Peter’s reign continued to do so afterwards, and continued to exploit the influence of their kith and kin. The early stages of meritocratic reform often prove to be in the interests of existing elites, since their wealth and connections secure them access to the best education and to the vital early stages of a high-flying career (the Northcote-Trevelyan reforms in the nineteenth-century British civil service had the same effect).

Those elite families were sorely needed, owing to the ambivalence of Peter’s reforms. On the one hand, impersonal raison d’état was proclaimed, on the other personal intervention was constantly needed to ensure its application in practice. Rational rule had to be implemented by personal authority, or nothing would work as intended. So the ‘state’, if it existed at all in this period, consisted of changing but not wholly unstable constellations of powerful clans, given legitimacy by promotion on merit, and held together by kinship, by symbolic devotion to the autocrat, by military uniforms, a new semi-Germanic administrative terminology and an increasingly exclusive culture borrowed from the royal courts of Europe.

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It would be wrong, however, to overestimate the effectiveness of Russian state authority in the mid-eighteenth century. In most respects the ‘state’ (to use what may be too pretentious a word) was still like a rickety framework in a howling gale, subject to all the chance cross-winds of court intrigue and kinship feuding. It was a mere skeleton whose flesh and sinews consisted of the clannish interests of the great families who provided its continuity and its motive power. As for local government, it was notional only, feeble to the point of being non-existent: for lack of suitable personnel to staff its offices, it lapsed back into the hands of the arbitrary and venal military governors from whom Peter had tried to rescue it.

Nor was there a consistent code of laws, only the chancery records of a succession of hasty, sometimes contradictory and often ill-worded decrees. In these circumstances law was, in the words of a popular saying, ‘like the shafts of a cart: wherever the horse pulls, that’s where it goes’ – the horse being anyone in authority. To make matters worse, Peter himself had neglected to apply the elementary adhesive of a binding law of succession. In the absence of stable laws or institutions, not only peasants, but nobles as well could not feel fully secure in their persons or properties unless they had protection from a powerful patron, a member of one of the leading families, with access to the court.

That is why the forty years after Peter’s death were so insecure and turbulent, with a succession of monarchs dependent on the fortuitous constellation of power in the capital’s Guards regiments. The Guards regiments were the kernel of Imperial Russia in the eighteenth century. Stationed in the capital, with unbroken access to the court even for junior officers, they constituted for much of the century a police force as well as a personal bodyguard and a crack military formation. They were the nurseries of the power and patronage which not only decided crucial questions of domestic and foreign policy, but which made and broke rulers themselves. Controlling the disposition of physical force in the capital city, they took a decisive part in every monarchical succession from the death of Peter the Great in 1725 to the assassination of Paul I in 1801. They were the mechanism by which the leading families ensured that autocracy worked on the whole in their interests and not against it.

The one serious attempt to challenge the autocratic superstructure came in 1730, on the sudden death of the adolescent Peter II. Members of the Supreme Privy Council (which had been set up in 1727, in the absence of a dominating monarch, to coordinate the executive) offered the crown to Peter the Great’s niece, Anna, Duchess of Kurland, on certain konditsii (conditions): the monarch must not marry or appoint her own heir, and in future must obtain the consent of the Council before deciding questions of war and peace, raising taxes, spending revenue, making high appointments in government or court, and making land grants. Members of the nobility were not to be deprived of life, honour or property without trial.

In the longer term, these konditsii might have formed the basis on which a constitutional monarchy could have evolved: analogous charters had had this effect in several European countries from the late middle ages onwards. Their immediate effect, however, would have been to subject Russia to oligarchic rule, with the monarch dependent on the few well-placed families which dominated the Supreme Privy Council, currently the Golitsyns and Dolgorukiis. Most of the service nobility was opposed to the idea, not only because they did not want to have to crawl to the Golitsyns and Dolgorukiis, but also because they were mindful of Russia’s vulnerability when plagued by the feuds of boyar clans. With their support Anna demonstratively tore up the konditsii and assumed the throne as an autocrat.

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There was no other attempt in the eighteenth century to limit the monarchy nor till after 1762 to reform the institutions of state. Even during the relatively protracted reign of Empress Elizabeth (1741–62) power remained in the hands of aristocratic clans and their associated Guards regiments, unrestrained by the rule of law or powerful social institution.

The first ruler who tried to continue Peter the Great’s work and to provide Russia with institutions more able to bear the weight of a huge empire was Catherine II – who, however, came to the throne in time-honoured fashion as beneficiary of a coup directed against her husband, Peter III. She saw the weaknesses of the Russian polity clearly enough. The voracious if indiscriminate reading which filled the vacant evenings of a loveless marriage had taught her that the remedy lay in promulgating good laws and founding good institutions. It is true that these laws and institutions took on a subtly different purpose in her mind from the one she found in her texts. The French and Italian Enlightenment theorists she studied – Montesquieu, Beccaria, Diderot – were thinking in terms of countries with old established institutions whose legal rights needed to be reaffirmed and buttressed about by liberal theory against the threat of an increasingly assertive monarchy. In Russia, however, law and intermediate institutions were so weak that, far from resisting the monarchy, they scarcely had backbone enough even to act as a passive transmitter of the ruler’s will. To strengthen law and institutions was above all else to strengthen the monarchy, and this was Catherine’s purpose.

For her this was doubly important because of her parlous individual situation. She occupied a throne to which she had no legitimate claim and so she urgently needed to broaden the circle of her supporters beyond the coterie of Guards officers who had acted on her behalf, beyond even the social class of which they were members. The best way to do this was to create institutions which would outlast the designs of even the most tenacious court clique, and laws which would be widely acceptable and might become permanent.

It so happened that P.I. Shuvalov, principal adviser to Empress Elizabeth, had convened a Law Codification Commission in 1754 to try and bring order to Peter Ps peremptory and improvised lawmaking and coordinate it with the preceding Law Code (Ulozhenie) of 1649. Shuvalov’s commission had been intended to examine the state of the law and make recommendations in four areas: (i) the rights of subjects according to their estate; (ii) court structures and procedures; (iii) property and contract law; (iv) punishments and penalties. The commission completed its work on the last three subjects and reported to Elizabeth, but its recommendations were not followed up, for reasons which are unclear, and the commission was abolished shortly after Catherine came to the throne.

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It is not clear that Catherine even read the materials of the commission, yet when she began her own work of codification in 1767, the principles she enunciated were very similar to its findings, and she herself called an analogous commission, with the same name and same remit. She composed for its consideration a Nakaz, an Instruction, really a set of principles, which reflected her own opinions on the political and legal structure desirable for Russia, though she did not release the final draft till she had had time to consult her advisers about the text.

Citing the Christian principle of doing ‘all the Good we possibly can to each other’, she declared it ‘the Wish of every worthy Member of Society to see his Native Country raised to the highest degree of Prosperity, Glory, Happiness and Peace’, and ‘to see every Individual of his fellow-Citizens protected by Laws, which so far from injuring him, will shield him from every Attempt against his Welfare, and opposite to this Christian Precept’.

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Her version of law was a restricted and étatiste one compared with that of her Enlightenment mentors. In her eyes law was not an impersonal force adjudicating between autonomous and sometimes competing social institutions, but an instrument through which the ruler exercises his or her authority and through which moral precepts are put into practice. ‘In a State, that is in a Collection of People living in Society where Laws are established, Liberty can consist only in the Ability of doing what everyone ought to desire, and in not being forced to do what should not be desired.’

(#litres_trial_promo) This was the version of law and statehood propounded not by the French philosophes, but by the German cameralists, especially by Leibniz and Wolff. In this vision, the aim of law was to enable the authorities to provide for the well-being and security of their subjects. For the same purpose, subjects were to have their own functions, and would belong to social institutions which would enable them the better to fulfil those functions and to partake of the general well-being. There was no notion here of natural law, of inherent freedom or of a social contract.

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The members of Catherine’s Law Code Commission were elected in local gatherings of the relevant estates: the nobility, townsfolk, state peasants, Cossacks, odnodvortsy (descendants of the militarized peasants who had manned the frontier lines) and non-Russians. Conspicuous by their absence were the serfs and the clergy. One might argue that the serfs were represented by their landlords, but the absence of the clergy can only mean that Catherine did not regard them as members of secular society, an astonishing lapse in view of the fact that she had just deprived them of the means – their landed wealth – of maintaining a separate, spiritual arm of government. [See chapter on church, p. 231]

Catherine’s agenda was to draw up a law code along the lines indicated in her Nakaz. Now the deputies brought with them their own nakazy or ‘cahiers’, requests and statements of grievance originating from their electors. When the Commission first met in July 1767 to discuss them, it soon transpired that there was little meeting of minds. Each social estate concentrated in its presentation on its own narrowly conceived interests, insensitive to the broad vision of creative statesmanship laid before them by their monarch. The nobility wanted to restrict entry to its own estate, strengthen its property rights, secure its monopoly of higher civil and military posts and be freed from corporal punishment. Merchants requested a monopoly of trade in the towns and the right to own serfs. The peasants asked for relief from taxation and other burdens. Few deputies displayed an awareness of the overall structure of the state, which in any case most of them clearly expected to remain unchanged: their efforts were thus directed at obtaining what they could within the existing system rather than recommending fundamental reform.

(#litres_trial_promo) The contrast is striking with the French Estates-General, which, meeting only some twenty years later, came up with radical programmes of reform, while the ‘third estate’ projected a vision of itself as the bearer of popular sovereignty, as ‘the nation’.

For most of its sessions the Commission was divided into subcommittees, one of which was specifically charged to look into how a ‘third estate’ or ‘middle sort of people’ might be created. These sub-committees carried out some useful work in assimilating existing laws and drafting new ones. But the General Assembly ceased its sessions late in 1768, with the outbreak of war against Turkey: since many of the deputies belonged to the army, they had to report for service. Many of the sub-committees continued their work for a year or two longer, and some of them completed drafts on their sphere of legislation. Although there was now no General Assembly to refer these drafts to, they were not necessarily wasted, since Catherine later made use of them in elaborating laws. Furthermore, their materials were employed in a ‘Description of the Russian Empire and its Internal Administration and Legal Enactments’, drawn up by the Procurator-General and published in 1783: this was the closest thing Russia had to a law code for the next fifty years.

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Although the Turkish war genuinely precipitated the suspension of the Commission, it did not necessarily entail its abolition. Catherine let it fade away because she was disappointed by its work, especially perhaps by the fact that its members showed so little awareness of the needs of society as a whole and so little readiness to exercise self-restraint for the general good. She decided, probably rightly, that, before positing common interests which did not exist, she should put more backbone into a fragmented society by creating institutions which would enable citizens to work together at least within their own estates and orders. In a sense she was endeavouring actually to create social institutions which had hitherto been embryonic or non-existent.

With that in mind, during the rest of her reign she did much to impart substance to what had been an atomized society and polity, laying the foundation for what she herself called a ‘civil society’. Like Peter, she believed that the monarch should make laws, but unlike him that the monarch should also be bound by laws once made, supervising the general process of administration, but not interfering with it at every step, and intervening only if urgency or the complexity of the issues demanded it. She did something to stimulate a science of jurisprudence in Russia, so that law and administrative practice could become regular and stable, a permanent factor which citizens could rely on in their daily activity, especially in economic affairs where predictability is so important. She read and annotated Blackstone’s ‘Commentary on the Laws’: he saw the guarantee of legality as lying not so much in representative institutions as in having rational laws backed up by strong and stable authorities.

(#litres_trial_promo) She sent young nobles abroad, mainly to German universities, to study the theory and practice of jurisprudence there (among them, as it happened, was Alexander Radishchev, who derived from his studies much more than she bargained for – an indication of the ambiguous results of her initiative).

To the same end she strengthened the Senate’s role as supervisor of the administration and the law, though without going so far as to make it a ‘repository of law’ on the model of the French parlements, as she had once contemplated. Even more important was her strengthening of local government. European Russia was divided into gubernii (provinces), with a population of 200,000–300,000 and uezdy (districts) of 20,000–30,000. Each guberniia was to be overseen by a governor responsible to the Senate and having the right of personal report to the Emperor; he would be assisted by a provincial administrative board to handle matters like tax-collection, policing and trade monopolies. The higher administrative staff of these institutions was to come from the nobility, a provision intended to guarantee their probity and professional competence. To fortify the nobles’ pride and corporate identity she granted them a Charter freeing them from corporal punishment and giving them the right to organize in local associations at the provincial and district level: these associations would then elect key local government officials. [For other provisions of the Charter, see Part 3, Chapter 1.]

Catherine promulgated a similar City Charter [see Part 3, Chapter 5]. This was part of a complex of measures aimed at encouraging manufacture and trade, reducing their direct dependence on the state and facilitating their penetration throughout the empire. Before her accession internal tariffs had been abolished (in 1753), and Catherine followed this up by measures to improve the provision of credit through a law to introduce bills of exchange, improve roads and canals, ease passport restrictions and enable both nobles and peasants to trade more widely (a measure which was however much resented by the merchants, since it infringed their monopoly of urban trade).

(#litres_trial_promo) Nobles were given more secure property rights not only to the topsoil of their land, but to mineral resources which might be found below. All these measures were an important contribution towards making the empire an economic unit, and towards giving all classes of the population access to trade and manufacture on the basis of secure property rights.

She also contemplated a Charter for the State Peasants, which would have given them corporate status through their village communities, as well as secure property rights and the possibility of defending them before law courts. The draft was completed and ready to be promulgated: why it was never issued remains uncertain, though it seems likely that Catherine was deterred by the thought that its promulgation was bound to awaken dangerous hopes among the private serfs.

(#litres_trial_promo) It was potentially extremely important, for it would have been the first occasion on which a Russian monarch accorded full property rights to peasants. Taken together, Catherine’s Charters constitute her version of a society ruled by law; but this makes the exclusion of the state peasants (not to mention the serfs) an even more glaring anomaly.

The disordered and unpredictable condition of the laws was matched by the state of the empire’s finances, which proved a lasting obstacle to attempts to mobilize the resources of population and territory. The fundamental problem was that, at least until the late eighteenth century, Russia was straining itself to the utmost to sustain the role of European great power, and could do so only by exploiting the population in ways which prevented them from deploying their own economic enterprise.