Russia: People and Empire: 1552–1917

Like most eighteenth-century European states, Russia had no unified state budget, merely a collection of estimates or recorded expenditures for various departments, which could be enlarged for the requirements of the court and imperial favourites, and were occasionally reduced by loans from them. From the information we have, at the time of Peter’s death in 1725 military and naval expenditure made up about 70% of the treasury’s outgoings (6.5 million rubles out of 9.1 million). Most of the new expenditure arose from the introduction of the recruitment system, the creation of large infantry regiments and the introduction of improved firearms, ammunition and artillery.

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The introduction of the poll tax had been essential to cope with these unprecedented expenditures. It both simplified the tax system and made it much more productive, increasing revenues appreciably. Local branches of the Kamer-Kollegiia were set up all over the country, and local landowners and army officers were mobilized for the task. Since landowners were now in effect agents for both taxation and recruitment, their practical powers over the serfs were greatly augmented. Army units were used to back them up with coercion, when that was needed, as was frequently the case.

This was a remarkably centralized fiscal system for a country with such tenuous communications, and it is scarcely surprising that it did not always function as planned. Arrears and late payments were normal. Peasants and posad people (townsfolk) quite often refused point-blank to pay the levies due from them and were sometimes prepared to bolster their cause by armed resistance. Alternatively, following a long tradition, they might abandon their holdings and flee to the frontiers of south and east, to fill the ranks of Cossacks, odnodvortsy (single householders) and Old Believer communities.

(#litres_trial_promo) Thus heavy-handed tax-collecting undermined the very wealth it was supposed to tap.

By the middle of the century, when expenditure increased sharply, especially during the Seven Years’ War, it was obvious that more money could not be raised through the poll tax, and the authorities decided instead to cover the chronic deficits by increasing indirect taxes, the most remunerative of which was on alcoholic liquor, and by issuing paper money. These two methods – debauching the people and debauching the currency, Keynes might have called them-proved addictive [!] and lasted in one case well into the nineteenth century, in the other right up to 1917.

Apart from brief and not very successful experiments at direct administration, the state liquor monopoly was farmed out, and was a source of enrichment to its agents – officials, landowners, merchants and publicans – right up to the 1860s, when it was replaced by an excise levy. Between 1724 and 1759, the revenue from the sale of liquor rose from 11% to 21% of the state’s income, while by the 1850s it had reached about 40% of the total, declining to about a third in the 1880s.

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It would be an exaggeration, but not an absurd one, to say that the empire was kept financially afloat on the proceeds of the drunkenness of the people. It was naturally far easier to raise revenue from thirsty drinkers than by means of punitive expeditions from reluctant poll-tax payers. Russian popular custom demanded bouts of heavy drinking at times of celebration, whether christenings, weddings and funerals or public festivals. Not to consume huge quantities of alcohol on such occasions, often over several days, was to render oneself liable to ridicule or worse. With the growth of towns and of migratory work during the nineteenth century, a new and probably more pernicious drinking culture took hold, involving casual heavy consumption in taverns with workmates on pay day, without the relatively long periods of abstinence in between such as marked rural customs. The state deliberately took advantage of these habits to augment its income – which meant in turn that it came to have a stake in popular drunkenness and even alcoholism.

It also had a stake in the corruption of its own officials. The liquor farm was auctioned out every four years, on which occasions the prospective farmers (otkupshchiki), to win the franchise, would undertake to sell vodka at approved (low) prices while generating maximum revenues for the state. In practice it was impossible for them to keep these promises without resorting to illegal methods, for example, adulteration, shortweight or claiming to have only expensive liquors in stock when by law they were obliged to have ordinary ones always available for sale. Provincial officials often considered bribes from publicans for indulgence over unavoidable abuses a normal and regular part of their income, which in many cases roughly doubled their meagre official salaries. As one commentator put it, ‘the police officials are themselves farmed out to the tax farmers’.

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The Ministry of Finance admitted as much in a circular of 1859, which instructed governors to turn a blind eye to abuses. ‘A certain increase in the sale of improved beverages at higher prices does not breach the tax farm regulations and should not be regarded as an abuse on the part of the farmers, but is rather the consequence of the calculations necessary for the successful transfer to the Treasury of 366,745,056 silver rubles, which the farmers are obliged to surrender over the present four-year period.’

(#litres_trial_promo) As Herzen remarked, ‘Who can buy from the government a fixed quantity at a fixed price, sell it to the people without raising its price, and pay the government ten times as much? Of course, having made such deals with the tax farmers, the government not only cannot prosecute them for abuses, but is actually obliged to protect them … The government is consciously robbing the people, and then dividing up the spoils with the tax farmers and others who have participated in the crime.’

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Corruption, then, was not just a side-effect of the liquor tax system. It was a necessary consequence of the state’s desperate need to raise cash in a still largely natural economy. One should not regard these expedients as all that unusual: both ancient Rome and 17th-18th century France relied on tax-farming for much of their income. But in both cases this reliance was damaging, and in Russia too it obstructed both economic growth and the state’s ability to mobilize real wealth in the interests of the population as a whole. In the words of Charles Tilly, Russia was a state being formed by means which were highly ‘coercion-intensive’, because the country was so poor in capital. The poll tax, paper money and the farming of the liquor; monopoly were natural methods to adopt in the circumstances.

(#litres_trial_promo) That does not alter its obstructive effects.

Paper money (assignaty) was introduced in 1769, and inevitably public confidence in it fell fairly rapidly: by 1801 a paper ruble was worth 66k in silver, by 1817 after the outlays of the Napoleonic war, only 25k. Between 1817 and 1823 the state tried to treat paper rubles frankly as state debt and to buy them back for metal and destroy them, but had not enough bullion to complete the exercise. Another more successful attempt was made between 1839 and 1843, this time issuing bills of credit against them. For a time, gold and silver were the basic means of exchange, but the huge debts of the Crimean War were again covered by the issue of assignaty. Another attempt at monetary reform in the early 1860s ran aground on the expense of suppressing the Polish rebellion.

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The inflated paper money, the excessive taxation, the reliance on heavy popular drinking, the absence of budgetary discipline: all these evils were symptoms of a state which was straining itself beyond what the resources of land and people would bear at the current level of technology. Its demands, moreover, were obstructing the development of an internal market and investment such as might have raised the level of that technology. There was no shortage of proposals about how those resources might be more efficiently and less damagingly mobilized, but the pressure of immediate needs and the dead hand of serfdom ensured that they were never properly followed up.

In some ways Catherine’s most successful economic measures were connected with the colonization of newly opened or under-populated territories, in the Volga basin and the Urals, and especially along the coast of the Black Sea, in so-called Novorossiia or ‘New Russia’, annexed from Turkey between 1774 and 1792. Here, presented with a tabula rasa, the combination of cameralism and mercantilism came into its own, in the absence of competing privileged social groups or corporate organizations. In territories largely unpopulated Catherine was able to attract immigrants both from within Russia and from more crowded European countries, especially from Germany, by offering them land, guarantees of religious toleration, favourable loans and a period of relief from taxation.

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The conquest and successful colonization of this region freed Russia from many of the chronic disadvantages it had suffered for centuries while hemmed in among the forests and on the poor soils of the north. It provided secure and fertile soil and reliable all-year communications with Europe and the Middle East. During the early nineteenth century the production of grain and other agricultural goods from these regions decisively ameliorated the economic situation of the whole empire: in effect they underwrote Russia’s great power status for another century.

The success of the policy was due to the way in which the Russian authorities could easily combine military and civilian arms of government, subordinating both to a rational vision of political economy untrammelled by inherited custom or ethnic prejudice.

(#litres_trial_promo) Here the absence of intermediate associations with their own interests and privileges was a positive advantage.

The military campaigns necessary to conquer these regions imposed, however, a grievous burden on the population, nobles as well as peasants. Catherine’s Turkish wars entailed calling up many able-bodied male peasants, requisitioning horses and grain stores, raising taxes, inflating the currency and in other ways undermining the productive potential of both noble estates and peasant holdings. Perhaps the most dangerous opposition Catherine ever faced was from groups of courtiers and writers centred first around Nikita Panin and later A. R. Vorontsov, and including the heir to the throne: they contended that her aggressive southern policy (which tactfully they identified with court favourites rather than with her personally) was both ruinous to the economy and exposed the northern regions, including the capital city, to strategic dangers, especially from Sweden. While they never gained a predominant influence, these thinkers – who included writers like Shcherbatov, Fonvizin, Radishchev and Novikov – presented a more ‘organic’ alternative to the expansive military and imperial policies of Catherine.

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THE PUGACHEV REBELLION Rationalism and disdain for tradition were the very characteristics which rendered the imperial regime so alien to many of its peoples. The Pugachev rebellion was the last and most serious in a long series of risings which broke out on the south-eastern borders of the Russian state, in that open and ill-defined region where Old Believers and other fugitives from imperial authority rubbed shoulders with non-Russian tribesmen of the steppes, and where Cossacks mounted defence of the Tsar’s fortresses and stockades, while continuing to dream of the brigands’ licence which they had been accustomed to enjoy.

By the mid-eighteenth century the region was being slowly but surely brought under firm imperial control. In fact, one may regard the Pugachev rebellion as the last – but powerful – spasm of peoples whose untrammelled way of life was incompatible with distinct and definite state authority. Nobles were being awarded new estates along and beyond the Volga, and peasants who already lived there were becoming serfs, while new ones were being imported. Obrok (dues in money or kind) was being raised or converted into barshchina (labour dues) by landlords anxious to maximize their revenues and to take advantage of fresh and lucrative trading opportunities. A census and land survey undertaken soon after Catherine II came to power fixed and perpetuated these still relatively unfamiliar arrangements. Also new market opportunities were opening up along the Volga and in the south, putting pressure on more traditional and less productive enterprises.

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A special group in the area were the odnodvortsy, survivors of the peasant-soldiers sent to man the Volga frontier during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and most of them Old Believers. Still in theory freemen, they suffered from the economic competition of the nobles, feared losing their independence and falling into the regular taxpaying estates as state peasants.

The rebellion began among the Yaik Cossacks, whose situation reflected the changes wrought by the ever more intrusive Tsarist state. They had long enjoyed the freedom to run their own affairs, to elect their own leaders and to hunt, fish and raid along the lower Yaik (Ural) River as they chose, in return for acknowledging the Tsar’s ultimate suzerainty and rendering him service when required. A change in this status came in 1748, when the government decreed the establishment of a Yaik Army of seven regiments to man the Orenburg Line currently being built to keep out the Kazakhs and divide them from the Bashkirs. A few Yaik Cossacks among the starshyna (officer class) reacted favourably to this idea, hoping that it would give them secure status within the Table of Ranks; but most rank-and-file Cossacks opposed integration into the Russian army as an infringement of their freedom and of their elective democratic institutions. They also feared being enlisted as common soldiers. Their suspicions were deepened by the proposal in 1769 to form a ‘Moscow legion’ from the smaller Cossack hosts to fight against the Turks. This implied wearing regular uniform, undergoing parade-ground drilling, and worst of all having beards shaven, a prospect deeply repugnant to Old Believers.

Emel’ian Pugachev was discovered and put up as a front man by the disaffected Yaik Cossacks. A Don Cossack by origin, he had deserted from the Russian army and become a fugitive: several times captured, he had always contrived to escape. He assumed the title of the dead Emperor Peter III and espoused the Old Belief. This ruse may have been suggested to him by a Yaik Cossack, but he took on his invented roles with conviction and panache, and he became a figure far outstripping the Cossacks’ ability to manipulate him.

Peter III had aroused hopes among peasants and religious dissidents by some of the measures he had adopted during his brief period as Tsar. He had expropriated church lands and thereby converted ecclesiastical and monastic serfs to the more favourable status of state peasants. He had prohibited the purchase of serfs by non-nobles and halted the ascription of serfs to factories and mines. He had eased the persecution of Old Believers and pardoned fugitive schismatics who voluntarily returned from abroad. His emancipation of the nobility from state service, though not itself of direct benefit to the serfs, seemed to hold out the hope that they too might soon be emancipated from equivalent obligations.

At any rate, the sudden dethronement of Peter III aroused the strongest suspicions among ordinary peasants, especially since his successor was a German, popularly held not to be truly an Orthodox believer. Pugachev was not the first to profit from his reputation by claiming to be the suffering and wandering deposed Peter, ready to lead his people to the restoration of the true faith and of their traditional freedoms. There were a dozen or so such figures between 1762 and 1774. But he was much the most successful, partly by luck, partly by personality and partly because of the breadth of support he received.

The epidemic of pretenders in those years invites reflection. A pretender was a symptom of a serious disorder in the body politic, a disorder which could not be corrected through any institutional procedures, or through the clash of corporate and representative bodies, for these did not exist. For most Russians, if the state was pursuing fundamentally misguided policies, then that was a sign that the Tsar was not really Tsar – that he was an impostor, who had usurped the throne, unordained by God. It followed that the logical mode of opposition was to find the ‘real’ Tsar, the one who carried God’s seal of approval (often thought to be discernible as an actual mark on his body) and to support his claim to the throne. It will be remembered that Ivan IV, when faced with a fundamental challenge to his rule, himself played the comedy of abdicating his royal powers, and even handing them over to another, in order to prove that he was in fact entitled to exercise divinely-ordained authority.

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Pugachev augmented his popularity by projecting an image of a suffering Christ-like leader, who had meekly accepted his dethronement, and instead of resisting had left St Petersburg to wander sadly among his people, learning of their sufferings and grievances. He also claimed to have visited Constantinople and Jerusalem, buttressing his sanctity and authority by these contacts with the second Rome and with the site of Christ’s crucifixion.

The circumstances in which Catherine came to power were calculated to provoke speculation about her legitimacy. She deepened resentment by curbing the freedom of the Cossacks and oppressed still further the already meagre rights of the serfs – for example by forbidding them to present petitions to the sovereign.

Pugachev’s first manifesto, addressed to the Yaik Cossacks and to Tatar and Kalmyk tribesmen, situated his appeal to them within the Muscovite tradition of state service as a legitimate corollary of their freedoms and privileges. He invoked the blood their fathers and grandfathers had shed in the service of previous Tsars, and in return for equivalent service promised them ‘Cossack glory … forever’, forgiveness of sins, and return of their material privileges: ‘the river from the heights to the mouth, and the land and grasses, and money, and lead, and powder, and provision of grain’.

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The major cause of Pugachev’s success was his capacity to appeal not just to any one social group, but to a wide variety of the empire’s discontented, finding enough in common in their grievances and aspirations to forge a sense of common purpose, however temporary it proved to be. The central feature of this appeal was the promise to restore a simplified, just and personalized service state of the kind which since the time of Peter I was gradually being replaced by more distant, impersonal and bureaucratic procedures. He certainly did not renounce autocracy: indeed, his improvised state offices were headed by a War College, on the Petrine model, while he himself granted notional estates and even notional serfs to his favoured followers.

(#litres_trial_promo) The key to his appeal was his rejection of secularism in church and state and his campaign of hatred against the nobility, with their Westernized ways.

The adoption of the Old Belief set the seal on this projected image of an older and better Russia, for it evoked the ancient myth of national unity which the imperial state had disavowed. In his manifesto of 31 July 1774 Pugachev set forth the ideal which he knew would have most appeal to the common people. ‘By God’s grace We, Peter III, Emperor and Autocrat of all the Russias … with royal and fatherly charity grant by this our personal ukaz to all who were previously peasants and subjects of the pomeshchiks to be true and loyal servants of our throne, and we reward them with the ancient cross and prayer, with bearded heads, with liberty and freedom and to be for ever Cossacks, demanding neither recruit enlistment, poll tax or other money dues, and we award them the ownership of the land, of forests, hay meadows and fishing grounds, and with salt lakes, without purchase and without dues in money or in kind, and we free peasants and all the people from the taxes and burdens which were previously imposed by the wicked nobles and mercenary urban judges.’ He further accused the landlords of ‘violating and abusing the ancient tradition of the Christian law, and having with pernicious intent introduced an alien law taken from German traditions, and the impious practice of shaving and other blasphemies contrary to the Christian faith.’

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Pugachev’s use of the symbols of the Old Belief is worth dwelling on, since recent research shows that few members of Old Believer communities actually participated in the rising.

(#litres_trial_promo) His appeal was rather to the numerous Old Believers among the Cossacks and odnodvortsy, and to Russian peasants generally, who he knew would respond strongly to evocations of the ancient Russian myth. The synthesis of Old Believer and Cossack ideals provided an alternative model of Russian nationhood which was deeply attractive in those unsettled regions.

This common appeal overarched specific promises made to each social group that enrolled under his banners: to the Cossacks the restoration of their traditional freedom and their democratic procedures, to the Bashkirs and Kalmyks the return of their tribal lands, to the possessional and ascribed serfs of the Urals factories either a release from their bonded manual labour or an improvement in then-pay and conditions, to the state peasants the easing of burdens and to the private serfs the ousting (and murder) of their landowners.

The Bashkirs were a special case. Their grievances at this time were deep and persistent. They were gradually losing their grazing lands both as a result of peasant settlement, the establishment of factories and of government attempts to persuade or compel them to settle down and take to agriculture. Like the Cossacks, they were being pressed into military service on the frontier, under conditions which were not always congenial. These grievances had stimulated bitter and tenacious armed rebellions in the first half of the eighteenth century.

The diversity of his appeal meant that when Pugachev suffered a serious setback, as he did in the spring of 1774, with the failure to capture Orenburg, and in the summer with the loss of Kazan’, he was able to move into a new area and raise large numbers of fresh supporters with a speed which took the authorities by surprise. His success in the final stages of his campaign, along the mid-and lower Volga, was especially remarkable, for here he managed to spark off a general peasant rising, a jacquerie of French 1789 proportions, merely by his general presence in the region. This was ‘Pugachevsh-china without Pugachev’, as one historian has called it.

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