Russia: People and Empire: 1552–1917

In the towns, as Pugachev’s host approached, the local clergy would come out with the principal townsmen to greet their new ‘Tsar’ with icons, bell-ringing, bread and salt. They would celebrate divine service in honour of their lord Peter Fedorovich, after which the rebels would plunder the state salt and liquor monopoly warehouses, handing out their contents to the citizens, and open up the jails, recruiting fresh troops, or ‘Cossacks’, from among the inmates.

In the villages, minor emissaries sufficed, calling themselves ‘Cossacks of Peter III’, or even the mere rumour that Pugachev was in the vicinity. Peasants would gather at the sound of the tocsin, seize whatever weapons they could lay their hands on – scythes, pitchforks, clubs, and perhaps a musket or two – and march on the local manor house or state kabak. Several thousand nobles and their families, as well as stewards, publicans, tax officials and sometimes clergymen, lost their lives, or would flee at the approach of trouble, only to have their property confiscated and their homes rendered uninhabitable. Pugachev’s emissaries would pronounce the peasants freed from private serfdom and exempt from the poll tax and military recruitment for the next seven years. The odnodvortsy also took a lively part in this stage of the rebellion.

In spite of the destruction he caused, and the fear he inspired both in landowners and the government, Pugachev succeeded in capturing only two major cities (Kazan’ and Saratov) and was unable to hold either for more than a few days. His army, at times numerically quite formidable – at least 10,000 during the siege of Orenburg

(#litres_trial_promo) – was effective against small garrisons and against other disaffected Cossacks. But it proved unequal to the task of countering sizeable units of the regular army. Here the wisdom of the government’s policy of recruiting peasants for life manifested itself fully. Soldiers in the regular army were almost totally immune to Pugachev’s appeals: they did not identify themselves with the serfs’ grievances, still less the Cossack ones, and they were constrained by a harsh and all-embracing discipline. Pugachev’s lightning campaign along the lower Volga, for all its success in attracting peasant support, was in reality a headlong flight before a pursuing army which he knew he could not defeat.

What is perhaps more surprising is that the Don Cossacks also failed to back Pugachev when he approached their region at the end of his campaign. The explanation may be that, since Pugachev was by origin a Don Cossack, they knew very well that he was not Peter III. Furthermore, they had been in revolt themselves a few years earlier, so that their energy had expended itself, and they were under particularly attentive official supervision.

It is significant that, although the Don Cossacks mostly withheld their support from Pugachev, they subsequently celebrated his memory no less than other Cossacks and peasants in songs and folklore.

(#litres_trial_promo) As Marc Raeff has commented: ‘They exemplified the discontent and rebelliousness of a traditional group in the face of transformations wrought (or threatened) by a centralised absolute monarchy. Like the feudal revolts and rebellions in the name of regional particularism and traditional privileges in Western Europe, the Cossacks opposed the title of rational modernisation and the institutionalisation of political authority. They regarded their relationship to the ruler as a special and personal one based on their voluntary service obligations; in return they expected the Tsar’s protection of their religion, traditional social organisation, and administrative autonomy. They followed the promises of a pretender and raised the standard of revolt in the hope of recapturing their previous special relationship and of securing the government’s respect for their social and religious traditions.

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The rebellion deeply troubled Catherine. She tried in her correspondence with foreign powers to belittle it by contemptuous references to ‘le. Marquis Pougatchev’, but actually she feared that, if the movement found a leader from among Russia’s elites, it might succeed in overthrowing her. From the way she had come to the throne she had good cause to know the fragility of her courtiers’ loyalty. She followed the progress of the rebellion closely and took an alert interest in the capture and interrogation of its leaders. In her manifestoes to the population, she displayed a shrewd sense of their psychology by using the old pre-Petrine alphabet.

(#litres_trial_promo) It is uncertain what effect the rebellion had on her later policies, since the reforms she carried out in the later 1770s and 1780s were already being planned before it erupted. It probably reinforced her determination to integrate the Cossacks thoroughly within army and administration, a process which she carried through systematically in the remaining years of her reign.

There can be not much doubt that the rebellion intensified her caution and her distrust of all possible sources of internal disaffection. It had the same effect on her successors too: fears of a possible pugachevshchina figured among the arguments advanced over a possible emancipation of the serfs right up to 1861, nearly a century later.

Perhaps unnecessarily: the evidence suggests that peasants cannot rebel without leaders from outside their ranks. With the Cossacks tamed, no other potential leaders offered themselves for nearly a century. Before Bakunin, no educated Russian, even those grimly opposed to the autocracy, advocated peasant revolution as a way of overthrowing it. Most would have concurred with Pushkin’s sentiment: ‘God preserve us from a Russian revolt, senseless and merciless.’

Yet in another sense, Russia’s officials and nobles were right not to forget Pugachev. For he had revealed just how wafer-thin was the loyalty of some of the non-Russians, and above all of the Russian peasants, to the regime which ruled over them and to its agents, their own lords. The nobles would not lightly forget the image of burnt-out manor houses, with the corpses of their former occupants hanging from the gates. It was a sharp reminder of the gulf – now perhaps at its widest – which separated the ordinary people from their superiors.

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EDUCATION AND CULTURE It was natural that a ruler so conscious of the need to change society should be passionately interested in education. It was indeed one of Catherine’s constant preoccupations. She read a lot about it in the fashionable works of the time, but professed herself unimpressed with Rousseau’s Emile: probably its emphasis on the free formation of the personality clashed with her own greater interest in social order. On the other hand, she had a broader conception of education than did Peter I, wanting it to penetrate beyond the elites to the whole of society. She did her best to make the court a nursery and propagator of culture. In this she was continuing and broadening the initiative already taken by Elizabeth, who had established an excellent tradition of court theatre, music and ballet.

Perhaps her most remarkable initiative was the founding of a society journal, on the model of the London Spectator. Entitled This and That (Vsiakaia vsiachina), it was edited by Catherine’s secretary, G. Kozitskii, but contained frequent editorial contributions by a certain Babushka, who was widely known to be Catherine herself. Perhaps she wanted in its pages to revive the debate she felt she had not achieved through the Legislative Commission; perhaps she aimed through satire and pleasant reading to disseminate good moral principles and modern European cultural examples.

She pursued the same aim in her demonstrative promotion of links with some of the leading European thinkers of the time. She founded a Society for the Translation of Foreign Books into Russian, which she endowed with two thousand rubles. She corresponded with Voltaire, who applauded her resolute action against the Catholic Church (in Poland). She offered Diderot a press and publishing facilities for the Encyclopédie in Riga when he was having difficulties with the authorities in France and she invited him to St Petersburg, where they had long conversations in private. For an ambitious and politically committed thinker like Diderot, Russia, unencumbered by ancient institutions and privileges, appeared to offer enticing scope for an enlighted reformism which was continually frustrated in France. At any rate, he urged Catherine to issue a proper law on the succession, to keep the Legislative Commission in being as a ‘repository of the laws’ and to institute a free and compulsory system of primary education.

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She would have known that the last suggestion was impracticable (though Prussia attempted it in 1763), but she concurred with the sentiment, and did want to make a start on making general education more widely available than merely to the nobility. In 1786, after a commission under her ex-favourite, P.V. Zavadovskii, had examined the subject, she issued a National Statute of Education, which provided for a two-tier network of schools: secondary at the guberniia, and primary at the uezd level, free of charge, co-educational, and open to all classes of the population except serfs.

Not the least significant feature of the proposed new network was that it did not build in any way on the existing church schools, the only ones which were at all widespread. The new schools were to be secular, free of charge and co-educational, with the government providing the initial capital expenditure, and local boards of social welfare meeting the running costs. They were intended to instil ‘a clear and intelligent understanding of the Creator and His divine law, the basic rules of firm belief in the state, and true love for the fatherland and one’s fellow citizens’. Pupils were to be issued with a guidebook outlining the ‘Duties of Man and Citizen’, whose tone was that of the authoritarian secular state, as in the injunction to obey one’s superiors. Those who give orders know what is useful to the state, their subjects and all civil society in general, [and] they do not wish for anything but what is generally recognised as useful by society.

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In 1764 Catherine set up a Foundling Hospital in Moscow, under her personal supervision, the first of several. It was to take orphans – the children most dependent on the state – and fashion them according to the latest educational theories as good citizens. In a sense, this was another of Catherine’s initiatives to create a ‘third estate’. In the same year she established the Smol’nyi Institute for Noble Women, which emphasized socially useful attainments, such as music, dancing and French. The new Institute was a token of her conviction that a more broadly-based society and culture required an informed input from women. Both were intended to advance her purpose of creating a secular civil society as a support for the state.

Catherine’s educational initiatives were undoubtedly ambitious, perhaps too much so: many of the new schools had few pupils and relied on poorly paid and poorly qualified foreigners to provide the bulk of their teaching staff. By the end of the century scarcely more than one in a thousand inhabitants was receiving any kind of schooling. All the same, a basic network had been created on which Catherine’s successors were able to build, and the principle had been accepted that education was not the preserve of the privileged or of males, but should eventually be open to all, free of charge. This principle passed into the life-blood of Russia’s educationalists, giving them a bias towards a democratic, open-access system which survived all nineteenth-century attempts to narrow it.

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Catherine also did something to continue the drive to provide Russia with a scientific and research base outside as well as inside the Academy. She lifted the state monopoly on printing, enabling private entrepreneurs to enter the field, provided only that they registered their presses with the police. She encouraged the foundation of the Free Economic Society, which aimed to investigate techniques and practices in the field of agriculture and industry and to disseminate them as widely as possible. It was not an official institution, but was run by aristocrats and academics, and it sponsored experiments and studies, as well as the regular reading and publication of reports. On Catherine’s suggestion it investigated the relative productivity of free and serf labour, but it does not seem that she paid much attention to its verdict in favour of the former. Even if its influence was not always great, however, the Free Economic Society survived right through to 1917 as a learned society genuinely independent of the state.

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Its work was supplemented by some of the earliest scientific expeditions to investigate the minerals, flora and fauna of the empire’s immense territories, as well as their human potential. These expeditions were organized by the Academy of Sciences, which was the only institution in a position to coordinate all the disciplines involved: geography, ethnography, medicine, geology, zoology, botany, mineralogy. The results were made available in huge publication projects deposited in the Academy library, a mine of information to the present about all aspects of Russian life. Such information was essential to the eventual exploitation of the empire’s full potential – still a long distant goal.

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CONCLUSIONS At the end of Catherine’s reign, Russia was undoubtedly stronger militarily, culturally and economically than when she acceded to the throne. Both the state and society had taken on more palpable sinews, and the influence of European manners and culture had both broadened and deepened among the elites. Russia had become not only a European great power, but a successful one. Senior soldiers and statesmen, and people of high culture, would later look back on her years in power with nostalgia.

All this had not been achieved without cost, however. Catherine had shown that social estates could be created from above as well as from below, but that the process was slow, painful and contradictory. In strengthening the corporate status of the strong, it further undermined the already feeble defences of the weak. As one of Fonvizin’s characters remarks: ‘What use is the freedom of the nobility if we are not free to whip our serfs?’

(#litres_trial_promo) Probably that is why she hankered throughout her reign after a ‘third estate’, which would be educated and fit for official employment without the divisive privileges held by the nobility.

Perhaps also that is why Catherine never promulgated her Charter of the State Peasants: it might have underlined the utter legal helplessness of the private serfs. It would have been her most ambitious attempt to extend civil rights to large numbers of the population. At any rate, she drew back, leaving one with the suspicion that civil society could only be created at the expense of deepening the civic and ethnic rift within the Russian population, between the elites and the masses.

4 The Apogee of the Secular State (#ulink_8bfc7689-7b15-564a-b49d-520468986c08)

By the end of the eighteenth century the society created by Peter the Great had survived, but its culture and traditions had taken root only in one social estate, the nobility. To bridge the gap thus opened between the nobility and other strata, the ruler could now proceed in two alternative ways: either by confirming the freedoms (or privileges) of the nobility and letting them percolate gradually down the social scale, or by reining the nobility back and enforcing more equitably the universal principle of state service.

PAUL 1 (1796–1801) Paul was an exemplar of the second approach. He heartily disliked his mother, and took a positive pleasure in declaring her practice of enhancing privilege misguided. Everywhere, and especially in the army, he promoted obedience, discipline and efficiency. Paul was an extreme adherent of the ‘Prussomania’ prevalent in many late eighteenth-century European courts: the fascination with precise formation and immaculate drill. In seventeenth-century France drill had originally been introduced to enhance the battle-readiness of the soldiers; but under Paul its purpose changed, and it became a means of glorifying the monarch as symbolic hero, an embodiment of the disciplined social order he liked to think he headed. Each day at 11 a.m. throughout his reign, in the brooding Mikhailovskii Palace which was his residence, he would review the troops of the watch in their new-style Prussian uniforms.

He insisted that nobles should play their due part in this parade ground display and dedicate themselves to service, especially military service, whatever their theoretical exemption from it. He lavished decorations and serfs on those who excelled, but humiliated and punished those who evaded their duties. The Guards suffered especially from his authoritarianism: having being gallant comrades-in-arms at the elegant court of the Empress, they became mere subalterns in Paul’s grim parade lines.

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Paul stabilized the monarchy by issuing an unambiguous Law of Succession, providing for descent of the throne by way of the oldest male heir, and stipulating the precise provisions for a regency, should one be needed. He also assumed the role of religious ruler with greater panache than any monarch since the seventeenth century. He accepted the office of Grand Master of the Knights of Malta after the Knights’ home island had fallen to Napoleon, and used the occasion to cultivate his image as doughty defender of Christianity against the aggressive atheism of the French revolution. What was involved was not just Orthodoxy but Christianity as a whole, the first sign that the Russian monarch aspired to a universal religious mission. He intended that the new order of the Knights of Malta should offer an example of chivalry and re-inspire in nobles the ideals of service: self-sacrifice, duty and discipline.

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To isolate Russia from the contagion of the French revolution, Paul forbade the import of books and journals and, in an extraordinary abrogation of previous practice, prohibited travel abroad-which had been the normal way for Russian nobles to round off their education. He also made abundant use of his intelligence service, the tainaia ekspeditsiia (inherited, ironically, from his mother) to spy on nobles whom he suspected of opposition to himself. Although he never repealed the Charter to the Nobility, he undid many of its provisions. Local assemblies of the nobility were abolished, together with their right to elect local officials, who were instead appointed by the government. Landed estates were subjected to taxation, and the gentry’s emancipation from corporal punishment was ended: in certain circumstances, nobles could now be flogged.

On the peasant question Paul was inconsistent, since he awarded his favourites land populated by serfs no less bountifully than his mother; but at the same time he restored the right of serfs to petition the crown over mistreatment, he restricted the selling of serfs without land, and he recommended limiting the number of days of the week on which landlords could require their serfs to work for them.

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As a person, Paul was harsh and punctilious, and given to furious outbursts of rage which generated widespread rumours that he was mentally unbalanced. He was undoubtedly inconsistent, but his madness, if that is what it was, reflected the objective situation of the Russian monarchy, with its vast claims to power and its limited practical means of exercising that power.

The nobles in general, and especially the Guards officers, chafed at the symbolic and substantive humiliations he inflicted. In 1801 a group of them, headèd by Count Petr Palen, Governor-General of St Petersburg, managed to obtain the consent of the heir, Grand Duke Alexander, to depose Paul. In the event, they not only did that, but also murdered him, something to which Alexander had not agreed, and which left him with an abiding burden on his conscience.

ALEXANDER 1 Paul’s reign had shown how fragile were the privileges and freedoms of the nobility, and that the minimal civil liberties which existed in Russia could be liquidated at a stroke. The accession of Alexander was therefore welcomed with great satisfaction and eager expectation. Like his grandmother a devotee of the European Enlightenment, Alexander had been brought up under the guidance of a tutor chosen by her, La Harpe, a Swiss republican, who inculcated in him a vivid impression of the evils of despotism and the benefits of the rule of law. These lessons were reinforced by the negative experience of his father’s rule.

Alexander, however, was not merely repelled by his father. He had spent his youth in two courts, that of his grandmother and that of his father, and he had learned from both. He found the contrast between them extremely difficult to digest, and it marked his personality with a permanent ambivalence. He was never quite able to make a clear choice between the alternative paths open to him.

As heir to the throne, he gathered round himself a circle of young aristocratic friends with whom he would discuss ideas for a future freer and better government, yet he never ceased to be attracted by the military model of social order. At times he would give up trying to reconcile the warring aspects of his personality and would shrink back before the awful responsibility of governing Russia, dreaming instead of withdrawing to a cottage in the country somewhere in Germany. Sometimes he hoped that it might be possible to grant a constitution first, and then seek out his rural idyll, leaving the nation to govern itself. He told his tutor: ‘Once … my turn comes, then it will be necessary to work, gradually of course, to create a representative assembly of the nation which, thus directed, will establish a free constitution, after which my authority will cease absolutely; and, if Providence supports our work, I will retire to some spot where I will live contentedly and happily, observing and taking pleasure in the well-being of my country.’ It was sentiments of this kind which led Berdiaev to call Alexander a ‘Russian intelligent on the throne’.

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When he came to power, Alexander declared in a manifesto that he would return to the principles of Catherine. He undid many of his father’s acts, declaring a general amnesty for political prisoners, abolishing the tainaia ekspeditsiia, restoring the Charters to the Nobles and the Towns, and the right of importing books from abroad, and inviting the Senate to make proposals regarding its own future functions.

On the other hand, the circumstances of his father’s deposition and murder left Alexander with a sense of guilt and unease which lasted the whole of his life. The conspirators who assassinated Paul were senior aristocrats who had definite views on these matters. They belonged to the ‘Senatorial party’, adherents of the view that noble privilege should be bolstered. Responding to Alexander’s invitation, they outlined their view that the Senate should be elected by the dvorianstvo, and should act as guarantor of the rule of law, by advising the Emperor to reject any proposed legislation which contradicted the existing legal framework, by ensuring that freedom of property and person was upheld, and by supervising administrative officials. Under this scheme the Senate would also have the right to propose taxes, nominate senior personnel, and submit to the Tsar ‘the nation’s needs’. Count Alexander Vorontsov, the leading figure in the group, composed a ‘Charter to the Russian People’, enshrining these principles, which it was hoped Alexander would proclaim at his coronation. Such a proclamation could have laid the basis for an English Whig approach to government, or for an aristocratically guaranteed Rechtstaat.