A history of Russia

by Riazanovsky

  As Karpovich, to mention one historian, has pointed out, Russian foreign policy from 1726 to 1762, and immediately before and after that period, approached what has been called the checkerboard system: Russia was to a considerable degree an enemy of its neighbors and a friend of its neighbors' neighbors, with other relations affected by this basic pattern. France, for example, consistently remained an antagonist of Russia, because in its struggle for the mastery of the continent it relied on Turkey, Poland, and Sweden to envelop and weaken its arch-enemy, the Hapsburgs. France had maintained an alliance with Turkey from 1526, in the days of Suleiman the Magnificent; with Poland from 1573, when Henry of Valois was elected to the Polish throne; and with Sweden from the time of the Thirty Years' War in the early seventeenth century. Russia, of course, had repeatedly fought against the three eastern European allies of France.

  Austria, ruled by the Hapsburgs, stood out, by contrast, as the most reliable Russian ally. The two states shared hostility toward France, and, more importantly for Russia, also toward Turkey and Sweden, which, beginning with its major intervention in the Thirty Years' War, acted repeatedly in Germany against the interests of the Hapsburgs. In Poland also both Russia and Austria found themselves opposed to the French party. The first formal alliance between the two eastern European monarchies was signed in 1726, and it remained, with certain exceptions, a cornerstone of Russian foreign policy until the Crimean War in mid-nineteenth century.

  Prussia, the other leading German power, represented a threat to Russia rather than a potential ally. Prussia's rise to great power rank under Frederick the Great after 1740, together with Russia's rise under Peter the Great which had just preceded it, upset the political equilibrium in Europe. Bestuzhev-Riumin was one of the first continental statesmen to point to the Prussian menace. He worried especially about the Russian position on the Baltic, called Frederick the Great "the sudden prince," and spoke in a typically eighteenth-century doctrinaire manner of Russia's "natural friends," Austria and Great Britain, and its "natural enemies," France and Prussia. The hostile Russian attitude toward Prussia lasted, with some interruptions, until the time of Catherine the Great and the partitions of Poland which satisfied both monarchies and brought them together.

  In the period under consideration, Great Britain could well be called a "natural friend" of Russia. After the scare occasioned by the achievements of Peter the Great and his navy, no serious conflicts arose between the two until the last part of the century. On the contrary, Great Britain

  valued Russia both as a counterweight to France and as a trade partner from which it obtained raw materials, including naval stores, in exchange for manufactured goods. Thus it is no surprise that Russia concluded its first modern commercial treaty with Great Britain.

  In line with its interests and alliances, Russia participated in five wars between 1725 and 1762. In 1733-35 Russia and Austria fought against France in the War of the Polish Succession, which resulted in the defeat of the French candidate Stanislaw Leszczynski and the coronation of Augustus II's son as Augustus III of Poland. In 1736-39 Russia, again allied to Austria, waged a war against Turkey who was supported by France. Munnich and other Russian commanders scored remarkable victories over the Ottoman forces. However, because of Austrian defeats and French mediation, Russia, after losing approximately 100,000 men, gained very little according to the provisions of the Treaty of Belgrade: a section of the steppe between the Donets and the Bug, and the right to retain Azov, captured during the war, on condition of razing its fortifications and promising not to build a fleet on the Black Sea. In 1741-43, Russia, supported by Austria, fought Sweden, who was supported by France. Sweden started the war to seek revenge, but was defeated, and by the Treaty of Abo ceded some additional Finnish territory to Russia.

  In its new role as a great power Russia became involved also in wars fought away from its borders over issues not immediately related to Russian interests. Thus in 1746-48 she participated in the last stages of the War of the Austrian Succession, begun in 1740 when Frederick the Great seized Silesia from Austria. That conflict saw Bestuzhev-Riumin's theory of alliances come true: Russia joined Austria and Great Britain against Prussia and France. The Russian part in this war proved to be, however, entirely inconsequential.

  A much greater importance must be attached to the Russian intervention in the Seven Years' War, 1756-63, fought again largely over Silesia. The conflict was preceded by the celebrated diplomatic revolution of 1756 which saw France ally itself with its traditional enemy Austria, while Prussia turned for support to Great Britain. In the war Russia joined Austria, France, Sweden, and Saxony against Prussia, Great Britain, and Hanover. Yet it should be noted that Russia never declared war on Great Britain and that she found it natural to aid Austria against Prussia, so that in the case of the empire of the tsars the diplomatic revolution had a rather narrow meaning. Russian armies participated in great battles, such as those of Zorndorf and Kunersdorf, and in 1760 Russian troops even briefly held Berlin. Moreover, Russia and its allies managed to drive Prussia to the brink of collapse. Only the death of Empress Elizabeth early in 1762, and the accession to the throne of Peter III, who admired Frederick the Great, saved the Prussian king. Russia withdrew without any compensation from

  the war and made an alliance with Prussia, which in turn was discontinued when Catherine the Great replaced Peter III.

  Although Russian foreign policy between 1725 and 1762 has been severely criticized for its cost in men and money, its meddling in European affairs which had no immediate bearing on Russia, and its alleged sacrifice of national interests to those either of Austria or of the "German party" at home, these criticisms on the whole are not convincing. In its new role Russia could hardly disengage itself from major European affairs and conflicts. In general Russian diplomats successfully pursued the interests of their country, and the wars themselves brought notable gains, for example, the strengthening of the Russian position in Poland and the defeat of the Swedish challenge, even though Peter III did write off in a fantastic manner the opportunities produced by the Seven Years' War. Catherine the Great would continue the basic policies of her predecessors. Militarily the Russians acquitted themselves well. The Russian army, reorganized, improved, and tempered in the wars, scored its first major victories against Turkey in 1736-39, and played its first major part in the heart of Europe in the course of the Seven Years' War. Such famous commanders as Peter Rumiantsev and Alexander Suvorov began their careers in this interim period between two celebrated reigns.

  XXII

  THE REIGNS OF CATHERINE THE GREAT, 1762-96, AND PAUL, 1796-1801

  Long live the adorable Catherine!

  VOLTAIRE

  What interest, therefore, could the young German princess take in that magnum ignotum, that people, inarticulate, poor, semi-barbarous, which concealed itself in villages, behind the snow, behind bad roads, and only appeared in the streets of St. Petersburg like a foreign outcast, with its persecuted beard, and prohibited dress - tolerated only through contempt.

  HERZEN

  Of the three celebrated "Philosophic Despots" of the eighteenth century Catherine the Great could boast of the most astonishing career.

  GOOCH

  Catherine the Great was thirty-three years old when she ascended the Russian throne. She had acquired considerable education and experience. Born a princess in the petty German principality of Anhalt-Zerbst, the future empress of Russia grew up in modest but cultured surroundings. The court in Anhalt-Zerbst, like many other European courts in the eighteenth century, was strongly influenced by French culture, and Catherine started reading French books in childhood. In 1744, at the age of fifteen, she came to Russia to marry Peter of Holstein-Gottorp and prepare herself to be the wife of a Russian sovereign.

  The years from 1744 to 1762 were hard on Catherine. Peter proved to be a miserable husband, while the German princess's position at the imperial court Could be fairly described as isolated and even precarious. To add t
o Catherine's difficulties, her mother was discovered to be Frederick the Great's agent and had to leave Russia. Yet the future empress accomplished much more than merely surviving at court. In addition to becoming Orthodox in order to marry Peter, she proceeded to learn Russian language and literature well and to obtain some knowledge of her new country. Simultaneously she turned to the writings of the philosophes, Voltaire, Montesquieu, and others, for which she had been prepared by her earlier grounding in French literature. As we shall see, Catherine the Great's

  interest in the Enlightenment was to constitute an important aspect of her reign. The young princess adapted herself skillfully to the new environment, made friends, and won a measure of affection and popularity in court circles. While simulating innocence and submissiveness, she participated in political intrigues and plots, carefully covering up her tracks, however, until she led the successful coup in mid-summer 1762, which brought deposition and death to her husband and made her Empress Catherine II.

  Catherine the Great's personality and character impressed many of her contemporaries as well as later commentators. A woman quite out of the ordinary, the empress possessed high intelligence, a natural ability to administer and govern, a remarkable practical sense, energy to spare, and an iron will. Along with her determination went courage and optimism: Catherine believed that she could prevail over all obstacles, and more often than not events proved her right. Self-control, skill in discussion and propaganda, and a clever handling of men and circumstances to serve her ends were additional assets of that unusual monarch. The empress herself asserted that it was ambition that sustained her. The historian can agree, provided that ambition is understood broadly, that is, not merely as a desire to snatch the crown, or attain glory by success in war, or gain the admiration of the philosophes, but as a constant, urgent drive to excel in everything and bring everything under one's control. For the first time since Peter the Great, Russia acquired a sovereign who worked day and night, paying personal attention to all kinds of matters, great and small.

  Yet, together with her formidable virtues, Catherine the Great had certain weaknesses. Indeed the two were intrinsically combined. Determination easily became ruthlessness, ambition fed vanity just as vanity fed ambition, skill in propaganda would not stop short of asserting lies. Above all, the empress was a supreme egoist. As with most true egoists, she had few beliefs or standards of value outside of herself and her own overpowering wishes. Even Catherine II's admirers sometimes noticed that she lacked something, call it charity, mercy, or human sympathy, and, incidentally, that she looked her best in masculine attire. It was also observed that the sovereign took up every issue with the same unflagging drive and earnestness, be it Pugachev's rebellion or correspondence with Voltaire, the partitions of Poland or her latest article for a periodical. Restless ambition served as the only common denominator in her many activities, and, apparently, the only thing that mattered. Similarly, in spite of Catherine's enormous display of enlightened views and sentiments and of her adherence to the principles of the Age of Reason, it remains extremely difficult to tell what the empress actually believed, or whether she believed anything. In fact, the true relationship of Catherine the Great to the Enlightenment

  constitutes one of the most controversial subjects in the historiography of her reign.

  Catherine the Great's notorious love affairs also reflected her peculiar personality: grasping, restless, determined, and somehow, in spite of all passion and sentimentality, essentially cold and unable to establish a happy private life. It has been asserted that her first lover was forced on Catherine, so that she would have a son and Russia an heir, and that Paul resulted from that liaison rather than from the marriage to Peter. In any case, Catherine soon took matters into her own hands. The empress had twenty-one known lovers, the last after she had turned sixty. The favorites included Gregory Orlov, an officer of the guards who proved instrumental in elevating Catherine the Great to the throne and whose brother may have killed Peter III; Stanislaw Poniatowski, a Polish nobleman whom the empress made King of Poland; and, most important, Gregory Potemkin. Potemkin came to occupy a unique position both in the Russian government, to the extent that he can be considered the foremost statesman of the reign, and in the empress's private life. Some specialists believe he married her; he certainly continued to be influential with her after the rise of other favorites. One description of the unusual menage says: "From 1776 to 1789 her favorites succeeded one another almost every year, and they were confirmed in their position, as a court poet would be, by Potemkin himself, who, after he had lost the empress's heart, remained for thirteen years the manager of her male harem."

  The First Years of the Reign. The Legislative Commission

  Catherine II had to behave carefully during her first years on the throne. Brought to power by a palace revolution and without a legal title to the crown, the empress had the enthusiastic support of guardsmen such as the Orlov brothers, but otherwise little backing. Elder statesmen looked at her with some suspicion. There persisted the possibility that another turn of fortune would make her son Paul sovereign and demote Catherine to the position of regent or even eliminate her altogether. A different danger struck in July 1764, when a young officer, Basil Mirovich, tried to liberate Ivan VI from his confinement in the Schlusselburg fortress. The attempt failed, and in the course of it Ivan VI - who, apparently, because of isolation since early childhood, had never grown up mentally and emotionally but remained virtually subhuman - was killed by his guards, who carried out emergency instructions of long standing. The depressing impact of the incident on Russian society was heightened by the execution of Mirovich, an event all the more striking because Elizabeth had avoided executions. Catherine also ran into a certain amount of trouble when, in

  1763-64, she completed the long process of divesting the Church of its huge real estate by secularizing Church lands. This reform, which we shall discuss briefly in a later chapter, evoked a violent protest on the part of Metropolitan Arsenii of Rostov, who did not stop short of excommunicating those connected with the new policy. Fortunately for the empress, other hierarchs failed to support Metropolitan Arsenii, and, after two trials, the empress had him defrocked and imprisoned for life.

  Gradually Catherine II consolidated her position. She distributed honors and rewards on a large scale, in particular state lands with peasants, who thus became serfs. She traveled widely all over Russia, reviving Peter the Great's practice, both to learn more about the country and to win popularity. She selected her advisers carefully and well. Time itself worked for the empress: with the passage of years memories of the coup of 1762 faded, and the very fact that Catherine II continued to occupy the throne gave the reign a certain legitimacy. In late 1766 she felt ready to introduce into Russia important changes based on the precepts of the Enlightenment, and for that purpose she called the Legislative Commission.

  The aim of the Commission was to codify laws, a task last accomplished in 1649, before the Westernization of the country. Moreover, Catherine the Great believed that the work of the Commission would go a long way toward rationalizing and modernizing Russian law and life. Although the empress had certainly no desire to grant her subjects a constitution, and although her propaganda greatly exaggerated the radical nature of her intentions, the Nakaz, or Instruction, which she prepared for the Legislative Commission, was in fact, even in its final attenuated version, a strikingly liberal document. Composed by Catherine the Great herself over a period of eighteen months, the Instruction found its inspiration in the thought of the Enlightenment, particularly in the writings of Montesquieu and the jurist Beccaria. Montesquieu, whose Spirit of the Laws the empress referred to as her prayer book, served as the chief guide in political theory. Yet it should be noted that the willful sovereign adapted rather than copied the French philosopher: she paid lip service to his ideas, but either left them conveniently vague or changed them drastically in application to Russian reality; for example, Montesquieu's celeb
rated admiration of the division of powers in England into the executive, the legislative, and the judicial became an administrative arrangement meant to improve the functioning of Russian autocracy. The empress continued to believe that autocracy was the only feasible form of government for holding enormous Russia together. And in fairness it should be added that here, too, she had some support in the thought of the Enlightenment. Serfdom, on the other hand, she was willing to condemn in theory, although again she largely avoided the issue: the final draft of the Instruction contained merely a pious

  wish that masters would not abuse their serfs. As to the influence of Beccaria, Catherine the Great could afford to follow his views more closely, as they were expressed in his treatise Crimes and Punishments, and she did. Thus the Instruction denounced capital punishment - which had already been stopped in Russia by Elizabeth - as well as torture, argued for crime prevention, and in general was abreast of advanced Western thought in criminology. On the whole, the liberalism of the Instruction produced a strong impression in a number of European countries, and led to its being banned in France.

  The Legislative Commission, which opened deliberations in the summer of 1767, consisted of 564 deputies, 28 appointed and 536 elected. The appointees represented the state institutions, such as the Senate. The elected deputies comprised delegates from different segments of the population of the empire: 161 from the landed gentry, 208 from the townspeople, 79 from the state peasants, and 88 from the cossacks and national minorities. Yet this numerous gathering - an "all-Russian ethnographic exhibition," to quote Kliuchevsky - excluded large bodies of the Russian people: the serfs, obviously, but also, in line with the secular tendency of the Enlightenment, the clerical class, although the Holy Synod was represented by a single appointed deputy. Delegates received written instructions or mandates from their electorates, including the state peasants, who, together with the cossacks and national minorities, supplied over a thousand such sets of instructions. Taken together, the instructions of 1767 offer the historian insight into the Russian society of the second half of the eighteenth century comparable to that obtainable for France in the famous cahiers of 1789. Kizevetter and other scholars have emphasized the following well-nigh universal characteristics of the instructions: a practical character; a definite acceptance of the existing regime; a desire for decentralization; complaints of unbearable financial demands and, in particular, requests to lower the taxes; and a wish to delineate clearly the rights and the obligations of all the classes of society.