A history of Russia

by Riazanovsky

  The Legislative Commission met for a year and a half, holding 203 sessions; in addition, special committees were set up to prepare the ground for dealing with particular issues. But all this effort came to naught. The commission proved unwieldy, not enough preliminary work had been done, often there seemed to be little connection between the French philosophy of the empress's Instruction and Russian reality. Most important, however, the members of the commission split along class lines. For example, gentry delegates argued with merchant representatives over serf ownership and rights to engage in trade and industry. More ominously, gentry deputies clashed with those of the peasant class on the crucial issue of serfdom. No doubt Catherine the Great quickly realized the potential

  danger of such confrontations. The outbreak of war against Turkey in 1768 provided a good occasion for disbanding the Legislative Commission. Some committees continued to meet for several more years until the Pugachev rebellion, but again without producing any practical results. Still, the abortive convocation of the Commission served some purpose: it gave Catherine the Great considerable information about the country and influenced both the general course of her subsequent policy and certain particular reforms.

  Pugachev's Rebellion

  Social antagonisms which simmered in the Legislative Commission exploded in the Pugachev rebellion. That great uprising followed the pattern of earlier lower-class insurrections, such as the ones led by Bolotnikov, Razin, and Bulavin, which strove to destroy the established order. A simple Don cossack, a veteran of several wars and a deserter, Emelian Pugachev capitalized on the grievances of the Ural cossacks to lead them in revolt against the authorities in the autumn of 1773. Before long the movement spread up and down the Ural river and also westward to the Volga basin. At its height the rebellion encompassed a huge territory in eastern European Russia, engulfing such important cities as Kazan and posing a threat to Moscow itself.

  Pugachev profited from the fact that Russia was engaged at the time in a major war against Turkey, that few troops were stationed in the eastern part of the country, and that many local officials, as well as, to some extent, the central government itself, panicked when they belatedly realized the immediacy and extent of the danger. Yet his most important advantages stemmed from the nature and the injustice of the Russian social system. The local uprising of the Ural cossacks became a mass rebellion. Crowds of serfs, workers in the Ural mines and factories, Old Believers, Bashkirs, Tartars, and certain other minority peoples, joined Pugachev's original cossack following. Indeed, some specialists believe that Pugachev should have shown more daring and marched directly on Moscow in the heart of the serf area. As Pushkin's A Captain's Daughter illustrates, few, except officials, officers, and landlords, tried to stem the tide.

  Pugachev acted in the grand manner. He proclaimed himself Emperor Peter III, alleging that he had fortunately escaped the plot of his wife Catherine; and he established a kind of imperial court in imitation of the one in St. Petersburg. He announced the extermination of officials and landlords, and freedom from serfdom, taxation, and military service for the people. Pugachev and his followers organized an active chancellery and engaged in systematic propaganda. Also, the leaders of the rebellion arranged elections for a new administration in the territory that they held,

  and they tried to form a semblance of a regular army with a central staff and an artillery, for which Ural metal workers supplied some of the guns.

  Although the extent and organization of the Pugachev uprising deservedly attract attention, it still suffered from the usual defects of such movements: a lack of preparation, co-ordination, and leadership. Small army detachments, when well commanded, could defeat peasant hordes. After government victories and severe reprisals, the raging sea of rebellion would vanish almost as rapidly as it had appeared. In late 1774, following the defeat of his troops and his escape back to the Ural area, Pugachev was handed over by his own men to the government forces. He was brought to Moscow, tried, and executed in an especially cruel manner. The great uprising had run its course.

  The Pugachev rebellion served to point out again, forcefully and tragically, the chasm between French philosophy and Russian reality. Catherine the Great had in any case allied herself with the gentry from the time of the palace coup which gave her the throne, and it is highly doubtful that she had ever seriously intended to act against any essential interests of the landlords. The sharp division of her reign into the early liberal years and a later period of conservatism and reaction appears none too convincing. Still, the enormous shock of the revolt, following the milder one of the collapse of the work of the Legislative Commission because of social antagonisms, made the alliance between the crown and the gentry very close, explicit, and even militant. In the conditions of eighteenth-century Russia and as a logical result of the policies followed by the Russian government, the two had to sink or swim together. Yet Catherine the Great was too intelligent to become simply a reactionary. She intended instead to combine oppression and coercion with a measure of reform and a great deal of propaganda.

  Reforms. The Gentry and the Serfs

  The new system of local government introduced by Catherine the Great in 1775 was closely related to the Pugachev rebellion, although it also represented an attempt to bolster this perennially weak aspect of the administration and organization of Russia. Frightened by the collapse of authority at the time of the revolt, the empress meant to strengthen government in the provinces by means of decentralization, a clear distribution of powers and functions, and local gentry participation. She divided some fifteen major administrative units, through which the country was governed at the time, to make a total of fifty units by the end of her reign. Each of these gubernii - "governments" or "provinces" - was subdivided into some ten uezdy, or districts. Every province contained about 300,000 inhabitants and every district about 30,000, while historical and regional

  considerations were completely disregarded in the drawing of the boundaries.

  An appointed governor at the head of the administration of each province was assisted by a complicated network of institutions and officials. Catherine the Great tried - not too successfully - to separate the legislative, executive, and judicial functions, without, of course, impairing her autocracy or ultimate control from St. Petersburg. Local gentry participated in local administration, and were urged to display initiative and energy in supporting the new system. The judicial branch too was organized, quite explicitly, on a class basis, with different courts and procedures for different estates. Catherine the Great's reform of local government was apparently influenced by the example of England, more particularly by Blackstone's views on the matter, and also by the example of the Baltic provinces. The arrangement that she introduced lasted until the fundamental reform of 1864.

  Catherine the Great's scheme of local government fitted well into her program of cooperating with and strengthening the landlords. Other measures contributing to the same purpose included the granting of corporate representation and other privileges to the gentry. The incorporation of the gentry began in earnest with the formation of district gentry societies in 1766-67, developed further through the legislation of 1775 concerning local government, and reached its full development in the Charter to the Nobility of 1785. The Charter represented the highwater mark of the position and privileges of the Russian gentry. It recognized the gentry of each district and province as a legal body headed by an elected district or provincial Marshal of the Nobility. The incorporated gentry of a province could petition the monarch directly in connection with issues which aroused its concern, a right denied the rest of the population. Moreover, the Charter confirmed the earlier privileges and exemptions of the landlords and added certain new ones to give them a most advantageous and distinguished status. Members of the gentry remained free from obligations of personal service and taxation, and they became exempt from corporal punishment. They could lose their gentry standing, estates, or life only by court decision. The prope
rty rights of the landlords reached a new high; members of the gentry were recognized as full owners of their estates, without any restriction on the sale or exploitation of land, forests, or mineral resources; in case of forfeiture for crime, an estate remained within the family. Indeed some scholars speak - exaggeratedly to be sure - of Catherine the Great's introducing the modern concept of private property into Russia. Also in 1785, the empress granted a largely ineffective charter to towns which provided for a quite limited city government controlled by rich merchants.

  As earlier, a rise in the position of the gentry meant an extension and

  strengthening of serfdom, a development which characterized Catherine the Great's entire reign. Serfdom spread to new areas, and in particular to Ukraine. Although Catherine's government in essence confirmed an already-existing system in Ukraine, it does bear the responsibility for helping to legalize serfdom in Ukraine and for, so to speak, standardizing that evil throughout the empire. A series of laws, fiscal in nature, issued in 1763-83, forbade Ukrainian peasants to leave an estate without the landlord's permission and in general directed them "to remain in their place and calling." Catherine the Great personally extended serfdom on a large scale by her frequent and huge grants of state lands and peasants to her favorites, beginning with the leaders of the coup of 1762. The total number of peasants who thus became serfs has been variously estimated, but it was in the order of several hundred thousand working males - the usual way of counting peasants in imperial Russia - and well over a million persons. The census of 1794-96 indicated this growth of serfdom, with the serfs constituting 53.1% of all peasants and 49% of the entire population of the country. As to the power of the masters over their serfs, little could be added, but the government nevertheless tried its best: it became easier for the landlords to sentence their peasants to hard labor in Siberia, and they were empowered to fetch the peasants back at will; the serfs were forbidden, under a threat of harsh punishment, to petition the empress or the government for redress against the landlords. Catherine the Great also instituted firmer control over the cossacks, abolishing the famed Sech on the Dnieper in 1775 and limiting the autonomy of the Don and the Ural "hosts." Some of the Dnieper cossacks were transferred to the Kuban river to establish a cossack force in the plain north of the Caucasian mountains.

  Other government measures relating to land and people included a huge survey of boundaries and titles - an important step in legalizing and confirming landholdings - the above-mentioned final secularization of vast Church estates with some two million peasants who became subject to the so-called College of Economy, and a program of colonization. Colonists were sought abroad, often on very generous conditions and at great cost, to populate territories newly won from Turkey and other areas, because serfdom and government regulations drastically restricted the mobility of the Russian people. Elizabeth had already established Serbian communities in Russia. Catherine the Great sponsored many more colonies of foreigners, especially of Germans along the Volga and in southern Russia.

  Catherine II's efforts to promote the development of industry, trade, and also education and culture in Russia will be treated in appropriate chapters. Briefly, in economic life the empress turned in certain respects from rigid mercantilism to the newly popular ideas of free enterprise and trade. In culture she cut a broad swath. A friend of the philosophes, one

  who corresponded with Voltaire and arranged for Diderot to visit Russia - unprofitably, as it turned out - a writer and critic in her own right, and a determined intellectual, Catherine the Great had plans and projects for everything, from general education to satirical reviews. Indeed, she considered it her main mission to civilize Russia. For this reason, too, she established a Medical Collegium in 1763, founded hospitals, led the way in the struggle against infectious diseases, and decreed that Russia be equipped to produce its own medicines and surgical instruments. And, again in the interests of civilization, the empress pioneered in introducing some feeble measures to help the underprivileged, for example, widows and orphans.

  Foreign Affairs: Introductory Remarks

  In spite of her preoccupation with internal affairs, Catherine the Great paid unflagging attention to foreign policy. Success and glory could be attained by diplomacy as well as by enlightened reform at home, in war perhaps even more than in peace. Assisted by such statesmen as Nikita Panin and Potemkin and such generals as Rumiantsev and Suvorov, the empress scored triumph after triumph on the international stage, resulting in a major extension of the boundaries of the empire, the addition of millions of subjects, and Russia's rise to a new importance and eminence in Europe. However, Catherine the Great's foreign policy was by no means a novel departure. New ideas did appear: for example, Panin's early doctrine of a northern accord or alliance of all leading northern European states to counterbalance Austria, France, and Spain; and Potemkin's celebrated "Greek project," which we shall discuss in its proper place. But, in fact, these ideas proved ephemeral, and Russia continued on her old course. As Russian historians like to put it, Peter the Great had solved one of the three fundamental problems of Russian foreign relations: the Swedish. Catherine the Great settled the other two: the Turkish and the Polish. In addition to these key issues, the famous empress dealt with many other questions, ranging from another Swedish war to the League of Armed Neutrality and the need to face the shocking reality of the French Revolution.

  In foreign affairs, important events of the reign clustered in two brief segments of time. The years 1768-74 witnessed the First Turkish War, together with the first partition of Poland in 1772. Between 1787 and 1795 Russia participated in the Second Turkish War, 1787-92, a war against Sweden, 1788-90, and the second and third partitions of Poland, 1793 and 1795. It was also during that time, of course, that Catherine the Great became increasingly hostile to the French Revolution. Fortunately for the empress, Great Britain was immersed in a conflict with its North

  American colonies during the latter part of the First Turkish War, while during the second crucial sequence of years all powers had to shift their attention to revolutionary France.

  Russia and Turkey

  In their struggle against Turkey the Russians aimed to reach the Black Sea and thus attain what could be considered their natural southern boundary as well as recover fertile lands lost to Asiatic invaders since the days of the Kievan state. The Crimean Tartars, successors to the Golden Horde in that area, had recognized the suzerainty of the Sultan of Turkey. In pushing south Catherine the Great followed the time-honored example of Muscovite tsars and such imperial predecessors as Peter the Great and Anne. The First Turkish War, 1768-74, was fought both on land and, more unusual for Russia, on sea. A Russian army commanded by Rumiantsev advanced into Bessarabia and the Balkans, scoring impressive victories over large Turkish forces and appealing to the Christians to rise against their masters; another Russian army invaded and eventually captured the Crimea. A Russian fleet under Alexis Orlov sailed from the Baltic to Turkish waters and sank the Ottoman navy in the Bay of Chesme on July 6, 1770; however, it did not dare to try to force the Straits. After Alexis Orlov's expedition Russia maintained for a considerable period of time a direct interest in the Mediterranean - witness Paul's efforts at the end of the century to gain Malta and the Ionian islands - and gave up its attempt to obtain a permanent foothold there only in the reign of Alexander I, under British pressure. In spite of the fact that the Russian drive into the Balkans had bogged down, Turkey was ready in the summer of 1774 to make peace.

  By the Treaty of Kuchuk Kainarji, Russia received the strategic points of Kinburn, Yenikale and Kerch in and near the Crimea as well as part of the Black Sea coast, west and east of the peninsula, reaching almost to the foot of the Caucasian range and including Azov. The Crimean Tartars were proclaimed independent, although they recognized the sultan as caliph, that is, the religious leader of Islam. Russia obtained the right of free commercial navigation in Turkish waters, including permission to send merchantmen through the S
traits. Moldavia and Wallachia were returned to Turkey, but they were to be leniently ruled, and Russia reserved the prerogative to intervene on their behalf. Also, Russia acquired the right to build an Orthodox church in Constantinople, while the Turks promised to protect Christian churches and to accept Russian representations in behalf of the new church to be built in the capital. The provisions of the treaty relating to Christians and Christian worship became the basis of many subsequent Russian claims in regard to Turkey.

  Although the First Turkish War in Catherine the Great's reign marked the first decisive defeat of Turkey by Russia and although the Treaty of Kuchuk Kainarji reflected the Russian victory, Russian aims had received only partial satisfaction. Some of the northern littoral of the Black Sea remained Turkish, while the Crimea became independent. From the Ottoman point of view, the war was a disaster which could only be remedied by exaction of revenge and by restoration of Turkey's former position by force of arms. The unstable political situation in the Crimea added to the tension. In 1783 Russia moved in to annex the Crimea, causing many Crimean Tartars to flee to the sultan's domain. By 1785 Russia had built a sizable fleet in the Black Sea, with its main base in Sevastopol. At the same time Potemkin made a great effort to populate and develop the newly-won southern lands. The display which Potemkin put up for Catherine the Great, Emperor Joseph II of Austria, and the Polish king Stanislaw Poniatowski when they visited the area in early 1787 gave rise to the expression "Potemkin villages," i.e., pieces of stage decor which passed at a distance for real buildings and communities. Actually, without minimizing Potemkin's showmanship, recent studies by Soloveytchik and others indicate that progress in southern Russia had proved to be real enough.