by Riazanovsky
something like half of Russia's total European trade. The Russians continued to be passive in their commercial relations with the West: foreign businessmen who came to St. Petersburg and other centers in the empire handled the transactions and carried Russian products away in foreign ships, especially British and Dutch. Russia also engaged in commerce with Central Asia, the Middle East, and even India and China, channeling goods through the St. Macarius Fair, Moscow, Astrakhan, and certain other locations. A considerable colony of merchants from India lived in Astrakhan in the eighteenth century.
The Peasants, the Gentry, and Other Classes
Eighteenth-century Russia was overwhelmingly rural. In 1724, 97 per cent of its population lived in the countryside and 3 per cent in towns; by 1796 the figures had shifted slightly to 95.9 per cent as against 4.1 per cent. The great bulk of the people were, of course, peasants. They fell into two categories, roughly equal in size, serfs and state peasants. Toward the end of the century the serfs constituted 53.1 per cent of the total peasant population. As outlined in earlier chapters, the position of the serfs deteriorated from the reign of Peter the Great to those of Paul and Alexander I and reached its nadir around 1800. Increasing economic exploitation of the serfs acompanied their virtually complete dependence on the will of their masters, without even the right to petition for redress. It has been estimated that the obrok increased two and a half times in money value between 1760 and 1800, while the barshchina grew from three to four and in some cases even five or more days a week. It was this striking expansion of the barschina that Emperor Paul tried to stem with his ineffectual law of 1797. Perhaps the most unfortunate were the numerous household serfs who had no land to till, but acted instead as domestic servants or in some other capacity within the manorial household. This segment of the population expanded as landlords acquired new tastes and developed a more elaborate style of life. Indeed, some household serfs became painters, poets, or musicians, and a few even received education abroad. But, as can be readily imagined, it was especially the household serfs who were kept under the constant and complete control of their masters, and their condition could barely be distinguished from slavery. State peasants fared better than serfs, although their obligations, too, increased in the course of the century. At best, as in the case of certain areas in the north, they maintained a reasonable degree of autonomy and prosperity. At worst, as exemplified by possessional workers, their lot could not be envied even by the serfs. On the whole the misery of the Russian
countryside provides ample explanation for the Pugachev rebellion and for repeated lesser insurrections which occurred throughout the century.
By contrast, the eighteenth century, especially the second half during the reign of Catherine the Great, has been considered the golden age of Russian gentry. Constituting a little over one per cent of the population, this class certainly dominated the life of the country. With the lessening and finally the abolition of their service obligations, the landlords took a greater interest in their estates, and some of them also pursued other lines of economic activity, such as manufacturing. The State Lending Bank, established by Catherine the Great in 1786, had as its main task the support of gentry landholding. Moreover, it was the gentry more than any other social group that experienced Westernization most fully and developed the first modern Russian culture. And, of course, the gentry continued to surround the throne, to supply officers for the army, and to fill administrative posts.
While the gentry prospered, the position of the clergy and their dependents declined. This sizable group of Russians, about one per cent of the total - it should be remembered that Orthodox priests marry and raise families - suffered from the anti-ecclesiastical spirit of the age and especially from the secularization of Church lands in 1764. In return for vast Church holdings populated by serfs, the Church received an annual subsidy of 450,000 rubles, representing about one-third of the revenues from the land and utterly insufficient to support the clergy. With time and inflation the value of the subsidy dropped. Never rich, the Russian priests became poorer and more insecure financially after 1764. They had to depend almost entirely on fees and donations from their usually impoverished parishioners. In the country especially the style of life of the priests and their families differed little from that of peasants. In post-Petrine Russia, in contrast to some other European states, the clergy had little wealth or prestige. Largely neglected by historians, the Russian clerical estate has recently received some valuable attention from Freeze and a few other scholars.
Most of the peasants, the gentry, and the clergy lived in rural areas. The bulk of the town inhabitants were divided into three legal categories: merchants, artisans, and workers. These classes were growing: for instance, peasants who established themselves as manufacturers or otherwise successfully entered business became merchants. Nevertheless, none of these classes was numerous or prominent in eighteenth-century Russia. As usual, it was the government that tried to stimulate initiative, public spirit, and a degree of participation in local affairs among the townsmen by such means as the creation of guilds and the charter of 1785 granting urban self-government. As usual, too, these efforts failed.
Finance. Concluding Remarks
The fiscal policies of the state deserve notice. The successors of Peter the Great, not unlike the reformer himself, ruled in a situation of continuous financial crisis. The state revenue rose from 8.5 million rubles in 1724 to 19.4 million in 1764 and over 40 million in 1794. But expenses tended to grow still more rapidly, amounting to 49.1 million in the last year mentioned. Of that sum, 46 per cent went to the army and the navy, 20 per cent to the state economy, 12 per cent for administration and justice, and 9 per cent to maintain the imperial court. A new item also appeared in the reign of Catherine the Great: this was the state debt, which accounted for 4.5 per cent of the total state expenses in 1794. To make up the difference between revenue and expenses, the government borrowed at home and, beginning in 1769, borrowed abroad too, mainly in Holland. The government also issued paper money on a large scale, especially after the outbreak of the Second Turkish War. By the end of Catherine the Great's reign a paper ruble was worth only 68 per cent of its metallic counterpart. Taxes remained heavy and oppressive.
In effect, the rulers of imperial Russia, perhaps even more than the Muscovite tsars who preceded them, insisted on living beyond their means and thus strained the national economy to the limit. Although a poor, backward, overwhelmingly agricultural, and illiterate country, Russia had a large and glorious army, a complex bureaucracy, and one of the most splendid courts in Europe. With the coming of Westernization, the tragic, and as it turned out fatal, gulf between the small enlightened and privileged segment at the top and the masses at the bottom became wider than ever. We shall consider this again when we deal with Russian culture in the eighteenth century and, indeed, throughout our discussion of imperial Russian history.
XXIV
RUSSIAN CULTURE IN THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY
The new culture born as a result of the Petrine revolution constituted in the beginning nothing but a heterogeneous collection of imported articles; but the new elite assimilated them so rapidly that by the end of the eighteenth century there already existed a Russian culture, more homogeneous and more stable than the old one. That culture was Russian in the strictest sense of the word, expressing emotional states and creating values that were properly Russian, and if the people no more than half understood it, this transpired not because it was not sufficiently national, but because the people were not yet a nation.
WEIDLE
… A mixture of tongues,
The language of France with that of Nizhnii Novgorod.
GRIBOEDOV
The eighteenth century constitutes a distinct period in the history of Russian culture. On one hand it marked a decisive break with the Muscovite past; although, as we know, that break had been foreshadowed and assisted by certain influences and trends. Peter the Great's violent activity was perhaps m
ost revolutionary in the domain of culture. All of a sudden, skipping entire epochs of scholasticism, Renaissance, and Reformation, Russia moved from a parochial, ecclesiastical, quasi-medieval civilization to the Age of Reason. On the other hand, Russian culture of the eighteenth century also differed significantly from the culture of the following periods. From the beginning of Peter the Great's reforms to the death of Catherine the Great, the Russians applied themselves to the huge and fundamental task of learning from the West. They still had much to learn after 1800, of course; nonetheless, by that time they had acquired and developed a comprehensive and well-integrated modern culture of their own, which later on attracted attention and adaptation abroad. The eighteenth century in Russia then was an age of apprenticeship and imitation par excellence. It has been said that Peter the Great, during the first decades of the century, borrowed Western technology, that Empress Elizabeth, in the middle of the period, shifted the main interest to Western fashions and manners, and that Catherine the Great, in the course of the last third of the century, brought Western ideas into Russia. Although much too simple, this scheme has some truth. It gives an indication of
the stages in the Russian absorption of Western culture, and it suggests that by 1800 the process had spread to everything from artillery to philosophy.
The Russian Enlightenment
The culture of the Enlightenment, which Russia borrowed, had a number of salient characteristics. It represented notably the triumph of secularism and thus stood in sharp contrast to the Church-centered civilization of Muscovy. To be sure, Orthodoxy remained in imperial Russia and even continued, in a sense, to be linked to the state and occupy a high position. But instead of being central to Russian life and culture, it became, at least as far as the government and the educated public were concerned, a separate and rather neglected compartment. Moreover, within this compartment, to follow Florovsky and other specialists, one could detect little originality or growth. The secular philosophy which dominated the stage in eighteenth-century Europe emphasized reason, education, and the ability of enlightened men to advance the interests of society. The last point applied especially to rulers, so-called enlightened despots, who had the greatest means at their disposal to direct the life of a country. These views fitted imperial Russia remarkably well. Indeed, because of the magnitude and the lasting impact of Peter the Great's efforts to modernize his state, he could be considered the outstanding enlightened despot, although a very early one, while Catherine the Great proved only too eager to claim that title.
In addition to the all-pervasive government sponsorship, Enlightenment came to Russia through the educated gentry. After the pioneer years of Peter the Great, with his motley group of foreign and Russian assistants, the gentry, as we know, increasingly asserted itself to control most phases of the development of the country. Despite some striking individual exceptions, modern Russian culture emerged as gentry culture and maintained that character well into the nineteenth century. It became the civilization of an educated, aristocratic elite, with its salons and its knowledge of French, a civilization which showed more preoccupation with an elegant literary style and proper manners than with philosophy or politics. Nonetheless, this culture constituted the first phase of modern Russian intellectual and cultural history and the foundation for its subsequent development.
Education
The glitter of the age of Catherine the Great was still far away when Peter the Great began his work of educating the Russians. Of necessity,
his efforts were aimed in many directions and dealt with a variety of fundamental matters. As early as 1700 he arranged for publication of Russian books by a Dutch press; several years later the publishing was transferred to Russia. Six hundred different books published in the reign of the reformer have come down to our time. In 1702 the first Russian newspaper, Vedomosti or News, began to be published, the monarch himself editing its first issue. Next Peter the Great took part in reforming the alphabet to produce what came to be known as the civil Russian alphabet. Composed of Slavonic, Greek, and Latin letters, the new alphabet represented a considerable simplification of the old Slavonic. The old alphabet was allowed for Church books, but, following a decree in early 1710, all other works had to use the new system. Also, Peter the Great introduced Arabic numerals to replace the cumbersome Slavonic ones.
Peter the Great sent, altogether, hundreds of young Russians to study abroad, and he opened schools of new types in Russia. For example, as early as 1701 he established in Moscow a School of Mathematical and Navigational Sciences. Essentially a secondary school, that institution stressed the teaching of arithmetic, geometry, trigonometry, astronomy, and geography. The number of its students reached five hundred by 1715, and two elementary schools were founded to prepare Russian boys to enter it. In 1715 a Naval Academy for three hundred pupils opened in St. Petersburg. Moscow, in turn, received an artillery and an engineering academy of the same general pattern. Some other special schools, such as the so-called "admiralty" and "mathematical" ones, also appeared in the course of the reign. In 1716, in an attempt to develop a broader educational system, the government opened twelve elementary "cypher" schools in provincial towns. By 1723 their number had increased to forty-two. In 1706 a medical school with a student body of fifty began instruction in Moscow; in 1709 another medical school, this time with thirty students, started functioning in St. Petersburg. Peter I also organized small classes to study such special subjects as Chinese and Japanese and the languages of some non-Russian peoples within the empire. In addition to establishing state schools, the reformer tried to improve and modernize those of the Church. Finally, education in Russia expanded by means of private schools which began to appear in the course of his reign.
Peter the Great's measures to promote enlightenment in Russia also included the founding of a museum of natural science and a large general library in St. Petersburg. Both were opened free to the public. But the reformer's most ambitious cultural undertaking was the creation of the Imperial Academy of Sciences. Although the Academy came into being only some months after Peter the Great's death, it represented the realization of a major project of the reformer's last years. The Academy had three departments, the mathematical, physical, and historical, as well as a sec-
tion for the arts. The academicians gave instruction, and a high school was attached to the Academy to prepare students for this advanced education. Although the Academy operated at first on a small scale and consisted of only seventeen specialists, all of them foreigners, it became before long, as intended, the main directing center of science and scholarship in the Russian Empire. The enormously important Academy of Sciences of the U.S.S.R. was a continuation of the Petrine Academy. It has been noted repeatedly, sometimes with an unbecoming derision, that Russia obtained an Academy of Sciences before it acquired elementary schools - a significant comment on the nature of Peter the Great's reforms and the role of the state in eighteenth-century Russian culture.
After the death of Peter the Great, there followed a certain decline in education in Russia. Once the government relaxed its pressure, state schools tended to empty and educational schemes to collapse. Church schools, which were much less dependent on the reformer, survived better. They were to produce many trained Russians, some of whom became prominent in a variety of activities in the eighteenth and subsequent centuries. On the whole, however, Church schools served Church needs, i.e., the training of the clergy, and stood apart from the main course of education in Russia. With the rise of the gentry in the eighteenth century, exclusive gentry schools whose graduates were given certain privileges became increasingly important. Peter the Great's artillery and engineering academies were restricted to members of that class, while new cadet schools were opened under Empress Anne and her successors to prepare sons of the nobility to assume the duties of army officers, in contrast to the first emperor's insistence on rising through the ranks. Home education, often by foreign tutors, also developed among the gentry. Increasing atte
ntion was given to good manners and the social etiquette that the Russians began to learn from the West at the time of Peter the Great's reforms: the first emperor had a manual on social etiquette, A Mirror for Youth, translated from the German as early as 1717. In the education of the gentry much time and effort were devoted to such subjects as proper bearing in society, fencing, and dancing, as well as to French and sometimes to other foreign languages. As noted in the scheme mentioned earlier, Western manners and fashions came to occupy much of the attention of educated Russians.
While Russian schools showed relatively little vitality or development between the reigns of Peter I and Catherine II, the government did take at least one decisive step forward: in 1755 in Moscow the first Russian university came into existence. Promoted by Ivan Shuvalov and Michael Lomonosov, this first Russian institution of higher learning was to be, all in all, the most important one in the history of the country, as well as a model for other universities. Responsible directly to the Senate and endowed with considerable administrative autonomy, the university possessed