A Concise History of Russia (Cambridge Concise Histories)

by Bushkovitch, Paul

  Peter the Great, with his personal eccentricities and the scale of his accomplishment was a ruler unique in Russian history. For most of the eighteenth century he was the great ideal of the Russian monarchy and its supporters at home and abroad. As time passed, Peter’s image changed, for already in Catherine’s time conservative noblemen began to complain, echoing their ancestors of Peter’s time, that Peter had imported foreign ways to Russia, undermining its ancient religion and morality. In the nineteenth century a full-blown quarrel broke out about this issue, pitting liberal and radical Westernizers against Slavophile admirers of Russian tradition – that is, Peter’s admirers were pitted against his detractors. This was a dispute fraught with metaphysics and national pride, but the question remains: What did Peter really accomplish?

  The most obvious answer has to do with religion. The administrative subordination of the church to the tsar was only one side of the changes Peter wrought, however important. Peter was determined to put the church in its place, but he was not irreligious. He attended the liturgy at least once a week in St. Petersburg and more often during Lent and Easter week. His style of religious observance in other respects deviated from traditional Orthodoxy. After his mother’s death, he never made a pilgrimage to any of the many shrines of miraculous relics and icons. In his new capital there was only one monastery, in contrast to the dozens in Moscow, and it was founded only in 1714. Peter went there on occasion, but the attraction was the sermons of the Ukrainian monks, which Peter sought out and seems to have enjoyed. The monastery was dedicated to Prince Alexander Nevskii, certainly a saint in the Orthodox Church, but one known mainly for his military victories, including that over the Swedes on the Neva. In case the significance of the choice was not clear enough, Peter ordered the celebration of the saint’s feast day moved from the traditional November 30 to August 23, the day of the conclusion of the treaty of Nystad that ended his own war with Sweden. Peter knew his scripture and liturgy, and could trade biblical quotations with his correspondents, but his personal piety was the outgrowth of the cultural changes in Russian Orthodoxy of the seventeenth century, the emphasis on sermons and learning over miracles and monasticism.

  The key here is the change in emphasis: Peter did not abolish monasteries or suppress the devotion to miracle-working relics. Similarly Peter was not out to eliminate religion. The consequence of his policies was to end the universal domination of religion in Russian culture, and to reduce it to the place it held in the mental life of early modern Europe after the Renaissance: a foundational belief system in a society whose high culture was already secular. Thus he accomplished in thirty-six years a change in Russian culture that took centuries in Western Europe.

  The new secular culture imported into Russia in Peter’s time was undoubtedly European. At the time, no one thought of it that way. Neither Russians nor Europeans used the terms “Westernization” or “Europeanization.” They thought Peter had brought education and culture in place of ignorance, light in the place of darkness. Moreover, the term “European,” can be misleading, as it conceals the choices Peter as well as other Russians made among the great variety of European culture. Peter’s personal tastes were unusual to say the least. He had what some contemporaries called a “mathematical mind,” meaning that he was interested in what was then understood to be mathematics. That meant not just a theoretical science of numbers, but also mechanics, hydraulics, fortification, surveying, astronomy, architecture, and many other sciences and techniques that employed more or less mathematics. There were no European monarchs who shared these tastes and they were unknown among Russian aristocrats at his court. He also had a passion for the Dutch, their language, their ships, their engineering and architecture, and their painting. In general his personal culture took its inspiration from Protestant northern Europe, and from there he borrowed his laws and administration, his navy, the engineering for his new capital, and much more. His architects, however, were more German or Italian, in spite of his Dutch leanings, and his sculptors were Italian. His choices were eclectic as were those of the other Russians, mostly aristocrats, whose cultural interests in Western Europe we can trace. Many of the aristocrats, and apparently all of Peter’s opponents, were more attracted by the culture of Catholic southern Europe and Poland – by the Baroque grandeur of Rome and the aristocratic constitutions of Venice and Poland. Some parts of European culture had not yet arrived in Russia, jurisprudence, medicine, and the scholarly study of the classics. For the time being the result was a strange mixture of Baroque Europe and the early Enlightenment, a combination of disparate and sometimes contradictory elements derived from European thought and culture.

  Part of the cultural transformation of Russia was a new conception of the state. The traditional Russian state’s goals were very simple: maintenance of the power of the tsar and his government at home and abroad and the conservation of the state by the just and Christian behavior of the rulers. Peter introduced a secular goal, the good of the state (including its subjects) as well as the means to achieving that goal, that is, the establishment of good and legal order and the education of the elite in European culture. It was the latter in particular that Peter’s spokesmen repeatedly stressed, proclaiming that he had brought light (learning) into darkness (ignorance), and that is also how Peter’s European contemporaries saw his achievement. Equally important was the creation of explicit written and legal foundations of governmental institutions, not a constitution in the modern sense, but a sharp break with the customary, unwritten, foundations of previous Russian government. The structure he created was noticeably similar to European monarchies, and was accepted as such in the West. It shared with many European states one fundamental contradiction, that the monarch was the source of all law. That being the case, how could the legal order be preserved if the ruler chose to ignore it? Eventually this contradiction in the continental European states could only be resolved by the French Revolution and its consequences, but for the time it seemed to work.

  The Russian state looked like Europe, but it had its peculiarities. Russia lacked one important institution that was universal in European states, a trained legal profession. Russia was not to get a university with a law faculty until 1755, and a trained legal profession came only in the nineteenth century. Another typically Russian problem with Peter’s state was that its new features were concentrated in St. Petersburg. The tsar’s reform of provincial administration had never been very effective, languished for lack of suitable personnel, and was abolished after his death. Unlike European monarchies, Russia lacked an administrative structure dense enough and well trained enough to execute the sovereign’s will on provincial society. Unimpeachably enlightened measures formulated in the capital did not affect the provinces, and just to collect taxes Peter often had to rely on specially delegated military officers. To some extent the new state floated in the air over a society that was not changing with the pace of the capital or even Moscow. For the peasants, relations with the state had hardly changed.

  With all these limitations, however, Peter succeeded and transformed his country forever. He did not do this without the aid of some previous changes, particularly in the culture of the church and the boyar elite in the last decades of the seventeenth century. His reordering of the state, however, had no precedent, and came out of his early improvisations and the decision to adopt Swedish models of administration. Peter did not do all of this alone. A major part of his success was his political skill in managing a reluctant aristocracy that inevitably lost part of its power in the new arrangements. The aristocrats, legends aside, were not boyars in long beards trying to restore Orthodox Russia as it was in 1650. They too were European, but with different goals and interests from the tsar, and Peter managed them by including enough of them in the new government, army, and diplomatic corps to keep them quiet if not fully satisfied. Peter also had popular discontent to contend with, and that did have an element of cultural conservatism. When this discontent turned into rebellion,
he suppressed it with savage punishments, to the approval of Europe. No one supported rebels against the crown. With the aristocrats Peter worked entirely differently, pretending to ignore their sympathy for his son and keeping them in the center of government along with his favorites and Western experts until the end of his reign. Thus Peter kept the elite together and allied with him and his policies. His mastery of court politics was as important as his relentless determination and iron will.

  Peter’s death in January 1725, plunged Russia into a political crisis, for one of the many paradoxes of his reign is that he did not carry out the provisions of his decree permitting the tsar to nominate his heir. Therefore at his death there were several possible alternatives: his wife Catherine, crowned his empress the previous year; his ten-year-old grandson Peter by the unfortunate Aleksei; and several daughters by Catherine. The latter were too young or married abroad, and the choice came down to Catherine or Peter under a regency. The ruling elite split over the choice, but after considerable pressure from the guards regiments, the Senate opted for Catherine. For the first time the guards made their wishes felt and opted for a woman. Though Catherine had a reputation as a very strong personality (“the heart of a lion,” said the French ambassador), she did not prove an effective ruler, and very soon state business went to Menshikov and a Supreme Privy Council formed to manage the state. Then Catherine died in 1727. Menshikov seemed poised for supreme power with a boy tsar, but the aristocrats proved too powerful, and the Supreme Privy Council exiled him to Siberia, where he died. The Princes Dolgorukii and Golitsyn were masters of the government and they signaled a new course, moving the capital back to Moscow. They cemented their position by marrying the young tsar to a Dolgorukii princess. Then fate intervened. Suddenly in 1730 Peter II died of smallpox. The aristocrats had to find a new monarch, and they did not choose Peter’s remaining daughter Elizabeth but his niece, Anna, the daughter of his erstwhile co-tsar Ivan V. Anna ruled in Baltic Kurland as the widow of the Duke, and was quickly summoned to Moscow. At the same time the aristocrats decided to hold on to power by compiling a series of conditions that Anna would have to sign to ascend the throne, conditions giving power to the sitting members of the Supreme Privy Council, the Dolgorukiis and Golitsyns. Here they made a fatal error, for the conditions gave power not to the aristocracy as a whole, but to a clique of families. As the English ambassador reported, the Russian aristocrats “have no true notions of a limited government.” When Anna came to Moscow, she quickly sized up the situation and with the support of the other aristocratic clans, the rank and file nobility, and the guards, she tore up the conditions and restored autocracy. Russia was back on the road Peter had mapped out, but with another woman on the throne who had no direct heirs, male or female. No one knew that for the next sixty-six years Russia’s rulers would be women, like Anna, put on the throne by male aristocrats and guards officers.

  6 Two Empresses

  With the restoration of autocracy, Anna came to the throne as Empress of Russia, and after a time she sent the leaders of the Golitsyn and Dolgorukii clans into exile. The ten years of Anna’s reign in the memory of the Russian nobility was a dark period of rule by Anna’s German favorites – particularly her chamberlain – Ernst-Johann Bühren (Biron to the Russians), who was allegedly all-powerful and indifferent to Russian interests. That memory was a considerable exaggeration. After a brief interlude, Empress Elizabeth, Peter the Great’s daughter and a capable and strong monarch succeeded her (1741–1761). Underneath all the drama at court, Russia’s new culture took shape, and Russia entered the age of the Enlightenment. In these decades we can also get a glimpse of Russian society that goes beyond descriptions of legal status into the web of human relations.

  Politically Anna’s court was not a terribly pleasant place, though the story of “German domination” is largely a legend. Anna was personally close to Biron, who had served her well in Courland, where she had lived since the death of her husband the duke in 1711. She entrusted foreign policy to Count Andrei Ostermann and the army to Count Burkhard Christian Münnich, but the three were in no sense a clique. Indeed, they hated one another and made alliances with the more numerous Russian grandees in the court and in the government. The truth was that Anna relied on them and a few others and she did not consult with the elite as a whole. The Senate languished. Not surprisingly, Anna was terrified that there would be plots against her in favor of Elizabeth, Peter’s eldest surviving daughter, or other candidates for the throne, and she used the Secret Chancellery to try to uncover them. The darkest episode of the reign was the trial and execution of her minister Artemii Volynskii in 1740 on the charge of insulting the Empress. This was an excuse: the real reason for his death was Volynskii’s loss of favor with Biron and Ostermann and his own ambitious plans, which frightened Anna and many others in her entourage.

  Anna’s reign was by no means a failure. She restored much of Peter’s work that had been rejected by the oligarchy in the time of Peter II. She returned the capital to St. Petersburg and abolished the Supreme Privy Council. She did not restore the Senate to power, ruling with a Cabinet of Ministers dominated by her favorites. Her government tried to reduce the burden on the country of the large military and naval establishment that Peter had created, but found that they could not. Instead, Russia fought a successful war in Poland to keep France from placing a king on the Polish throne who would be hostile to Russia and Austria – and then Russia went to war with Turkey. Münnich proved a highly capable commander, and Russia was able to return the fort at Azov that was lost in 1711.

  Since Anna’s husband had died before they could produce children, she remained childless. In accord with Peter’s 1722 succession law she chose her heir, albeit on her deathbed: a two-month-old infant who was given the name Ivan VI. The baby’s connection with the Russian throne was remote. He was the grandson of Anna’s elder sister Catherine, who had married the Duke of Mecklenburg in 1716. Catherine’s daughter, also named Anna, in turn married the Duke of Brunswick-Bevern-Lüneburg, and Ivan was their first son. In other words, the tsar of Russia was actually a minor German prince with only the most tenuous connection to the country he was supposed to rule. The baby tsar obviously had to have a regent to rule for him, a fact that brought the conflicts among the grandees into the open. At first Biron was in charge, but Münnich quickly ousted him, only to fall victim to Ostermann and the infant tsar’s parents. Complicating matters was a Swedish declaration of war during the summer of 1741, an attempt by the Swedes to get revenge for their earlier defeats. Not surprisingly in this situation an elaborate plot came into being with all sorts of international ramifications (the French ambassador was one of the leaders) and in November 1741, the guards overthrew the regency and carried Elizabeth on their shoulders into the Winter Palace. Ivan VI and the Brunswick family were sent into exile in northern Russia, Ivan to perish in the Mirovich affair of 1764 and his family to be released only some twenty years later.

  Elizabeth’s reign brought a renewed sense of normalcy to Russia. The remaining Golitsyns, Dolgorukiis, and alleged confederates of Volynskii were returned from exile, their lands and position restored. The Senate was restored to the position that it had under Peter. The Russian army defeated the Swedes, quickly ending the war in 1743. Elizabeth was intelligent and capable, but rather lazy and self-indulgent. The number of her dresses was legendary, and in a modest way she followed her father’s taste for banquets and drink. Secretly she married her lover, originally a Ukrainian choir-boy named Aleksei Razumovskii, who became a major figure at court. He was clever enough to not try to overshadow the others, and for most of the reign affairs were in the hands of the Shuvalovs, the brothers Peter and Alexander, and the chancellor (foreign minister) Aleksei Bestuzhev-Riumin. All of these men, like their rivals the Vorontsovs, came from families of ancient nobility but far from the great aristocracy, who now settled into secondary positions in government and diplomacy. Elizabeth’s grandees were relatively new men who owed their pos
itions to Peter’s promotion of talented young men from outside the small circle of old aristocratic families. Bestuzhev-Riumin was an experienced diplomat, and the Shuvalovs had been part of Elizabeth’s personal entourage in the 1730s. Though they owed their rise to their personal connection with the new empress, they proved energetic and intelligent. They were the first since Peter’s time to systematically turn their attention to the economic development of Russia, primarily toward strengthening its commerce. In 1752 they convinced Elizabeth to abolish all internal tolls and modestly raise the tariff, so that trade would be freer but the state revenue would not suffer. Less happy was their scheme to increase revenue through the state vodka monopoly by raising the price. There were other ideas, the most important to produce a new law code, and the plan to secularize monastery lands, though neither were realized. They also introduced their young cousin Ivan Shuvalov to Elizabeth, and he became a major force in Russian culture.

  Elizabeth’s decision to join Austria against Prussia in the Seven Years War (1756–1763) put any reform plans on the shelf. Russia’s army performed well against the supposed military genius of the age, Frederick the Great, and even briefly occupied Berlin in 1760. The death of the Empress on Christmas day 1761 in the Julian calendar, however, put an end to Russia’s participation in the conflict, and simultaneously set the stage for yet another drama.