While the court alternated between routine governance, dangerous intrigue, and dramatic palace revolutions, Russia gradually integrated the cultural changes that were the result of Peter the Great’s turn toward European culture. It is not the case that the Empresses and the court elite played no role in the development and deepening of Russian culture. Empress Anna was paradoxically one of the most important innovators. It was in her reign that Russia finally abandoned the simplicity of Peter’s time and acquired a court like those of other European states with the usual cultural institutions. Anna was the first to establish a court theater, beginning with an Italian Commedia dell’arte troupe, and then a regular French and German theater. She also brought an opera company, with its composer-director, the Neapolitan Francesco Araya. Anna replaced Peter’s tiny Winter Palace with a new one, more in keeping with the status of Russia’s rulers. Anna’s government was not only concerned with the court, for she also founded the Infantry Cadet Corps, using the old buildings of Menshikov’s palace. The Cadet Corps later evolved into an elite military school, but in the eighteenth century it was the main institution for the education of young Russian noblemen and had a broad curriculum that was borrowed from the academies for young nobles common in central Europe. The school taught military subjects, but also stressed modern languages, history, elementary jurisprudence, and mathematics. Not just officers, but also government ministers and many writers studied at the Cadet Corps.
Elizabeth continued in this direction, and it was she who ordered Bartolomeo Rastrelli to build the magnificent Winter Palace that stands to this day. Finally St. Petersburg had a residence for the monarch that rivaled or even outshone those of other European capitals. Elizabeth loved the theater even more than Anna, and in her court there were performances of the opera and the French theater two or three times a week. Araya kept his position to the end of her reign, writing his own operas and producing the work of other then prominent composers. In 1749 for the first time her theater put on a Russian play, Semira, by Alexander Sumarokov (1718–1777), a recent graduate of the Cadet Corps. Semira was a typical classical drama in verse in five acts, following the classical unities of time and place and imitating the French theater, Racine, Corneille, and Voltaire (then considered a great playwright and poet more than a thinker). Today it seems wooden and dull, with unexciting verse and an eminently predictable plot pitting duty against love. It was good enough, however, to enchant Elizabeth and her court, performed as it was by the boys of the Cadet Corps taking both male and female roles. Russians had no objection to female actors, the problem was that the theater was so new there simply were not any available, nor was there yet a school for girls equivalent to the Cadet Corps. The appearance of a Russian play, quickly followed by many others, required Russian actors, and by the end of the 1750s Russia had its first native theaters, the court theater as well as some short-lived enterprises outside the court network. Russia also had no school to train visual artists, and in 1756 Ivan Shuvalov founded the Academy of Arts in St. Petersburg. For the next century it would be the main center for Russian painting and sculpture.
Russia, however, still lacked a university. Peter’s academy of sciences had included a university, but that aspect of the academy was too small to make much impact. Again it was Elizabeth’s favorite, Count Ivan Shuvalov, who set out to correct the situation. The empress decreed the foundation of a university in Moscow that opened its doors in 1755. The university was very much on the German model, with a heavily German faculty and lectures frequently in Latin the first years, but it worked. It had two gymnasia attached to it to prepare the students – one for nobles and one for pupils from humbler stations in society. The new university had faculties of law and medicine as well as arts and sciences, and the very first graduates were to make major contributions to Russian culture.
Shuvalov had the political skills to pilot the university through the government’s offices, but he turned for the programmatic details to the Academy, and particularly to Mikhail Lomonosov (1711–1765), who had been pressing the idea in vain for some time. Lomonosov was in many ways the last man of the era of Peter, for he was the son of a wealthy merchant of the far north who owned fishing boats, but who was legally a peasant. Lomonosov had walked south to Moscow to enter the Slavo-Greco-Latin Academy in 1731. After graduation he was sent to Germany to study mining, but eventually opted for chemistry and related sciences. He had to leave Marburg University in a hurry, as his landlord’s daughter was pregnant, and he threw himself on the mercies of the Russian ambassador in Holland. Fortunately the ambassador sent him back to St. Petersburg, where he found a position in the Academy and was able to bring his German mistress to become his wife. Lomonosov’s most important scientific achievement was an early version of the law of conservation of matter and energy that was later formulated by Lavoisier in France, but Lomonosov was something of a polymath. He was a major poet, producing many odes for court occasions, an important genre at the time, for the odes were often declaimed at court occasions before the empress herself. These were not just flattery, for Lomonosov used them to present a program of enlightened and powerful monarchy that reflected his priorities and also those of Elizabeth and the court elite. He also took time off from his chemistry to engage in disputes over Russian history, and most important, to codify Russian grammar. This apparently simple contribution was fraught with consequence, for the cultural changes of Peter’s time had left the Russian literary language in a quandary. The old literary language had been formed by the Church and it was a combination of Old Church Slavic and vernacular elements. Peter’s reign had seen the introduction of thousands of new words and concepts and the restriction of the church language to traditional religious texts. Lomonosov’s contribution was to regularize all this, declaring the Church Slavic elements to be appropriate for high-style literature, but not necessarily ordinary speech or writing, and to provide a grammar for the normal written language that was essentially the spoken vernacular. Together with his own poetry and other writings, he laid the foundation for the literary language of Pushkin and Tolstoy.
Russia may not have had a university, but it certainly had a church. The time of Elizabeth was the high point of the domination of the Orthodox Church by Ukrainian bishops, who were trained in Kiev and elsewhere on Western, and to a large extent, Catholic models. They brought Latin and Western devotional literature to the Russian clergy, and continued the effort to bring their teachings to the population through sermonizing and attempts to educate the clergy. What they could not do was interfere in the process of absorption of Western secular culture. The Church in Russia, under the power of the state through the Synod, lacked the ability to ban books or interfere in the educational process. Boys in the Cadet School certainly had religious instruction, but the curriculum was entirely in the hands of laymen. As the European Enlightenment flowered, this Russian peculiarity meant that works banned in France or Italy found their way to Russia without interference from the clergy.
Starting around 1750, the Enlightenment came to Russia. For men of Lomonosov’s generation, formed in the earlier part of the century, the European culture they absorbed was essentially that of seventeenth-century rationalism. The predominant philosophy at the Academy in Lomonosov’s youth was that of Georg Christian Wolff, a follower and systematizer of the work of Gottfried Leibniz and Peter’s advisor on the Academy of Sciences. Wolff taught a deductive rationalism that depended on mathematics and logic, not sense experience, for its conclusions. Though many Lutheran theologians saw him as a threat, Wolff had no quarrel with revealed religion and was equally respectful of absolute monarchy. This was the worldview that the philosophy faculty of Moscow University propagated as well, not surprisingly, since it still held sway in German universities until the 1770s and beyond. During the middle years of the century, however, newer ideas from France and indirectly from England began to penetrate into Russian libraries and bookstores. Voltaire’s plays, some performed in Russia, illustrated cla
ssic themes of the French enlightenment, religious tolerance, enlightened monarchy, and the struggle against superstition and the clergy. As the French language began to replace German at court in these years, French writers acquired a public in Russia for the first time. In 1756 the first of Voltaire’s essays appeared in Russian translation and three years later his novel Zadig, the first major text of the mature French Enlightenment to be translated. This small stream grew into a flood in the next reign.
The political and cultural efforts of the state and the court rested on the shoulders of the Russian peasantry, seventy percent of whom were serfs. About half of all peasants were the property of the gentry, another fifteen percent were serfs of the Orthodox monasteries, and the rest relatively free. Monastery serfs had been the object of government policy since the time of Tsar Aleksei, who had already taken control of church lands to shore up state revenues. Peter had imitated him, but after his death, control of the land went back to the church. In the 1750s the Shuvalovs decided on a more radical measure: the state would confiscate the monastery lands and make the peasants into tenants of the state. In practice this would mean the end of serfdom for monastery peasants, but the war with Prussia intervened and the reform was delayed.
The fifty percent of peasants that were the property of the gentry varied in their economic position considerably. In the old Russian heartland of central Russia and the northwest, by 1750 most peasants rarely performed labor services, though the gentry could demand them at any time. Mostly the peasants paid some sort of rent and managed the affairs of the village themselves under the supervision of an often distant estate steward and an even more distant owner. The peasant economy of these regions was a complex mix of food crops, small-scale stock raising, and more specialized pursuits like market gardening for the Moscow and St. Petersburg population, both of which were growing rapidly. Some peasants also grew flax to make linen and canvas or hemp for ropes. To the northeast of Moscow and on the upper Volga in particular, there were whole villages and even districts emerging where the peasants were scarcely farmers at all. Here they made frying pans and other iron implements, wove coarse cloth, made wooden spoons and dishes, and even produced more sophisticated items, such as painted chests, toys, and even icons on wood and metal. Herein lay the origins of the Palekh icon painting of the nineteenth century, and the later production of painted lacquer boxes. In these villages the richest artisans were merchants as well, who attended all the local fairs like the great fair near Nizhnii Novgorod or who went to Moscow and St. Petersburg. Some such peasant traders even came to Archangel as early as Peter’s time. Many of these were monastery villages, but some were the property of great magnates like the Sheremetevs. In later times the Sheremetev villages would grow into great industrial cities.
South of the Oka River, where the steppe began with its black earth, a different sort of serf economy emerged. These areas were still open to Crimean slave raids, but since the 1630s the Russian state had steadily strengthened its defenses in the south, so that the area was relatively secure by 1750. The seventeenth century defensive lines had relied on armed peasants, Cossacks, and local noblemen, but Peter’s regular army replaced them in large part, leaving land open for normal peasant settlement. Noblemen began to move farther and farther south, buying or receiving larger and larger estates as grants from the crown. Many of them were devoted at first to sheep and cattle raising, as this was easier to manage in remote and thinly settled areas, but soon the area began to shift to grain production and the nobles began to set up estates largely worked by labor services. This system demanded the presence of a nearby steward to give orders to the peasants or even the residence of the landowner. Labor services were much more oppressive to the peasantry, and were balanced only by the greater fertility of the southern soil.
The peasantry, however, under either system was not ground down into abject and universal poverty. Eighteenth century Russian peasants probably ate as well as their counterparts in France or Germany, at least in years of normal harvest, and they owned their own animals, ploughs, and other agricultural tools as well as modest material goods. The oppressive nature of the serf system lay not in the diet or the lack of material possessions of the peasants, but rather in the nature of the social relations that defined serfdom. Serfdom was never defined in written law, though by custom the master had nearly complete power over the serf. He could demand any sort of labor services or payments, forbid marriages, reorder the land allotments of the village community, or move whole villages to different parts of the country. Short of torturing or killing the serf, he could do anything. In practice radical mistreatment was not in the master’s interest, but not all masters understood that, and in any case the threat of arbitrary exactions or commands hung over the serf for the whole of his life. The only real limit to the landowner’s power was the threat of revolt or personal revenge, and this was a very real possibility given the lack of effective state power in rural areas. Yet that option meant that the peasant burned his bridges and had to flee, which was not desirable for most peasants. It was better to put up with the master and hope for the best.
Fortunately not all Russian peasants were serfs. About thirty percent of the peasantry had no master and paid only taxes and an additional “rent” to the state. These were the peasants of the north, the Urals, and Siberia, as well as many on the southern frontier. All Cossacks, who increasingly farmed the land, were also free. These areas were not unimportant, and indeed from the sixteenth to the end of the eighteenth century the north was a land of great prosperity, founded on the fur trade with Siberia and the salt springs that supplied most of Russia’s needs. The Stroganov family had made its fortune as early as the sixteenth century on salt, so much so that the tsar granted them a separate legal status of their own – not noble but higher than all other merchants. Their houses in the north had been a major center of not only trade, but also of book production and icon painting. At the beginning of the eighteenth century the collection of salt from surface deposits around the mouth of the Volga took the profits out of the salt trade, but the Stroganovs turned to iron manufacturing in the Urals, along with the Demidovs, a peasant-merchant family from central Russia and a few other families. From Peter’s time onward the state granted them the right to use corvée labor by the peasantry to supply the iron foundries with wood for fuel, and the iron mines prospered. The Urals mines and foundries were very remote, and the iron had to be floated down the rivers on barges during the spring floods to reach the Volga where it went on to Moscow and St. Petersburg. Much of it was even exported to England and elsewhere in Western Europe. Though a technically rather primitive industry, it made enormous fortunes for the owners, and both the Stroganovs and Demidovs entered the nobility. The profitability of the iron works rested on the unpaid labor of the state peasants “assigned” to them, and their peasants fell into a sort of semi-serfdom, which in time proved highly explosive.
The Urals and the Volga River were areas with a population that included many nationalities other than the Russians. At the time of Peter the Great’s death, the Volga-Urals area had about a million people, half of them Tatars, Chuvash, Bashkirs, among others. In the seventeenth century half or more of the Tatars had served in the Russian army, while the remainder, along with the other Volga peoples, continued to pay the old yasak tax. As serfdom spread, the tax defined their status as non-serfs. From Peter’s time the yasak-payers and the Tatar soldiers were almost all converted to state peasants like the Russian peasants of the north. A continuous flow of Russian peasants and nobles came into the area, avoiding the agricultural Tatar and Chuvash territories but taking much land from the nomadic Bashkirs, leading to predictable revolts in 1705, 1735, and 1755. Altogether Russia was still about ninety percent Russian, the largest minority being the Ukrainians (who made up five percent), with the Volga peoples and the Baltic provinces making up the remaining five percent. The Baltic nobles retained their privileges, as did the Cossack nobility of the Ukrainian H
etmanate. There the office of hetman itself was restored in 1727, abolished again in 1734, and then subsequently restored by Elizabeth. The empress appointed Kirill Razumovskii, the brother of her Ukrainian lover Aleksei, to the post. He would be the last hetman.
If Elizabeth was happy with local autonomy in the Hetmanate and the Baltic provinces, she was not tolerant of religious variation. She had come to power with the support of the bishops of the Orthodox Church, most of them Ukrainians who had absorbed Catholic notions of the need for religious uniformity. Empress Elizabeth initiated a new wave of persecution of the Old Believers, and supported the efforts of the Bishop of Kazan’ and others to convert the Muslims. Hundreds of mosques were destroyed and various forms of enticement and coercion were applied to the Tatars to get them to accept Orthodox Christianity. These attempts were an abject failure, for only a small percentage abjured their faith, and those in large numbers returned to Islam after the death of the empress.
Russia remained an overwhelmingly agrarian society, and few exceptions aside, peasant labor and landowning were the basis of the wealth of the nobility. The growth of the population and the cultivation of virgin land in the south brought enormous prosperity to the nobility. They demonstrated it for all to see not only in mansions in Moscow and St. Petersburg, but also in their new country houses. Traditionally Russian boyars had lived in towns, maintaining only small houses on their estates for their infrequent visits. At the end of the seventeenth century they began to build more magnificent residences around Moscow – whole complexes with churches in the new semi-baroque style of the time – but these were few and near the capital. Only in the middle of the eighteenth century did the newfound prosperity of the nobility lead to the construction of country houses with Baroque and later Classical architecture, far from the cities. These were real country houses with elaborate gardens, natural and artificial ponds, sculpture and pavilions for dining, and entertainment outside. The great aristocrats like the Sheremetevs and Golitsyns had entire theaters built into their house, suitable for drama or ballet. Some of them formed theatrical troupes from their serfs, who were taught to read, play music, and dance or act in performances that replicated European models. One of the Sheremetevs even married one of his serf ballerinas. For the average noble family such luxuries were unattainable, but all over the country noblemen built one or two story wooden houses with at least one room large enough for dances and entertainment. By 1800, obligatory style included a portico with classical columns around the house’s main door. These houses became one of the centers of the life and culture of the nobility in its last century, to be memorialized in countless stories and novels of the great Russian writers from Pushkin onwards: Evgenii Onegin, Fathers and Sons, and War and Peace.
A Concise History of Russia (Cambridge Concise Histories) Page 14