A Concise History of Russia (Cambridge Concise Histories)

by Bushkovitch, Paul

  With the noblemen serving in the army and civil service (and legally obliged to do so from 1714 to 1762), much of the management of the estates fell on the women. One of the many paradoxes of Russian society was that noblewomen had much stronger legal rights to property and much more control over it than their counterparts in almost all Western societies of the time. Their control of their dowrer property after marriage was virtually complete in law (if not always in fact), and widows usually retained control of their husbands’ estates. The absence of primogeniture in Russia meant that among the nobility a widow was often the ruler of the family when her sons were long-time adults with important careers. These were the ancestors of the strong women found in the classic novels that were set in the country estates a century later.

  Empress Elizabeth, like her predecessor Anna, had to provide for a succession to her throne, as she had no children of her own. She chose her nephew, Karl Peter Ulrich, the Duke of Holstein-Gottorp and the son of her older sister Anna Petrovna, who had married the then Duke in 1725. Elizabeth’s idea was to keep the succession in her family, not in the family of Empress Anna. The Holstein connection also had diplomatic advantages in relation to Sweden and the German states, especially Prussia. Elizabeth brought the boy to Russia in 1742 with a large suite of Holsteiners and he converted to Orthodoxy with the name Peter in honor of his grandfather, Peter the Great. The young Peter was not a particularly promising boy, and Elizabeth decided that he needed a wife. She chose Sophie, the daughter of the Duke of Anhalt-Zerbst – Anhalt-Zerbst being a small German principality in the Prussian orbit. Sophie’s mother was also from the Holstein family, so that Sophie and Peter were cousins and were both related to the then King of Sweden. The family also had the support of Frederick the Great of Prussia, victorious in war with Austria (1740–1748), and whom Elizabeth opposed but wished to placate. In 1744 Sophie came to Russia with her mother and there was instructed in Orthodoxy, eventually taking the name Catherine at conversion. Thus at the age of fifteen the future Catherine the Great took up her position at the Russian court as the wife of the heir to the throne. The young girl was lonely, and her mother’s intrigues only increased their isolation. The one bright spot for the princess was that she got along with the Empress well on a personal level.

  At first the marriage was uneventful, a tepid friendship rather than a real marriage, and no heir appeared. As the years passed both Peter and Catherine found other interests, and as Catherine matured she found her husband’s childish behavior and coarseness increasingly irritating. She also began to have political worries, for Peter stuck close to his Holstein entourage and displayed little interest in the country he was to rule. Catherine was already acute enough to realize that this was a dangerous characteristic in a future tsar. Finally Catherine had her first love affair with the young aristocrat Sergei Saltykov, and in 1754 she gave birth to a son whom Empress Elizabeth had baptized Paul. Russia now had an heir, whom Catherine in her later memoirs would make clear was the son of Sergei Saltykov, not her husband Peter. Paul’s presumed parentage was a well-kept secret, even in the gossipy world of the court.

  As she recovered from childbirth, Catherine began to read. She had always been more of a reader than was typical in court circles. Her choices had ranged from romances to serious works like Henri Bayle’s Dictionary, a classic of early Enlightenment thought. Now in her momentary isolation she turned to Voltaire, Tacitus, and most important for her later conception of government, Charles-Louis de Montesquieu’s Spirit of the Laws, which was published in 1748. Not all of her reading was so heavy, for she appreciated Voltaire’s wit as much as his ideas, but most of it seems to have been books she thought valuable for the wife of a future emperor of Russia. For whatever she thought of her husband, he seemed certain to inherit the throne.

  Peter had his own mistress by now, and Saltykov was sent abroad. Catherine soon took up with a young Polish nobleman, Stanislaw Poniatowski, who came to Russia with the English ambassador, but politics soon removed him as well. The politics of Elizabeth’s court did not just affect Catherine’s private life, but her political status as well. Russia had entered the Seven Years War in 1756 under the foreign policy leadership of Bestuzhev-Riumin, who had maintained an alliance with England and Austria against France and Prussia. Unfortunately for Bestuzhev-Riumin, as well as many of his colleagues throughout Europe, the Austrian chancellor count Wenzel Anton Kaunitz engineered a major reversal of alliances in 1756. Austria allied with France in order to get revenge on Prussia. England allied with Prussia, for in London the main enemy and rival was always France – in India and the New World, as well as in Europe. Russia had to choose, and Bestuzhev-Riumin persuaded Elizabeth to remain with Austria and join it in fighting Prussia when war broke out in 1756. At the same time Russia did not declare war on England, nor did England on Russia. This tangle led to Bestuzhev-Riumin’s fall in 1758, and the rise of the Vorontsov family (whose sympathies were with France, not England) to power at court. Hence they accused Bestuzhev-Riumin of lack of zeal in the war and convinced the empress to oust him. As the Seven Years’ War progressed and the Russian army kept Frederick the Great on the defensive, Peter’s pro-Prussian sympathies became more and more of an irritant to Elizabeth and made him unpopular in the army and much of the court. As his wife, Catherine incurred the empress’s suspicions. Personal conflicts added fuel to the flames, though Catherine was able to appeal personally to the empress through several crises.

  In this delicate and potentially dangerous situation Catherine encountered Grigorii Orlov in the summer of 1760. Orlov was one of five brothers, all of them officers in the guards and very popular in that milieu. This was a powerful romantic attachment, but also politically quite important, for it was the guards who had already decided three times who would rule Russia. She also found her first real woman friend, Princess Elizabeth Dashkova. Dashkova was much younger than Catherine, but was a woman of intelligence and fortitude, and moreover was the sister of Peter’s mistress, one of the Vorontsovs. In spite of this family tie, Dashkova had developed an intense personal dislike of Peter and shared the general discontent with his political orientation. The tutor to Catherine’s son Paul, count Nikita Panin, a shrewd and experienced diplomat, also distrusted Catherine’s husband. Though Peter was still the heir, he was acquiring many enemies.

  Then, just at the moment when Prussia seemed about to collapse, Empress Elizabeth died. In January 1762, the Duke of Holstein-Gottorp ascended the Russian throne as Peter III. His first act was to make peace with Prussia, negating all of Russia’s efforts and sacrifices over the previous five years. To add insult to injury, he persuaded Prussia to help him to attack Denmark, a traditional Russian ally, to recover territory he believed to rightly belong to Holstein. He even ordered Prussian style uniforms for the guards, and drilled them endlessly after the Prussian fashion. No moves could be more precisely calculated to insult the Russian army and the court elite. It did not matter that peace allowed him to take up some of the old proposals of the Shuvalov group and to abolish the requirement that noblemen serve in the army or civil service (which once again made service voluntary). Peter had hopelessly ruined his relations with his most important constituency in St. Petersburg.

  Catherine and the Orlovs began to plan a way to remove him and proclaim Catherine empress in her own right. Peter had suspicions that he had enemies, and one of the conspirators was arrested. Grigorii Orlov’s brother Aleksei decided that the time had come and on June 28, 1762, he came at dawn to Peterhof and told Catherine they had to strike. She had no hesitation and with Dashkova rode into St. Petersburg. Orlov took them to the barracks of the Izmailov guards, and the soldiers fell on their knees, swearing loyalty to Empress Catherine II. Catherine and her party went to the two other guards regiments, who joined her, ending at the Winter Palace by ten o’clock in the morning. A manifesto was readied, officially proclaiming her the sovereign and ordering the army and people to swear the oath of allegiance.

  Pe
ter III still remained with his Holstein hussars and German advisers at Oranienbaum, the suburban palace on the Gulf of Finland west of Peterhof that Menshikov had built decades before. Catherine donned the uniform of the oldest guards regiment, the Preobrazhenskii guards, and riding like a man on a white horse, moved out of the city toward Oranienbaum with the troops to capture her husband. Peter completely collapsed in fear, and surrendered after feeble attempts at escape. Catherine had him sent to one of his nearby estates to await incarceration under the watch of Aleksei Orlov and there on July 6, he perished. The public announcement was that he died of colic, and there was a sumptuous public funeral, but Catherine privately knew that Aleksei Orlov had taken matters into his own hands. The murder may have been unplanned, for everyone at the scene, including Peter, was drunk – but whatever the case, the murder was done. Aleksei Orlov secretly wrote to Catherine begging her forgiveness, and she kept the letter locked in her desk to the end of her life. With Peter out of the way, the once obscure German princess was now – at the age of thirty-three – Catherine II, the empress of Russia.

  7 Catherine the Great

  Catherine’s first task on ascending the throne was to secure her power and deal with the unfinished business of her husband’s reign. She quickly confirmed his decree abolishing compulsory service for the nobility, but she delayed the decree confiscating monastery lands. She had proclaimed herself the defender of Russian interests and of Orthodoxy, and she knew that the church was not happy with the move. Furthermore count Panin had plans to reorganize the central government around a state council that would have some sort of power alongside the monarch. The new empress, after a delay of more than a year, and after deposing the obstreperous and very rich bishop of Rostov, decreed the secularization of church lands in 1764. Nearly a fifth of the Russian peasantry ceased to be serfs. Regarding Panin’s plans she was more cautious, merely ignoring them and keeping him to head the College of Foreign Affairs and supervise the education of her son and heir Paul.

  Foreign policy demanded Catherine’s attention for much of the first decade of her reign, even though she had been preoccupied with notions of reform of state and society from the time of her reading of Montesquieu and others in the 1750s. Unfortunately, Catherine could not control events and in the autumn of 1763 the king of Poland died. His death created a serious problem and Catherine had to act. From the last years of the Northern War, Poland, the onetime great power of Eastern Europe, had succumbed to a declining economy and population and an anarchic constitution. It had a weak elected king, all-powerful magnates, and a diet of nobles whose main aim was the conservation of traditional law and privileges above all else. Its neighbors, Prussia, Austria, and especially Russia liked this situation, and however absolute at home, their rulers were intent on preserving the “Golden Freedom” of the Polish nobility. A weak Poland with a tiny army suited them all and their ambassadors directed the Polish state.

  The death of the king in 1763 came at a time of slowly returning prosperity and calls for modest constitutional reform. Catherine decided to support some of these calls, and with the aid of Polish allies, intimidation of their opponents, and simple bribery, placed her former lover, Stanislaw Poniatowski, on the throne of Poland. Poniatowski and his allies were able to enact some of their very modest proposals, but Catherine wanted a practical guarantee of continued Russian influence, and she found it in the issue of political rights of dissidents (non-Catholics) in Poland. Poland possessed a sizable Protestant minority (who mostly spoke German) in the northwest and a more numerous Orthodox minority in the east and southeast. The Protestants included a number of noble families as well as townsmen, but were excluded from political representation and most offices. The Orthodox were mostly Ukrainian peasants, and had no spokesman but the one Orthodox bishop, a Ukrainian from the Russian side of the border. Both groups, but especially the Orthodox peasants, were subject to continuous harassment from Catholic clergy and nobles. Catherine, through her ambassador, ordered Poniatowski and his allies to enact legal toleration of the religious dissidents. The ultimate result in 1768 was a revolt of Catholic nobles against the Russians and the king, and this involved the Russian army in the internal dissensions of Poland. Catherine knew that her intervention in Poland could have dangerous consequences, but she had formed a firm alliance with Prussia and hoped for the best. Unfortunately the Ottomans, prompted by France and understandably disturbed by the specter of even greater Russian influence in Poland, declared war on Russia at the end of the year. Russia was again at war with a major power possessing a huge – if sometimes unwieldy – army; this was a war that would have to be fought across vast and largely empty steppes very far from Russia’s home bases.

  The war with Turkey also put an end to one of Catherine’s pet projects, the Legislative Commission. For decades the government had been aware of the confused state of Russian law, based as it was on the 1649 law code, Peter’s legislation, and hundreds of decrees on particular issues that often contradicted more general statutes. Catherine saw the opportunity to carry out a thorough review and revision and to establish some general principles. To this end in January 1765, she began to compile an Instruction, a guideline for reform. The result was a volume of several hundred pages, compiled (as she freely admitted) of passages translated from her beloved Montesquieu; the Italian law reformer Cesare Beccaria; and German writers on finance and economics, such as the now forgotten Baron J. F. von Bielfeld. In the text she began with the principle that Russia was a European state, and it was a monarchy, not a despotism. That is, its government was based on law, not the arbitrary will of the monarch. At the same time, following Montesquieu, she argued that a state the size of Russia required an absolute monarch who would have the necessary vigor and power to rule effectively. Without that, lawlessness and chaos would ensue. The Instruction was not a series of specific recommendations about particular issues but a description of general principles for laws regulating social status, law courts, and the encouragement of population growth, agriculture, commerce, and industry. It concluded with a series of principles for what was then called “police” in Europe. These principles were ordinances not concerned so much with crime as they were with cleanliness, communication, fire prevention, and general good order in town and country. The text was remarkable enough, but even more remarkable was the use to which she put it.

  At the end of 1766 she issued a manifesto that announced that various local communities were to choose representatives to come to Moscow to discuss the reform of the law, and a few months later she published her Instruction and ordered it distributed throughout the country. Thus an extensive compilation of Enlightenment political thought was to be distributed openly to the population at large, and this was to be the basis for the deliberations of the Legislative Commission in Moscow.

  The Commission opened on July 30, 1767, with 428 of the 564 delegates already present. The most important group comprised the 142 deputies from the nobility and the 209 deputies from the cities (many of them also noblemen). There were also 29 delegates from the free peasants and 44 Cossack deputies. From the various Volga peoples, Tatars and others came 54 deputies – 22 deputies represented the Ukrainian Cossack nobility of the Hetmanate, and the Baltic provinces had their deputies among the nobles. Even the free Finnish peasants of the Vyborg area had their representatives. Some nobles tried to challenge their presence, but Catherine upheld them on the basis of the Swedish law of this conquered territory. The only group that was not represented consisted of the serf peasants of Russia and the Baltic provinces, who together made up more than fifty percent of the population of the state.

  The process of choosing representatives was hardly a modern ideal election, for in many remote areas the nobles simply failed to show up or did so in very small numbers. In the towns it was hard to achieve consensus, and the free peasants also seem to have seen the process as a chance to petition the monarch rather than to suggest law. Nevertheless, they all did show up in Moscow and
with some prompting from the empress, got down to work assembling and examining existing legislation and compiling proposals that would serve as the basis of general statutes for regularizing the status of the various groups in society in judicial institutions. The delegates were not a parliament and were not there to pass laws – they had assembled to make proposals to Catherine that she could choose to follow or not. They were also supposed to follow the guidelines of her instruction, and they generally did, but not without considerable discussion. Opinions were exchanged remarkably freely, and some of the more conservative nobles rejected the implications of the Instruction that were favorable to peasants and townspeople. As time passed, the various subcommissions deliberated slowly and Catherine decided to move them to St. Petersburg. By the summer of 1768, the nobles were ready with a proposal, itself the object of considerable wrangling, especially over issues like the conditions for promotion of commoners to noble rank and crimes against nobles by serfs. Catherine was getting a very rapid lesson in the values and ideas of the various classes of Russian society, and it was fairly clear that reform of state and society would meet considerable obstacles among a large part of the nobility. The Turkish declaration of war intervened before she had to make difficult decisions. Most of the noble deputies were also army officers, and now full mobilization was necessary to deal with both Turkey and the Polish situation. The Commission was dissolved. Its work, however, was not in vain, as later events would prove.