Catherine’s time marked the beginning of Russian classicist architecture, which transformed St. Petersburg into the city familiar today. She was firmly against the Baroque exuberance of her predecessor Elizabeth’s chief architect Rastrelli. Catherine and her contemporaries built with unmistakable Roman allusions, a proper architecture for a great imperial capital and its elites. Strict symmetry, Roman columns and triumphal arches were the order of the day. The crowning achievement of the age was the monument to Peter the Great, the “Bronze Horseman” in Pushkin’s immortal phrase. The work of the French sculptor Etienne Maurice Falconet and his wife, it displayed Peter in the garb of a Roman emperor on horseback standing on a giant rock with the simple inscription “Catherine the Second to Peter the First” in Latin and Russian. Unveiled in 1782 to great ceremony, the statue remains Catherine’s most powerful contribution to the city of St. Petersburg.
The years after Pugachev were not just filled with artistic projects and court entertainments, for these were the years of extensive reform of Russian government and society. Finally the Legislative Commission bore fruit, albeit indirectly: Catherine knew how the nobility thought about the issues and what might prove useful while not antagonizing them. The first task was to reorder the administration of the provinces and the towns, which involved creating a new court system. Catherine’s 1775 decrees broke up the large administrative units into some forty new provinces, which in turn divided into five or six smaller units. At the level of these smaller units government essentially stopped, leaving the countryside to the nobility and the peasant communities. The most powerful local figure was the provincial governor appointed by the empress. These were invariably noblemen, sometimes including great aristocrats but more often military men. In the same decree Catherine established courts for the nobility that were to combine appointed judges with local noblemen elected to assist them. These were courts for nobility only. In areas where free peasants predominated there were also to be courts with peasants elected alongside officials to provide justice. As ever, it was the village level that was weakest and where state power often existed only on paper. In the towns, Catherine also established courts, for the townspeople alone, that consisted of appointed judges and elected assessors. Thus justice was divided among special courts for each social group and combined state-appointed judges with elected assessors.
The new legislation implied greater responsibility on the part of the nobility and the elite of the townspeople, yet many basic aspects of their status and relationship to the state remained undefined. The answers to this problem were the 1785 Charters of the Nobility and of the Townspeople. The Charter of the Nobility confirmed and broadened the rights already in practice from Peter’s time and added others, including the 1762 decree on freedom from obligatory state service. Nobles could not be deprived of life and property without a trial by a court that was composed of their peers. Their nobility was hereditary, and could not be terminated without a conviction in court of specified crimes like murder or treason. They were not subject to corporal punishment, and the right to own land and serfs was guaranteed to them alone. Nobles in each province were to come together to form a provincial Assembly of Nobility, electing its own marshal and determining its own membership. The marshal was to act as the leader of the local gentry, conveying its wishes to the capital and the government’s orders to the nobility. The marshals had little formal power, but as the chief representatives of the local nobility, and often with powerful connections in St. Petersburg, they were formidable figures. Provincial governors, in spite of their formal power, found it wise to cultivate the marshals of the nobility. In the towns Catherine’s decrees divided the town population by simple wealth, and put most of the administration, like the courts, in the hands of the town elites. The population was to elect a governing body from among the wealthier citizens to manage the business side of town life, leaving the courts and police as specified in the 1775 provincial reform. Townspeople were also not to be deprived of life and property without conviction in a court of their peers. Lesser townsfolk were subject to corporal punishment. There was also elaborate sumptuary legislation that specified limits to ostentatious display by the lower orders. Though restricted to the upper and middle classes, the Charters were the first fruit of Enlightenment thought about the rights and duties of the citizen to be enacted into Russian law.
As Catherine and her ministers were reordering Russian government they did not lose sight of the situation on the southern border. The Ottomans were reluctant to ignore Russian gains, and the “autonomy” of Crimea under Russian stewardship proved an unstable arrangement. In 1783 Catherine annexed the territory to Russia, adding it to the vast areas of New Russia under the firm hand of Potemkin. Catherine and Potemkin began to develop larger plans of conquest in the south, tempting Austria to join them with the “Greek project,” a proposal for the partition of the Balkans and restoration of a Greek monarchy with Russian princes on the ruins of the Ottoman Empire. Finally in 1787 Turkey declared war. Russian troops began to advance into the Balkans, but elsewhere the situation deteriorated. The Austrian Emperor Joseph II honored his treaty with Russia and his army began to move south too, but he was rapidly defeated by the Turks. King Gustavus III of Sweden attacked Russia as well, hoping for revenge for earlier losses and to strengthen his hand at home. Catherine had hoped for Polish troops to support the Russian effort, but when Stanislaw Poniatowski called the diet to discuss the issue, it swiftly turned into a revolutionary assembly that proceeded to throw off Russian domination and elaborate a reformed constitution. To make matters worse, Prussia cynically supported the Polish effort with a view to its own future aggrandizement in Poland. Catherine had no one to rely upon but Potemkin and her army and navy.
Catherine showed the steel nerves that had brought her to the throne thirty years before. Hearing the guns of the Swedish fleet from her palace windows, she continued to work without giving them any notice. Progress in the south was slow, especially at first, but the new Black Sea fleet (with some help from the American naval hero John Paul Jones) was victorious and the army relentlessly pushed the Turks into the Rumanian principalities. Gustav III made little progress and found himself the object of a conspiracy of Finnish officers discontented with Swedish absolutism. His resources exhausted in spite of modest success on the sea, Gustav made peace in 1790. Turkey remained in the war.
To complicate Russia’s situation still further, Britain, with its own imperial ambitions rapidly growing, began to worry about Russian movement toward the Mediterranean and adopted a hostile stance. Catherine needed success, and at the end of December 1790, general Alexander Suvorov gave it to her, taking the fortress of Izmail near the mouth of the Danube. He took the fort by frontal assault with great casualties, but he took it. In the next spring the Russians moved south toward Bulgaria, and by the end of the summer the Turks capitulated. Russia’s borders now extended to the Dniestr River, including the site of future city of Odessa. Catherine had played her cards with great skill, and she had won. At that moment, Potemkin died. Catherine continued to have lovers and favorites, but none of them ever had the love and trust that Potemkin had inspired.
The wars with Turkey and Sweden had required the complete attention and resources of the Russian government, but they were aware that Europe was increasingly in crisis. The French Revolution was transforming European politics daily, and closer to home the Polish diet’s reformed constitution of May 3, 1791, meant that Russia would soon have a hostile and more powerful neighbor. There was little Catherine could do about France, but Poland was a different case. She intrigued with aristocratic opponents of the new constitution, and as soon as the Turkish war ended she and her Polish allies moved against Poniatowski and the new government. The small Polish army was easily swept away, and Catherine arranged with Prussia to make a new partition. This was not her preferred option, for all along she wanted a united compliant Poland, but she realized that the new order was too popular among Polish nob
les to be reversed, and that she had to conciliate Prussia and Austria.
Thus a much reduced Poland acquired a conservative constitution supported by Russian bayonets, but it did not last. In 1794 Tadeusz Kosciuszko led a rebellion in southern Poland that quickly spread to Warsaw and scored a few modest successes. Catherine was convinced that French Jacobinism was behind it, and sent in Suvorov at the head of a Russian army. Suvorov took Warsaw with great slaughter, and the partitioning powers agreed to put an end to Poland’s existence. Prussia and Austria carved up the areas with predominantly Polish populations, while Russia took the Western Ukraine, the rest of Belorussia, and Lithuania.
Russia now had become a truly multi-national empire. The five-and-onehalf million new subjects brought the proportion of Russians in the state from some eighty-five percent down to perhaps seventy. Catherine did not fight the war to reunite the Eastern Slavs, but she had in fact brought into her empire virtually the whole territory of the medieval Kiev Rus.
If Catherine could do little to affect the progress of the French Revolution, she was no less frightened by its increasing radicalism, and the Russian nobility shared her fears. The policy of toleration and enlightenment gradually came to an end. Especially after the proclamation of the republic and execution of Louis XVI, the importation and circulation of new French books and even long-familiar Enlightenment writers now faced serious restrictions. In 1792 Novikov was arrested after investigation but there was no trial and he was ordered to be confined in prison indefinitely. The Masons were shut down and fell under increasing suspicion as potential supporters of the French revolutionaries. In 1796, only a few weeks before her death, Catherine established the first Russian system of state censorship, no longer depending on the Academy of Sciences or the local police to do the work.
The most spectacular case of dissent and its repression, however, had already come in 1790. In that year Alexander Radishchev, a nobleman and minor civil servant, published a book called A Journey from St. Petersburg to Moscow. Using the then-popular genre of the fictitious journey, he described the villages and towns of Russia and interspersed his own reflections on society and politics. His portrait of serfdom was unflattering to the extreme – in his view a system that corrupted master and serf alike was morally indefensible and economically ruinous. His political ruminations were vaguer, but they clearly suggested that autocracy was not the best way to govern Russia. Catherine read the book herself and made many marginal notes, and ultimately had Radishchev arrested. Interrogated in the Secret Department of the Senate, Radishchev was convicted in the St. Petersburg criminal court of sedition and lèse majesté and was condemned to death. Catherine commuted the punishment to exile in a remote Siberian fort, and Radishchev went off, though with a substantial stipend from one of Catherine’s grandees, who interceded with the empress on his behalf.
The French Revolution and Catherine’s death in 1796 brought Russia’s eighteenth century to a close. For a century the state, or more accurately the monarchs and their courts, had labored to transform the country along European lines and bring European culture to Russia. In this task they had largely succeeded. Russia had institutions and laws copied from European models, and Western diplomats, merchants, and travelers felt at home in St. Petersburg, if not everywhere else in Russia. The new state structure had provided the basis for the rise of Russia to the place of a great power, and helped the growth of commerce and industry, education and science. Settlement of new areas in the south contributed to an ongoing population explosion that was rapidly making Russia the largest country in Europe, even without newly annexed territory.
The cultural transformation was profound. By the end of the century educated Russians, most of them still nobles, had absorbed most of the major ideas and artistic achievements of modern Europe and they were beginning to offer their own still modest contributions. Russian political thought had the same elements and was based on the same writings as that farther west. If Russian noblemen did not admire Rousseau’s democratic musings, they did absorb the teachings of Puffendorf and Montesquieu as well as those of a host of minor writers. Monarchy in Russia was understood in much the same way as in France or Prussia, Austria or Sweden.
Russian reality imposed limits to both state-building and cultural progress. Russia was still too poor to support an extensive education system and all local government suffered from chronic lack of funds and staff. Outside of the capitals, large towns, and aristocratic country estates, life remained much as it had before, a round of rural labor punctuated by Orthodox liturgy. Areas of economic progress existed in the Urals and the trading villages and towns of central Russia, but it was still an overwhelmingly agrarian society.
Moreover, it was an agrarian society, half of whose peasant farmers were serfs. This was an issue Catherine and her enlightened friends could neither change nor even confront. She disliked the system and knew it was pernicious, not least to agricultural progress, but was aware that virtually all noblemen, on whom her throne depended, saw it as the basis of their wealth and position in society, as indeed it was. Russia was not alone in the serf system at the end of the century, it persisted in Poland and Prussia, and Joseph II had only just begun to dismantle it in Austria.
Just at the moment when Russia seemed to have achieved a stable and European order, the French Revolution changed all the rules of the game. It would now have to try to respond to a whole series of new challenges, international and domestic, cultural and political. Eventually its very survival would be at stake. It was a new and dangerous era.
8 Russia in the Age of Revolution
On his mother’s death Paul came to the throne, the first undisputed and male inheritance in seventy years. His first act was to rebury Peter III, whom he believed to be his father, in the church of St. Peter and Paul with the other rulers of Russia from Peter onwards. His next act was to replace most of Catherine’s ministers and officials, and send a number of them into exile. Thus began the brief and often bizarre reign of Tsar Paul.
Paul’s reign began just at the moment that the French revolution, having passed through its most radical phase, began to turn outward, and the new tsar had to respond to the apparent danger from his first days on the throne. Far more conservative than his mother, he made it his priority to strengthen the power and authority of the state. He recentralized the government, reestablishing some of the colleges and reviving the Council of State. He also enlarged the Senate, and saw to it that it exercised more effective supervision of law and administration. To this end he issued an enormous number of new laws, orders, and regulations. In Paul’s mind, everything needed a regulation and his job was to compose one where it did not already exist.
Even greater than the changes in institutions were the changes in style. Paul took every opportunity to assert his personal authority in matters no matter how petty. From his youth he had spent much of his time drilling the troops under his personal control, living away from his mother in the suburban palace of Gatchina, which he turned into a military camp on the style of the Prussian army so beloved by his father. Thus his reassertion of authority began with the army. He ordered the Russian army to switch to uniforms on the Prussian model and adopt Prussian drill and training, to the intense irritation of officers and soldiers alike. The French revolutionary armies had already shown the old Prussian methods to be outmoded, but Paul did not see this in his pursuit of strict hierarchy and mindless obedience. His new orders went far beyond the military, for he required anyone, of any age or sex, who encountered any member of the imperial family on the street to dismount and kneel no matter what the weather. Officers were cashiered or even exiled for minor cases of neglect of duty, details of drill, or even just court etiquette. He prescribed the details of dress for court and other occasions and enforced them with pedantic thoroughness. To many noblemen and officers, his behavior was both insulting and bizarre, but to Paul the enforcement of regulation was part of the restoration of discipline and morality that he regarded a
s crucial after the laxities of Catherine’s rule and the threat of revolution from France. With these ends in mind he revoked many of the provisions of the Charter of the Nobility and reduced and downgraded the elective element in provincial government. Part of this program of counter-reform was the restoration of the old privileges of the nobles of the Baltic provinces and the Ukraine, and an attempt to reach some reconciliation with the Polish gentry. Thus Kosciuszko and other Polish prisoners of war were released, and the legal system of the formerly Polish provinces was maintained. He did not notice the contradictions.
A Concise History of Russia (Cambridge Concise Histories) Page 17