Russia A History

by Gregory L. Freeze

  The primary beneficiaries of expansion were the state and landlords, not the serfs. The former profited directly from a profound eighteenth-century ‘price revolution’, which, coming much later than similar inflation in Western Europe, brought a fourfold increase in the price of grain, hemp, flax, and textiles. This price revolution, moreover, impelled many landlords to transfer their serfs from quitrent to corvée dues. Whereas quitrent provided a regular monetary sum, corvée labour enabled the squire to increase the volume of his own production and hence profit from the rising prices on agricultural commodities. As a result, a historic shift took place in serfdom wherein peasants from the central black earth regions, heretofore working the land mostly on quitrent, were consigned increasingly to corvée, much to their dismay and resentment.

  An additional measure which greatly advantaged landlords was colonization. Catherine believed firmly in the mercantilist notion that population equalled wealth. She did all in her power to promote immigration to the empire, including inviting whole communities of religious dissenters, mostly Mennonites, to resettle from southern Germany to southern Russia. She also opened borderlands in the south-east (near Ufa and Orenburg) and south-west (in the territories north of the Black Sea known officially as ‘New Russia’) to nobles, granting vast tracts of land to those who resettled their serfs there. Apart from mercantilism, here the empress was also motivated by concerns of security: by settling large Russian populations on borderlands historically populated by Turkish peoples (mostly Bashkirs and Kalmyks), Tatars, and Cossacks, she hoped to domesticate these peoples and integrate them into the empire. Catherine further believed that the borderlands were ripe for agricultural exploitation. Endowed with fertile soil and favourable climate, this underpopulated region had remained untapped for centuries because their open plains made them difficult to defend and vulnerable to incursions from without.

  Quitrent and corvée: serf dues

  By the late eighteenth century, however, the balance of power in the south had shifted from the indigenous populations in favour of the Russian state. Cossack hosts and tribal populations retained considerable autonomy and, in most instances, enjoyed exemption from conscription and the poll tax. But their service obligations as subject peoples were now firmly inscribed in law and practice. None of them favoured the influx of Russian nobles and serfs, but, beyond verbal protests and occasional disturbances, they were powerless to resist. As a result, the vast rich expanse of the Black Sea basin was now opened for cultivation. These lands generated higher yield, with seed grain ratios of 4:1 to 5:1 rather than the usual 3:1 in central Russia. A large portion of this output went to market and, because of the proximity to the Black Sea, for export. To handle this burgeoning trade, in 1794 Catherine founded the port city of Odessa, which within a few decades would become one of the largest cities in the empire.

  These developments—the price revolution, the expansion of rural markets, the export of grain, and the increasing control over serf labour—proved a veritable windfall for those nobles able to take advantage of them. According to one estimate, their profit from corvée rose from 36 copecks per male serf in 1710 to 10 roubles in 1800, a rate that far exceeded by sevenfold the general inflation rate. In practice, only a relatively large estate was able to exploit this opportunity, and that required a noble family to remain visible and acquire enough land so as to counteract the downward pressure of partible inheritance. Although some nobles succeeded, many others did not, widening further the stratification along the continuum of poor and rich noble.

  Taken as a whole, Russia’s eighteenth-century economy presented quite a paradox. On one hand, it could boast of burgeoning trade and markets, increased exports, rapid expansion of paper money, and very healthy growth rates. On the other hand, all of this led somehow to a wealthier and more privileged nobility alongside a weaker, smaller, and less secure merchant status. The centre of gravity for wealth, social power, and even population stood far more firmly in the countryside in 1800 than it had a century earlier.

  The Pugachev Rebellion

  Probably the single greatest blow to the moral foundations of the existing order was the fateful decision by Peter III to free the nobility from service. The reciprocal principle of universal service—serfs serve the noble, the nobles serve the state—had provided the primary justification for serfdom; Peter the Great had said as much, as had every one of his successors. It was the tsar’s will; and, as the Orthodox Church taught, God Himself demanded obedience to the tsar’s will. But ‘freeing’ the nobles had abrogated this reciprocity. Here and there serfs circulated rumours that this was just the first step, that soon the tsar would free them as well. When this did not happen, and when Peter III was deposed shortly afterwards, these rumours were transmuted into a variant of the familiar pretender myth: Catherine II and her cohort were illegitimate (indeed, German!) usurpers, Peter III was not dead but had taken refuge with loyal Orthodox peasants until he could return triumphantly, reclaim his throne, and complete his emancipatory project. This myth spawned numerous pretenders during the 1760s and 1770s, some as far away as Silesia, Hungary, and the Urals, all claiming to be the true Peter.

  The greatest challenge, however, came from a rebellion led by a fugitive Don Cossack, Emelian Pugachev, who waged intermittent campaigns against the state between 1772 and 1774. Like previous rebellions, this one drew principally on disaffected frontier Cossacks—in this case the Iaik Cossacks north of the Caspian Sea, who were fighting a lengthy and losing struggle to maintain autonomy from the imperial state. But the rebellion eventually attracted many other disaffected elements, producing the bloody Pugachevshchina that could only be suppressed by a full-scale military expedition.

  Pugachev began to proclaim himself the avenging Peter III sometime in 1772 and assembled his own ‘court’, surrounding himself with confederates who renamed themselves after leading figures in the capital. This cadre of impersonators gathered a small contingent of Cossacks and fugitive ‘possessionary’ factory serfs and next proceeded to lay siege to Kazan and Orenburg. Success increased credibility and garnered new support; soon some of the Turkic peoples of the southern Volga (Kalmyks, Bashkirs, Kazakhs, and Tatars) joined the rebellion. In 1774 the conflagration spread to the mining settlements at the foot of the Urals, and Ekaterinburg found itself besieged.

  Once the Russo-Turkish War ended in 1774, Catherine could now redeploy the returning regiments to deal with Pugachev. His forces were on the run, losing control of most of the towns they had earlier overwhelmed. But in midsummer of 1774 they crossed the Volga into territories populated mostly by Russian serfs. At one point Pugachev acquired a printing press and began to issue manifestos and decrees declaring the serfs free and ordering them to wreak vengeance against their ‘former’ masters. To the dismay of nobles and state officials, such radical appeals struck a sympathetic chord with many serfs, who seized lands, pillaged granaries and warehouses, and torched numerous manor-houses. Over 1,500 landlords were reported killed before the wave of violence was suppressed. What began as a frontier rebellion had turned into a dangerous peasant jacquerie.

  Despite widespread support, Pugachev’s forces were no match for the experienced military and suffered a decisive defeat in August 1774. A month later Pugachev was delivered to the authorities by erstwhile followers in the town of Iaitskii gorodok. At last the rebellion was over, and the perpetrators were shipped to Moscow where they were paraded in the streets in cages before being interrogated, tried, and executed. But troubling questions lingered. Never before had a Cossack revolt succeeded in rousing so many peasants. Did the serfs really believe that Pugachev was Peter, and did they genuinely think themselves free and empowered to act violently? Certainly this was their defence once the rebellion was crushed, but such claims were made by peasants desperately trying to minimize the state’s retribution against them. Whatever the peasants actually thought, the whole episode showed that the myth of freedom ‘in the name of the tsar’ was sufficient to mobiliz
e serfs for organized violence. Whether or not serfs looked upon their bondage as unjust in the wake of the 1762 manifesto is a matter of conjecture, but the mere fact that they acted as if they did introduced a new element into the political cosmology of the countryside: the incompatibility of justice and serfdom now that universal service was no more.

  Although the Pugachevshchina was the last great Cossack-led rebellion, it forced Catherine to recognize the dangers of ‘under-government’ at the provincial level. Leaving administration largely to local landlords may have sufficed in peaceful times, but Pugachev’s activities coincided with a war that forced many landlords to resume their careers in uniform and thus leave provincial service. In the absence of full-time civil administrations, whole regions found themselves virtually bereft of governmental personnel, a vacuum that allowed the popular violence to spread uncontrolled. In response, Catherine decided upon a major restructuring of provincial government, a process that culminated in the Statute on Provincial Administration in 1775 and the Law on Provincial Police (blagochinie) in 1782.

  These two reforms expanded the number of provincial governments from eight to thirty-five (later the number rose to fifty), each having a population between 300,000 and 400,000 souls. Each provincial capital had a full-time and salaried civil staff headed by a governor, who was appointed personally by the sovereign and given a large salary and high grade on the Table of Ranks. In addition, there was to be a commander-in-chief, appointed by the Senate, with responsibility for maintaining order. Courts and judgeships were established, and responsibility for staffing them was shared by the central authorities and the local nobility. Charity, education, wardship, and the like fell under the aegis of a newly established body called the Board of Public Welfare, an agency headed by the governor but managed by representatives from the local élites.

  The Law on Provincial Police nominally established local police offices and empowered them to maintain order, keep track of religious minorities and schismatics, and oversee local publishing. But in practice these responsibilities, like many of the provisions in the 1775 Statute, were honoured mostly in the breach, at least during the eighteenth century; hence serious investigations typically had to be handled by other agencies. Nevertheless, the two statutes had the combined effect of establishing a civil presence sufficient to prevent local disturbances from getting out of control. By the minimalist standards of Russian government in the eighteenth century, this was one definition of success.

  The Church, Dissenters, and Popular Religion

  With the sequestration of church lands and peasants in 1764, Catherine severely limited the Church’s resources and capacity to address its various problems. However, the ‘Common on Church Properties’ provided a modest budget for ecclesiastical administration and some funds for monasteries (many of which, however, were abolished as redundant and ‘useless’). But that budget contained no funds to provide proper support for the parish churches and their staffs. Given the lack of endowments, benefices, or tithes, parish clergy had to support themselves primarily by cultivating the plot of parish church land and by exacting gratuities for various religious rites (for example, baptism, weddings, and burials). Significantly, the parish as an institution was also losing its centrality in daily life: it did not form a lower unit of civil administration, had indeed no juridical status in state law, and even lost some of its traditional functions as the commercial and cultural vortex of the community.

  At the same time, parish clergy underwent far-reaching changes in their status and training. The Spiritual Regulations of 1721 had required them to be educated, to know Feofan Prokopovich’s catechism, to read laws and important notices to the parishioners, and to maintain accurate parish registries of births, deaths, and marriages. As ever, imperial fiat was slow to become everyday fact, but in the second half of the century parish clergy did in fact find it necessary to fulfil these various mandates. Perhaps the most significant change pertained to formal education: from the 1740s the Church gradually erected a network of diocesan seminaries where, increasingly, the clergy’s sons were forced to enroll—on pain of exclusion from the clergy and even conscription into the army. It took time, of course, to construct a seminary system based on the Latin curriculum of Jesuit schools, but by the mid-1780s nearly every diocese had established such a seminary, with advanced classes in philosophy and theology. Few students completed the course of study, however, and most departed at the first opportunity to fill a vacant clerical position in their home region. Nevertheless, ecclesiastical élites—above all, the ‘learned episcopate’ and isolated members of the parish clergy—did master the curriculum and, on the basis of their education, held the top positions in church administration.

  For most rural clergy, however, a schooling based on rote memory and Latin curriculum was irrelevant to the service in a village church. Although church leaders recognized the shortcomings of the new seminary, they remained staunch adherents of the classical curriculum, chiefly because it provided a symbolic link to a sacred antiquity and placed the clerical élite on the same level as learned savants in the West. But the classical curriculum crowded out instruction in subjects essential for rural clergy, such as homiletics, the teachings of church fathers, and dogmatic theology. Equally startling was the scanty instruction in civil Russian. In the wake of Peter the Great’s language reforms, Church Slavonic was increasingly remote from the civil Russian of official documents and cosmopolitan society—a significant handicap in the light of the extensive secular duties ascribed to parish priests. Not until the 1780s did the Church attempt to rectify the deficiency by introducing parallel literacy instruction in Slavonic and civil Russian, and by offering specifically ‘Russian classes’ (russkie shkoly) in the seminaries.

  Hamstrung by these material and cultural deficiencies, the Church found itself ill-equipped to combat the spiritual deficiencies of its flock. Despite the claims to be ‘Holy Rus’, the clergy knew that they faced formidable problems among the nominally Orthodox. These included not only simple superstition and ignorance, but far more deep-rooted problems—such as shamanism, worship of nature or ancestors, and deviant interpretations of basic Orthodox doctrines (for example, the Trinity, the resurrection, and the annunciation). The line between popular Orthodoxy and heresy remained blurry and shifting; its rank-and-file parish clergy had neither the training, nor the independence, nor the incentive to make the mass of illiterate peasants into self-conscious Orthodox believers.

  Moreover, the Church faced a formidable adversary in the ‘Old Belief’. Indeed, the threat of dissent increased, not least because the state had assumed a far more tolerant attitude towards Old Believer communities. The new policy permitted many Old Believers to return from distant borderlands to central Russia, even within a relatively short distance from Moscow itself. More distant Old Believer strongholds, such as those of Vyg and Klintsy maintained close contact with their brethren across the realm, often circulating manuscripts and printed books to sustain the Old Belief. Compared to most peasants, the Old Believers could boast of a higher rate of literacy and also had a sharper grasp of their basic beliefs. They were thus a serious threat to the Church and its uncertain flock of believers.

  Enlightenment and Élite Culture

  Compared to the problems of the Old Belief and popular religion, the cosmopolitan Enlightenment represented a matter of relatively minor concern for Church and state. Indeed, Catherine the Great herself was a principal progenitor and propagandist of Enlightenment ideas. Drawing upon the Petrine tradition, but also relying almost verbatim on the works of contemporary European writers, Catherine adumbrated a full-blown theory of enlightened absolutism, one which combined a faith in reason and reform with a recognition of the absolute authority of the monarch. These principles reached their apotheosis in the ‘Great Instruction’ (Bol′shoi nakaz) that she prepared in advance for the Legislative Commission (1767–8). It was a most remarkable document, one that began by proclaiming Russia to be both a Europe
an and absolutist state, but followed with prolix chapters replete with references to reason, rights, tolerance, and happiness.

  Her ‘Great Instruction’ was not, of course, the only product of the Russian Enlightenment. Indeed, such sentiments and values came to pervade the service élite—newly educated, mostly noble in origin, who imagined themselves to be European gentlemen (and women), moral, fashionable, and literary. Their new cultural world conferred great privilege and honour on the printed word, reading, and writing. It identified France’s ‘Republic of Letters’ as the model of choice, the philosophe as the preferred (if postured) identity.

  The first secular men of letters—Vasilii Trediakovskii, Antiokh Kantemir, Alexander Sumarokov, and Mikhail Lomonosov—received their education before mid-century either at the newly established academies for military cadets or at seminaries for prospective priests. Each proved to be a prolific essayist, poet, and translator; each endeavoured to preside over the emergent secular print culture housed at the Academy of Sciences. During the 1750s, however, élite secondary education underwent a significant transformation; it now placed far greater emphasis on modern languages, belles-lettres, and gentlemanly pursuits (fencing, dancing, parade-ground assembly)—all at the expense of narrowly technical subjects. Equally important was the establishment of Moscow University in 1755 (Russia’s first), with its affiliated secondary boarding-schools (pansiony) in Moscow and Kazan.

  For the next two generations Moscow University and, especially, its two boarding-schools, would train cohorts of literati who would subsequently establish the main translation societies, journals, and printing presses. Although they received little or no income for their literary endeavours, these first intellectuals devoted at least as much time to their cultural activities as to service and, indeed, saw these activities as a proper extension of their official duties. Their cultural engagement was facilitated by the reduced demands of state service: commissioned officers had few daily responsibilities in peacetime, those in administration rarely had to work more than three or four mornings a week. Favoured with such leisure, the young literati embraced the world of letters, expanding the annual number of publications from under 100 in the 1740s to about 500 in the late 1780s. They created a new genre of literary and polemical journalism, an enterprise that, by the 1770s, was producing two or three new periodicals a year. Most literary journals had tiny press runs (rarely more than a few hundred copies per issue) and often failed after just a few issues. Nevertheless, others quickly took their place, keeping the spirit of creation and engagement alive.