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Britannica Educational Publishing
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Beckman, Rosina, editor.
Title: The history of Russia to 1801 / edited by Rosina Beckman.
Description: New York : Britannica Educational Publishing, in Association with Rosen Educational Services, 2019. | Series: Societies and cultures : Russia |
Includes bibliographical references and index. | Audience: Grades 7–12.
Identifiers: LCCN 2017047204| ISBN 9781538301845 (ebook)
Subjects: LCSH: Russia—History.
Classification: LCC DK39 .H57 2019 | DDC 947—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017047204
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INTRODUCTION
CHAPTER ONE
THE EARLY RUS AND THE MONGOL PERIOD
The Rise of the Rus
Kiev
The Decline of Kiev
Social and Political Institutions
The Lands of Rus
Novgorod
The Northwest
The Northeast
The Southwest
The Mongol Period
Tatar Rule
The Rise of Muscovy
Cultural Life and the “Tatar Influence”
CHAPTER TWO
RURIKID MUSCOVY
Ivan III
Vasily III
Ivan IV (the Terrible)
The Oprichnina
Boris Godunov
The Time of Troubles
Social and Economic Conditions
Cultural Trends
CHAPTER THREE
ROMANOV MUSCOVY
Michael
Alexis
Trends in the 17th Century
Cultural Life
The Great Schism
CHAPTER FOUR
PETER THE GREAT AND HIS SUCCESSORS
Peter’s Youth and Early Reign
The Petrine State
The Roles of Different Social Classes
Peter I’s successors
Anna
Elizabeth
CHAPTER FIVE
CATHERINE THE GREAT
Expansion of the Empire
An Increasingly Diverse Russia
Government Administration Under Catherine
Education and Social Change in the 18th Century
CONCLUSION
GLOSSARY
BIBLIOGRAPHY
INDEX
INTRODUCTION
The land that is now Russia has been inhabited since the second millennium BCE. Slavic peoples originally lived over a large area of eastern Europe that included parts of what are now Poland, Ukraine, and Belarus. In the 5th and 6th centuries CE the Slavs spread south and east, some of them into southern Russia.
In about 830 traders from Scandinavia moved into the north Volga region. These traders were known as the Rus—the source of the name Russia. Soon the Rus and other Scandinavian groups—together called the Varangians—extended their raiding down the main river routes toward the Middle East.
According to tradition, the Slavs of Novgorod, tired of political turmoil, invited the Varangian prince Rurik to rule the city. Rurik’s successor Oleg added Kiev to his domains, making it his capital. This was the beginning of Kievan Rus, the first East Slavic state. In time Kievan Rus was crushed by the onslaught of the Mongols. Asian customs became a part of Russian culture, but as long as they paid tribute the Russians were free to practice their religion and native customs.
Mongol rule was eventually undercut by internal discord. The principality of Muscovy (Moscow), nestled deep in the forest at the hub of the major trade routes, developed at the expense of the Mongols as their power declined. As descendants of the Rurik line, Muscovite princes came to be regarded by the people as justified leaders of all Russians. The best-known ruler of Rurikid Muscovy is Ivan IV, called “the Terrible” because of his savage cruelty. He was followed first by his mentally unfit son Fyodor and then by Fyodor’s brother-in-law Boris Godunov. After Godunov’s death in 1605, Russia descended into civil war. This unsettled period ended with Michael Romanov’s election as tsar in 1613, launching the Romanov Dynasty.
Peter the Great disguised himself as a ship’s carpenter while traveling through western Europe in 1697–98. What he learned helped his efforts to make Russia a modern power in the western European world.
The Russian Empire—and with it the beginning of modern Russian history—dates from the reign of Peter the Great (1682–1725). Peter defeated Sweden in the Second Northern War (Great Northern War) and gained an outlet to the Baltic Sea. He founded a navy, introduced factories, reformed the administrative machinery, and organized a modern army. He forced education upon his officers and members of his court, many of whom could not read. He created a new Russian capital—St. Petersburg—on the Gulf of Finland.
Although Peter died in 1725, his work survived almost half a century of incompetent rulers. Then Catherine the Great came to the throne in 1762. She again took up the task of reform. She also greatly expanded the Russian Empire. Her armies defeated Turkey, giving Russia control of the northern Black Sea coast and the Crimean Peninsula. During her reign Russia also acquired vast amounts of territory from Poland.
Indo-European, Ural-Altaic, and diverse other peoples have occupied what is now the territory of Russia since the 2nd millennium BCE, but little is known about them. In ancient times, Greek and Iranian settlements appeared in the southernmost portions of what is now Ukraine. Trading empires of that era seem to have known and exploited the northern forests—particularly the vast triangular-shaped region west of the Urals between the Kama and Volga rivers—but these contacts had little lasting impact. Between the 4th and 9th centuries CE, the Huns, Avars, Goths, and Magyars passed briefly over the same terrain, but these transitory occupations also had little influence upon the East Slavs, who during this time were spreading south and east from an area between the Elbe River and the Pripet Marshes. In the 9th century, as a result of penetration into the area from the north and south by northern European and Middle Eastern merchant adventurers, their society was exposed to new economic, cultural, and political forces.
THE RISE OF THE RUS
From about 770 to about 830, commercial explorers began an intensive penetration of the Volga region. From early bases in the estuaries of the rivers of the eastern Baltic region, Germanic commercial-military bands, probably in search of new routes to the east, began to penetrate territory populated by Finnic and Slavic tribes, where they found amber, furs, honey, wax, and timber products. The indigenous population offered little resistance to their incursions, and there was no significant local authority to negotiate the balance between trade, tribute, and plunder. From the south, trading organizations based in northern Iran and North Africa, seeking the same products, and particularly slaves, became active in the lower Volga, the Don, and, to a lesser extent, the Dnieper region. The history of the Khazar state is intimately connected with these activities.
About 830, commerce appears to have declined in the Don and Dnieper regions. There was increased activity in the north Volga, where Scandinavian traders who had previously operated from bases on Lakes Ladoga and Onega established a new centre, near present-day Ryazan. There, in this period, the first nominal ruler of Rus (called, like the Khazar emperor, khagan) is mentioned by Islamic and Western sources. This Volga Rus khagan state may be considered the first direct political antecedent of the Kievan state.
Within a few decades these Rus, together with other Scandinavian groups operating farther west, extended their raiding activities down the main river routes toward Baghdad and Constantinople, reaching the latter in 860. The Scandinavians involved in these exploits are known as Varangians; they were adventurers of diverse origins, often led by princes of warring dynastic clans. One of these princes, Rurik, is considered the progenitor of the dynasty that ruled in various portions of East Slavic territory until 1598. Evidences of the Varangian expansion are particularly clear in the coin hoards of 900–930. The number of Middle Eastern coins reaching northern regions, especially Scandinavia, indicates a flourishing trade. Written records tell of Rus raids upon Constantinople and the northern Caucasus in the early 10th century.
In the period from about 930 to 1000, the region came under complete control by Varangians from Novgorod. This period saw the development of the trade route from the Baltic to the Black Sea, which established the basis of the economic life of the Kievan principality and determined its political and cultural development.
Rurik’s story is told in the 12th-century Russian Primary Chronicle but is not accepted at face value by modern historians. This is an artist’s idea of what the semilegendary founder of the Rurik dynasty looked like.
The degree to which the Varangians may be considered the founders of the Kievan state has been hotly debated since the 18th century. The debate has from the beginning borne nationalistic overtones. Recent works by Russians have generally minimized or ignored the role of the Varangians, while non-Russians have occasionally exaggerated it. Whatever the case, the lifeblood of the sprawling Kievan organism was the commerce organized by the princes. To be sure, these early princes were not “Swedes” or “Norwegians” or “Danes;” they thought in categories not of nation but of clan. But they certainly were not East Slavs. There is little reason to doubt the predominant role of the Varangian Rus in the creation of the state to which they gave their name.
KIEV
The consecutive history of the first East Slavic state begins with Prince Svyatoslav (died 972). His victorious campaigns against other Varangian centres, the Khazars, and the Volga Bulgars and his intervention in the Byzantine-Danube Bulgar conflicts of 968–971 mark the full hegemony of his clan in Rus and the emergence of a new political force in eastern Europe. But Svyatoslav was neither a lawgiver nor an organizer. It was his son Vladimir (c. 980–1015) who established the dynastic seniority system of his clan as the political structure by which the scattered territories of Rus were to be ruled. He invited or permitted the patriarch of Constantinople to establish an episcopal see in Rus.
Vladimir extended the realm (to include the watersheds of the Don, Dnieper, Dniester, Neman, Western Dvina, and upper Volga), destroyed or incorporated the remnants of competing Varangian organizations, and established relations with neighbouring dynasties. The successes of his long reign made it possible for the reign of his son Yaroslav (ruled 1019–54) to produce a flowering of cultural life. But neither Yaroslav, who gained control of Kiev only after a bitter struggle against his brother Svyatopolk (1015–19), nor his successors in Kiev were able to provide lasting political stability within the enormous realm. The political history of Rus is one of clashing separatist and centralizing trends inherent in the contradiction between local settlement and colonization on the one hand and the hegemony of the clan elder, ruling from Kiev, on the other. As Vladimir’s 12 sons and innumerable grandsons prospered in the rapidly developing territories they inherited, they and their retainers acquired settled interests that conflicted both with one another and with the interests of unity.
The conflicts were not confined to Slavic lands: the Turkic nomads who moved into the southern steppe during the 11th century (first the Torks, later the Kipchaks—also known as the Polovtsy, or Cumans) got drawn in the constant internecine rivalries, and Rurikid and Turkic princes often fought on both sides. In 1097, representatives of the leading branches of the dynasty, along with their Turkic allies, met at Liubech, north of Kiev, and agreed to divide the Kievan territory among themselves and their descendants; later, however, Vladimir II Monomakh was briefly successful in reuniting the land of Rus (1113–25).
THE DECLINE OF KIEV
This map shows the extent of the state of Kievan Rus at its peak in the early to mid-11th century.
The hegemony of the prince of Kiev depended on the cohesion of the clan of Rurik and the relative importance of the southern trade, both of which began to decline in the late 11th century. This decline seems to have been part of a general shift of trade routes associated with the First Crusade (1096–99) that made the route from the Black Sea to the Baltic less attractive to commerce. At the same time, conflicts among the Rurikid princes acquired a more pronounced regional and separatist nature, reflecting new patterns in export trade along the northern and western periphery. Novgorod, in particular, began to gravitate toward closer relations with the cities of the Hanseatic League, which controlled the Baltic trade. Smolensk, Polotsk, and Pskov became increasingly involved in trade along western land routes, while Galicia and Volhynia established closer links with Poland and Hungary. The princes of these areas still contested the crown of the “grand prince of Kiev and all of Rus,” but the title became an empty one. When Andrew Bogolyubsky (Andrew I) of Suzdal won Kiev and the title in 1169, he sacked the city and returned to the upper Volga, apparently seeing no advantage in establishing himself in the erstwhile capital. (Roman Mstislavich of Galicia and Volhynia repeated these actions in 1203.) By the middle of the 12th century, the major principalities, owing to the prosperity and colonization of the Kievan period, had developed into independent political and economic units.
SOCIAL AND POLITICAL INSTITUTIONS
The paucity of evidence about social and political institutions in Kievan Rus suggests that they were rudimentary. The East Slavs had no significant tradition of supratribal political organization before the coming of the Varangians, who themselves had little interest in institutions beyond those necessary for the exploitation of their rich, new territory. The territory of Rus, moreover, was immense and sparsely settled. The scattered towns, some probably little more than trading posts, were separated by large primeval forests and swamps.
Thus, although the campaigns of Svyatoslav indicate the political vacuum that his clan filled, he construed his domains as a clan possession rather than as a territorial or national state. His successor, Vladimir, however, seems to have been conscious of one political element—organized religion—that distinguished both the contemporary empires and the newly established principalities in Poland and Hungary from his own. The church provided the concepts of territorial and hierarchical organization that helped to make states out of tribal territories; its teachings transformed a charismatic prince into a king possessing the attributes and responsibilities of a national leader, judge, and first Christian of the realm.
Once Vladimir had adopted Christianity in 988, his rule was supported by the propagation of Byzantine notions of imperial authority. The political traditions and conditions of Rus, however, required that the actual workings of the political system and some of its style be derived from other sources. The succession system, probably a vestige of the experience of the Rus khaganate in the upper Volga, was based upon two principles: the indivisibility of the basic territory of Rus (the principalities of Kiev, Chernigov, and Pereyaslavl) and the shared sovereignty of a whole generation. Seniority passed through an ascension by stages from elder brother to younger and from the youngest eligible uncle to the eldest eligible nephew. Such a system was admirably suited to the needs of the dynasty, because, by providing a rotating advancement of members of the clan through apprenticeships in the various territories of the realm, it assured control of the key points of the far-flung trading network by princes who were subject to traditional sanctions, and it gave them experience in lands over which they could someday expect to rule from Kiev. This system served well for a century after it was given final form by Vladimir and was revived by Monomakh (Vladimir II, ruled 1113–25), but it could not survive the decline of Kiev’s importance.
This image of Vladimir I—known in full as Vladimir Svyatoslavich—is from Saint Sophia Cathedral, in Kiev. The first Christian ruler in Kievan Rus, he is considered a saint.
Individual Rurikid princes maintained military retinues led by boyars. The princes and boyars drew their most significant revenues from the tribute or taxes collected annually in kind from territories under their control and disposed of in the export trade. Most of the population, apparently free peasants living in traditional agricultural communes, had little other connection with the dynasty.
Little is known of law in this period; it may be assumed that juridical institutions had not developed on a broad scale. The earliest law code (1016), called the “Russian Law,” was one of the “Barbarian” law codes common throughout Germanic Europe. It dealt primarily with princely law—that is, with the fines to be imposed by the prince or his representative in the case of specified offenses.
Some scholars have held that, since land was in the hands of the boyar class, who exploited the labour of slaves and peasants, Kievan society should be termed feudal. The meagre sources indicate, however, that Kiev experienced nothing like the complex and highly regulated legal and economic relationships associated with feudalism in western Europe. Kiev’s political system existed primarily for and by international trade in forest products and depended on a money economy in which the bulk of the population scarcely participated. The subsistence agriculture of the forest regions was not the source of Kiev’s wealth, nor was it the matrix within which law and politics and history were made.
Formal culture came to Rus, along with Christianity, from the multinational Byzantine synthesis, primarily through South Slavic intermediaries. A native culture, expressed in a now-lost pagan ritual folklore and traditions in the arts and crafts, existed before the Kievan period and then persisted alongside the formal culture, but its influence on the latter is conjectural.
No single one of the regional (or, later, national) cultures, perhaps least of all that of Muscovy, can be called the heir of Kiev, although all shared the inheritance. The strands of continuity were everywhere strained, if not broken, in the period after Kiev’s decline. But “Golden Kiev” was always present, in lore and bookish tradition, as a source of emulation and renascence.
THE LANDS OF RUS
The decline of Kiev led to regional developments so striking that the subsequent period has often been called the “Period of Feudal Partition.” This phrase is misleading: “feudal” is hardly more applicable to the widely varying institutions of this time than to those of the Kievan period, and “partition” implies a former unity of which there is insufficient evidence.
NOVGOROD
Novgorod arose in the 9th century and remained the most important commercial centre of the Kievan period. The changes of the latter Kievan period did not diminish the town’s importance, for it benefited both from the increased activity of the Hanseatic League and from the development of the upper Volga region, for which it was a major trade outlet. Although Novgorod was an early base for the Rurikids, the princely traditions characteristic of Kiev and other post-Kievan centres never developed there. When Kiev declined, Novgorod soon (1136) declared its independence from princely power, and, although it accepted princely protectors from various neighbouring dynasties, it remained a sovereign city until conquered by Muscovy (Moscow).
During the 13th century, Novgorod’s burghers easily found an accommodation with the invading Mongols. In the Mongol period its energetic river pirates pushed farther north and east toward the Urals and even down the Volga, and Novgorod’s prosperity was generally unbroken until the commercial revolution of the 16th century. Its absorption by the growing principality of Muscovy in 1478 ended its political independence and changed its social structure, but Novgorod’s characteristic economic and cultural life did not end with that catastrophe.
This manuscript recounts how Novgorod’s defenders—led by Alexander Nevsky, prince of Vladimir—repulsed an attack by the Teutonic Knights on the ice of Lake Peipus in 1242.
Novgorod was governed by an oligarchy of great trading boyar families who controlled the exploitation of the hinterland. They chose (from among themselves) a mayor, a military commander, and a council of aldermen, who controlled the affairs of the city and its territories. The town itself was divided into five “ends,” which seem to have corresponded to the “fifths” into which the hinterland was divided. There was in addition a veche (council), apparently a kind of town meeting of broad but indeterminate composition whose decisions, it would appear, were most often controlled by the oligarchy. A major role in politics was played by the archbishop, who after 1156 controlled the lands and incomes previously owned by the Kievan princes and who appears throughout Novgorod’s history as a powerful, often independent figure.
THE NORTHWEST
During this period, much of the territory of the principalities of Smolensk, Polotsk, Turov, and Pinsk was controlled by the grand duchy of Lithuania, which was essentially an international or nonnational formation led by a foreign dynasty (of eastern Lithuanian pagan origins) ruling over predominantly Belarusian and Ukrainian populations. By the 15th century the dynasty had become Slavic in culture (a version of Belarusian was the official language of the realm), and at its height under Vytautas (1392–1430) it controlled all the old Kievan territory outside Russia proper—that is, most of present-day Lithuania, Belarus, Moldova, and Ukraine. In 1385 the grand duchy joined the kingdom of Poland, and the union was sealed shortly thereafter by the marriage of Grand Prince Jogaila to Jadwiga, the Polish queen.
THE NORTHEAST
The region bounded by the Oka and Volga rivers, later to be the heartland of the Grand Principality of Moscow, was settled before the arrival of Slavs from Novgorod and the Baltic area by a Finnic tribe. Rostov, the earliest princely centre, was from Vladimir’s time included in the princely rotation system. In the 12th century it became the patrimony of the younger branch of Vladimir II Monomakh’s family (who founded the new princely centre Vladimir in 1108). Under his son Yury Dolgoruky (1125–57) and grandson Andrew I (1157–74), the principality reached a high political and cultural development, which it retained through much of the succeeding century. Early in the 13th century the principality of Moscow was created as an appanage (royal grant) within the grand principality of Vladimir, and this new seat grew in importance when Michael Khorobrit, brother of Alexander Nevsky, conquered Vladimir (1248) and made himself prince of both centres. Daniel, Nevsky’s son and the progenitor of all the later Rurikid princes of Moscow, had a long and successful reign (1276–1303), but at his death the principality still embraced little more than the territory of the present Moscow province. The beginning of Moscow’s rise to its later preeminence came during the reign of Daniel’s son Ivan (1328–41), who, by cooperating with Öz Beg, khan of the Golden Horde, and also by his shrewd purchases (probably of tax-farming rights), greatly expanded the influence of his principality.
THE SOUTHWEST
The lands of Galicia and Volhynia were always ethnically and economically distinct from the Kievan region proper, as well as from more distant regions. Agriculture was highly developed, and trade, particularly in the valuable local salt, tended to take westward and overland routes. Galicia, already a separate principality by 1100, grew as Kiev declined. Later, Roman Mstislavich of Volhynia (ruled 1199–1205) conquered Galicia and united the two principalities. Under his son Daniel (1201–64), difficulties with the Galician landed magnates and the interference of the Hungarians weakened the principality, and it was subjugated in 1240 by the Mongol invasion. Eventually this region came under the domination of Lithuania (Volhynia) and Poland (Galicia).
THE MONGOL PERIOD
In 1223, when the first Mongol reconnaissance into former Kievan territory led to the disastrous defeat of a Volhynian-Galician-Polovtsian army on the Kalka River, the Rurikid principalities had for generations been intermittently at war. Kiev was in ruins, Novgorod was preoccupied with commerce and with its northern neighbours, Galicia was being torn internally and drawn increasingly into Polish and Hungarian dynastic affairs, and Vladimir-Suzdal, apparently the leading principality, could not resist the finely organized and skillful mounted bowmen of the steppe, the greatest military force of the age.
Tradition has exaggerated both the destructiveness of the first Mongol conquests and the strength of the resistance. The Mongols aimed to revive, under a unified political system, the trade that had traditionally crossed the Central Asian steppe and vitalized the economy of the pastoral nomads. As they moved westward, they gained the collaboration of groups of Turkic nomads and the predominantly Iranian and Muslim traders in the towns of the old Silk Road; they encountered the greatest resistance in sedentary political centres and among landowning elites. The lands of the Rus presented numerous similarities with the Central Asian areas that the Mongols had already conquered. There too, a former commercial empire had fallen apart into an aggregation of warring principalities. There too, ready recruits were to be found—in the Polovtsians, who controlled the lower Dnieper and Volga and Don, and in the Muslim merchants, who dealt in the towns on the Crimean Peninsula and the upper Volga. These merchants showed the way, first (1223) to the Crimean Peninsula and up the Volga to the old centre of Bulgar, later to Ryazan, Rostov, and the Suzdalian towns, and still later (1240) to Kiev and Galicia.
Many of the conquered cities made a striking recovery and adjustment to the new relationships. Some towns, such as Kiev, never fully recovered in Mongol times, but the cities of the Vladimir-Suzdal region clearly prospered. New centres, such as Moscow and Tver, hardly mentioned in any source before the Mongol period, arose and flourished in Mongol times.
This 20th-century painting by an unknown Soviet artist shows members of the Golden Horde extracting tribute from conquered Russian townspeople.
Thus, the Mongol invasion was not everywhere a catastrophe. The local princely dynasties continued unchanged in their traditional seats; some princes resisted the new authority and were killed in battle, but no alien princes ever became established in Slavic territory. Few Mongols remained west of the Urals after the conquest; political and fiscal administration was entrusted to the same Turkic clan leaders and Islamic merchants who had for generations operated in the area. The whole of the Novgorodian north remained outside the sphere of direct Tatar control, although the perspicacious burghers maintained correct relations with the khans.
TATAR RULE
After a brief attempt to revive the ancient centres of Bulgar and Crimea, the Jucids (the family of Jöchi, son of Genghis Khan, who inherited the western portion of his empire) established a new capital, Itil. (It was moved to New Sarai, near the site of Tsaritsyn, modern Volgograd, about 1260.) These towns became the commercial and administrative centres of what was later to be called the “Golden Horde” (the term is probably a Western invention). Its East Slavic territories were tributaries of an extensive empire, including, at its height, Crimea, the Polovtsian steppe from the Danube to the Ural River, the former territories of the Bulgar empire (including the fur-rich Mordvinian forests and parts of western Siberia), and in Asia the former kingdom of Khwārezm, including Urgench, the cultural capital of the Jucids. Control of the Slavic lands was exercised through the native princes, some of whom spent much of their time at the Mongol capital, and through agents charged with overseeing the activities of the princes and particularly the fiscal levies.
This multinational commercial empire was unstable. Early in the history of the Golden Horde, the khans of Sarai, who tended to reflect the interests of the Volga tribes, were challenged by the tribal princes of the west, whose control of the Danube, Bug, and Dnieper routes and of the access to Crimea gave them considerable political and economic power. As early as 1260, Nokhai, one of these western chieftains, showed his independence of Sarai by establishing his own foreign policy, and toward the end of the 13th century he seized control of Sarai itself. At his death the eastern tribes reestablished their control in Sarai, but, in the reign of the great Öz Beg (1313–41), the high point of Golden Horde power, the west was again ascendant. Öz Beg based his power upon firm control of Crimea and had extensive relations with the Genoese and Venetians, who controlled the main ports there. After the death of Öz Beg’s son Jani Beg in 1357, however, the empire began to reveal serious internal strains. The tribes of the west paid little heed to the dizzying succession of khans in Sarai. The northern Russian princes focused on maneuvering for their own advantage in the internecine politics of the Golden Horde. The Volga Bulgar region was detached by a dissident Tatar prince, while the lands of the east were drawn into the orbit of the Turkic conqueror Timur (Tamerlane).
This illustration shows Tokhtamysh’s invasion of Moscow in 1382. Tokhtamysh sacked and burned Moscow in retaliation for the Russians’ victory over the Golden Horde at the Battle of Kulikovo in 1380.
The Golden Horde’s last cycle of integration and dismemberment was linked with events in Timur’s domains. Tokhtamysh, son of a minor Tatar prince, had been unsuccessfully involved in the skirmishes around the throne of Sarai in the 1370s and had fled to the court of Timur, with whose aid he returned to Sarai and vanquished the tribal leaders who had opposed him. Having defeated and made peace with them, he now turned to defeat Mamai (1381), who had the previous year been defeated by Prince Dmitry Donskoy (grand prince of Moscow, 1359–89). Mamai’s western tribal allies went over to Tokhtamysh, and, for a brief time, the major components of the tribal structure of the Golden Horde were reunited. Tokhtamysh successfully attacked Moscow (just as Mamai had hoped to do) and set about consolidating his gains. As his power grew, however, Tokhtamysh was drawn into a struggle with Timur, who had conquered much of Iran, the south Caucasus, and eastern Anatolia. After a number of encounters in the northern Caucasus, Timur, who apparently was intent upon diversion of east-west trade through his own Transoxanian and north Iranian territories, set out to destroy Tokhtamysh and the latter’s commercial centres. In 1395–96 Timur’s armies systematically annihilated Sarai, Azov, and Kaffa. The Golden Horde never recovered.
The Rise of Muscovy
From the beginning of the Tatar period, the Rurikid princes displayed much disunity. During the reign of Öz Beg there was a shift of alignments. The princes of Moscow and their allies, together with Öz Beg and his Crimean supporters, generally opposed the princes of Tver, Pskov, and, intermittently, Novgorod. The major punitive measures directed by Öz Beg against Tver with Muscovite support were a part of this pattern.
The links forged in the 14th century between Moscow and Crimea (and Sarai, while Öz Beg controlled it) were crucial to Moscow’s later preeminence. They not only afforded Moscow a steady and profitable export trade for its furs but, because of contacts between Crimean merchants and Byzantium, also led to close relations between the Muscovite hierarchy and the patriarchate of Constantinople. This special relationship was but one of the reasons for the eventual rise of Moscow as leader of the Russian lands. Situated in the northeast, linked with all of the major navigable river systems and with the steppe, close to the major fur-producing regions and the most intensely settled agricultural lands, served by a succession of shrewd and long-lived princes, Moscow came naturally to a position of preeminence during the 14th century and was best equipped to enter the struggle for the political inheritance of the Golden Horde that followed the destruction of its capitals by Timur.
CULTURAL LIFE AND THE “TATAR INFLUENCE”
Traditional scholarship advanced the notions that (1) the Mongol invasion “destroyed” Kievan culture, (2) the Tatar period was one of “stultification” and “isolation from the West,” and (3) “Russian” culture was deeply influenced by Golden Horde culture, in particular by “Oriental” conceptions of despotism. These views do not accord with the evidence and should probably be discarded.
First, Kievan culture was not destroyed. In the shift of the cultural centre of gravity to the numerous regional centres, Kievan traditions were in the main continued and in some cases (i.e., Galician literature, Novgorodian icon painting, Suzdalian architecture) enjoyed remarkable development.
Nor are notions of stultification and isolation from the West supported. The enormous Novgorodian culture sphere, the upper Dnieper territories that eventually came under Lithuanian control, and the principalities of Volhynia and Galicia all had, if anything, closer contacts with western and central Europe than in the previous period.
In the areas of religion and intellectual life, “Tatar influence” was practically nonexistent due to the control of formal culture by the Orthodox clergy and Muslim divines and the limited contact between the Slavic and Turkic populations. There is no evidence that any single Turkic or Islamic text of religious, philosophical, literary or scholarly content was translated directly into Slavonic or any East Slavic vernacular during the period.
Concerning the secular culture of the court and counting house, the situation was radically different. These spheres were controlled by very pragmatic princes, merchants, and diplomats. There, Slavs and Tatars elaborated together an international subculture whose language was Turkic and whose administrative techniques and chancellery culture were essentially those of the Golden Horde. Slavic merchants took full part in this culture, and the princes of Muscovy in particular developed their original court culture and chancellery practices within its context. These borrowings were not of a theoretical or ideological nature, and ascribing later despotism to “Oriental” influence is inaccurate.
The collapse of the Golden Horde saw a growth in the political power of the old sedentary centres—Muscovy, Lithuania, the Volga Bulgar region (which became the khanate of Kazan), and Crimea. This growth was accompanied by dynastic struggles. This period of recovery also saw cooperation among the emerging dynasties against their internal enemies and toward the stabilization of the steppe.
Even by the end of the 14th century, Moscow’s position was by no means as dominating as the cartographers’ conventions or the historians’ hindsight makes it seem. Other centres—Lithuania, Tver, Novgorod—were as rich and powerful as Moscow. Many of the areas nominally subject to the Muscovite princes retained their own dynasties, whose members often broke away and sided with one of Moscow’s rivals. Only after a series of dynastic conflicts in the early 15th century did Moscow emerge as the leader of the Russian territory.
The struggle began at the death of Vasily I, a son of Dmitry Donskoy, in 1425. The succession of his 10-year-old son Vasily II was challenged by his uncle Yury, prince of the important upper Volga commercial town of Galich. After many turns of fortune, Vasily II succeeded, with the help of Lithuanian and Tatar allies, in establishing his house permanently as the rulers of Muscovy.
IVAN III
Ivan III (ruled 1462–1505) consolidated from a secure throne the gains his father, Vasily II, had won. The “gathering of the Russian lands,” as it has traditionally been known, became under Ivan a conscious and irresistible drive by Moscow to annex all East Slavic lands, both the Russian territories, which traditionally had close links with Moscow, and the Belarusian and Ukrainian regions, which had developed under distinctly different historical and cultural circumstances. In 1471 Ivan mounted a simultaneous attack upon Novgorod and its upper Volga colonies, which capitulated and accepted Moscow’s commercial and political demands. The trading republic, however, retained considerable de facto independence and became involved with the Lithuanian princes in an attempt to resist Moscow. Ivan, using these dealings as a pretext, attacked again, and in 1478 Novgorod was absorbed by Moscow. A Muscovite governor was installed, and 70 Novgorodian boyar families were deported and replaced by members of the Moscow military-service class.
Tver suffered a similar fate. Ivan had agreed with Prince Michael Borisovich to conduct foreign relations in concert and by consultation, but, when the Tverite complained that Ivan was not consulting him on important matters, Ivan attacked him and annexed his lands (1485). By the end of Ivan’s reign, there were no Russian princes who dared conduct policies unacceptable to Moscow.
This expansion was enabled by his skillful dealings with the Polish-Lithuanian state, which had expanded down the Dnieper basin and into Slavic territories on the south flank of Moscow. After 1450 competition developed for control of the semi-independent principalities of the Dnieper and upper Donets regions. In the early 1490s some minor East Slavic princes defected from Lithuania to Moscow. The first phase of the conflict, confined to border skirmishes, ended in 1494 with a treaty ceding Vyazma to Moscow and the marriage of Ivan’s daughter Yelena to Alexander, grand duke of Lithuania. In 1500, on the initiative of Lithuanian defectors, Ivan’s armies seized several border towns, beginning a war that ended somewhat inconclusively in 1503 with a truce extending Ivan’s border to the west.
This illustration by Aleksey Kivshenko shows Martha the Mayoress being escorted to Moscow. A wealthy Novgorodian, Martha (or Marfa) became a symbol of Novgorodian resistance against Ivan III.
The third major element of Ivan’s foreign policy comprised his relations with the various Tatar confederations. In the 1470s the Crimean khan Mengli Giray came into increasing conflict with Khan Ahmed of the Golden Horde and hoped to ally with Moscow against Ahmed and Lithuania. Ivan, eager to dissolve the connection between Lithuania and Crimea but not wanting to alienate Ahmed, stalled for time. In 1481, when Ahmed died, Ivan forged an alliance with the Nogays, Mengli Giray, and Kazan.
Ivan faced a number of challenges from within his own family and court. In 1472 his eldest brother, Yury, died childless, and Ivan appropriated his entire estate. This antagonized his brothers Andrey and Boris, whose grievances were further increased by Ivan’s refusal to give them a share of conquered Novgorod. In 1480 they rebelled, and only with difficulty were they persuaded to remain loyal. A more serious conflict arose (1497–1502) in the form of an open and murderous struggle among Ivan’s relatives for succession to the throne. Ivan had named as his heir his grandson Dmitry, but a group close to Ivan’s second wife, Sofia (Zoë) Palaeologus, opposed this. Her son Vasily threatened and perhaps attempted an insurrection, and Ivan was forced to accept Vasily.
Ivan became the first Muscovite ruler to engage in diplomacy with western Europe. He wanted a counterpoise to the Polish-Lithuanian power, while the diplomats of Rome and Vienna were interested in the possibility of flanking the growing Ottoman Empire with a Muscovite-Tatar force. In the 1470s and ’80s there was an unprecedented traffic between these capitals and Moscow. It was through these channels that Ivan arranged his marriage to Sofia Palaeologus, a niece of the last Byzantine emperor. Ivan’s adoption of the Byzantine political style (e.g., autocracy, state domination of the church, etc.) has been often been credited—though probably incorrectly—to his wife’s influence. However the territorial and religious conflicts of the Slavic East and the opportunism of the local magnates disrupted Ivan’s overtures to the West and brief rapprochement with Lithuania. The death of Crimean khan Mengli Giray in 1515 worsened Moscow’s situation, as the collapse of that alliance opened a new period of chaos and readjustment in the steppe.
This portrait of Ivan III is from André Thenet’s La Cosmographie universelle, which was published in Paris in 1575.
Although Ivan’s reign was notable for the annexation of the rich Novgorodian provinces and for the establishment of a regular bureaucracy and a land-tenure system, these achievements created new problems for his successors. The system of land grants to military servitors ultimately suppressed the interest of both landlords and tenants in increasing agricultural productivity.
VASILY III
Ivan’s son Vasily, who came to the throne in 1505, greatly strengthened the monarchy. He completed the annexation of Russian territories with the absorption of Pskov (1510) and Ryazan (1521) and began the advance into non-Russian territories (Smolensk, 1514). Faced with a continuing Lithuanian war and with the breakdown of his father’s Tatar policy, Vasily carefully temporized in order to avoid uniting his enemies. Once he had secured peace in the west, he was able to deal directly with the khan of the Crimean Tatars. In the end, however, much of what Vasily accomplished was undone by his failure as a procreator: divorcing his first wife for her apparent barrenness, he married Yelena Glinskaya, who bore him only two children—the deaf and mute Yury and the sickly Ivan, who was three years old at Vasily’s death in 1533.
IVAN IV (THE TERRIBLE)
Vasily had appointed a regency council composed of his most trusted advisers and headed by his wife Yelena, but the grievances created by his limitation of landholders’ immunities and his antiboyar policies soon found expression in intrigue and opposition, and the bureaucracy he had relied upon could not function without firm leadership. Although Yelena continued Vasily’s policies with some success, on her death, in 1538, various parties of boyars sought to control the state apparatus. A decade of intrigue followed, during which affairs of state, when managed at all, went forward because of the momentum developed by the bureaucracy.
Toward the end of the 1540s, a coalition of Muscovite boyars emerged. Inspired by a common awareness of the needs of the state, they embarked upon a program of reform. The first step was the reestablishment of the monarch—for the first time officially designated a tsar—accomplished through the coronation of the 16-year-old Ivan. Shortly afterward he married Anastasia Romanovna Zakharina of a leading boyar family.
On January 16, 1547, Ivan IV was crowned “tsar and grand prince of all Russia.” The title “tsar” was derived from the Latin title “caesar” and was translated by Ivan’s contemporaries as “emperor.”
Ivan was doubtless a puppet in the hands of the leading politicians long after his coronation. The major reforms of the middle 1550s, which produced a new law code, a new military organization, a reform of local government, and severe restrictions on the powers of hereditary landowners (including the monasteries), were probably the work of the bureaucrats and boyars, their objective being to modernize and standardize the administration of the growing state. The immediate goal was to strengthen the state and military apparatus in connection with major campaigns (the first undertaken in 1547) against the khanate of Kazan and to prepare for the major colonization of the new lands that the conquest and others were expected to secure. Toward the end of the 1550s, Ivan seems to have gained the support of certain groups opposed to these policies and to have seized control of the government. The issue was evidently foreign policy. The planned conquest of the Volga and steppe region had been delayed in execution, and the Kazan campaigns had been enormously costly. By 1557, when the campaigns against Crimea began, there was much opposition in the highest military circles. Ivan took the dissidents’ part and for the first time emerged as an independent figure.
The Oprichnina
Ivan established his famous oprichnina, an aggregate of territory separated from the rest of the realm and put under his immediate control as crown land, in 1564; this was the device through which he expressed his rejection of the established government. As it was his private domain, a state within the state, he took into it predominantly northern and commercial territories that had enjoyed a special prosperity in preceding decades. Specific towns and districts all over Russia were included in the oprichnina, their revenues being assigned to the maintenance of Ivan’s new court and household. He established a new, much simplified officialdom and a court composed of sycophants and mercenaries, prone to rule through terror, accompanied by persecution of precisely those groups that had contributed so much to the modernization of the state. As trained statesmen and administrators were replaced by hirelings and cronies, the central government and military organization began to disintegrate. The destructiveness of the oprichnina was heightened by Ivan’s involvement in the costly and ultimately disastrous Livonian War (1558–83) throughout this period (indeed, some historians have viewed the oprichnina as a device for the prosecution of that lengthy war’s taxing campaigns). Even before the war ended, Ivan was forced by the utter incompetence of his special oprichnina army to reintegrate it (1572) with the regular army and to revert, in theory at least, to the previous institutions of government.
Ivan was a disastrously bad ruler, in part because no one had anticipated that he would rule. His poor health and the mental failings of his brother made it quite natural for the regency and the politicians to ignore him and to neglect his education. In adulthood he contracted an incurable bone disease, from which he sought relief in alcohol and in potions provided by a succession of foreign doctors and quacks. Once he had acquired full power, he set about destroying those who had ruled during the interregnum, as well as the machinery of government they had built up. By the time he died, in 1584, the state that he had wanted to reclaim from its makers was in ruins.
BORIS GODUNOV
Ivan the Terrible had murdered his eldest son, Ivan, in a fit of rage in 1581, and his only surviving legitimate heir, Fyodor, was mentally unfit to succeed him. Boris Godunov, who had capped a rapid rise in court circles with the marriage of his sister Irina to Fyodor, soon emerged as the leading player. Godunov’s judicious combination of chicanery, vision, and force disarmed his most dangerous enemies when he proclaimed himself tsar after Fyodor’s death in 1598. His policies during Fyodor’s reign had been conciliatory, and he had apparently succeeded in repairing much of the damage done to the state in Ivan’s time. He conducted a cautious and generally successful foreign policy: the 20 years of his reign were, except for a short, successful war against Sweden, peaceful. In domestic matters, he returned to the modernizing and standardizing policies of the mid-century. He reorganized the land-tenure system, commerce, and taxation.
A member of the noble Tatar Saburov-Godunov family that had migrated to Muscovy in the 14th century, Boris Godunov began his career of service in the court of Ivan the Terrible.
However a number of problems remained, including the depopulation of the central Muscovite lands and the discontent among small landholders in the territories recently acquired in the south and southwest. Added to these problems was the continuing opposition of the boyars. Despite these difficulties and widespread famine caused by crop failures in 1601–02, Godunov remained in control of the situation until the appearance of the first False Dmitry, a defrocked monk who had appeared in Poland in 1601 claiming to be the son of Ivan IV. (The true Dmitry had died during an epileptic seizure in 1591.) The False Dmitry found supporters in Poland—notably Jerzy Mniszech, to whose daughter, Maryna, he became engaged. As the impostor moved northeast toward Muscovy, he acquired growing support among the disaffected petty gentry and Cossacks (peasants who had escaped from serfdom to a nomadic life) of the regions through which he passed, and border cities throughout the south opened their gates to him. Godunov’s troops easily defeated the ragtag force, which apparently had many secret supporters among Muscovite boyars, but a few weeks later Godunov died. The boyars staged a coup against Godunov’s family and declared Dmitry tsar. The pretender entered Moscow in triumph, was crowned, and married Maryna Mniszchówna.
THE TIME OF TROUBLES
In the period from 1606 to 1613, during the so-called Time of Troubles, chaos gripped most of central Muscovy. Muscovite boyars, Polish-Lithuanian-Ukrainian Cossacks, and assorted mobs of adventurers and desperate citizens were among the chief actors. In May 1606 a small-scale revolt supported by popular indignation at the insulting behaviour of Dmitry and his Polish garrison brought the overthrow and murder of the pretender. The boyars gave the crown to Prince Vasily Shuysky, a leader of the revolt against Dmitry, with the understanding that he would respect the special rights and privileges of the boyars. While the new tsar had the support of most boyars and of the northern merchants, he could not end the disorders in the south or the adventures of the Polish and Swedish kings, who used Muscovy as a battlefield in their continuing conflict with each other. In 1608 a number of boyars, led by the Romanovs, went over to a second False Dmitry, who had ridden a wave of discontent from the Cossack south into the centre of Muscovy. A shadow government formed in the village of Tushino, 9 miles (14 km) west of Moscow, in which the boyars and bureaucrats of the Romanov circle took leading posts. It managed to gain Cossack support and to manipulate Dmitry’s pretensions while negotiating with the Polish king Sigismund III on terms by which his son Władysław IV might become tsar. Shuysky, in desperation, turned to Sweden for aid, promising territorial concessions along the Swedish-Muscovite border. At this the Polish king invaded Muscovy and besieged Smolensk (September 1609). The Tushino coalition dissolved, and Dmitry withdrew to the south. The position of the Shuysky government deteriorated, and in 1610 the tsar was deserted by his army and his allies. The boyars formed a seven-man provisional government with the aim of installing a Polish tsar. This government proved unable to restore order to the country. A new insurgent army, financed by northern merchants and staffed with Swedish troops, marched on Moscow with the intention of ousting the Polish garrison and of bringing the various Cossack bands under control. It nearly gained Moscow but fell apart because its leadership could make no arrangement with the Cossack leaders. A year later a second force, raised in the same northern cities and supported by Cossacks who had been part of the Tushino camp, was able to take possession of the Kremlin. A call was issued for the election of a new tsar.
SOCIAL AND ECONOMIC CONDITIONS
The social and economic life of the 15th and 16th centuries was dominated by three processes: steady economic growth, mainly from colonization and trade; expansion in the power of the central government; and the encroachment of the nobility upon the lands previously held by the free peasantry, accompanied by the fall of the peasantry to serf status.
In the middle of the 15th century, society and the economy were still organized along traditional lines. The land was sparsely settled. Life for most of the population was simple and probably close to the subsistence level. Serfdom did not yet exist. Most of the peasantry lived on state lands and paid whatever taxes could be extracted from them by their prince or his bailiff.
About 1460, measures were taken to bring the peasantry under more regular control of the state and the landlord. Peasant registration appeared at this time, and also the requirement spread that peasants might renounce the tenancy of the land they were working only at the end of the agricultural cycle, in the week of St. Yury’s Day, November 26. (The date in the New Style—or Gregorian calendar, which was adopted in the 1580s by Catholic Europe, but was not used in Russia until 1918—is December 8). The growing controls upon the peasantry received impetus from the large-scale deportations and colonizations that accompanied the annexations of Novgorod, Tver, Pskov, and Ryazan, when the old nobility were replaced with nobility owing service to the prince of Muscovy. The nationwide promulgation of the restriction on movement to St. Yury’s Day was contained in the law code of 1497, which added the stipulation that peasants leaving a former situation must pay the landlord all arrears in addition to a departure fee. All of the measures, together with the expansion of the state apparatus for tax gathering and adjudication of disputes over land and peasants, were associated with the growing complexity and power of the central government.
The law code of 1550 repeated the stipulation of 1497 limiting peasant departure, but with more specific provisions and stronger sanctions. Other reforms put an end to local administration by rotating military governors and limited monastic landholding and the juridical rights of landlords over their peasants. The events and policies of the latter half of the reign of Ivan IV destroyed many of the beneficial results of the reforms. The Livonian War imposed unprecedented burdens upon the taxpaying population and the landowning military caste. The political disruption caused by Ivan’s oprichnina further undermined the position of the service class and led to the looting of Novgorod and other towns. At the same time, other new trends provided the basis for economic growth: trade in local and Asian transit goods, organized through Arkhangelsk, primarily by English and Dutch merchants, brought unprecedented wealth and luxury to the court; the opening of Siberia provided additional income; and the extension of Russian agriculture into the steppe promised, for the first time, agricultural prosperity.
CULTURAL TRENDS
This period also saw the crystallization of that complex of forms and ideas that can, for the first time, be identified as Russian culture. There was a gathering and integration of the Novgorodian, Tverite, and Suzdalian cultural traditions. Moscow attracted artists, craftsmen, and learned monks who built the eclectic but “national” churches of Ivan III’s otherwise Italianate Kremlin and who wrote the revised national, pro-Muscovite versions of the chronicles that had been kept in Rostov, Ryazan, and Novgorod. The regional traditions were not always easily reconciled. Novgorodian attitudes in particular clashed with those of Muscovy.
An example of the “national” churches built under Ivan III, the tiny Church of the Deposition of the Robe (right) was built in 1484–86 by craftsmen from Pskov.
The reign of Ivan III saw a marked turning toward the West. Ivan surrounded himself with Italian and Greek diplomats and craftsmen. His palace of 1487, his Kremlin with its Latin inscription over the main gate, and his churches, the original aspect of which has been altered by successive Russifying restorations, were clearly in the Italian style, as contemporary foreign visitors noted. His marriage to Sofia Palaeologus had, in addition to its diplomatic significance, a symbolic function of bringing Ivan into the circle of Western princes. Muscovy supposedly regarded itself as the heir of Byzantium and as the spiritual leader of the Orthodox world. It may be that the church leadership, militantly anti-Roman, thought of itself in this light. Ivan and many around him viewed the Byzantine heritage as Western, in contrast to the Ottoman and Tatar world, and were at pains to associate Muscovy with Western traditions and interprincely relations. This striving to be accepted in the Western world marked most of the changes in regalia and style of Ivan’s reign, although these were later to be buried in the lore of Muscovite Byzantinism.
Three significant causes can be discerned for the evolution of Muscovite culture in the 16th century. The first was the growth and prosperity of the Russian population, united under a stable and increasingly centralized monarchy, which produced the conditions for the rise of a national culture. The second was the diplomatic and cultural isolation in which Muscovy found itself, particularly in the first half of the 16th century, as a result of hostile relations with increasingly powerful Lithuania and Poland, a cause that, more than any other, brought an end to Ivan III’s westward turn and to the revolutionary adjustments of the age of exploration. The third cause was the resolution of church-state relations, in the course of which the church submitted to the power of the princes in politics but gained control over the culture, style, and ideology of the dynasty, producing the peculiar amalgam of nationalistic, autocratic, and Orthodox elements that became the official culture of high Muscovy. This new synthesis was reflected in the great undertakings associated with the name of Metropolitan Makary of Moscow: St. Basil’s Cathedral in the Kremlin; the encyclopaedic Menolog, or calendar of months, which contained all the literature, translated and original, permitted to be read in the churches; and the Illustrated Codex, a compilation of East Slavic and Greek chronicles in an official Muscovite version.
The military drive that finally expelled the Poles from Moscow led to the election of Michael (Mikhail Fyodorovich), the 16-year-old son of Fyodor Romanov, as tsar. The composition of the coalition that elected him is not clear, but he evidently represented a compromise between the Cossacks, the boyars (especially the Tushino boyars), and the leaders of the northern army. It would be difficult to imagine circumstances less favourable for the beginning of the reign of the adolescent monarch and a new ruling coalition. The military campaigns had left much of the central and southwestern portions of the country in ruins. In many areas, populations had fled, land lay fallow, and administration was in disarray. Significant portions of the Novgorod, Smolensk, and Ryazan regions were occupied by Swedish and Polish armies and by insurrectionary forces, who threatened to renew hostilities.
MICHAEL
The Romanov government required more than a decade to establish itself politically and to restore economic and social order. Few expected the election of a new tsar (the fourth in eight years) to bring an end to the turmoil. But Michael’s election permitted the coalition government to address itself to the problems of reconstruction. Also helpful was the survival of the central bureaucracy; the civil servants in Moscow were ready to restore administrative regularity as soon as political order was established. Fortunately, the new government refrained from involving itself in the Polish-Swedish conflicts, which reached their height at this period. This restraint was a most important element in the success of the 1613 settlement, for the international situation was, if anything, grimmer than the domestic one. Polish-Swedish differences permitted Muscovite diplomats to bring the two countries to separate truces (Sweden, 1617; Poland, 1618); although these left substantial territories under the control of Poland and Sweden, they provided a needed interlude of peace. The Romanov government wisely avoided significant participation in the Thirty Years’ War, in which most European states engaged. At the death of the Polish king Sigismund III in 1632, Muscovy made an ill-advised attempt to regain Smolensk that ended in military disaster, but in 1634 it obtained Władysław’s formal abjuration of the Polish king’s questionable claim to the title of tsar.
Michael I established the Romanov dynasty. Michael was also related to the last tsar of the Rurik dynasty, Fyodor I. His grandfather, Nikita Romanov, was Fyodor’s maternal uncle.
After the failure of the Smolensk campaign, the government avoided military involvement with Poland for nearly a generation. It concentrated instead upon the extension and fortification of its southern borders, where the incursions of Crimean Tatars were an impediment to colonization. Moscow, however, was not prepared to go to war with the Ottomans, who were the protectors of the Crimean khan. When the Don Cossacks, Muscovy’s clients, captured the critical port of Azov in 1637 and appealed to Moscow for aid in holding off a counterattack, a zemsky sobor, or national assembly, decided not to intervene, and the port was lost.
ALEXIS
The reign of Michael’s son Alexis (Aleksey Mikhaylovich), whom later generations considered the model of a benevolent tsar, began badly. Like his father, Alexis came to the throne a mere boy. The boyar who controlled the government, Boris Ivanovich Morozov, immediately embarked upon policies that brought the government to the brink of disaster. Morozov cut government salaries; he also introduced a tax on salt and a state monopoly of tobacco, the former causing widespread hardship and discontent and the latter bringing the church’s condemnation. At the same time, he alienated boyar groups close to the throne by his interference in his ward’s marriage.
Morozov’s actions exacerbated an already dangerous situation in the country. The city populations and the service gentry in particular were heavily burdened by taxes and other obligations and were increasingly angry at the growing wealth and power of the ruling clique. During a riot in Moscow in May 1648, a mob surrounded the 19-year-old tsar and demanded the execution of Morozov and the leading officials. Some of the latter were thrown to the mob, and a brief protective exile was arranged for Morozov. Morozov’s boyar enemies took control of affairs and carried out a series of reforms. The salt tax and tobacco monopoly were ended, and a commission was established for the drafting of a new law code. Serious disorders continued in the cities of the north, particularly in Pskov and Novgorod, where force was required to reimpose authority.
In Novgorod the principal actor in the government’s interest was the metropolitan Nikon, an energetic and authoritarian monk who had made influential friends in Moscow while archimandrite at the Romanov family church and continued to cultivate the tsar and his relations while in Novgorod. In 1652 his solicitations earned him the patriarchate. Tradition has it that Nikon, before accepting the position, demanded a declaration of full obedience in religious and moral matters from the tsar. In the first years of Nikon’s tenure, his relations with Alexis and the court were good. The patriarch carried out a number of liturgical and organizational reforms, surrounding himself with an impressive bureaucracy modeled upon the state apparatus. Relations with the tsar became strained in 1658, and, after being publicly snubbed by Alexis, Nikon announced that he was abandoning the patriarchate. He later held that he had simply gone into temporary seclusion, but his effective power and influence were at an end.
This portrait of Tsar Alexis of the Romanov dynasty was painted about 1670. It is in the State Historical Museum in Moscow.
The main event of Alexis’s reign was the annexation of eastern Ukraine. His government had continued the previous policy of avoiding entanglements in the West while expanding eastward but could not resist the opportunity offered in 1654 when Bohdan Khmelnytsky, the leader of a Cossack revolution against Polish rule in Ukraine, appealed to Moscow for help. Moscow accepted his allegiance in return for military assistance and thus became involved in a protracted struggle with Poland and Sweden for the Ukrainian, Belarusian, and Baltic territories. At first the war went well, but the differing objectives of the Ukrainians and Muscovites soon revealed themselves. When Charles X of Sweden entered the fray against Poland, Alexis made peace, in 1656; he feared a strong Sweden as much as a strong Poland. Muscovite forces plunged into war with Sweden for the Estonian, Livonian, and Karelian territories along the Baltic coast. The situation in Ukraine became increasingly confused and dangerous for Moscow, and it was necessary to end the war with Sweden in 1661, even at the cost of yielding, once again, the Baltic coast.
In Ukraine the war took on a new aspect when in 1664 Peter Doroshenko, a new leader, put himself under the protection of the Ottomans. The Turks joined in a number of major military operations, alarming both Poland and Moscow sufficiently to bring them to a truce at Andrusovo (1667). Poland recognized Moscow’s control over eastern Ukraine and Kiev, while Moscow yielded the part of Ukraine west of the Dnieper and most of Belarusia.
The peace did not greatly improve the government’s position, for the same year saw the beginning of a threatening movement among the Don Cossacks and peasants of the Volga region, led by Stenka Razin, and a political battle within the inner circles at court, caused by the death of Alexis’s wife. After two years, Alexis married Nataliya Naryshkina. In 1676, however, Alexis himself died, and Fyodor, a sickly son of his first wife, Mariya Miloslavskaya, succeeded him. A struggle began between the rival Naryshkin and Miloslavsky families. The Naryshkins were exiled, and the Miloslavskys took over. In 1682, however, Fyodor died, and the Naryshkin faction sought to place his half brother Peter on the throne instead of Fyodor’s full brother, the ailing Ivan. The elite corps of streltsy (a hereditary military caste) revolted and established Ivan’s elder sister Sophia as regent.
TRENDS IN THE 17TH CENTURY
Economic reconstruction was slow, particularly in agriculture and in the old central lands, but it was accompanied by a growth of trade and manufacturing. The state revenues profited from the expansion eastward beyond the Urals and southward into the black-soil region. In the north the port of Arkhangelsk handled the export of forest products and semimanufactures (naval stores, potash) to the English and Dutch, and its merchants took a leading role in the early exploitation of Siberia. The government itself became deeply involved in the development of trade and commerce, both through its monopolistic control of certain areas and commodities and by its efforts to build up such strategic industries as metallurgy. The economy grew at unprecedented speed during the 17th century. By 1700 Russia was a leading producer of pig iron and potash, and the economic base on which Peter’s military successes were to depend had been firmly established.
The political recovery of the Russian state after the Time of Troubles was largely due to the survival of the central bureaucracy and ruling oligarchy. The lines of subsequent development were determined by the growth, consolidation, and almost unimpeded self-aggrandizement of these groups in the 17th century. The expansion of the bureaucratic apparatus can be measured in various ways. In 1613 there were 22 prikazy, or departments; by mid-century there were 80. At the beginning of the period, the jurisdiction of the bureaucracy included primarily fiscal, juridical, and military matters; by the end of the century, it also covered industrial, religious, and cultural life. At the close of the Time of Troubles, the bureaucracy’s functions were exercised by leading boyars and professional administrators; by Peter’s time the mercantile class, the whole of the nobility, and the clergy had become part of its ubiquitous network. This bureaucracy was the buttress—indeed, the substance—of an absolute monarchy whose prerogatives knew few internal bounds.
The ease with which the extension of central authority overwhelmed all other political and social forces is to be explained by the frailty of local institutions and by the absence of independent ecclesiastical or social authority. The Muscovite administration was extended first into the devastated areas, where local institutions had been swept away, and then into new territories that had no significant political institutions, until it became a standardized and centralized mechanism powered by the colossal wealth generated by its own expansion.
These processes were reflected in the great law code of 1649, the first general codification since 1550, which was to remain the basis of Russian law until 1833. Its articles make clear the realities of Muscovite political practice: the rule of the bureaucrats and the extension of the powers of the state into all spheres of human activity. It was based in large measure upon the accumulated ad hoc decisions of the officials and was intended for their guidance. The code made ecclesiastical affairs a matter of state jurisdiction; it gave legal expression to the practice of serfdom; and it enumerated crimes “of word and deed” against the “Sovereign”—by which were to be understood the state and all its agents.
By the end of the century, only those families that had made new careers in the state apparatus through service as generals, ministers, and ambassadors remained at the apex of society. They were joined by numerous parvenu families that had risen in government service. Particularly striking was the prosperity of the dyak class of professional administrators, which had become a closed hereditary estate by a decree of 1640.
During much of the 17th century, thegovernment was run for all practical purposes by high officials in cooperation with relatives and cronies of the reigning tsar. Historians in the 19th century, eager to find constitutional traditions in Russia’s past, stressed the role of the zemsky sobor—an assembly of dignitaries that from the time of Ivan IV had been called together when matters of crucial importance had to be decided. In the period after 1613 it was in almost continuous session for some years. After 1619, however, the services of these assemblies were no longer required. It is questionable whether they ever had any power beyond that of a crowd of military and administrative leaders. The government summoned them, and the government determined their composition.
CULTURAL LIFE
No period of Russia’s cultural history has been as full of change, turmoil, creativity, failure, and sheer destructiveness as the 17th century. Russian society emerged from the Time of Troubles shattered and unsure of itself, disoriented and impoverished. This shaken society was then subject to wrenching social and economic change and strong external influences.
The old culture had been the culture of the monasteries. Art, literature, architecture, and music remained traditional, canonical, and orthodox until the end of the 16th century. The 17th century produced, first among the officials and boyars and later among the merchants and middle classes, a new elite that was increasingly interested in European culture and had mainly secular interests. Yet the government of these same officials and boyars stifled native cultural development, and many of these merchants and nobles were drawn into movements opposed to Westernization.
There were three reasons for this paradoxical development. First, Western culture had reached Muscovy largely through Polish and Roman Catholic mediation, rendering it unacceptable to all but those sophisticated enough to take a very broad view of the events of the Time of Troubles. In the Ukrainian and Belarusian territories, the Polish CounterReformation had brought a national cultural revival. The books, ideas, and people flowing from these lands to Muscovy in the 17th century, however, were hardly less suspect than those of Roman Catholic Poland, and, as these “aliens” acquired a dominant position in Muscovite cultural affairs, resentment was added to suspicion.
The Great Schism
The contradictions of the age were reflected in the great schism within the Russian church. The doctrinal debate began over obscure and petty matters of ritual, but larger, unarticulated issues were at stake. Religion after the Time of Troubles had taken two directions, which were at first closely associated: the reformation of religious life (with stress on the pastoral functions of the clergy and the simplification of the liturgy) and the correction and standardization of the canonical books (which had come to vary widely from the Greek originals). The government had at first supported these linked objectives, but the supporters of “Old Russian piety” opposed the reforms as they were officially promulgated. When, in the 1650s, the patriarch Nikon began to enforce the reforms in the parishes, where they had been generally ignored, the discontent developed into a massive religious and regional insurrection. Towns and parishes of the north were riven by warring “old” and “new” bishops. The Old Believers, dissenters who refused to accept Nikon’s liturgical reforms imposed upon the Russian Orthodox Church, were either crushed by government force, driven to self-destruction, or reduced to silent resistance.
In the end, the Western secular culture fostered at the court and the new religious culture and education spread by Ukrainians and Belarusians, who came to dominate church life, submerged and displaced the disparate beginnings of a modern synthesis within native matrices and cleared the way for Peter’s cultural policies, which erected a Western facade over the ruins of the native traditions.
A second reason was the preponderant role of the church and, later, the state, which took over at last the assets, liabilities, and responsibilities of the ecclesiastical establishment. From 1620, when the patriarch Philaret pronounced an anathema upon “books of Lithuanian imprint” (the only secular books in print for the Russian reader), until the end of the century, when the government turned to imposing Greek and “Lithuanian” (i.e., Ukrainian and Belarusian) views upon a resisting populace, the state and its ecclesiastical adjunct had a repressive influence.
The patriarch Philaret was the father of Tsar Michael I. Exercising both ecclesiastical and political rule in Russia, Philaret reformed church administration and strove to minimize the influence of the Roman Catholic Church.
Finally, indigenous cultural forces were unable to assert themselves. They were physically dispersed, socially diverse, and set at odds by cultural and political disaffection. The development of a vernacular literature, which can be seen in the synthetic “folk songs,” pamphlets, tales, and imitations produced for and by the growing educated class, remained a marginal phenomenon. They were unpublished because of the ecclesiastical monopoly of the press, and they were anonymous. The promising experiments of a group of noble writers who worked within the formal Slavonic tradition were ended by exile and repression.
Despite these negative influences, the court itself was a centre of literary and artistic innovation, and many of the leading men of the realm were considered cultured and cosmopolitan by Westerners who knew them.
The accession of Peter I ushered in and established the social, institutional, and intellectual trends that were to dominate Russia for the next two centuries. Both Russian and Western historians, whatever their evaluation of Peter’s reign, have seen it as one of the most formative periods of Russia’s history. The seminal nature of the reign owes much to Peter’s personality and youth.
PETER’S YOUTH AND EARLY REIGN
The child of his father’s second marriage, Peter was pushed into the background by his half brother Fyodor and exiled from the Kremlin during the turbulent years of the regency (1682–89) of his half sister Sophia. He grew up among children of lesser birth, unfettered by court etiquette. Playing at war and organizing his young friends into an effective military force, he could manifest his energy, vitality, and curiosity almost untrammeled. He also came into close contact with the western Europeans who lived in Moscow; the association kindled his interest in navigation and the mechanical arts—of which he became a skilled practitioner—and gave him the experience of a socially freer and intellectually more stimulating atmosphere than he might otherwise have had. He resolved to introduce this more dynamic and “open” style of life into Russia, a goal he pursued after the overthrow of Sophia in 1689 and that he erected into a policy of state after he became sole ruler following the death of his mother in 1694. (His half brother Ivan V remained co-tsar but played no role and died in 1696.)
Peter’s first political aim was to secure Muscovy’s southern borders against the threat of raids by Crimean Tatars supported by the Ottoman Empire. For lack of adequate sea power, his initial attempt, in 1695, failed to gain a foothold on the Sea of Azov. Undaunted, Peter built up a navy—becoming the first Russian ruler since early Kievan times to do so—and succeeded in capturing Azov a year later. The experience convinced him of the necessity of extending his own technical knowledge and of securing tools and personnel from the West. To this end Peter traveled to western Europe, something no Muscovite tsar had ever done; he spent almost a year in Holland and England acquiring mechanical and maritime skills, hiring experts in various fields, purchasing books and scientific curiosities, and carrying on diplomatic negotiations for a crusade against the Turks. In the course of negotiations with Poland-Saxony and Denmark, an alliance was formed, not against Turkey but against Sweden. The alliance led to the Second Northern War (1700–21), which became Peter’s major concern for almost the remainder of his reign.
A man of original and shrewd intellect, exuberant, courageous, industrious, and iron-willed, Peter I soberly appraised complex and changeable situations so as to uphold consistently the general interests of Russia and his own particular designs.
The war started inauspiciously for Peter when King Charles XII of Sweden, disembarking suddenly on the eastern coast of the Baltic Sea, inflicted a severe defeat on the Russians before the fortress of Narva (November 1700). Thinking that he had eliminated Russia as a military factor, Charles invaded Poland to force King Augustus II to make peace and to install his own candidate, Stanisław Leszczyński, on the Polish throne (Stanisław I, ruled 1704–09, 1733). In the meantime Peter proceeded to reorganize and equip his troops systematically, while the generals B.P. Sheremetev and A.D. Menshikov gradually conquered the Swedish Baltic provinces of Ingria and Livonia. By terms of the capitulations of Riga and Revel (now Tallinn), Swedish sovereignty was ended and the provinces incorporated into the Russian Empire; the local German landed nobility and urban patriciate were confirmed in their historic corporate privileges. In 1703 Peter laid the foundations of his new capital, St. Petersburg, at the mouth of the Neva River; the site was chosen to secure a firm footing on the Gulf of Finland and to open direct sea access to western Europe.
Having forced Augustus II to withdraw from the war, Charles again turned eastward. Invading Russia in 1708, he decided to first secure Ukraine as a source of supplies and manpower (promised by the Cossack hetman Ivan Stepanovich Mazepa, who had defected from Peter’s side) and await reinforcements from the north. These reinforcements, however, were prevented from reaching Charles by Menshikov’s victory at Lesnaya in September 1708. After much maneuvering, Charles laid siege to the Ukrainian town of Poltava in the spring of 1709. Peter hastened to relieve the town, and it was before its walls that the crucial battle was fought on June 27 (July 8, New Style), 1709. Russian victory was complete—Charles and Hetman Mazepa barely escaped capture, and the remainder of their troops were taken prisoner when they tried to cross the Dnieper at Perevolochnaya a few days later. Charles took refuge with the Turkish army encamped on the banks of the Prut River. Peter made the mistake of pursuing him into Turkish territory and barely escaped entrapment by the Turks, whom Charles had persuaded to renew war with Russia. With the help of bribery and diplomacy, Peter extricated himself from the trap by signing a peace treaty (July 1711) under which he gave up Azov and promised to dismantle fortresses near the Turkish border.
The Battle of Poltava ended Sweden’s status as a major power and marked the beginning of Russian supremacy in eastern Europe. It was fought north and west of Poltava in what is now Ukraine.
Charles remained interned in Turkey (he did not escape until 1714), hoping to rebuild a coalition and rejecting all peace proposals. The war dragged on: Augustus II recovered the Polish throne, and Peter consolidated his hold on the Baltic by invading southern Finland. Russia won its first significant naval victory in July 1714 off the Hangö (Gangut) peninsula and raided the Swedish mainland. The death of Charles XII (killed accidentally in Norway in 1718, soon after his return from Turkey) led to protracted negotiations (Congress of Åland) that ultimately resulted in the Peace of Nystad (August 30 [September 10, New Style], 1721), under the terms of which Sweden acquiesced to Russian conquests on the eastern coast of the Baltic Sea. Thereafter Russia was the dominant power in the Baltic region, while Sweden rapidly sank to second-rate status.
Russia’s acquisition of Ingria and Livonia (and later of Kurland) brought into the empire a new minority: the German elites—urban bourgeoisie and landowning nobility—with their corporate privileges, harsh exploitation of native (Estonian and Latvian) peasantry, and Western culture and administrative practices. Eventually these elites made significant contributions to the imperial administration (military and civil) and helped bring German education, science, and culture to Russian society. From a diplomatic point of view, Peter’s triumph over Sweden secured Russia an important voice (enhanced by matrimonial connections) in the affairs of the German states. By the same token, Russia was to be drawn into all the diplomatic and military conflicts that beset western and central Europe throughout the 18th century, most particularly in connection with the rise of Prussian power, the decline of the Ottoman Empire, and the domestic turmoil in Poland. Russia was forced to maintain great military strength, which put a heavy burden on the fiscal, social, and economic development of the empire.
The long war’s requirements determined domestic policy as well. Only when victory was in sight could Peter devote his attention to a systematic overhaul of Russia’s institutions. The hastiness and brutality of steps taken under the stress of war had an effect on subsequent history. Historians have debated whether Peter’s legislation was informed by an overall plan based on more or less clearly formulated theoretical considerations or whether it was merely measures taken to meet emergencies as they occurred. Pragmatic elements predominated, no doubt, over theoretical principles. The intellectual climate and administrative practices of Europe, however, contributed to orient Peter’s thinking.
THE PETRINE STATE
Formally, Peter changed the tsardom of Muscovy into the Empire of All Russias, and he himself received the title of emperor from the Senate at the conclusion of the peace with Sweden. Not only did the title identify the new Russia with European political tradition, but it also bespoke the new conception of rulership and of political authority that Peter wanted to implant: that the sovereign emperor was the head of the state and its first servant, not the patrimonial owner of the land and “father” of his subjects (as the tsar had been). Peter stressed the function of his office rather than that of his person and laid the groundwork of a modern system of administration. Institutions and officials were to operate on the basis of set rules, keep regular hours and records, apply laws and regulations dispassionately, and have individual and collective responsibility for their acts. Reality, of course, fell far short of this ideal, because Muscovite traditions and conditions could not be eradicated so rapidly. Furthermore, there was a great shortage of educated and reliable persons imbued with such rationality and efficiency (a problem that bedeviled the imperial government until its end). They were mainly to be found in the military establishment, where officer and noncommissioned ranks acquired the requisite outlook, experience, and values in the army and navy established by Peter.
The changeover from the traditional militia-like military organization to a “European” professional army had been initiated during the reigns of Tsars Michael and Alexis. But it was Peter who gave it the full-fledged “modern” form it retained until the middle of the 19th century. The army—and, for the first time in Russia, the navy as well—was manned by recruits drawn from the peasantry (and other taxable groups) whose service obligation was for 25 years. Recruitment entailed liberation from serf status both for the soldier and all his children born after his recruitment. Eventually this provided a path, however steep and narrow, for lower-class children to follow to join the ranks of petty officialdom and nobility. Submitted to savage discipline, the soldier was isolated from direct contact with the population, and his total commitment was to the state. Drilled in modern battle order and technology, the peasant recruit was forcibly “modernized.”
Peter personally cut the beards of his boyars, as shown in this engraving. Old Believers and merchants who insisted on keeping their beards had to pay a special tax, but peasants and the Orthodox clergy were allowed to remain bearded.
The officer corps was recruited in similar fashion from the landowning service class. The young noble serviceman was called to serve from age 15 until his death or total incapacity. In principle, service was permanent with only rare leaves granted to attend to family and estate matters. Called up individually, the service noble was assigned and transferred at the will of the state. In principle, service nobles were remunerated by regular salary payments, though in the reign of Peter I and for long afterward salaries were paid neither promptly nor fully in cash; officers had to rely on their family estates or special gifts and awards. Starting as soldiers and noncommissioned officers, service nobles were to progress through the ranks on the basis of merit and longevity. Minimum educational standards had to be met by officers and officials, and they came to play a crucial role in both the careers and the social status of the service nobility. The empire’s large population, which grew at a rapid rate throughout the century, enabled the government to maintain the largest standing army in Europe. Good generalship and the soldiers’ loyalty and resilience, as well as excellent artillery and cavalry, made for a formidable military force that achieved the notable expansion of the empire during the 18th century. The Russian bureaucracy, whose members were often drawn from the military, thus acquired a preference for uniformity and militarism that did not foster respect or concern for the individual needs of the various regions and peoples of the far-flung empire.
In the new administration, performance was to be the major criterion for appointment and promotion. Peter wanted this principle to apply to the highest offices, starting with that of the emperor himself. As a result of his bad experience with his own son, Alexis (who fled abroad, was brought back, and died in prison), Peter decreed in 1722 that every ruler would appoint his own successor. He did not have the opportunity to avail himself of this right, however, and the matter of regular succession remained a source of conflict and instability throughout the 18th century.
Peter’s concern for performance lay at the basis of the Table of Ranks (1722), which served as the framework for the careers of all state servants (military, civil, court) until the second half of the 19th century. In it the hierarchy was divided into 14 categories, or ranks; theoretically one had to begin at the bottom (14th rank) and proceed upward according to merit and seniority. Throughout the 18th century the 8th rank (1st commissioned officer grade) automatically conferred hereditary nobility on those who were not noble by birth. In a sense, therefore, the Table of Ranks opened all offices to merit and thus democratized the service class. But because service was contingent on good preparation (i.e., education), it was accessible only to the few—nobility and clergy—until later in the 18th century.
The Roles of Different Social Classes
The same need for qualified personnel that had brought about the Table of Ranks also determined Peter’s policies toward the several social classes of his realm. The traditional obligation of members of all estates to perform service to the state, each according to his way of life (i.e., the nobleman by serving in the army and administration, the peasantry and merchants by paying taxes, the clergy by prayer), was given a modern, rational form by Peter. Paradoxically, the reform helped to transform the traditional estates into castelike groups from which—except in rare instances of clergy and rich merchants—it became impossible to escape. The nobility was most directly affected by the change, not only in Peter’s lifetime but under his successors as well. The nobleman’s service obligation became lifelong, regular, and permanent. The staffs of military and government institutions were no longer recruited on the basis of regional origin or family ties, but strictly according to the need of the state and the fitness of the individual for the specific task at hand. The serviceman was transferred from one assignment, branch, or locality to another as the state saw fit. The office of heraldry within the Senate kept the service rosters up-to-date and decided on appointments and transfers. It was not easy to break traditional family and clan ties, however. Family connection continued to be a factor in successful service careers, especially if a relative was close to the ruler or was a favourite. On the level of the central government and the court, the struggle between cliques for imperial favour was the major factor in determining policy orientations and appointments to high positions.
Peter also introduced single inheritance of real estate (1714), attempting to break the traditional inheritance pattern that had led to the splintering of estates. In so doing he hoped to create a professional service nobility unconnected with the land and totally devoted to the state, but the resistance the law met in its application forced its revocation in 1731. He also required the nobility to be educated as a prerequisite for service. Schooling, whether at home or in an institution, became a feature of the nobleman’s way of life. Schooling was a radical innovation, at first resented and resisted; but within a generation it was accepted as a matter of course and became the decisive element in the status and self-image of the nobility.
The peasantry had been enserfed during the 17th century, but the individual peasant had retained his traditional ties to the village commune and to the land that he worked. To prevent tax evasion through the formation of artificial households, Peter introduced a new unit of taxation, the “soul”—a male peasant of working age—and the lords were made responsible for the collection of the tax assessed on each of their souls. The peasant thus became a mere item on the tax roll who could be moved, sold, or exchanged according to the needs and whims of his master—whether a private landlord, the church, or the state. The serf became practically indistinguishable from a slave.
As befitted a secular-minded autocrat who saw his main task as enlightening and leading his people to “modernity,” Peter had little regard for the church. He recognized its value only as an instrument of control and as an agent of modern education. When the patriarch died in 1700, Peter appointed no successor. Finally in 1721 he gave the church a bureaucratic organization: a Holy Synod composed of several appointed hierarchs and a lay representative of the emperor; the latter, called the chief procurator, came to play the dominant role. Ecclesiastical schools turned into closed institutions with a narrowly scholastic curriculum. Membership in the clerical estate became strictly hereditary; the priesthood was transformed into a closed caste of government religious servants cut off from the new secular culture being introduced in Russia and deprived of their traditional moral authority. Both on economic and religious grounds, therefore, the reign of Peter I appeared particularly oppressive to the common people. For many it clearly was the reign of the Antichrist, from which one escaped only through self-immolation (practiced by some of the Old Believers), open rebellion, or flight to the borderlands of the empire.
This engraving shows a conflict between the Old Believers and Peter I in the Palace of Facets. Numbering millions in the 17th century, the Old Believers eventually split into multiple sects, of which several survived into modern times.
Resistance and flight were made possible by Peter’s failure to endow the government with effective means of control on the local level. Peter tried to have the officers of the regiments that were garrisoned in the provinces double as local officials, but the experiment failed because of the necessities of war and because regular officers proved incompetent to administer peasants. The attempts at copying Western models were also unsuccessful, for the Russian nobility lacked (and was not allowed to develop) a local corporate organization that could serve as the foundation for local self-government.
Peter concentrated his attention almost entirely on the central administration. To prosecute the war, the Petrine state had to mobilize all the resources of the country and to supervise practically every aspect of national life. This required that the central executive apparatus be extended and organized along functional lines. Peter hoped to accomplish this by replacing the numerous haphazard prikazy (administrative departments) with a coherent system of functional and well-ordered colleges (their number fluctuating around 12 in the course of the century). Each college was headed by a board for more effective control; it had authority in a specific area such as foreign affairs, the army, the navy, commerce, mining, finances, justice, and so on. The major problems with this form of organization proved to be the coordination, planning, and supervision of the colleges.
Peter tried to cope with these defects pragmatically through the creation of a Senate, which came to serve as a privy council as well as an institution of supervision and control. In addition, he set up a network of agents (fiskaly) who acted as tax inspectors, investigators, and personal representatives of the emperor.
Much reliance was put on the obligation to denounce all would-be violators of imperial orders. Those failing to do so suffered the same punishment as the actual violator, while the informer was rewarded with the property confiscated from the “criminal.” Internal security was vested in 1689 in the chancery of the Preobrazhensky Guards, the tsar’s own regiment, which became a much-dreaded organ of political police and repression. Under different names the police apparatus remained a permanent feature of the imperial regime. The police were also the instrument of the ruler’s personal intervention, an essential function for the preservation of the autocracy as a viable political system.
The needs of war, as well as the desire to modernize Russia, led Peter to promote and expand industry, particularly mining, naval construction, foundries, and the production of glass and textiles. The emperor aimed at maximizing the use of all potential resources of the country to heighten its power and further its people’s welfare. These goals were pursued in mercantilist fashion through discriminatory tariffs, state subsidies, and regulation of manufactures. Peter hoped to involve the rich merchants and the nobility in economic enterprise and expansion. As a class, however, the merchants failed to follow his lead. Many were Old Believers who refused to work for what they considered the Antichrist. Nor did Peter’s urban legislation provide the townspeople with the incentives and freedom necessary to change them into an entrepreneurial class. In fact, the municipal reforms were simply means to collect taxes and dues. Only a few members of the nobility had the necessary capital to become entrepreneurs, and their time and energies were completely taken up by their service obligations. Nor did Peter provide for the security of property and for the landowner’s right to dispose of the mineral, water, and timber resources on his estate. The shortage of capital could be, and in some cases was, overcome by direct government grants. But the equally serious labour shortage was not so easily resolved. Peter permitted the use of servile labour in mines and manufactures, with the result that thousands of peasants were moved and forced to work under unfamiliar conditions, in new places, at very difficult tasks. Resentment ran high and the productivity of this forced labour was very low. Most of the enterprises established in Peter’s lifetime did not survive him.
Among the important factors in Russia’s economic development under Peter was the building of St. Petersburg on the then inhospitable shores of the Gulf of Finland. Its construction cost an estimated 30,000 lives (lost from disease, undernourishment, and drowning) and engulfed vast sums of public and private money. Nobles who served in the central administration and at court were required to settle in the new city and to build townhouses.
The location of the new capital symbolized the shift in the empire’s political, economic, and cultural centre of gravity toward western Europe. Trade and social intercourse with western Europe became easier, and the icebound peripheral ports of what is now Murmansk and of Arkhangelsk were abandoned for the more convenient harbours of Riga, Revel, and the new St. Petersburg. After 1721 Peter also extended the borders of the empire in the south along the Caspian Sea as a result of a successful war against Persia (Treaty of St. Petersburg, 1723).
On May 16 (May 27, New Style), 1703, Peter himself laid the foundation stones for the Peter-Paul Fortress on Zayachy Island. This date is taken as the founding date of St. Petersburg.
The changes that made Peter’s reign the most seminal in Russian history were transformation in the country’s culture and style of life, at least among the service nobility. Foreign observers made much of Peter’s requirement that the nobility shave off their beards, wear Western clothes, go to dances and parties, and learn to drink coffee. These were only the external marks of more profound changes that in a generation or so were to make the educated Russian nobility members of European polite society. Commoners, especially the peasantry, were not so immediately affected, although by the end of the 18th century most peasants, and all inhabitants of towns, had moved a considerable distance from the values and habits of their 16th-and 17th-century forebears.
Most important of all, perhaps, Peter I’s reign marked the beginning of a new period in Russian educational and cultural life. He was the first to introduce secular education on a significant scale and to make it compulsory for all state servants. First, Peter tried to use the church to establish a network of primary schools for all children of the free classes—a plan that failed largely because the clergy were unable to finance and staff schools for secular learning. But the specialized technical schools Peter founded, such as the Naval Academy, struck roots and provided generations of young men with the skills necessary for leadership in a modern army and navy. Although he did not live to see its formal inauguration, Peter also organized the Academy of Sciences as an institution for scholarship, research, and instruction at the higher level. The academy’s beginnings were quite modest and its development was not free from difficulties, but at the end of the 18th century it was a leading European centre of science and enlightenment, preparing and guiding Russia’s scientific and technological flowering in the 19th century.
PETER I’S SUCCESSORS
Peter’s unexpected death in 1725 threw Russia into chaos. Normal and peaceful succession to the throne was thwarted by a combination of biological accidents and palace coups. At Peter’s death his chief collaborators, headed by Prince Aleksandr Danilovich Menshikov and assisted by the guard regiments, put on the throne Peter’s widow—his second wife, Catherine I, the daughter of a Lithuanian peasant. Quite naturally, Menshikov ruled in her name. Soon, however, he was forced to share his power with other dignitaries of Peter’s reign. A Supreme Privy Council was established as the central governing body, displacing the Senate in political influence and administrative significance. Catherine I’s death in 1727 reopened the question of succession. Peter’s grandson was proclaimed Emperor Peter II by the council. An immature youngster, Peter II fell under the influence of his chamberlain, Prince Ivan Alekseyevich Dolgoruky, whose family obtained a dominant position in the Supreme Privy Council and brought about the disgrace and exile of Menshikov. It looked as if the Dolgorukys would rule in fact because Peter II was to wed the chamberlain’s sister, but Peter’s sudden death—on the day set for the wedding—crossed the plans of that ambitious family.
ANNA
Under the leadership of Prince Dmitry Golitsyn—the scion of an old Muscovite boyar family who had been prominent official under Peter I—the Supreme Privy Council elected to the throne Anna, dowager duchess of Courland and niece of Peter I (daughter of his co-tsar, Ivan V). Golitsyn tried to circumscribe Anna’s power by having her accept a set of conditions that left to the council the decisive voice in all important matters. This move toward oligarchy was foiled by top-level officials (the generalitet—i.e., those with the service rank of general or its equivalent), in alliance with the rank-and-file service nobility. While the former wanted to be included in the ruling oligarchy, the latter opposed any limitation on the autocratic power of the sovereign. Indeed, the ordinary service nobles feared that an oligarchy, however broad its membership, would shut them off from access to the ruler and thus limit their opportunity to rise in the hierarchy of the Table of Ranks.
Anna had little interest in government affairs. She relied heavily on her favourite and lover, Ernst Johann Biron, and a small group of German advisers to manage the state.
Anna relinquished most of her authority to her Baltic German favourite, Ernst Johann Biron, who acquired a reputation for corruption, cruelty, tyranny, and exploitation and who was felt to have set up a police terror that unfairly benefited the Germans in Russia. Recent scholarship suggests that Biron’s bad reputation rested on his inflexibility in applying the law and collecting taxes, rather than on malevolence. The Supreme Privy Council was abolished upon Anna’s accession in 1730, and the functions of coordination, supervision, and policy planning were vested in a cabinet of ministers composed of three experienced high officials, all Russians.
ELIZABETH
The childless Anna appointed as successor her infant nephew, Ivan Antonovich (Ivan VI), under the regency of his mother, Anna Leopoldovna. Biron at first retained his influence, but was eventually overthrown by Burkhard Christoph, count von Münnich. The continuing domination of a few favourites—many of whom were Germans—displeased the high officials, whose position was threatened by the personal caprices of ruler or favourite, and incensed the rank and file of the service nobility, who could not obtain favours from the sovereign without the approval and help of the favourites. The malcontents banded together around Peter I’s daughter Elizabeth, whose easygoing ways had gained her many friends. She was also popular because of her Russian outlook, which she emphasized. With the help of the guard regiments and high officers and the financial support of foreign diplomats (in particular the French envoy), Elizabeth overthrew the infant Ivan VI and the regent Anna Leopoldovna in 1741. Her 20-year reign saw the rise of certain trends and patterns in public life, society, and culture that were to reach their culmination under Catherine the Great. On the political plane, the most significant development was the restoration of the Senate to its earlier function of chief policy-making and supervising body. At the end of her reign, Elizabeth also established a kind of permanent council for planning and coordination—the Special Conference at the Imperial Court.
This 1919 painting by Evgeny Evgenievich Lanceray shows Elizabeth with the guards in the midst of the coup d’état she staged on the night of Nov. 24–25 (Dec. 5–6), 1741.
During this period Peter’s administrative reforms began to bear fruit. The Table of Ranks became the framework for a class of servicemen whose lives were devoted to the interests of the state. In principle, entry to this class of officials was open to anyone with the required ability and education, including the sons of priests and non-Russian landowners. In fact, promotion in the Table of Ranks was possible only if the individual’s merit and performance were recognized by the ruler or, more likely, by high officials and dignitaries who had access to the ruler. The personal element, bolstered by family and marriage ties, came to play an important role in the formal system of promotion. Most significantly, it determined the makeup of the top echelon of the administrative and military hierarchies (which were interchangeable). This group constituted an almost permanent ruling elite, co-opting its own membership and promoting the interests of the families most directly connected with it. In order to solidify its influence and function, it aimed at bringing as many routine government operations as possible under a system of regulations that would make appeal to the ruler unnecessary. The ruler’s autocratic power could not be infringed, however, because his authority was needed not only to settle special cases but also to promote, protect, and reward members of the ruling group and their clients. The greatest threat to the system was the interference or interposition of favourites. To guard against this, the oligarchy entered into an alliance with the rank-and-file service nobles who wanted to join its ranks and could hope to do so with the help of the dignitaries’ patronage. This alliance permitted successful palace coups against favourites. The system worked well enough to allow the consolidation of Peter’s reforms, some success in foreign policy, and a general increase in the power and wealth of the state, despite the deficiencies of the rulers and their favourites.
The system rested on the availability to all nobles of the minimum education necessary for entrance and promotion in service. As a consequence, cultural policy became a major concern of the government and the nobility alike. The members of the service class demanded that institutions of learning be set up to prepare the nobility for better careers, permitting them to skip the lowest ranks. That demand was fulfilled in 1731 with the creation of the Corps of Cadets. In the course of the following decades, the original corps was expanded, and other special institutions for training the nobility were added. General education became accessible to a large stratum of the rank-and-file nobility with the founding of the Moscow State University in 1755, although the lack of automatic preferment for its graduates kept it from being popular among the wealthier nobles until the end of the century. The Corps of Cadets and similar public and private institutions also acted as substitutes for local and family bonds. These schools became the seedbeds for intellectual life, and their students played a leading role in spreading the literature and ideas of western Europe in court circles and in the high society of the capitals.
Elizabeth encouraged the development of education and art, founding Russia’s first university (in Moscow) and the Academy of Arts (in St. Petersburg) and building the extravagant Winter Palace (also in St. Petersburg).
The service noblemen were also landlords and serf owners. The majority of them, however, were quite poor due to the low productivity of Russian agriculture, absentee management, and the scattered and splintered character of the landholdings. The average small or middling estate yielded only the bare necessities for the survival of the serviceman’s family. As long as he remained in service, away from the estate, and without capital, he could do little to improve his property, especially since any change in the agrarian routine would have to be accepted by his peasant-serfs and the noble neighbours among whose lands his own lay scattered in an inextricable patchwork. He thus depended on the ruler for additional income, either in the form of a salary or as grants of land (and serfs). Salaries were not large, were often in kind (furs), and were paid out irregularly. Lands and serfs could be obtained only from the ruler, and most went to favourites, courtiers, or high dignitaries. Service provided the nobleman with some extras, such as uniforms, sometimes lodgings, and—most important—greater accessibility to court, cultural life, and education for his children. Thus, he remained in service and took little direct interest in his estates and serfs.
Elizabeth’s chief adviser, Pyotr Shuvalov, had the government grant exclusive privileges and monopolies to some of the nobility, hoping to involve them in the development of mining and manufacturing. Shuvalov also initiated a gradual loosening of state controls over economic life in general. He began to dismantle the system of internal tariffs, so that local trade could develop. He strengthened the landlord’s control over all the resources on his estate and gave the nobles the right to distill alcohol.
At the same time, the landlords were obtaining still greater power over their serfs. The full weight of these powers fell on the household serfs, whose number increased because their masters used them as domestics and craftsmen. When noblemen established factories or secured estates in newly conquered border areas, they transferred serfs there without regard for family or village ties. The operation of most estates was, in the absence of the landlord, left to the peasants. This only perpetuated the traditional patterns of agriculture and made the modernization and improvement of agricultural productivity impossible.
Elizabeth’s reign witnessed Russian victories over Turkey that expanded and consolidated the empire’s control in southwestern Ukraine and promoted settlement there. Moreover, Russia was interfering more and more in the domestic politics of Poland and in the diplomatic game of central and western Europe. Elizabeth joined Austria, France, Sweden, and Saxony in a coalition against Prussia, under Frederick II, Great Britain, and Hanover. This led to Russia’s involvement in the Seven Years’ War. Russian armies were successful in conquering East Prussia and occupied Berlin briefly. The empress’s death saved the king of Prussia from total disaster.
Elizabeth, too, was childless, and the throne passed to the heir she had selected—her nephew the duke von Holstein-Gottorp, who became Peter III. Peter III made himself personally unpopular with St. Petersburg society. He allowed his entourage (mainly his Holstein relatives and German officers) to control the government. The regular hierarchy of officials—particularly the Senate—was pushed into the background. Power passed into the hands of the emperor’s favourites, while a modernized police, under the personal control of a general who was one of the emperor’s minions, spread its net over the empire. Peter’s pro-Prussian foreign and military policy (he abruptly ended Russia’s victorious involvement in the Seven Years’ War) and his treatment of his wife, Catherine, provoked much resentment. It was easy for Catherine, with the help of the senators, high officials, and officers of the guard regiments (led by her lover Grigory Orlov and his brothers), to overthrow Peter on June 28 (July 9, New Style), 1762. Thus began the long reign of Catherine II, whom her admiring contemporaries named “the Great.”
Catherine the Great led her country into full participation in the political and cultural life of Europe, carrying on the work begun by Peter the Great.
The daughter of a poor German princeling, Catherine had come to Russia at age 15 to be the bride of the heir presumptive, Peter. She matured in an atmosphere of intrigue and struggle for power. She developed her mind by reading contemporary literature, especially the works of the French Encyclopaedists and of German jurists and cameralists. When she seized power at age 33, she was well prepared, as her reign would prove.
Even before seizing power, Catherine wrote that the task of good government was to promote the general welfare of the nation by providing for the security of person and property. To that end, government should operate in a legal and orderly fashion, furthering the interests of individual subjects and giving groups and classes as much autonomy in the pursuit of their normal activities as possible. All the same, Catherine believed that the autocratic state had important functions. She had no intention of relinquishing or limiting her authority, though she was willing to delegate certain tasks to an educated elite.
EXPANSION OF THE EMPIRE
Catherine’s reign was notable for imperial expansion. First in importance for the empire were the securing of the northern shore of the Black Sea (Treaty of Küçük Kaynarca, 1774), the annexation of the Crimean Peninsula (1783), and the expansion into the steppes beyond the Urals and along the Caspian Sea. This permitted the adequate protection of Russian agricultural settlements in the south and southeast and the establishment of trade routes through the Black Sea and up the Danube. On the other hand, these gains involved Russia more and more in the political and military struggle over the crumbling Ottoman Empire in the Balkans.
Grigory Aleksandrovich Potemkin, Catherine’s favourite in the 1770s, was the chief architect of her imperial policy. He promoted large-scale foreign colonization and peasant resettlement in the south—with only mediocre success so far as agricultural settlements went but with great success in the foundation and rapid growth of such towns and ports as Odessa, Kherson, Nikolayev, Taganrog, and Mariupol (Pavlovsk). Within a generation or two, these became lively cultural centres and major commercial cities for all of southern Russia, contributing to the reorientation of Russia’s pattern of trade with the development of agricultural exports from Ukraine. Local society was transformed on the Russian pattern. Landlords became imperial service nobles with full control over their peasants. Vast new lands were parceled out to prominent officials and made available for purchase by wealthy Russian nobles, who also received the right to resettle their own serfs from the central regions. Thus serfdom, along with elements of the plantation system, was extended over whole new provinces. While this expansion benefited the state and a small, wealthy part of the Russian nobility, it increased the misery and exploitation of the Ukrainian and Russian peasantries. The traditional military democracies of the Cossack hosts on the Dnieper, Don, Ural, Kuban, and Volga rivers lost their autonomy and special privileges. The wealthier officers became Russian service nobles, receiving the right to own and settle serfs on their own lands, while the rank-and-file Cossacks sank to the level of state peasants with special military obligations.
Potemkin was Catherine’s lover for two years and for 17 years the most powerful man in the empire. An able administrator, licentious, extravagant, loyal, generous, and magnanimous, he was the subject of many anecdotes.
In the course of the Russo-Turkish War of 1768–74, Frederick II of Prussia suggested that Russia, Austria, and Prussia find territorial compensation at the expense of Poland rather than squabble over the spoils of the Ottoman Empire. The internal situation of the Polish Commonwealth—in particular the treatment of non-Catholics, which allegedly was grossly discriminatory—had led the three neighbours to meddle in Poland’s domestic affairs. After much diplomatic and political maneuvering, Russia, Prussia, and Austria compelled Poland to cede large chunks of its territory in the First Partition (1772–73), the major beneficiaries of which were Russia (which obtained the Belarusian lands) and Austria (Prussia obtained less actual territory, but what it acquired was of great economic value). Polish patriots attempted to bring political stability to their country by drafting the “Constitution of 3 May 1791,” which provided for stronger royal authority, established four-year sessions of the elected Sejm (the Polish diet), abolished the liberum veto in its proceedings (under the liberum veto, any single member of the Sejm could kill a measure), and introduced significant liberal reforms in education and law. The prospect of social and political progress within the framework of a stable government did not suit the partitioning powers, so the Second Partition was forced on the Poles in 1792. The revolt led by Tadeusz Kościuszko to save Poland’s independence was crushed, and in 1795 the three neighbours seized the remainder of the country and ended its political sovereignty and national independence.
An Increasingly Diverse Russia
Integration of the new territories required the absorption of a large number of non-Russian, non-Christian nomadic peoples. The approach that prevailed until the late 19th century was based on the idea, taken from Enlightenment writings, that there is a natural progress of society from primitive hunting and fishing groups through the stage of nomadism to settled agriculture, trade, and urbanization. Accordingly, the government sought to bring the nomadic peoples up to what it considered to be the Russian peasantry’s higher way of life. This policy had the advantage also of producing uniformity in administrative and legal structures.
Catherine’s government was quite willing to let religious, cultural, or linguistic differences stand, although it did not feel committed to protect them actively. Inevitably, however, its effort to change the ways of the nomads affected their culture and religion and, through these, their social equilibrium and sense of national identity. While Catherine’s policy led some peoples to accept (more or less under duress) changes in their way of life, thus facilitating the extension of Russian agricultural settlements onto the open steppes, it also gave rise to a growing sense of identity based on cultural, linguistic, and religious traditions. These nationalistic sentiments clashed with the outlook and practices of officials accustomed to thinking in universal categories. The policy thus defeated its own aims: it handicapped the economic development of the empire’s border regions (e.g., in Siberia) and worked against the social and cultural integration of the natives into the fold of the dominant Russian culture (although Russification did take place on a significant scale in the case of some native elites, as in the Caucasus and Crimea).
Poland’s size was progressively reduced by three territorial divisions (1772, 1793, 1795) perpetrated by Russia, Prussia, and Austria. After the final partition, the state of Poland ceased to exist.
In the short term the partitions seemed a significant success for the Russian Empire, completing the “gathering of ‘Russian’ lands” (begun in the 15th century) with the acquisition of Belarusia and Volyn, but in the long run they proved more of a liability. Russia became politically tied to Prussia and had to shoulder an increased military burden to defend its new boundaries as well as to maintain law and order among a people restive under foreign occupation. It also proved difficult to co-opt the Polish elites into the imperial establishment, as had been the case with the Ukrainians, the Baltic Germans, and non-Slavic natives. In addition, the empire acquired for the first time a large Jewish population. It can be argued that controlling the obstreperous nation resulted in a regime of harsh police supervision and oppressive censorship throughout the empire.
GOVERNMENT ADMINISTRATION UNDER CATHERINE
The reforms of local government carried out by Catherine also contained contradictions. The successors of Peter I had not solved the problem of local administration. St. Petersburg relied on appointed officials, too few in number and much given to abuse and corruption, and on the informal control exercised by individual landowners and village communes. However, a great peasant rebellion led by Yemelyan Ivanovich Pugachov in 1773–74 demonstrated the inadequacy of this system. Taking up suggestions of various officials and mindful of the information offered by the deputies to the Legislative Commission (1767–68), Catherine shaped the local administration into a structure that remained in force until the middle of the 19th century and also served as a foundation for the zemstvos (local elected councils), established in 1864. The basic pattern was established by the statute on the provinces of 1775 and complemented by the organization of corporate self-administration contained in the Charters to the Nobility and the Towns (1785). Essentially, the reforms divided the empire’s territory into provinces of roughly equal population; the division paid heed to military considerations. Each of these units (guberniya) was put under the supervision and responsibility of a governor or governor-general acting in the name of the ruler, with the right of direct communication with him. A governor’s chancery was set up along functional lines (paralleling the system of colleges) and subordinated to and supervised by the Senate. The regular provincial administration was assisted by officials who were elected from among the nobility for the countryside and from the higher ranks of townspeople for the cities; these elected officials took care of routine police matters in their jurisdictions, helped to enforce orders received from the central authorities, and assisted in the maintenance of law and the collection of taxes. Other elected personalities (marshals of the nobility and heads of city councils) protected the interests of their respective classes and helped to settle minor conflicts without recourse to regular tribunals. This system multiplied the number of state agents on the local level but also fostered a sense of responsibility among the members of the local upper classes. However, the serfs and the lower classes in the towns had nobody to protect their interests.
Catherine made no fundamental changes in the administration of the central government. The system of colleges was retained, but the authority of the presidents increased at the expense of the boards, initiating an evolution that culminated in the establishment of monocratic ministries in 1802. The Senate supervised all branches of administration, regulating the orderly flow of business. The Senate was also indirectly involved in coordination, mainly because its procurator general, Prince Aleksandr A. Vyazemsky, held the office for a quarter of a century with the full trust of the empress. At the same time, the judicial functions of the Senate as a high court of appeal and administrative review were widened.
The major institutional weakness of the Petrine system remained—namely, the lack of a body to coordinate the jurisdictions and resolve the conflicts of the colleges and to plan policies and control their implementation. A ruler as energetic, hardworking, and intelligent as Catherine could perform these tasks, but with the growing complexity of administration even Catherine felt the need for such a body.
The empire also needed an up-to-date code of laws. The last code, issued in 1649, had become largely inoperative. Peter and his successors had recognized this need by appointing commissions to prepare a new code, but none reached a successful conclusion. Catherine tried to tackle the job, but in a different manner. In 1767 she convoked a commission of representatives elected by all classes except private serfs. For their guidance she drafted an instruction largely inspired by Western political thinkers. Far from providing a blueprint for a liberal code, it emphasized the need for autocracy. In its civil part the instruction owed much to German political philosophy and natural-law jurisprudence, putting the individual’s duties before his rights, emphasizing the state’s responsibility for the welfare of the nation, and encouraging the pursuit of material self-interest within the established order. Although not implemented by the commission (which was adjourned indefinitely in 1768), the instruction stimulated the modernization of Russian political and legal thought in the early 19th century.
This copy of the Instruction of Catherine the Great (Nakaz Yekateriny Velikoy in Russian) has the empress’s orders to the Legislative Commission of 1767 in both Russian and Latin.
In her social policy Catherine aimed at steering the nobility toward cultural interests and economic activity so as to reduce their dependence on state service. (They had been freed from compulsory service by Peter III in 1762.) She ordered a general land survey that permanently fixed the boundaries of individual estates, and she granted the nobility the exclusive right to exploit both the subsoil and surface resources of their land and to market the products of their estates and of their serfs’ labour. The nobles also obtained a monopoly of ownership of inhabited estates, which in fact restricted ownership of agricultural serfs to the noble class. Catherine hoped to stimulate agricultural expansion and modernization by providing easy credit and by disseminating the latest techniques and achievements of Western agriculture through the Free Economic Society, founded in 1765. She also fostered the nobility’s corporate organization. The Charter to the Nobility (1785) gave the corps of nobility in every province the status of a legal entity. The corporation’s members gathered periodically in the provincial and district capitals to elect a marshal, who represented their interests before the governor and the ruler himself. They also elected a number of officials to administer welfare institutions for the nobility (schools, orphanages, and so on), to help settle disputes, and to provide guardianships for orphans. The corporate life of the nobility did not develop as well as expected, however. The nobility never became the class it was in Prussia or England, but the charter did foster a sense of class consciousness and afforded legal security to the members and their property. The periodic electoral meetings stimulated social intercourse, led to a livelier cultural life in the provinces, and helped to involve the nobility in local concerns. The charter provided both a framework and the stage for the gradual formation of a “civil society” whose members cultivated interests, activities, and values independent of the state’s—a trend that would come to full bloom and manifest itself in the first half of the 19th century.
Turning the nobility’s interests toward economic activity brought the return home of many landowners to supervise the operation of their estates. Interested in obtaining greater income, they not only intensified the exploitation of serf labour but also interfered in the traditional routine of the village by attempting to introduce new agricultural techniques. In most cases, this meant increased regimentation of the serfs. The secularization of the lands (estates) of monasteries and episcopal sees in 1764 had brought a considerable amount of land into the possession of the state. To reward her favourites and to encourage the nobility to economic activity, Catherine gave away large tracts with many peasants, who now had to work for ambitious and capricious masters.
Serfdom, which had never been acceptable to the Russian peasant, now became particularly burdensome and unjust. It became even more so since the lord’s extensive police powers removed his serfs from the state’s protection, and the new local officials enforced strictly the prohibition against appealing to the sovereign for relief. There were also the specific grievances of the Cossacks, whose traditional liberties had been sharply curtailed and their social organization undermined, as well as the discontent of the nomadic peoples forced to accept a new way of life. Peasant misery erupted in rebellion, led by the Cossack Yemelyan Pugachov, that engulfed all of eastern European Russia in 1773–74. The peasant forces captured a number of towns and cities before they were finally defeated by government armies. The revolt demonstrated the inadequacy of local controls and was thus partly responsible for the reform of provincial administration mentioned above. It also brought the educated elite to a new awareness of the profound alienation of the peasantry from the culture of St. Petersburg.
An illiterate Don Cossack, Yemelyan Ivanovich Pugachov was the leader of the Pugachov Rebellion, a major Cossack and peasant uprising that took place in Russia in 1773–75.
The reign of Catherine II was a period of active town planning and building. The number and size of the urban centres grew slowly but steadily. Along with new cities in the south, many old towns were rebuilt and developed. The renaissance of the old provincial centres was in part due to the administrative reforms of 1775 and 1785, which brought an influx of officials and nobles. Along with them came craftsmen, artisans, and merchants. An act of Peter III that permitted peasants to trade in neighbouring towns without passports or controls at the gates gave impetus to the emergence of a class of small merchants from among the peasantry. This trend received support from the administrative reorganization of the towns and the limited degree of corporate self-administration granted by the Charter to the Towns of 1785.
EDUCATION AND SOCIAL CHANGE IN THE 18TH CENTURY
Secular education had been actively propagated by Peter I. At first it focused on technical subjects—those directly related to the prosecution of war, the building of a navy, and the running of the government. This was also the original emphasis of the Academy of Sciences and the school connected with it. But, as education became the prerequisite for advancement in service and as Western ways of life spread among the upper classes, its focus gradually broadened. There developed a class of nobles who were interested in culture for the sake of their own development, as well as for cutting a good figure in society. Beginning in the 1760s, the demand for western European artistic and cultural works grew in the salons of St. Petersburg. By the 1780s the major classics of European literature had become easily available in translation to any educated person. Private boarding and day schools proliferated, as did the tutors hired by wealthy nobles. The Academy of Sciences took its place among the major academies of Europe. Moscow State University and the chief schools of the military, naval, and civil services had become regular institutions.
There were also ecclesiastical schools. The seminaries and theological academies not only trained future members of the episcopate and officials of the Holy Synod but also staffed government bureaus on the middle and higher levels and produced the first native Russian academics, scholars, and scientists. Russia’s lack of professional experts in such fields as jurisprudence, civil and military engineering, astronomy, and geophysics brought a great influx of foreigners. They brought with them French and German philosophy: the metaphysics and epistemology of René Descartes and the natural law doctrines of the German school of Gottfried Leibniz, Samuel, baron von Pufendorf, and Christian, baron von Wolff. These emphasized social obligation and the individual’s dependence on the community and laid the foundation for a critique of society. The critique was at first directed against the moral inadequacies of individuals, but it soon broadened into the view that the educated man had an obligation to help others improve themselves. In the Russian context the class most obviously in need of improvement was the peasantry. Moral progress, the argument went, was not possible without material progress. This led to an advocacy of practical philanthropy and social action.
Imported German professionals furthered the dissemination of German Pietism, with its emphasis on spiritual progress and on the need to serve man and the community. Similar tendencies underlay the most influential branch of Freemasonry. The Freemasons devoted themselves to disseminating knowledge, relieving hunger, and caring for orphans and other destitutes. The publisher Nikolay Novikov carried the Pietist and Masonic messages to the public in his satiric journals and periodicals for women and children. The major writers of Catherine II’s reign (including the empress herself, who dabbled in journalism and drama) produced satires, fables, and comedies of manners attuned to the belief that moral and spiritual progress would lead to social improvements. A similar approach was noticeable in education, which stressed the development of moral feeling in the conviction that a good heart would guide the well-filled head in the proper direction.
The Russian writer, philanthropist, and Freemason Nikolay Novikov tried to raise the educational and cultural level of the Russian people. He produced social satires and also founded schools and libraries.
All these intellectual currents combined to awaken among educated Russians a sense of national pride and a feeling that Russia had managed to lift itself to the cultural and political level of a great European state. The educated Russian was no longer a servile and mute slave of the tsars; he had made himself into a gentleman, a man of heart and honour, a “true son of the fatherland,” concerned about his compatriots and his country’s condition and future.
The response of the empress and her entourage to these intellectual developments was ambivalent. The new sense of national pride enhanced the government’s prestige and was in line with Catherine’s own aspirations for the nobility. But moral criticism of abuses could easily turn into criticism of Russia’s social and political system. The outbreak of the French Revolution in the late 1780s made Catherine II particularly anxious. She felt that large-scale private philanthropic and educational activities without government guidance and control were trespassing on her own prerogatives as an enlightened autocrat. By the end of the 18th century, the ideal of service to the state, which had underlain the Russian nobility’s value system, had been transformed into one of service to the people. This meant the elite’s separation from the state, which Catherine could not accept. A dramatic illustration of Catherine’s concern occurred on the appearance in 1790 of Aleksandr Radishchev’s A Journey from St. Petersburg to Moscow. In it Radishchev depicted social conditions as he saw them, particularly the dehumanization of the serfs and the corruption of their masters, warning that these threatened the stability of the existing order. Incensed by the book, Catherine had Radishchev arrested and banished to Siberia. He became the first political martyr of the Russian elite; his book and his fate foreshadowed the antagonism between the intelligentsia and the government that was to dominate Russia’s history in the 19th century.
CONCLUSION
Catherine died in 1796 and was succeeded by her son Paul. A capricious, somewhat unstable individual, Paul had a passion for military order that conflicted with the basic values of the developing civil society. He felt that the nobility should again become a service class (or withdraw completely into agriculture) and help the ruler implement his reform program, even at the expense of its private interests. In trying to reestablish compulsory state service, he made it more rigid, harsh, and militaristic. He sought to promote the welfare of the serfs, but the manner of his approach—a decree permitting a maximum of three days of labour service per week—was clumsy and high-handed; it did nothing to help the serfs and angered their lords. Paul also wanted to govern with his own minions, disregarding both tradition and the administrative patterns that had developed during his mother’s 30-year reign. Paul’s hatred of the French Revolution and of everything connected with it led him to impose tight censorship on travel abroad and to prohibit foreign books, fashions, music, and so forth. He thereby earned the enmity of upper society in St. Petersburg. On March 11 (March 23, New Style), 1801, he was murdered by conspirators drawn from high officials, favourites of Catherine, his own military entourage, and officers of the guard regiments. The accession of his son Alexander I inaugurated a new century and a new period in the history of imperial Russia.
GLOSSARY
ANATHEMA Occasioning the severest form of excommunication that formally separated a heretic completely from the Christian church.
AUTOCRACY A government in which one person has unlimited power.
AUTONOMY The power or right of self-government.
BOYAR A member of the upper stratum of medieval Russian society and state administration.
BURGHER An inhabitant of a borough or a town.
CAMERALIST A public administrative servant of continental rulers of the 17th and 18th centuries who was a mercantilist and advocated economic policies tending to strengthen the position of the ruler.
CHAMBERLAIN A chief officer in the household of a sovereign or noble.
CONCESSION Something granted, often grudgingly.
COSSACKS A people dwelling in the northern hinterlands of the Black and Caspian seas. They had a tradition of independence and finally received privileges from the Russian government in return for military services.
DEFECTOR Someone who deserts one cause, party, or country to take up another.
EPISTEMOLOGY The philosophical study of the nature, origin, and limits of human knowledge.
HANSEATIC LEAGUE An organization founded by north German towns and German merchant communities abroad to protect their mutual trading interests. The league dominated commercial activity in northern Europe from the 13th to the 15th century.
HEGEMONY The social, cultural, ideological, or economic influence exerted by a dominant group.
INTERREGNUM A period between two successive reigns or regimes.
KHAZARS A confederation of Turkic-speaking tribes that in the late 6th century CE established a major commercial empire covering the southeastern section of modern European Russia.
METAPHYSICS The philosophical study whose object is to determine the real nature of things—to determine the meaning, structure, and principles of whatever is insofar as it is.
NATIONALISM Loyalty and devotion to a nation, especially as expressed by praise of one nation above all others and intense concern with promotion of its culture and interests.
OLIGARCHY Government by the few, especially despotic power exercised by a small and privileged group for corrupt or selfish purposes.
PATRIARCH The head of one of various Eastern churches, such as the Russian Orthodox Church.
PASTORAL NOMADS Groups that raise livestock and move about within their established territory to find good pastures for their animals.
RAPPROCHEMENT The establishment of or state of having cordial relations.
REGENCY The rule of a person who governs a kingdom during the minority, absence, or disability of the sovereign
RETINUE The body of retainers or attendants.
SECULAR Not religious or related to religion.
SELF-IMMOLATION A deliberate and willing sacrifice of oneself, sometimes by setting oneself on fire.
SERF A tenant farmer who was bound to a hereditary plot of land and to the will of his landlord.
SOVEREIGNTY Supreme power, especially over a political unit.
STULTIFICATION Becoming ineffective, foolish, or absurdly illogical.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
One historical study of geopolitical aspects is James H. Bater and R.A. French (eds.), Studies in Russian Historical Geography (1983). Also helpful is Martin Gilbert, The Routledge Atlas of Russian History, 3rd ed. (2002).
Judicious broad surveys of early Russian history include Nicholas V. Riasanovsky, A History of Russia, 6th ed. (2000); and Simon Franklin and Jonathan Shepard, The Emergence of Rus, 750–1200 (1996). The history of Muscovy is chronicled in Robert O. Crummey, The Formation of Muscovy, 1304–1613 (1987).
J.L.I. Fennell, Ivan the Great of Moscow (1962), the most detailed account of Ivan III’s reign in English, emphasizes his diplomacy and foreign policy. Biographies of Ivan IV include S.F. Platonov, Ivan the Terrible (1974, reissued 1986); Robert Payne and Nikita Romanoff, Ivan the Terrible (1975); Ruslan G. Skrynnikov, Ivan the Terrible (1981), interesting for its official Soviet interpretation of his place in history; and Benson Bobrick, Fearful Majesty: The Life and Reign of Ivan the Terrible (1987).
An interpretative survey with significant treatment of the 18th century is Richard Pipes, Russia Under the Old Regime, 2nd ed. (1995). The Petrine period is examined in Paul Bushkovitch, Peter the Great: The Struggle for Power, 1671–1725 (2001, reissued 2003); and Lindsay Hughes, Russia in the Age of Peter the Great (1998, reissued 2000).
Pis’ma i bumagi Imperatora Petra Velikogo, 11 vol. (1887–1964), contains Peter’s correspondence as well as valuable documents on Russian history up to 1711. Biographies include M.M. Bogoslovskiĭ, Petr I, 5 vol. (1940–48, reissued 1969), a detailed study up to 1700; Ian Grey, Peter the Great, Emperor of All Russia (1960); M.S. Anderson, Peter the Great (1978); Alex De Jonge, Fire and Water: A Life of Peter the Great (1979); Robert K. Massie, Peter the Great: His Life and World (1980, reprinted 1991); and Henri Troyat, Peter the Great (1987; originally published in French, 1979), a popularized account.
Works that put Peter the Great and his reign into historical perspective include Vasili Klyuchevsky, The Rise of the Romanovs, trans. and ed. by Liliana Archibald (1970; originally published in Russian, 1912); E.M. Almedingen, The Romanovs: Three Centuries of an IllFated Dynasty (1966); John D. Bergamini, The Tragic Dynasty: A History of the Romanovs (1969), based on English-and French-language sources; Ian Grey, The Romanovs: The Rise and Fall of a Dynasty (1970); and W. Bruce Lincoln, The Romanovs: Autocrats of All the Russias (1981).
A critical analysis of the relationship between administration and society in the 18th century is given in John P. LeDonne, Absolutism and Ruling Class: The Formation of the Russian Political Order, 1700–1825 (1991).
The reign and person of Catherine II (perhaps better known as Catherine the Great) are analyzed in Isabel De Madariaga, Russia in the Age of Catherine the Great (1981, reissued 2002), and Catherine the Great: A Short History, 2nd ed. (2002). Philosophical and political thought is presented in Andrzeji Walicki, A History of Russian Thought: From the Enlightenment to Marxism, trans. by Hilda Andrews-Rusiecka (1979, reissued 1988; originally published in Polish, 1973).
Mémoires de Catherine II, ed. by Dominique Maroger (1953; Eng. trans. 1955), is of great importance for the history of Catherine’s beginnings and for an analysis of her character. This edition is not complete, but it constitutes a choice made among the various versions of the autobiography begun by Catherine; all versions stop very near to the date of her accession to power. Equally important are the Correspondance of Catherine II with Voltaire (published in various editions of the complete works of Voltaire, as well as in the Evdokimov edition of the complete works of Catherine II, 1893); the Correspondance avec le Baron F.M. Grimm (1774–1796), Grot edition (1878), is interesting for its autobiographical character; Grimm was Catherine’s confidant. See also Lettres d’ amour de Catherine II à Potemkine, Georges Oudard edition (1934), which unfortunately is edited without chronological order.
V.A. Bilbassov, Geschichte Katharina II, 3 vol. (1891–93; also published in French as Histoire de Catherine II, 1900), is the most important work written about Catherine II, with quotations from many documents of the period; the last volume was banned in Russia under the tsarist regime. Ian Grey, Catherine the Great: Autocrat and Empress of All Russia (1961), a remarkable work, is a penetrating analysis of Catherine’s character and notably of her relationships with Potemkin. Olga Wormser, Catherine II (1957; in French), is particularly interesting for its analysis of the social and cultural situation in Russia. Z. Oldenbourg, Catherine de Russie (1964; in French), is a work devoted primarily to the first half of Catherine’s life.
INDEX
A
Alexis I, 58–62, 76
Andrew I, 18
Anna,, 88–89, 90
Arkhangelsk, 52, 62, 85
army, modernization and professionalization of under Peter I, 76–78
Augustus II, 71, 72
Azov, 58, 73
B
boyars, 21, 23, 43, 44, 47, 48, 49, 55, 56, 58, 59, 63, 65, 88
Byzantine style of rule, Ivan III’s adoption of, 42
C
Catherine II (Catherine the Great), 117
ascension to power, 96, 98
expansion of the empire, 98–101, 103–104
government reforms, 104–109, 111
social and education reforms, 90, 111–113, 115–116
Charles XII, 71, 72, 73, 74
Charters to the Nobility and Towns, 105
Christianity, adoption of in early Russia, 19, 22
clerical estate, hereditary membership in, 81
colleges, as replacement for prikazy, 83, 105, 106
Constantinople, raids on, 13, 15
Corps of Cadets, 93
Cossacks, 48, 49, 50, 56, 58, 60, 61, 100, 109
Crimea, 28, 30, 31, 36, 40, 42, 43, 46, 58, 70, 98
D
Dnieper River, 12, 15, 28, 30, 34, 38, 72, 100
Don River, 12, 15, 28, 100
E
education, as compulsory for state servants, 80, 86, 92–93
Elizabeth, 90–95
F
False Dmitry, 47–48
Finland, Gulf of, 72, 85
folk music and literature, production of synthetic, 68
Freemasons, 113
French Revolution, 115, 117
G
Galicia, 18, 27, 28, 34
German elite, as class in Russia, 74, 89
German Pietism, 113
Glinskaya, Yelena, 43
Godunov, Boris, 46–48
government bureaucracy, expansion of in 17th century, 62
H
Hanseatic League, 18, 23
Holy Synod, 80
Hungary, 18, 19, 27
I
Illustrated Codex, 54
Ivan I, 26
Ivan III, 37–40, 42, 52–53, 54
Ivan IV (Ivan the Terrible), 43–46, 47, 51
J
Journey from St. Petersburg to Moscow, A, 115–116
K
Kalka River, 27
Kazan, 44, 45
khagan, 12
Khmelnytsky, Bohdan, 69
Khorobrit, Michael, 26
Kremlin, 50, 52, 54, 69
Küçük Kaynarca, Treaty of, 98
L
landlords, and estate management, 94–95, 99, 109
law of 1649, 63–64
Legislative Commission, 104
Lithuania, 25, 27, 34, 36, 37, 38–39, 40, 42, 48, 54, 67, 87
Livonian War, 45, 51
M
Mamai, 31, 32
Mengli Giray, 40, 42
Menolog, 54
Menshikov, A.D., 71, 72
Metropolitan Makary, 54
Michael I, 55, 56, 58, 76
Mniszech, Jerzy, 48
monarchy, reestablishment of, 43
Mongols, 23, 26, 27–35, 36, 39–40
Morozov, Boris Ivanovich, 58, 59
Muscovy, 22, 23, 32, 47, 48, 49
cultural life, 52–54, 65, 67
establishment of, 26, 28, 33
as political center of Russia, 36–37
Moscow State University, 93, 112
N
navy, Peter I’s creation of, 70
Neva River, 72
Nevsky, Alexander, 26
Nikon, 59, 66
Novgorod, 13, 18, 23, 25, 26, 33, 34, 36, 37, 40, 42, 51, 52, 55
Novikov, Nikolay, 114
O
Old Believers, 66, 81, 84
oprichnina, 45, 51
Orlov, Grigory, 96
Ottoman Empire, 40, 53, 70, 74, 99, 100
Öz Beg, 26, 31, 33
P
Palaeologus, Sofia, 40, 42, 52
Peace of Nystad, 74
peasantry, transition from freedom to serfdom, 50–51
performance, as main criteria for government promotion under Peter I, 78
Peter I (Peter the Great)
early reign, 63, 69–75
as emperor, 75–78, 80–87, 91
successors, 87–95, 104, 106
Peter III, 96 107, 111
Philaret, 67
pig iron, 62
Poland, 18, 19, 25, 27, 38, 40, 47, 48, 49, 54, 55, 56, 58, 60, 61, 65, 67, 70, 71, 74, 100, 103–104
Polish CounterReformation, 65
Polovtsians, 27, 28
potash, 62
Potemkin, Grigory Aleksandrovich, 99
Preobrazhensky Guards, 83
prikazy, 63, 83
Prussia, 74, 95, 96, 100, 103 104, 108
Pskov, annexation of, 42, 51
Pugachov, Yemelyan Ivanovich, 104, 111
Pugachov Rebellion, 104, 111
R
Radishchev, Aleksandr, 115–116
Roman Catholicism, 65, 67
Rostov, 26, 28, 52
Rurik, Grand Prince, 13, 16
Rus
establishment of early state, 12–13, 15
Kievan period, 13, 15–16, 18–22
post-Kievan period, 22–23, 25
system of succession, 19–21
“Russian Law,” 21
Russian Orthodox Church, 34, 53, 54, 81, 66
Ryazan, 52, 55, 59
annexation of, 42, 51
S
Second Northern War, 71–75
self-immolation, 81
Senate, creation of, 83, 106
serfs, 48, 50, 64, 76, 80–81, 94, 95, 99, 108, 109–110, 116
service nobles, 77–78
Seven Years’ War, 95, 96
Sheremetev, B.P., 71
Shuvalov, Pyotr, 94
Siberia, 52, 62, 101, 116
Sigismund III, 49, 56
single inheritance of real estate, 80
Smolensk, 42, 49, 55, 56, 58
soul, as unit of taxation, 80–81
Special Conference at the Imperial Court, 90
St. Basil’s Cathedral, 54
steppe, extension of agriculture into, 52
St. Petersburg, founding of, 72, 85
streltsy, 62
St. Yury’s Day, 50
Supreme Privy Council, 87, 88
Svyatoslav, 15
Sweden, 47, 49, 55, 56, 60–61, 71–72, 73–74, 75, 95
T
Table of Ranks, 78, 79, 80, 89, 91–93
Tatars, 29–35, 36, 39–40, 42, 53, 58, 70
taxes, 21, 26, 45, 47, 50, 51, 58, 59, 80, 83, 89
technical schools, 87, 111–112
Thirty Years’ War, 56
Time of Troubles, 48–50, 62, 63, 65, 66
tobacco, state monopoly on, 58, 59
Tokhtamysh, 31, 32
trade, 11–12, 13, 18, 22, 23, 28, 33, 50, 52, 62
U
Ukraine, 48, 60, 61, 65, 66, 67, 72, 95, 99
Ural Mountains, 11, 23, 30, 62, 98
V
Varangians, 13, 15, 19
Vasily I, 37
Vasily II, 37
Vasily III, 42–43
Vladimir, 15, 16, 19, 26
Vladimir II, 16, 21, 26
Volga River, 11, 12, 15, 18, 19, 23, 26, 28, 30, 31, 37, 45, 61, 100
Vytautas, 25
W
Westernization, of Russian culture, 65, 52–53, 86
Y
Yaroslav, 16
Z
zemsky sobor, 58, 64
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Names: Beckman, Rosina, editor.
Title: The history of Russia from 1801 to the present / edited by Rosina Beckman.
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INTRODUCTION
CHAPTER ONE
THE REIGNS OF ALEXANDER I AND NICHOLAS I
Government
Social Classes
Ministry of State Domains
Education and Intellectual Life
The Russian Empire
Foreign Policy
CHAPTER TWO
FROM ALEXANDER II TO NICHOLAS II
Emancipation and Reform
Revolutionary Activities
Economic and Social Development
The Commune
Education and Ideas
Russification Policies
Foreign Policy
CHAPTER THREE
THE LAST YEARS OF TSARDOM
The Revolution of 1905–06
The State Duma
Agrarian Reforms
World War I and the Fall of the Monarchy
CHAPTER FOUR
SOVIET RUSSIA
The October (November) Revolution
The Civil War
New Economic Policy
War Communism
The Stalin Era
The Khrushchev Era
The Brezhnev Era
The Gorbachev Era
CHAPTER FIVE
POST-SOVIET RUSSIA
The Yeltsin Era
Economic Reforms
Problems with the Ruble
Political and Social Changes
Organized Crime
Ethnic Relations and Russia’s “Near-Abroad”
Foreign Affairs
The Putin Presidency
Separatism
Foreign Affairs
Political and Economic Reforms
The Medvedev Presidency
The Second Putin Presidency
The Ukraine Conflict and Syrian Intervention
Silencing Critics and Actions in the West
CONCLUSION
GLOSSARY
BIBLIOGRAPHY
INDEX
INTRODUCTION
During the 19th century, Russian tsars alternated between sometimes successful attempts at reform and returns to suppression, with Alexander I (ruled 1801–1825) and Alexander II (ruled 1855–1881) in the reformist camp and Nicholas I (ruled 1825–1855) and Alexander III (ruled 1881–1894) having a more autocratic outlook. Nicholas II, son of Alexander III, came to power in 1894. Weak-willed and indecisive, he was unsuited for the task of ruling a vast empire.
In 1914 Russia entered World War I. After three years of terrible losses, the Russian people rebelled against the tsar in March 1917. Nicholas II stepped down, and the country set up a temporary government. Nicholas and his family were later executed.
In November 1917 a faction of the revolutionaries called the Bolsheviks seized control of Russia. Led by Vladimir Lenin, the Bolsheviks set up a Communist government. The new government took Russia out of World War I.
Between 1918 and 1920 the Red Army successfully defended the new government against anticommunist forces in a civil war. The communist government officially established the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics on Dec. 30, 1922. The Russian Soviet Federated Socialist Republic dominated the Soviet Union for its entire 74-year history. It was by far the largest of the republics, and Moscow, its capital, was also the capital of the Soviet Union.
Following years of economic decline and political turmoil, the Soviet Union was dissolved in 1991. Boris Yeltsin, leader of the former Russian republic, became president of the independent Russian Federation. Russia entered the post-Soviet era on the verge of economic collapse. Yeltsin’s government began transforming the government-run Soviet economy into one based on private enterprise. However, privatization mainly benefited a handful of individuals whose political connections enabled them to buy companies for much less than they were worth. These “oligarchs” came to control huge segments of the Russian economy.
The Russian Revolution of 1917 took place in two stages. The February Revolution overthrew the imperial government, while the October Revolution placed the Bolsheviks in power. This protest in Petrograd (now St. Petersburg) happened during the second stage.
Vladimir Putin, Yeltsin’s final prime minister, followed him as president. He declared his priorities to be reestablishing a strong state, restoring law and order, and relaunching economic reform. When the constitution prevented Putin from running for another term, Dmitry Medvedev, was elected president in 2008. In 2012, Putin was elected to a third term as president of Russia. His first months in office were marked by attempts to quash or marginalize protest movements against the government that had materialized in the past few years. Putin also took an active role in the events in neighboring Ukraine, resulting in Russia’s annexation of Crimea in 2014.
When Alexander I came to the throne in March 1801, Russia was in a state of hostility with most of Europe, though its armies were not actually fighting. Its only ally was its traditional enemy, Turkey. The new emperor made peace with both France and Britain and restored normal relations with Austria. However his interest in internal reforms was frustrated by the reopening of war with Napoleon in 1805. Defeated at Austerlitz in December 1805, the Russian armies fought Napoleon in Poland in 1806 and 1807. Five years of peace followed the Treaty of Tilsit (1807), ended by Napoleon’s invasion of Russia in 1812. After two years of heavy fighting, Russia won, emerging as Europe’s greatest land power.
The mood was one of intense national pride: Orthodox Russia had defeated Napoleon, and therefore it was not only foolish but also impious to copy foreign models. Educated young Russians, however, felt otherwise. Masonic lodges and secret societies flourished in the early 1820s. From their deliberations emerged a conspiracy to overthrow the government. The conspirators, known as the Decembrists because they tried to act in December 1825 when the news of Alexander I’s death became known and there was uncertainty about his successor, were defeated.
Alexander I ruled Russia from 1801 to 1825. Although he alternately fought and befriended Napoleon I during the Napoleonic Wars, he ultimately helped form the coalition that defeated the French emperor.
Nicholas I, who succeeded after his elder brother Constantine refused the throne, was deeply affected by these events and set himself against major political change. After the revolutions of 1848 in Europe, his opposition to all change, his suspicion of even mildly liberal ideas, and his insistence on an obscurantist censorship reached their climax. To the upper classes in central Europe, Nicholas I was the stern defender of monarchical legitimacy; to democrats around the world, he was “the gendarme of Europe” and the chief enemy of liberty. But the Crimean War (1853–56) showed that this giant had feet of clay. The vast empire was unable to mobilize, equip, and transport enough troops to defeat medium-size French and English forces under very mediocre command. Nicholas died in the bitter knowledge of general failure.
GOVERNMENT
The early years of Alexander’s reign saw two periods of attempted reform. During the first, from 1801 to 1803, the tsar and four friends formed the so-called Unofficial Committee with the intention of drafting ambitious reforms. In the period from 1807 to 1812, he had as his chief adviser the liberal Mikhail Speransky. Both periods produced valuable administrative innovations, but neither produced real reform.
The discussions of the Unofficial Committee were part of an ongoing debate between enlightened oligarchy and enlightened autocracy. The proponents of oligarchy wished for the aristocracy to possess greater power. Their opponents, including the young count Pavel Stroganov, were against any limitation on the power of the tsar. Whereas the oligarchs wished to make the Senate an important centre of power and to have it elected by senior officials and country nobility, Stroganov maintained that this would leave the sovereign with “his arms tied.” Alexander, however, never abandoned the idea of representative institutions. He encouraged Speransky to prepare in 1809 a draft constitution that included a pyramid of consultative elected bodies and a national assembly with some legislative powers. In 1819 he asked Nikolay Novosiltsev, a former member of the Unofficial Committee, to prepare a second, somewhat more conservative constitution. Neither was implemented, though Alexander used some features of the first, notably the institution of the State Council, out of their intended context.
In 1802 Alexander instituted eight government departments, or ministries. There was no question of a formal council of ministers, or of anything corresponding to a cabinet, and there was no prime minister. A committee of ministers coordinated the affairs of the departments, but its importance depended on circumstances and on individuals. When the tsar was abroad, the committee was in charge of internal affairs.
Under Nicholas I the committee of ministers continued to operate, but individual ministers were responsible only to the emperor. The centre of power to some extent shifted into the emperor’s personal chancery. The Third Department of the chancery, created in 1826 under Count Aleksandr Benckendorff, was responsible for the security police. Its head was also chief of gendarmes, and the two offices were later united. The security force repressed all political activity that might be considered dangerous to the regime. The tsar considered the Third Department to be the defender of those unjustly treated by the powerful and rich. Some of the department’s reports show officials who took these duties seriously, but as a whole it showed more talent for wasting time, repressing opposition, and stifling opinion than for redressing the grievances of the powerless.
Nicholas I is often considered the personification of classic autocracy. Due to his reactionary policies, he has been called the emperor who froze Russia for 30 years.
Russia under Alexander I and Nicholas I was ruled by its bureaucracy. Russian bureaucrats were obsessed with rank and status. Rank was not so much a reward for efficient service as a privilege to be grasped and jealously guarded. In order to prevent able persons, especially of humble origin, from rising too quickly, great emphasis was placed on seniority. The size of the bureaucracy steadily increased, perhaps trebling in the first half of the century. It remained poorly paid. The government’s poverty was caused by the underdeveloped state of the economy, by the fact that no taxes could be asked of the nobility, and by the cost of waging wars. Government officials were badly educated. They were reluctant to make decisions: responsibility was pushed higher and higher up the hierarchy, until thousands of minor matters ended on the emperor’s desk. Since many small officials were unable to support their families, corruption existed on a mass scale. To a certain extent it was a redeeming feature of the regime: with less corruption the government would have been even slower, less efficient, and more oppressive.
SOCIAL CLASSES
No significant changes were made in the condition of the serfs in the first half of the century. Alexander I possessed a cautious desire for reform, but first war and then diplomacy diverted him. Nicholas disliked serfdom, but there were political hazards in eliminating it. The power of the central government extended down to the provincial governors and, more tenuously, down to the ispravnik, or chief official of the district, of which each province had several. The ispravnik was elected by the local nobility. Below the level of the district, the administration virtually ceased to operate: the sole authority was the serf owner. If serfdom were to be abolished, some other authority would have to take its place, and the existing bureaucratic apparatus was plainly inadequate. The Decembrist conspiracy in 1825 had greatly increased the tsar’s distrust of the nobility. He was determined to avoid public discussion of reform, even within the upper class.
Only minor measures were taken to benefit the serfs on private estates. Opposition to serfdom grew steadily, not only among persons of European outlook but also among high officials. It seemed intolerable that in a great nation men and women could be owned. Serfdom was also obviously an obstacle to economic development.
Whether serfdom was contrary to the interests of serf owners is a more complex question. Certainly in parts of southern Russia where the soil was fertile, labour was plentiful, and potential profits in the grain trade with Europe were high, a landowner would do better if he could replace his serfs with paid agricultural labour and be rid of obligations to peasants whose labour he did not require. In other regions, where the population was scanty, serfdom provided the landowner with an assured labour supply. If it were abolished, he would have to pay more for his labour force or see it melt away. In large parts of northern Russia where the land was poor, many serfs made a living from crafts—in cottage industry or even in factories—and from their wages had to pay dues to their masters. The abolition of serfdom would deprive the serf owner of this income and leave him with only what he could make from farming.
Ministry of State Domains
The one exception to the general bureaucratic stagnation during this period was the creation of the Ministry of State Domains, under General Pavel Kiselev. This became an embryonic ministry of agriculture, with authority over peasants who lived on state lands. These were a little less than half the rural population: in 1858 there were 19 million state peasants and 22.5 million private serfs. Kiselev set up a system of government administration down to the village level and provided for a measure of self-government under which the mayor of the volost (a district grouping several villages or peasant communes) was elected by male householders. There was also to be a volost court for judging disputes between peasants. Kiselev planned to improve medical services, build schools, establish warehouses for stocks of food in case of crop failure, and give instruction in methods of farming. Some progress was made, even if less than intended and often in a manner that provoked hostility or even violent riots; the personnel of the new ministry was no more competent than the bureaucracy as a whole.
Industry and trade made slow progress during these years. In the late 18th century, Russia had been, thanks to its Urals mines, one of the main producers of pig iron. In the next 50 years, it was eclipsed by Great Britain, Germany, and the United States. In cotton textiles and sugar refining, Russia was more successful. Count Egor Frantsevich Kankrin, minister of finance from 1823 to 1844, tried to encourage Russian industry by high protective tariffs. He set up schools and specialized institutes for the advancement of commerce, engineering, and forestry. Russia’s exports of grain increased, though its share of total world trade remained about the same in 1850 as in 1800. The road system remained inadequate, but rail traffic between St. Petersburg and Moscow began in 1851.
The urban population grew significantly. There were a few prosperous merchants, well protected by the government. Some centres, such as Ivanovo in central Russia, with its textile industry, had the beginnings of an industrial working class. The rest of the inhabitants of the cities consisted of small tradesmen and artisans, together with serfs living in town with their owners’ permission as household servants or casual labourers.
EDUCATION AND INTELLECTUAL LIFE
Alexander I’s School Statute (1804) provided for a fourtier system of schools from the primary to the university level, intended to be open to persons of all classes. Several new universities were founded, and gymnasiums (pre-university schools) were established in most provincial capitals. Less was done at the lower levels, due to inadequate funds. In the latter part of Alexander’s reign, education was supervised by Prince Aleksandr Nikolayevich Golitsyn. To combat what he believed to be dangerous irreligious doctrines emanating from western Europe, Golitsyn encouraged university students to spy on their professors and each other. Those who taught unacceptable ideas were dismissed or threatened with prison. Under Nicholas I there was some improvement. Count Sergey Uvarov, minister of education from 1833 to 1849, permitted a freer intellectual atmosphere, but he also began excluding children of the lower classes from the gymnasiums and universities, a policy continued under his successors.
Nevertheless, in increasing numbers the children of minor officials, small tradesmen, and especially priests were acquiring education. Together with the already Europeanized nobility, they formed a new cultural elite. Direct political criticism was prevented by the censorship of books and periodicals. Petty police interference made life disagreeable even for writers who were not much concerned with politics. Aleksandr Pushkin, Russia’s greatest poet, got into trouble with the police for his opinions in 1824. After 1826 he lived an unhappy life in St. Petersburg, distrusted by the authorities and producing magnificent poetry until his death in a duel in 1837.
Censorship was not always efficient, and some censors were liberal. It became possible to express political ideas in the form of philosophical arguments and literary criticism. It was partly in intellectual periodicals and partly in discussions in the private houses of Moscow noblemen that the controversy between “Westernizers” and “Slavophiles” developed. It began with the publication of a “philosophical letter” by Pyotr Chaadayev in the periodical Teleskop in 1836.
The difference between Westernizers and Slavophiles was essentially that between radicals and conservatives. It set those who wished to pull the whole political structure down and replace it against those who preferred to knock down some parts and repair and refurnish others, bit by bit. Another basic difference was that the Slavophiles were Orthodox Christians and the Westernizers either atheists or, like the historian T.N. Granovsky, Deists. Westernizer Vissarion Belinsky described the Orthodox church in his famous “Letter to Gogol” (1847) as “the bulwark of the whip and the handmaid of despotism.” He maintained that the Russian populace was “by its nature a profoundly atheistic people” and viewed the priesthood with contempt. These were but half-truths: the church was indeed subject to the government and upheld autocracy, and priests were often unpopular. Nevertheless the peasants and much of the upper and middle classes were devoted to the Orthodox faith.
The Slavophiles believed that Peter the Great had destroyed the once-happy partnership between tsar and people when he imported foreign administrative models. They asked not for a legislative body of the Western type, but for a consultative assembly to advise the emperor. This was quite unacceptable to Nicholas, who saw himself as the political heir of Peter the Great. To the Westernizers, Peter was a symbol of radical change, not autocracy.
The eminent Russian literary critic Vissarion Belinsky is often called the father of the Russian radical intelligentsia. After being expelled from the University of Moscow in 1832, Belinsky earned his living as a journalist.
THE RUSSIAN EMPIRE
Russia in the 19th century was a multilingual, multireligious empire. Only about half the population was at the same time Russian by language and Orthodox by religion. The Orthodox were privileged in comparison with the other Christians; all Christians enjoyed a higher status than did the Muslims; and the latter were not so disadvantaged as were the Jews.
Nicholas expected all his subjects to obey him, but did not expect non-Russians to become Russians. The idea that Russians should have a status superior to that of other peoples of the empire was distasteful to Nicholas. Russian nationalism nevertheless received some support from Count Uvarov, who, in his famous report to the tsar in 1832, proclaimed three principles as “truly Russian”: Orthodoxy, autocracy, and the national principle (narodnost). In 1833 Uvarov set up a new university in Kiev to spread Russian language and culture. Nicholas approved of this, for the Poles had been guilty of rebellion, but when the attempt was made to Russify the Germans of the Baltic provinces, he objected. The Baltic Germans were loyal subjects and provided admirable officers and officials; they were therefore allowed to preserve their culture and maintain their cultural and social domination over the Estonians and Latvians.
The most revolutionary of the Decembrist leaders, Pavel Pestel, had insisted that all non-Russian peoples of the empire except the Poles “completely fuse their nationality with the nationality of the dominant people.” Another group of Decembrists, however, the Society of United Slavs, believed in a federation of free Slav peoples, including some living under Austrian and Turkish rule. In 1845 this idea was put forward in a different form in the Brotherhood of SS. Cyril and Methodius, in Kiev. This group believed that a federation of Slav peoples should include the Ukrainians, whom they claimed were not a part of the Russian nation but a distinct nationality. The society was crushed by the police, but Ukrainian national consciousness, though still confined to an educated minority, was growing.
The celebrated Ukrainian poet Taras Shevchenko was a member of the Brotherhood of SS. Cyril and Methodius. Nothing did more to crystallize Ukrainian as a literary language than Shevchenko’s poetry.
During the first half of the century, Russia made substantial conquests in Asia. In the Caucasus the kingdom of Georgia united voluntarily with Russia in 1801, and other small Georgian principalities were conquered in the next years. Persia ceded northern Azerbaijan, including the peninsula of Baku, in 1813 and the Armenian province of Erivan (Yerevan) in 1828. The mountain peoples of the northern Caucasus, however, proved more redoubtable. The Chechens, led by Shāmil, resisted Russian expeditions from 1834 until 1859, and the Circassians were not finally crushed until 1864. In the 1840s Russian rule was established over the pastoral peoples of Kazakhstan. In East Asia, Russian ships explored the lower course of the Amur River and discovered the straits between Sakhalin and mainland Asia in 1849. The Russian-American Company, founded in 1799, controlled parts of coastal Alaska.
FOREIGN POLICY
At the beginning of the 19th century, Russian foreign policy concentrated on the neighbouring countries with which it had been preoccupied since the 16th century: Sweden, Poland, and Turkey. The policy toward these countries determined Russian relations with France, Austria, and Great Britain.
Russo-Swedish relations were settled during the Napoleonic era. When Napoleon met with Alexander at Tilsit, he gave the latter a free hand to proceed against Sweden. After two years of war, the Swedish government ceded Finland to the tsar in 1809. Alexander became grand duke of Finland, but Finland was not incorporated into the Russian Empire, and its institutions were fully respected. When Napoleon’s former marshal, Jean-Baptiste Bernadotte, was elected heir to the Swedish throne in 1810, he showed no hostility toward Russia. In 1812 Bernadotte recognized the tsar’s position in Finland in return for Russian support for his plan to annex Norway from Denmark. Thereafter relations between Russia and Sweden were not seriously troubled.
Alexander I, influenced by his Polish friend Prince Adam Czartoryski, had plans for the liberation and unity of Poland, which had ceased to exist as a state when it was partitioned among Russia, Prussia, and Austria in the 18th century. After his defeat by Napoleon in 1805, Alexander abandoned those plans in favour of an alliance with Prussia. In 1807 Napoleon established a dependency called the Grand Duchy of Warsaw and in 1809 increased its territory at the expense of Austria. Alexander’s attempts to win the Poles to his side in 1811 and persuade Austria to make concessions to them failed. When Napoleon invaded Russia in 1812, he had 100,000 first-class Polish troops fighting for him. After Napoleon’s defeat, Alexander protected the Poles against the demands of Russian nationalists who wanted revenge and sought to create a Polish kingdom comprising the territories annexed by Russia and Prussia in the 18th century. He was opposed at the Congress of Vienna in 1814–15 by Austria and Britain. The ensuing kingdom of Poland, though nominally autonomous, was to be in permanent union with the Russian Empire and consisted of only part of the Prussian and Russian conquests.
Alexander was popular in Poland for a time. But competing claims for the borderlands, which had belonged to the former grand duchy of Lithuania, made real reconciliation between Poles and Russians impossible. Russians argued that most of Lithuania had been part of “the Russian land” until the 14th century, and the Poles that it had been Polish since the 16th. Alexander had some sympathy for the Polish point of view, but political forces in Russia strongly opposed it. The disappointment of Polish hopes for Lithuania led to growing tension between Warsaw and St. Petersburg in the late 1820s, culminating in a revolt in November 1830 and war the following year. This ended in the defeat of the Poles and the exile of thousands of political leaders and soldiers to western Europe.
Turkey had long been the object of Russian territorial expansion. The policy was reinforced by religious motives—a romantic desire to liberate Constantinople (Istanbul), the holy city of Orthodoxy—but more important in the 19th century was the desire to export Russian grain through the Black Sea. Russia sought to dominate Turkey as a powerful ally. When this policy was successful, Russia supported the Ottoman Empire and made no territorial demands. When it failed, Russia sought to undermine Turkey by supporting rebellious Balkan peoples or by war.
In the periods of hostility, the main object of Russian expansion was the area later known as Romania—the Danubian principalities of Moldavia and Walachia. In 1812 Moldavia was partitioned between Russia and Turkey: the eastern half was annexed to Russia. Russian armies marched through the principalities in the war of 1828–29 and occupied them until 1834. In 1848 the Russians returned, with Turkish approval, to suppress the revolution that had broken out in Bucharest. It seemed only a matter of time before Russia annexed the Romanian principalities. Russia’s defeat in the Crimean War, however, prevented this.
The November Insurrection of 1830–31 unsuccessfully tried to overthrow Russian rule in the Kingdom of Poland, as well as in the Polish provinces of western Russia and parts of Lithuania, Belorussia (now Belarus), and Ukraine.
The Crimean War (1853–56) pitted Russia against Great Britain, France, and Turkey. It was fought in Crimea due to Austrian diplomacy. In June 1854 the Russian government accepted the Austrian demand that Russian troops withdraw from the Danubian principalities, and in August Austrian troops entered. It is arguable whether the presence of Austrian troops benefited Russia by preventing French and British forces from marching on Ukraine or damaged Russia by preventing its troops from marching on Istanbul. The tsar resented the Austrian action as showing ingratitude toward the power that had saved Austria from Hungarian rebels in 1849. Unable to attack in the principalities, the British and French sent an expedition to Crimea to destroy the Russian naval base at Sevastopol. It was there that the war dragged out its course. The war showed the inefficiency of Russia’s top military command and of its system of transport and supply. The Russian armies nevertheless won victories over the Turks in the Caucasus, and the defense of Sevastopol for nearly a year was a brilliant achievement.
Defeat in Crimea made Russia’s lack of modernization clear, and the first step toward modernization was the abolition of serfdom. The new tsar, Alexander II (reigned 1855–81), believed that the dangers to public order of dismantling the existing system, which had deterred Nicholas I from action, were less than the dangers of leaving things as they were.
EMANCIPATION AND REFORM
The Ministry of the Interior spearheaded the reform efforts. The bulk of the landowning class was determined, if it could not prevent abolition of serfdom, to give the freed peasants as little as possible. The settlement, proclaimed on February 19, 1861, was a compromise. (The date in the New Style—or Gregorian calendar, which was adopted in the 1580s by Catholic Europe, but was not used in Russia until 1918—is March 3). Peasants were freed from servile status, and a procedure was laid down by which they could become landowners. The government paid the landowners compensation and recovered the cost in annual “redemption payments” from the peasants. The terms were generally unfavourable to the peasants.
The main beneficiary of the reform was arguably not the peasant but the state. A new apparatus of government was established to replace the authority of the serf owner. From the ispravnik, who in 1862 ceased to be elected by the nobility and became an appointed official of the Ministry of the Interior, the official hierarchy now stretched down to the village notary, who was assisted by an elder elected by an assembly of householders. The lowest effective centre of power was the village commune (obshchina), an institution of great antiquity with the power to redistribute land for the use of its members and determine the crop cycle, that now also became responsible for collecting taxes on behalf of the government.
Further reforms followed emancipation. A system of elected assemblies at the provincial and county levels was introduced in 1864. These assemblies, called zemstvos, were elected by all classes including the peasants, although the landowning nobility had a disproportionately large share of both the votes and the seats. The zemstvos could levy taxes to fund schools, public health, roads, and other social services. In 1864 a major judicial reform was completed. Russia received a system of law courts based on European models, with irremovable judges and courts of appeal. Justices of the peace, elected by the county zemstvos, were instituted for minor offenses. An organized, modern legal profession arose and soon achieved high standards. The old system of endless delays and judicial corruption rapidly disappeared. There were, however, gaps in the system. Regardless of the courts, the Ministry of the Interior had the power to banish persons whom it regarded as politically dangerous.
Alexander II’s liberal education and distress at the outcome of the Crimean War inspired him toward a great program of domestic reforms, the most important being the emancipation of the serfs in 1861.
REVOLUTIONARY ACTIVITIES
During the 1860s revolutionary groups began to appear. The outstanding figure was the socialist writer N.G. Chernyshevsky. In 1861–62 revolutionary leaflets were distributed in St. Petersburg, ranging from the demand for a constituent assembly to a passionate appeal for insurrection. An unsuccessful attempt on the tsar’s life in 1866 led Alexander to pick extremely conservative advisers. Nevertheless, some worthwhile reforms happened. In 1870 the main cities of Russia were given elected municipal government (on a very narrow franchise), and in 1874 a series of military reforms was completed by the establishment of universal military service.
In the 1870s revolutionary activity revived. Its centre was the university youth, influenced by socialist ideas derived from Europe but adapted to Russian conditions. These young people saw in the peasantry the potential for revolutionary action. In 1873–74 hundreds of the youth, including women, “went to the people,” invading the countryside and seeking to rouse the peasants with their speeches. The peasants did not understand, and the police arrested the young revolutionaries. Some were sentenced to prison, and hundreds deported to remote provinces or to Siberia. It became clear that no progress could be expected from overt action: conspiratorial action was the only hope. In 1876 a new party was founded that took the title of Zemlya i Volya (“Land and Freedom”). Some of its members favoured assassination of prominent officials in reprisal for the maltreatment of their comrades and to pressure the government for Western-type political liberties. Experience also had shown them that, while the peasants were too scattered to be an effective force and were in any case too apathetic, workers in the cities offered a more promising audience. This faction was opposed by others in the party who deprecated assassination, continued to pay more attention to peasants than workers, and were indifferent to the attainment of political liberties. In 1879 the party split. The violent wing took the name Narodnaya Volya (“People’s Will”) and made its aim the assassination of Alexander II. After several unsuccessful attempts, the tsar was fatally wounded by a bomb on March 1 (March 13, New Style), 1881. The main leaders of the group were caught by the police, and five were hanged.
Before his death the tsar had been considering reforms that would have introduced a few elected representatives into the apparatus of government. His successor, Alexander III (reigned 1881–94), instead reaffirmed the principle of autocracy. In 1882 Alexander appointed Dmitry Tolstoy minister of the interior. Konstantin Pobedonostsev (Alexander’s former tutor and the procurator of the Holy Synod) and Tolstoy crafted the reactionary policies that followed. Education was further restricted, the work of the zemstvos hampered, and village communes were brought under closer control in 1889 by the institution of the “land commandant” (zemsky nachalnik)—an official appointed by the Ministry of the Interior who interfered in all aspects of peasant affairs. The office of elected justice of the peace was abolished, and the government was authorized to assume emergency powers when public order was said to be in danger. By this time Russian public officials had become better paid and educated and less corrupt, but they retained their arrogant contempt for the public and especially for the poorer classes.
The economic development of the following decades created new social tensions and brought into existence new social groups, from whom active opposition once more developed. The zemstvos were in growing conflict with the central authorities. Even their efforts at nonpolitical social improvement met with obstruction. The Ministry of the Interior, once the centre of Russia’s best reformers, became a stronghold of resistance. In the obscurantist view of its leading officials, only the central government had the right to care for the public welfare, and zemstvo initiatives were undesirable usurpations of power. Better that nothing should be done at all than that it should be done through the wrong channels. This attitude was manifested in 1891, when crop failures led to widespread famine; government obstruction of relief efforts was widely—though often unfairly—blamed for the peasantry’s sufferings. The revival of political activity may be dated from this year. It was accelerated by the death of Alexander III in 1894 and the succession of his son Nicholas II (reigned 1894–1917), who antagonized the zemstvo liberals by publicly describing their aspirations for reforms as “senseless dreams.” In the late 1890s moderate liberalism was common among elected zemstvo members, who were largely members of the landowning class and hoped to establish a consultative national assembly. A more radical attitude, combining elements of liberalism and socialism, was found in the professional classes of the cities. The growth of an industrial working class provided a mass basis for socialist movements, and by the end of the century interest in politics even began to penetrate the peasantry.
Alexander III was an opponent of representative government and an ardent supporter of Russian nationalism. He supported the Russification of national minorities and the persecution of non-Orthodox religious groups.
ECONOMIC AND SOCIAL DEVELOPMENT
Though many peasants improved their position after emancipation, agriculture remained underdeveloped and widespread poverty persisted. This was partly due to the government’s indifference to agriculture. Economic policy was motivated by the desire for national and military power. This required the growth of industry, and great efforts were made to encourage it. Agriculture was regarded mainly as a source of revenue to pay for industry and the armed forces. Taxes paid by peasants filled the state’s coffers. The redemption payments drained the peasants’ resources, though a gradual fall in the value of money reduced that burden in time. Consumption taxes, especially on sugar, tobacco, matches, and oil, affected the peasants, and so did import duties. In 1894 the government introduced a liquor monopoly that drew enormous revenues from the peasants. The techniques and tools of agriculture remained primitive and farm output low; virtually nothing was done to instruct peasants in modern methods.
Another cause of peasant poverty was overpopulation. The vast landmass of Russia was sparsely populated, but the number of persons employed in agriculture per unit of arable land, and relative to output, was extremely high. There was a vast and increasing surplus of labour in Russian villages. Peasants competed with each other to lease land from the landlords’ estates, driving rents up. The existence of the large estates came to be resented more and more and prompted demands for further land redistribution.
Capitalist development did occur, if rather slowly. A rapid growth of railways came in the 1870s, and in the same decade the exploitation of petroleum began at Baku in Azerbaijan. Only in the 1890s did the demand for iron and steel, created by the railway program and the military, begin to be satisfied on a large scale within Russia. By the end of the century there was a massive metallurgical industry in Ukraine, based on the iron ore of Krivoy Rog and the coal of the Donets Basin. Poland was another metallurgical centre. The iron industry of the Urals, which lost much of its labour force when the serfs became free to leave, lagged far behind. Textiles were concentrated in the central provinces of Moscow and Vladimir; by the end of the century they were drawing much of their raw cotton from the newly conquered lands of Central Asia. Baku was booming, especially as a supplier of petroleum to the Moscow region. St. Petersburg had begun to develop important engineering and electrical industries. Count Sergey Witte, minister of finance from 1892 to 1903, put Russia on the gold standard in 1897 and encouraged foreign investors.
Industrial growth produced an urban working class. Workers were unskilled, badly paid, overworked, and miserably housed. This was especially true of central Russia, where the labour surplus kept wages low. In St. Petersburg, where it was harder to recruit workers, the transformation of the urban poor into a modern working class made the most progress. St. Petersburg employers were also less hostile to government legislation on behalf of the workers.
In 1882 Finance Minister Nikolay Khristyanovich Bunge introduced an inspectorate of labour conditions and limited hours of work for children. In 1897 Witte introduced a maximum working day of 11.5 hours for all workers, male or female, and of 10 hours for those engaged in night work. Trade unions were not permitted, though several attempts were made to organize them illegally. The Ministry of the Interior, being more interested in public order than in businessmen’s profits, occasionally showed concern for the workers. Strikes were forbidden but occurred anyway.
The Commune
Another economic problem was the inefficiency of the peasant commune, which had the power to redistribute holdings according to the needs of families and dictate the rotation of crops. This hampered enterprising farmers and protected incompetent ones. Nevertheless the commune ensured a living for everyone and stood for values of solidarity and cooperation. Russian officials also found it useful as a means of collecting taxes and keeping the peasants in order. The 1861 settlement did provide a procedure by which peasants could leave the commune, but it was complicated and little used. The communal system predominated in northern and central Russia, and individual peasant ownership was widespread in Ukraine and in the Polish borderlands. In 1898 about 198 million acres (80 million hectares) of land were under communal tenure in European Russia, while about 54 million (22 million) were under individual tenure.
The value of the commune was disputed. The Ministry of the Interior, which stood for paternalism and public security at all costs, favoured the commune in the belief that it was a bulwark of conservatism, traditional values, and loyalty to the tsar. The Socialist Revolutionaries saw it as, at least potentially, the natural unit of a future socialist republic. The Ministry of Finance, concerned with developing capitalism, objected to the commune as an obstacle to economic progress; it envisioned a prosperous minority of individual farmers as a basis of a more modern type of Russian conservatism. The Social Democrats agreed that the commune must be replaced by capitalist ownership, but saw this only as the next step toward a socialist revolution led by urban workers.
Russia’s industrial progress differed from classical Western capitalism in that the motivation of Russian industrial growth was political and military, and the driving force was government policy. Russian and foreign capitalists provided the resources and the organizing skill, and they were richly rewarded. The richness of their rewards accounted for a second difference from classical capitalism: Russian capitalists were completely satisfied with the political system as it was. Whereas English and French capitalists had material and ideological reasons to fight against absolute monarchs and aristocratic upper classes, Russian businessmen accepted autocracy.
EDUCATION AND IDEAS
In the last half of the 19th century, the word “intelligentsia” came into use in Russia. Essentially, the intelligentsia consisted of persons with a modern education and a passionate preoccupation with general political and social ideas. Its nucleus was to be found in the professions of law, medicine, teaching, and engineering, which grew in numbers and social prestige as the economy became more complex. Yet it also included private landowners, bureaucrats, and even army officers. The intelligentsia was opposed to the existing political and social system, which coloured its attitude toward culture in general. In particular, works of literature were judged according to whether they furthered the cause of social progress.
Professional revolutionaries were largely recruited from the intelligentsia. The lack of civil liberties and the prohibition of political parties made it necessary for socialists to use conspiratorial methods. Illegal parties had rigid centralized discipline. Yet the emergence of the professional revolutionary, imagined in romantically diabolical terms in the Revolutionary Catechism of Mikhail Bakunin and Sergey Nechayev in 1869 and sketched more realistically in What Is to Be Done? by Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov, better known as Lenin, in 1902, was not entirely due to the circumstances of the underground political struggle. The revolutionaries were formed also by their sense of mission, by their absolute conviction that they knew best the interests of the masses.
Russian revolutionary socialism at the end of the century was divided into two main streams, each subdivided into a section that favoured conspiratorial tactics and one that aimed at a mass movement. The Socialist Revolutionary Party (Socialist Revolutionaries; founded in 1901 from a number of groups more or less derived from Narodnaya Volya) at first hoped that Russia could bypass capitalism; they later aimed to limit its operation and build a socialist order based on village communes. The land was to be socialized but worked by peasants on the principle of “labour ownership.” The Russian Social-Democratic Workers’ Party (Social Democrats; founded in 1898 from a number of illegal working-class groups) believed that the future lay with industrialization and a socialist order based on the working class. The Socialist Revolutionaries were divided between their extreme terrorist wing, the “Fighting Organization,” and a broader and looser membership that at one end merged imperceptibly with radical middle-class liberalism. The Social Democrats were divided between Lenin’s group, which took the name “Bolshevik,” and a number of other groups that were by no means united but that came to be collectively known as “Menshevik.” Among the issues dividing these groups were Lenin’s preference for rigid discipline, the Mensheviks’ attempts to create a mass labour movement of the western European type and greater willingness to cooperate with nonsocialist liberals, and Lenin’s greater estimation of peasants as a potential revolutionary force.
Mikhail Bakunin was the chief propagator of 19th-century anarchism, a prominent Russian revolutionary agitator, and a prolific political writer.
RUSSIFICATION POLICIES
After the Crimean War, the Russian government attempted to introduce a pro-Russian program in Poland. This proved unacceptable to the Poles, and in January 1863 armed rebellion broke out. This rebellion was put down, being suppressed with special severity in the Lithuanian and Ukrainian borderlands. To punish the Polish gentry for their part in the insurrection, Russian authorities carried out a land reform on terms exceptionally favourable to the Polish peasants. The reform was followed by an anti-Polish policy in education and other areas. By the 1880s the language of instruction even in primary schools in areas of purely Polish population was Russian. At first, the Poles acquiesced in their defeat, but in the 1890s two strong, if illegal, anti-Russian political parties appeared—the National Democrats and the Polish Socialist Party.
After 1863 the authorities also severely repressed all signs of Ukrainian nationalist activity. In 1876 all publications in Ukrainian, other than historical documents, were prohibited. In Eastern Galicia, however, which lay just across the Austrian border and had a population of several million Ukrainians, not only the language but also political activity flourished. There the great Ukrainian historian Mikhail Hrushevsky and the socialist writer Mikhail Drahomanov published their works; Ukrainian political literature was smuggled across the border. In the 1890s small illegal groups of Ukrainian democrats and socialists existed on Russian soil.
From the 1860s the government embarked on a policy designed to strengthen the position of the Russian language and nationality in the borderlands of the empire. This policy is often described as “Russification.” Though Russian was to be the lingua franca, the government never explicitly demanded that its non-Russian subjects abandon their own languages, nationalities, or religions. Still, conversions to Orthodoxy were welcomed, and converts were not allowed to revert to their former religions. The government policy of Russification found its parallel in the overtly Russian nationalist tone of several influential newspapers and journals. For most supporters of Russification, however, the policy’s main aim was to consolidate a Russian national identity and loyalty at the empire’s centre and to combat the potential threat of imperial disintegration in the face of minority nationalism.
By the late 19th and early 20th century, some of the most prominent objects of Russification were peoples who had shown consistent loyalty to the empire and now found themselves confronted by government policies that aimed to curtail their rights and privileges. The Germans of the Baltic provinces were deprived of their university, and their secondary schools were Russified. The attempt to abolish many aspects of Finnish autonomy united the Finns in opposition to St. Petersburg in the 1890s. In 1904 the son of a Finnish senator assassinated the Russian governor-general, and passive resistance to Russian policies was almost universal. Effective passive resistance also occurred among the traditionally Russophile Armenians of the Caucasus when the Russian authorities began to interfere with the organization of the Armenian church and close the schools maintained from its funds.
Of the Muslim peoples of the empire, those who suffered most from Russification were the Tatars of the Volga valley. Attempts by the Orthodox church to convert Muslims and the rivalry between Muslims and Orthodox to convert small groups practicing traditional religions caused growing mutual hostility. By the end of the century the Tatars had developed a substantial merchant class. Modern schools were creating a new Tatar educated elite that was increasingly receptive to modern democratic ideas. In Central Asia, on the other hand, modern influences had barely made themselves felt, and there was no Russification. In those newly conquered lands, Russian colonial administration was paternalistic and limited: like the methods of “indirect rule” in the British and French empires, it made no systematic attempt to change old ways.
The position of the Jews was hardest of all. Due to their history and religious traditions, as well as of centuries of social and economic discrimination, the Jews were overwhelmingly concentrated in commercial and intellectual professions. They were thus prominent both as businessmen and as political radicals, hateful to the bureaucrats as socialists and to the lower classes as capitalists. The pogroms, or anti-Jewish riots, which broke out in various localities in the months after the assassination of Alexander II, effectively ended any dreams for assimilation for Russia’s Jewish community. At this time there also arose the oft-repeated accusation that anti-Semitic excesses were planned and staged by the authorities, not only in Ukraine in 1881 but also in Kishinev in 1903 and throughout the Jewish Pale of Settlement in 1905. The view of government-sponsored pogroms has not, however, been corroborated by documental evidence. Indeed, the officials in St. Petersburg were too concerned with maintaining order to organize pogroms that might pose a direct threat to that order. However, local government officials were certainly at least remiss in their duties in protecting Jewish lives and properties and even in cahoots with the anti-Semitic rioters. The 1881 pogrom wave resulted in the promulgation in May 1882 of the notorious “temporary rules,” which further restricted Jewish rights and remained in effect to the very end of the Russian Empire.
This engraving shows Jews being expelled from St. Petersburg. While the city was not within the Jewish Pale of Settlement—the area in which Jews were permitted to live—veterans and more educated Jews were at times permitted to live there
FOREIGN POLICY
During the second half of the 19th century, Russian foreign policy gave about equal emphasis to the Balkans and East Asia. The friendship with Germany and Austria weakened, and in the 1890s the Triple Alliance of Germany, Austria-Hungary, and Italy opposed a Dual Alliance in France and Russia.
In 1876 the Serbo-Turkish War produced an outburst of Pan-Slav feeling in Russia. Under its influence, but also in pursuit of traditional strategic aims, Russia declared war on Turkey in April 1877. After overpowering Turkish resistance at the fortress of Pleven in Bulgaria, the Russian forces advanced almost to Istanbul. By the Treaty of San Stefano of March 1878 the Turks accepted the creation of a large independent Bulgarian state. Fearing that this would be a Russian vassal, Britain and Austria-Hungary opposed the treaty. At the international Congress of Berlin, held in June 1878, Russia had to accept a much smaller Bulgaria. The Russian people regarded this as a bitter humiliation. In the 1890s, despite the pro-Russian sentiment of many Serbs and Bulgarians, neither country’s government was much subject to Russian influence. Russian policy on the whole tended to support the Turkish government. In 1897 an Austro-Russian agreement was made on spheres of influence in the Balkans.
The Russian government, alarmed by indications of a closer cooperation between the Triple Alliance and Britain, reluctantly turned toward France. The French needed an ally against both Germany and Britain; the Russians needed French capital, in the form both of loans to the Russian government and of investment in Russian industry. The Franco-Russian alliance was signed in August 1891 and was supplemented by a military convention.
Russia established diplomatic and commercial relations with Japan by three treaties between 1855 and 1858. In 1860, by the Treaty of Beijing, Russia acquired from China a long strip of Pacific coastline south of the mouth of the Amur. The Russians began to build the naval base of Vladivostok. In 1867 the Russian government sold Alaska to the United States for $7.2 million. The Treaty of St. Petersburg between Russia and Japan in 1875 gave Russia sole control over all of Sakhalin and gave Japan the Kuril Islands.
The Russian conquest of Turkistan, south of the Kazakh steppes, began in the 1860s. This was watched with distrust by the British authorities in India, and fear of Russian interference in Afghanistan led to the Anglo-Afghan War of 1878–80. In the 1880s Russian expansion extended to the Turkmen lands on the east coast of the Caspian Sea, whose people offered stiffer military resistance. The Russian conquest of Merv in 1884 caused alarm in Kolkata (Calcutta), and in March 1885 a clash between Russian and Afghan troops produced a major diplomatic crisis between Britain and Russia. An agreement on frontier delimitation was reached in September 1885, and for the next decades Central Asian affairs had little effect on Anglo-Russian relations.
In 1894–95 the long-standing rivalry between the Japanese and Chinese in Korea led to a war between the two empires, which the Japanese won. Russia faced the choice of collaborating with Japan (with which relations had recently been fairly good) or allying with China. The tsar chose the second policy, largely under the influence of Count Witte. Together with the French and German governments, the Russians demanded that the Japanese return to China the Liaodong Peninsula. Russia concluded an alliance with China in 1896, which included the establishment of the Chinese Eastern Railway, linking Siberia with Vladivostok and owned and operated by Russia. In 1898 the Russian government went further and acquired the Liaodong Peninsula from China. There the Russians built a naval base in ice-free waters at Port Arthur (Lüshun; now in Dalian, China). They also obtained extraterritorial rights of ownership and management of a southern Manchurian railroad that was to stretch from north to south, linking Port Arthur with the Chinese Eastern Railway at the junction of Harbin. When in 1900 the European powers sent armed forces to relieve their diplomatic missions in Beijing, besieged by the Boxer Rebellion, the Russian government took the opportunity to bring substantial military units into Manchuria. All of this bitterly antagonized the Japanese. They might have been willing, nonetheless, to write off Manchuria as a Russian sphere of influence provided that Russia recognize Japanese priority in Korea, but the Russian government would not do this. The British government, fearing that Russia would interfere with the interests of Britain in other parts of China, made an alliance with Japan in January 1902. On the night of January 26/27 (February 8/9, New Style), 1904, Japanese forces made a surprise attack on Russian warships in Port Arthur, and the Russo-Japanese War began.
This map traces Russia’s expansion between 1533 and 1894. The last of the many additions to the empire’s territory were all in Asia.
The Russo-Japanese War brought a series of Russian defeats on land and sea, culminating in the destruction of the Baltic fleet in the Tsushima Strait. The defeat finally brought to a head a variety of political discontents simmering back at home. First the professional strata, especially in the zemstvos and municipalities, organized a banquet campaign in favour of a popularly elected legislative assembly. Then, on January 9 (January 22, New Style), 1905, the St. Petersburg workers, led by Georgy Gapon (of the Assembly of Russian Factory Workers), marched on the Winter Palace to present Emperor Nicholas with a petition containing even wider-ranging demands. They were met by troops who opened fire on them, killing about 130.
News of this massacre spread quickly. Soon the whole empire was in uproar. There were student demonstrations, workers’ strikes, peasant insurrections, and mutinies in both the army and navy. The peasants organized themselves through their traditional village assembly, the mir, to decide how to seize the land or property of the landlords. The workers, on the other hand, created the Soviet of Workers’ Deputies. These new institutions, consisting of elected delegates from the factories and workshops of a whole town, organized the strike movement, negotiated with the employers and police, and sometimes kept up basic municipal services during the crisis.
Protests during the Russian Revolution of 1905 ranged from liberal rhetoric to strikes and included student riots and terrorist assassinations. This painting shows a barricade in the streets of Moscow during the uprising.
The revolutionary movement reached its climax in October 1905, with the declaration of a general strike and the formation of a soviet (council) in St. Petersburg itself. Most cities, including the capital, were paralyzed. Witte recommended that the government yield to the demands of the liberals and create an elected legislative assembly. The tsar reluctantly consented, in the manifesto of October 17 (October 30, New Style), 1905. It did not end the unrest, however. In several towns, armed bands of monarchists, known as Black Hundreds, organized pogroms against Jewish quarters and attacked students and left-wing activists. In Moscow the soviet unleashed an armed insurrection in December, which had to be put down with artillery, resulting in considerable loss of life. Peasant unrest and mutinies in the armed services continued well into 1906 and even 1907.
Throughout the period from 1905 to 1907, disorders were especially violent in non-Russian regions of the empire, where the revolutionary movement took on an ethnic dimension. A campaign of terrorism, waged by the Maximalists of the Socialist Revolutionary Party against policemen and officials, claimed hundreds of lives in 1905–07. The police felt able to combat it only by infiltrating their agents into the revolutionary parties and particularly into the terrorist detachments of these parties. This use of double agents (or agents provocateurs, as they were often known) did much to demoralize both the revolutionaries and the police and to undermine the reputation of both with the public at large. The nadir was reached in 1908, when it was disclosed that Yevno Azef, longtime head of the terrorist wing of the Socialist Revolutionary Party, was also an employee of the department of police.
The split in the Social Democratic Party was deepened by the failure of the 1905 revolution. Both Mensheviks and Bolsheviks agreed that a further revolution would be needed but disagreed fundamentally on how to bring it about. The Mensheviks favoured cooperation with the bourgeois parties in the Duma, the new legislative assembly, in order to legislate civil rights and then use them to organize the workers for the next stage of the class struggle. The Bolsheviks regarded the Duma purely as a propaganda forum, and Lenin drew from 1905 the lesson that in Russia, where the bourgeoisie was weak, the revolutionaries could combine the bourgeois and proletarian stages of the revolution by organizing the peasantry as allies of the workers. In 1912 the split with the Mensheviks was finalized when the Bolsheviks called their own congress in Prague that year, claiming to speak for the entire Social Democratic Party.
THE STATE DUMA
The October Manifesto had split the opposition. The professional strata, now reorganizing themselves in liberal parties, accepted it and set about trying to make the new legislature, the State Duma, work in the interest of reform. The two principal socialist parties, the Socialist Revolutionaries and the Social Democrats, saw the manifesto as just a first step and the Duma (which at first they boycotted) as merely a tool to project their revolutionary ideas.
Alongside the Duma there was to be an upper chamber, the State Council, half of its members appointed by the emperor and half elected by established institutions such as the zemstvos and municipalities, business organizations, the Academy of Sciences, and so on. Both chambers had budgetary rights, the right to veto any law, and the ability to initiate legislation. Nevertheless the government would be appointed, as before, by the emperor, who had the right to dissolve the legislative chambers at any time or pass emergency decrees when they were not in session.
The first elections, held in spring 1906, produced a relative majority for the Constitutional Democratic Party (Kadets), a group drawn largely from the professional strata that wished for a full constitutional monarchy and to grant autonomy to the non-Russian nationalities. The next largest caucus, the Labour Group (Trudoviki), included many peasants and some socialists who had ignored their comrades’ boycott. The two parties demanded amnesty for political prisoners, equal rights for Jews, autonomy for Poland, and the expropriation of landed estates for the peasants. These demands were totally unacceptable to the government, which used its powers to dissolve the Duma.
In early 1907 new elections were held. The Social Democrats, having abandoned their boycott, came in as the third largest party, behind the Kadets and the Trudoviki. Premier Pyotr Arkadyevich Stolypin advised the tsar to once again dissolve the Duma.
Some of Nicholas’s advisers wished to abolish the Duma altogether. Instead, he and Stolypin altered the electoral law in favour of landowners, wealthier townsfolk, and Russians to the detriment of peasants, workers, and non-Russians. The Third Duma, elected in autumn 1907, and the Fourth, elected in autumn 1912, were therefore more congenial to the government. The leading caucus in both Dumas was the Union of October 17 (known as the Octobrists), whose strength was among the landowners of the Russian heartland.
The conservative statesman Pyotr Stolypin initiated far-reaching agrarian reforms to improve the legal and economic status of the peasantry, general economy, and political stability of imperial Russia.
Although the legislative achievements of the Duma were meagre, it should not be written off as an ineffective body. It voted credits for a planned expansion of education that was on target to introduce compulsory primary schooling by 1922. Although it could not create or bring down governments, it exerted real pressure on ministers, especially during the budget debates in which even foreign and military affairs (constitutionally the preserve of the emperor alone) came under the deputies’ scrutiny. These debates were extensively reported in the newspapers and enormously intensified public awareness of political issues.
The Siberian peasant and mystic Rasputin’s treatment of Alexis, the hemophiliac heir to the Russian throne, made him an influential favourite at the court of Nicholas II and Alexandra.
The workers’ movement revived in 1912, after a disorder at the Lena gold mines, where some 200 workers were killed by troops. Strikes and demonstrations broke out in many cities, culminating in the erection of barricades in St. Petersburg in July 1914. This time, the workers were on their own: there was no sign that peasants, students, or professional people were prepared to join their struggle.
One area where the failure to reform had serious effects was in the church. Most prelates and clergymen wanted to see the Orthodox church given greater independence, perhaps by restoring the patriarchate and assigning authority within the church to a synod elected by clergy and laity. Many also favoured internal reform by strengthening the parish, ending the split between parish and monastic clergy, and bringing liturgy and scriptures closer to the people. Instead the church remained under secular domination and fell increasingly under the influence of Grigory Yefimovich Rasputin, a starets (holy man) of dubious reputation who became a favourite of the imperial couple.
Agrarian Reforms
The 1905 revolution showed that the village commune was not a guarantor of stability, but rather a promoter of unrest. Stolypin aimed to undermine it as part of his program for restoring order. He also aimed to give peasant households the chance to leave the commune and to consolidate their strip holdings, enclosing them as privately owned smallholdings.
The reforms enjoyed some success. By 1915 some 20 percent of communal households had left the communes, and about 10 percent had taken the further step of consolidating their strips into one holding. All over the country, land settlement commissions were surveying, redrawing boundaries, and negotiating with the village assemblies on behalf of the new smallholders. Not unnaturally, individual withdrawals often aroused resentment, and reform worked more effectively when whole villages agreed to consolidate and enclose their strips. Many households, both within and outside the commune, joined cooperatives to purchase seeds and equipment or to market their produce. Some peasants from the more densely settled regions of Russia migrated to the open spaces of Siberia and northern Turkistan, attracted by free land, subsidies for travel, and specialist advice.
WORLD WAR I AND THE FALL OF THE MONARCHY
Excluded as a serious player in East Asia, Russia focused on the Balkans, where the vulnerability of the Habsburg monarchy and the Ottoman Empire were generating an increasingly volatile situation. Besides, the Octobrists and many of the Rights who supported the government in the Duma took a great interest in the fate of the Slav nations of the region and favoured more active Russian support for them.
Negotiations between the Russian foreign minister, Aleksandr Petrovich Izvolsky and his Austrian counterpart, Alois, Count Lexa von Aehrenthal did not go in Russia’s favor. Austria occupied Bosnia and Herzegovina unilaterally, without making Russia any reciprocal concessions. Russia protested but was unable to achieve anything, as Germany threw its support behind Austria. The public humiliation forced Izvolsky to resign, and his successor, Sergey Dmitriyevich Sazonov, set about building an anti-Austrian bloc of Balkan states, including Turkey. This failed, but instead Russia was able to sponsor a Serbian-Greek-Bulgarian-Montenegrin alliance, which was successful in the First Balkan War against Turkey (1912–13). This seemed to herald a period of greater influence for Russia in the Balkans. Austria, however, demanded that the recently enlarged Serbia be denied an outlet to the Adriatic Sea by the creation of a new state of Albania. Russia supported the Serbian desire for an Adriatic port, but the European powers decided in favour of Austria. The Balkan alliance then fell apart, with Serbia and Greece fighting on the side of Turkey in the Second Balkan War (1913).
The assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand in June 1914 placed Russia in a difficult situation. If Russia let Serbia down and yielded to Austrian pressure, it would cease to be taken seriously as a participant in Balkan affairs and its prestige as a European great power would be seriously compromised. The alternative was to escalate the Balkan conflict to the point where Germany would come in behind Austria and a wider war would ensue. Russia chose the second alternative. Nicholas II hoped that, by mobilizing only those forces on his border with Austria-Hungary, he could avoid both German intervention and escalation into world war. Instead, the result was World War I.
In 1914 the Franco-Russian alliance proved its value. The German army could have crushed either France or Russia but not both. The Russian invasion of East Prussia in August 1914 failed, but it caused the Germans to withdraw troops from their western front and left the French to win the First Battle of the Marne (September 6–12, 1914). Turkey’s entry into the war on the German side was a major setback, since it not only created a new front in the Caucasus (where the Russian armies performed rather well) but, by closing the straits, enormously reduced the supplies that the Allies could deliver to Russia. When the Central Powers launched a spring offensive in 1915, the Russian army was already short of munitions. The Germans and Austrians occupied Poland and began advancing into the western provinces and the Baltic region, unleashing a flood of refugees.
After the military reverses of 1915, the Duma and State Council pressed the government to become more responsive to public opinion. The centre and left of the State Council combined with all the centre parties in the Duma to form a Progressive Bloc. Its aim was a “government enjoying public confidence,” whose ministers would be drawn partly from the legislative chambers. The bloc called for a broad program of political reform, including freeing political prisoners, repealing discrimination against religious minorities, emancipating the Jews, autonomy for Poland, the elimination of the remaining legal disabilities suffered by peasants, the repeal of anti-trade-union legislation, and the democratization of local government. Premier Ivan Logginovich Goremykin rejected the plan as an attempt to undermine the autocracy.
For Nicholas, only the autocratic monarchy could sustain effective government and avoid social revolution and the disintegration of the multinational empire. In August 1915 Nicholas announced that he was taking personal command of the army, leaving the empress in charge of the government. He decamped to Mogilyov, in Belarusia, but played only a ceremonial role, allowing his military chief of staff, General Mikhail Vasilyevich Alekseyev, to act as true commander in chief. During the next few months Nicholas dismissed all eight ministers who had supported the Progressive Bloc. He insisted on maintaining ultimate power and prevented capable ministers from coordinating the administration of the government and war effort. From afar he ordained frequent pointless ministerial changes, partly under the influence of his wife and Rasputin. Even loyal monarchists despaired of the situation, and in December 1916 Rasputin was murdered in a conspiracy involving some of them.
Nicholas II visits a munitions factory in St. Petersburg in 1914. A lack of munitions would prove one of the major problems for Russia in the early years of World War I.
In the end it was the economic effect of the war that proved too much for the government. The munitions shortage prompted a partly successful reorganization of industry to concentrate on military production, and by late 1916 the army was better supplied than ever. But life on the home front was grim. The German and Turkish blockade choked off most imports. The food supply was affected by the call-up of numerous peasants and by the diversion of transport to other needs. The strain of financing the war generated accelerating inflation, with which the pay of ordinary workers failed to keep pace. Strikes began in the summer of 1915 and increased during the following year, culminating in a huge strike centred on the Putilov armament and locomotive works in Petrograd (the name given to St. Petersburg in 1914) in January 1917.
The February (March, New Style) Revolution began among the food queues of the capital, which started calling for an end to autocracy. Soon workers from most of the major factories joined the demonstrations. The vital turning point came when Cossacks summoned to disperse the crowds refused to obey orders and troops in the city garrison mutinied and joined insurgents. The workers and soldiers rushed to re-create the institution they remembered from 1905, the Soviet of Workers’ and Soldiers’ Deputies. Other towns and army units throughout the empire followed their example. Faced with the threat of a civil war, the military high command abandoned Nicholas II in the hope that the Duma leaders would contain the revolution and provide effective leadership of the domestic front.
By agreement between the Petrograd soviet and the Duma, a Provisional Government formed, headed by Prince Georgy Yevgenyevich Lvov and consisting mainly of Kadets and Octobrists. On March 2 (March 15, New Style), this government’s emissaries reached Pskov, where the emperor had become stranded in his train, attempting to reach Petrograd. He abdicated, bringing to an end the Romanov dynasty.
The February Revolution of 1917 was spontaneous, leaderless, and fueled by deep resentment over the economic and social conditions that had prevailed in imperial Russia under Tsar Nicholas. The country, having been sucked into World War I, found the strains of fighting a modern war with a premodern political and economic system intolerable. The tsar fell short as a war leader and was unable to cope with the burdens of being head of state. Hardly a hand was raised in support when the imperial order collapsed in February (March, New Style) 1917. The key factor had been the defection of the military. Without this instrument of coercion, the tsar could not survive. Most Russians rejoiced, but a political vacuum had been created.
The Provisional Government (established to govern until elections for a Constituent Assembly could be held) was undone by war, economic collapse, and its own incompetence. It postponed hard decisions—what to do about land seizures by the peasants, for example—for the Constituent Assembly. A fatal mistake was its continued prosecution of the war. Disgruntled peasant-soldiers wanted to quit the army. They did not perceive Germany to be a threat to Russian sovereignty, and they deserted in droves to claim their piece of the landlord’s estate. Industrial decline and rising inflation radicalized workers and cost the Provisional Government the support of the professional middle classes. The Bolshevik slogan of “All power to the soviets” was attractive. The government seemingly spoke for the country, but in reality it represented only the middle class; the soviets represented the workers and peasants. Moderate socialists—Mensheviks and Socialist Revolutionaries—dominated the Petrograd and Moscow soviets after February, but the radical Bolsheviks began to win local elections and by September had a majority in the Petrograd Soviet.
THE OCTOBER (NOVEMBER) REVOLUTION
A turning point in the struggle for power was the attempt by General Lavr Kornilov, who had been appointed commander in chief, to take control of Petrograd in August 1917 and wipe out the soviet. Prime Minister Aleksandr Kerensky, who had been negotiating with Kornilov, turned around and labeled him a traitor, perceiving his attack as an attempt to overthrow the government. Kerensky agreed to the arming of the Petrograd soviet, but after the failed coup the weapons were retained. The Bolsheviks could now consider staging an armed uprising.
The October Revolution began when Kerensky, angered by claims that the Bolsheviks controlled the Petrograd garrison, sent troops to close down two Bolshevik newspapers. The Bolsheviks, led by Leon Trotsky, feared that Kerensky would attempt to disrupt the Second All-Russian Congress, scheduled to open in October. They reacted by sending troops to take over key communications and transportation points in the city. Lenin emerged from hiding to urge the Bolsheviks to press forward and overthrow the Provisional Government, which they did on the morning of October 26. After the almost bloodless siege, Lenin proclaimed that power had passed to the soviets.
Lenin speaks to a cheering crowd during the Russian Revolution. Few individuals in modern history had as profound an effect on their times or evoked as much heated debate as Lenin.
At the Second All-Russian Congress of Soviets in October (November, New Style) 1917, Lenin secured a solely Bolshevik government—the Council of People’s Commissars, or Sovnarkom. The Bolsheviks also had a majority in the Soviet Central Executive Committee, which was accepted as the supreme lawgiving body. It was, however, the Central Committee of the Communist Party, the Bolsheviks’ party, in which true power came to reside. This governmental structure was to last until the convocation of the Constituent Assembly in January 1918. However, Lenin disbanded the assembly when it became clear that the Bolsheviks did not hold a majority, setting the stage for civil war. In the immediate post-October days, a majority of the Bolshevik Central Committee favoured a coalition government, and Lenin eventually had to give in. Some Socialist Revolutionaries were added in December 1917, but the coalition government remained in office only until March 1918, when the Bolsheviks accepted the defeatist Treaty of Brest-Litovsk, ending Russian participation in World War I. The Socialist Revolutionaries, disagreeing with the terms of the treaty, resigned. The Bolsheviks had the Congress of Soviets under control by the summer of 1918. Local soviets continued to defy the Bolsheviks but to no avail.
THE CIVIL WAR
By this point, only part of Russia—Moscow, Petrograd, and much of the industrial heartland—was under Bolshevik control. Ukraine slipped under German influence, and the Mensheviks held sway in the Caucasus. The countryside belonged to the Socialist Revolutionaries. Given the Bolshevik desire to dominate the former empire, civil war was inevitable.
The Red Army was recruited exclusively from among workers and peasants and immediately faced the problem of creating a competent officers’ corps. Trotsky met this problem by mobilizing former officers of the imperial army.
The Red Army was formed in February 1918, and Leon Trotsky became its leader. He was to reveal great leadership and military skill, fashioning a rabble into a formidable fighting force. The Reds were opposed by the “Whites,” anticommunists led by former imperial officers. There were also the “Greens” and the anarchists, who fought the Reds and were strongest in Ukraine; their most talented leader was Nestor Makhno. The Allies (Britain, the United States, Italy, and a host of other states) intervened on the White side and provided much matériel and finance. By mid-1920 the Reds had consolidated their hold on the country.
The feat of winning the Civil War and the organizational methods adopted to do so made a deep impact on Bolshevik thinking. The Bolsheviks were ruthless in their pursuit of victory. The Cheka (a forerunner of the notorious KGB), or political police, was formed in December 1917 to protect communist power. By the end of the Civil War it had become a powerful force. Among the targets of the Cheka were Russian nationalists who objected strongly to the bolshevization of Russia. They regarded bolshevism as alien and based on western European and not Russian norms. Lenin was always mindful of “Great Russian” chauvinism, which was one reason he never permitted the formation of a separate Russian Communist Party apart from that of the Soviet Union. Russia, alone of the U.S.S.R.’s 15 republics, did not initially have its own communist party.
NEW ECONOMIC POLICY
Soviet Russia adopted its first constitution in July 1918 and fashioned treaties with other republics such as Ukraine. The latter was vital for Russia’s economic viability, and Bolshevik will was imposed. It was also imposed in the Caucasus, where Georgia, Armenia, and Azerbaijan were tied to Bolshevik Russia by 1921. Russia lost control of the Baltic states and Finland, however. Lenin’s nationality policy assumed that nations would choose to stay in a close relationship with Russia, but this proved not to be the case. Many wanted to be independent in order to develop their own brand of national communism. The comrade who imposed Russian dominance was Joseph Stalin. As commissar for nationalities, he sought to ensure that Moscow rule prevailed.
War Communism
Lenin did not favour moving toward a socialist economy after October, because the Bolsheviks lacked the necessary economic skills. He preferred state capitalism, with capitalist managers staying in place but supervised by the workforce. The Civil War caused the Bolsheviks to adopt a more severe economic policy known as War Communism, characterized chiefly by the expropriation of private business and industry and the forced requisition of grain and other food products from the peasants. The Bolsheviks subsequently clashed with the labour force, which understood socialism as industrial self-management. Ever-present hunger exacerbated the poor labour relations, and strikes became endemic, especially in Petrograd. The Bolsheviks pressed ahead, using coercion as necessary. The story was the same in the countryside. Food had to be requisitioned in order to feed the cities and the Red Army. The Reds informed the peasants that it was in their best interests to supply food, because if the landlords came back the peasants would lose everything.
Forced requisitioning led to peasant revolts, and the Tambov province revolt of 1920 in particular forced Lenin to change his War Communism policy. The Bolshevik leadership were willing to slaughter the mutinous sailors of the Kronstadt naval base in March 1921, but they could not survive if the countryside turned against them. They would simply starve to death. A tactical retreat from enforced socialism was deemed necessary. Key sectors of the economy—heavy industry, communications, and transport—remained in state hands, but light and consumer-goods industries were open to the entrepreneur. The economy was back to its 1913 level by the mid-1920s, which permitted a debate on the future. All Communist Party members agreed that the goal was socialism, and this meant the dominance of the industrial economy. The working class, the natural constituency of the Communist Party, had to grow rapidly.
Soviet Russia gave way to the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (U.S.S.R.) in 1922, but this did not mean that Russia gave up its hegemony within the new state. As before, Moscow was the capital, and it dominated the union. Lenin’s death in January 1924 set off a succession struggle that lasted until the end of the decade. Joseph Stalin eventually outwitted Trotsky, Lenin’s natural successor, and other contenders.
THE STALIN ERA
Stalin, a Georgian, surprisingly turned to “Great Russian” nationalism to strengthen the Soviet regime. During the 1930s and ’40s he held the Russians up as the elder brother for non-Slavs to emulate.
Industrialization developed first and foremost in Russia (followed by Ukraine) and expanded rapidly under Stalin. The industrialization of the Caucasus and Central Asia began during the 1930s, and it was the Russians, aided by the Ukrainians, who ran the factories. The labour force was also predominantly Russian, as was the emerging technical intelligentsia. Collectivization, though, met with resistance in rural areas. Ukraine in particular suffered harshly at Stalin’s hands because of forced collectivization. He encountered strenuous resistance there, for which he never forgave the Ukrainians. His policies thereafter brought widespread starvation to that republic, especially in 1932–33, when millions died.
One of the most ruthless dictators of modern times was Joseph Stalin, the despot who transformed the Soviet Union into a major world power. The victims of his campaigns of political terror included some of his followers.
Stalin’s nationality policy initially promoted native cultures, but this changed in the late 1920s. Stalin appears to have perceived that the non-Russians were becoming dangerously self-confident and self-assertive. He came to the conclusion that a Sovietized Russian elite would be a more effective instrument of modernization. In the non-Russian republics, Russians and Ukrainians were normally second secretaries of the Communist Party and occupied key posts in the government and political police. Diplomats were predominantly Russian. The Soviet constitution of 1936 was democratic—but only on paper. It rearranged the political and nationality map. The boundaries of many autonomous republics and oblasts were fashioned so as to prevent non-Russians from forming a critical mass. Moscow’s fear was that they would circumvent central authority. For example, Tatars found themselves in the Tatar (Tatarstan) and Bashkir (Bashkiriya) autonomous republics, although Tatars and Bashkirs spoke essentially the same language. Tatars also inhabited the region south of Bashkiriya and northern Kazakhstan, but this was not acknowledged, and no autonomous republic was established. Moscow played off the various nationalities to its own advantage. This policy was to have disastrous long-term consequences for Russians, because they were seen as imperialists bent on Russifying the locals. New industry usually attracted Russian and Ukrainian labour rather than the locals, and this changed the region’s demographic pattern.
Victory over Germany in World War II precipitated an upsurge of Russian national pride. Russia, in the guise of the U.S.S.R., had become a great power. War reparations went first and foremost to Russian factories. When the United Nations was first set up, in 1945, Stalin did not insist that Russia have a separate seat like the Ukrainian and Belorussian republics had, which suggests he regarded the U.S.S.R.’s seat as Russia’s. The advent of the Cold War in the 1940s led to Stalin tightening his grip on his sphere of influence in eastern and southeastern Europe. Russian was imposed as the main foreign language, and Russian economic experience was copied. A dense network of treaties enmeshed the region in the Russian web.
The Bolsheviks had always been suspicious of minorities on their frontiers, and the first deportation of non-Russian minorities to Siberia and Central Asia began in the 1920s. Russian Cossacks were removed forcibly from their home areas in the north Caucasus and elsewhere because of their opposition to collectivization and communist rule. On security grounds, Stalin deported entire small nationality groups, such as the Chechen and Ingush, from 1944 onward. They were accused of collaborating with the Germans. The Volga Germans were deported in the autumn of 1941 lest they side with the advancing Wehrmacht. Altogether, more than 50 nationalities, embracing about 3.5 million people, were deported to various parts of the U.S.S.R. The vast majority of these were removed from European Russia to Asiatic Russia.
The late Stalin period witnessed campaigns against Jews and non-Russians. Writers and artists who dared to claim that Russian writers and cultural figures of the past had learned from the West were pilloried. Russian chauvinism took over, and anything that was worth inventing was claimed to have been invented by a Russian.
THE KHRUSHCHEV ERA
Nikita Khrushchev won the power struggle for leadership that ensued after Stalin’s death in 1953. Khrushchev’s landmark decisions in foreign policy and domestic programs changed the direction of the Soviet Union, bringing détente with the West and a relaxation of rigid controls within the country. A Russian who had grown up in Ukraine, Khrushchev rose as an agricultural specialist under Stalin. He took it for granted that Russians had a natural right to instruct less-fortunate nationals. This was especially evident in the non-Slavic republics of the U.S.S.R. and in eastern and southeastern Europe. His nationality policies reversed the repressive policies of Stalin. This allowed many peoples to return to their homelands within Russia, the Volga Germans and the Crimean Tatars being notable exceptions.
Correspondents from Western nations described Khrushchev as a man of enormous energy and drive, talkative, sociable, earthy, tough, and shrewd. With great self-confidence he took colossal gambles in both foreign and domestic policy.
As head of the party Secretariat (which ran the day-to-day affairs of the party machine) after Stalin’s death, Khrushchev used that vehicle to promote his campaigns. Pravda (“Truth”), the party newspaper, served as his mouthpiece. His main opponent in the quest for power, Georgy M. Malenkov, was skilled in administration and headed the government. Izvestiya (“News of the Councils of Working People’s Deputies of the U.S.S.R.”), the government’s newspaper, was Malenkov’s main media outlet. Khrushchev’s agricultural policy involved a bold plan to rapidly expand the sown area of grain. He chose to implement this policy on virgin land in the north Caucasus and west Siberia, lying in both Russia and northern Kazakhstan. The Kazakh party leadership was not enamoured of the idea, however, not wanting more Russians in their republic. The result was that Kazakh leadership was dismissed, and the new first secretary was a Malenkov appointee; he was soon replaced by Leonid I. Brezhnev, a Khrushchev protégé who eventually replaced Khrushchev as the Soviet leader. Thousands of young communists descended on Kazakhstan to grow crops where none had been grown before.
Khrushchev’s so-called “secret speech” at the 20th Party Congress in 1956 had far-reaching effects on both foreign and domestic policies. Through its denunciation of Stalin, it substantially destroyed the infallibility of the party. The congress softened the party’s hard-line foreign policy. De-Stalinization had unexpected consequences, especially in eastern and southeastern Europe in 1956, where unrest became widespread. The Hungarian uprising in that year was brutally suppressed, which stoked anti-Russian fires.
Successes in space exploration under Khrushchev’s regime brought great applause for Russia. He improved relations with the West, establishing a policy of peaceful coexistence that eventually led to the signing of the Nuclear Test-Ban Treaty of 1963. But he was eccentric and blunt, traits that sometimes negated his own diplomacy. Khrushchev’s offhanded remarks occasionally caused massive unrest in the world. He told the United States, “We will bury you,” and boasted that his rockets could hit a fly over the United States, which convinced the Americans to increase their defense budget. This accelerated the arms race with the United States, when his objective had been the opposite. His plan to install nuclear weapons in Cuba for local Soviet commanders to use should they perceive that the Americans were attacking brought the world seemingly close to the brink of nuclear war.
Khrushchev genuinely wanted to improve the lot of all Soviet citizens. Under his leadership there was a cultural thaw. Russian writers who had been suppressed began to publish again. Western ideas about democracy penetrated universities and academies. These were to leave their mark on a whole generation of Russians.
THE BREZHNEV ERA
After Khrushchev came the triumvirate of Leonid I. Brezhnev, Aleksey N. Kosygin, and N.V. Podgorny. The first was the party leader, the second headed the government, and the third became chairman of the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet, a ceremonial position. By the late 1960s Brezhnev was clearly the dominant leader. He ensured an unprecedented stability of cadres within the Communist Party and the bureaucracy, allowing for the spread of corruption in the Soviet political and administrative structures. However, it was also under Brezhnev that the U.S.S.R. acquired nuclear parity with the United States and was recognized as a world superpower. Détente flourished in the 1970s but was disrupted by the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in December 1979.
Under Brezhnev, Russia dominated the U.S.S.R. as never before. Three-fourths of the defense industries were in Russia, and the republic accounted for about three-fourths of the Soviet gross national product. The rapid expansion of the chemical, oil, and gas industries boosted exports so that Russia earned most of the union’s hard-currency income. The middle class grew in size, as did its average salary, which more than doubled in two decades. Ownership of consumer goods, such as refrigerators and cars, became a realistic expectation for a growing part of the population. The availability of medical care, good housing, and higher education reached unprecedented levels. But the income from the sale of Russia’s natural resources also allowed the Soviet regime to evade undertaking necessary but potentially politically dangerous structural economic reforms.
Brezhnev gave the Soviet Union a formidable military-industrial base capable of supplying large numbers of the most modern weapons, but in so doing he impoverished the rest of the Soviet economy.
Kosygin recognized the seriousness of the problems facing the Soviet economic structure and attempted to implement reforms in 1965 and 1968, but the Brezhnev leadership stopped them. By the mid-1970s, growth in the non-natural resource sector of the economy had slowed greatly. The Soviet economy suffered from a lack of technological advances, poor-quality products unsatisfactory to both Soviet and foreign consumers, low worker productivity, and highly inefficient factories. The government was spending an increasing amount of its money trying to feed the country. Soviet agriculture suffered from myriad problems, the resolution of which required radical reforms. In sum, by the 1970s, continued economic stagnation posed a serious threat to the world standing of the U.S.S.R. and to the regime’s legitimacy at home.
The state gradually lost its monopoly on information control. A counterculture influenced by Western pop music spread rapidly, aided by the rise of the audiocassette. The widespread teaching of foreign languages further facilitated access to outside ideas. By the end of the Brezhnev era, the Russian intelligentsia had rejected Communist Party values. The party’s way of dealing with uncomfortable critics, such as the dissenting novelist Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, was to deport them. These exiles then became the voice of Russian culture abroad. The academician Andrey Sakharov could not be imprisoned, for fear of Western scientists cutting off contact with the Soviet Union, but he was exiled to the closed city of Gorky (now Nizhny Novgorod). Sakharov was released in 1986 and returned to Moscow. In 1989 he was elected to the Congress of People’s Deputies, and many of the causes for which he originally suffered became official policy under Mikhail Gorbachev’s reforms.
THE GORBACHEV ERA
When Brezhnev died in 1982, most elite groups understood that the Soviet economy was in trouble. Due to senility, Brezhnev had not been in effective control of the country during his last few years, and Kosygin had died in 1980. The Politburo was dominated by old men, and they were overwhelmingly Russian. Non-Russian representation at the top of the party and the government had declined over time. Yury V. Andropov and then Konstantin Chernenko led the country from 1982 until 1985, but their administrations failed to address critical problems. Andropov mistakenly believed that the economic stagnation could be remedied by greater worker discipline and cracking down on corruption.
When Gorbachev became head of the Communist Party in 1985, he launched perestroika (“restructuring”). His team was more heavily Russian than that of his predecessors. It seems that initially even Gorbachev believed that only minor reforms were needed. He aimed to increase economic growth while increasing capital investment to improve the technological basis of the Soviet economy. His goal was quite plain: to bring the Soviet Union up to par economically with the West. After two years, Gorbachev concluded that deeper structural changes were necessary. In 1987–88 he pushed through reforms that went less than halfway to the creation of a semi-free market system. The consequences of this semi-mixed economy brought economic chaos to the country and great unpopularity to Gorbachev.
Gorbachev launched glasnost (“openness”) as the second vital plank of his reform efforts. He believed that the opening up of the political system—essentially, democratizing it—was the only way to overcome inertia in the political and bureaucratic apparatus. In addition, he believed that economic and social recovery required the inclusion of people in the political process. Glasnost allowed the media more freedom of expression, and editorials complaining of depressed conditions and of the government’s inability to correct them began to appear.
As the economic and political situation began to deteriorate, Gorbachev concentrated his energies on increasing his authority. He became a constitutional dictator—but only on paper. His policies were simply not put into practice. When he took office, Yegor Ligachev was made head of the party’s Central Committee Secretariat, one of the two main centres of power (with the Politburo) in the Soviet Union. Ligachev made it difficult for Gorbachev to use the party apparatus to implement his views on perestroika.
By the summer of 1988, however, Gorbachev was able to take the party out of the day-to-day running of the economy. This responsibility would pass to the local soviets. A new parliament, the Congress of People’s Deputies, was convened in the spring of 1989, with Gorbachev presiding. The new body superseded the Supreme Soviet as the highest organ of state power. It elected a new Supreme Soviet, and Gorbachev, who had opted for an executive presidency modeled on the U.S. and French systems, became the Soviet president, with broad powers. This meant that all the republics, including first and foremost Russia, could have a similar type of presidency. Moreover, Gorbachev radically changed Soviet political life when he removed the constitutional article that had made the Communist Party of the Soviet Union the only legal political organization.
Gorbachev understood that the defense burden, perhaps equivalent to 25 percent of the gross national product, was crippling the country. It had led to cuts in expenditures in education, social services, and medical care, which hurt the regime’s domestic legitimacy. Gorbachev therefore transformed Soviet foreign policy. He traveled abroad extensively and was brilliantly successful in convincing foreigners that the U.S.S.R. was no longer an international threat. His changes in foreign policy led to the democratization of eastern Europe and the end of the Cold War. On the other hand, Gorbachev’s policies deprived the Soviet Union of ideological enemies, which in turn weakened the hold of Soviet ideology over the people.
After summits in 1985, 1986, and 1987, Gorbachev and U.S. President Ronald Reagan signed the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces (INF) Treaty on December 8, 1987, in Washington, D.C.
As the U.S.S.R.’s economic problems became more serious (e.g., rationing was introduced for some basic food products for the first time since Stalin) and calls for faster political reforms and decentralization began to increase, the nationality problem became acute for Gorbachev. Limited force was used in Georgia, Azerbaijan, and the Baltic states to quell problems, though Gorbachev was never prepared to use systematic force in order to reestablish the centre’s control. The reemergence of Russian nationalism seriously weakened Gorbachev as the leader of the Soviet empire.
In 1985 Gorbachev brought Boris Yeltsin to Moscow to run that city’s party machine. Yeltsin was a deputy from Moscow to the Congress of People’s Deputies in 1989. When the Congress of People’s Deputies elected the Supreme Soviet as a standing parliament, Yeltsin was not chosen. However, a Siberian deputy stepped down in his favour. Yeltsin for the first time had a national platform. In parliament he pilloried Gorbachev, the Communist Party, corruption, and the slow pace of economic reform. Despite the bitter opposition of Gorbachev, Yeltsin was elected president of the Russian parliament.
When Gorbachev launched an all-union referendum about the future Soviet federation in March 1991, Russia and several other republics added supplementary questions. One of the Russian questions was whether the voters supported a directly elected president. They were, and they chose Yeltsin. He used his newfound legitimacy to promote Russian sovereignty, to advocate and adopt radical economic reform, to demand Gorbachev’s resignation, and to negotiate treaties with the Baltic republics, in which he acknowledged their right to independence. Soviet attempts to discourage Baltic independence led to a bloody confrontation in Vilnius in January 1991, after which Yeltsin called upon Russian troops to disobey orders that would have them shoot unarmed civilians.
Yeltsin’s politics reflected the rise of Russian nationalism. Russians began to view the Soviet system as working for its own political and economic interests at Russia’s expense. There were complaints that the “Soviets” had destroyed the Russian environment and had impoverished Russia in order to maintain their empire and subsidize the poorer republics. Yeltsin and his supporters demanded Russian control over Russia and its resources. In June 1990 the Russian republic declared sovereignty, establishing the primacy of Russian law within the republic. This effectively undermined all attempts by Gorbachev to establish a Union of Sovereign Socialist Republics. Yeltsin had appeared willing to go along with this vision but, in reality, wanted Russia to dominate the new union and replace the formal leading role of the Soviet Union. The Russian parliament passed radical reforms that would introduce a market economy, and Yeltsin cut funding to many Soviet agencies based on Russian soil. Clearly, he wished to rid Russia of the encumbrance of the Soviet Union.
A poorly executed coup attempt occurred August 19–21, 1991, bringing an end to the Communist Party and accelerating the movement to disband the Soviet Union. It was carried out by hard-line Communist Party, KGB, and military officials attempting to avert a new liberalized union treaty and return to the old-line party values. The most significant anti-coup role was played by Yeltsin, who brilliantly grasped the opportunity to promote himself and Russia. He demanded the reinstatement of Gorbachev as U.S.S.R. president, but, when Gorbachev returned from house arrest in Crimea, Yeltsin set out to demonstrate that he was the stronger leader. Yeltsin banned the Communist Party in Russia and seized all of its property.
THE YELTSIN ERA
The U.S.S.R. legally ceased to exist on December 31, 1991. The new state, called the Russian Federation, set off on the road to democracy and a market economy without any clear conception of how to complete such a transformation. Like most of the other former Soviet republics, it entered independence in a state of serious disorder and economic chaos.
ECONOMIC REFORMS
Upon independence, Russia faced economic collapse. The new Russian government not only had to deal with the economic problems from the Gorbachev period, but also needed to transform the entire Russian economy. In 1991 alone, gross domestic product (GDP) dropped by about one-sixth, and the budget deficit was approximately one-fourth of GDP. Price controls on most goods led to scarcity. By 1991 few items essential for everyday life were available in traditional retail outlets. The entire system of goods distribution was on the verge of disintegration.
The transformation of the command economy to a market-based one was fraught with difficulties and had no historical precedent. Since the central command economy had existed in Russia for more than 70 years, the transition to a market economy proved more difficult for Russia than for the countries of eastern Europe. Russian reformists had no clear plan, and circumstances did not give them time to put together a reform package. In addition, the reformists had to balance the necessities of economic reform with powerful vested interests.
In an effort to bring goods into stores, the Yeltsin government removed price controls on most items in January 1992—the first essential step toward creating a market-based economy. However, it also spurred inflation, which became a daily concern for Russians, whose salaries and purchasing power declined as prices for even the most basic goods continued to rise. The government frequently found itself printing money to fill holes in the budget and to prevent failing factories from going bankrupt.
In 1991 Boris Yeltsin became the first popularly elected leader in Russia’s history, guiding the country through a stormy decade of political and economic retrenching until his resignation on the eve of 2000.
During the Soviet era the factory had often been the base of social services, providing benefits such as childcare, vacations, and housing. If industries collapsed, the government would have had to make provisions not only for unemployed workers but also for a whole array of social services. The government’s infrastructure could not cope with such a large additional responsibility. Yet the inflation caused by keeping these factories afloat led to waning support for both Yeltsin and economic reform, as many average Russians struggled to survive. Starved for cash, factories reverted to paying workers and paying off debts to other factories in kind. It was not uncommon for workers to go months without being paid and to get paid in, for example, rubber gloves or crockery, either because they made such things themselves or because their factory had received payment for debt in kind.
Another element of economic reform was the privatization of Russian industries. Reformists in the Yeltsin government sought to speed privatization, believing that only by privatizing factories and enterprises and letting them fight for survival would the economy have any hope of recovering. By the end of 1992, some one-third of enterprises in the services and trade fields had been privatized. The second wave of privatization occurred in 1994–95. However, the process seemed to benefit solely the friends of those in power, who received large chunks of Russian industry for little. In particular, companies in the natural resource sector were sold at prices well below those recommended by the IMF to figures who were close to “the Family,” meaning Yeltsin, his daughter, and their allies in the government. From this process emerged the “oligarchs,” individuals who, because of their political connections, came to control huge segments of the Russian economy. Many oligarchs bought factories for almost nothing, stripped them, sold what they could, and then closed them, creating huge job losses. By the time Yeltsin left office in 1999, most of the Russian economy had been privatized. The stripping of factories played a major role in the public’s disenchantment with the development of capitalism in Russia. The majority of the population saw its living standards drop, social services collapse, and a great rise in crime and corruption.
Problems with the Ruble
In 1995 the government, through loans secured from the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and through income from the sale of oil and natural gas, succeeded in stabilizing the national currency by establishing a ruble corridor. This corridor fixed the exchange rate of the ruble that the Russian Central Bank would defend. The rate of inflation dropped, and some stabilization ensued. However, the government continued to borrow large sums of money while avoiding real structural reforms of the economy. By failing to establish an effective tax code and collection mechanisms, clear property rights, and a coherent bankruptcy law and by continued support of failing industries, the government found it increasingly expensive to maintain an artificially set ruble exchange rate. The problem was that the government-set exchange rate did not reflect the country’s economic reality and thereby made the ruble the target of speculators. As a result, the ruble collapsed in 1998, and the government was forced to withhold payments on its debt amid a growing number of bankruptcies. The ruble eventually stabilized and inflation diminished, but the living standards of most Russians improved little, though a small proportion of the population became very wealthy. Most economic gains occurred in Moscow, St. Petersburg, and other major urban areas, while vast tracts of Russia faced economic depression.
POLITICAL AND SOCIAL CHANGES
Although Yeltsin had come to represent for many the face of political and economic reform, his first priority was the preservation of his own power and authority. His divide-and-rule strategy led to the emergence of various factions in both the government and the bureaucracy. Indeed, some bureaucrats spent more time in conflict with each other than governing the country. Yeltsin frequently removed ministers and prime ministers, which led to abrupt changes in policy. Throughout his presidency he refused to establish his own political party or to align himself with any party. He believed that the president should remain above party politics, though he was at the heart of the political process, playing the role of power broker—a position he coveted—until his resignation in 1999.
When the Soviet Union collapsed, the Russian Federation continued to be governed according to its Soviet-era constitution, which did not specify which branch—legislative or executive—held supreme power. Political differences manifested themselves as constitutional conflicts. The government’s focus on financial stabilization and economic reform to the apparent neglect of the public’s social needs contributed to the growing political battle between the legislative and executive branches. Complicating Yeltsin’s difficulties was the fact that many deputies in the parliament had vested interests in the old economic and political structure. The leader of the parliament, Ruslan Khasbulatov, and Yeltsin both sought support from regional elites by promising subsidies and greater local control. The political battle between Yeltsin and Khasbulatov climaxed in March 1993 when Yeltsin was stripped of the decree-making powers that he had been granted after the 1991 coup attempt. Yeltsin was not prepared to accept total defeat. On March 20 Yeltsin announced that he was instituting a presidential regime until April 25, when a referendum would be held over who “really ruled” Russia. He stated that during this period any acts of parliament that contradicted presidential decrees would be null and void. After intense political haggling, Yeltsin was forced to back down. Nonetheless, it was agreed that a referendum would be held on April 25. When the results of the referendum came in, they were a victory for Yeltsin.
1993 offered dramatic scenes of confrontation between Yeltsin and the conservative parliament. These anti-Yeltsin protesters built barricades in central Moscow’s Smolenskaya Square on October 2.
That summer Yeltsin established a Constitutional Convention to draw up a new constitution. The parliament also set up its own Constitutional Committee. Inevitably, the drafts were contradictory, and the increasing number of regional leaders who supported the parliamentary version worried Yeltsin. The conflict between Yeltsin and the parliament continued, growing yet more intense on September 21, 1993, when Yeltsin issued a series of presidential decrees that dissolved the parliament and imposed presidential rule until new parliamentary elections and a referendum on a new draft constitution were held in December. The parliament declared Yeltsin’s decree illegal, impeached him, and swore in his vice president, Aleksandr Rutskoy, as president. Weapons were handed out to civilians to defend the parliamentary building. On September 25, troops and militia loyal to Yeltsin surrounded the building. On October 2, there were armed clashes between troops and supporters of the Congress. The most serious battle took place around the television station at Ostankino. It seemed a civil war was going to erupt, prompting Yeltsin to declare a state of emergency in Moscow on October 4. Shortly thereafter, tanks begin firing on the parliamentary building and on the deputies inside, leading to the surrender and arrest of everyone inside the building, including the speaker of the parliament and Rutskoy.
Yeltsin’s new constitution gave the president vast powers. The president’s decrees had the force of law as long as they did not contradict federal or constitutional law. The prime minister was now appointed by the president (though that appointment would still have to be approved by the Duma). The president also had the power to dismiss the Duma and call for new parliamentary elections. Although the prime minister was accountable to the parliament, he had to maintain the president’s confidence to remain in office. The premiership of Viktor Chernomyrdin (1992–98) reflected the extent to which a Russian prime minister was dependent on the president for his mandate to rule. Yeltsin dismissed Chernomyrdin in 1998, ostensibly for failing to implement reforms energetically enough, though there was the suspicion that the prime minister had offended the president’s ego.
In the first two Dumas (elected in 1993 and 1995), the Communist Party of the Russian Federation was the largest party, though it was never close to becoming a majority party. Having inherited the infrastructure of the dissolved Communist Party of the Soviet Union, it had the most effective nationwide organization. Other parties found it difficult to project their message outside the major urban areas. Party loyalties were weak; deputies jumped from one party to another in hope of improving their electoral chances.
The relationship between the Duma and Yeltsin was characterized by public shows of anger and opposition; behind the scenes, however, compromises were more often than not hammered out by political foes. Moreover, Yeltsin had no qualms about threatening the Duma with dissolution when it proved recalcitrant to presidential bills. Deputies, fearful of losing their extensive perks of office and of an electorate angry with all politicians, regularly backed down when faced with the implicit threat of dissolution. During Yeltsin’s second term, some deputies tried to initiate impeachment proceedings against him, but Yeltsin easily avoided impeachment.
The weakened Russian state failed to fulfill its basic responsibilities. The legal system, suffering from a lack of resources and trained personnel and a legal code geared to the new market economy, was near collapse. Low salaries led to a drain of experienced jurists to the private sector; there was also widespread corruption within law enforcement and the legal system, as judges and police officials resorted to taking bribes to supplement their meagre incomes. The country’s health, education, and social services were also under incredible strain. Due to a lack of resources, law-enforcement agencies proved unable to combat the rising crime. The collapse of medical services led to a decline in life expectancy and to concerns over the negative rate of population growth; doctors and nurses were underpaid, and many hospitals did not have enough resources to provide even basic care.
Organized Crime
One consequence of the political and economic changes of the 1990s was the emergence of Russian organized crime. For most of the Yeltsin administration, shoot-outs between rival groups and the assassinations of organized-crime or business figures filled the headlines of Russian newspapers and created greater disgust among Russians over the course of economic reform and democracy. The explosive rise in crime came as a shock to most Russians, who under the Soviet period had very rarely come into contact with such incidents. The assassinations of well-known and well-liked figures, such as human rights advocate Galina Starovoitova, served to underscore the Yeltsin regime’s inability to combat crime. By the end of the Yeltsin era, the open warfare between organized-crime groups had diminished not because of effective state action but because of the consolidation of the remaining criminal groups that had emerged victorious from the bloody struggles.
ETHNIC RELATIONS AND RUSSIA’S “NEAR-ABROAD”
During the Yeltsin years, Russia’s numerous regions sought greater autonomy. For example, Tatarstan negotiated additional rights and privileges, and the republic of Chechnya declared independence in 1991, before the collapse of the Soviet Union. Chechen nationalism was based on the struggle against Russian imperialism since the early 19th century and the living memory of Stalin’s massive deportations of the Chechen population in 1944 that had resulted in the deaths of a large segment of the population. In late 1994 Yeltsin sent the army into Chechnya after a botched Russian-orchestrated coup against the secessionist president, Dzhokhar Dudayev. There were fears that if Chechnya succeeded in breaking away from the Russian Federation, other republics might follow suit. Moreover, Dudayev’s Chechnya had become a source of drug dealing and arms peddling. In 1995 Russia gained control of the capital, Grozny. However, in 1996 Russian forces were pushed out of the capital city. Yeltsin, faced with an upcoming presidential election, had General Aleksandr Lebed sign a cease-fire agreement with the Chechens. The Russians withdrew, postponing the question of Chechen independence.
Moscow coined the term “the near-abroad” when discussing its foreign policy toward the states. Russia hoped to maintain influence over them, and it considered both the Caucasus and Central Asia special areas of interest. Aid from the Russian government to Russian separatists in the Dniester region of Moldova and intervention in the Tajik civil war were illustrative of Moscow’s attempt to maintain influence in these areas. In addition, the Russian government was prepared to use other means of exerting influence, such as economic pressure on Ukraine and the threat of separatism in Georgia, to attain its ends.
These Russian soldiers entered the Chechen stronghold of Bamut in May 1996. By that point, Russian forces had been in Chechnya for over a year, and support for the war there was weakening.
The collapse of the Soviet Union left some 30 million Russians outside the borders of the Russian Federation. The largest Russian populations were in Kazakhstan, Ukraine, and the Baltic countries. Governments in these countries feared that Moscow could, if it wanted, use the Russian populations there to pressure the governments to adopt policies friendly to Moscow. However, Moscow refrained from following such an approach during the 1990s —sometimes to the great criticism of the Russians living in these areas.
FOREIGN AFFAIRS
Yeltsin placed a high priority on relations with the West, particularly the United States. The initial honeymoon period in U.S.-Russian relations ended abruptly, as it became increasingly clear that the countries had different geopolitical goals. One issue was Russia’s opposition to the eastward expansion of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO). Policy disagreements over the Balkans—in particular, U.S. support for armed intervention against the Yugoslav government of Slobodan Milošević—also contributed to the cooling of relations between Washington and Moscow.
The collapse of the Soviet Union left the United States as the sole superpower. Concern with U.S. hegemony in the world system became a constant theme in Russian foreign policy, especially after Yevgeny Primakov became foreign minister in 1995. Primakov stressed the need for a multipolar system of international relations to replace the unipolar world dominated by the United States. In an attempt to counter U.S. power, Moscow strengthened its political and military relations with China and India, although friction between New Delhi and Beijing made a strong trilateral alliance unlikely. Russia’s relations with Iran and differences in approaches to Iraq further increased tensions in Russian-U.S. relations.
THE PUTIN PRESIDENCY
Toward the end of Yeltsin’s tenure as president, Vladimir Putin began playing a more important role. During the Soviet period, he joined the KGB and worked in East Germany for many years. In July 1998 Putin became director of the Federal Security Service, one of the successor organizations of the KGB, and in August 1999 Yeltsin plucked Putin from relative obscurity for the post of prime minister.
SEPARATISM
As prime minister, Putin blamed Chechen secessionists for the bombing of several apartment buildings that killed scores of Russian civilians, prompting the government to send Russian forces into the republic once again. (Evidence never proved Chechen involvement in these bombings, leading some to believe that the Russian intelligence services played a role.) The campaign enjoyed some initial success, with Grozny falling quickly to the Russians. Putin’s popularity soared, and Yeltsin, having chosen Putin as his successor, resigned on December 31, 1999. Putin’s first official act as president was to grant Yeltsin a pardon for any illegal activities he might have committed during his administration.
Many Russians believed that Putin’s coolness and decisiveness would help him establish economic and political order in the country and deal with the Chechen problem.
Putin easily defeated Communist Party leader Gennady Zyuganov in the first round of balloting of the March 2000 presidential election. Although the Russian military won control of Chechnya, Chechen fighters fled to the mountains and hills, threatening Russian forces with a prolonged guerilla war. Fighting continued during the next two years, but by 2002 it had abated. Putin, confident in Russia’s military position, sought talks with what remained of the Chechen leadership. Nevertheless, in October 2002, Chechen separatists seized a Moscow theatre and threatened to kill all those inside. Putin responded by ordering special forces to raid the theatre, and during the operation some 130 hostages died.
Putin soon reasserted central control over the country’s 89 regions by dividing Russia into seven administrative districts, each overseen by a presidential appointee. The new districts were created to root out corruption, keep an eye on the local governors, and ensure that Moscow’s will and laws were enforced. During the Yeltsin years, contradictions between Russian federal law and regional law had created chaos in the Russian legal system. Putin worked to establish the supremacy of Russian Federation law throughout the country.
FOREIGN AFFAIRS
Although Putin hoped to maintain a strategic partnership with the United States, he focused on strengthening Russia’s relations with Europe. Nevertheless, after the September 11 attacks in 2001 on the United States by al-Qaeda, Putin was the first foreign leader to telephone U.S. President George W. Bush to offer sympathy and help in combating terrorism. Moreover, Russia established a council with NATO on which it sat as an equal alongside NATO’s 19 members. Russia also reacted calmly when the United States officially abandoned the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty in 2002, established temporary military bases in several former Soviet states in Central Asia, and dispatched special forces on a training mission to Georgia, where there were suspected al-Qaeda training bases. However, Putin was wary of U.S. unilateralism and worked to strengthen Russian ties with China and India and maintain ties with Iran. In 2002–03 he opposed military intervention against Iraq by the United States and the United Kingdom.
Putin strengthened Russia’s ties with the Central Asian republics in order to maintain Russian influence. Under Yeltsin the Russian army, starved of funds, had lost much of its effectiveness and technological edge. Russian defeats in the first Chechen war only underlined the appalling state in which the armed forces found itself. Through greater arms sales, Putin hoped to increase funding for the armed forces, particularly for personnel and for the research and development sector of the Russian military industrial complex.
POLITICAL AND ECONOMIC REFORMS
Putin also took steps to limit the political and economic power of the infamous oligarchs. Although Putin could not destroy the business elite, he made it clear that certain limits on their behaviour would be expected. Oligarchs who opposed Putin during the presidential campaign or were critical of his policies faced the Kremlin’s wrath. For example, in 2001 Vladimir Gusinsky and Boris Berezovsky, two of Russia’s richest men, were stripped of their electronic media holdings. In 2003 Mikhail Khodorkovsky, the former head of the oil giant Yukos, was arrested and eventually convicted of fraud and tax evasion. The campaign against certain oligarchs caused fear among many about Putin’s commitment to freedom of speech and the press. Television networks (or their owners) seen as unfriendly to Putin and his policies faced closure by the government—usually on charges of nonpayment of taxes and financial mismanagement.
Although Mikhail Khodorkovsky had been vilified by Putin as an embodiment of the worst excesses of the era of the oligarchs, his imprisonment made him a symbol for proponents of democratic reform in Russia.
Yeltsin’s automatic hostility to the Communist Party had resulted in a shaky relationship with the Duma. Putin worked better with it and secured the passage of bills that reformed the tax, judicial, labour, and bankruptcy systems, provided property rights, adopted national symbols and the flag, and approved arms treaties. Unlike Yeltsin, Putin was not inclined to frequent changes in the cabinet or premiership, resulting in policy consistency and political stability that ordinary Russians appreciated.
Despite some opposition, Putin pursued economic reforms. These included a new tax code that simplified the system in order to encourage individuals and businesses to pay taxes and improve the efficiency of collecting taxes. As a result, the state’s rate of tax collection dramatically increased. Coupled with a surge in income from the increase in world oil prices, the Russian government enjoyed a budget surplus and was able pay off some of its external debt. Putin was also keen to attract foreign investment in order to reduce Russia’s dependence on Western loans (which he believed threatened the country’s national interests) and to help finance the refurbishment and expansion of Russian industry. Russia sought to increase its exports by promoting the sale of oil, natural gas, and arms.
Despite criticism that he had centralized too much power in the presidency and was curtailing freedoms, Putin remained popular and was reelected in 2004 in a landslide. During his second term, speculation loomed that he might engineer a change to the constitution to allow him to be reelected yet again. Instead, Putin surprised observers in October 2007 by announcing that he would head the list of the pro-Putin United Russia party in parliamentary elections. In December 2007 United Russia won more than three-fifths of the vote and 315 of the Duma’s 450 seats. Putin anointed First Deputy Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev as his successor. In turn, Medvedev announced that he would appoint Putin prime minister if his campaign succeeded, enabling Putin to continue his dominance of Russian politics. In March 2008, Medvedev was elected president in a contest that some Western election observers considered not fully fair or democratic. Medvedev took office on May 7, 2008, and Putin was confirmed as Russia’s prime minister the following day.
THE MEDVEDEV PRESIDENCY
Three months into his presidency, Medvedev was confronted with a growing military conflict between Russia’s neighbour Georgia and South Ossetia, a separatist region of Georgia that borders the Russian republic of North Ossetia–Alania. As fighting between Georgian and Ossetian forces escalated in August 2008, Russia sent troops across the border with the goal of supporting rebels in not only South Ossetia but also Abkhazia, another separatist region within Georgia. In response to condemnation from NATO, Russia suspended its cooperation with the Atlantic alliance. In September the Russian government agreed to withdraw its troops from Georgia. However, it planned to maintain a military presence in South Ossetia and Abkhazia, whose independence it had recognized.
The central message of Medvedev’s presidential campaign was “Freedom is better than no freedom,” a remark that hinted at an openness to the West that was uncharacteristic of the Putin years.
Meanwhile, sporadic fighting between Russian forces and local militants continued elsewhere in the Caucasus region, particularly in the Russian republics of Ingushetiya and Chechnya. By early 2009 the conflict in Chechnya appeared to have abated. That April Medvedev announced the end of Russia’s counterinsurgency operations there. Despite this official pronouncement, clashes between security forces and militants in the Caucasus continued, as did militant attacks on local officials and infrastructure. In March 2010 suicide bombers, believed to be linked to an extremist group in the Caucasus, detonated explosives that killed more than three dozen people in the Moscow Metro.
As 2011 progressed, Russians wondered if Medvedev would stand for reelection. He ended months of speculation in September 2011 when he announced that he and Putin would, in essence, trade jobs. Putin would run for president and, if elected, would likely appoint Medvedev prime minister. The plan for a seamless succession hit a snag on December 4, 2011, when United Russia lost the two-thirds majority that allowed it to make changes to the constitution. International observerscharacterized the election as lacking fairness. Within days of the election, an estimated 50,000 people gathered near the Kremlin to protest the results. Putin dismissed them and claimed that the protesters were “paid agents of the West.” Independent analyses of the December vote uncovered irregularities, including statistically unlikely voter turnout levels and final results that were wildly at odds with preliminary counts. Organized protests continued into 2012, and in February of that year an estimated 30,000 people formed a human chain around the centre of Moscow.
THE SECOND PUTIN PRESIDENCY
On March 4, 2012, Putin was elected to a third term as president of Russia. His first year back in office was characterized by a largely successful effort to stifle the protest movement. Opposition leaders were jailed, and nongovernmental organizations that received funding from abroad were labeled “foreign agents.” Tensions with the United States flared in June 2013, when U.S. National Security Agency (NSA) contractor Edward Snowden found refuge in Russia after revealing the existence of a number of secret NSA programs. After chemical weapons attacks outside Damascus in August 2013, the U.S. made the case for military intervention in the Syrian Civil War. In an editorial published in the New York Times, Putin urged restraint, and U.S. and Russian officials brokered a deal whereby Syria’s chemical weapons supply would be destroyed.
THE UKRAINE CONFLICT AND SYRIAN INTERVENTION
In February 2014, the government of Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych was overthrown after months of protest. Yanukovych fled to Russia. Refusing to recognize the interim government in Kiev as legitimate, Putin requested parliamentary approval to dispatch troops to Ukraine. By early March 2014 Russian troops and pro-Russian paramilitary groups had effectively taken control of the Crimea. In a popular referendum held on March 16, residents of the Crimea voted to join Russia. In protest, Western governments introduced a series of travel bans and asset freezes against members of Putin’s inner circle. On March 21 Putin signed legislation that formalized the Russian annexation of Crimea.
In April 2014, groups of unidentified gunmen outfitted with Russian equipment seized government buildings throughout southeastern Ukraine, sparking an armed conflict with the government in Kiev. Putin referred to the region as Novorossiya (“New Russia”), evoking claims from the imperial era. Although all signs pointed to direct Russian involvement in the insurgency, Putin steadfastly denied having a hand in the fighting. On July 17, 2014, Malaysia Airlines flight MH17 crashed in eastern Ukraine, and overwhelming evidence indicated that it had been shot down by a Russian-made surface-to-air missile fired from rebel-controlled territory. Western countries responded by tightening sanctions. This, combined with plummeting oil prices, sent the Russian economy into a tailspin. NATO estimated that more than 1,000 Russian troops were actively fighting inside Ukraine when Russian and Ukrainian leaders met for cease-fire talks in Minsk, Belarus, on September 5. The cease-fire slowed, but did not stop, the violence, and pro-Russian rebels spent the following months pushing back Ukrainian government forces.
In February 2014, armed militants took control of government buildings in Simferopol, the capital of the Crimea. They wore uniforms without insignia but were believed to have connections to the Russian military.
On February 12, 2015, Putin met with world leaders to approve a peace plan aimed at ending the fighting in Ukraine. Although fighting slowed for a period, the conflict picked up again in the spring. By September 2015 the UN estimated that some 8,000 people had been killed and 1.5 million had been displaced. On September 28, 2015, in an address before the UN General Assembly, Putin presented his vision of Russia as a world power, capable of projecting its influence abroad, while painting the United States and NATO as threats to global security. Two days later Russia became an active participant in the Syrian Civil War, when Russian aircraft struck targets near the cities of Homs and Hama. Although Russian defense officials stated that the air strikes were intended to target troops and matériel belonging to the Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant, the actual focus of the attacks seemed to have been opponents of Syrian president and Russian ally Bashar al-Assad.
SILENCING CRITICS AND ACTIONS IN THE WEST
On February 27, 2015, opposition leader Boris Nemtsov was gunned down just days after he speaking out against Russian intervention in Ukraine. Nemtsov was only the latest Putin critic to die under suspicious circumstances. In January 2016 a British public inquiry officially implicated Putin in the 2006 murder of former Federal Security Service (FSB; the successor to the KGB) officer Alexander Litvinenko, who had spoken out against Russian government ties to organized crime. Litvinenko was poisoned with polonium-210 while drinking tea in a London hotel.
Aleksey Navalny, an opposition activist who achieved prominence as a leader of the 2011 protest movement, was repeatedly imprisoned on what supporters characterized as politically motivated charges. Navalny finished second in the Moscow mayoral race in 2013, but his Progress Party was shut out of subsequent elections on procedural grounds. In the September 2016 legislative election, voter turnout was just 47.8 percent, the lowest since the collapse of the Soviet Union. Voter apathy was attributed to Putin’s steady implementation of so-called “managed democracy,” a system whereby the basic structures and procedures of democracy were maintained but the outcome of elections was largely predetermined. Putin’s United Russia party claimed victory, but election observers documented numerous irregularities. Navalny’s party was prohibited from fielding any candidates, and Nemtsov’s PARNAS received less than 1 percent of the vote.
This protest in memory of Boris Nemtsov took place on March 1, 2015. Nemtsov was a physicist, politician, and outspoken critic of Putin.
By 2016 evidence emerged that Russia was conducting a wide-ranging campaign intended to undermine the legitimacy of Western democracies. Many of the attacks blurred the line between cyberwarfare and cybercrime, while others recalled the direct Soviet interventionism of the Cold War era. Russian fighter jets routinely violated NATO airspace in the Baltic, and a pair of sophisticated cyberattacks on the Ukrainian power grid plunged hundreds of thousands of people into darkness. Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko reported that his country had been subjected to more than 6,000 cyber intrusions over a two-month period, with virtually every sector of Ukrainian society being targeted. Poroshenko stated that Ukrainian investigators had linked the cyberwar campaign to Russian security services. In Montenegro, where the pro-Western government was preparing for accession to NATO, authorities narrowly averted a plot to assassinate Prime Minister Milo Ðjukanović and install a pro-Russian government. Montenegrin prosecutors uncovered a conspiracy that linked nationalist Serbs, pro-Russian fighters in eastern Ukraine, and, allegedly, a pair of Russian intelligence agents who had orchestrated the planned coup.
In the months prior to the 2016 U.S. presidential election, a series of hacking attacks targeted the Democratic Party and its presidential nominee Hillary Clinton. Computer security experts tied these attacks to Russian intelligence services, and in July 2016 thousands of private e-mails were published by WikiLeaks. Within days the FBI opened a probe into Russian efforts to influence the presidential election. It was later revealed that this investigation was also examining possible connections between those efforts and the campaign of Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump. Trump joked that Russia had released the hacked e-mails because “Putin likes me” and later invited Russia to “find [Clinton’s] 30,000 e-mails that are missing.” In spite of these statements, Trump repeatedly dismissed the possibility that Putin was attempting to sway the election in his favour.
After Trump’s victory in November 2016, renewed attention was focused on the cyberattacks and possible collusion between Trump’s campaign team and Russia. U.S. intelligence agencies concluded that Putin had ordered a multipronged campaign to influence the election and undermine faith in American democratic systems. U.S. President Barack Obama imposed economic sanctions on Russian intelligence services and expelled dozens of suspected Russian operatives, but Trump continued to reject the conclusions of U.S. intelligence agencies.
For his part, Putin denied the existence of any campaign to influence foreign elections. In May 2017, another cyberattack was attributed to Fancy Bear, the Russian government-linked group that had carried out the hack on the Democratic Party. France was holding the second round of its presidential election, and the finalists were centrist Emmanuel Macron and far-right National Front candidate Marine Le Pen. Le Pen had previously received financial support from a bank with ties to the Kremlin, and she vowed to push for the end of the sanctions that had been enacted after Russia’s annexation of Crimea. Just hours before a media blackout on campaign-related news coverage went into effect, a massive trove of internal communications dubbed “MacronLeaks” surfaced on the Internet. This effort came to naught, as Macron captured nearly twice as many votes as Le Pen.
CONCLUSION
His inability to rally popular support with sustained economic prosperity was what forced Putin to appeal to patriotic fervor and to highlight Russia’s differences with the West. The shift in focus was gradual, but definitively took hold by 2012. In the intervening years, Putin has been committed to reestablishing Russia as a great power. That shift has proven considerably risky, however, not only for Russia but also for the rest of the international community.
Putin’s foreign moves appeared to produce significant dividends at home, as his popular approval rating consistently remained above 80 percent despite Russia’s sluggish economy and endemic government corruption. Low oil prices and Western sanctions compounded an already grim financial outlook as foreign investors remained reluctant to put their capital at risk in a land where personal ties to Putin were seen as more important than the rule of law. Even after Russia emerged from seven consecutive quarters of recession, wages and consumer spending remained stagnant in 2017. These and other domestic problems seemed to do little to dent Putin’s image, though; among those expressing concern for such issues in opinion polls, blame was most often affixed to Putin’s prime minister, Dmitry Medvedev.
GLOSSARY
ANARCHISM A cluster of doctrines and attitudes centred on the belief that government is both harmful and unnecessary.
ANNEX To incorporate (a territory) within one’s own domain.
ARABLE Suitable for the growing of crops.
AUTOCRACY A government in which one person has unlimited power.
AUTONOMOUS Having the right to self-govern, at least to some degree.
BOURGEOIS Referring to a person whose social behavior and political views are held to be influenced by interest in private property.
CAPITALISM The economic system, dominant in the Western world since the breakup of feudalism, in which most of the means of production are privately owned and production is guided and income distributed largely through the operation of markets.
COMMUNISM The political and economic doctrine that aims to replace private property and a profit-based economy with public ownership and communal control of at least the major means of production (such as mines, mills, and factories) and the natural resources of a society.
CONCESSION Something granted, often grudgingly.
COUNTERINSURGENCY Organized military activity designed to combat an uprising.
DEPORTATION The removal from a country of a person (often a non-citizen) whose presence is determined to be unlawful or harmful to the public.
DÉTENTE A relaxation of strained relations or tensions (as between nations).
EXPROPRIATION The taking away of property or the right to property.
GENDARME A member of an armed national police force.
GROSS DOMESTIC PRODUCT (GDP) The total value of the goods and services produced in a country during a specific period of time, usually a year.
GYMNASIUM A state-maintained secondary school, particularly in Germany, that prepares pupils for higher academic education.
HEGEMONY The social, cultural, ideological, or economic influence exerted by a dominant group.
INFLATION Collective increases in the supply of money, in money incomes, or in prices. Inflation is generally thought of as an inordinate rise in the general level of prices.
INTERVENTIONISM The interference by one country in the political affairs of another.
MATÉRIEL Equipment, apparatus, and supplies used by an organization or institution.
OLIGARCHY Government by the few, especially despotic power exercised by a small and privileged group for corrupt or selfish purposes.
OPERATIVE A person who works toward achieving the objectives of a larger interest, sometimes as a secret agent.
PRIVATIZATION The transfer of government services or assets to the private sector.
PROLETARIAN Relating to the class of wage workers who were engaged in industrial production and whose chief source of income was derived from the sale of their labour power.
PROPAGANDA The dissemination of information—facts, arguments, rumours, half-truths, or lies—to influence public opinion.
SERF A tenant farmer who was bound to a hereditary plot of land and to the will of his landlord.
SOCIALISM The social and economic doctrine that calls for public rather than private ownership or control of property and natural resources.
ZEMSTVO An organ of rural self-government in the Russian Empire and Ukraine; established in 1864 to provide social and economic services, it became a significant liberal influence within imperial Russia.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
General surveys of Russian history in the 19th century include David Saunders, Russia in the Age of Reaction and Reform, 1801–1881 (1992); and Hugh Seton-Watson, The Russian Empire, 1801–1917 (1967, reprinted 1990). An excellent English-language work on the reign of Alexander I is Janet M. Hartley, Alexander I (1994). Politics during the reign of Alexander I is discussed in Alexander M. Martin, Romantics, Reformers, and Reactionaries: Russian Conservative Thought and Politics in the Reign of Alexander I (1997). The reign of Nicholas I is explored in W. Bruce Lincoln, Nicholas I, Emperor and Autocrat of All the Russias (1978, reprinted 1989). The general economic development of Russia in the 19th century is analyzed in W. Bruce Lincoln, The Great Reforms: Autocracy, Bureaucracy, and the Politics of Change in Imperial Russia (1990); Ben Eklof, John Bushnell, and Larissa Zakharova (eds.), Russia’s Great Reforms, 1855–1881 (1994); and Arcadius Kahan, Russian Economic History: The Nineteenth Century, ed. by Roger Weiss (1989). An analysis of reform and counterreform dynamics is given in Thomas S. Pearson, Russian Officialdom in Crisis: Autocracy and Local Self-Government, 1861–1900 (1989, reissued 2002). Dominic Lieven, Nicholas II (1993, reissued 1996), examines the personality of Nicholas II and his reign.
Studies of important issues in Russian foreign policy and the emergence of the Russian Empire include William C. Fuller, Jr., Strategy and Power in Russia, 1600–1914 (1992); Dietrich Geyer, Russian Imperialism: The Interaction of Domestic and Foreign Policy, 1860–1914, trans. by Bruce Little (1987; originally published in German, 1977); Andreas Kappeler, The Russian Empire: A Multiethnic History, trans. by Alfred Clayton (2001; originally published in German, 1992); Dominic Lieven, Empire: The Russian Empire and Its Rivals (2000, reissued 2003); and Geoffrey Hosking, Russia: People and Empire, 1552–1917 (1997).
An excellent general introduction to the period is Hans Rogger, Russia in the Age of Modernisation and Revolution, 1881–1917 (1983). Foreign policy is the subject of Barbara Jelavich, Russia’s Balkan Entanglements, 1806–1914 (1991, reissued 2002); David MacLaren McDonald, United Government and Foreign Policy in Russia, 1900–1914 (1992); and Dominic Lieven, Russia and the Origins of the First World War (1983). Dominic Lieven, Russia’s Rulers Under the Old Regime (1989), offers a collective portrait of the policy makers. The economy of the period is examined in Peter Gatrell, The Tsarist Economy, 1850–1917 (1986).
The Revolution of 1905 is addressed in Abraham Ascher, The Revolution of 1905, 2 vol. (1988–92); and Andrew M. Verner, The Crisis of Russian Autocracy: Nicholas II and the 1905 Revolution (1990). A more comparative socioeconomic approach to the revolution is demonstrated in Teodor Shanin, The Roots of Otherness: Russia’s Turn of Century, 2 vol. (1986), which concentrates especially on the peasantry. The reaction of the elites to the revolution is analyzed in Roberta Thompson Manning, The Crisis of the Old Order in Russia: Gentry and Government (1982). The politics of the new parliament, the Duma, is outlined in Geoffrey A. Hosking, The Russian Constitutional Experiment: Government and Duma, 1907–1914 (1973); and the social dimension of the new politics is examined in Leopold H. Haimson (ed.), The Politics of Rural Russia, 1905–1914 (1979); and Victoria E. Bonnell, Roots of Rebellion: Workers’ Politics and Organizations in St. Petersburg and Moscow, 1900–1914 (1983). Russia’s problems during World War I are described in Michael T. Florinsky, The End of the Russian Empire (1931, reprinted 1973). The revolutionary period is the subject of Orlando Figes, A People’s Tragedy (1996, reissued 1998).
For the Soviet period there are few specific histories of Russia, which is always treated in the wider context of the Soviet Union. An overview of the Revolution of 1917 and its consequences is offered in Sheila Fitzpatrick, The Russian Revolution, 2nd ed. (1994, reissued 2001). Robert Service, A History of Twentieth-Century Russia (1998), is a history of the Soviet state. Christopher Read, The Making and Breaking of the Soviet System (2001), analyzes the causes of the rise and fall of the Soviet Union. Relevant historical biographies include Robert Service, Lenin: A Biography (2000); Robert C. Tucker, Stalin as Revolutionary, 1879–1929 (1973), and Stalin in Power, 1928–1941 (1990); and William J. Tompson, Khrushchev: A Political Life (1995, reissued 1997). Chris Ward (ed.), The Stalinist Dictatorship (1998), is a readable examination of the Stalinist period. The Gorbachev era is analyzed in Archie Brown, The Gorbachev Factor (1996); Stephen White, After Gorbachev, 4th ed. (1994), a solid narrative of the years of perestroika; Richard Sakwa, Gorbachev and His Reforms, 1985–1990 (1990); Jeffrey F. Hough, Democratization and Revolution in the USSR, 1985–1991 (1997); and Mikhail Gorbachev, Perestroika: New Thinking for Our Country and the World, new, updated ed. (1988), and Memoirs (1996), which reveals insights into Gorbachev’s thinking. Good introductions to the Soviet political structure and situation are Richard Sakwa, Soviet Politics in Perspective, 2nd ed. rev. (1998); Gordon B. Smith, Soviet Politics: Struggling with Change, 2nd ed. (1992); Geoffrey Ponton, The Soviet Era: Soviet Politics from Lenin to Yeltsin (1994); and Evan Mawdsley and Stephen White, The Soviet Elite from Lenin to Gorbachev: The Central Committee and Its Members, 1917–1991 (2000), a wide-ranging survey. Alec Nove, An Economic History of the USSR, 1917–1991, 3rd ed. (1992), is an informed, accessible account. The breakup of the Soviet Union is the subject of Ronald Grigor Suny, The Revenge of the Past: Nationalism, Revolution, and the Collapse of the Soviet Union (1993); and Roman Szporluk, Russia, Ukraine, and the Breakup of the Soviet Union (2000). Foreign policy is discussed in Gabriel Gorodetsky (ed.), Soviet Foreign Policy, 1917–1991: A Retrospective (1994). Vladislav Zubok and Constantine Pleshakov, Inside the Kremlin’s Cold War: From Stalin to Khrushchev (1996), uses archival material released in the 1990s to examine the Cold War and its origins from the Soviet point of view. The secret police’s role during the Soviet period is the subject of Amy W. Knight, The KGB: Police and Politics in the Soviet Union, rev. ed. (1990).
Interpretative surveys include Lilia Shevtsova, Yeltsin’s Russia: Myth and Reality (2000); Stephen White, Alex Pravda, and Zvi Gitelman (eds.), Developments in Russian Politics 5, 5th ed. (2001); and Archie Brown (ed.), Contemporary Russian Politics: A Reader (2001). Studies of the economic transition include Andrei Shleifer and Daniel Treisman, Without a Map: Political Tactics and Economic Reform in Russia (2000); Alena V. Ledeneva, Russia’s Economy of Favours: Blat, Networking, and Informal Exchange (1998); Jefferey F. Hough, The Logic of Economic Reform in Russia (2001); Thane Gustafson, Capitalism Russian-Style (1999); Peter Reddaway and Dmitri Glinski, The Tragedy of Russia’s Reforms: Market Bolshevism Against Democracy (2001); and Tim McDaniel, The Agony of the Russian Idea (1996). Geoffrey Hosking and Robert Service (eds.), Russian Nationalism, Past and Present (1997), examines the reemergence of Russian identity since the collapse of the U.S.S.R. The conflict in Chechnya is explored in John B. Dunlop, Russia Confronts Chechnya: Roots of a Separatist Conflict (1998); and Anatol Lieven, Chechnya: Tombstone of Russian Power (1998). A solid account of Russian foreign policy in the Yeltsin years is Ted Hopf (ed.), Understandings of Russian Foreign Policy (1999).
Leon Aron, Yeltsin: A Revolutionary Life (2000), is an excellent biography. The institutional and political context in which Russian democracy emerged in the 1990s is the subject of Graeme Gill and Roger D. Markwick, Russia’s Stillborn Democracy?: From Gorbachev to Yeltsin (2000); Gordon B. Smith (ed.), State-Building in Russia: The Yeltsin Legacy and the Challenge of the Future (1999); and Valerie Sperling (ed.), Building the Russian State: Institutional Crisis and the Quest for Democratic Governance (2000).
INDEX
A
agents provocateurs, 54
Alaska, 25, 49
Alexander I, 11, 23
education reforms, 19–20
foreign policy under, 25–27, 29
government reforms, 13–16
intellectual life under, 20–22
social class reforms, 16–19
Alexander II
assassination of, 34, 46
emancipation of serfs, 30–31
opposition to, 33–34
reform of social classes, 31, 33
Alexander III, 34–37
economic reforms, 37–39, 41
foreign policy, 48–51
intellectual life under, 41–43
Russification of territories, 43–48
Anglo-Afghan War, 49
atheists, 21
autocracy, as one of the “truly Russian” principles, 23
Azef, Yevno, 54
B
Bakunin, Mikhail, 42
Balkan Wars, 60–61
Berlinsky, Vissarion, 21
Black Hundreds, 54
Bolsheviks, 43, 55, 66, 67, 68, 69, 70, 71, 72
Bonaparte, Napoleon, 11, 25, 26
Brezhnev, Leonid, 77, 79–80, 81
Brotherhood of SS. Cyril and Methodius, 23
bureaucracy, and dependence on rank and seniority, 16
C
censorship, 13, 20, 21
Chaadayev, Pyotr, 21
Chechnya, 24, 75, 98–99, 101, 102, 104, 108
Chernyshevsky, N.G., 33
child labour, 39
Clinton, Hillary, 114
commune, 31, 35, 40, 59
Communist Party, 68, 70, 72, 74, 79, 81, 82, 84, 85, 87, 96, 102, 105
Constituent Assembly, 65–66
Constitutional Democratic Party (Kadets), 56, 64
Cossacks, 64, 75
cotton textiles, production of, 19, 39
Council of People’s Commissars (Sovnarkom), 68
Crimean War, 13, 27, 29, 30, 43
Cuban Missile Crisis, 78
D
Decembrists, 13, 17, 23
deists, 21
F
famine, 35, 73
February Revolution, 64, 65, 66
Finland, 25, 45, 70
G
glasnost, 82–83
gold standard, Russian conversion to, 39
Gorbachev, Mikhail, 81–86, 87
grain, export of, 19
gymnasiums, 20
I
industrialization, how it differed in Russia from Western capitalism, 41
intelligentsia, development of and connection to radicalism, 41–42
iron, decline in production of, 19
ispravnik, 17, 31
Izvestiya, 77
J
Jews, 22, 46–47, 54, 56, 62, 75
K
Kankrin, Egor Frantsevich, 19
Kerensky, Aleksandr, 66, 67
Khrushchev, Nikita, 76–79
Kosygin, Aleksey, 79–81
L
Labour Group, 56
land commandant, 35
legal profession, foundation of modern, 31, 33
Lena gold mines, 58
Lenin, Vladimir, 42, 43, 55, 67, 68, 70, 71, 72
Le Pen, Marine, 115
“Letter to Gogol,” 21
Lithuania, 25, 44
M
Malenkov, Georgy, 77
Manchuria, 50
Medvedev, Dmitry, 106–109, 116
Menshevik, 43, 55, 66, 69
metallurgical industry, 38
ministries, function of under Nicholas I, 14
Ministry of the Interior, 30, 31, 33, 34, 35, 39, 40
Ministry of State Domains, 18
Muslims, 22, 45–46
N
Narodnaya Volya (“People’s Will”), 34, 42
national principle, as one of the “truly Russian” principles, 23
near-abroad, 99
Nechayev, Sergey, 42
Nicholas I, 13, 14, 16, 17, 20, 22, 23, 30
Nicholas II, 37, 52, 54, 56–57, 61, 62, 63, 65
Nuclear Test-Ban Treaty, 78
O
October Revolution, 66–68
October 17 Manifesto, 54, 55
oligarchs, creation of after end of communism, 90–92, 104
organized crime, 97
orthodoxy, as one of the “truly Russian” principles, 23
overpopulation, 38
P
Pale of Settlement, 46
perestroika, 82, 83
Pestel, Pavel, 23
Peter I (Peter the Great), 21, 22
petroleum industry, 38, 79
pogroms, 46–47, 54
Poland, 23, 25–27, 38, 40, 43–44, 56, 62
Polish National Democrats, 44
Polish Socialist Party, 44
Pravda, 77
privatization of industry, 90–92
Progressive Bloc, 62, 63
Pushkin, Aleksandr, 20
Putin, Vladimir, 108
foreign policy, 103–104, 109–112, 116
intervention in Western politics, 113–115
political and economic reforms, 104–107
separatism under, 101–103
suppression of critics, 112–113
R
Rasputin, Grigory Yefimovich, 59, 63
Red Army, 69, 70, 71
redemption payments, for peasants, 31, 37
Revolutionary Catechism, 42
ruble, collapse of, 91
Russian Civil War, 68–70
Russian nationalism, 23–25
Russian Orthodox Church, 21, 22, 27, 45, 46, 58–59
Russian Revolution of 1905–06, 52–55, 64
Russian Social-Democratic Workers’ Party, 42
Russification, 23, 43–48, 74
Russo-Japanese War, 51, 52
S
Sakhalin, 25, 49
Sakharov, Andrey, 81
School Statute (1804), 19–20
Serbia, 48, 60, 61
serfs, 16–19
emancipation of, 30–31, 37, 38
Siberia, 34, 59, 77
Slavophiles, 21–22
Social Democratic Party, 43, 55, 56
Socialist Revolutionary Party, 42–43, 54, 55, 66, 68, 69
Society of United Slavs, 23
Soviet Provisional Government, 65–66, 67
Soviet of Workers’ Deputies, 53, 64
Speransky, Mikhail, 13, 14
Stalin, Joseph, 71, 72–76, 77, 85
State Duma, 55–58, 60, 62, 64, 95, 105
T
Tatars, 45–46, 74, 77
taxes, 31, 37–38, 106
Teleskop, 21
“temporary rules,” restricting Jewish rights, 47
Third Department of the chancery, 15
Tilsit, Treaty of, 11, 25
Tolstoy, Dmitry, 34, 35
Triple Alliance, 48
Trotsky, Leon, 67, 69, 72
Trump, Donald, 114–115
Turkey, 11, 23, 25, 28, 29, 48, 60, 61, 63
Turkistan, 49, 59
U
Ukraine, 23–24, 29, 38, 40, 55, 68, 69, 73, 74, 75, 100, 109, 110, 111, 112, 113
Union of October 17 (Octobrists), 57, 64
universal military service, establishment of, 33
university, as center of revolutionary activities, 33–34
Unofficial Committee, 13, 14
Uvarov, Sergey, 23
W
War Communism, 71–72
Westernizers, 21, 22
What Is to Be Done?, 42
Witte, Sergey, 39, 50, 54
workday, restrictions on length of, 39
World War I, 61–64, 65, 66, 68
Y
Yeltsin, Boris, 85, 86, 87
economic reforms, 88–92
foreign policy, 100–101
policy on ethnic groups, 98–100
political reforms, 92–98, 103, 105
Z
Zemlya I Volya (“Land and Freedom”), 34
zemstvos, 31, 35, 52
