Government and foreign policy in Russian empire from Cambridge history of Russia, volume 2

Central government

ZHAND P. SHAKIBI

Introduction

A study of the central government of the Russian Empire sheds light on three important issues in the imperial era. How well did the institutions handle the challenge of modernisation from above? How did the autocracy's and bureaucracy's view of their respective roles in society change over time? What were the major challenges related to effective governance from the centre and how did the monarchy and bureaucracy handle them? By extension a solid understanding of the workings of central government helps to determine the extent to which it and its personnel held responsibility for the collapse of the Romanov regime.

Peter the Great's reform of the central government marked the begin­ning of the imperial bureaucracy's evolution on two different but equally important and mutually linked levels. The ministerial bureaucracy from the early nineteenth century staffed the so-called subordinate organs (podchinen- nye organy), which at least theoretically handled activities in a designated field, such as finance or foreign affairs. The supreme organs (verkhovnye organy) had the responsibility to manage and co-ordinate the activities of the subor­dinate organs. The effectiveness of government depended on cadres at least as much as institutions. Indeed, Konstantin Pobedonostsev, well-known con­servative and tutor to the last two emperors, Alexander III and Nicholas II, frequently stressed, 'Institutions are of no importance. Everything depends on individuals.'[1] Whilst his categorical rejection of the role of institutions is highly debatable, we do need to take into account the dynamic between institutions and human agents, the most important of whom was the emperor, in order to obtain a more coherent understanding of how the central organs actually functioned.[2]

Subordinate organs (podchinennye organy)

For most of his reign Peter the Great (1689-1725), occupied with transforming Russia into a great European power, relied primarily on the form of central government he had inherited. His predecessors, the first Romanovs, governed through some forty chancelleries (prikazy) which constituted the heart of the central governing organs. Noble servitors, often of boyar level, headed the prikazy: underthem served non-noble cadres. Responsibilities and jurisdictions of the prikazy greatly overlapped and frequently contradicted each other, making difficult even relatively efficient government, including the extraction from society of resources needed to support Peter's military campaigns.

Peter, who had acquainted himself with the bureaucratic machines of some of the great powers of Europe, understood that this unwieldy structure could not help him realise his goal of making Russia a major European power. Like many of his fellow monarchs, Peter believed that more effective governing institutions provided the best mechanism for solving economic and societal ills. As a result, in the last seven years of his reign (1718-25) Peter set his sights on introducing radical change in Russia's central governing organs, a process which marked the end of the country's patrimonial state.

His plan on the one hand of founding a system of subordinate organs operating on rational concepts of administration similar to those of Western and Central Europe, and on the other hand of maintenance of the autoc­racy's establishment of the norms and rules for the bureaucracy remained a goal of Russia's monarchs until the end of the dynasty. However, as time would show, the concentration of absolute power in the hands of the emperor made realisation of this goal difficult. Peter's immediate concern was improvement of the government's taxing mechanism, establishment of budgetary controls and supervision over expenditures. Along with this came greater centralisation of power and increased governmental penetration into society.

The heart of the system of subordinate organs was the colleges. Initially there were Foreign Affairs, War, Navy (which also looked after gun manu­facture and the forests), Mining (which was also charged with the minting of money), Manufacture, Revenue, Control, State Expenditure, Commerce and Justice.³ Each college was headed by a president chosen by Peter from his clos­est associates under whom in turn served a small group often to eleven trained officials who collectively took decisions within the college's purview.⁴ A poor level of co-ordination between the individual college's various departments characterised the new system. However, the colleges were an improvement on the previous prikaz system. One of the major reasons for the emergence of the Russian Empire as a great power in the eighteenth century was this new administrative structure which proved effective in tax collection and military recruitment.⁵ At the same time the Ottoman Empire's failure to copy such reforms played a large role in its decline.⁶ But a great degree of overlapping remained. Frequently one area of activity fell under the jurisdiction of sev­eral colleges. That government was not divided into administrative, judicial, legislative and fiscal functions, but rather into blocks of activities helped cre­ate the conditions for institutional autonomous existence and also for poor responsiveness to co-ordination and integration from above.

Duringthe remainder ofthe eighteenth century these centrifugaltendencies strengthened. Increasingly, individual heads ofthe colleges in private meetings with the monarch enacted policy in a haphazard manner. However the real power of the colleges and their ability to make policy were dependent to a large degree on the monarch and the influence of various groups around him or her. Not infrequently a college was charged with implementing policies which it had played no part in making. Whether the colleges made policy or the monarch and his or her closest servitors did so, overall co-ordination was poor. Catherine the Great (r. 1762-96) weakened the colleges with her Statute of Provincial Reforms of 1775 which transferred most of the their responsibilities to provincial governors. However, the central bureaucracy

3 Throughout the eighteenth century various colleges appeared and then were abolished according to the needs of the time.

4 Several small departments handling various aspects of a college's portfolio made up each college. Moreover, attached to each college was a chancellery which handled adminis­trative issues.

5 L. Hughes, Russia in the Age of Peter the Great (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998) pp. 133-5. However, Hughes adds: 'If the grand aim of the exercise was to impose order' and 'to make Russia better governed' Peter's reforms were not very successful.

6 D. Lieven, Empire: The Russian Empire and Its Rivals (London: John Murray, 2000), p. 140.

remained. During the eighteenth century its size increased in conjunction with a growing professionalism, thereby providing a springboard for the next major change in the subordinate organs under Alexander I.

Ministerial government

Alexander I (r. 1801-25) established Russia's ministerial system which lasted until the collapse of the Romanov dynasty in February 1917.⁷ The young emperor initially toyed with the idea of constitutional change but soon showed a pref­erence for administrative reform which he saw as more essential for effective government and Russia's modernisation and less threatening to his autocratic power.

Alexander replaced what remained of Peter's collegiate system with min­istries, a step which reinforced centralised power. He intended the ministries to be the highest subordinate organs headed by individual ministers who were appointed by and responsible to the emperor alone. The initial ministries were War, Navy, Foreign Affairs, Justice, Internal Affairs, Finance, Commerce, and Education. The number of ministries did not differ greatly until the beginning of the twentieth century. The founding of a ministerial system with its relatively clear responsibilities, specialised functions and internal structure represented an important step in the evolution of Russia's subordinate organs. Moreover, unlike the collegiate system where decisions were at least theoretically taken collectively within each college, a single minister directed a ministry, thereby increasing administrative efficiency.

Regular ministerial reports, written and oral, constituted the heart of the new system. Ministers met individually with the emperorto deliver oral reports and make policy decisions on matters at least theoretically directly related only to their own ministerial portfolio. The emperors preferred this arrangement for it provided them the opportunity to exercise direct personal influence over the administration of the empire. In addition, the emperors ensured for themselves a central and pivotal role in the running of government by ensuring they were the only ones privy to the activities and policies of all the ministries. Ministers also had the right to propose legislation and to participate in discussions over proposed laws.

The establishment of the ministerial system laid the groundwork for the emergence of a large and functionally differentiated bureaucratic apparatus. Alexander I and his successor, Nicholas I (r. 1825-55) also established univer­sities and lycees to train future high-level bureaucrats, increasingly seen as

7 J. Hartley, Alexander I (London: Longman, 1994); S.V Mironenko, Samoderzhavie i reformy: politicheskaiabor'bavRossii vnachale XIXv. (Moscow: Nauka, 1989).

the key to better government. Under Nicholas I and Alexander II (r. 1855-81) the bureaucratic machine grew immensely in size and became more profes­sional, especially at the higher and middle ranks.[3] In 1847 Count S. S. Uvarov bemoaned that the bureaucracy as an institution had acquired a sovereignty of its own capable of rivalling that of the monarch. The increasing bureaucrati- sation had created a noble bureaucratic elite which the landed nobility viewed as a threat to its interests and its access to the monarch. As the nineteenth century progressed, much of the bureaucratic class came to regard the landed nobility as a relic of a bygone era and an obstacle to the further development of Russia. Beginning already during the reign of Catherine II and intensifying in the nineteenth century the landed nobility fought with the bureaucracy for influence over the emperor. At the same time, many of the senior officials came from land-owning families. Accompanying this process was increasing empha­sis on the bureaucracy's role as catalyst for social and/or economic change, which began to take serious shape as a result of Catherine II's thoughts on enlightened despotism and gained irreversible momentum with the Emanci­pation of the Serfs and the Great Reforms under Alexander II. Consequently the bureaucracy's view of itself began to evolve. The bureaucrats of the sev­enteenth and eighteenth centuries regarded themselves as personal servitors of the tsar. By the last half of the nineteenth century the class of professional bureaucrats felt a genuine institutional loyalty, an esprit de corps. This insti­tutional identity and the idea of service to the state as public officials began to compete with the person of the monarch for the bureaucracy's ultimate loyalty.

Modernisation from above, however, created administrative problems between the subordinate organs. Given the absence ofpublic forums or parlia­mentary institutions, debates over the desirability and form of modernisation, and over how to handle its socioeconomic consequences took place within the bureaucratic structures, posing a challenge to bureaucratic efficiency.[4]The best-known cleavage emerged between the two most powerful subor­dinate organs, the Ministry of Finance and the Ministry of Internal Affairs. One of the greatest struggles between them dealt with labour issues around the turn of the twentieth century and had its origins in the priorities of the respective ministries. The prime responsibility of the Ministry of Internal Affairs was the maintenance of public order throughout the Empire. Moreover, many aristocrats, who believed that the autocracy had a responsibility to look after the wellbeing of the less fortunate in Russian society (namely the peas­ants and workers) staffed this ministry. They regarded worker disturbances, which became more frequent towards the end of the nineteenth century, as the logical consequence of the labourers' poor working conditions and pay, and therefore saw the factory owners as exploiters. While meeting striking workers with force, the Ministry of Interior supported policies which aimed at improving the lot of the worker at the expense of the emerging class of industrialists.

The Ministry of Finance's primary responsibility was the rapid indus­trialisation of Russia, which its head Sergei Witte regarded as essential if Russia was to avoid becoming a second-rate power and provider of natu­ral resources to the great powers of Europe. To achieve this goal a Russian class of industrialists was needed, as was foreign investment. Witte regarded the Ministry of Internal Affairs' view on the labour problem as damaging for the realisation of the greater goal of industrialisation. The Ministry of Internal Affairs responded that the strikes derived from the workers' condi­tions and posed a serious political danger. In the absence of co-ordination from above these two ministries spent much time and energy either waging a bureaucratic struggle to gain control over the labour problem or follow­ing their respective and ultimately contradictory labour policies. One result of this administrative chaos was the large worker rebellions during the 1905 Revolution.

The conclusion can be reached that modernisation from above strength­ened the process of atomisation of the ministries, each of which pursued its own policies, purpose and courses of action. This is not to say, however, that ministers were at each other's throats most of the time. Inevitably they under­stood the necessity of collaboration in most cases. A set of informal, unwritten procedures to regulate their relationship with each other emerged over time. In addition whenever a threat to overall ministerial integrity emerged, such as excessive influence of a figure outside of government, the bureaucratic esprit de corps worked to check it. The ministries had been established with the purpose of reorganising government into a single administrative system. By the last quarter of the nineteenth century the ministerial bureaucracy was capable of making and implementing policy but also had evolved into separate organisa­tions, each with its own purpose which strengthened the need for stable and efficient supreme co-ordinating organs.

Supreme organs (Verkhovnye organy)

From the establishment of the collegiate system to the 1917 February Revo­lution, the imperial government faced the challenges of co-ordination, unity and supervision of the subordinate organs. Peter founded the Senate on 22 February 1711. His handwritten decree failed to enunciate clearly this supreme organ's responsibilities, save one. He charged the Senate with administering the empire when he absented himself from the capital to command troops in the field. That same day Russia declared war on the Ottoman Empire. A second decree dated March of that same year to a significant degree delineated the Senate's duties. In the period before the establishment of the collegiate system, the Senate was charged with increasing the amount of taxes collected, improvingtax collecting organs, rooting out corruption, and supervision ofthe state's expenditure. It could issue its own directives which all institutions were required to obey. The Senate was indeed governing, exercising the executive, legislative and judicial powers of the monarch.

With the establishment of the collegiate system, the Senate lost administra­tive duties, such as tax collection, and received the responsibility of a supreme organ - co-ordination and supervision of the subordinate organs, the colleges. The Senate combined this with its role as a higher judicial body which was to provide a degree of conformity in the interpretation of the empire's laws. The presidents of the colleges were members of the Senate until 1722 when Peter came to the conclusion that having the heads of subordinate organs participate in the supreme organs whose responsibility was oversight of those same subordinate organs was counterproductive and discontinued the prac­tice. The Senate's performance did not satisfy Peter, who eventually appointed a procurator-general who represented him in the Senate and was responsible to him alone. The procurator-general's role was supervisory, confirming the Senate's decrees and ensuring it carried out its duties and the emperor's will.

In the period between Peter's death in 1725 and the enthronement of Cather­ine II in 1762 the supreme organs existed in a state of great flux, reflecting a lack of institutionalisation and dependence on the attitudes of individual monarchs and high servitors. Under Catherine I (r. 1725-7) and Peter II (r. 1727-30) the Senate's role as a supreme organ diminished with the establishment of the Supreme Privy Council, the intended co-ordinating point of the subordinate organs. Anna Ivanovna (r. 1730-40), suspicious of the Supreme Privy Council given its members' attempt to limit her autocratic power at the beginning of her reign, in 1731 abolished it. The new focal point ofthe administration became Her Majesty's Cabinet. Elizabeth (r. 1741-62) abolished this body and restored many powers to the Senate, though real power of co-ordination remained in the hands of those close to the empress herself. Nonetheless, the Senate reviewed and approved most of the legislation of her reign. These changes in the supreme organs reflected a three-way battle for real power. One between the aristocracy and the bureaucratic bodies, one between the aristocracy and the autocracy, and another between the autocrat and the growing bureaucracy.

Catherine II was keen to reorganise the central organs which to her mind sorely lacked co-ordination and efficiency. Her adviser, Nikita Panin, stressed the need to found some form of imperial council capable of co-ordination and to establish an effective relationship between the monarch, the Senate and other governmental institutions. Taking into consideration Panin's views, the empress subordinated the Senate to the procurator-general once again, believing like Peter the Great before her, that a supervisor of the supervisory body would create the conditions for a more smooth and unified central government. Nevertheless by the end of her reign the continuous need for an effective mechanism capable of co-ordinating government was clear, especially given the growing tendency to see change in society as the responsibility of the government.

Co-ordination of the subordinate organs, the relationship between the supreme organs themselves and more specifically between them and the sovereign, were at the base of Alexander I's major administrative reforms. His decrees of 1801 and 1802 fundamentally changed the Senate's role. The body received the right of judicial review and supervision of the highest gov­ernment organs, including the newly established ministries. Given his fleeting interest in constitutional change, Alexander gave senators the right to make remonstrances to the emperor and stipulated that no bill could become law without its approval. When the Senate exercised this right soon after, Alexan­der rescinded it. Clearly the supreme organs were to occupy themselves with co-ordination of the subordinate organs, not with infringement on the auto­cratic power. The founding of ministerial government and of the State Council (1810) led to the sidelining of the Senate in practice. For the remainder of the nineteenth century it was a High Court of Review and along with other insti­tutions exercised a degree of administrative supervision.

Yet the problem of effective supreme organs remained. Count Mikhail M. Speranskii, Alexander's close adviser and regarded by many as the father of the modern imperial bureaucracy, argued that 'in the present system of gov­ernment there is no institution for the general deliberation of governmental affairs from the point of view of their legislative aspect. The absence of such an institution leads to major disorders and confusion in all aspects of the administration.'[5] Recognising this, Alexander founded the State Council. On the day of its inauguration he drew attention to the reasons for taking this step:

The order and uniformity of state affairs require that there be a single focal point for their general consideration. In the present structure of our adminis­tration, we do not have such an institution. In such a vast state as this, how can various parts of the administration function with harmony and success when each moves in its own direction and when these directions nowhere lead to a central focus? Given the great variety of state affairs, the personal activity of the supreme power alone cannot maintain this unity. Beyond this, individuals die and only institutions can survive and, in the course of centuries, preserve the basis of a state ... The State Council will form the focal point of all affairs of the central administration.[6]

The intention was that the establishment of the State Council, which should be considered a major development in the history of the central government of the empire, was to end the search for a supreme co-ordinating organ begun some one hundred years previously under Peter I.

The emperor appointed the State Council's membership which consisted of sitting ministers and other high dignitaries. The body had no right to initiate legislation, which remained the prerogative ofthe autocrat and ministers, but it could make recommendations on legislation sent to it, which the emperor could accept or reject. In theory no legislative project could be presented to the emperor without the State Council's approval. Practice proved otherwise. At times the emperor and ministers chose or established alternative ways to push through legislation if the path through the State Council was considered too difficult. Nevertheless, the State Council did provide a forum for the debate, reformulation and preparation of legislation before its delivery to the emperor.

Russia's elite hoped the founding of the State Council would place the gov­ernmental and legislative process on some form of legal basis. With the State Council, Russia was to be an orderly autocratic state fixed on a foundation of law and legal process. But the continued existence of the autocracy under­mined in practice this supreme organ. Alexander III (r. 1881-94), by a decree dated 5 November 1885, legalised what had been long going on in practice. According to the decree, all commands of the emperor carried the full force of legality. The State Council's role in the legislative process was fatally weakened. The upshot was the strengthening of the tendency on the part of ministers to avoid seeking support amongst members of the supreme organs or fellow ministers and to rely on the emperor's support alone to obtain passage of legislation.

Alexander I, with two decrees dated 1802 and 1812, founded the Committee of Ministers. Its most important short-term responsibility was to govern the empire while he was at the front fighting Napoleon. The committee was charged with overall co-ordination of administrative issues as they emerged amongst the various subordinate organs and therefore could not become a supreme co-ordinating organ. A chairman headed the committee, a position which by the middle of the nineteenth century carried no great authority. When Sergei Witte was removed from his post as minister of finance in 1903 and made chairman he considered it a demotion. The emperor in theory could attend the committee, but almost never did so until its dissolution in 1906, thereby further weakening the committee's authority. Ministerial disunity and the committee's weak institutional authority limited its ability to have any real effect. In any case the available evidence does not show that Alexander even wanted the committee to play a cabinet-style role. On the one hand, he wished that ministers co-ordinate policies and consult each other before presenting bills for his consideration. But his continued practice of meeting in private with individual ministers undermined any moves in that direction. The committee did have the right to draw the monarch's attention to the need for a particular law or policy.

Alexander I initially showed a fair amount of interest in the Committee of Ministers, which enabled it to enjoy a relatively prominent role. However, in the final years of his reign he showed a decreasing inclination to rule, preferring to give greater authority to favourites. By deciding policy and making laws in meetings with individual ministers, Alexander or his current favourite greatly undercut the authority of the supreme institutions. Despite his intention to establish a degree of legality, routine and institutionalisation, Alexander fol­lowed in the footsteps of his illustrious predecessors, Peter I and Catherine II, and succumbed to the desire to rely primarily on personalities and pay less attention to institutions. Peter's legacy of 'institutional order as well as one of individual wilfulness' remained until the end of the empire.[7]

Nicholas I showed little trust for the supreme and subordinate organs estab­lished by Alexander. He preferred to govern the empire through ad hoc com­mittees dedicated to specific issues and through His Majesty's Own Personal Chancellery which Paul I had founded in 1796. By placing the chancellery above the supreme and subordinate organs and under his direct control, Nicholas fur­ther centralised power in his hands and in practice stripped the State Council, Senate and Committee of Ministers of their more significant functions. In the aftermath of the Decembrist revolt Nicholas believed he was fighting a two- front war. One was against the increasing penetration into Russia of Western ideas dangerous to the autocracy which required greater control over society. The other was against the enemy within the autocracy itself- the bureaucracy. As the bureaucracy increased in size, Russian monarchs struggled to maintain personal control over it and to overcome bureaucratic inertia which seemed increasingly to block the imperial will. Nicholas's response to this was the pro­motion of the chancellery, which to his mind provided for greater monarchical control over both the bureaucracy and society.

The chancellery's First Section prepared documents for the emperor's review and supervised the bureaucracy's personnel. The Second Section, under the administration of Speranskii, worked on the codification of the empire's laws. Between 1828 and 1830 Russia's laws, broadly defined and with some exceptions, were published. In 1832 a law code was published, which replaced the Law Code of 1649. At long last the government had written relatively coher­ent rules. The Fifth Section, established in 1836, studied the living conditions of state peasants and pursued reforms designed to improve them. Its research became a basis for the Emancipation of the Serfs in 1861 during the reign of Alexander II.

The Third Section became most well-known because of its police and super­visory functions that were equivalent to an internal intelligence service. It was a relatively effective state organ for the collection and analysis of information and for the implementation of the emperor's will. Five subsections handled wide-ranging duties, which included surveillance of society and rooting out of corruption in the state apparatus, censorship, investigation of political crimes and management of relations between landowner and peasant.

The autocracy's reliance on the chancellery lessened greatly with the start of Alexander II's reign. The problem of co-ordination of the subordinate organs became more acute with the continued growth in the size, tasks and com­plexity of the ministries, and once the new emperor decided to pursue the emancipation of the serfs and other reforms. The existing avenues for govern­ing and co-ordination open to Alexander could not provide the mechanism needed for ministerial unity and co-ordination. The State Council was too large and unwieldy a body while the Committee of Ministers, itself also a large body, was bogged down in sorting out administrative detail. In 1857 Alexander founded the Council of Ministers which was to be the supreme organ capable of preparing and implementing reforms free of bureaucratic inertia, ensuring co-ordination of ministers and policy-making and thereby increasing the power of the emperor, under whose direct control the body existed.

No provisions were made for the post of a co-ordinating figure such as a first minister or chairman. That vital function the emperor himself was to fill. It was expected that the monarch would frequently himself chair the council's meetings. The purpose of this was twofold. Firstly, the emperor along with his ministers could consider legislation put forward by individual ministers before its submission to the State Council. This would create the conditions for greater policy co-ordination and coherence. Secondly, by obtaining collective council support for a measure, Alexander hoped to create ministerial unity behind policy decisions.

However, Alexander was not prepared to give up the great personal control afforded by the individual ministerial reports to him in private or to accept a first minister or chairman of the council. The ministers for their part under­stood that a guarantee of policy success was not obtained by discussion with colleagues in the Council of Ministers, but rather by going after the emperor's ear. This was the crux of the issue. Neither autocrat nor ministers wished in reality to see the full institutionalisation of the supreme organs which they correctly understood would lead to some limitation of their freedom of action. Consequently the Council of Ministers atrophied.

The Council of Ministers could not become the co-ordinating point of governmental and ministerial activity . . . The unequal status of its members and the presence of the tsar exercising absolute power prevented this. This situation prevented the emergence of a collegiate organ and transformed it into a personal council of the tsar where collective discussion of questions was used to discover the position of the tsar himself. If we take into account that in practice the ministers continued to deliver reports to the tsar individually and privately, which should have been abandoned, it is easy to come to the conclusion that the last attempt before the Revolution of 1905-1906 to create in Russia a supreme collegiate organ failed and the central parts of governmental administration in the country remained disconnected.[8]

By the 1870s a dangerous political situation faced Alexander. Radicals stepped up their action against the monarchy, even attempting to assassinate the emperor himself. At the same time the government was losing moderate public opinion due to the slowing pace ofreform. Alexander understood that decisive action which required a united and co-ordinated government was needed to deal with the threat posed by the radicals and regain a degree of public support. In February 1880 Alexander made Count Loris-Melikov chief ofthe newly established Supreme Administrative Commission, a virtual dicta­tor charged with co-ordination of government policies. Loris-Melikov quickly realised that full support of the emperor did not automatically give him the authority and real power to make the bureaucratic machine and its highest servants responsive to his wishes. Less than a month later he requested and received the portfolio of the Third Section. By the summer of 1880 this author­ity rooted in a bureaucratic entity was clearly not enough. Loris-Melikov disbanded the Supreme Commission and assumed stewardship of the most powerful bureaucratic institution, the Ministry of Internal Affairs. From this base, Loris-Melikov, with the open and full support ofAlexander II, conducted a ministerial reshuffle to ensure all members of the Council of Ministers could be counted on for strong support.

During the eighteenth and early nineteenth century favourites had indeed ruled for and in the name of the monarch, but they did not have a political base in a particular bureaucratic institution, such as a ministry. By the second half of the nineteenth century the subordinate organs had become so large and unwieldy that when co-ordination of action and policy-making became necessary, the co-ordinating figure needed to have a base in a subordinate organ which provided real power. Alexander II had accidentally found a rel­atively effective way for establishing order among the subordinate organs. Alexander III and Nicholas II adopted this modus operandi, commonly alter­nating between the Ministry of Internal Affairs and the Ministry of Finance as the focal point of co-ordination of domestic policy. There was an addi­tional benefit to this approach. It did not raise sensitivities over threats to the emperor's authority. A first minister or chairman of a ministerial council could prove a rival to the supreme monarchical power given his mediating role between the monarch and the ministers. The use of one 'strong' minister was one response to the recurring problem of co-ordination of the subor­dinate organs, policy direction and the preservation of the personal power of the autocracy. However, the unofficial status of a 'strong minister' com­bined with the absence of a first minister or chairman created conditions in which if the emperor did not play his designated co-ordinating role, supreme and then subordinate organs lost direction. It also meant that overall gov­ernment policy could be excessively influenced by the perceptions of one ministry.

Autocrat and autocracy

Whatever the extent to which the subordinate organs improved in the impe­rial era, if the supreme organs failed to regulate the relationship between the highest members of the bureaucracy and to provide the means for rela­tive unity in both policy-making and execution at the very top, governmen­tal paralysis and disaster could ensue. Central to the issue of the supreme organs was the monarch, who appointed the highest members of the state apparatus and was ultimately responsible for co-ordinating and directing their actions. The importance of this role increased in the absence of a first min­ister. The monarch's modus operandi, views and opinions until the collapse of the Romanov state clearly exercised a vital impact on the subordinate and supreme organs' everyday operation and on the state's ability to act and react to the changing environment in which it found itself. Several years before the revolution of 1905 Witte summed up the situation for Nicholas II. 'These questions [i.e. key strategic issues - Z.S.] can only be properly solved if you yourself take the lead in the matter, surrounding yourself with people chosen for the job.... The bureaucracy itself cannot solve such matters on its own.'¹⁴ Autocracy was the form of government in Russia until 1905 when in theory a semi-constitutional monarchy was established. The official conception of the autocracy stressed that all political power and legitimacy emanated from the autocrat, who claimed to be God's representative on earth and responsible to Him alone. The autocracy was seen as uniquely Russian and the historical source of her greatness, indeed the only institution capable of mobilising and directing Russia's resources and of ensuring the empire's unity and moderni­sation. Therefore it was said that any diminution of its power, in theory or in practice, would have negative consequences for the future of Russia. The idea of union between the people and the autocratic tsar with strong paternalistic overtones constituted the base of the autocracy's ideology. Whilst carrying the title of emperor the tsar was also known as the 'little father' who according to apologists for the autocracy acted as the arbiter between the various self- interested groups in society, preventing exploitation and guaranteeing supreme truth and justice. The vast and relatively quick expansion of the bureaucracy in the nineteenth century made the emperors suspicious of its growing power and potential to infringe on the exercise of autocratic power. One result was a longing for a time when the tsar supposedly ruled his domains directly and maintained contact with his people. Consequently the monarch began to be portrayed as the defender of the people from his own bureaucracy. Nicholas

14 Quoted in D. Lieven, Nicholas II (London: John Murray, 1993), p. 84.

II took on this view to a much greater extent than any of his predecessors, which resulted in a behaviour that only created greater chaos in the central governing organs at a time of growing social and political problems.

The emperors and supporters of the autocratic principle understood that the growth ofthe bureaucracy, and specifically the functional specialisation and impersonalisation of government that accompanied it, was slowly and seem­ingly irreversibly eroding the practical extent to which the autocrat could exercise his power. At the same time the emperors recognised the need to instil order into the expanding system in order to improve co-ordination of governmental organs and policy-making and establish a form of legality and predictability. Their goal remained that the autocrat was to create laws and establish institutions which were to operate within the law whilst he would remain above the law, implementing absolute justice. Yet the systemisation of the governing organs eroded further the practical exercise of autocratic authority. Therefore the emperors whilst on the one hand attempting to intro­duce order into the system, at the same time undermined their own supreme organs, seeing in them a potential threat to their power. They established ad hoc committees or commissions to draw up decrees, supervise the execution of policy, or oversee the government of a territory. Alexander III's remark that he despised the administration and drank champagne to its destruction succinctly describes how Russia's emperors felt about the bureaucratic machine.

Even Alexander III, the embodiment of paternalist autocrat, clearly under­stood, however, that he could not govern without the bureaucracy. Even an intelligent and active monarch could not hope to govern the realm without the guidance, knowledge and administrative help of ministers. Ideally decisions were to be made within the supreme organs through the gathering of infor­mation and deliberation and analysis by experts. The reality of government then as always differed. Institutional and personal rivalries abounded, opinions differed sharply among ministers and top officials as regards both strategy and tactics. Of course, people seldom reach the top in politics without powerful egos and aggressive and ambitious personalities. The chief executive officer of any regime must ensure that such egos and squabbles do not paralyse the state's capacity to act and react. No Russian minister could formulate or exe­cute any major policy without the explicit support of the monarch, who was therefore essentially the chief executive.

A successful minister had to retain the monarch's favour and consequently fortify and expand his power and influence with him by limiting the influence of, or discrediting fellow ministers. Consequently, a monarch could end up with a group of men who, rather than striving for a unified government, engaged in factional fighting and policy sabotage. This situation is attributable also to the absence of collective responsibility or of a common institutional or ideological loyalty (e.g. to a political party) amongst the ministers to balance departmental and personal conflicts. In the end most monarchs realised that a great degree of ministerial unity was needed if the government was to accomplish anything. That is particularly true as the bureaucratic apparatus grew in scale and specialisation and society became more complex.

However, one key question was who would fulfil the role of the co­ordinating centre? There was no reason in principle why a monarch himself could not fulfil the role of a first minister, engendering unity and co-ordinating the state's servants at the highest level. Louis XIV of France, Alexander III of Russia and Joseph II of Austria all governed in this way.[9] But to act as life­time chief executive officer and bear the burdens of head of state could easily break a twentieth-century monarch given the sheer complexity and scale of a modern government's activity. Alternatively, if the monarch recognised his unwillingness or inability to fulfil this role he could throw the full weight of the monarchy's power behind a chief minister. This would be done to ensure governmental unity in the absence of an active monarch. The relationships between Louis XIII and Cardinal Richelieu, Wilhelm I of Prussia/Germany and Otto von Bismarck, Alexander I and Count A. A. Arakcheev and Empress Maria-Teresa of Austria and Kaunitz are examples of this situation. Russian emperors could in extraordinary circumstances decide to appoint, perhaps temporarily, a Richelieu. Despite the growing size of the tsarist bureaucracy there was no reason one figure could not macro-manage it.[10] To entrust the job to a man who could be dismissed if too unpopular and who was not burdened with the job of chief executive officer for life made good sense. If, however, the monarch for any reason could not fulfil this co-ordinating role and refused to allow a capable first minister to do so, a hole in the centre of government emerged, fatally weakening its ability to act and react.

Russian emperors feared that a unified ministry would lead to 'ministerial despotism', whereby ministers would either limit the flow of information to the monarch or present a unified front on various policy decisions with the aim of obtaining imperial consent. Ministers did in fact have the opportunity to block both the flow of information to the monarch and the execution of policy since it was they who controlled to a great extent what the emperor did and did not see. Therefore the emperors adopted a form of divide and rule in a bid to protect monarchical power and the monarch's room for manoeuvre.

These were not problems or expedients unique to the Russian monarchy. A monarch's problems became more acute with the growth of the bureaucratic machinery of state. Not surprisingly, Imperial China, the first polity to develop a large and sophisticated bureaucracy, also provided some of the earliest and most spectacular examples of a monarch's efforts to struggle against bureau­cratic encroachment on royal power. The Ming Emperor Wanli (1572-1620), dis­gusted with bureaucratic infighting, inertia and intransigence withdrew from governing altogether, refusing for years to meet with his top bureaucrats.[11]The first Ming emperor, T'ai-tsu, deeply suspicious of high-level bureaucrats, 'fractured bureaucratic institutions' in order to exercise real control and enable greater flow of information to himself. When his successors proved less com­petent or willing chief executives than the dynasty's founder this contributed greatly to the Ming regime's collapse.[12]

A more modern example of the chief executive's dilemma is provided by President Richard Nixon's building up of the National Security Council in order to make certain that various viewpoints could be heard and debated at the top, and clear policy choices thereby presented to him. Nixon wanted all differences of view to be 'identified and defended, rather than muted or buried'. Nixon stated that he did not want 'to be confronted with a bureaucratic consensus that leaves me no option but acceptance or rejection, and that gives me no way of knowing what alternatives exist'.[13]

The Russian emperors' response to the chief executive's dilemma was use of courtiers, unofficial advisers, or officials from outside the 'responsi­ble' ministry's line-of-command to the great chagrin of their ministers. At times these figures constituted a useful alternative source of information and opinion. However, even when this was true, the co-ordination and consis­tency/execution of policy once a decision had been made had to be ensured, which often failed to happen under Nicholas II. Sometimes Nicholas would use such people to implement a policy which for some reason or another was not being followed by the responsible ministry. This happened as regards for­eign policy in the Far East, with the Russo-Japanese War as its consequence: another example was the establishment of the police trade unions, the rem­nants of which led the march to the Winter Palace on Bloody Sunday.

The last emperor was infamous for his suspicion of his ministers. During a meeting over foreignpolicy in the Far East, Minister ofWar Aleksei Kuropatkin, worried by Nicholas's tendency to listen to the counsel of unofficial advisors, complained that, '(your) confidence in me would only grow when I ceased to be a minister'. Nicholas responded, 'It is strange, you know, but perhaps that is psychologically correct.'[14] To do Nicholas justice, this was not a unique situation. Louis XV, frustrated by his foreign minister's failure to share his enthusiasm for Poland and Sweden, conducted a secret policy with these two countries, whilst George II of England sent secret agents to negotiate with Saxony and Austria in contradiction with his own government's policy.

Post 1905

As a result of the revolution of 1905 Russia became a semi-constitutional monar­chy. The now half-elected State Council became the upper house of the par­liamentary system. The Duma made up the lower house.[15]

The major change in the central governing organs was the prominence given to the Council of Ministers as the focal point of the administration and, more importantly, the emergence of the council's chairman. This figure held the responsibility of co-ordinating policy-making and ministerial activity and ensuring unity in the council. Many figures inside and outside of government came to the conclusion that the causes of the disasters of 1904-6 could be linked to the chaos and disunity of the subordinate organs resulting from faulty supreme organs. Particular blame was placed on Nicholas II who came to be regarded as unable to play the co-ordinating role demanded by the autocratic system. This drive for ministerial unity under the leadership of the chairman ofthe Council of Ministers predictably raised sensitivities concerning infringement on the emperor's real power and role. Nicholas II summed up his feeling in a telling comment. 'He (Peter A. Stolypin, chairman of the Council of Ministers, 1906-1911) dies in my service, true, but he was always so anxious to keep me in the background. Do you suppose that I liked always reading in the papers that the chairman of the council of ministers had done this . . . The chairman had done that? Don't I count? Am I nobody?'[16] For the rest of his reign Nicholas worked towards the emasculation of the chairman's power, which he considered a direct threat to his authority. However, he himself was unable to co-ordinate his government or provide astute political leadership - with disastrous consequences.

Nicholas's undermining of his own government was owed above all to his personality, though also to his conception ofhis role as patriarch ofhis people, and to the suspicion and contempt of bureaucracy widespread in Russian soci­ety.[17] Even Kaiser Wilhelm II of Germany, let alone Emperor Francis Joseph of Austria never undermined their chief ministers to the degree Nicholas sabotaged Stolypin and after him, Vladimir Kokovtsev. More importantly, the Hohenzollern and Habsburg monarchs did not see a fundamental differ­ence between themselves and the policies followed by their governments.[18]Nicholas, however, regarded the Council of Ministers and the bureaucracy as direct threats to his power and worked to undermine them, which lead to paralysis of the central governing organs in the years before and during the First World War.

Modernisation from above

Inseparable from this discussion is the regime's institutional response to the challenges posed by modernisation from above. Unsurprisingly the achieve­ment and maintenance of great power status, an essential plank in Romanov legitimacy, became a driving force behind the evolution of subordinate and supreme governing organs under Peter the Great and subsequently. Defeat in the Crimean War put on top of the agenda not only the necessity for major socioeconomic reform on a scale not seen since the time of Peter, such as the abolition of serfdom, inculcation of legal principles and industrialisation, but also the enlargement and improvement of the bureaucracy, whose responsi­bility now was transformation of a society regarded as backward in relation to the advanced powers of Europe.

The Russian bureaucracy undertook one of the first programmes of mod­ernisation from above, having been forced to play many roles which belonged to private groups in the economically advanced countries of Europe. The regime collapsed in 1917, but to deny the positive contributions ofthe bureau­cratic system, despite all its faults, is difficult. Even if we just focus on the period from the Great Reforms to the Revolution the list of achievements is impressive: emancipation of the serfs, establishment of an independent judi­ciary system and local government (zemstvos), industrialisation, construction of a vast railway network, the beginnings of a constitutional form of govern­ment, Stolypin's land reforms, attempts at a genuine social welfare system and expansion of mass education. All of these required a fairly competent bureaucratic infrastructure as well as expertise and professionalism.[19] But the subordinate organs needed direction from above. In the absence of effec­tive supreme organs, many times the ministries handled 'personal and par­ticular problems, to the obvious detriment of larger, more important issues and unforeseen circumstances'.[20] In the end, Russia's subordinate organs in St Petersburg to a significant extent operated well, while the more serious problems of governing existed elsewhere in the supreme organs and in the modus operandi of the emperors and most especially of Nicholas II.

Provincial and local government

JANET M. HARTLEY

Introduction

A study of local government raises several important questions about the nature of the imperial Russian state, the level of development of provincial Russian society and the relationship between government and society in Rus­sia. To what extent did the government allow or wish to encourage a genuine decentralisation or devolution of power to the provinces? Could local gov­ernment institutions - either corporate institutions or 'all-class' institutions - flourish given both the pressures from the centre and the poor economic and cultural levels of rural Russia which inhibited the growth of an educated and politically conscious provincial society? To what extent can we even speak of a structure of local government when a significant proportion ofthe population - the peasants - were only rarely touched by it, at least until the Emancipation of 1861 and to some extent even thereafter? The status of local government - either as separate from the central bureaucracy or as an integral part of the government structure - was a major debate in Russia in the nineteenth cen­tury. At the root of these questions is the fundamental issue of the relationship between local government and the modernisation of the Russian state. On the one hand, local government was potentially a tool to stimulate corporate identity, urban self-confidence and economic and cultural progress across all sectors of society, including the peasantry after 1861. On the other hand, prob­lems in local government could be interpreted as symbolic of the failure, or the unwillingness, of the tsarist regime to adapt to change and to establish an effective relationship between state and society If the latter has some validity, then we have to ask in addition whether local government contributed to the downfall of the regime which created it.

Local government was a matter which concerned all the tsars but there were periods of particularly intensive and significant legislative activity, namely: (i) the reign of Peter I (1682-1725) when urban administration was reformed (in 1699 and more notably in 1721 when urban magistracies were established) and when, in 1718, the country was re-divided into gubernii (provinces), which were in turn subdivided into provintsii and uezdy (districts); (ii) the reign of Catherine II (1762-96) when three major laws were promulgated-the Statute of Provincial Administration of 1775 and the Charters to the Nobles and the Towns in 1785; (iii) the era of reforms in the decade which followed the Emancipation of the Serfs in 1861, which saw the introduction of the zemstvos (local elected assemblies) and the re-structuring of the legal system and reform of urban administration; (iv) the 1890s when many of the reforms of the 1860s were modified or curtailed. In addition, legislation which ostensibly only concerned central government - in particular the establishment of the Senate in 1711, the Ministry of Internal Affairs in 1802 and then the introduction of national representation in the State Duma (Parliament) in 1905 - had a significant impact on the functions of local institutions and their relationship with the centre. This chapter is concerned with Russian local administration but it should be noted that different structures, different traditions and even different law codes applied in many of the non-Russian parts of the empire until well into the nineteenth century and sometimes until 1917. These areas include the Baltic provinces, the lands of former Poland-Lithuania, the Ukraine, the Grand Duchy of Finland, the Caucasus and Central Asia.

The Centre and the provinces

Local government was an issue which spawned extensive, and lengthy, legis­lation over the whole imperial period (the 1775 Statute of Provincial Adminis­tration, for example, comprised 491 articles; the two statutes of 1864 and 1890 on the zemstvos comprised 120 and 138 articles respectively). The provenance and nature of this legislation reflect something of the relationship between the centre and the provinces. For the most part in the first two hundred years of this study, legislation was not stimulated by demands for its introduction from nobles or townspeople or by local officials. This does not mean, how­ever, that these groups had no views on the matter. When they were asked for opinions - as they were in the Legislative Commission of 1767, by N. A. Miliutin in the 1840s in the context of municipal reform of St Petersburg, and in the formulation of what became the zemstvo legislation in the late 1850s and early 1860s - they were prepared to give them and to highlight the inade­quacies of current local administration at the same time. But the timing and content of local government legislation was primarily determined by the tsars and their advisers and the institutional structures created were often based on Western models (which could be Swedish, Baltic, Prussian, French or English) rather than being drawn from analyses of local needs or the experiences of the provinces.

The 'dynamic, interventionist and coercive state', as Marc Raeff charac­terised Petrine Russia,¹ had always assumed that it had the power and the obligation to govern all aspects of the lives of its citizens. This belief was not, of course, unique to the Russian government, either in the eighteenth century or afterwards, but possibly featured most strongly in the Russian case because of the lack of balancing factors such as bodies representing estate interests, well- developed urban institutions or a powerful and independent Church hierarchy which existed elsewhere in Europe. A study of the legislation concerning local government, however, is not only central to the understanding of the inten­tions of central government but also exposes the weakness of the central government and the essential contradictions in tsarist policy. The government wanted to stimulate provincial and urban institutions of self-government and, by extension, stimulate the development of a provincial society, but it needed to control these institutions and ensure above all that they fulfilled state obliga­tions as a greater priority than satisfying local needs. The potential for conflict between provinces and the centre was always there but became more acute after the establishment of the zemstvos in the 1860s. The government also needed the participation of elected, and poorly paid, officials from members of provincial noble and urban society (and also state peasants after 1775 and former serfs after 1864) to staff local institutions (in particular, the lower levels of courts) because it lacked the trained manpower and the financial resources to fill these posts with a professional bureaucracy appointed from the centre. At the same time it feared the independence of these officials and attempted to co-opt them to carry out government policies and subordinated them to appointed representatives of the government and to ministries in the capital.

These dilemmas of the central government can be seen both in the general scope of local government legislation and in relation to the functions given to particular institutions and individuals. The centre determined the boundaries of units of local administration (and re-drew them at various times either to increase efficiency or to incorporate new territorial acquisitions, often with a deliberate neglect of historical territorial division), defined, created and abol­ished towns (and designed their coats of arms and determined the layouts of

1 M. Raeff, The Well-Ordered Police State: Social and Institutional Change through Law in the Germanies andRussia, 1600-1800 (New Haven: Yale University Press), p. 206.

the streets and the architectural styles to be employed),² decided the structure, social composition and areas of competence of all provincial and urban insti­tutions, defined the membership and groupings of urban society, determined and altered the franchise for towns, noble assemblies and zemstvos, and set the fiscal and other obligations of all institutions, including taxation and billeting of troops in civilian houses (that is, state and not local needs). At the same time, local institutions from the time of Peter I were obliged to report and respond to 'local needs' and to stimulate the local economy

The example of urban government in the eighteenth century will illustrate how government legislation could bear little relation to reality. Peter I and Catherine II tried to stimulate the corporate identity of townspeople and the economic development of Russian towns through legislation which deliber­ately attempted to incorporate 'Western' or 'European' practices. Both rulers attempted to introduce 'Western'-style craft guilds and passed regulations on their composition and on the training of apprentices (in 1785 Catherine even stipulated the hours of work for apprentices including the length of meal breaks!).³ Both rulers defined the composition of urban society by law, and in addition divided the merchantry into groups according to their declared capital, and then used these groupings as a basis for the composition of an elaborate structure of urban institutions of self-government based on repre­sentatives from each group (six groups in the Charter to the Towns in 1785). These definitions were modified in the reigns of Alexander I and Nicholas I but not fundamentally altered.

This legislation, however, ignored the reality of eighteenth-century urban life. In practice, very few towns outside a few exceptional centres like St Peters­burg and Moscow had a sufficiently developed economy or sufficiently wealthy merchants to fill all the social categories of townspeople as defined by Peter and Catherine. In 1786 it was reported that in the province of St Petersburg only the city of St Petersburg itself had representatives of all six urban groups and that only there were merchants divided into three guilds as Catherine had stipulated; the smaller district towns could not fill these social categories.⁴ Urban government could never therefore function as the legislation envisaged

2 R. Jones, 'Urban Planning and Development of Provincial Towns in Russia during the Reign of Catherine II', in J. G. Garrard (ed.), The Eighteenth Century in Russia (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1973), pp. 321-44.

3 PSZ, vol. 22, no. 16188, article 105, p. 378, The Charter to the Towns, 1785.

4 RGADA Moscow, Fond 16, d. 530, ll. 266-66ob, report by N. Saltykov to the Senate, 1786, also quoted in J. M. Hartley, A Social History of the Russian Empire 1650-1825 (London and New York: Longman, 1999), p. 42. This theme is developed more fully in J. M. Hartley, 'Governing the City: St Petersburg and Catherine II's reforms', in A. Cross (ed.), St Petersburg, 1703-1825 (London: Palgrave, 2003), pp. 99-118.

in the eighteenth century because representatives ofsome ofthe social groups on which the institutional structure was built simply did not exist. Further­more, Russian towns in this period were overwhelmingly peasant in compo­sition (state and serf) and these peasants were not only excluded from urban government but could also undercut urban guilds with their own home-made products. The attempt to revitalise urban life whist ignoring the peasant pres­ence in the towns, the competition of peasant craft goods and the impossibility of separating the town from the countryside in an overwhelmingly rural econ­omy made the import of Western-style institutions simply impractical. The dilemma facing local institutions of having to respond to local needs whilst carrying out their obligations to the state can also be seen in the weakness of eighteenth-century urban institutions. Service in urban institutions was unpopular and regarded as yet another state obligation - like billeting and conscription - imposed on a long-suffering and impoverished urban popula­tion. Urban institutions had only limited rights to impose taxation for local needs; their main function was to meet state fiscal obligations.

The ambiguity between local and national obligations is even more clearly illustrated by the zemstvos after 1864. Zemstvos were given considerable local rights, including the right to petition the governor directly on local concerns, to manage the local postal system, to have responsibility for local education and health, and to levy taxes for local as well as national needs. But these rights had only been granted after a ministerial struggle (in the centre, not in the provinces) over the merits of self-government versus central control. At the same time the governor was given the right to veto zemstvo activity if it conflicted with state interests. In practice, this meant inevitable conflict between zemstvos and local officials from the start and resulted in the curbing of the zemstvos' independent sphere of activities in 1890. This curb did nothing to ease relations between the zemstvo and the bureaucracy, and zemstvo radicalism increased after the accession of Nicholas II in 1894. Conflicts at the local level between zemstvo and governor were most heated over the zemstvos' right of taxation, particularly to raise income to provide education and healthcare, but more acute conflicts arose at the turn of the century between the zemstvos and officials in St Petersburg who by this stage not only opposed the rights of the zemstvo to claim much-needed taxation revenue but also had come to distrust every manifestation of what they regarded as elements of radical opposition to the regime.[21]

The most serious conflict between the zemstvos and the central bureau­cracy focused on the scope for inter-zemstvo contact and co-operation, a conflict which became part of the liberal opposition movement to the tsar up to and including the year 1905. Zemstvos were instructed to deal only with matters within the boundaries of their province and district. This restric­tion was based on the fear that the zemstvos, as representative bodies, albeit not democratic ones, would seek to expand their responsibilities upwards through co-operation with other provincial zemstvos and then ultimately in the 'crowning edifice' of a national body. The number of resolutions passed by zemstvos which included constitutional demands shows that this fear was not unfounded. This conflict was won by the zemstvos in the early twentieth century just as their political threat to the government diminished following the establishment of the State Duma and just as many of the provincial nobility who dominated the zemstvos were coming to renounce these liberal views. During the Russo-Japanese War of 1904-5, and again in the First World War, the government permitted the formation of an all-Russian union of zemstvos for the purpose of war relief.⁶

A further indication of the potential conflict in state-inspired local govern­ment can be seen in the relations between local and central officials. This was a dilemma from the start as Peter I attempted to reduce the influence of powerful voevody (military commanders) in the provinces by introducing governors in 1708. Governors always trod a difficult line, responsible for the conduct of local affairs whilst at the same time they were representatives of both the tsar and the central government. The sheer burden of work imposed by the centre - it has been estimated that governors had to sign over 100,000 papers per year by the 1840s⁷ - meant that there were practical impediments to devoting time to local affairs. Marshals of the nobility, elected by their fellow nobles, also faced the problem of representing the interests of the provincial nobles whilst being weighed down with bureaucratic functions imposed by the governor and the state.⁸ The provincial police force suffered from the same divided

Russia: An Experiment in Local Self-Government (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982), pp. 177-239. The rise of zemstvo radicalism is described in S. Galai, The Liberation Movement in Russia 1900-1905 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1973), pp. 7-35.

6 T. E. Porter, The Zemstvo and the Emergence of Civil Society in Late Imperial Russia 1864-1917 (San Francisco: Mellen Research University Press, 1991); these activities are described by a contemporary in T. J. Polner, Russian Local Government during the War and the Union of Zemstvos (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1930).

7 B.N. Mironov, 'Local Government in Russia in the First Half of the Nineteenth Century: Provincial Government and Estate Self-Government', JfGO 42 (1994): 165.

8 G. Hamburg, 'Portrait of an Elite: Russian Marshals of the Nobility 1861-1971', SR 40, 4 (1981): 585-602.

loyalties. A rural police officer (called the zemskii komissar in 1719 and the zem- skii ispravnik after 1775) was elected from the nobility but was subordinated to the local regiment under Peter and then to the governor under Catherine, and was ultimately responsible to the central government. An urban police force was set up in 1782 whose responsibility extended beyond dealing with petty crimes to the preservation of the wellbeing and morals of the urban population (amongst other things the police had to ensure that the sexes were segregated in the bathhouses). But in 1802 the police force was subordinated to the Ministry of Internal Affairs (although land captains, or zemskie nachal'niki, remained responsible to the governor) and their relationship with local gov­ernment thereby weakened. The establishment of the Third Department in 1826 in the reign of Nicholas I, made responsible for political security, added another layer of a secret police force which was entirely removed from local control.

On the other hand, the ability of the state to interfere in local adminis­tration was always curbed by two factors - the problem of communications in the vast empire, and poverty. Even in the middle of the nineteenth cen­tury it took forty-four days for a letter from Orenburg province to reach St Petersburg.[22] The situation improved only in the 1860s with the introduc­tion of the telegraph. The poignancy and comic effect of Gogol's Government Inspector (Revizor, written in the 1830s) is based on the fact that inspectors so rarely visited the provinces in person so allowing local officials to act as they wished. Furthermore, the lawlessness of the Russian countryside - whether it be through bands of deserters or brigands or the spontaneous activities of individuals - militated against orderly government of any kind. Poverty meant that the state lacked the funds to staff the provinces in full or to offer high enough salaries to make elective posts attractive. The result was that Russia was seriously under-manned at all levels (with the possible exception of the peasant commune before 1861 which is outside the scope of this chapter). In 1763 Russia employed 16,500 officials in central and local government, while Prussia, with less than 1 per cent of Russia's land area employed some 14,000 civil servants.[23] It has been estimated that in 1796 there were only 6 administra­tors per 10,000 inhabitants; by 1857 this had only increased to 17 administrators per 10,000 inhabitants.[24] One estimate in 1897 was that there were just over 100,000 officials with some police responsibility at all levels in Russia.[25] Despite the amount of legislation devoted to local administration the conclusion has to be that Russia was under- rather than over-governed throughout the imperial period.[26]

The operation of local administration

The problems outlined above made smooth and complete implementation of government legislation impossible to achieve. Local administration was fur­ther weakened by the exclusion of large sections of the population from its control. Before the reforms of the 1860s, many of the matters relating to the everyday concerns of peasants - state peasants and serfs - were dealt with by peasants themselves through the commune. The commune not only dis­tributed state obligations such as taxation and the recruit levy but also acted as a peasant court of first instance, using customary law and 'peasant justice' for civil matters and minor criminal offences. The Statute of Administration of 1775 established a structure of courts for state peasants, but serfs only par­ticipated in the state legal system when they were accused of major criminal offences or when they were litigants in cases involving other social estates (which could happen in disputes in town courts involving so-called 'trading peasants'). After emancipation and the reforms of 1864, exclusively peasant institutions were retained, as in the case of the commune, or created, in the case of volost' peasant courts where customary law continued to be applied, so that peasants were deliberately treated differently from other members of society, separately and outside the reformed state court structure.[27] This sug­gested that the reforms of 1864, like those of 1775, were primarily urban, and were of relevance to towns but not to the countryside, where, of course, the majority of the population lived. Industrial workers before the 1860s in the large privately owned enterprises mainly comprised assigned, orpossessional, serfs who were also outside the jurisdiction oflocal administration. The army, the clergy and several national and religious groups were also governed by a separate jurisdiction (although conflicts within towns between the Church and urban institutions, which was common in the seventeenth century, declined in the eighteenth century, particularly after the secularisation of Church land in 1764). These anomalies and the continuation of 'legal separateness' point to a fundamental problem in local administration, namely whether admin­istration should be centred on soslovie, or social 'estate', reflecting corporate interests (such as urban institutions of self-government and noble assemblies), or whether administration should, or could be, 'all-class' or 'all-estate' (which was partly the case with some of the 1775 institutions, which excluded serfs but not state peasants, and fully the case with the zemstvos). An analysis of the functioning of both types of institution illustrates some of the dilemmas facing local administration during the imperial period.

Corporate institutions

The universal obligations of state service for individuals in Russia from the reign of Peter I - service for nobles (formal until 1762 and informal thereafter), dues and conscription for townspeople and peasants - combined with the government's deliberate choice of 'collective responsibility' as a means by which villages and towns (at least until the urban tax reform of 1775) met these obligations - inhibited the development of independent, corporate bodies which could defend the interests of their members against the government. This is not to say that corporate institutions could not become a pervasive and essential part of the life of the Russian people - the peasant commune for all categories of peasants is testimony to this - but it goes some way to explain the failure of the urban population or the nobility to develop powerful 'Western' or Central European-style corporate institutions.

The tsars - from Peter to Nicholas II - legislated at length on the struc­tures of urban self-government and on the composition, responsibilities and privileges of the urban population. It has been seen above that government hoped through legislation to 'Westernise' or modernise Russian towns by the introduction of Western-style guilds, the creation, and then re-creation, of cat­egories of urban citizens and the development of corporate institutions. The impracticability of this legislation in itself damaged the ability of corporate institutions to function in the way envisaged in the legislation, and only wors­ened from the late nineteenth century when the influx of new urban residents was not matched by an attempt to change the nature of urban representation. Further damage was inflicted by the inadequacies of the legislation itself, in particular: the confusion over administrative and judicial functions in Peter I's ratushy (town councils) in 1699 and magistraty or magistracies, established in 1721, which were not fully resolved by the re-definition of the magistracies as urban courts in Catherine II's legislation of 1775; the overlapping jurisdictions of the strata of town dumas established after 1775 and overlapping between the dumas and the urban courts and the urban police force; the ambiguous role of the governor in urban affairs (especially after the Municipal Statute of 1892); the relationship between urban government and the Ministry of Internal Affairs; the vast amount of paperwork which passed through institutions (Mironov has estimated that some 100,000 documents passed through the St Petersburg city duma from 1838 to 1840);[28] the lack of clarity over the rights of the towns to raise local taxes for local needs; inadequate control over urban budgets, at least until the 1840s. The constant competition from an overwhelming peasant population in an overwhelmingly rural country in itself was always going to militate against the importance of towns and townspeople.

In the late eighteenth century there is some limited evidence to suggest that despite these inadequacies of legislation Catherine's 1785 Charter to the Towns did have some positive effects, quite possibly linked with the attempts in her reign to modernise and beautify towns by building schemes and town planning. The attempt to dignify urban office not only by financial rewards but by social recognition made at least the highest urban posts more attractive. Urban institutions began to play some part in the economic life of the cities which went beyond mere tax collectors for the state. Indeed, the physical inability of the centre to control the activities of local administrators enabled the towns to circumvent the legislation and make institutions more responsive to genuine urban needs. Urban posts became the preserve of a small number of prominent families, which, while it reflects poorly on the democratic nature of urban institutions, at least demonstrates that urban administration was considered to be of importance. In the first half of the nineteenth century, however, absenteeism increased in urban institutions while urban government became more chaotic and disorderly.

As the nineteenth century progressed, the large cities had to face far greater challenges in terms of housing, law and order, education, transport, health and sanitation as rural labourers flooded into the towns to seek employment in the newly established factories without an effective administration or adequate financial base. The need for more effective urban government which could address the economic, cultural and physical needs ofthe population had been partly recognised in the municipal reform of St Petersburg in 1846 and Moscow (and Odessa) in 1862, followed by the municipal statute of 1870, and seems to have encouraged the development of what can be termed a 'civil society' in the larger towns such as St Petersburg, Moscow and Odessa.[29] This development was, however, deliberately undermined by restrictions being placed on the urban franchise and on the independence of towns from the governor in the municipal statute of 1892. In Moscow, where there was a more established and stable urban class and where a sense of'civic responsibility' seems to have developed, these issues were addressed to an extent. In St Petersburg, however, where the needs of the court, the central bureaucracy and the wealthy noble residents outweighed those of the merchantry and industrialists, these issues remained unresolved, with the inevitable consequence of the aggravation of social tensions within the city.[30] In Odessa, municipal government declined in effectiveness after the restrictions imposed on its activities in 1892 and lost the support of the professional classes,[31] whilst it deliberately neglected the needs of the new wave of urban poor employed in the factories. In this respect it can be said that corporate administration in the towns failed to respond to the needs of a rapidly changing urban population.

Catherine established the corporate institution for the nobility - noble assemblies - originally in 1766 to elect deputies for the Legislative Commission, although their functions were more fully defined in the Statute of Provincial Administration of 1775 and then in the Charter to the Nobles in 1785. The assemblies were supposed to fulfil state needs, namely to conduct the three- yearly election of nobles to posts in the new institutions of local administration established in 1775, but were also designed to stimulate a sense of local cor­porate responsibility by keeping records of nobles and to consider and act collectively to address local needs in the wake of the abolition of compulsory noble service to the state in 1762 and the beginnings of a settled provincial noble society. Noble assembles, however, suffered from the same failure of the government to recognise the reality of provincial life which had adversely affected urban corporate institutions established by Peter I and Catherine II. In practice, the wealthy and most educated nobility preferred to live away from their estates, and in the remoter parts of Russia the resident nobility tended to be impoverished, to the extent that few met the qualifications (which were based on income and service rank) to vote or take elective office.[32]

Although the assemblies did serve to fill posts, which in turn provided some much needed income for some of the poorer provincial nobles, and although the elections generated equally welcome social activity which broke the tedium of life in the provincial backwaters, their significance for the devel­opment of a corporate mentality was limited. Even by the end of Catherine II's reign, absenteeism in assemblies at election time was rife. The prestige of the assemblies was undermined further by Paul I, who abolished assemblies at provincial level. Although Alexander I restored the provincial assemblies, the damage was done and the power of the governor grew over their conduct of affairs. The property qualifications for active participation - that is, voting - were further restricted in the reign ofNicholas I. Indeed, the noble assemblies were almost moribund when they were artificially revived during the debates on local administration in the wake of the Emancipation. This debate led to a not entirely welcome participation by the assemblies, in particular because six noble assemblies requested the establishment of a national parliament. The assemblies continued to coexist alongside the zemstvos after 1864. The intense political activity in the years 1904 to 1905 also affected the assemblies, although they tended to be more moderate than the zemstvos. There is no doubt that a corporate sense of shared interests and, not least, shared fears developed within the provincial gentry in the early years of the twentieth century as their land-ownership diminished. But the fact that this manifested itself far more within the zemstvos - that is, within 'all-estate' bodies - than within the noble assemblies was a reflection of the limited power and importance of this corporate institution for the nobility.

'All-estate' institutions

A limited attempt to create 'all-estate' institutions was made by Catherine II in 1775 when she established alongside the corporate institutions for the towns and nobles (her draft Charter for the State Peasantry was never promulgated) an elaborate local government structure of courts and institutions for preserv­ing law and order and for welfare in which members of three estates - nobles, townspeople and state peasants -participated, but which excluded serfs. Courts were segregated by the estate ofthe litigant in the first two instances and mem­bers of each of the three estates elected members of these courts (although state peasants only elected assessors and not the judges). But, at least in prin­ciple, nobles and state peasants sat together in the two institutions set up in 1775 whose functions are most imprecise: the conscience court (sovestnyi sud), a court which was set up to handle cases which fell outside the normal scope of civil and criminal offences (and which included a rather vague provision for habeus corpus, a concept acquired by Catherine from her reading of Black- stone in French translation);[33] the lower land court (nizhnii zemskii sud) whose activities are largely unrecorded, but which was supposed to handle rural police matters and petty crimes. All three estates also participated in the boards of social welfare (prikazy obshchestvennogo prizreniia) which were given an initial capital of 15,000 roubles each and which had responsibilities for a whole range of welfare institutions, including national schools, hospitals, almshouses, asy­lums, houses of correction, workhouses and orphanages. There is no record of the way in which representatives of different estates worked in this body. At least in some provinces the board was extremely active, although it was not always possible to set up the full range of institutions envisaged; reports in the 1780s found that the institutions were almost complete in the provinces of central Russia but that in Olonets province only a hospital had been opened.[34]Progress in establishing national schools was impressive given that the boards were operating almost from scratch; by 1792 there were 302 national schools teaching 16,322 boys and 1,178 girls.[35] Some boards also acted quite effectively as provincial banks by lending out its original capital at interest.[36]

A more comprehensive attempt to create an 'all-estate' institution occurred in 1864, with the establishment of zemstvos at the provincial and district level. This statute followed the Emancipation of the Serfs, and the consequent need to create a substitute to handle the many administrative functions handled by the serf-owning nobleman, although the zemstvo legislation drew heavily on past experience of corporate institutions, including the peasant commune as much as urban and noble organs and the boards of social welfare.[37] Zemstvos at both levels had an assembly, to which nobles, townspeople and peasants' representatives were elected, and a board, with executive power, which was elected from the assemblies. But from the start the 'estate' nature of the elec­tions to the assemblies were ambiguous, and the assumption that 'estates' were equal in any way was completely absent. In 1864 the three categories, or curia, were defined by their ownership of property - private landed, urban and collective land - rather than strictly by social estate (although merchants with 'certificates' were also eligible), which meant that peasants could partic­ipate in the first curia alongside nobles if they purchased sufficient land. The land qualification ensured that noble deputies would be in majority. In 1890, this principle of land-ownership as a franchise qualification was changed and became 'estate' based, with the peasants eligible to vote only in the third curia, a change inspired in part by the increase in land purchased by peasants at the expense of the rural nobility.[38] At the same time the rural property qualifi­cations for nobles were lowered and certified merchants lost their automatic right to vote which served to increase the noble franchise at the expense of other social groups (including Jews and clergy). It also increased their repre­sentation on both district and provincial level assemblies, but most particularly at the district level (where it increased from 42.4 per cent in the period 1883-6 to 55.2 per cent in 1890)[39] and became even more prominent at the board level, which they had always dominated. In the last years of the imperial regime peasants regained some seats in the zemstvos, particularly at district level, as landowners but remained under-represented on zemstvo boards.

In addition, the zemstvo led to the employment of large numbers of zemstvo employees - teachers, agronomists, doctors, surveyors - of various social origins, which cut across the 'estate' character of the zemstvos. These white- collar workers were termed the 'Third Element' and became more politically minded and more radicalised than most zemstvo leaders. By the turn of the century the size and potential power of this group was a source of concern to the government; there were some 70,000 zemstvo employees in the thirty-four provinces where zemstvos had so far been set up, that is, some fifty members of the 'Third Element' to each elected member of the zemstvo board.[40]

The establishment of the zemstvos did not displace the existing corporate institutions. Urban institutions of self-government and noble assemblies con­tinued to exist. Urban participation in the zemstvos was limited and did not diminish the significance of urban institutions of self-government. Peasants - both serf and state - had more direct experience, however, of self-government through the peasant communes than ordinary townspeople or the nobles col­lectively. Peasants continued to govern many of their own affairs outside the competence of the zemstvo, or any other institution, through the commune and the peasant, volost', courts, although the introduction of land captains (zemskie nachal'niki) in 1889, with the intention of imposing greater supervi­sion over peasant institutions, created another linkbetween the peasant village and provincial administration. Peasant experience of commune administration was reflected in their attitudes towards the zemstvo, which, along with the dominance of the nobles and the weakness of urban participation, inhibited the growth of any sense of the zemsvtos representing 'all-estate' interests. Peasants' resentment against the zemstvo paralleled their resentment of other state institutions and officials which oppressed them in return for few bene­fits. In particular peasants resented what they regarded as 'unnecessary' taxes imposed by the zemstvos, particularly tax on land which fell disproportionately on peasant allotment land, but they also shunned the, largely urban, welfare institutions - schools, hospitals, etc. - established by the zemstvos.[41] While other distinctive features of peasant obligation and non-privilege gradually came to an end - the poll tax, mutual responsibility for taxes, corporal punish­ment, etc. - peasant distinctiveness in local administration was retained. The increase in tax burdens by the zemstvo after 1890 as peasant representation declined only reinforced their negative perception of the 'all-estate' zemstvo as yet another burden imposed by the state and as an institution which served the interests of only one class, the nobility. The success of the provincial nobility in blocking Stolypin's attempts after 1907 to reform the zemstvos by increasing non-noble members only confirmed these views.

The zemstvos suffered from the same ambiguities in legislation as Petrine or Catherinian corporate institutions, which inhibited their opportunities to function effectively in the provinces. Some ofthis was due to ambiguous word­ing (such as 'participation' or 'co-operation' in certain activities) in some parts of 1864 statute.[42] More seriously, the areas of competence of the zemstvos potentially brought them into conflict with the governor, local officials, police and/orthe central bureaucracy. Zemstvos (in the statutes of 1864 and 1890) had to address local needs (economic, administrative, educational, humanitarian) whilst implementing the demands of the local civil and military administra­tion. It has already been noted that the main conflict of interest arose over the extent of the zemstvo rights to raise taxes for local needs as well as fulfilling state fiscal obligations - taxes, of course, which were largely paid by peas­ants and townspeople rather than by the nobles who dominated the zemstvo boards. Nevertheless, the zemstvos did make some advances in the provision of healthcare and primary education, which has been described as 'the area of greatest zemstvo achievement'[43] (by the turn of the century the zemstvo was supporting almost 20,000 elementary schools,[44] a number which had risen to over 40,000 by 1914),[45] and played some role in stimulating agricultural mod­ernisation.[46] Zemstvos took over welfare functions which had previously been performed by the state through the boards of public welfare and, in the case of education, by the Church.

After 1890 the governor's powers to blockzemstvo enactments and to super­vise its operations were clarified and increased, but the zemstvos continued to provide and extend local services. But the conservative gentry reaction after the 1905 Revolution made the zemstvos far less receptive to reform; in their last decade zemstvos hindered the implementation of the Stolypin land reforms and blocked attempts to reform local administration, including the establish­ment of a zemstvo at the lowest, volost' level which was intended to make the peasants truly 'full members of Russian society'.[47] At the same time, the increase in state funding for primary schools at the expense of the zemstvos also meant an increase in state control over the operation of those schools even as their numbers rose. On the eve of war, the zemstvos had retreated from their 'all-estate' character and had become forums to reflect the views of the conservative provincial nobility.

A local bureaucracy?

Local administration suffered from the inability of the state to recruit men of quality. Local administration was never as prestigious, or as well rewarded, as service in St Petersburg or Moscow, and the civil service was never as highly regarded as military service. Young, provincial noble boys often entered the civil service only if they lacked the social connections or the physical ability to join a regiment. In the eighteenth century senior officials were frequently accused of corruption or ignorance. This was partly due to the lack of effective control exercised by the centre over distant provinces. It was also due to the paucity of institutions of higher education, and in particular to the slow development of legal training in Russia (the first Russian professor of law was S. A. Desnitskii, appointed in 1773 to Moscow University, who trained at Glasgow University),[48] to the poor salaries and to the unattractiveness of life in unsophisticated provincial backwaters. A high proportion of senior elective noble posts in the institutions set up in 1775 were occupied by nobles who had served in the army and had no civil training (in 1788 some 85 per cent of the presidents of the highest provincial courts were appointed directly from the army).[49] At the lower level, the clerical staff, who were mostly themselves the sons of clerks or sons of the clergy ('culled' or lured by the state from clerical seminaries), shifted vast amounts of paperwork around but were badly paid, badly educated and badly treated by their superiors. Police officers were underpaid, poorly trained and not respected. Bribery was endemic in Russian courts, and scarcely regarded as corrupt, at least at the lower levels.[50]

Although the corruption, greed and ignorance of local officials remained a theme in Russian literature in the nineteenth century, there is some evidence to suggest that a gradual professionalisation of the local bureaucracy was taking place during the century. Even in the late eighteenth century there were a small number of enlightened governors and senior provincial administrators who took their duties seriously and who developed a sense of what we might call 'a legal consciousness'.[51] Educational standards of senior officials rose after the introduction of formal examinations in 1809, and the reform of clerical schools and increase in numbers of state schools (at least in towns) led to a gradual increase ofstandards amongst junior staff(although salaries remained pitifully low). The number of direct transfers from the military to seniorposts in the civil service declined in the first half of the nineteenth century. The proportion of nobles in the bureaucracy - local and central - fell as the century progressed. After the municipal statute of 1870 the levels of education amongst mayors and senior urban representatives rose. Land captains, despite the criticisms levelled at them at the time by peasants and St Petersburg officials alike, had respectable levels of education (some 30 per cent had higher education).[52] The most important change affected governors, who by the early twentieth century frequently had considerable experience of local government, either as marshals of the nobility or as vice-governors. They had become, as the historian Robbins states, 'experts' and 'specialists' who had a profound knowledge of local affairs (some 80 per cent of governors in 1913 had served in another capacity in the provinces).[53] The consequence of this, however, was that governors became less willing to implement government policy unquestioningly; after 1905 many governors blocked further attempts at local reform in order to preserve what they regarded as local interests.[54]

Epilogue

In times of crisis, local government institutions hadperformed valuable service. In 1812 noble assemblies and town dumas had collected considerable sums and foodstuffs which they contributed to the war effort.[55] The zemstvos (which by this time reflected predominantly noble interests) carried out important relief work during the Russo-Japanese War and the First World War. The All-Russian Union of Towns performed the same service in the First World War.[56] These were exceptional circumstances, but nevertheless, this activity demonstrated that there was some potential for local society to act collectively to address not only local but also national interests. By the early twentieth century there is some evidence that a corporate, or 'estate', identity had developed amongst the provincial nobility and at least in the merchant-dominated towns like Moscow. This was the type of identity which Peter I and Catherine II had tried to stimulate in the eighteenth century with very limited success. The tragedy was that by the time it had been achieved it was already anachronistic in the light of the very rapid social and economic changes which had taken place since the late nineteenth century. The exclusion of the most dissatisfied groups in society - peasants and workers - from all but the most limited participation in these institutions was symptomatic of a more general failure to recognise that society had changed and that local institutions should modernise to reflect the new economic and society reality. The fault lay not only with the government which established, and then modified, these institutions but also by the early twentieth century with the local institutions which blocked further reforms in defence of 'corporate' interests which no longer served the interests of the country.

22

State finances

PETER WALDRQN

In 1898, Sergei Witte, the Russian minister of finance, wrote to Emperor Nicholas II:

The French state budget is 1,260 million rubles for a population of 38 million; the Austrian budget is 1,100 million rubles for a population of 43 million. If our taxpayers were as prosperous as the French, our budget would be 4,200 million rubles instead of its current 1,400 million, and if we matched the Austrians, our budget would be 3,300 million rubles. Why can we not achieve this? The main reason is the poor condition of our peasantry.[57]

While the minister of finance bemoaned the poverty of the Russian population and the consequent low level of taxation that it produced, the Russian state's overall financial performance had proved to be relatively successful. Although it had faced financial difficulties, Russia had avoided the type of financial crisis that had made a major contribution to the collapse of the French monarchy at the end of the eighteenth century, and had given the Habsburg state such difficulties during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.[58] Witte's analysis identified low per capita yields from taxation as the fundamental weakness of the Russian state's financial system and he laid the blame for Russia's inability to generate a sufficiently large state budget firmly at the door of the peasantry. But Witte, Imperial Russia's most successful and influential finance minister, failed to recognise that the tsarist regime had proved adept at both avoiding fatal financial crises and at overcoming lesser problems. It had proved able to fight a multitude of wars and to expand the boundaries of its empire, as well as to make major internal reforms that had financial implications. This discussion of Russian state finances will examine the Russian government's chief elements of expenditure and revenue and analyse changes that took place during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. It will also analyse the impact of the government's taxation policies on the empire's population and the wider social consequences of fiscal policy.

The Russian state budget hardly warranted such an appellation until well into the nineteenth century. Troitskii describes the 'inadequate centralisation of financial administration, the lack of a central treasury, the secrecy of the budget, the unsatisfactory recording of business, the lack of accountability in agencies and the almost complete absence of state fiscal control of expenditure' that characterised Russian state finances during the first half of the eighteenth century.[59] Catherine the Great acknowledged the disarray of Russia's financial position at her accession to the throne in 1762: soldiers' wages were in arrears, customs duties had been farmed out for a tiny return to the state and the cur­rency itself was of dubious worth.[60] While there were improvements during Catherine's reign, financial policy-making and the process of budget-making remained weak until the last decades of the nineteenth century Even in 1879, a committee established to examine ways of reducing government expendi­ture reported that the Ministry of Finance could exert little influence over the process by which expenditure was determined and noted that, in effect, the Finance Ministry had proved unable to assert its authority over the spend­ing ministries.[61] The process of budget-making was essentially driven by the demands of the spending ministries and the role of the Ministry of Finance was to raise the revenue that was demanded to meet the spending plans of each ministry. The absence of proper cabinet government in Russia until the first decade ofthe twentieth century also contributed to the lack ofa clear direction in financial policy Individual ministers had the right of access to the emperor and were able to plead the case for their own ministries' spending plans directly to the tsar, bypassing their fellow ministers. The inter-departmental Commit­tee of Finances, designed to provide overall political direction for the empire's financial policies, played an inconsistent role. While it was the formal arena in which fiscal and monetary policy could be debated, its significance could depend on the level of interest that the emperor displayed in its affairs, as well as in the political status of the Minister of Finance and on his place within the

hierarchy of the empire's governing elite.

***

It was military expenditure that dominated Russia's state finances. During the eighteenth century, the army and navy consistently accounted for more than half of the Russian state's spending and, at times, more than 60 per cent of the budget was devoted to military expenditure.[62] This is hardly surprising, given Russia's persistent involvement in wars and the continuing impetus to extend the territorial boundaries of the empire. Military expenditure grew significantly during times of war, with sharp increases during the Napoleonic Wars, the Crimean War and the Russo-Turkish War of 1878-9.[63] There was also a considerable increase in military spending in the years preceding the First World War, with expenditure growing from 420 million roubles in 1900 to 820 million roubles in 1913.[64] Although this did not represent a significant increase in the proportion of the government's income devoted to military spending, since the state's budget was growing rapidly during this period, it was a much heavier burden than at first appears. By 1914, Russian military expenditure exceeded that of Britain, even though Britain's army and navy were needed to protect the security of its far-flung empire.[65] Throughout the nineteenth century, there were repeated efforts to restrain military expenditure and government committees regularly grappled with the problem of the cost of the Russian army and navy. A special committee met in 1818, followed by a review of military expenditure by A. A. Arakcheev in 1822, and a further attempt to rein in expenditure in 1835. This last review concluded that reductions in expenditure during the 1820s had had a negative impact on both Russia's military forces and on the overall national economy, as a reduced demand for materials by the army had resulted in an overall reduction in the prices of domestically produced goods and this had affected both manufacturers and the treasury, since the government suffered a consequent loss of tax revenues. The dominant place that Russia's military strength played in the government's thinking is reflected in the results of the 1835 review: the committee could only suggest 'housekeeping measures' to limit military spending and then only if both economic and military conditions continued to be stable.[66] A further attempt was made to reduce overall government expenditure in 1861 but, in the aftermath of the debacle in the Crimea, no serious attempt was made to constrain military spending.[67] The 1879 committee's work came at the end of the Russo-Turkish War, when it was again clearly impolitic to propose any major reductions in military spending. At the first hint of a proposed reduction in the army's budget, D. A. Miliutin, the minister of war, wrote to A. A. Abaza, the president of the State Council's economic department that 'any significant reduction in [military] expenditure would rapidly cause damage to the crucial matter of the state's readiness to support its political dignity'.[68] Abaza's committee had begun with the lofty ambition of moving beyond short-term solutions to the recurrent financial difficulties that faced the Russian government, and instead putting in place measures that would prevent ministries increasing their expenditure after their annual budget had been set. But by the middle of 1879, Abaza was compelled to admit that due to 'the alarming events of recent times', ministries had been unable to devote adequate attention to the work of his committee and that they had proved very tardy in providing the information he needed in order to proceed.[69] The Russian bureaucracy proved able to frustrate these plans; central authority was not yet well established enough to override the power of individual ministries.

Russia's military expenditure continued to grow in absolute terms, but other calls on the state's budget came to play a significant part in govern­ment spending. During the second half of the nineteenth century, the Russian government considerably extended its activities and, in particular, played a much greater direct role in the economy of the country The government's recognition of the importance of the railway network in stimulating Russia's overall economic performance, together with the absence of other sources of investment capital, meant that the state itself took on much of the burden of financing Russia's railways. The Ministry of Communications accounted for only 2.5 per cent of the state budget in 1885, but by 1895 this had increased to 11 per cent and by 1908 to 20 per cent. The construction of the Trans-Siberian railway was an essential element in this development, and Witte was pre­pared to expend whatever resources were necessary in order to see the project realised. The government spent some 600 million roubles on its construction in the last decade of the nineteenth century, far above the original estimate of 320 million roubles, and further spending was needed after 1900, bringing the total cost for the railway to over 1,000 million roubles, at a time when Russia's annual budget was less than 1,500 million roubles.[70] The state also increased its direct involvement in another critical area of the Russian economy - the liquor trade. In 1863 the government abolished the system of tax farming that had generated revenue from the production and sale of vodka, but this was only a step on the road towards the state taking full control of the wholesale and retail trade in liquor. Between 1894 and 1901 the state became the only legal purchaser for the products of Russia's vodka distilleries and, while this proved an effective move in terms of safeguarding tax revenues from vodka, it did also involve the government in increased expenditure as it took direct control of the industry. By 1912, the state was expending nearly 200 million roubles annually to maintain the vodka monopoly.[71] Further strains were placed upon the Russian budget by the state's growing indebtedness and the need to service its loans. By 1899, 98 million roubles was required annually to pay interest on Russia's loans and Russia proved lucky in its ability to contain its expenditure in this area. Russian credit abroad had improved during the 1890s, especially with the signing of the Franco-Russian alliance in 1894, and this enabled the Russian government to reduce the level of interest it paid. Between 1891 and 1902, Russia was able to reduce its average rate of interest on its loans from 4.9 per cent to 3.86 per cent, thus allowing the state to borrow signifi­cantly more money, but without increasing the cost of servicing the public debt.[72]

The increasing social burdens that the Russian state assumed during the nineteenth century also had budgetary consequences. Judicial reform from the 1860s onwards made the legal system increasingly complex and easier access to justice resulted in a growing number of cases brought before the courts each year. The Ministry of Justice pressed for annual increases in its budget, emphasising that its expenditure was modest in comparison with that in other

European states.[73] Education provision expanded rapidly at the end of the nineteenth century and the financial demands on the state grew significantly. In 1879 the central government budget had only contributed 11 per cent of total funding for rural schools, but this proportion increased to 45 per cent by 1911. The government spent 2 million roubles on primary education in 1895, but this increased very rapidly to 19 million roubles in 1907 and to more than 82 million in 1914. Total education expenditure accounted for 2.69 per cent of the state budget in 1881, but this had increased to 7.2 per cent in 1914.[74] There were growing pressures on Russia's budget from every side. The army and navy continued to take the largest single element of government spending as war and the threat of war remained ever-present. The state's expansion into both direct involvement in the national economy and into enhanced social provision meant that the government could not easily seek to compensate for increasing military expenditure by making significant reductions elsewhere. The result was that the overall Russian state budget grew as expenditure increased in nearly every area. The challenge for the state was to increase its revenues to match this additional spending.

***

The main component of government revenue during the eighteenth century was the poll tax. Peter the Great levied this tax on most of the male population, using it to replace the household tax that had been in force between 1678 and 1721. The rationale for the poll tax was straightforward: Peter needed a reliable source of income to support his military campaigns, while revenue from the household tax was falling as the population discovered that they could combine their households and thus evade the tax. The poll tax proved to be a highly successful means of raising money. Its collection presented no great difficulties: initially, military detachments collected the taxes from the regions in which they were stationed and then used the revenue to maintain themselves. After the end of Peter's wars, collection became the responsibility ofthe civil administration, and serfowners were given the prime responsibility for collecting the taxes from their serfs. The success of the poll tax was partly due, however, to the rise in the Russian population through the expansion of its frontiers and gradually decreasing mortality rates. Its relative ease of collection meant that the government felt able to increase poll-tax rates during the course of the century, increasing the burden on private serfs by one-third across the period. Between 1726 and 1796, the amount collected from the poll tax increased from 4 million roubles to 10.4 million roubles.¹⁹ After 1800, the poll tax played a less significant role in government revenues as other taxes contributed larger shares of the government's income. The emancipation of the serfs in the 1860s made the collection of the tax more difficult, while voices were heard suggesting that the tax burden should be more equally shared, rather than through the poll tax with its flat rate for each category of tax­payer.²⁰ The government remained undecided about the fate of the poll tax during the 1860s, recognising that it caused difficulties for some tax-payers, but also needing the revenue that it generated. Even at the end of the 1870s, the poll tax produced 59 million roubles annually.²¹ It was the sense of growing crisis and peasant discontent that gripped the government in the late 1870s and early 1880s that propelled the Russian state towards a fundamental review of its taxation system and the abolition of the poll tax.²²

Revenue also came from a variety of other sources. Indirect taxation formed an important part of the government revenues, even in the eighteenth century. The largest single source of indirect taxation was from liquor. Distilling was established as a monopoly of the nobility in 1754, and from 1767 revenue was collected through a system of tax farming in which a merchant obtained a concession to sell liquor and paid the government a fixed fee for the privilege; the Moscow and St Petersburg liquor farm for 1767-70 attracted a price of 2.1 million roubles annually. Revenue from the liquor trade made up an increas­ing proportion of the government's income during the eighteenth century: in 1724 only 11 per cent of the state's revenue came from liquor, but this jumped sharply, reaching a peak of 43 per cent of the total in 1780 and then falling back to 24 per cent in 1805.²³ During the nineteenth century, liquor revenue aver­aged 31 per cent of total government revenue. By the middle of the century, the government had developed sufficient bureaucratic capability to consider abolishing the system of tax farming and taking on itself the administration of the liquor trade. This was a highly significant development, since the state was now able to monopolise tax collection and thus gain much greater control over its fiscal affairs, without needing to take the tax farmers into account. In

19 Kahan, The Plow, p. 333.

20 See, for example, Iu. G. Gagemeister's 1856 report, 'Ofinansakh Rossii', in L. E. Shepelev (ed.), Sud'by Rossii (St Petersburg: Liki Rossii, 1999), p. 14.

21 L. Bowman, 'Russia's First Income Taxes: The Effects of Modernized Taxes on Com­merce and Industry 1885-1914', SR 52 (1993): 257.

22 N. I. Anan'ich, 'K istorii otmeny podushnoi podati v Rossii', IZ 94 (1974): 186-8.

23 J. P. LeDonne, 'Indirect Taxes in Catherine's Russia. II. The Liquor Monopoly', JfGO 24 (1976): 203. D. Christian, Living Water: Vodka andRussian Society on the Eve of Emancipation (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1990), pp. 382-5.

1863, the tax farm was abolished. It not only signified the growing strength of the state's fiscal apparatus, but also resulted in an increase in the net rev­enue that the liquor trade brought in. Gross liquor revenues rose consistently after 1863, but the costs of collecting the new excise duties were consistently reduced. In the 1850s, some 18 per cent of gross liquor revenue was eaten up by the cost of collecting the taxation, but this was reduced to only 3 per cent by 1880. The risk that the state had taken in believing that its resources were strong enough to cope with this major change in its fiscal system proved to be justified. The introduction of a full government monopoly on the manu­facture and sale of vodka brought significantly increased gross revenues to the treasury from liquor, reaching more than 950 million roubles in 1913, but this was offset by considerably higher costs, meaning that the net contribution to the state's budget from liquor remained steady after the 1894 reform.

In common with other states, the Russian government sought to raise revenue by taxing salt. Peter the Great introduced a state monopoly on salt in 1705 and the government took control of a vast enterprise to refine and distribute salt across the empire. This did not prove to be the same easy source of revenue as the liquor trade, since Russia's salt deposits were often located far away from the main centres of population and the costs involved in exploiting these resources proved to be very high. In 1762 the state spent one-third of its gross revenues from salt on production and distribution costs, leaving it with a net contribution to the budget of only 2.2 million roubles. Within twenty years, the net income had halved and, in 1791 the government made a loss on its salt operations for the first time.[75] In such a situation, the state had to act to protect its revenues. Even though the government raised the price of salt, this did not help in stabilising the situation and in 1818 the state gave up its monopoly on the sale of salt, eventually abolishing the salt tax completely in 1880.

The government also received income in its capacity as landowner from the peasants who lived on its land. In 1723 Peter the Great standardised the variety of labour service and other dues that were owed by state peasants and instead made them liable for cash payments (obrok) to the government. This produced a growing source of income and was one that the state believed it could exploit. During the eighteenth century, the rate of obrok payments increased by roughly twice the rate of inflation, although state peasants did pay significantly less than privately owned serfs. Discussions took place about further increases in the rate of obrok in the 1840s alongside Kiselev's overall reforms of the state peasantry. The government was wary of demanding large additional sums from the peasants, believing that this 'would disturb the tran­quillity of the population and have dangerous consequences'.[76] While obrok did offer some advantages to the government as it sought to increase its rev­enues, the government also recognised that by publicising its move away from the poll tax, it would be publicly demonstrating its problems in making an accurate census of the population. Kiselev did reform the system of obrok, but this question again raised its head when the emancipation of the state peasants was implemented in 1866. The government was reluctant to lose its income from obrok and was wary of making radical changes that might threaten the security of its revenues. Instead of moving immediately to a system of redemp­tion payments, as with privately owned serfs, the government reformed the system of obrok, calculating peasants' liability not just by the value of the land they held, but by taking into account their total income. It was only in 1886 that state peasants' obrok payments were finally converted into redemption payments. This move resulted in a significant increase in revenues: the aver­age total revenue from obrok between 1880 and 1885 was 32 million roubles annually, whereas in the period 1887 to 1890, income averaged 43 million rou­bles. The famine years of 1891 and 1892 witnessed a reduction in revenue from state peasants' redemption payments, but they then increased again, reaching 55 million roubles in 1895.[77]

As the Russian government looked for ways to curb its expenditure, it also sought to increase its revenues. This process, however, proved of equal diffi­culty. The 1841 committee that had rejected a large increase in obrok also found good reasons to turn down most other suggested methods of increasing the government's income. It avoided detailed discussion of the poll tax, preferring to wait for the Ministry of Finance to make its own proposals, argued that the government was already seeking ways to enhance the efficiency of the salt industry and thus enhance income from that source, and finally rejected any wholesale reform of the liquor industry.[78] The committee took a highly defen­sive tone towards criticism of the government's record on enhancing its own revenues, finding reasons to reject every suggestion for improvement. By the 1860s, the government's financial position was more precarious and attempts to find ways of raising additional revenues met with a more positive response.

This new attempt to increase revenues was also motivated by what proved to be a mistaken assumption; that the changes to the system of liquor taxation and the introduction of excise duties would lead to a fall in the government's income from that source. In 1861 the Committee of Finances proposed making small increases to both the poll tax levied on state peasants and to the level of obrok that they paid to produce an additional 3.2 million roubles of income annually. Alongside this, a rise in the salt tax was proposed, together with increases in customs duties and in postal charges. Altogether, the government calculated that these measures would bring in an extra 7.5 million roubles which would help to offset the expected decline in liquor revenues.[79] These proposals represented only adjustments to existing sources of taxation and did not involve any overall review of Russia's system of taxation.

From the mid-i860s, however, the government began to move towards a more radical approach to restructuring its sources of income. The motivation for this was complex. First, the emancipation of the serfs had consequences in the financial sphere, as in almost every other area of Russian life. The emanci­pation settlement itself had been significantly conditioned by the government's financial position which had led to the peasantry paying the full price for the land that they gained, without any government subsidy.[80] The perception of contemporaries was that redemption payments from the peasantry were thus set at a level which was on the edge of affordability for many of them. This view has been challenged by modern analyses[81] but in the 1870s and 1880s the tsarist state was deeply concerned about the potential threat that it faced from a discontented peasantry that was perceived to be downtrodden and impoverished. Changing the system of taxation to reduce the burden on the peasants and thus lessen the threat of discontent was an important reason for the tax reforms that took place in the 1880s. At the same time, the Russian government recognised that it could not hope to achieve significant increases in revenue from the existing taxation system and therefore needed to take more radical steps. During the nineteenth century, the government had faced a series of financial problems which had been resolved without making struc­tural changes to either expenditure patterns or sources of revenue. By the last quarter of the century, officials were coming to realise that this strategy could not be sustained and that, especially at a time when the nature of the Russian economy was changing with the development of an industrial sector, new sources of revenue had to be found.

***

The crises that affected the Russian government's finances were mostly precip­itated either by war or by the threat of war. War with Persia and with Turkey in the late 1820s placed stresses on the budget and, in late 1830, the Ministry of Finance indicated that the outbreak of further conflict would cause significant problems. Expenditure was already likely to rise due to a series of poor harvests and the outbreak of cholera in some parts of the empire and the Finance Min­istry warned that further war could not be financed from ordinary expenditure: Kankrin, the minister of finance, had already reported to Nicholas I that the government would face severe difficulties in finding the additional resources needed for conflict. Kankrin's view was not, however, shared by the govern­ment as a whole and the Finance Committee argued that any difficulties could be overcome by printing money and by a number of measures that would enable the government to raise internal loans.[82] This approach to dealing with the financial pressures of war continued throughout the reign of Nicholas I. Discussions about managing the costs of the Crimean War in the mid-i850s resulted in the same measures being proposed. The Ministry of Finance issued more paper money as its first reaction to the increase in expenditure that was required by war, more than doubling the amount of paper money in circula­tion, but the Ministry did acknowledge that this solution was only sustainable if the war was short. It also recognised that this was a risky move to take, since the outcome of printing money would become clear only once the war was over: if the economy prospered, all would be well, but difficulties would arise if it

weakened.[83]

The economic situation across Europe in the late 1850s was not propitious for a Russian recovery, and this was exacerbated by domestic conditions. A banking crisis, produced partly by a reduction in interest rates by the government, had effects that were felt right across the Russian economy. At the same time, the Ministry of Finance complained of a fall in exports as a result of both the war and poor domestic harvests. Combined with a growth in imports, this meant that Russia was suffering a net outflow of foreign capital and that government revenues were suffering. The national economy was facing serious difficulties, while the government's own financial position was looking increasingly pre­carious. Kniazhevich, the minister of finance, reported that the government had been using its traditional methods to deal with the budget deficit: loans and issuing paper money. But, by i860, the situation was such that it was difficult to solve the burgeoning budget deficit in these ways. The government already owed very large sums to the banks, its debts having grown from i66 million roubles in 1845 to 441 million roubles in 1859. Over the same period, the amount of paper money in circulation had more than quadrupled, reaching 93 million roubles in 1859. Foreign debts had also increased, totalling 365 million roubles in 1859. Kniazhevich argued that while it would be possible, in an extreme case, to issue yet more paper money, this would threaten the whole financial system, since the population could easily lose confidence in the currency. The minister of finance was prepared to print money to finance one-off items of expenditure, but he argued that this method could no longer be used as a permanent means of monetary policy. Further loans, whether from domestic sources or from abroad, were unsustainable, given Russia's huge burden of debt. The government was faced with a growingbudget deficit and the Finance Ministry could see no easy way of financing it.[84] This crisis demonstrated the weakness ofthe government's budget-setting process. The Ministry ofFinance could only implore that expenditure be kept at its projected levels, and that any requests for additional spending must be communicated to the ministry before being sent for the emperor's approval. At the same time, ministries were presented with suggestions for reducing their expenditure, in one of the first examples of the Russian government as a whole taking responsibility for financial policy. Not surprisingly, ministries resented these attempts at central direction of their spending and argued fiercely against proposals that came from the Committee of Finances.[85]

The government was helped out of its immediate difficulties by the success of the new liquor taxation system in raising revenue but, without making any structural changes to the state's fiscal and spending systems, Russia's finances remained problematic. M. Kh. Reutern had been appointed as minister of finance in 1862 and recognised that the issues raised by his predecessor Kni- azhevich in i860 had still not been solved. In 1866 Reutern wrote a lengthy report on the financial and economic condition of Russia that attracted the attention of Alexander II who presided at the meeting of the Committee of Finances in September 1866 where Reutern's report was considered. As his predecessors had done, Reutern identified a pressing need to cease using domestic loans as a means of covering government expenditure. He argued that it was now difficult for the government to raise money at home, as the financial markets were exhausted. But Reutern did recognise that he could not be over-prescriptive here, since the state had an urgent need to borrow to finance railway construction, and the long-term economic interests of the state over-rode these temporary financial difficulties. He was also prepared to use the state's slender credit resources to try to find a more permanent way out of Russia's financial difficulties, despite the risks that this presented. Reutern also wanted to protect the value of the rouble and proposed mea­sures to stop the outflow of funds abroad. He wanted the government to stop making purchases abroad, and included the War Ministry and the Ministry of Communications in his strictures here, and was intent on stopping costly foreign visits by Russia's navy. Reutern argued that the budget deficit could be eliminated only by both raising additional revenue and by placing curbs on expenditure. As successive finance ministers had discovered, it was difficult to squeeze extra income from existing sources and the suggestion by P. A. Valuev that an income tax should be introduced was thus placed on the agenda for fur­ther investigation.[86] The government's good intention of relying less on loans could not be implemented immediately: in i868 the Committee of Finance resolved that the only way in which it could finance a projected budget deficit for the year of 12.5 million roubles, as well as meet railway construction costs of more than 36 million roubles, was to take a loan from foreign bankers.[87]

Russia continued to run sizeable budget deficits. Between i866 and i888, the budget was in surplus for three years, and in balance for a further two. Deficits ranged from i million roubles in i870 to 80 million roubles in i88i, with an average budgetary outcome across the period of i8 million roubles deficit annually. This did represent a considerable improvement on the pre-1861 period, when deficits averaged 45 million roubles annually in the thirty years after 1832, but it was only in the 1890s that the budget situation showed signs of consistent improvement. This situation was short-lived, however, since the budget returned to deficit in eight of the years between 1900 and 1913, averaging a deficit of 44 million roubles annually. This situation, while equivalent in cash terms to the level of deficit between 1831 and 1861, represented some improvement on that period, since the overall level of government spending had increased more than tenfold by the beginning of the twentieth century and the largest deficit in this period -386 million roubles in 1905 - represented 14 per cent of government revenue, in contrast to the average deficit of 16.8 per cent in the thirty pre-reform years. Improved performance during the i890s came through significant increases in revenues, outstripping expenditure growth by 15 per cent over the decade. This reflected Russia's healthy overall economic situation during this period, as increased economic activity generated higher income from taxation. This was assisted by changes to the structure of the taxation system that were introduced during the i880s.

The period of N. Kh. Bunge's tenure of the Ministry of Finance witnessed important shifts in the emphasis of the taxation system. The government shifted the balance of taxation away from direct levies and towards indirect taxation. The poll tax was gradually abolished between i883 and i886 but the government had to find other sources of income to compensate for the loss of the more than 50 million roubles of revenue that the poll tax generated annually at the beginning ofthe 1880s. Other direct taxes did not have sufficient potential to produce sufficient additional income. Revenue from the land tax barely grew during the 1880s and 1890s, remaining steady at some 6 million roubles each year. There was little scope to increase obrok significantly, although revenue from this source did increase from 33 million roubles in 1881 to 45 million roubles a decade later. Redemption payment revenue too remained steady at around 40 million roubles annually during the late 1880s and 1890s.[88] Attempts were made to increase the tax revenue from business by introducing an income tax, to add to the existing patent system of 1824 which gave merchants a licence to engage in a trade or industry in return for a fixed annual fee to the government.[89] In 1885 the government introduced a 3 per cent tax on business profits, increasing this to 5 per cent in i893 and, in i898, made the tax progressive. This proved to be an effective source of revenue, helping to more than double tax revenues from business between i884 and i895.[90]

The only other real opportunity for increasing revenue came from indirect taxation. The success of the government in gaining additional revenue from its alcohol monopoly has already been noted, but during the 1880s concerted efforts were made to enhance income from other sources. The existing taxes on tobacco and on sugar were increased, so that revenues from tobacco more than doubled between 1880 and 1895, while the income from taxing sugar showed a tenfold increase during this period. By 1895, taxes on sugar produced more than 47 million roubles annually, some 80 per cent of the revenue that the poll tax was producing in the last years before its abolition. The government also moved to introduce indirect taxes in new areas: oil and matches were both subject to new taxation from 1888, bringing in more than 27 million roubles annually by 1895. Stamp duties were also increased, resulting in a near-doubling of revenues from that source. The last area of indirect taxation where the government was able to increase its revenues was through customs duties. Tariffs produced close to 100 million roubles of revenue annually by 1880, but the government's policy of moving to increase duties on imported goods during the 1880s in order to stimulate domestic production resulted in an additional 40 million roubles of revenue by 1890. Bunge's successor as finance minister, I. A. Vyshnegradskii, put in place a major tariffreform in i89i and this accelerated the growth of revenue from this source so that in 1894 the government collected more than 183 million roubles from customs duties. This development of indirect taxation made Russia much more dependent on these sources of income than any of the other European powers. By i9ii, Russia gained 84 per cent of its revenues from indirect taxes, while indirect taxation in France accounted for 70 per cent of its budget and Britain's budget gained 59 per cent of its total revenue from this source.[91] This dependence on indirect taxation had serious consequences for Russia on the outbreak of war in 1914. In a fit of patriotic enthusiasm, the Russian government decided to introduce prohibition during wartime, but this brought about a severe and immediate reduction in the government's income, as it lost its income from liquor. Revenues in 1914 showed a reduction of more than 500 million roubles on the previous year, at the same time as the government was having to cope

with severely increased expenditure to fight the First World War.

***

The impact of Russia's budgetary policies on its population was considerable. Since the overwhelming majority of Russia's population were peasants, it was inevitable that they would bear the greatest burden of taxation. Discussions over the effect of government taxation policies on the peasantry have centred on two periods: the early part of the eighteenth century, when Peter the Great introduced the poll tax, and the post-emancipation period. While the Russian government's need for revenue was acute, and its apparent authority over its population was very considerable, it had to act with considerable caution when calculating the impact of its taxation policies. The threat of peasant rebellion - whether real or merely perceived - was ever-present and the government was well aware that its control of the empire could easily be challenged by uprisings across its domains. The four great peasant revolts that Russia experienced after i606, culminating in the Pugachev revolt in the i770s, reinforced this belief and acted as a reminder of the power that the Russian peasant could exert. While the state had been able to deal with these rebellions and to reassert its own authority on each occasion, the government became wary of implementing policies that could provoke the peasants into further revolts. This was especially true in the mid- and late nineteenth century, when the interests of noble landowners had to be balanced against the needs of the peasantry in the construction of the 1861 emancipation settlement. An increase in the number of peasant revolts in the i850s caused genuine alarm inside the government, and a nervousness about the potential power of the rural population played a significant part in the taxation reforms of the 1880s.

The impact of Peter the Great's introduction of the poll tax on the peasant has been widely debated. The emperor wanted to introduce a new and reliable source of revenue, but at the same time he was very conscious of the need not to antagonise the peasantry by making severe financial demands on them. Despite this, it has been argued, most notably by P. N. Miliukov in his writings before 1917, that the burden of taxation increased very substantially during Peter's reign and that, in particular, the poll tax generated 260 per cent more in revenue than the taxes that it replaced.[92] This argument is based on analysis of the total tax yield, rather than looking at the burden faced by each Russian household and does not take into account the increase in population over the period and has thus been challenged by more recent commentators. It has been argued that the state's tax revenues increased partly because there were more tax-payers, but that this was also due to inflation and that the real tax burden on individuals remained more or less steady. It has even been suggested that the introduction of the poll tax represented a reduction in the level of taxation, after the government's need to increase taxes to pay for the Great Northern War.[93]As has been widely acknowledged, however, there is insufficient evidence to come to definitive judgements about the burdens of taxation in the early part of the eighteenth century. The Russian state did not have the bureaucratic capacity to maintain accurate records of its finances during this period and the budget-making process was still rudimentary. While complete evidence for the actual financial burdens faced by the peasantry during and immediately after Peter's reign is lacking, the perception produced by the introduction of the poll tax is much clearer. The population as a whole believed that the poll tax had resulted in significantly increased taxation. But this belief was related to the circumstances of the tax's introduction. The early 1720s were hard years for Russian farmers. Poor harvests and resulting high prices for grain helped to reduce the peasants' standard of living: many peasants were compelled to become purchasers of grain, rather than being able to sell their own produce. At the same time, the government moved to requisition grain, paying only very modest prices to the peasantry, to try to alleviate famine. The methods by which the new poll tax was collected also served to generate antagonism: the task of tax-collection was initially handed over to the army and the military sought to collect the new tax in cash. Previously, the work of tax-collection had been undertaken by landowners, and peasants had been able to negotiate to pay their taxes in kind or by performing additional labour services. The combination of the need for the peasants to produce cash to pay the new poll tax, together with the unbending attitude of the army during the process of collection, served to intensify the stress that the peasants were already feeling as a result of poor agricultural conditions. Even though the burden that the newtax represented may, overall, not have represented any substantial increase in the overall level of taxation demanded from the Russian peasants, their clear perception was that the poll tax did represent a considerable extra demand by the government.

The position of the peasantry in the second half of the nineteenth century was also complex. Emancipation had been introduced partly as a response to the apparent growth in peasant discontent during the 1850s. The terms of the settlement had been dictated as much by the Russian state's financial posi­tion as by the needs of either peasants or landowners. The government was extremely unsure of the likely peasant response to emancipation, both in the short term and as the real effects of the reform became clear. It was, therefore, very wary of making significant changes to the tax system until emancipa­tion had bedded down. The system of redemption payments introduced a new financial burden for former serfs and, even though the state's need for extra revenue was considerable during the 1860s and 1870s, it was reluctant to embark on a radical restructuring of the tax system. The perception that gripped the Russian establishment after emancipation was that the peasantry were becoming more and more impoverished,[94] and that this was not unre­lated to the growth in revolutionary activity in the 1870s, culminating in the assassination of Alexander II in 1881. The government came to believe that it needed to try to alleviate the financial situation of the peasant if it was to prevent widespread rebellion. Alongside this, in the last part of the nineteenth century the state wanted to promote industrial growth in Russia. As minister of finance, Bunge wanted to reduce the level of direct taxation on the peasantry, but the increases in indirect taxes in the 1880s and 1890s clearly had a significant impact on the rural population. The argument turns on the extent to which the reductions in direct taxation were balanced by increases in excise duties and other indirect levies. It has been suggested that in the first halfofthe i880s the overall tax burden on the peasantry was reduced: even though indirect taxation increased by some i0 per cent, this was more than compensated for by significant reductions in direct taxes. Urban residents paid more in taxation during this period, but the rural population saw its overall tax burden reduced by some 8 per cent.[95] This analysis is short-sighted, since it considers only the first part of the 1880s and fails to take into account the new impositions that were levied during the late 1880s and 1890s. There has also been considerable debate over the overall standard of living that the Russian peasant enjoyed after emancipation, with historians arguing that the supposed 'crisis of Russian agri­culture' at the end of the nineteenth century was a chimera.[96] The role that taxation played in the peasant economy has formed part of these discussions, with the increases in indirect taxation being taken as evidence to support the view that the peasant standard of living declined at the end of the nineteenth century. While indirect taxes do bear more heavily on lower-income groups, the peasantry could also purchase less of the taxed goods, should they find themselves in straitened circumstances. Even the excise duty on vodka could be avoided by the age-old practice of the peasantry distilling their own illegal spirits.

The increased revenues that the government received from indirect tax­ation at the end of the nineteenth century suggests that the population was sufficiently prosperous to continue to consume taxed goods, even as the tax on them rose. The preponderance ofrural dwellers in the Russian Empire makes it improbable that it was townspeople who were the main purchasers ofthese goods and, in any case, significant numbers ofthe peasantry augmented their income from farming by wage labour in Russia's growing factories. It does appear as if the Russian peasant was, overall, well enough off to be able to continue to consume manufactured goods, even as the government increased the taxation on them. Witte's 1898 plaintive report to the emperor about the impoverishment of the peasantry and the effect this had on the state's bud­get is a reflection on the long-term relative poverty of the Russian peasant. The poor yields that Russian agriculture produced meant that the per capita income of Russia's farmers continued to be much lower than incomes else­where in Europe and thus, that the tax revenues that they could contribute were significantly lower than in Austria or France.

The challenge that the Russian state faced in framing its fiscal policies was how to enhance the overall prosperity of its population and thus increase the state's revenues. Although it was able to stave off the most serious financial crises, tsarist Russia faced a series of nevertheless persistent and significant budget difficulties. These were the product of the imperial Russian regime seeking to maintain a military profile equivalent to that of its Western neigh­bours and rivals from an economic base that was much less developed than its Great Power rivals. The tsarist state's expenditure was on the same level as that of its more prosperous rivals to the west, but its revenue-raising potential was much lower. The tsarist state had, therefore, to impose relatively high levels of taxation on its population to enable it to continue as a Great Power and it had to collect its revenues effectively and ruthlessly if it was to continue to be a credible military power.

PART VI

*

FOREIGN POLICY AND THE ARMED FORCES

Peter the Great and the Northern War

PAUL BUSHKOYITCH

From the end of the fifteenth century to Peter's time the main preoccupa­tion of Russian foreign policy was the competition with Poland-Lithuania for territory and power on the East European plain. Poland was the hegemonic East European power for almost two centuries, and after initial success by 1514, Russia struggled in vain against its neighbour with few intervals of peace or goodwill. The long series of wars that resulted culminated in the war of 1653-67, which brought the Ukrainian Hetmanate into the Russian state and marked a decisive turn in Russia's favour. Relations with the Tatar khanates to the south and east were more complex. Russia had conquered Kazan and Astrakhan in 1552-6 but was unwilling to confront Crimea, whose overlord was the Ottoman Empire, western Eurasia's greatest power until the very end of the seventeenth century. The tsars preferred to build elaborate defences in the south, a line of forts and obstructions that stretched hundreds of miles from the Polish border to the Volga, and mobilise the army every spring rather than risk war with the Ottomans by pressing too hard on Crimea. The only area of relative security was the north-west, the Swedish border. The expan­sion of Sweden into Estonia in the 1570s and the capture of Ingria, ratified at Stolbovo in 1619, cut Russia off from the Baltic and placed an ever more pow­erful neighbour on Russia's frontier, but Sweden's main preoccupations were with Denmark, Germany and Poland, not Russia. In the seventeenth century Russia's relations with Sweden were good (apart from the war of 1656-8, a result of the Polish tangle) and the King of Sweden was the only European monarch to be allowed to send a resident emissary to Moscow, from 1630 until the outbreak of the Northern War. Thus it was not without reason that Peter's declaration of war on Sweden in 1700, in concert with Denmark and King Augustus II of Poland, came as a surprise in Stockholm.[97]

Peter's new war was also a surprise because Russian foreign policy after 1667 had been preoccupied with the Ottoman Empire and its Crimean vassal. Russia's strategic situation had been radically altered by the acquisition of the Ukrainian Hetmanate, placing Russian troops in Kiev and other Ukrainian towns on the northern edge of the steppe, that is, of Crimean territory. The immediate result was the Chigirin War of 1677-81, the first in which Russian troops actually confronted Ottoman soldiers as well as the Crimeans. The outcome was a minor military defeat for Russia but also recognition of Russia's new border along the Dnieper. With their northern frontier secure, the Turks under Kara Mustafa pasha turned to Vienna but were defeated in 1683. The failed Turkish siege of Vienna led to the Habsburg reconquest of Hungary and the formation of the Holy League, consisting of the Empire, Poland, Venice and the Papacy. The regent Sophia, Russia's ruler in Peter's youth (1682-9) responded positively to an imperial invitation to join the Holy League, but such a step required a full reconciliation with Poland (1686), something that aroused doubts not only among Polish magnates but also in Moscow The Naryshkin faction was against it, but Sofia and her favourite Prince V V Golitsyn persuaded the duma (council of Boyars) to go along and Russia joined in. Her contribution was to be the two Crimean campaigns of 1687 and 1689, both attempts to strike Crimea across the steppe, moving south from the Ukraine, and both ignominious failures. The failures led to the triumph of Peter and the Naryshkins, but the new government was not decisive enough either to break with the alliance or to continue the struggle. The war stagnated until the death of Peter's mother in 1694 put him wholly in charge for the first time. Late in that year, on his return from Archangel and his first sea voyage, Peter decided to move against the Turks and he did not consult the boyars about it. He followed the enthusiastic advice of his two foreign favourites, Francois Lefort of Geneva and the Scottish general Patrick Gordon, not that of his Naryshkin relatives. In the war Peter moved not against Crimea but against the Ottoman fort of Azak (Azov) at the mouth of the Don. The lack of a Russian navy caused the failure of the first siege, so over the following winter Peter built one at Voronezh and in 1696 took the fort. It seems that he intended to go on fighting the Turks, opening his way into the Black Sea, and talks with his allies were the diplomatic purpose of the famous trip to Europe in 1697-8. There he discovered that the Habsburgs in particular were weary of war and that Peter would himself have to make peace with Istanbul.

On the way home he met with Augustus II in Poland, who had a new idea: attack Sweden. If Peter went along it meant a break with the tsar's previous favourites, Lefort and Gordon, who continued to favour an anti-Ottoman policy, but both died early in 1699. He mourned their deaths, but for political support found two new favourites, Fedor Golovin, the scion of an old boyar family, and Aleksandr Menshikov, the son of one of the palace falconers. Peter moved quickly to make a treaty with Denmark, completing the circle of allies against Sweden. His method was characteristic, for he ordered the Danish envoy to Voronezh where he was inspecting the shipyards. There he met the Dane at night in a small house on the edge of town with only Fedor Golovin and a translator present, and together they wrote the treaty. Peter told the Dane to be sure to keep the matter secret from the Russian boyars. Complications with the Turkish peace put off the Swedish war until the autumn of 1700, but the new direction was now set.

The course of the war was full of surprises, for the political, military, eco­nomic and even demographic position of the warring powers was not what it seemed on the surface. Sweden had been the hegemonic power in northern Europe since the great victories of Gustavus Adolphus, having reduced Den­mark in size and power and established itself not only in the Baltic provinces but in northern Germany The performance of KingJan Sobieski's army before Vienna in 1683 seemed to suggest that Poland had recovered from its losses in the Russian-Ukrainian war. Contemporaries attributed great significance to Augustus II's success in Hungary as an imperial ally and commander, presum- ingthat he, like Sobieski, could overcome the contentions of Polish magnates long enough to secure victory. Russia, in contrast, was still a marginal power, fighting with mixed success against the Turks and Tatars and apparently much less important than Poland.

In reality, the situation was quite different. Poland's problems extended beyond magnate quarrels with the king and with one another. The Cossack rebellion of 1648 and the subsequent wars had largely been fought on Polish territory, leading to economic catastrophe and demographic collapse. It did not regain its pre-1648 population (about 11 million) until the middle of the eighteenth century. Further, its crucial grain exports met increasing compe­tition from improved farming techniques in Holland and England, its main markets. Polish cities stagnated after 1648, falling in population and prosperity The most ruthless government would have raised revenue with difficulty in this situation, but revenue for the army was almost entirely at the will of the diet (Polish parliament) and the szlachta (nobility) served in the army as volun­teer cavalry or on the wages of great magnates. A modern infantry army was an impossibility. The king also could not fully control Poland's Baltic ports (Danzig and Elbing) nor could he build a navy.

Sweden was in much better shape, but also had weaknesses under the sur­face. The new naval base at Karlskrona made it possible to check the Danish navy and control at least the northern Baltic, as long as England or Holland did not intervene. Sweden's army was the best trained and organised in the area, for the system of cantoning the army (indelningsverk) on particular districts preserved it as a fighting force even in peacetime. Sweden's state organisa­tion, formed under Gustavus Adolphus and count Axel Oxenstierna, gave the country an efficiency that was the envy of Europe. The 1680 proclamation of absolutism by King Charles XI gave, it appeared, the flexibility to the execu­tion of policy that the need to consult the riksdag (Swedish assembly of estates) thwarted. The return of royal lands (the reduktion) seemed to ensure revenue for the absolute king.

This impressive structure was built on sand. Under the Swedish crown was a population of only about 1.8 million in Sweden and Finland and a few hundred thousands in the Baltic provinces and other possessions. These numbers were too small to sustain large armies, and it was always necessary to recruit outside of Sweden. This meant money, and that was in short supply. Sweden was simply too poor to provide enough money, particularly in cash. For most of the seventeenth century the single largest item of cash income for the crown were the Riga tolls. Nothing in Sweden proper could compare. Gustavus Adolphus had pursued his wars by confiscating the tolls in Polish and Ducal Prussia and subsidies from France. The economic situation had not changed in any major way by the 1690s, and furthermore those years were ones of poor harvests and famine. Sweden could win a war only by carrying the fight to other lands, exploiting their wealth and attracting subsidies. The brilliance of Swedish organisation, civil and military, made such a strategy possible, but a long war could create immense obstacles.

Russia's strength lay under the surface and the initial underestimation of Peter's chances by allies and enemies alike was entirely understandable. Rus­sia's army was in the process of modernisation, and previous experience demonstrated how difficult that was. The use of mercenaries in the Time of Troubles and the Smolensk War (1632-4) was a failure. Later on Tsar Alexis used European officers to train Russian soldiers, infantry and cavalry, in the new techniques of warfare, fighting in formation and using pikes to supple­ment musket fire. The change was not complete, however, and Peter had to start anew in the 1690s. Older elements remained, such as the Russian gentry cavalry, even operating in considerable numbers through the early years of the Northern War. The speed of change meant a great lack of trained officers, whom Peter recruited abroad, but that system had its own difficulties. Unless the modernisation was thorough and rapid, the changeover could create even greater confusion, as the first battle of Narva demonstrated.

No one had a clear idea of Russia's economic resources, but everyone knew the distances were vast and communications very poor. It did not have extensive iron production, artisanal or otherwise, and imported weapons in large num­bers. Russia had to maintain an expensive permanent army on the southern frontier against the Crimeans. It had no navy, and thus no experienced officers and sailors when Peter built one. The tsar and great boyars were wealthy, but the country as a whole was poor (if not as poor as Sweden) and the adminis­trative structure inadequate. In the provinces the administrative structure was especially limited, leaving the provincial governors with tiny staffs to admin­ister areas the size of several French provinces. The central government in Moscow was slow and cumbersome, operating according to unwritten tra­ditional procedures. Russia lacked not only trained officers but men with a whole series of technical skills necessary to warfare, modern fortification, shipbuilding, mathematically precise artillery. It had no engineers to drain swamps or build canals, rendering the communication problem even worse. Finally, most ofthe Russian elite lacked the general education on which to base the acquisition of these skills. In the terminology of the time, Russia lacked the arts and sciences and was thus 'barbaric'.

Nevertheless, Russia had some crucial advantages of which even her leaders may not have been fully aware. One important advantage was demographic. In Peter's time, from the 1670s to 1719, the population grew from some 11 million to about 15.5 million. In the sixteenth century, Russia and Poland-Lithuania had been similar in population (6 -7 million), probably with an advantage to Poland. After the middle of the seventeenth century Russia had decisively pulled ahead of Poland, and compared to Sweden, it was becoming a giant. This population growth had been rapid after the end of the Time of Troubles, and was accompanied by a shift in settlement away from the western frontier and the centre towards the east, the Urals and the south-east, the Volga and the steppe. This shift also meant that labour was available for the salt wells and iron mines of the north and the Urals, and that better, richer, land was coming under cultivation in the south. Thus grain prices remained stable over a century of population growth. Russia's foreign trade grew throughout the century, primarily through Archangel. As the terms of trade were in Russia's favour, Dutch and English merchants came to the Dvina with their ships ballasted with silver that flowed into the Russian treasury directly at Archangel and indirectly through Russian fairs and market towns. The importance of this trade lay not in any larger economic transformation - Russia remained firmly agrarian - but in the flow of cash which it produced. The tsar, unlike the King of Sweden, had a ready supply of silver coins, coming in from the sales tax and the vodka monopoly. The trade also provided the merchants with modest capital, part of which was invested in iron mines and metalworking shops that supplied the army. None of the favourable economic factors was strong enough to allow Russia to fight a war without difficulty, but all were sufficient to allow protracted conflicts without major crisis. The old Russian administration had been fairly good at procuring resources, and Peter's new methods were even better. He was able to take the war into the territory of his enemies and neighbours, and at the same time Russia's very size and poor communications were immense obstacles to any invader.

Thus Peter was by no means weak when he went to war, though he was probably no more aware of his advantages at first than other contemporaries. In his agreements with Augustus, he had demanded little, giving most of the Baltic provinces to Poland and asking only for a small coastal strip, basically Russia's pre-1617 territory. He had built a new army and navy, and was quickly learning how to mobilise resources, but he had only some experience of success and admired the alleged political and military skills of Augustus.The question that to some extent still eludes us is, however, what did he want to accomplish? The three wars of Peter's reign, the Azov Campaign, the Northern War and the Persian Campaign, were all different, but they had one thing in com­mon, the desire for ports. This desire does not imply that Peter was trying to found a commercial empire, but it does seem to have been high on his priorities in all three cases.

The Azov Campaign is the most difficult to explain simply because of the character of record-keeping in seventeenth-century Russia. The Russian state kept detailed records of decrees, orders, military and tax rosters, diplomatic negotiations and judicial proceedings, but not of the discussions leading up to decisions. Thus we can only infer Peter's motives. In joining the Holy League, Sofia had demanded of the Ottomans access to the Black Sea at the Dnieper and Don and the destruction of the Crimean Khanate. Golitsyn's military strategy, a frontal attack on the peninsula, seems to vindicate the seriousness of these demands. After her overthrow, the Naryshkin government moderated these demands, requiring not the destruction ofthe Khanate but only a cessation of raids, and access to the Black Sea by the two rivers. The Naryshkins, however, were too indecisive to actually realise their presumed aims. Peter's military moves, a main blow at Azov with a secondary campaign on the Dnieper under Boris Sheremetev and Hetman Mazepa, fitted the Russian demands, which now gave priority to the river mouths. At the same time Russia's post-1667 borders had placed her in direct confrontation with the Ottomans. Not only were the Crimeans closer but from Kiev it was only a short journey across the steppe to the Ottoman forts at Bender and Khotin, the gates to the Balkans. The competition for power and territory was unavoidable, and in addition the religious factor is not to be discounted. Peter's propaganda and diplo­macy stressed Christian solidarity against Islam, and given Peter's real ifrather unconventional piety, as well as the culture of the age, these were serious motives. All this being said, we still have to infer Peter's reasons primarily from his actions.

The Northern War is another situation entirely, for there are many, if often imperfect, testimonies to Peter's motives. During the Great Embassy of 1697­8 a number of the Europeans who met Peter and his entourage recorded some discussion about acquiring a Baltic port, and diplomats back in Moscow picked up the same talk. We have nothing from Peter's hand that records this notion, but the envoy of Peter's new ally Augustus II, Georg Carl von Carlowitz, reported Peter's words, that the tsar felt that he was unjustly deprived of a Baltic port, both for his navy and for commerce, and wanted to revenge himself on Sweden. The latter remark may have referred to the insult Peter felt he had received at Riga in 1697 but also pointed to another issue that surfaced in the war and in Peter's private correspondence as well as public propaganda. The lands at the head of the Gulf of Finland, Ingria and the Kexholm province, had been part of Novgorod and then of Russia since the beginning of recorded history and were lost only in the Time of Troubles. The population remained to a large extent Orthodox (though most of it was probably Finnish speaking) after 1617. Thousands had left for Russian territory, fleeing Lutheran pastors and Swedish landlords, and new, Lutheran, settlers from the Finnish interior came to replace them in many areas. Of course the ethnic structure of the area per se was a matter of indifference in seventeenth-century Europe, but the whole story served as a reminder of the territory's Russian past. In the original treaty with Augustus II these territories were to be Russia's prize.

The problem with Ingria was that it had no port, so it is not surprising that once he declared war on Sweden in August 1700, Peter marched not into Ingria but towards Narva, in Estonia. This move disturbed Augustus II, since the treaty with Peter gave him all of Livonia and Estonia (including Narva) in the event of victory over Sweden. There was nothing Augustus could do, however, and the move did have a certain military logic, for Narva was more important a fortress than any ofthe small Swedish positions in Ingria. In the event Charles XII (with Anglo-Dutch naval help) knocked Denmark out of the war and turned towards Estonia. Peter's army suffered its greatest defeat before Narva on 19 /30 November, an event that forced him to change direction, and in 1702-3 he captured Ingria, from the head of the Neva at Noteborg (Oreshek, after 1703 Shlissel'burg) to Estonia, with the island of Retusaari in the gulf itself. At the mouth of the Neva Peter began to build St Petersburg, precisely the naval and commercial port he had wanted. Retusaari became Kronslot (Kronstadt), his main naval base in the Baltic. Peter's subsequent behaviour and statements underscored the centrality of the new city in his plans. During 1706-8 he made a number of overtures to Charles XII for a compromise peace. Though he had captured Narva and Dorpat in 1704, he offered to surrender all of his conquests with the exception of St Petersburg and its immediate vicinity. Charles rejected the offers, but they show what Peter considered absolutely essential. Nothing that Peter did or said after Poltava contradicts the priority given to the new port. Peter took Viborg in 1710 to provide a better defensive perimeter to the new city on the north-west, and the capture of Reval and Riga served the same aim, as well as expanding Russia's naval and commercial possibilities. Peter left Baltic society in the hands of the local nobility and encouraged the towns to act as ports for the empire as a whole. Similarly he had no interest in Finland west of Viborg, for the country was too poor, lacked good ports and significant commerce, and was not essential for the defence of Petersburg.

The priority given to the port was perhaps the basis of Peter's commitment to the war with Sweden, but it was not the only element. He seems to have really felt that the losses from the Smuta needed to be rectified. In 1716 he commissioned Shafirov to write a long defence of his policies in the war, which he personally edited and supplemented,[98] and had it translated into German and other European languages The thrust of the text was that he was only rectifying past injustice, the seizure of Ingria and Karelia in the Time of Troubles and also Sweden's failure to uphold Russian claims to Livonia, which it had (he argued) recognised in the 1564 truce with Ivan the Terrible. The argument was that Russia, not the dynasty, had claim to all this, and indeed Shafirov even said that the 'Russian empire' (rossiiskaia imperiia) had such claims, thus using the term five years before Peter adopted the title of Emperor (imperator). In claiming the territory for Russia, Shafirov and Peter did two things. They abandoned the older Russian claims to territory based on patrimonial inheritance: Ivan IV had claimed that Livonia was his personal inherited estate (votchina) as a

Riurikovich, as he and his ancestors had also done in the cases of Smolensk and Polotsk. The authors also fit their claims into the then usual definitions of a just war. Samuel Pufendorf, who came to be Peter's favourite European historian and political thinker, alleged two sorts of just war, defence against an attempt against one's life and property (defensive war) and an attempt to recover things lost unjustly in previous conflicts (offensive war) [Pufendorf, De Officio hominis et civis, 1682, bk. II, chapter 16.2]. They also followed Pufendorf in pointing to Charles XII's attempt to stir up rebellion in Russia, something both Pufendorf and Grotius had condemned as inflicting more harm on the enemy than humanity in warfare allowed [Pufendorf, De Officio, II, 16.12]. The Russians did not, however, follow Pufendorf in all respects. Pufendorf believed in the interests of states, and that these interests were the main motives of their policies, as he described in his history of Europe (translated into Russian in 1710). Peter and Shafirov also got from Pufendorf their idea of Sweden's main motive in the war, to keep Russia ignorant and weak, to prevent it from learning the arts of war of the West. They do not allege any such state interests for Russia, however, perhaps only because the need for a port coincided so neatly with the recovery of unjustly taken territories. It is also the case that European monarchs still preferred to downplay or just plain conceal their own state interests while emphasising those of their opponents. Shafirov's tract followed this example.

In the 1717 tract and elsewhere Peter and his spokesmen also deviated from another norm of earlier Russian justifications for war, the defence of Ortho­doxy. In all the wars with Poland and Sweden, but especially in 1653-4, the tsars had made much of this issue, and in 1700 Peter had a good case. The Swedish government did harass and persecute Orthodox peasants, Finnish and Russian alike, after 1619. Stefan Iavorskii, the curator of the patriarchal throne after 1701, did mention this issue in some of his early sermons, but it soon disappeared from Russian official and unofficial pronouncements as well as from the themes of celebrations and other types of propaganda. In a differ­ent way, however, Peter retained a religious understanding of his war along with the secular rationale, for he clearly believed that God was on his side. He celebrated his triumphs with liturgy as well as fireworks. In 1724 he decided to correct the liturgy composed by Feofilakt Lopatinskii to celebrate Poltava. He objected to the monk's phrase that Russia had fought for the cross of Christ. The Swedes, he wrote, honour the cross just as we do, 'Sweden was proud, and the war was not about faith, but about measure.'³ Charles XII, in other words,

3 P. Pekarskii, Nauka i literatura v Rossii pri Petre Velikom, 2 vols. ( St Petersburg, 1862), vol.

II, p. 201.

was proud beyond measure, and God punished him. Peter wanted Feofilakt to quote the Bible, 'Goliath's proud words to David, and David's trusting in the Lord': 'This day will the Lord deliver thee into mine hand, and I will smite thee . . .' (1 Samuel 17: 46).

Many motives made up Peter's decision to start and continue the war with Sweden. He felt that his cause was just, even according to the latest European thinking. He believed that Russia needed a port to maintain its prosperity and power. He thought Sweden was preventing Russia from acquiring the fruits of European civilisation. He also understood the prestige conferred by military victory at home and abroad, and the power that it gave in diplomacy. He wrote to his son Alexis in 1716 that it was through war that 'we had come from darkness out into the light; us, whom no one in the world knew, they now respect. . .'[99]

Thus Peter's dogged determination to bring the war to a victorious close should not be surprising. The success of Charles in deposing Augustus II in 1706 and placing Stanislaw Leszczynski on the Polish throne as a Swedish pup­pet certainly prompted Peter's proposals for a compromise peace, but when Charles rejected them, Peter continued to fight. At Zolkiew in December, 1706, he chose the basic strategy of withdrawal to the Russian frontier that he pursued for the next two and a half years. Charles was in no hurry, sure as he was that his approach to the Russian border would result in an aristocratic as well as popular revolt against the tsar. Charles's advisers had been telling him for years that Russia was unstable and Peter unloved, and he printed proclamations to circulate in Russia calling for revolt. Indeed many in Europe held the same opinion. As the Swedish king moved east, however, his supplies ran low, and at Lesnaia (28 September/9 October 1708) Peter cut off the relief column. At the Russian frontier there was no revolt, so Charles turned south towards the Ukraine where Hetman Mazepa joined him, but without most of the Ukrainian Cossackhost, whose rank and file remained loyal to the tsar. The Swedes managed to survive the winter and laid siege to Poltava, where Peter defeated them (27 June/8 July 1709), his greatest triumph. At Poltava Peter's relentless training, good use of artillery and understanding of his limits gave him victory. Peter built field fortifications and let Charles attack him, realising that his army lacked the precise training and experience for an attack. The steadfast courage of his infantry broke the Swedish assault, not the last battle of this type in Russian history. Even more crushing to Charles's fortunes was the aftermath, for he escaped across the Dnieper to Turkish territory, leaving behind all the troops who had escaped from Poltava. His veterans, dispersed as prisoners through Siberia, could not be replaced in a small country like Sweden.

The rest ofthe Northern War was a struggle to finish the job. Charles was as stubborn as Peter, and even the loss ofall the Swedish German possessions and the Russian conquest of Finland in 1713-14 did not shake his resolve. Instead, Charles spun fantastic plans to conquer Norway, where he perished in 1718. For Russia, the years after Poltava meant coalition warfare in northern Germany and new diplomatic complexities. Denmark was a largely loyal ally until 1720, but too small to be of much use. Hanover and other German states were glad to seize Swedish possessions, but Peter's marriage of his daughter to the Duke of Mecklenburg in 1716 convinced both the Habsburgs in Vienna and King George I of Great Britain and Hanover that Peter had great designs in the Baltic. In fact, the Mecklenburg scheme was part of a desperate attempt to surround Sweden and put enough pressure on Charles to accept defeat and make peace. His death brought a new king and queen to the Swedish throne, who hoped to rely on the British navy to pressure Peter into a peace favourable to Sweden. Their hope was in vain. The British navy was certainly enormously more powerful than Peter's ships of the line with their newly trained crews and foreign officers, but the Russian galley fleet, borrowed from Mediterranean practice to sail in the Baltic skerries, inflicted devastating raids on the Swedish coast with virtual impunity. At Nystad in August, 1721, Peter got all he wanted: Ingria, Karelia, Viborg, Estonia and Livonia. Russia had a port, with a large defensive perimeter around it, and was now a European power, dominant in the north-east.

The final war of Peter's life was in a totally different direction, and seems to have been entirely commercial in inspiration. This was the Persian campaigns. Peter had toyed with the idea of exploiting the internal dissension in Iran for some time, but only with the conclusion of the Northern War was he free to move south. This he did immediately, a difficult series of campaigns overland and by sea, ending in the short-lived Russian occupation of Gilan. Peter's correspondence with Artemii Volynskii and other documents make clear that this was a commercial enterprise. The idea was to seize the silk-producing areas of northern Iran, which had long provided Russia with silk, both for its own needs and for resale to Europe.[100] Peter had learned from the Dutch and

English that overseas trade backed by military force was the road to wealth and power, and in a small way was determined to imitate them. Ultimately Russia had neither the commercial development nor the type of military forces necessary for such a task, and in 1735 had to return the territories to Iran.

For all Peter's interest in Iran after 1721, Russia's international relations necessarily focused on Europe. Peter had created an entirely new situation in northern and eastern Europe, and needed a new set of alliances and rela­tionships. Most dramatic perhaps was the new relationship to Poland. The return of Peter's erstwhile ally, Augustus II, to the Polish throne after Poltava at first seemed like a great boon to Russia, again giving Russia's former chief antagonist a friendly monarch. Peter continued his earlier policy of support­ing Augustus against his magnate opponents in Poland until 1715. As time passed, however, Augustus grew increasingly fearful of Russia's new power, and annoyed that Peter was keeping his conquests in the Baltic provinces. He put out feelers to the Baltic nobility, and began to look for other allies. Peter began to move away from the king and towards his Polish opponents, who proved a constant thorn in the side of the king until his death. Continued royal weakness and magnate rivalries in Poland, to boot a country heavily ruined by the Northern War, gradually changed the relationship. By the end of Peter's life the Russian ambassador in Warsaw was intriguing with the various magnate parties and other ambassadors, keeping the king in check, and operating as if Poland was a Russian protectorate, which in many respects it was until the partitions put a temporary end to its existence as a state.

Sweden also found itself in a wholly new situation. If its economy was in better shape than Poland's, and it gradually recovered from the war, politically there were many analogies. The death of Charles XII in 1718 led to a new constitution, with a weakking and powerful estates, primarily the noble estate. Though the new king had relied on Britain to try to reverse Peter's victories, he signally failed and had to agree to Peter's conditions at the 1721 Treaty of Nystad. The treaty not only ratified Peter's conquests, Ingria, Estonia, Livonia, Karelia and the Viborg district of Finland, it specified that Russia would not interfere with the new Swedish constitution. Peter was perfectly aware that Sweden's 'Age of Freedom' meant the freedom of Russian, French and British ambassadors to bribe the members of the Diet to follow their lead.

For Peter after 1721, the central point of his European policy was to retain his position in the Baltic, which led him to the Holstein alliance and later the 1724 defensive treaty with Sweden. The Holstein alliance gave him a means to pressure Denmark to remove the Sound tolls on Russian shipping, but primarily it gave him a means to influence Swedish politics. At that moment the Swedish estates were resisting King Frederick's attempts to reinforce his position, and thus supported the idea of an eventual Holstein succession (Karl Friedrich of Holstein was the son of Charles XII's sister). The idea seems to have been that Holstein could provide a base for a recovery of the Swedish position in Germany. For Peter, such aims in Sweden meant that Sweden would not be looking to regain his Baltic conquests. Thus Russia assured the leaders of the Swedish estates that she supported the new constitution and the Holstein succession, and the result was a defensive alliance that helped secure Russia's position in the Baltic. Soon afterwards Peter married his daughter Anna to Karl Friedrich. For Peter's lifetime the arrangement brought security, but Russia was to abandon the commitment to Holstein in 1732, as it no longer was needed to restrain Sweden. (The only importance of the whole episode was that it led to the birth of the future Peter III.) In all these manoeuvres around the Baltic Peter avoided taking sides among the larger European powers. Russia would chose Austria for an ally only after his death.

Russia's role in larger European politics was extensive, but should not be exaggerated. Though dominant in north-eastern Europe, Russia did not become a truly Europe-wide power until the Seven Year's War. For the main European rivalry of the time, that of France with the Habsburgs, Holland and Britain, Russia was still peripheral. France did not even bother to send a permanent ambassador until after Nystad, using only low-level commercial agents before. For the Habsburgs, Russia was obviously crucial because of the Ottomans, and Peter's involvement in German affairs brought a sharp reaction. Russian and Austrian ambassadors had complex relations in War­saw, sometimes antagonistic, sometimes working together. The Dutch and English had commercial relations with Russia, and their stake in the stability of the Baltic and its trade meant that Peter's advances caused great excitement and occasional fear. None of this, however, had much to do with the crucial points of conflict in Flanders, the Rhineland, North America and Asia. Russia remained a major regional power, part of the northern and Balkan systems that overlapped with the conflicts farther west at certain points, but was not part of those conflicts.

***

Peter's dreams and Russia's new position demanded not only a better army and navy, it demanded a new diplomatic corps. Most of all this meant per­manent Russian ambassadors outside of Russia, in Istanbul as well as Russia's neighbours and the major powers. Before Peter, the Ambassadorial Office (Posol'skii prikaz) had been one of the most sophisticated of Russian offices, maintaining detailed records of embassies and negotiations and abroad service of news collecting. European newsletters were obtained in large numbers and translated into Russian to be read in the boyar duma on a regular basis. Russian culture changed rapidly after about 1650, with knowledge of Polish and Latin spreading among the elite and much geographic knowledge in translation as well. None of this, however, could substitute for diplomats on the spot, and in the 1667 treaty with Poland there had been provisions for the exchange of permanent residents. In Moscow by the 1690s the Polish ambassador was part of a group that included emissaries from the Netherlands, Sweden, Denmark and the Holy Roman Emperor, but Russia sent out permanent ambassadors only from 1699. The first two were Andrei Matveev (1699) to the Netherlands (and north-west Europe in general) and Prince Petr Golitsyn to Vienna (1701). These were men with knowledge of (at least) Latin, and some reading on European states, and they also brought their wives and servants. Bringing families was not easy (Princess Golitsyna was very unhappy with high-heeled shoes and stockings), but it meant that Russian diplomats could begin to mix in elite society with greater ease. The new diplomats were men of consider­able learning, as Matveev's writings and library demonstrate. He wrote his communications to the Dutch government at first in Latin, but later seems to have learned French. Prince Boris Kurakin, his successor in the Hague and later ambassador to other countries, spoke Italian best of all, a language he learned in Venice. Peter sent him there in 1697 to learn languages and naviga­tion, and he seems to have passed his navigation tests, but learned his Italian also from the famous Venetian courtesans. He found in Venice a justification and ideology of aristocratic government, which he developed in private notes and writings on Russian history and European states, all the time serving the absolute tsar.

Most of the Russian ambassadors were indeed great aristocrats (Matveev the exception here). Kurakin, the Golitsyns, several Dolgorukiis, were all princes and men who could hold their own in contests of honour and pride, as well as political acumen, with their European counterparts. Peter also found foreigners to serve him in this capacity, the unfortunate Patkul but also James Bruce, Heinrich Ostermann, and lesser lights like Johann Baron von Urbich and Johann Baron von Schleinitz. At the centre of this network in Russia was Gavriil Ivanovich Golovkin (1660-1734), who took over foreign policy after the death of Fedor Golovin in 1706. Golovkin came from a noble but not aristocratic family, but he had been part of Peter's household since 1676. He stayed in Moscow in 1697, where Peter wrote to him regularly. His second in command was Petr Pavlovich Shafirov (1669-1739), the son of a converted Jew brought to Moscow in the 1650s. Shafirov was a professional, a translator in the Ambassadorial Office since 1691, serving in that capacity on the Great Embassy. Later he was Fedor Golovin's personal secretary. Golovkin found him indispensable for his knowledge of languages and European politics, though nobody seems to have liked him. He was ambassador to Istanbul in the crucial years after the Prut campaign, and Russia's extrication from that mess owed much to his skill. In court politics Golovkin retained a strict neutrality, as did Shafirov at first. After 1714 he was moving closer to the aristocrats, perhaps out of enmity with Menshikov. Both Golovkin and Shafirov were part of court politics, but they were both lightweights, and both isolated and neutral for most of their careers, Golovkin entirely so and Shafirov until nearly the end of Peter's life. It was their administrative and other talents that kept them where they were, not aristocratic origins or court alliances. They were, however, what Peter needed, knowledgeable executors of his will, good organisers of diplomacy, not policy-makers.

Peter was the policy-maker. In the early years of the reign, Gordon and Lefort seem to have exerted their influence to encourage Peter to return to war with the Ottomans, and aftertheir death the rise of Golovin and Menshikov similarly reflected the new foreign policy. Golovin died in 1706, and by the time of Poltava Peter seems to have made his foreign policy with much consultation with his favourites, but less with the aristocracy. Menshikov certainly had opinions, and as Peter's commander in Germany in 1713 made decisions on his own that Peter did not like, but they were not major changes of direction, and Peter reversed them. Later on there is no information to suggest that Prince V. V. Dolgorukii in his time of favour (1709-18) or Iaguzhinskii, a favourite from about 1710 onwards had any consistent vision of foreign policy or influence over it. The basic factional breakdown at court after 1709 was about the position of the aristocracy, pitting the Dolgorukiis and their allies against Menshikov and his. Legends aside, Peter was not a monarch who refused to consult his ministers and generals, like Charles XII. On campaign he regularly held councils of war and seems to have generally gone with the majority, even when he had doubts, as in the decision not to invade Sweden from Denmark in 1716. Yet his foreign policy was his own, made with the technical assistance of Golovkin, Shafirov, the diplomats and the generals, but not with the great men of the court.

Russian foreign policy, 1725-1815

HUGH RAGSDALE

In Russian foreign policy in the era, certain basic generalisations apply: Peter I had dealt remarkably successfully with the Swedish challenge; he had devised a novel and rather satisfactory solution for the Polish problem; but he had failed to resolve satisfactorily the issue of the Ottoman Empire, a challenge for the future. Moreover, these three sensitive areas were so inextricably inter­dependent in Russian foreign policy that St Petersburg could not isolate them from each other and deal with them separately. A crisis in any one of the three states almost invariably involved complications with the others. The com­ing of the French Revolution magnified these problems, and the coming of Napoleon Bonaparte to some extent supplanted them by grander geostrategic challenges.

Era of palace revolutions

The first period following Peter's reign was most conspicuous for the instability of the throne and the resultant inconsequence that it inflicted on Russian foreign policy. The diplomatic chancery of the time was not by any means in incompetent hands; it simply lacked the constancy of government support to give it proper effect.

The early post-Petrine era exhibited clear elements of the continuity of Peter's policy in foreign affairs.¹ The most significant such element was the continuation of Russian policy in the experienced hands of Vice-Chancellor

For critical readings and comments I am grateful to Paul Bushkovitch, Claudine Cowen, Anatoly Venediktovich Ignat'ev, Dominic Lieven, Roderick McGrew, Valery Nikolaevich Ponomarev, David Schimmelpenninck and Vladlen Nikolaevich Vinogradov.

1 Considerations of space prohibit entering into all of the issues of the period, in particular the complex marriage alliances that Peter I made in northern Germany For a clear and authoritative account, see Hans Bagger, 'The Role of the Baltic in Russian Foreign Policy 1721-1773', in Hugh Ragsdale and Valery N. Ponomarev (eds.), Imperial Russian Foreign Policy (Washington and New York: Wilson Center and Cambridge Univerity Presses,

1993), pp. 36-72.

Andrei Ostermann. From the days of the Habsburg-Valois - subsequently Habsburg-Bourbon (1589) - rivalry, France had cultivated the favour of the East European border states hostile to Habsburg Austria, and the rise of Rus­sia naturally threatened these border states and therefore French interests in Eastern Europe. In the circumstances, Ostermann defined Russian policy naturally by forming an Austrian alliance hostile to France.

It was thus natural enough upon the death of King Augustus II of Poland in 1733 that the Russians and the French fielded different candidates for the Polish throne. St Petersburg and Vienna supported the son of Augustus II (Saxon dynasty), while Paris supported former King Stanislaus Leszczynski (1704-9). In the War of Polish Succession (1733-6), Russia and Austria prevailed, and Augustus III became King of Poland (1734-63).

It was equally natural that the Turks perceived in this development a shift of the balance of power against their interests in south-eastern Europe. Border clashes and raiding parties aggravated tension, but the decisive precipitant of conflict was undoubtedly Russian success in the disputed Polish succession. In the Russo-Turkish War (1735-9), Russia and Austria fought a lacklustre cam­paign, and while Russia re-annexed (Treaty of Belgrade) the territories of Azov and Taganrog (previously annexed in 1700, relinquished in 1711), it surrendered the right to fortify these areas and accepted the humiliating principle of trading on the Black Sea exclusively in Turkish ships.

As the name of the period suggests, discontinuity and volatility were as con­spicuous features of the time as was continuity. Ostermann, having served as foreign minister during four transient reigns since 1725, was unseated by a web of intrigues culminating in the palace coup of Elizabeth Petrovna in November 1741. Elizabeth brought a semblance of stability to the throne (1741-62), and she appointed Alexis P. Bestuzhev-Riumin to the office of vice-chancellor and the duties of foreign minister. Bestuzhev was to guide Russian foreign policy during the turbulent and fateful period of the two great European wars of mid-century.