History of Russia

History

From the beginnings to c. 1700

Prehistory and the rise of the Rus

Indo-European, Ural-Altaic, and diverse other peoples have occupied what is now the territory of Russia since the 2nd millennium BCE, but little is known about their ethnic identity, institutions, and activities. In ancient times, Greek and Iranian settlements appeared in the southernmost portions of what is now Ukraine. Trading empires of that era seem to have known and exploited the northern forests—particularly the vast triangular-shaped region west of the Urals between the Kama and Volga rivers—but these contacts seem to have had little lasting impact. Between the 4th and 9th centuries CE, the Huns, Avars, Goths, and Magyars passed briefly over the same terrain, but these transitory occupations also had little influence upon the East Slavs, who during this time were spreading south and east from an area between the Elbe River and the Pripet Marshes. In the 9th century, as a result of penetration into the area from the north and south by northern European and Middle Eastern merchant adventurers, their society was exposed to new economic, cultural, and political forces.

The scanty written records tell little of the processes that ensued, but archaeological evidence—notably, the Middle Eastern coins found in eastern Europe—indicates that the development of the East Slavs passed through several stages.

From about 770 to about 830, commercial explorers began an intensive penetration of the Volga region. From early bases in the estuaries of the rivers of the eastern Baltic region, Germanic (Germanic peoples) commercial-military bands, probably in search of new routes to the east, began to penetrate territory populated by Finnic and Slavic tribes, where they found amber, furs, honey, wax, and timber products. The indigenous population offered little resistance to their incursions, and there was no significant local authority to negotiate the balance between trade, tribute, and plunder. From the south, trading organizations based in northern Iran and North Africa, seeking the same products, and particularly slaves, became active in the lower Volga, the Don, and, to a lesser extent, the Dnieper region. The history of the Khazar state is intimately connected with these activities.

About 830, commerce appears to have declined in the Don and Dnieper regions. There was increased activity in the north Volga, where Scandinavian traders who had previously operated from bases on Lakes Ladoga and Onega established a new centre, near present-day Ryazan. There, in this period, the first nominal ruler of Rus (called, like the Khazar emperor, khagan) is mentioned by Islamic and Western sources. This Volga Rus khagan state may be considered the first direct political antecedent of the Kievan state.

Within a few decades these Rus, together with other Scandinavian groups operating farther west, extended their raiding activities down the main river routes toward Baghdad and Constantinople, reaching the latter in 860. The Scandinavians involved in these exploits are known as Varangians (Viking); they were adventurers of diverse origins, often led by princes of warring dynastic clans. One of these princes, Rurik, is considered the progenitor of the dynasty (Rurik Dynasty) that ruled in various portions of East Slavic territory until 1598 (see Rurik Dynasty). Evidences of the Varangian expansion are particularly clear in the coin hoards of 900–930. The number of Middle Eastern coins reaching northern regions, especially Scandinavia, indicates a flourishing trade. Written records tell of Rus raids upon Constantinople and the northern Caucasus in the early 10th century.

In the period from about 930 to 1000, the region came under complete control by Varangians from Novgorod. This period saw the development of the trade route from the Baltic to the Black Sea, which established the basis of the economic life of the Kievan principality and determined its political and cultural development.

The degree to which the Varangians may be considered the founders of the Kievan state has been hotly debated since the 18th century. The debate has from the beginning borne nationalistic overtones. Recent works by Russians have generally minimized or ignored the role of the Varangians, while non-Russians have occasionally exaggerated it. Whatever the case, the lifeblood of the sprawling Kievan organism was the commerce organized by the princes. To be sure, these early princes were not “Swedes” or “Norwegians” or “Danes”; they thought in categories not of nation but of clan. But they certainly were not East Slavs. There is little reason to doubt the predominant role of the Varangian Rus in the creation of the state to which they gave their name.

Kiev

The rise of Kiev

The consecutive history of the first East Slavic state begins with Prince Svyatoslav (Svyatoslav I) (died 972). His victorious campaigns against other Varangian centres, the Khazars, and the Volga Bulgars and his intervention in the Byzantine-Danube (Byzantine Empire) Bulgar conflicts of 968–971 mark the full hegemony of his clan in Rus and the emergence of a new political force in eastern Europe. But Svyatoslav was neither a lawgiver nor an organizer; the role of architect of the Kievan state fell to his son Vladimir (Vladimir I) (c. 980–1015), who established the dynastic seniority system of his clan as the political structure by which the scattered territories of Rus were to be ruled. He invited or permitted the patriarch of Constantinople to establish an episcopal see in Rus.

Vladimir extended the realm (to include the watersheds of the Don, Dnieper, Dniester, Neman, Western Dvina, and upper Volga), destroyed or incorporated the remnants of competing Varangian organizations, and established relations with neighbouring dynasties. The successes of his long reign made it possible for the reign of his son Yaroslav (Yaroslav I) (ruled 1019–54) to produce a flowering of cultural life. But neither Yaroslav, who gained control of Kiev only after a bitter struggle against his brother Svyatopolk (1015–19), nor his successors in Kiev were able to provide lasting political stability within the enormous realm. The political history of Rus is one of clashing separatist and centralizing trends inherent in the contradiction between local settlement and colonization on the one hand and the hegemony of the clan elder, ruling from Kiev, on the other. As Vladimir's 12 sons and innumerable grandsons prospered in the rapidly developing territories they inherited, they and their retainers acquired settled interests that conflicted both with one another and with the interests of unity.

The conflicts were not confined to Slavic lands: the Turkic (Turkic peoples) nomads who moved into the southern steppe during the 11th century (first the Torks, later the Kipchaks (Kipchak)—also known as the Polovtsy, or Cumans (Cuman)) became involved in the constant internecine rivalries, and Rurikid and Turkic princes often fought on both sides. In 1097, representatives of the leading branches of the dynasty, together with their Turkic allies, met at Liubech, north of Kiev, and agreed to divide the Kievan territory among themselves and their descendants; later, however, Vladimir II Monomakh made a briefly successful attempt (1113–25) to reunite the land of Rus.

The decline of Kiev

The hegemony of the prince of Kiev depended on the cohesion of the clan of Rurik and the relative importance of the southern trade, both of which began to decline in the late 11th century. This decline seems to have been part of a general shift of trade routes that can for convenience be associated with the First Crusade (Crusades) (1096–99) and that made the route from the Black Sea to the Baltic less attractive to commerce. At the same time, conflicts among the Rurikid princes acquired a more pronounced regional and separatist nature, reflecting new patterns in export trade along the northern and western periphery. Novgorod, in particular, began to gravitate toward closer relations with the cities of the Hanseatic League, which controlled the Baltic trade. Smolensk, Polotsk, and Pskov became increasingly involved in trade along western land routes, while Galicia and Volhynia established closer links with Poland and Hungary. The princes of these areas still contested the crown of the “grand prince of Kiev and all of Rus,” but the title became an empty one; when Andrew Bogolyubsky (Andrew I) ( Andrew I) of Suzdal won Kiev and the title in 1169, he sacked the city and returned to the upper Volga, apparently seeing no advantage in establishing himself in the erstwhile capital. (Roman Mstislavich of Galicia and Volhynia repeated these actions in 1203.) By the middle of the 12th century, the major principalities, owing to the prosperity and colonization of the Kievan period, had developed into independent political and economic units.

Social and political institutions

The paucity of evidence about social and political institutions in Kievan Rus suggests that they were rudimentary. The East Slavs had no significant tradition of supratribal political organization before the coming of the Varangians, who themselves, until well into the 10th century, had little interest in institutions more elaborate than those necessary for the exploitation of their rich, new territory. The territory of Rus, moreover, was immense and sparsely settled. The scattered towns, some probably little more than trading posts, were separated by large primeval forests and swamps.

Thus, although the campaigns of Svyatoslav indicate the extent of the political vacuum that his clan filled, he construed his domains as a clan possession rather than as a territorial or national state. His successor, Vladimir, however, seems to have been conscious of one political element—organized religion—that distinguished both the contemporary empires and the newly established principalities in Poland and Hungary from his own. The church (Christianity) provided the concepts of territorial and hierarchical organization that helped to make states out of tribal territories; its teachings transformed a charismatic prince into a king possessing the attributes and responsibilities of a national leader, judge, and first Christian of the realm.

Once Vladimir had adopted Christianity in 988, his rule was supported by the propagation of Byzantine notions of imperial authority (absolutism). The political traditions and conditions of Rus, however, required that the actual workings of the political system and some of its style be derived from other sources. The succession system, probably a vestige of the experience of the Rus khaganate in the upper Volga, was based upon two principles: the indivisibility of the basic territory of Rus (the principalities of Kiev, Chernigov, and Pereyaslavl) and the shared sovereignty of a whole generation. Seniority passed through an ascension by stages from elder brother to younger and from the youngest eligible uncle to the eldest eligible nephew. Such a system was admirably suited to the needs of the dynasty, because, by providing a rotating advancement of members of the clan through apprenticeships in the various territories of the realm, it assured control of the key points of the far-flung trading network by princes who were subject to traditional sanctions, and it gave them experience in lands over which they could someday expect to rule from Kiev. This system served well for a century after it was given final form by Vladimir and was revived by Monomakh (Vladimir II (Vladimir II Monomakh), ruled 1113–25), but it could not survive the decline of Kiev's importance.

Individual Rurikid princes maintained military retinues led by boyars (boyar). The princes and boyars drew their most significant revenues from the tribute or taxes collected annually in kind from territories under their control and disposed of in the export trade. The bulk of the population, apparently free peasants living in traditional agricultural communes, had little other connection with the dynasty and its trading cities.

Little is known of law in this period; it may be assumed that juridical institutions had not developed on a broad scale. The earliest law code (1016), called the “Russian Law,” was one of the “Barbarian” law codes common throughout Germanic Europe. It dealt primarily with princely law—that is, with the fines to be imposed by the prince or his representative in the case of specified offenses.

Some scholars have held that, since land was in the hands of the boyar class, who exploited the labour of slaves and peasants, Kievan society should be termed feudal (feudalism). The meagre sources indicate, however, that Kiev experienced nothing like the complex and highly regulated legal and economic relationships associated with feudalism in western Europe. Kiev's political system existed primarily for and by international trade in forest products and depended on a money economy in which the bulk of the population scarcely participated. The subsistence agriculture of the forest regions was not the source of Kiev's wealth, nor was it the matrix within which law and politics and history were made.

Formal culture came to Rus, along with Christianity, from the multinational Byzantine synthesis, primarily through South Slavic intermediaries. A native culture, expressed in a now-lost pagan ritual folklore and traditions in the arts and crafts, existed before the Kievan period and then persisted alongside the formal culture, but its influence on the latter is conjectural.

No single one of the regional (or, later, national) cultures, perhaps least of all that of Muscovy, can be called the heir of Kiev, although all shared the inheritance. The strands of continuity were everywhere strained, if not broken, in the period after Kiev's decline. But “Golden Kiev” was always present, in lore and bookish tradition, as a source of emulation and renascence.

The lands of Rus

The decline of Kiev led to regional developments so striking that the subsequent period has often been called the “Period of Feudal Partition.” This phrase is misleading: feudal is hardly more applicable to the widely varying institutions of this time than to those of the Kievan period, and partition implies a former unity of which there is insufficient evidence. The distinctiveness of the character and historical fortunes of each of the major East Slavic regions, discussed briefly below, is clear even in the Kievan period and has persisted into the 21st century.

Novgorod

Novgorod arose in the 9th century as one of the earliest centres of the exploitation of the forest hinterland and remained the most important commercial centre of the Kievan period. The changes of the latter Kievan period did not diminish the town's importance, for it benefited both from the increased activity of the Hanseatic League and from the development of the upper Volga region, for which it was a major trade outlet. Although Novgorod was an early base for the Rurikids, the princely traditions characteristic of Kiev and other post-Kievan centres never developed there. When Kiev declined, Novgorod soon (1136) declared its independence from princely power, and, although it accepted princely protectors from various neighbouring dynasties, it remained a sovereign city until conquered by Muscovy (Moscow).

During the 13th century, Novgorod's burghers easily found an accommodation with the invading Mongols. In the Mongol period its energetic river pirates pushed farther north and east toward the Urals and even down the Volga, and Novgorod's prosperity was generally unbroken until the commercial revolution of the 16th century. Its absorption by the growing principality of Muscovy in 1478 ended its political independence and changed its social structure, but Novgorod's characteristic economic and cultural life did not end with that catastrophe.

Novgorod was governed by an oligarchy of great trading boyar families who controlled the exploitation of the hinterland. They chose (from among themselves) a mayor, a military commander, and a council of aldermen, who controlled the affairs of the city and its territories. The town itself was divided into five “ends,” which seem to have corresponded to the “fifths” into which the hinterland was divided. There was in addition a veche (council), apparently a kind of town meeting of broad but indeterminate composition whose decisions, it would appear, were most often controlled by the oligarchy. A major role in politics was played by the archbishop, who after 1156 controlled the lands and incomes previously owned by the Kievan princes and who appears throughout Novgorod's history as a powerful, often independent figure.

The northwest

During this period, much of the territory of the principalities of Smolensk, Polotsk, Turov, and Pinsk was controlled by the grand duchy of Lithuania (Lithuania, grand duchy of), which was essentially an international or nonnational formation led by a foreign dynasty (of eastern Lithuanian pagan origins) ruling over predominantly Belarusian and Ukrainian populations. By the 15th century the dynasty had become Slavic in culture (a version of Belarusian was the official language of the realm), and at its height under Vytautas (Vytautas the Great) (1392–1430) it controlled all the old Kievan territory outside Russia proper—that is, most of present-day Lithuania, Belarus, Moldova, and Ukraine. In 1385 the grand duchy joined the kingdom of Poland, and the union was sealed shortly thereafter by the marriage of Grand Prince Jogaila (see Władysław II Jagiełło) to Jadwiga, the Polish queen.

The northeast

The region bounded by the Oka and Volga rivers, later to be the heartland of the Grand Principality of Moscow (Moscow, Grand Principality of), was settled before the arrival of Slavs from Novgorod and the Baltic area by a Finnic tribe. Rostov, the earliest princely centre, was from Vladimir's time included in the princely rotation system. In the 12th century it became the patrimony of the younger branch of Vladimir II Monomakh (Vladimir)'s family (who founded the new princely centre Vladimir in 1108). Under his son Yury Dolgoruky (1125–57) and grandson Andrew I (1157–74), the principality reached a high political and cultural development, which it retained through much of the succeeding century. Early in the 13th century the principality of Moscow was created as an appanage (royal grant) within the grand principality of Vladimir, and this new seat grew in importance when Michael Khorobrit, brother of Alexander Nevsky, conquered Vladimir (1248) and made himself prince of both centres. Daniel, Nevsky's son and the progenitor of all the later Rurikid princes of Moscow, had a long and successful reign (1276–1303), but at his death the principality still embraced little more than the territory of the present Moscow province (an area of 140 miles [225 km] in length and width). The beginning of Moscow's rise to its later preeminence came during the reign of Daniel's son Ivan (Ivan I) (1328–41), who, by cooperating with Öz Beg, khan of the Golden Horde, and also by his shrewd purchases (probably of tax-farming rights), greatly expanded the influence of his principality.

The southwest

The lands of Galicia and Volhynia were always ethnically and economically distinct from the Kievan region proper, as well as from more distant regions. Agriculture was highly developed, and trade, particularly in the valuable local salt, tended to take westward and overland routes. Galicia, already a separate principality by 1100, grew as Kiev declined. Later, Roman Mstislavich of Volhynia (ruled 1199–1205) conquered Galicia and united the two principalities. Under his son Daniel (Daniel Romanovich) (1201–64), difficulties with the Galician landed magnates and the interference of the Hungarians weakened the principality, and it was subjugated in 1240 by the Mongol invasion. Eventually this region came under the domination of Lithuania (Volhynia) and Poland (Galicia).

The Mongol period

The Mongol invasion

In 1223, when the first Mongol reconnaissance into former Kievan territory led to the disastrous defeat of a Volhynian-Galician-Polovtsian army on the Kalka River, the Rurikid principalities had for generations been intermittently at war. Kiev was in ruins, Novgorod was preoccupied with commerce and with its northern neighbours, Galicia was being torn internally and drawn increasingly into Polish and Hungarian dynastic affairs, and Vladimir-Suzdal (Suzdal), apparently the leading principality, was unable to resist the finely organized and skillful mounted bowmen of the steppe, the greatest military force of the age.

Pious tradition, born of the works of monkish annalists and court panegyrists, has exaggerated both the destructiveness of the first Mongol conquests and the strength of the resistance. The Mongols aimed to revive, under a unified political system, the trade that had traditionally crossed the Central Asian steppe and vitalized the economy of the pastoral nomads. As they moved westward, they gained the collaboration of groups of Turkic nomads and the predominantly Iranian and Muslim traders in the towns of the old Silk Road; they encountered the greatest resistance in sedentary political centres and among landowning elites. The lands of the Rus presented numerous similarities with the Central Asian areas that the Mongols had already conquered. There too, a former commercial empire had fallen apart into an aggregation of warring principalities. There too, ready recruits were to be found—in the Polovtsians, who controlled the lower Dnieper and Volga and Don, and in the Muslim merchants, who dealt in the towns of the Crimea (Crimean Peninsula) and the upper Volga. These merchants showed the way, first (1223) to the Crimea and up the Volga to the old centre of Bulgar (Bolgary), later to Ryazan, Rostov, and the Suzdalian towns, and still later (1240) to Kiev and Galicia.

Many of the conquered cities made a striking recovery and adjustment to the new relationships. Some towns, such as Kiev, never fully recovered in Mongol times, but the cities of the Vladimir-Suzdal region clearly prospered. New centres, such as Moscow and Tver, hardly mentioned in any source before the Mongol period, arose and flourished in Mongol times.

Thus, the Mongol invasion was not everywhere a catastrophe. The local princely dynasties continued unchanged in their traditional seats; some princes resisted the new authority and were killed in battle, but no alien princes ever became established in Slavic territory. Few Mongols remained west of the Urals after the conquest; political and fiscal administration was entrusted to the same Turkic clan leaders and Islamic merchants who had for generations operated in the area. The whole of the Novgorodian north remained outside the sphere of direct Tatar control, although the perspicacious burghers maintained correct relations with the khans.

Tatar rule

After a brief attempt to revive the ancient centres of Bulgar and the Crimea, the Jucids (the family of Jöchi, son of Genghis Khan, who inherited the western portion of his empire) established a new capital, Itil. (It was moved to New Sarai, near the site of Tsaritsyn, modern Volgograd, about 1260.) These towns became the commercial and administrative centres of what was later to be called the “ Golden Horde” (the term is probably a Western invention). Its East Slavic territories were tributaries of an extensive empire, including, at its height, the Crimea, the Polovtsian steppe from the Danube to the Ural River, the former territories of the Bulgar empire (including the fur-rich Mordvinian forests and parts of western Siberia), and in Asia the former kingdom of Khwārezm, including Urgench, the cultural capital of the Jucids. Control of the Slavic lands was exercised through the native princes, some of whom spent much of their time at the Mongol capital, and through agents charged with overseeing the activities of the princes and particularly the fiscal levies.

This multinational commercial empire was unstable. Early in the history of the Golden Horde, the khans of Sarai, who tended to reflect the interests of the Volga tribes, were challenged by the tribal princes of the west, whose control of the Danube, Bug, and Dnieper routes and of the access to the Crimea gave them considerable political and economic power. As early as 1260, Nokhai, one of these western chieftains, showed his independence of Sarai by establishing his own foreign policy, and toward the end of the 13th century he seized control of Sarai itself. At his death the eastern tribes reestablished their control in Sarai, but, in the reign of the great Öz Beg (1313–41), the high point of Golden Horde power, the west was again ascendant. Öz Beg based his power upon firm control of the Crimea and had extensive relations with the Genoese and Venetians, who controlled the main ports there. After the death of Öz Beg's son Jani Beg in 1357, however, the empire began to reveal serious internal strains. The tribes of the west paid little heed to the khans who appeared in dizzying succession in Sarai; the northern Russian princes fell to quarreling and to maneuvering for their own advantage in the internecine politics of the Golden Horde; the Volga Bulgar region was detached by a dissident Tatar prince; and the lands of the east were drawn into the orbit of the Turkic conqueror Timur(Tamerlane).

The Golden Horde's last cycle of integration and dismemberment was closely linked with events in Timur's domains. Tokhtamysh, son of a minor Tatar prince, had been unsuccessfully involved in the skirmishes around the throne of Sarai in the 1370s and had fled to the court of Timur, with whose aid he returned to Sarai and vanquished the tribal leaders who had opposed him. Having defeated and made peace with them, he now turned to defeat Mamai (1381), who had the previous year been defeated by Prince Dmitry Donskoy (Dmitry (II) Donskoy) (grand prince of Moscow, 1359–89). Mamai's western tribal allies went over to Tokhtamysh, and, for a brief time, the major components of the tribal structure of the Golden Horde were reunited. Tokhtamysh successfully attacked Moscow (just as Mamai had hoped to do) and set about consolidating his gains. As his power grew, however, Tokhtamysh was drawn into a struggle with Timur, who had conquered much of Iran, the south Caucasus, and eastern Anatolia. After a number of encounters in the northern Caucasus, Timur, who apparently was intent upon diversion of east-west trade through his own Transoxanian and north Iranian territories, set out to destroy Tokhtamysh and the latter's commercial centres. In 1395–96 Timur's armies systematically annihilated Sarai, Azov, and Kaffa. The Golden Horde never recovered; its subsequent history is a record of struggles among its erstwhile subjects for supremacy and attempts to restore political and commercial stability to the steppe.

The rise of Muscovy (Moscow, Grand Principality of)

From the beginning of the Tatar period, the Rurikid princes displayed much disunity. During the reign of Öz Beg there was a shift of alignments. The princes of Moscow and their allies, together with Öz Beg and his Crimean supporters, generally opposed the princes of Tver, Pskov, and, intermittently, Novgorod. The major punitive measures directed by Öz Beg against Tver with Muscovite support were a part of this pattern.

The links forged in the 14th century between Moscow and the Crimea (Crimean Peninsula) (and Sarai, while Öz Beg controlled it) were crucial to Moscow's later preeminence. They not only afforded Moscow a steady and profitable export trade for its furs but, because of contacts between Crimean merchants and Byzantium, also led quite naturally to close relations between the Muscovite hierarchy and the patriarchate of Constantinople. This special relationship was but one of the reasons for the eventual rise of Moscow as leader of the Russian lands. Admirably situated in the northeast, linked with all of the major navigable river systems and with the steppe, close to the major fur-producing regions and to the most intensely settled agricultural lands, served by a succession of shrewd and long-lived princes, Moscow came naturally to a position of preeminence during the 14th century and was best equipped to enter the struggle for the political inheritance of the Golden Horde that followed the destruction of its capitals by Timur.

Cultural life and the “Tatar influence”

Most traditional scholarship has accepted the notions that (1) the Mongol invasion “destroyed” Kievan culture, (2) the Tatar period was one of “stultification” and “isolation from the West,” and (3) “Russian” culture was deeply influenced by Golden Horde culture, in particular by “Oriental” conceptions of despotism. These views do not accord with the evidence and should probably be discarded.

In the first place, it seems incorrect to say that Kievan culture was destroyed. In the shift of the cultural centre of gravity to the numerous regional centres, Kievan traditions were in the main continued and in some cases (i.e., Galician literature, Novgorodian icon painting, Suzdalian architecture) enjoyed remarkable development.

Similarly, the notions of stultification and isolation from the West cannot be supported. The enormous Novgorodian culture sphere, the upper Dnieper territories that eventually came under Lithuanian control, and the principalities of Volhynia and Galicia all had, if anything, closer contacts with western and central Europe than in the previous period.

As to “Tatar influence,” in the areas of religion and intellectual life, it was practically nonexistent. Control of formal culture by the Orthodox clergy (Russian Orthodox church) and Muslim (Islāmic world) divines and limited contact between the Slavic and Turkic populations prevented it. There is no evidence that any single Turkic or Islamic text of religious, philosophical, literary or scholarly content was translated directly into Slavonic or any East Slavic vernacular during the period.

Concerning the secular culture of the court and counting house, the situation was radically different. These spheres were controlled by very pragmatic princes, merchants, and diplomats. There, Slavs and Tatars elaborated together an international subculture whose language was Turkic and whose administrative techniques and chancellery culture were essentially those of the Golden Horde. Slavic merchants took full part in this culture, and the princes of Muscovy in particular developed their original court culture and chancellery practices within its context. These borrowings, however, were not of a theoretical or ideological nature, and to ascribe later despotism—and its theoretical basis—to “Oriental” influence is to misunderstand the development of Muscovite absolutism.

The post-Sarai period

The collapse of the Golden Horde saw a growth in the political power of the old sedentary centres—Muscovy, Lithuania, the Volga Bulgar region (which became the khanate of Kazan), and the Crimea. This growth was accompanied by dynastic struggles. This period of recovery also saw cooperation among the emerging dynasties against their internal enemies and toward the stabilization of the steppe.

Even by the end of the 14th century, Moscow's position was by no means as dominating as the cartographers' conventions or the historians' hindsight makes it seem. Other centres—Lithuania, Tver, Novgorod—were as rich and powerful as Moscow; many of the areas nominally subject to the Muscovite princes retained their own dynasties, whose members often broke away and sided with one of Moscow's rivals. Only after a series of dynastic conflicts in the early 15th century did Moscow emerge as the leader of the Russian territory.

The struggle began at the death of Vasily I, a son of Dmitry Donskoy, in 1425. The succession of his 10-year-old son Vasily II was challenged by his uncle Yury, prince of the important upper Volga commercial town of Galich. After many turns of fortune, Vasily II succeeded, with the help of Lithuanian and Tatar allies, in establishing his house permanently as the rulers of Muscovy.

Rurikid Muscovy (Rurik Dynasty)

Ivan III

Ivan III (ruled 1462–1505) consolidated from a secure throne the gains his father, Vasily II, had won. The “gathering of the Russian lands,” as it has traditionally been known, became under Ivan a conscious and irresistible drive by Moscow to annex all East Slavic lands, both the Russian territories, which traditionally had close links with Moscow, and the Belarusian and Ukrainian regions, which had developed under distinctly different historical and cultural circumstances. In 1471 Ivan mounted a simultaneous attack upon Novgorod and its upper Volga colonies, which capitulated and accepted Moscow's commercial and political demands. The trading republic, however, retained considerable de facto independence and became involved with the Lithuanian princes in an attempt to resist Moscow. Ivan, using these dealings as a pretext, attacked again, and in 1478 Novgorod was absorbed by Moscow. A Muscovite governor was installed, and 70 Novgorodian boyar families were deported and assigned estates elsewhere to hold in service tenure, being replaced by members of the Moscow military-service class.

Tver suffered a similar fate. Ivan had agreed with Prince Michael Borisovich of Tver to conduct foreign relations in concert and by consultation, but, when the Tverite complained that Ivan was not consulting him on important matters, Ivan attacked him and annexed his lands (1485). By the end of Ivan's reign, there were no Russian princes who dared conduct policies unacceptable to Moscow.

The success of Ivan's expansion was determined by his skillful dealings with the Polish-Lithuanian state (Lithuania, grand duchy of), which had expanded down the Dnieper basin and into Slavic territories on the south flank of Moscow. After 1450 a competition developed for control of the numerous semi-independent principalities of the Dnieper and upper Donets regions. In the early 1490s some minor East Slavic princes defected from Lithuania to Moscow. The first phase of the conflict, confined to border skirmishes, ended in 1494 with a treaty ceding Vyazma to Moscow and with the marriage of Ivan's daughter Yelena to Alexander, grand duke of Lithuania. In 1500, on the initiative of Lithuanian defectors, Ivan's armies seized a number of important border towns, thus beginning a war that ended somewhat inconclusively in 1503 with a truce that extended Ivan's border considerably to the west.

The third major element of Ivan's foreign policy comprised his relations with the various Tatar confederations. In the 1470s the Crimean khan Mengli Giray came into increasing conflict with Khan Ahmed of the Golden Horde and became interested in an alliance with Moscow against Ahmed and Lithuania. Ivan, eager to dissolve the connection between Lithuania and the Crimea but not wanting to alienate Ahmed, stalled for time. In 1481, when Ahmed died, Ivan was able to forge an alliance with the Nogais, Mengli Giray, and Kazan. The security provided by this system became the cornerstone of his later policies.

In addition to problems of war and diplomacy, Ivan was faced with a number of challenges from within his own family and court. In 1472 his eldest brother, Yury, died childless, and Ivan appropriated his entire estate. This action antagonized the two eldest surviving brothers, Andrey and Boris, whose grievances were further increased by Ivan's refusal to give them a share of conquered Novgorod. In 1480 they rebelled, and only with difficulty were they persuaded to remain loyal. A more serious conflict arose (1497–1502) in the form of an open and murderous struggle among Ivan's relatives for succession to the throne. Ivan had originally named as his heir his grandson Dmitry, son of his deceased son Ivan and the Moldavian princess Yelena, but a group close to Ivan's second wife, Sofia (Zoë) Palaeologus, opposed this; her son Vasily threatened and perhaps attempted an insurrection, and Ivan was forced to accept Vasily.

Ivan made the first effort on the part of a Muscovite ruler to become involved in the diplomacy of western Europe. He and his advisers realized the need for a counterpoise to the Polish-Lithuanian power, while the diplomats of Rome and Vienna were interested in the possibility of flanking the growing empire of the Ottomans (Ottoman Empire) with a Muscovite-Tatar force. In the 1470s and '80s there was an unprecedented traffic between these capitals and Moscow. It was through these channels that Ivan arranged his marriage to Sofia Palaeologus, a niece of the last Byzantine emperor. Sofia has been credited with considerable influence over Ivan, in particular with urging him to adopt the Byzantine political style (e.g., autocracy, state domination of the church, etc.), but in fact she probably had little influence over Ivan's policies. His reign ended on a note of failure, with his overtures to the West and his brief rapprochement with Lithuania both disrupted by the intractable territorial and religious conflicts of the Slavic East and by the opportunism of the local magnates. Moscow's situation was worsened after Ivan's death by the collapse of the alliance with the Crimean khan Mengli Giray upon the khan's death in 1515, opening a new period of chaos and readjustment in the steppe.

A similar appraisal must be made of Ivan's domestic policies. Although his reign was notable for the annexation of the rich Novgorodian provinces and for the establishment of a regular bureaucracy and a land-tenure system, these achievements created new problems for his successors. The system of land grants to military servitors, maintained for centuries (with changes) in all conquered lands, ultimately suppressed the interest of both landlords and tenants in increasing agricultural productivity.

Vasily III

Ivan's son Vasily (Vasily III), who came to the throne in 1505, greatly strengthened the monarchy. He completed the annexation of Russian territories with the absorption of Pskov (1510) and Ryazan (1521) and began the advance into non-Russian territories (Smolensk, 1514). Faced with a continuing Lithuanian war and with the breakdown of his father's Tatar policy, Vasily carefully temporized in order to avoid uniting his enemies. Once he had secured peace in the west, he was able to deal directly with the khan of the Crimean Tatars. In the end, however, much of what Vasily accomplished was undone by his failure as a procreator: divorcing his first wife for her apparent barrenness, he married Yelena Glinskaya, who bore him only two children—the retarded Yury and the sickly Ivan, who was three years old at Vasily's death in 1533.

Ivan IV (the Terrible) (Ivan IV)

Vasily had been able to appoint a regency council composed of his most trusted advisers and headed by his wife Yelena, but the grievances created by his limitation of landholders' immunities and his antiboyar policies soon found expression in intrigue and opposition, and the bureaucracy he had relied upon could not function without firm leadership. Although Yelena continued Vasily's policies with some success, on her death, in 1538, various parties of boyars sought to gain control of the state apparatus. A decade of intrigue followed, during which affairs of state, when managed at all, went forward because of the momentum developed by the bureaucracy. Foreign policy was moribund, in spite of considerable opportunities presented by the continuing decay of the khanate of Kazan, and domestic policy vacillated so wildly that scholars cannot agree upon an appraisal of its main directions.

Toward the end of the 1540s, however, there emerged a strong coalition of Muscovite boyars. Apparently inspired by a common awareness of the needs of the state, they ended the debilitating intrigues and embarked upon a thoroughgoing program of reform. The first important step was the reestablishment of the monarch—for the first time to be officially designated tsar—accomplished through the coronation of the 16-year-old Ivan (Ivan IV) in unprecedented solemnity and pomp. Shortly afterward he was married to Anastasia Romanovna Zakharina of a leading boyar family.

Although there is a voluminous literature devoted to Ivan, almost nothing is known of his personality, his political views, or his methods of rule. There is little reliable biographical information about him aside from the facts of his six marriages, his lifelong ill health, and his mercurial temper. It is not even known when he began to rule in fact or which of the policies of his reign can be considered his.

Ivan was doubtless a puppet in the hands of the leading politicians long after his coronation. The major reforms of the middle 1550s, which produced a new law code, a new military organization, a reform of local government, and severe restrictions on the powers of hereditary landowners (including the monasteries), were probably the work of the bureaucrats and boyars, their objective being to modernize and standardize the administration of the growing state. The immediate goal was to strengthen the state and military apparatus in connection with major campaigns (the first undertaken in 1547) against the khanate of Kazan and to prepare for the major colonization of the new lands that the conquest and others were expected to secure. Toward the end of the 1550s, Ivan seems to have gained the support of certain groups opposed to these policies and to have seized control of the government. The issue was evidently foreign policy. The planned conquest of the Volga and steppe region had been delayed in execution, and the Kazan campaigns had been enormously costly. By 1557, when the campaigns against the Crimea began, there was much opposition in the highest military circles. Ivan took the dissidents' part and for the first time emerged as an independent figure.

Ivan was a disastrously bad ruler, in part because no one had ever anticipated that he would rule. His poor health and the mental failings of his brother made it quite natural for the regency and the politicians to ignore him and to neglect his education. In adulthood he contracted a painful and incurable bone disease, from which he sought relief in alcohol and in potions provided by a succession of foreign doctors and quacks. Once he had acquired full power, he set about destroying those who had ruled during the interregnum, as well as the machinery of government they had built up.

Ivan established his famous oprichnina, an aggregate of territory separated from the rest of the realm and put under his immediate control as crown land, in 1564; this was the device through which he expressed his rejection of the established government. As it was his private domain, a state within the state, he took into it predominantly northern and commercial territories that had enjoyed a special prosperity in preceding decades. Specific towns and districts all over Russia were included in the oprichnina, their revenues being assigned to the maintenance of Ivan's new court and household. He established a new, much simplified officialdom and a court composed of sycophants and mercenaries, prone to rule through terror, accompanied by persecution of precisely those groups that had contributed so much to the modernization of the state. As trained statesmen and administrators were replaced by hirelings and cronies, the central government and military organization began to disintegrate. The destructiveness of the oprichnina was heightened by Ivan's involvement in the costly and ultimately disastrous Livonian War (1558–83) throughout this period (indeed, some historians have viewed the oprichnina as a device for the prosecution of that lengthy war's taxing campaigns). Even before the war ended, Ivan was forced by the utter incompetence of his special oprichnina army to reintegrate it (1572) with the regular army and to revert, in theory at least, to the previous institutions of government. By the time he died, in 1584, the state that he had wanted to reclaim from its makers was in ruins.

Boris Godunov (Godunov, Boris)

Ivan the Terrible had murdered his eldest son, Ivan, in a fit of rage in 1581, and his only surviving legitimate heir, Fyodor (Fyodor I), was mentally unfit to succeed him. Power passed to those who were at Ivan's deathbed, among whom Boris Godunov (Godunov, Boris), who had capped a rapid rise in court circles with the marriage of his sister Irina to Fyodor, soon emerged as the leading contender. Godunov's judicious combination of chicanery, vision, and force enabled him to disarm his most dangerous enemies and to have himself proclaimed tsar after Fyodor's death in 1598. His policies during Fyodor's reign had been consistently restorative and conciliatory, and he had apparently succeeded in repairing much of the damage done to the state in Ivan's time. He conducted a cautious and generally successful foreign policy: the 20 years of his reign were, except for a short, successful war against Sweden, peaceful. In domestic matters, he returned to the modernizing and standardizing policies of the mid-century. He reorganized the land-tenure system, commerce, and taxation.

For a number of his problems Godunov could find no solution. Chief among these were the depopulation of the central Muscovite lands and the discontent among small landholders in the territories recently acquired in the south and southwest. Added to these problems was the continuing opposition of the boyars.

In spite of these difficulties and widespread famine caused by crop failures in 1601–02, Godunov remained well in control of the situation until the appearance of the so-called first False Dmitry (Dmitry, False), a defrocked monk who had appeared in Poland in 1601 claiming to be the son of Ivan IV. (The true Dmitry had died during an epileptic seizure in 1591.) The False Dmitry found some supporters in Poland—notably Jerzy Mniszech, to whose 15-year-old daughter, Maryna, he became engaged. As the impostor moved northeast toward Muscovy, he acquired growing support among the disaffected petty gentry and Cossacks (Cossack) (peasants who had escaped from serfdom to a nomadic life) of the regions through which he passed, and border cities throughout the south opened their gates to him. Godunov's troops easily defeated the ragtag force, which apparently had many secret supporters among Muscovite boyars, but a few weeks later Godunov died. The boyars staged a coup against Godunov's family and declared Dmitry tsar. The pretender entered Moscow in triumph, was crowned, and married Maryna Mniszchówna.

The Time of Troubles (Troubles, Time of)

In the period from 1606 to 1613, during the so-called Time of Troubles (Troubles, Time of), chaos gripped most of central Muscovy; Muscovite boyars, Polish-Lithuanian-Ukrainian Cossacks, and assorted mobs of adventurers and desperate citizens were among the chief actors. In May 1606 a small-scale revolt supported by popular indignation at the foolishly insulting behaviour of Dmitry and his Polish garrison brought the overthrow and murder of the pretender. The boyars gave the crown to Prince Vasily Shuysky (Vasily (IV) Shuysky), a leader of the revolt against Dmitry, with the understanding that he would respect the special rights and privileges of the boyars. While the new tsar had the support of most boyars and of the northern merchants, he could not end the disorders in the south or the adventures of the Polish and Swedish kings, who used Muscovy as a battlefield in their continuing conflict with each other. In 1608 a number of boyars, led by the Romanovs, went over to a second False Dmitry, who had ridden a wave of discontent and freebootery from the Cossack south into the centre of Muscovy. A kind of shadow government was formed in the village of Tushino, 9 miles (14 km) west of Moscow, in which the boyars and bureaucrats of the Romanov circle took leading posts. It managed to gain Cossack support and to manipulate Dmitry's pretensions while negotiating with the Polish king Sigismund III (Sigismund III Vasa) on terms by which his son Władysław IV (Władysław IV Vasa) might become tsar. Shuysky, in desperation, turned to Sweden for aid, promising territorial concessions along the Swedish-Muscovite border. At this the Polish king invaded Muscovy and besieged Smolensk (September 1609). The Tushino coalition dissolved, and Dmitry withdrew to the south. The position of the Shuysky government deteriorated, and in 1610 the tsar was deserted by his army and his allies. The boyars formed a seven-man provisional government with the aim of installing a Polish tsar. This government proved unable to settle its affairs and to restore order to the country. A new insurgent army, financed by northern merchants and staffed with Swedish troops, marched on Moscow with the intention of ousting the Polish garrison and of bringing the various Cossack bands under control. It nearly gained Moscow but fell apart because its leadership could make no arrangement with the Cossack leaders. A year later a second force, raised in the same northern cities and supported by Cossacks who had been part of the Tushino camp, was able to take possession of the Kremlin. A call was issued for the election of a new tsar.

Social and economic conditions

In the flux of social and economic life in the 15th and 16th centuries, three interconnected processes may be observed: a steady economic growth, mainly from colonization and trade; an expansion in the power of the central government; and the encroachment of the nobility upon the lands previously held by the free peasantry (peasant), accompanied by the reduction of the bulk of the peasantry to serf (serfdom) status.

In the middle of the 15th century, society and the economy were still organized along traditional lines. The land was sparsely settled. Life for most of the population was simple and probably close to the subsistence level. Serfdom did not yet exist. Most of the peasantry lived on state lands and paid whatever taxes could be extracted from them by their prince or his bailiff.

A number of changes occurred in this pattern in the latter part of the 15th century. About 1460, measures were taken to bring the peasantry under more regular control of the state and the landlord. Peasant registration appeared at this time, and also the requirement spread that peasants might renounce the tenancy of the land they were working only at the end of the agricultural cycle, in the week of St. Yury's Day (November 26 [December 8, New Style]). The growing controls upon the peasantry received impetus from the large-scale deportations and colonizations that accompanied the annexations of Novgorod, Tver, Pskov, and Ryazan, when the old nobility were replaced with nobility owing service to the prince of Muscovy. The nationwide promulgation of the restriction on movement to St. Yury's Day was contained in the law code of 1497, which added the stipulation that peasants leaving a former situation must pay the landlord all arrears in addition to a departure fee. All of the measures, together with the expansion of the state apparatus for tax gathering and adjudication of disputes over land and peasants, were associated with the growing complexity and power of the central government.

The law code of 1550 repeated the stipulation of 1497 limiting peasant departure, but with much more specific provisions and stronger sanctions. Other reforms put an end to local administration by rotating military governors and limited monastic landholding and the juridical rights of landlords over their peasants. The events and policies of the latter half of the reign of Ivan IV destroyed many of the beneficial results of the reforms. The Livonian War imposed unprecedented burdens upon the taxpaying population and the landowning military caste. The political disruption caused by Ivan's oprichnina further undermined the position of the service class and led to the looting of Novgorod and other towns. At the same time, other new trends provided the basis for economic growth: trade in local and Asian transit goods, organized through Arkhangelsk, primarily by English and Dutch merchants, brought unprecedented wealth and luxury to the court; the opening of Siberia provided additional income; and the extension of Russian agriculture into the steppe promised, for the first time, agricultural prosperity.

Cultural trends

This period also saw the crystallization of that complex of forms and ideas that can, for the first time, be identified as Russian culture. There was a gathering and integration of the Novgorodian, Tverite, and Suzdalian cultural traditions. Moscow began to attract the artists, craftsmen, and learned monks who built the eclectic but “national” churches of Ivan III's otherwise Italianate Kremlin and who wrote the revised national, pro-Muscovite versions of the chronicles that had been kept in Rostov, Ryazan, and Novgorod. The regional traditions were not always easily reconciled. Novgorodian attitudes in particular clashed with those of Muscovy.

The reign of Ivan III saw a marked turning toward the West. Ivan surrounded himself with Italian and Greek diplomats and craftsmen. His palace of 1487, his Kremlin with its Latin inscription over the main gate, and his churches, the original aspect of which has been altered by successive Russifying restorations, were clearly in the Italian style, as contemporary foreign visitors noted. His marriage to Sofia Palaeologus had, in addition to its diplomatic significance, a symbolic function of bringing Ivan into the circle of Western princes. Muscovy supposedly regarded itself as the heir of Byzantium and as the spiritual leader of the Orthodox world. It may be that the church leadership, militantly anti-Roman, thought of itself in this light. Ivan and many around him viewed the Byzantine heritage as Western, in contrast to the Ottoman and Tatar world, and were at pains to associate Muscovy with Western traditions and interprincely relations. This striving to be accepted in the Western world marked most of the changes in regalia and style of Ivan's reign, although these were later to be buried in the lore of Muscovite Byzantinism (Byzantine Empire).

Three significant causes can be discerned for the evolution of Muscovite culture in the 16th century. The first was the growth and prosperity of the Russian population, united under a stable and increasingly centralized monarchy, which produced the conditions for the rise of a national culture. The second was the diplomatic and cultural isolation in which Muscovy found itself, particularly in the first half of the 16th century, as a result of hostile relations with increasingly powerful Lithuania and Poland, a cause that, more than any other, brought an end to Ivan III's westward turn and to the revolutionary adjustments of the age of exploration. The third cause was the resolution of church-state relations, in the course of which the church submitted to the power of the princes in politics but gained control over the culture, style, and ideology of the dynasty, producing the peculiar amalgam of nationalistic, autocratic, and Orthodox elements that became the official culture of high Muscovy. This new synthesis was reflected in the great undertakings associated with the name of Metropolitan Makary of Moscow: St. Basil's Cathedral in the Kremlin; the encyclopaedic Menolog, or calendar of months, which contained all the literature, translated and original, permitted to be read in the churches; and the Illustrated Codex, a compilation of East Slavic and Greek chronicles in an official Muscovite version.

Romanov Muscovy (Romanov Dynasty)

Michael

The military drive that finally expelled the Poles from Moscow led to the election of Michael (Mikhail Fyodorovich), the 16-year-old son of Fyodor Romanov, as the new tsar. The composition of the coalition that elected him is not clear, but he evidently represented a compromise between the Cossacks, the boyars (especially the Tushino boyars), and the leaders of the northern army. It would be difficult to imagine circumstances less favourable for the beginning of the reign of the adolescent monarch and a new ruling coalition. The military campaigns had left much of the central and southwestern portions of the country in ruins. In many areas, populations had fled, land lay fallow, and administration was in disarray. Significant portions of the Novgorod, Smolensk, and Ryazan regions were occupied by Swedish and Polish armies and by sundry insurrectionary forces, who threatened to renew hostilities.

The Romanov (Romanov Dynasty) government required more than a decade to establish itself politically and to restore economic and social order. Few had expected the election of a new tsar (the fourth in eight years) to bring an end to the turmoil. But the election of Michael reflected a resolution of political forces that permitted the coalition government to address itself to the problems of reconstruction. Another cause was the survival of the central bureaucracy; the civil servants in Moscow had served all successive governments without much interruption and were ready to restore administrative regularity as soon as political order was established. Fortunately, the new government refrained from involving itself in the Polish-Swedish conflicts, which reached their height at this period. This restraint was a most important element in the success of the 1613 settlement, for the international situation was, if anything, grimmer than the domestic. Polish-Swedish differences permitted Muscovite diplomats to bring the two countries to separate truces (Sweden (Stolbovo, Treaty of), 1617; Poland (Deulino, Truce of), 1618); although these left substantial territories under the control of Poland and Sweden, they provided a needed interlude of peace. The Romanov government wisely avoided any significant participation in the Thirty Years' War, in which most European states engaged. At the death of the Polish king Sigismund III in 1632, Muscovy made an ill-advised attempt to regain Smolensk that ended in military disaster, but in 1634 it obtained Władysław's formal abjuration of the Polish king's questionable claim to the title of tsar.

After the failure of the Smolensk campaign, the government refrained from further military involvement with Poland for nearly a generation. It concentrated instead upon the extension and fortification of its southern borders, where the incursions of Crimean Tatars were an impediment to colonization. Moscow, however, was not prepared to go to war with the Ottomans, who were the protectors of the Crimean khan; when the Don Cossacks, Muscovy's clients, captured the critical port of Azov in 1637 and appealed to Moscow for aid in holding off a counterattack, a zemsky sobor, or national assembly (see below Trends in the 17th century (Russia)), decided not to intervene, and the port was lost.

Alexis

The reign of Michael's son Alexis (Aleksey Mikhaylovich), whom later generations considered the very model of a benevolent and gentle tsar, began badly. Like his father, Alexis came to the throne a mere boy. Immediately the boyar who controlled the government, Boris Ivanovich Morozov (Morozov, Boris Ivanovich), embarked upon policies that brought the government to the brink of disaster. Morozov cut government salaries; he also introduced a tax on salt and a state monopoly of tobacco, the former causing widespread hardship and discontent and the latter bringing the church's condemnation. At the same time, he alienated boyar groups close to the throne by his interference in his ward's marriage.

Morozov's actions exacerbated an already dangerous situation in the country. The city populations and the service gentry in particular were heavily burdened by taxes and other obligations and were increasingly angry at the growing wealth and power of the ruling clique. During a riot in Moscow in May 1648, a mob surrounded the 19-year-old tsar and demanded the execution of Morozov and the leading officials. Some of the latter were thrown to the mob, and a brief protective exile was arranged for Morozov. Morozov's boyar enemies, who may have abetted the riot, took control of affairs and carried out a series of reforms. The salt tax and tobacco monopoly were ended, and a commission was established for the drafting of a new law code. Serious disorders continued in the cities of the north, particularly in Pskov and Novgorod, where force was required to reimpose authority.

In Novgorod the principal actor in the government's interest was the metropolitan Nikon, an energetic and authoritarian monk who had made influential friends in Moscow while archimandrite at the Romanov family church and continued assiduously to cultivate the tsar and his relations while in Novgorod. In 1652 his solicitations earned him the patriarchate. Tradition has it that Nikon, before accepting the position, demanded a declaration of full obedience in religious and moral matters from the tsar. In the first years of Nikon's tenure, his relations with Alexis and the court were good. The patriarch, with official support, carried out a number of liturgical and organizational reforms, surrounding himself with an impressive bureaucracy modeled upon the state apparatus. Relations with the tsar became strained in 1658, however, and, after he was publicly snubbed by Alexis, Nikon announced that he was abandoning the patriarchate. He later held that he had simply gone into temporary seclusion, but his effective power and influence were at an end.

The main event of Alexis's reign was the annexation of eastern Ukraine. His government had continued the previous policy of avoiding entanglements in the West while expanding eastward but could not resist the opportunity offered in 1654 when Bohdan Khmelnytsky (Khmelnytsky, Bohdan), the leader of a Cossack revolution against Polish rule in Ukraine, appealed to Moscow for the help he had been unable to obtain from Sweden and the Turks. Moscow accepted his allegiance in return for military assistance and thus became involved in a protracted struggle with Poland and Sweden for the Ukrainian, Belarusian, and Baltic territories. At first the war went well, but the differing objectives of the Ukrainian and Muscovite allies soon revealed themselves. When Charles X of Sweden entered the fray against Poland, Alexis made peace, in 1656; he feared a strong Sweden as much as a strong Poland. Muscovite forces plunged into war with Sweden for the Estonian, Livonian, and Karelian territories along the Baltic coast. The situation in Ukraine became increasingly confused and dangerous for Moscow, and it was necessary to end the war with Sweden in 1661, even at the cost of yielding, once again, the Baltic coast.

In Ukraine the war took on a new aspect when in 1664 Peter Doroshenko, a new leader, put himself under the protection of the Ottomans. The Turks joined in a number of major military operations, alarming both Poland and Moscow sufficiently to bring them to a truce at Andrusovo (Andrusovo, Truce of) (1667). Poland recognized Moscow's control over eastern Ukraine and Kiev, while Moscow yielded the part of Ukraine west of the Dnieper and most of Belarusia.

The peace did not greatly improve the government's position, for the same year saw the beginning of a threatening movement among the Don Cossacks and peasants of the Volga region, led by Stenka Razin (Razin, Stenka), and a political battle within the inner circles at court, caused by the death of Alexis's wife. After two years, Alexis was married to Nataliya Naryshkina (Naryshkina, Natalya Kirillovna). In 1676, however, Alexis himself died, and Fyodor (Fyodor III), a sickly son of his first wife, Mariya Miloslavskaya, succeeded him. A struggle began between the rival Naryshkin and Miloslavsky families. The Naryshkins were exiled, and the Miloslavskys, with their clients and supporters, took over. In 1682, however, Fyodor died, and the Naryshkin faction sought to place his half brother Peter (Peter I) on the throne instead of Fyodor's full brother, the ailing Ivan (Ivan V). The elite corps of streltsy (a hereditary military caste) revolted and established Ivan's elder sister Sophia as regent. For the accession and reign of Peter the Great, see below The reign of Peter I (the Great; 1689–1725) (Russia).

Trends in the 17th century

Economic reconstruction was slow, particularly in agriculture and in the old central lands, but it was accompanied by a growth of trade and manufacturing. The state revenues profited from the expansion eastward beyond the Urals and southward into the black-soil region. In the north the port of Arkhangelsk handled the export of forest products and semimanufactures (naval stores, potash) to the English and Dutch, and its merchants took a leading role in the early exploitation of Siberia. The government itself became deeply involved in the development of trade and commerce, both through its monopolistic control of certain areas and commodities and by its efforts to build up such strategic industries as metallurgy. The economy grew at unprecedented speed during the 17th century. By 1700 Russia was a leading producer of pig iron and potash, and the economic base on which Peter's military successes were to depend had been firmly established.

The political recovery of the Russian state after the Time of Troubles was largely due to the survival of the central bureaucracy and ruling oligarchy. The lines of subsequent development were determined by the growth, consolidation, and almost unimpeded self-aggrandizement of these groups in the 17th century. The expansion of the bureaucratic apparatus can be measured in various ways. In 1613 there were 22 prikazy, or departments; by mid-century there were 80. At the beginning of the period, the jurisdiction of the bureaucracy included primarily fiscal, juridical, and military matters; by the end of the century, it also covered industrial, religious, and cultural life. At the close of the Time of Troubles, the bureaucracy's functions were exercised by leading boyars and professional administrators; by Peter's time the mercantile class, the whole of the nobility, and the clergy had become part of its ubiquitous network. This bureaucracy was the buttress—indeed, the substance—of an absolute monarchy whose prerogatives knew few internal bounds.

The ease with which the extension of central authority overwhelmed all other political and social forces is to be explained by the frailty of local institutions and by the absence of independent ecclesiastical or social authority. The Muscovite administration was extended first into the devastated areas, where local institutions had been swept away, and then into new territories that had no significant political institutions, until it became a standardized and centralized mechanism powered by the colossal wealth generated by its own expansion.

These processes were reflected in the great law code of 1649, the first general codification since 1550, which was to remain the basis of Russian law until 1833. Its articles make clear the realities of Muscovite political practice: the rule of the bureaucrats and the extension of the powers of the state into all spheres of human activity. It was based in large measure upon the accumulated ad hoc decisions of the officials and was intended for their guidance. The code made ecclesiastical affairs a matter of state jurisdiction; it gave legal expression to the practice of serfdom; and, in an important new article, it enumerated crimes “of word and deed” against the “Sovereign”—by which were to be understood the state and all its agents.

Social development paralleled and was to a great extent determined by the developments just described. By the end of the century, only those families that had made new careers in the state apparatus through service as generals, ministers, and ambassadors remained at the apex of society; they were joined by numerous parvenu families that had risen in government service. Particularly striking was the prosperity of the dyak class of professional administrators, which had become a closed hereditary estate by a decree of 1640; this class had become a new and powerful “nobility of the seal” that was to survive into modern times.

During much of the 17th century, the government was run for all practical purposes by high officials in cooperation with relatives and cronies of the reigning tsar. Historians in the 19th century, eager to find constitutional traditions in Russia's past, stressed the role of the zemsky sobor—an assembly of dignitaries that from the time of Ivan IV had been called together when matters of crucial importance had to be decided. In the period after 1613 it was in almost continuous session for some years. After 1619, however, the services of these assemblies were no longer required. It is questionable whether they ever had, in law or in fact, any power beyond that of a crowd of military and administrative leaders. They were summoned by the government, and their composition was determined by the government.

Cultural life

No period of Russia's cultural history has been as full of change, turmoil, creativity, failure, and sheer destructiveness as the 17th century. Russian society emerged from the Time of Troubles shattered and unsure of itself, disoriented and impoverished. This shaken society was then subject to wrenching social and economic change and strong external influences.

The old culture, in its formal aspects, had been the culture of the monasteries. Art, literature, architecture, and music remained traditional, canonical, and orthodox until the end of the 16th century. The 17th century produced, first among the officials and boyars and later among the merchants and middle classes, a new elite that was increasingly interested in European culture and that had mainly secular interests. Yet the government of these same officials and boyars worked to stifle native cultural development, and many of these merchants and nobles were drawn into movements opposed to Westernization.

There were three reasons for this paradoxical development. First, Western culture had reached Muscovy largely through Polish and Roman Catholic mediation, which rendered it unacceptable to all but those sophisticated enough to take a very broad view of the events of the Time of Troubles. In the Ukrainian and Belarusian territories, the Polish Counter-Reformation had brought a national cultural revival. The books, ideas, and people flowing from these lands into Muscovy in the 17th century, however, were hardly less suspect than those of Roman Catholic Poland, and, as these “aliens” acquired a dominant position in Muscovite cultural affairs, resentment was added to suspicion.

A second reason for the character of Muscovite cultural development in the 17th century was the preponderant role of the church and, later, of the state, which took over at last the assets, liabilities, and responsibilities of the ecclesiastical establishment. From 1620, when the patriarch Philaret pronounced an anathema upon “books of Lithuanian imprint” (in effect, the only secular books in print for the Russian reader), until the end of the century, when the government turned to imposing Greek and “Lithuanian” (i.e., Ukrainian and Belarusian) views upon a resisting populace, the state and its ecclesiastical adjunct had a repressive and stultifying influence.

Finally, indigenous cultural forces (Russian literature) were, for various reasons, unable to assert themselves. They were physically dispersed, socially diverse, and set at odds by cultural and political disaffection. The development of a vernacular literature, which can be seen in the synthetic “folk songs,” pamphlets, tales, and imitations produced for and by the growing educated class, remained a marginal phenomenon; they were unpublished because of the ecclesiastical monopoly of the press, and they were anonymous. The promising experiments of a group of noble writers who worked within the formal Slavonic tradition were ended by exile and repression.

Despite these negative influences, the court itself, especially in the time of Alexis, was a centre of literary and artistic innovation, and many of the leading men of the realm were considered cultured and cosmopolitan by Westerners who knew them.

The great schism (schism)

The contradictions of the age were reflected in the great schism within the Russian church. The doctrinal debate began over obscure and petty matters of ritual, but larger, unarticulated issues were at stake. Religion after the Time of Troubles had taken two directions, which were at first closely associated: the reformation of religious life (with stress on the pastoral functions of the clergy and the simplification of the liturgy) and the correction and standardization of the canonical books (which had come to vary widely from the Greek originals). The government had at first supported these linked objectives, but the supporters of “Old Russian piety (Old Believer)” fell into opposition to the reforms as they were officially promulgated. When, in the 1650s, the patriarch Nikon began to enforce the reforms in the parishes, where they had been generally ignored, the discontent developed into a massive religious and regional insurrection. Towns and parishes of the north were riven by warring “old” and “new” bishops. The Old Believers (Old Believer), dissenters who refused to accept Nikon's liturgical reforms imposed upon the Russian Orthodox Church, were either crushed by government force, driven to self-destruction, or reduced to silent resistance.

In the end, the Western secular culture fostered at the court and the new religious culture and education spread by Ukrainians and Belarusians, who came to dominate church life, submerged and displaced the disparate beginnings of a modern synthesis within native matrices and cleared the way for Peter's cultural policies, which erected a Western facade over the ruins of the native traditions.

Edward Louis Keenan

The 18th century

The reign of Peter I (the Great; 1689–1725)

Peter's youth and early reign

The accession of Peter I ushered in and established the social, institutional, and intellectual trends that were to dominate Russia for the next two centuries. Both Russian and Western historians, whatever their evaluation of Peter's reign, have seen it as one of the most formative periods of Russia's history. The seminal nature of the reign owes much to Peter's own personality and youth. The child of his father's second marriage, Peter was pushed into the background by his half brother Fyodor and exiled from the Kremlin during the turbulent years of the regency (1682–89) of his half sister Sophia. He grew up among children of lesser birth, unfettered by court etiquette. Playing at war and organizing his young friends into an effective military force, he could manifest his energy, vitality, and curiosity almost untrammeled. He also came into close contact with the western Europeans who lived in Moscow; the association kindled his interest in navigation and the mechanical arts—of which he became a skilled practitioner—and gave him the experience of a socially freer and intellectually more stimulating atmosphere than he might otherwise have had. He resolved to introduce this more dynamic and “open” style of life into Russia, a goal he pursued after the overthrow of Sophia in 1689 and that he erected into a policy of state after he became sole ruler following the death of his mother in 1694. (His half brother Ivan V remained co-tsar but played no role and died in 1696.)

Peter's first political aim was to secure Muscovy's southern borders against the threat of raids by Crimean Tatars supported by the Ottoman Empire. For lack of adequate sea power, his initial attempt, in 1695, failed to gain a foothold on the Sea of Azov. Undaunted, Peter built up a navy—he was the first Russian ruler since early Kievan times to do so—and succeeded in capturing Azov a year later. The experience convinced him of the necessity of extending his own technical knowledge and of securing tools and personnel from the West. To this end Peter traveled to western Europe, something no Muscovite tsar had ever done; he spent almost a year in Holland and England acquiring mechanical and maritime skills, hiring experts in various fields, purchasing books and scientific curiosities, and carrying on diplomatic negotiations for a crusade against the Turks. In the course of negotiations with Poland-Saxony and Denmark, an alliance was formed, not against Turkey but against Sweden. The alliance led to the Second Northern War (Northern War, Second) (also called the Great Northern War; 1700–21), which became Peter's major concern for almost the remainder of his reign.

The war started inauspiciously for Peter when King Charles XII of Sweden, disembarking suddenly on the eastern coast of the Baltic Sea, inflicted a severe defeat on the Russians before the fortress of Narva (November 1700). Thinking that he had eliminated Russia as a military factor, Charles invaded Poland to force King Augustus II to make peace and to install his own candidate, Stanisław Leszczyński, on the Polish throne ( Stanisław I, ruled 1704–09, 1733). In the meantime Peter proceeded to reorganize and equip his troops systematically, while the generals B.P. Sheremetev and A.D. Menshikov gradually conquered the Swedish Baltic provinces of Ingria and Livonia. By terms of the capitulations of Riga and Revel (now Tallinn), Swedish sovereignty was ended and the provinces incorporated into the Russian Empire; the local German landed nobility and urban patriciate were confirmed in their historic corporate privileges. In 1703 Peter laid the foundations of his new capital, St. Petersburg (Saint Petersburg) (called Leningrad (Saint Petersburg) between 1924 and 1991), at the mouth of the Neva River; the site was chosen to secure a firm footing on the Gulf of Finland and to open direct sea access to western Europe.

Having forced Augustus II to withdraw from the war (Treaty of Altranstädt (Altranstädt, treaties of), September 1706), Charles again turned eastward. Invading Russia in 1708, he decided to first secure Ukraine as a source of supplies and manpower (promised by the Cossack hetman Ivan Stepanovich Mazepa (Mazepa, Ivan), who had defected from Peter's side) and await reinforcements from the north. These reinforcements, however, were prevented from reaching Charles by Menshikov's victory at Lesnaya in September 1708. After much maneuvering, Charles laid siege to the Ukrainian town of Poltava (Poltava, Battle of) in the spring of 1709. Peter hastened to relieve the town, and it was before its walls that the crucial battle was fought on June 27 (July 8, New Style), 1709. Russian victory was complete—Charles and Hetman Mazepa barely escaped capture, and the remainder of their troops were taken prisoner when they tried to cross the Dnieper at Perevolochnaya a few days later. Charles took refuge with the Turkish army encamped on the banks of the Prut River. Peter made the mistake of pursuing him into Turkish territory and barely escaped entrapment by the Turks, whom Charles had persuaded to renew war with Russia. With the help of bribery and diplomacy, Peter extricated himself from the trap by signing a peace treaty (July 1711) under which he gave up Azov and promised to dismantle fortresses near the Turkish border.

Charles remained interned in Turkey (he did not escape until 1714), hoping to rebuild a coalition and rejecting all peace proposals. The war dragged on: Augustus II recovered the Polish throne, and Peter consolidated his hold on the Baltic by invading southern Finland. Russia won its first significant naval victory in July 1714 off the Hangö (Gangut) peninsula and raided the Swedish mainland. The death of Charles XII (killed accidentally in Norway in 1718, soon after his return from Turkey) led to protracted negotiations (Congress of Åland) that ultimately resulted in the Peace of Nystad (Aug. 30 [Sept. 10, New Style], 1721), under the terms of which Sweden acquiesced to Russian conquests on the eastern coast of the Baltic Sea. Thereafter Russia was the dominant power in the Baltic region, while Sweden rapidly sank to second-rate status; Russia meddled in Sweden's political affairs throughout the 18th century.

Russia's acquisition of Ingria and Livonia (and later of Kurland (Courland)) brought into the empire a new national and political minority: the German elites—urban bourgeoisie and landowning nobility—with their corporate privileges, harsh exploitation of native (Estonian and Latvian) servile peasantry, and Western culture and administrative practices. Eventually these elites made significant contributions to the imperial administration (military and civil) and helped bring German education, science, and culture to Russian society. From a diplomatic point of view, Peter's triumph over Sweden secured for Russia an important voice (enhanced by matrimonial connections) in the affairs of the German states; this culminated in Catherine II's guarantee of the constitutional integrity of the Holy Roman Empire (see below The reign of Catherine II [the Great; 1762–96] (Russia)). By the same token Russia was to be drawn into all the diplomatic and military conflicts that beset western and central Europe throughout the 18th century, most particularly in connection with the rise of Prussian power, the decline of the Ottoman Empire, and the domestic turmoil in Poland. As a result, Russia was forced to maintain great military strength, which naturally put a heavy burden on the fiscal, social, and economic development of the empire.

The long war's requirements determined most domestic policy measures as well. Only when victory was well in sight could Peter devote more of his attention to a systematic overhaul of Russia's institutions. The hastiness and brutality of steps taken under the stress of war had an effect on subsequent history. Historians have debated whether Peter's legislation was informed by an overall plan based on more or less clearly formulated theoretical considerations or whether it was merely a series of ad hoc measures taken to meet emergencies as they occurred. Pragmatic elements predominated, no doubt, over theoretical principles. The prevailing intellectual climate and administrative practices of Europe, however, contributed to orient Peter's thinking.

The Petrine state

Formally, Peter changed the tsardom of Muscovy into the Empire of All Russias, and he himself received the title of emperor from the Senate at the conclusion of the peace with Sweden. Not only did the title aim at identifying the new Russia with European political tradition, but it also bespoke the new conception of rulership and of political authority that Peter wanted to implant: that the sovereign emperor was the head of the state and its first servant, not the patrimonial owner of the land and “father” of his subjects (as the tsar had been). Peter stressed the function of his office rather than that of his person and laid the groundwork of a modern system of administration. Institutions and officials were to operate on the basis of set rules, keep regular hours and records, apply laws and regulations dispassionately, and have individual and collective responsibility for their acts. Reality, of course, fell far short of this ideal, because Muscovite traditions and conditions could not be eradicated so rapidly. Furthermore, there was a great shortage of educated and reliable persons imbued with such rationality and efficiency (a problem that bedeviled the imperial government until its end). They were mainly to be found in the military establishment, where officer and noncommissioned ranks acquired the requisite outlook, experience, and values in the army and navy established by Peter.

The changeover from the traditional militia-like military organization to a “European” professional army (as it developed in the course of the so-called military revolution of the 17th century) had been initiated during the reigns of Tsars Michael and Alexis. But it was Peter who gave it the full-fledged “modern” form it retained until the middle of the 19th century. The army—and, for the first time in Russia, the navy as well—was manned by recruits drawn from the peasantry (and other taxable groups) whose service obligation was for 25 years (i.e., virtually for life). Recruitment entailed liberation from serf status both for the soldier and for all his children born after his recruitment. Eventually this provided a path, however steep and narrow, for lower-class children to follow to join the ranks of petty officialdom and nobility. Submitted to cruel and savage discipline, the soldier was isolated from direct contact with the population, and his total commitment was to the state. Drilled in modern battle order and technology, the peasant recruit was forcibly “modernized,” and there are indications of some minimal influence of this on the population at large.

The officer corps was recruited in similar fashion from the landowning service class. The terms of service prevailing in Muscovite times, however, were transformed radically. The young noble serviceman was called to serve from age 15 until his death or total incapacity. In principle, service was permanent with only rare leaves granted to attend to family and estate matters. Called up individually, the service noble was assigned and transferred at the will of the state. In principle, service nobles were remunerated by regular salary payments, though in the reign of Peter I and for long afterward salaries were paid neither promptly nor fully in cash; officers still had to rely on their family estates or special gifts and awards. Starting as soldiers and noncommissioned officers, service nobles were to progress through the ranks on the basis of merit and longevity; eventually the latter became the principal criterion. Minimum educational standards had to be met by officers and officials, and they came to play a crucial role in both the careers and the social status of the service nobility. The empire's large population, which grew at a rapid rate throughout the century, enabled the government to maintain the largest standing army in Europe. Good generalship and the soldiers' loyalty and resilience, as well as excellent artillery and cavalry, made for a formidable military force that achieved the notable expansion of the empire during the 18th century. The Russian bureaucracy, whose members were often drawn from the military, thus acquired a preference for uniformity and militarism that did not foster respect or concern for the individual needs of the various regions and peoples of the far-flung empire.

In the new administration, performance was to be the major criterion for appointment and promotion. Peter wanted this principle to apply to the highest offices, starting with that of the emperor himself. As a result of his bad experience with his own son, Alexis (who fled abroad, was brought back, and died in prison), Peter decreed in 1722 that every ruler would appoint his own successor. He did not have the opportunity to avail himself of this right, however, and the matter of regular succession remained a source of conflict and instability throughout the 18th century. Peter's concern for performance lay at the basis of the Table of Ranks (Ranks, Table of) (1722), which served as the framework for the careers of all state servants (military, civil, court) until the second half of the 19th century. In it the hierarchy was divided into 14 categories, or ranks; theoretically one had to begin at the bottom (14th rank) and proceed upward according to merit and seniority. Throughout the 18th century the 8th rank (1st commissioned officer grade) automatically conferred hereditary nobility on those who were not noble by birth. In a sense, therefore, the Table of Ranks opened all offices to merit and thus democratized the service class. But because service was contingent on good preparation (i.e., education), it was accessible only to the few—nobility and clergy—until later in the 18th century.

The same need for qualified personnel that had brought about the Table of Ranks also determined Peter's policies toward the several social classes of his realm. The traditional obligation of members of all estates to perform service to the state, each according to his way of life (i.e., the nobleman by serving in the army and administration, the peasantry and merchants by paying taxes, the clergy by prayer), was given a modern, rational form by Peter. Paradoxically, the reform helped to transform the traditional estates into castelike groups from which—except in rare instances of clergy and rich merchants—it became impossible to escape. The nobility was most directly affected by the change, not only in Peter's lifetime but under his successors as well. The nobleman's service obligation became lifelong, regular, and permanent. The staffs of military and government institutions were no longer recruited on the basis of regional origin or family ties, but strictly according to the need of the state and the fitness of the individual for the specific task at hand. The serviceman was transferred from one assignment, branch, or locality to another as the state saw fit. The office of heraldry within the Senate kept the service rosters up-to-date and decided on appointments and transfers. It was not easy to break traditional family and clan ties, however. Family connection continued to be a factor in successful service careers, especially if a relative was close to the ruler or was a favourite. On the level of the central government and the court, the struggle between cliques for imperial favour was the major factor in determining policy orientations and appointments to high positions.

Peter also introduced single inheritance of real estate (1714), attempting in this way to break the traditional inheritance pattern that had led to the splintering of estates. In so doing he hoped to create a professional service nobility unconnected with the land and totally devoted to the state, but the resistance the law met in its application forced its revocation in 1731. He also required the nobility to be educated as a prerequisite for service. Schooling, whether at home or in an institution, became a feature of the nobleman's way of life. Schooling was a radical innovation, at first resented and resisted; but within a generation it was accepted as a matter of course and became the decisive element in the status and self-image of the nobility.

The peasantry had been enserfed during the 17th century, but the individual peasant had retained his traditional ties to the village commune and to the land that he worked. To prevent tax evasion through the formation of artificial households, Peter introduced a new unit of taxation, the “soul”—i.e., a male peasant of working age—and the lords were made responsible for the collection of the tax assessed on each of their souls. The peasant thus became a mere item on the tax roll who could be moved, sold, or exchanged according to the needs and whims of his master—whether a private landlord, the church, or the state. The serf became practically indistinguishable from a slave.

As befitted a secular-minded autocrat who saw his main task as enlightening and leading his people to “modernity,” Peter had little regard for the church. He recognized its value only as an instrument of control and as an agent of modern education. When the patriarch died in 1700, Peter appointed no successor. Finally in 1721 he gave the church a bureaucratic organization: a Holy Synod composed of several appointed hierarchs and a lay representative of the emperor; the latter, called the chief procurator, came to play the dominant role. Ecclesiastical schools turned into closed institutions with a narrowly scholastic curriculum. Membership in the clerical estate became strictly hereditary; the priesthood was transformed into a closed caste of government religious servants cut off from the new secular culture being introduced in Russia and deprived of their traditional moral authority. Both on economic and religious grounds, therefore, the reign of Peter I appeared particularly oppressive to the common people. It seemed unnatural and contrary to tradition; for many it clearly was the reign of the Antichrist, from which one escaped only through self-immolation (practiced by some of the Old Believers (Old Believer)), open rebellion, or flight to the borderlands of the empire.

Resistance and flight were made possible by Peter's failure, despite all his modernizing and rationalizing, to endow the government with effective means of control on the local level. Regular officials were short in number and experience and could not be easily spared for local administration. Peter tried to have the officers of the regiments that were garrisoned in the provinces double as local officials, but the experiment failed because of the necessities of war and because regular officers proved incompetent to administer peasants. The attempts at copying Western models were also unsuccessful, for the Russian nobility lacked (and was not allowed to develop) a local corporate organization that could serve as the foundation for local self-government.

Peter concentrated his attention almost entirely on the central administration, for which his reforms provided the basic framework within which the imperial government was to operate until its fall in 1917. To prosecute the war, the Petrine state had to mobilize all the resources of the country and to supervise practically every aspect of national life. This required that the central executive apparatus be extended and organized along functional lines. Peter hoped to accomplish this by replacing the numerous haphazard prikazy (administrative departments) with a coherent system of functional and well-ordered colleges (their number fluctuating around 12 in the course of the century). Each college was headed by a board for more effective control; it had authority in a specific area such as foreign affairs, the army, the navy, commerce, mining, finances, justice, and so on. The major problems with this form of organization proved to be the coordination, planning, and supervision of the colleges.

Peter tried to cope with these defects pragmatically through the creation of a Senate, which came to serve as a privy council as well as an institution of supervision and control. In addition, he set up a network of agents (fiskaly) who acted as tax inspectors, investigators, and personal representatives of the emperor.

Much reliance was put on the obligation to denounce all would-be violators of imperial orders. Those failing to do so suffered the same punishment as the actual violator, while the informer was rewarded with the property confiscated from the “criminal.” Internal security was vested in 1689 in the chancery of the Preobrazhensky Guards, the tsar's own regiment, which became a much-dreaded organ of political police and repression. Under different names the police apparatus remained a permanent feature of the imperial regime. The police were also the instrument of the ruler's personal intervention, an essential function for the preservation of the autocracy as a viable political system.

The needs of war, as well as the desire to modernize (economic development) Russia, led Peter to promote and expand industry (industrialization), particularly mining, naval construction, foundries, and the production of glass and textiles. The emperor aimed at maximizing the use of all potential resources of the country to heighten its power and further its people's welfare; these goals were pursued in mercantilist fashion through discriminatory tariffs, state subsidies, and regulation of manufactures. Peter hoped to involve the rich merchants and the nobility in economic enterprise and expansion. As a class, however, the merchants failed to follow his lead; many were Old Believers who refused to work for what they considered the Antichrist. Nor did Peter's urban legislation provide the townspeople with the incentives and freedom necessary to change them into an entrepreneurial class; as a matter of fact, the municipal reforms were simply means to collect taxes and dues in kind. As to the nobility, only a few had the necessary capital to become entrepreneurs, and their time and energies were completely taken up by their service obligations. Nor did Peter provide for the security of property and for the landowner's right to dispose of the mineral, water, and timber resources on his estate. The shortage of capital could be, and in some specific cases was, overcome by direct government grants. But the equally serious shortage of labour was not so easily resolved. Peter permitted the use of servile labour (forced labour) in mines and manufactures, with the result that thousands of peasants were moved and forced to work under unfamiliar conditions, in new places, at very difficult tasks. Resentment ran high and the productivity of this forced labour was very low. Most of the enterprises established in Peter's lifetime did not survive him. But the impetus he had given to Russian industrial development was not altogether lost; it revived with new vigour—under different policies—in the middle of the 18th century.

Among the important factors in Russia's economic development under Peter was the building of St. Petersburg (Saint Petersburg) on the then inhospitable shores of the Gulf of Finland (Finland, Gulf of). Its construction cost an estimated 30,000 lives (lost from disease, undernourishment, and drowning) and engulfed vast sums of public and private money. Nobles who served in the central administration and at court were required to settle in the new city and to build townhouses.

The location of the new capital symbolized the shift in the empire's political, economic, and cultural centre of gravity toward western Europe. Trade and social intercourse with western Europe became easier, and the icebound peripheral ports of what is now Murmansk and of Arkhangelsk were abandoned for the more convenient harbours of Riga, Revel, and the new St. Petersburg. After 1721 Peter also extended the borders of the empire in the south along the Caspian Sea as a result of a successful war against Persia (Treaty of St. Petersburg, 1723).

The changes that made Peter's reign the most seminal in Russian history were not the administrative reforms and the military conquests, significant as those were, but the transformation in the country's culture and style of life, at least among the service nobility. Foreign observers made much of Peter's requirement that the nobility shave off their beards, wear Western clothes, go to dances and parties, and learn to drink coffee. These were only the external marks of more profound changes that in a generation or so were to make the educated Russian nobility members of European polite society. Commoners, especially the peasantry, were not so immediately affected, although by the end of the 18th century most peasants, and all inhabitants of towns, had moved a considerable distance from the values and habits of their 16th- and 17th-century forebears.

Most important of all, perhaps, the reign of Peter I marked the beginning of a new period in Russian educational and cultural life. Peter was the first to introduce secular education on a significant scale and to make it compulsory for all state servants. (More significant than the limited quantitative results during Peter's lifetime was the fact that education eventually became indispensable to membership in the upper class.) First, Peter tried to use the church to establish a network of primary schools for all children of the free classes—a plan that failed largely because the clergy were unable to finance and staff schools for secular learning. But the specialized technical schools Peter founded, such as the Naval Academy, struck roots and provided generations of young men with the skills necessary for leadership in a modern army and navy. Although he did not live to see its formal inauguration, Peter also organized the Academy of Sciences (Sciences, Academy of) as an institution for scholarship, research, and instruction at the higher level. The academy's beginnings were quite modest—German professors lectured in Latin to a handful of poorly prepared students—and its development was not free from difficulties, but at the end of the 18th century it was a leading European centre of science and enlightenment, preparing and guiding Russia's scientific and technological flowering in the 19th century.

Assessment of Peter's reign

Contemporaries as well as later historians have given first place among Peter's accomplishments to his conquest of the Baltic provinces and areas on the Caspian Sea. More important was the fact that during his reign Russia became a major European power, in regular intercourse with the major trading powers and especially with Holland and Great Britain. This status of European power, however, burdened Russia with the maintenance of a large and up-to-date military establishment that became involved in many costly conflicts. The new institutional forms that Peter introduced helped to shape a less personal and more modern (i.e., routinized and bureaucratized) political authority. This led to an ambiguous relationship between the autocratic ruler and his noble servants and also to a sense of alienation between the common people and the ruler.

Contemporaries and later generations alike shared the feeling that Peter's reign had been revolutionary—a radical and violent break with the centuries-old traditions of Muscovy. To some extent this was the consequence of Peter's ruthless manner, his dynamism, his harsh suppression of all opposition, and his obstinate imposition of his will. From a historical perspective, Peter's reign may appear to have been only the culmination of 17th-century trends rather than a radical break with the past. But people are more conscious of changes in manners and customs than of deeper transformations that require a long time for their working out. Thus, Russia's cultural Europeanization in the early 18th century produced works of literature in a new manner, using foreign styles and techniques, such as the treatises and sermons of Feofan Prokopovich (Prokopovich, Feofan), Peter's main assistant in church matters, and the satires and translations of Prince Antiokh Kantemir (Kantemir, Antiokh Dmitriyevich), the first modern Russian poet. These writers and many lesser ones praised Peter's work, stressing its innovative and necessary character. The educated elite, reared on the cultural elements introduced by Peter, perceived his reign as the birth of modern Russia. This in itself became the source of critical thought and raised the question of whether the break with the past was desirable or a betrayal of the genuinely national patterns of development of Russian culture. It appeared that forcible imposition of foreign elements had led to an alienation between the elite and the Russian people. This debate as to the nature and value of the reign of Peter I served as the main stimulus to a definition of Russian national culture and to the elaboration of competing political and social philosophies in the 19th century (e.g., those of the Slavophiles (Slavophile) and the Westernizers (Westernizer)). Peter's reign has been at the centre of all debates over Russian history, since any attempt to define its periods and to assess Russia's development in modern times requires a prior judgment of the reign and work of Peter I. (For a more detailed biography, see Peter I.)

Peter I's successors (1725–62)

Peter's unexpected death in 1725 at age 52 left unresolved two major institutional problems. The first was the succession to the throne, which remained unsettled not only because Peter did not choose his own successor but also because during the remainder of the century almost any powerful individual or group could disregard the choice of the preceding ruler. The second problem was the lack of firm central direction, planning, and control of imperial policy; closely related to it was the question of who would have the determining role in shaping policy (i.e., what would be the nature of the “ruling circle” and its relationship to the autocrat). The failure to solve these problems produced a climate of instability and led to a succession of crises in St. Petersburg and Moscow that make it difficult to give unity to the period from 1725 until the accession of Catherine II (the Great) (Catherine II) in 1762.

Normal and peaceful succession to the throne was thwarted by a combination of biological accidents and palace coups. At Peter's death his chief collaborators, who were headed by Prince Aleksandr Danilovich Menshikov (Menshikov, Aleksandr Danilovich) and were assisted by the guard regiments (the offshoots of the play regiments of Peter's youth), put on the throne Peter's widow—his second wife, Catherine I, the daughter of a Lithuanian peasant. Quite naturally, Menshikov ruled in her name. Soon, however, he was forced to share his power with other dignitaries of Peter's reign. A Supreme Privy Council was established as the central governing body, displacing the Senate in political influence and administrative significance. Catherine I's death in 1727 reopened the question of succession; Peter's grandson (the son of Alexis, who had perished in prison) was proclaimed Emperor Peter II by the council. An immature youngster, Peter II fell under the influence of his chamberlain, Prince Ivan Alekseyevich Dolgoruky, whose family obtained a dominant position in the Supreme Privy Council and brought about the disgrace and exile of Menshikov. It looked as if the Dolgorukys (Dolgoruky family) would rule in fact because Peter II was to wed the chamberlain's sister, but Peter's sudden death on Jan. 18 (Jan. 29, New Style), 1730—on the day set for the wedding—crossed the plans of that ambitious family.

Anna (1730–40)

Under the leadership of Prince Dmitry Golitsyn (Golitsyn, Dmitry Mikhaylovich, Knyaz)—scion of an old Muscovite boyar family and himself a prominent official under Peter I—the Supreme Privy Council elected to the throne Anna, dowager duchess of Courland and niece of Peter I (daughter of his co-tsar, Ivan V). At the same time, Golitsyn tried to circumscribe Anna's power by having her accept a set of conditions that left to the council the decisive voice in all important matters. This move toward oligarchy was foiled by top-level officials (the generalitet—i.e., those with the service rank of general or its equivalent), in alliance with the rank-and-file service nobility. While the former wanted to be included in the ruling oligarchy (and Golitsyn seemed to have been ready to concede them this right), the latter opposed any limitation on the autocratic power of the sovereign. Indeed, the ordinary service nobles feared that an oligarchy, however broad its membership, would shut them off from access to the ruler and thus limit their opportunity to rise in the hierarchy of the Table of Ranks.

Anna left most of her authority to be exercised by her Baltic German favourite, Ernst Johann Biron (Biron, Ernst Johann, Reichsgraf von), who acquired a reputation for corruption, cruelty, tyranny, and exploitation and who was felt to have set up a police terror that benefited the Germans in Russia at the expense of all loyal and patriotic Russians. Recent scholarship has modified this image and shown that Biron's bad reputation rested on his inflexibility in applying the law and collecting taxes, rather than on malevolence. The Supreme Privy Council was abolished upon Anna's accession in 1730, and the functions of coordination, supervision, and policy planning were vested in a cabinet of ministers composed of three experienced high officials, all Russians.

Elizabeth (1741–62)

Anna, who was childless, appointed as successor her infant nephew, Ivan Antonovich (Ivan VI) ( Ivan VI), under the regency of his mother, Anna Leopoldovna. Biron, who had at first retained his influence, was overthrown by Burkhard Christoph, count von Münnich (Münnich, Burkhard Christoph, Count von), who had made his fortune in Russia. The continuing domination of a few favourites—many of whom were Germans—much displeased the high officials, whose position was threatened by the personal caprices of ruler or favourite, and incensed even more the rank and file of the service nobility, who could not obtain rewards or favours from the sovereign without the approval and help of the favourites. The malcontents banded together around Peter I's daughter Elizabeth, whose easygoing and open ways had gained her many friends; she was also popular because of her Russian outlook, which she emphasized, and because she shared the aura of her great father. With the help of the guard regiments and high officers and with the financial support of foreign diplomats (in particular the French envoy), Elizabeth overthrew the infant Ivan VI and the regent Anna Leopoldovna in 1741. Her 20-year reign saw the rise of certain trends and patterns in public life, society, and culture that were to reach their culmination under Catherine the Great. On the political plane, the most significant development was the restoration of the Senate to its earlier function of chief policy-making and supervising body. At the end of her reign, Elizabeth also established a kind of permanent council or cabinet for planning and coordination—the Special Conference at the Imperial Court.

During this period Peter's administrative reforms began to bear fruit. The Table of Ranks (Ranks, Table of) became the framework for a class of servicemen whose lives were devoted to the interests of the state. In principle, entry to this class of officials was open to anyone with the required ability and education, including the sons of priests and non-Russian landowners. In fact, however, promotion in the Table of Ranks was possible only if the individual's merit and performance were recognized by the ruler or, more likely, by high officials and dignitaries who had access to the ruler. The personal element, bolstered by family and marriage ties, came to play an important role in the formal system of promotion; most significantly, it determined the makeup of the very top echelon of the administrative and military hierarchies (which were interchangeable). This group constituted an almost permanent ruling elite, co-opting its own membership and promoting the interests of the families most directly connected with it; in order to solidify its influence and function, it aimed at bringing as many routine government operations as possible under a system of regulations that would make appeal to the ruler unnecessary. The ruler's autocratic power could not be infringed, however, because his authority was needed not only to settle special cases but also to promote, protect, and reward members of the ruling group and their clients. The greatest threat to the system was the interference or interposition of favourites—“accidental people”—and, to guard against this, the oligarchy entered into an alliance with the rank-and-file service nobles who wanted to join its ranks and could hope to do so with the help of the dignitaries' patronage. This alliance permitted successful palace coups against favourites. The system worked well enough to allow the consolidation of Peter's reforms, some success in foreign policy, and a general increase in the power and wealth of the state, despite the low calibre of the rulers and the mismanagement of favourites.

The system rested on the availability to all nobles of the minimum education necessary for entrance and promotion in service. As a consequence, cultural policy became a major concern of the government and the nobility alike; the members of the service class demanded that institutions of learning be set up to prepare the nobility for better careers, permitting them to skip the lowest ranks. That demand was fulfilled in 1731 with the creation of the Corps of Cadets. In the course of the following decades, the original corps was expanded, and other special institutions for training the nobility were added. General education became accessible to a large stratum of the rank-and-file nobility with the founding of the Moscow State University in 1755, although the lack of automatic preferment for its graduates kept it from being popular among the wealthier nobles until the end of the century. The Corps of Cadets and similar public and private institutions also acted as substitutes for local and family bonds; these schools were also the seedbeds for an active intellectual life, and their students played a leading role in spreading the literature and ideas of western Europe in court circles and in the high society of the capitals.

The service noblemen were also landlords and serf owners. The majority of them, however, were quite poor for a number of reasons, chief among which were the low productivity of Russian agriculture, absentee management, and the scattered and splintered character of the landholdings. The average small or middling estate yielded only the bare necessities for the survival of the serviceman's family. As long as he remained in service, away from the estate, and without capital, he could do little to improve his property, especially since any change in the agrarian routine would have to be accepted by his peasant-serfs and the noble neighbours among whose lands his own lay scattered in an inextricable patchwork. He thus depended on the ruler for additional income, either in the form of a salary or as grants of land (and serfs) in reward for service. The salary was not very large, it was often in kind (furs), and it was paid out rather irregularly; lands and serfs could be obtained only from the ruler, and most went to favourites, courtiers, or high dignitaries. Service, it is true, provided the nobleman with some extras, such as uniforms, sometimes lodgings, and—most important—greater accessibility to court, cultural life, and education for his children. Thus, he remained in service and took little direct interest in his estates and serfs.

Elizabeth's chief adviser, Pyotr Shuvalov (Shuvalov, Pyotr Andreyevich, Count), had the government grant exclusive privileges and monopolies to some of the nobility, hoping to involve them in the development of mining and manufacturing. Shuvalov also initiated a gradual loosening of state controls over economic life in general. He began to dismantle the system of internal tariffs, so that local trade could develop; he strengthened the landlord's control over all the resources on his estate; and he gave the nobles the right to distill alcohol.

At the same time, the landlords were obtaining still greater power over their serfs. The full weight of these powers fell on the household serfs, whose number increased because their masters used them as domestics and craftsmen in their town houses to make the Western-style objects with which they surrounded themselves. When noblemen established factories or secured estates in newly conquered border areas, they transferred their serfs to them without regard for family or village ties. The operation of most estates was, in the absence of the landlord, left to the peasants. This only perpetuated the traditional patterns of agriculture and made the modernization and improvement of agricultural productivity impossible.

Elizabeth's reign also witnessed Russian victories over Turkey that expanded and consolidated the empire's control in southwestern Ukraine, between the Bug (Buh) and Dniester rivers, and promoted settlement in Ukraine. Moreover, Russia was interfering more and more in the domestic politics of Poland and in the diplomatic game of central and western Europe. Elizabeth joined Austria, France, Sweden, and Saxony in a coalition against Prussia, under Frederick II, Great Britain, and Hanover; this led to Russia's involvement in the Seven Years' War. Russian armies were successful in conquering East Prussia and occupied Berlin briefly. The empress's death saved the king of Prussia from total disaster.

The reign of Catherine II (the Great; 1762–96)

Elizabeth too was childless, and the throne passed to the heir she had selected—her nephew the duke von Holstein-Gottorp, who became Peter III. Peter III made himself personally unpopular with St. Petersburg society; in addition, he allowed his entourage (mainly his Holstein relatives and German officers) to take control of the government. The regular hierarchy of officials—particularly the Senate—was pushed into the background; power passed into the hands of the emperor's favourites, while a modernized police, under the personal control of a general who was one of the emperor's minions, spread its net over the empire. The pro-Prussian foreign and military policy pursued by Peter III (who abruptly ended Russia's victorious involvement in the Seven Years' War) and his treatment of his wife, Catherine, provoked much resentment. As a result, the emperor lost all support in society. It was easy for Catherine, with the help of the senators, high officials, and officers of the guard regiments (led by her lover Grigory Orlov (Orlov, Grigory Grigoryevich, Graf) and his brothers), to overthrow Peter on June 28 (July 9, New Style), 1762. Thus began the long and important reign of Catherine II, whom her admiring contemporaries named “the Great.”

The daughter of a poor German princeling, Catherine had come to Russia at age 15 to be the bride of the heir presumptive, Peter. She matured in an atmosphere of intrigue and struggle for power. She developed her mind by reading contemporary literature, especially the works of the French Encyclopaedists and of German jurists and cameralists. When she seized power at age 33, she was intellectually and experientially prepared, as the more than 30 years of her reign were to show.

The historiography of Catherine's reign has been dominated by two approaches: a dramatization and romanticization of her personal life, which was indeed colourful for the number and variety of her lovers; and the viewpoint of 19th-century liberalism, which took literally her self-description as a “philosophe on the throne.” Marxist and Soviet historians, to the extent that they have dealt with her reign at all, see it primarily in terms of the pressures put on the state by the serf-owning nobility faced with the demands of an expanding market economy. In recent years, scholars have seen Catherine's government as working to further the formation of a modern civil society in which social classes and groups pursue their own interests rather than serving the needs of the state exclusively.

Even before she seized power, Catherine wrote that the task of good government was to promote the general welfare of the nation by providing for the security of person and property; to that end, government should operate in a legal and orderly fashion, furthering the interests of individual subjects and giving groups and classes as much autonomy in the pursuit of their normal activities as possible. All the same, Catherine believed that the autocratic state had important functions; she had no intention of relinquishing or limiting her authority, even though she was willing to withdraw from those areas of national life that could be safely administered by an educated elite.

Expansion of the empire (imperialism)

Catherine's reign was notable for imperial expansion. First in importance for the empire were the securing of the northern shore of the Black Sea (Treaty of Küçük Kaynarca (Küçük Kaynarca, Treaty of), 1774), the annexation of the Crimea (1783), and the expansion into the steppes beyond the Urals and along the Caspian Sea. This permitted the adequate protection of Russian agricultural settlements in the south and southeast and the establishment of trade routes through the Black Sea and up the Danube. On the other hand, these gains involved Russia more and more in the political and military struggle over the crumbling Ottoman Empire in the Balkans.

Grigory Aleksandrovich Potemkin (Potemkin, Grigory Aleksandrovich, Prince Tavrichesky, Imperial Prince), Catherine's favourite in the 1770s, may be considered the chief architect of her imperial policy. He promoted large-scale foreign colonization and peasant resettlement in the south—with only mediocre success so far as agricultural settlements went but with great success in the foundation and rapid growth of such towns and ports as Odessa, Kherson, Nikolayev (Mykolayiv), Taganrog, and Mariupol (Pavlovsk). Within a generation or two, these became lively cultural centres and major commercial cities for all of southern Russia, contributing to the reorientation of Russia's pattern of trade with the development of agricultural exports from Ukraine. Local society was transformed on the Russian pattern: the landlords became imperial service nobles with full control over their peasants; vast new lands were parceled out to prominent officials and made available for purchase by wealthy Russian nobles, who also received the right to resettle their own serfs from the central regions. Thus serfdom, along with elements of the plantation system, was extended to still more people and over whole new provinces. If this expansion benefited the state and a small and already wealthy part of the Russian nobility, it increased the misery and exploitation of the Ukrainian and Russian peasantries. The traditional military democracies of the Cossack hosts on the Dnieper, Don, Ural, Kuban, and Volga rivers lost their autonomy and special privileges; the wealthier officers became Russian service nobles, receiving the right to own and settle serfs on their own lands, while the rank-and-file Cossacks sank to the level of state peasants with special military obligations.

Integration of the new territories required the absorption of a large number of non-Russian, non-Christian nomadic peoples (nomadism). The approach that prevailed until the late 19th century was based on the idea, taken fromEnlightenment writings, that there is a natural progress of society from primitive hunting and fishing groups through the stage of nomadism to settled agriculture, trade, and urbanization. Accordingly, the government sought to bring the nomadic peoples up to what it considered to be the Russian peasantry's higher way of life; this policy had the advantage also of producing uniformity in administrative and legal structures. Catherine's government was quite willing to let religious, cultural, or linguistic differences stand, although it did not feel committed to protect them actively. Inevitably, however, its effort to change the ways of the nomads affected their culture and religion and, through these, their social equilibrium and sense of national identity. While Catherine's policy led some peoples to accept (more or less under duress) changes in their way of life, thus facilitating the extension of Russian agricultural settlements onto the open steppes, it also gave rise to a growing sense of identity based on cultural, linguistic, and religious traditions. These nationalistic sentiments clashed with the outlook and practices of officials accustomed to thinking in universal categories. The policy thus defeated its own aims: it handicapped the economic development of the empire's border regions (e.g., in Siberia) and worked against the social and cultural integration of the natives into the fold of the dominant Russian culture (although Russification did take place on a significant scale in the case of some native elites, as in the Caucasus and the Crimea).

In the course of the Russo-Turkish War (Russo-Turkish wars) of 1768–74, considerations of balance of power led Frederick II of Prussia to suggest that Russia, Austria, and Prussia find territorial compensation at the expense of Poland rather than squabble over the spoils of the Ottoman Empire. The internal situation of the Polish Commonwealth—in particular the treatment of non-Catholics, which allegedly was grossly discriminatory—had led the three neighbours to meddle in Poland (Poland, Partitions of)'s domestic affairs. After much diplomatic and political maneuvering, Russia, Prussia, and Austria compelled Poland to cede large chunks of its territory in the First Partition (1772–73; see Partitions of Poland (Poland, Partitions of)), the major beneficiaries of which were Russia (which obtained the Belarusian lands) and Austria (Prussia obtained less actual territory, but what it acquired was of great economic value). Polish patriots attempted to bring political stability to their country by drafting the “Constitution of 3 May 1791,” which provided for stronger royal authority, established four-year sessions of the elected Sejm (the Polish diet), abolished the liberum veto in its proceedings (under the liberum veto, any single member of the Sejm could kill a measure), and introduced significant liberal reforms in education and law. The prospect of social and political progress within the framework of a stable government did not suit the partitioning powers, so that the Second Partition was forced on the Poles in 1792. The revolt led by Tadeusz Kościuszko (Kościuszko, Tadeusz) to save Poland's independence was crushed, and in 1795 the three neighbours seized the remainder of the country and ended its political sovereignty and national independence.

In the short term the partitions seemed a significant success for the Russian Empire, completing the “gathering of ‘Russian' lands” (begun in the 15th century) with the acquisition of Belarusia and Volyn, but in the long run they proved more of a liability than an asset. Russia became politically tied to Prussia and had to shoulder an increased military burden to defend its new boundaries as well as to maintain law and order among a people restive under foreign occupation. It also proved difficult to co-opt the Polish elites into the imperial establishment, as had been the case with the Ukrainians, the Baltic Germans, and non-Slavic natives. In addition, the empire acquired for the first time a large Jewish population, which created numerous unforeseen problems. It may also be argued that controlling the obstreperous nation resulted in a regime of harsh police supervision and oppressive censorship throughout the empire.

Government administration under Catherine

The reforms of local government carried out by Catherine also contained contradictions. The successors of Peter I had not solved the problem of local administration. St. Petersburg relied on appointed officials, too few in number and much given to abuse and corruption, and on the informal control exercised by individual landowners and village communes. However, a great peasant rebellion led by Yemelyan Ivanovich Pugachov (Pugachov, Yemelyan Ivanovich) in 1773–74 demonstrated the inadequacy of this system. Taking up suggestions of various officials and mindful of the information and complaints offered by the deputies to the Legislative Commission (1767–68), Catherine shaped the local administration into a structure that remained in force until the middle of the 19th century and also served as a foundation for the zemstvos (zemstvo) (local elected councils), established in 1864. The basic pattern was established by the statute on the provinces of 1775 and complemented by the organization of corporate self-administration contained in the Charters to the Nobility and the Towns (1785). Essentially, the reforms divided the empire's territory into provinces of roughly equal population; the division paid heed to military considerations. Each of these units (guberniya) was put under the supervision and responsibility of a governor or governor-general acting in the name of the ruler, with the right of direct communication with him. A governor's chancery was set up along functional lines (paralleling the system of colleges) and subordinated to and supervised by the Senate. The regular provincial administration was assisted by officials who were elected from among the nobility for the countryside and from the higher ranks of townspeople for the cities; these elected officials took care of routine police matters in their jurisdictions, helped to enforce orders received from the central authorities, and assisted in the maintenance of law and the collection of taxes. Other elected personalities (marshals of the nobility and heads of city councils) protected the interests of their respective classes and helped to settle minor conflicts without recourse to regular tribunals. This delegation of some administrative functions to the local level multiplied the number of state agents on the local level but also fostered a sense of responsibility among the active and cultured members of the local upper classes. On the other hand, the serfs and the lower classes in the towns found themselves without anyone to protect their interests.

Catherine made no fundamental changes in the administration of the central government. The system of colleges was retained, but the authority of the presidents increased at the expense of the boards, initiating an evolution that culminated in the establishment of monocratic ministries in 1802. The Senate supervised all branches of administration, regulating the orderly flow of business. The Senate was also involved—albeit indirectly—in coordination, mainly because its procurator general, Prince Aleksandr A. Vyazemsky, held the office for a quarter of a century with the full trust of the empress. At the same time, the judicial functions of the Senate as a high court of appeal and administrative review were widened.

The major institutional weakness of the Petrine system remained—namely, the lack of a body to coordinate the jurisdictions and resolve the conflicts of the colleges and to plan policies and control their implementation. A ruler as energetic, hardworking, and intelligent as Catherine could perform these tasks almost single-handedly, as had Peter I; but with the growing complexity of administration even Catherine felt the need for such a body, if only to reduce her involvement in every small detail or contested matter and to provide a wider scope for government by permanent laws (law code) and uniform regulations.

A major need of the empire was an up-to-date code of laws. The last code, issued in 1649, had become largely inoperative as a result of Peter's reforms and the transformation of society. Peter and his successors had recognized this need by appointing commissions to prepare a new code; none of the several efforts having reached a successful conclusion, Catherine tried to tackle the job again, but in a different manner. In 1767 she convoked a commission of representatives elected by all classes except private serfs. For their guidance she drafted an instruction (Catherine the Great, Instruction of) largely inspired by Western political thinkers, but, far from providing a blueprint for a liberal code, it emphasized the need for autocracy. In its civil part the instruction owed much to German political philosophy and natural-law jurisprudence, putting the individual's duties before his rights, emphasizing the state's responsibility for the welfare of the nation, and encouraging the pursuit of material self-interest within the established order. Although not implemented by the commission (which was adjourned indefinitely in 1768), the instruction stimulated the modernization of Russian political and legal thought in the early 19th century.

In her social policy Catherine aimed at steering the nobility (aristocracy) toward cultural interests and economic activity so as to reduce their dependence on state service. (They had already been freed from compulsory service by Peter III in 1762.) To this end she ordered a general land survey that fixed clearly and permanently the boundaries of individual estates, and she granted the nobility the exclusive right to exploit both the subsoil and surface resources of their land and to market the products of their estates and of their serfs' labour. The nobles also obtained a monopoly of ownership of inhabited estates, which in fact restricted ownership of agricultural serfs to the noble class. Catherine hoped to stimulate agricultural expansion and modernization by providing easy credit and by disseminating the latest techniques and achievements of Western agriculture through the Free Economic Society, founded in 1765. She also fostered the nobility's corporate organization. The Charter to the Nobility (Gentry, Charter to the) (1785) gave the corps of nobility in every province the status of a legal entity. The corporation's members gathered periodically in the provincial and district capitals to elect a marshal, who represented their interests before the governor and the ruler himself; they also elected a number of officials to administer welfare institutions for the nobility (schools, orphanages, and so on), to help settle disputes, and to provide guardianships for orphans. The corporate life of the nobility did not develop as well as expected, however, and the nobility never became the class it was in Prussia or England, but the charter did foster a sense of class consciousness and afforded legal security to the members and their property. The periodic electoral meetings stimulated social intercourse, led to a livelier cultural life in the provinces, and helped to involve the nobility in local concerns. The charter provided both a framework and the stage for the gradual formation of a “civil society” whose members cultivated interests, activities, and values independent of the state's—a trend that would come to full bloom and manifest itself in the first half of the 19th century.

Turning the nobility's interests toward economic activity brought the return home of many landowners to supervise the operation of their estates. Interested in obtaining greater income, they not only intensified the exploitation of serf labour but also interfered in the traditional routine of the village by attempting to introduce new agricultural techniques. In most cases, this meant increased regimentation of the serfs. The secularization of the lands (estates) of monasteries and episcopal sees in 1764 had brought a considerable amount of land into the possession of the state. To reward her favourites and to encourage the nobility to economic activity, Catherine gave away large tracts with many peasants, who now had to work for ambitious and capricious masters.

Serfdom, which had never been acceptable to the Russian peasant, now became particularly burdensome and unjust; it became even more so since the lord's extensive police powers removed his serfs from the state's protection, and the new local officials enforced strictly the prohibition against appealing to the sovereign for relief. There were also the specific grievances of the Cossacks, whose traditional liberties had been sharply curtailed and their social organization undermined, as well as the discontent of the nomadic peoples forced to accept a new way of life. Peasant misery erupted in rebellion, led by the Cossack Yemelyan Pugachov (Pugachov, Yemelyan Ivanovich), that engulfed all of eastern European Russia in 1773–74. The peasant forces captured a number of towns and cities before they were finally defeated by government armies. The revolt demonstrated the inadequacy of local controls and was thus partly responsible for the reform of provincial administration mentioned above. It also brought the educated elite to a new awareness of the profound alienation of the peasantry from the culture of St. Petersburg.

The reign of Catherine II was a period of active town planning and building (urbanization). The number and size of the urban centres grew slowly but steadily. Along with new cities in the south, many old towns were rebuilt and developed. The renaissance of the old provincial centres was in part due to the administrative reforms of 1775 and 1785, which brought an influx of officials and nobles. Along with them came craftsmen, artisans, and merchants. An act of Peter III that permitted peasants to trade in neighbouring towns without passports or controls at the gates gave impetus to the emergence of a class of small merchants from among the peasantry. This trend received support from the administrative reorganization of the towns and the limited degree of corporate self-administration granted by the Charter to the Towns of 1785.

Education and social change in the 18th century

Secular education had been actively propagated by Peter I. At first it focused on technical subjects—those directly related to the prosecution of war, the building of a navy, and the running of the government. This was also the original emphasis of the Academy of Sciences and the school connected with it. But, as education became the prerequisite for advancement in service and as Western ways of life spread among the upper classes, the focus of education gradually broadened. There developed a class of nobles who were interested in culture for the sake of their own development, as well as for cutting a good figure in society. Beginning in the 1760s, the demand for western European artistic and cultural works grew increasingly in the salons of St. Petersburg. By the 1780s the major classics of European literature had become easily available in translation to any educated person. Private boarding and day schools proliferated, as did the tutors hired by wealthy nobles for their children (and for less fortunate neighbours and relatives). The Academy of Sciences took its place among the major academies of Europe. Moscow State University and the chief schools of the military, naval, and civil services had become regular institutions.

There were also ecclesiastical schools. The seminaries and theological academies not only trained future members of the episcopate and officials of the Holy Synod but also staffed government bureaus on the middle and higher levels and produced the first native Russian academics, scholars, and scientists. Russia's lack of professional experts in such fields as jurisprudence, civil and military engineering, astronomy, and geophysics brought a great influx of foreigners. They brought with them French and German philosophy: the metaphysics and epistemology of René Descartes (Descartes, René) and the natural law doctrines of the German school of Gottfried Leibniz (Leibniz, Gottfried Wilhelm), Samuel, baron von Pufendorf (Pufendorf, Samuel, Freiherr von), and Christian, baron von Wolff (Wolff, Christian, Freiherr (Baron) von). These emphasized social obligation and the individual's dependence on the community and thereby laid the foundation for a critique of society. The critique was at first directed against the moral inadequacies of individuals, but it soon broadened into the view that the educated man had an obligation to help others improve themselves. In the Russian context the class most obviously in need of improvement was the peasantry. Moral progress, it was quickly realized, was not possible without material progress, and this led quite naturally to an advocacy of practical philanthropy and social action.

Imported German professionals furthered the dissemination of German Pietism, with its emphasis on spiritual progress and on the need to serve man and the community. Similar tendencies underlay the most influential branch ofFreemasonry; the Freemasons devoted themselves to disseminating knowledge, relieving hunger, and caring for orphans and other destitutes. The publisher Nikolay Novikov (Novikov, Nikolay Ivanovich) carried the Pietist and Masonic messages to the public in his satiric journals and periodicals for women and children. The major writers of Catherine II's reign (including the empress herself, who dabbled in journalism and drama) produced satires, fables, and comedies of manners attuned to the belief that moral and spiritual progress would lead to social improvements. A similar approach was noticeable in education, which stressed the development of moral feeling in the conviction that a good heart would guide the well-filled head in the proper direction.

All these intellectual currents combined to awaken among educated Russians a sense of national pride (nationalism) and a feeling that, thanks to the impetus given by Peter I, Russia had managed to lift itself to the cultural and political level of a great European state. The educated Russian was no longer a servile and mute slave of the tsars; he had made himself into a gentleman, a man of heart and honour, a “true son of the fatherland,” concerned about his compatriots and his country's condition and future.

The response of the empress and her entourage to these intellectual developments was ambivalent. The new sense of national pride and personal dignity enhanced the government's prestige and was in line with Catherine's own aspirations for the nobility. But moral criticism of abuses could easily turn into criticism of Russia's social and political system. The outbreak of the French Revolution in the late 1780s made Catherine II particularly anxious. She felt that large-scale private philanthropic and educational activities without government guidance and control were trespassing on her own prerogatives as an enlightened autocrat. By the end of the 18th century, the ideal of service to the state, which had underlain the Russian nobility's value system, had been transformed into one of service to the people; this meant the elite's separation from the state, which Catherine II could not accept. A dramatic illustration of Catherine's concern occurred on the appearance in 1790 of Aleksandr Radishchev (Radishchev, Aleksandr Nikolayevich)'s A Journey from St. Petersburg to Moscow. In it Radishchev depicted social conditions as he saw them, particularly the dehumanization of the serfs and the corruption of their masters, warning that these threatened the stability of the existing order. Incensed by the book, Catherine had Radishchev arrested and banished to Siberia. He became the first political martyr of the Russian elite; his book and his fate foreshadowed the antagonism between the intelligentsia and the government that was to dominate Russia's history in the 19th century.

The reign of Paul I (Paul) (1796–1801)

Catherine died in 1796 and was succeeded by her son Paul. A capricious, somewhat unstable individual, Paul had a passion for military order that conflicted with the basic values of the developing civil society; he felt that the nobility should again become a service class (or withdraw completely into agriculture) and help the ruler in implementing his reform program, even at the expense of its private interests. In trying to reestablish compulsory state service, he made it more rigid, harsh, and militaristic. He sought to promote the welfare of the serfs, but the manner of his approach—a decree permitting a maximum of three days of labour service per week—was clumsy and high-handed; it did nothing to help the serfs and angered their lords. Paul also wanted to govern with his own minions, disregarding both tradition and the administrative patterns that had developed during his mother's 30-year reign. Paul's hatred of the French Revolution and of everything connected with it led him to impose tight censorship on travel abroad and to prohibit foreign books, fashions, music, and so forth. He thereby earned the enmity of upper society in St. Petersburg. On March 11 (March 23, New Style), 1801, he was murdered by conspirators drawn from high officials, favourites of Catherine, his own military entourage, and officers of the guard regiments. The accession of his son Alexander I inaugurated a new century and a new period in the history of imperial Russia.

Marc Raeff

Russia from 1801 to 1917

The reigns of Alexander I and Nicholas I

General survey

When Alexander I came to the throne in March 1801, Russia was in a state of hostility with most of Europe, though its armies were not actually fighting; its only ally was its traditional enemy, Turkey. The new emperor quickly made peace with both France and Britain and restored normal relations with Austria. His hope that he would then be able to concentrate on internal reform was frustrated by the reopening of war with Napoleon in 1805. Defeated at Austerlitz (Austerlitz, Battle of) in December 1805, the Russian armies fought Napoleon (Napoleon I) in Poland in 1806 and 1807, with Prussia as an ineffective ally. After the Treaty of Tilsit (Tilsit, Treaties of) (1807), there were five years of peace, ended by Napoleon's invasion of Russia in 1812. From the westward advance of its arms in the next two years of heavy fighting, Russia emerged as Europe's greatest land power and the first among the continental victors over Napoleon. The immense prestige achieved in these campaigns was maintained until mid-century. During this period, Russian armies fought only against weaker enemies: Persia in 1826, Turkey (Russo-Turkish wars) in 1828–29, Poland in 1830–31, and the mountaineers of the Caucasus during the 1830s and '40s. When Europe was convulsed by revolution in 1848 (see Revolutions of 1848 (1848, Revolutions of)), Russia and Great Britain alone among the great powers were unaffected, and in the summer of 1849 the tsar sent troops to crush the Hungarians in Transylvania. Russia was not loved, but it was admired and feared. To the upper classes in central Europe, Nicholas I was the stern defender of monarchical legitimacy; to democrats all over the world, he was “the gendarme of Europe” and the chief enemy of liberty. But the Crimean War (1853–56) showed that this giant had feet of clay. The vast empire was unable to mobilize, equip, and transport enough troops to defeat the medium-size French and English forces under very mediocre command. Nicholas died in the bitter knowledge of general failure.

Alexander I as a young man had longed to reform his empire and benefit his subjects. His hopes were disappointed, partly by the sheer inertia, backwardness, and vastness of his domains, partly perhaps because of defects of his own character, but also because Napoleon (Napoleon I)'s aggressive enterprises diverted Alexander's attention to diplomacy and defense. Russia's abundant manpower and scanty financial resources were both consumed in war. The early years of his reign saw two short periods of attempted reform. During the first, from 1801 to 1803, the tsar took counsel with four intimate friends, who formed his so-called Unofficial Committee, with the intention of drafting ambitious reforms. In the period from 1807 to 1812, he had as his chief adviser the liberal Mikhail Speransky (Speransky, Mikhail Mikhaylovich, Graf). Both periods produced some valuable administrative innovations, but neither initiated any basic reform. After 1815 Alexander was mainly concerned with grandiose plans for international peace; his motivation was not merely political but also religious—not to say mystical—for the years of war and national danger had aroused in him an interest in matters of faith to which, as a pupil of the 18th-century Enlightenment, he had previously been indifferent. While he was thus preoccupied with diplomacy and religion, Russia was ruled by conservatives and reactionaries, among whom the brutal but honest Gen. Aleksey Arakcheyev (Arakcheyev, Aleksey Andreyevich, Graf) was outstanding. Victory in war had strengthened those who upheld the established order, serfdom and all. The mood was one of intense national pride: Orthodox Russia had defeated Napoleon, and therefore it was not only foolish but also impious to copy foreign models. Educated young Russians, who had served in the army and seen Europe, who read and spoke French and German and knew contemporary European literature, felt otherwise. Masonic lodges and secret societies flourished in the early 1820s. From their deliberations emerged a conspiracy to overthrow the government, inspired by a variety of ideas: some looked to the United States for a model, others to Jacobin France. The conspirators, known as the Decembrists (Decembrist) because they tried to act in December 1825 when the news of Alexander I's death became known and there was uncertainty about his successor, were defeated and arrested; five were executed, and many more sentenced to various terms of imprisonment in Siberia. Nicholas I, who succeeded after his elder brother Constantine (Constantine, Veliky Knyaz) had finally refused the throne, was deeply affected by these events and set himself against any major political change, though he did not reject the idea of administrative reform. After the Revolutions of 1848 in Europe, his opposition to all change, his suspicion of even mildly liberal ideas, and his insistence on an obscurantist censorship reached their climax.

The sections that follow cover the development under Alexander I and Nicholas I of the machinery of government, of social classes and economic forces, of education and political ideas, of the relations between Russians and other peoples within the empire, and of Russian foreign policy.

Government

The discussions of Alexander I's Unofficial Committee were part of an ongoing debate that was to remain important until the end of the imperial regime. This may be called the debate between enlightened oligarchy and enlightened autocracy. The proponents of oligarchy looked back to a somewhat idealized model of the reign of Catherine II. They wished greater power to be placed in the hands of the aristocracy for the purpose of achieving a certain balance between the monarch and the social elite, believing that both together were capable of pursuing policies that would benefit the people as a whole. Their opponents, of whom the most talented was the young count Pavel Stroganov, were against any limitation on the power of the tsar. Whereas the oligarchs wished to make the Senate an important centre of power and to have it elected by senior officials and country nobility, Stroganov maintained that if this were done the sovereign would have “his arms tied, so that he would no longer be able to carry out the plans which he had in favour of the nation.” In any event, neither enlightened oligarchs nor enlightened absolutists had their way: Russia's government remained autocratic but reactionary. Alexander, however, never quite abandoned the idea of representative institutions. He encouraged Speransky to prepare in 1809 a draft constitution that included a pyramid of consultative elected bodies and a national assembly with some slight powers of legislation. In 1819 he asked Nikolay Novosiltsev (Novosiltsev, Nikolay Nikolayevich, Count), a former member of the Unofficial Committee who had made a brilliant career as a bureaucrat, to prepare another constitution, which turned out to be rather similar to the first, although somewhat more conservative and less centralist. Neither was ever implemented, though Alexander took some features of the first, notably the institution of the State Council, and used them out of their intended context.

In 1802 Alexander instituted eight government departments, or ministries, of which five were essentially new. The organization of the departments was substantially improved in 1811 by Speransky. In the 1820s the Ministry of the Interior became responsible for public order, public health, stocks of food, and the development of industry and agriculture. Inadequate funds and personnel and the dominant position of the serf-owning nobility in the countryside greatly limited the effective power of this ministry. There was no question of a formal council of ministers, or of anything corresponding to a cabinet, and there was no prime minister. A committee of ministers coordinated to some extent the affairs of the different departments, but its importance depended on circumstances and on individuals. When the tsar was abroad, the committee was in charge of internal affairs. Aleksey Arakcheyev was for a time secretary of the committee, but he did not cease to be the strongest man in Russia under the tsar when he ceased to hold this formal office. The committee had a president, but this office did not confer any significant power or prestige.

Under Nicholas I the committee of ministers continued to operate, but the individual ministers were responsible only to the emperor. The centre of power to some extent shifted into the emperor's personal chancery, which was built up into a formidable apparatus. The Third Department of the chancery, created in July 1826, under Count Aleksandr Benckendorff (Benckendorff, Aleksandr Khristoforovich, Count), was responsible for the security police. Its head was also chief of gendarmes, and the two offices were later formally united. The task of the security force was to obtain information on the state of political opinion and to track down and repress all political activity that might be considered dangerous to the regime. The Third Department was also considered by the tsar as an instrument of justice in a broad sense, the defender of all those unjustly treated by the powerful and rich. Some of the department's reports show that there were officials who took these duties seriously, but as a whole it showed more talent for wasting time and effort and for repressing opposition and stifling opinion than for redressing the grievances of the powerless. In addition, the department was often on the worst of terms with other branches of the public service.

Russia under Alexander I and Nicholas I was ruled by its bureaucracy. The efforts of successive sovereigns after Peter the Great to establish a government service of the European type had had partial success. The Russian bureaucracy of 1850 combined some features of a central European bureaucracy of 1750 with some features of pre-Petrine Russia. One may speak of a “service ethos” and trace this back to 16th-century Muscovy. But the foundation of this ethos was, for the great majority of Russian officials, servile obedience to the tsar and not service to the state as that phrase was understood in a country such as Prussia. The notion of the state as something distinct from and superior to both ruler and ruled was incomprehensible to most government servants. Russian bureaucrats were obsessed with rank and status. Indeed, because salaries were quite meagre, this was the only incentive that the government could give. Rank was not so much a reward for efficient service as a privilege to be grasped and jealously guarded. In order to prevent able persons, especially of humble origin, from rising too quickly, great emphasis was placed on seniority. There were exceptions, and outstandingly able, cultured, and humane men did reach the top under Nicholas I, but they were few.

The rank and file of the bureaucracy was mediocre, but its numbers steadily increased, perhaps trebling in the first half of the century. It remained poorly paid. The government's poverty was caused by the underdeveloped state of the economy, by the fact that no taxes could be asked of the nobility, and by the cost of waging wars—not only the great wars but also the long colonial campaigns in the Caucasus. Government officials were badly educated. They lacked not only precise knowledge but also the sort of basic ethical training that competent officials need. They were reluctant to make decisions: responsibility was pushed higher and higher up the hierarchy, until thousands of minor matters ended on the emperor's desk. Centralization of responsibility meant slowness of decision, and delays of many years were not unusual; death often provided the answer. There were also many antiquated, discriminatory, and contradictory laws. Large categories of the population, such as Jews and members of heretical Christian sects, suffered from various legal disabilities. Since not all those discriminated against were poor and since many small officials were unable to support their families, bending or evasion of the law had its market price, and the needy official had a supplementary source of income. Corruption of this sort existed on a mass scale. To a certain extent it was a redeeming feature of the regime: if there had been less corruption the government would have been even slower, less efficient, and more oppressive.

Social classes

No significant changes were made in the condition of the serfs in the first half of the century. Alexander I, perhaps from fear of the nobility and with the memory of his father's fate in mind, approached the problem with caution, though with a desire for reform, but first war and then diplomacy diverted him. His successor, Nicholas, disliked serfdom, but there were political hazards in eliminating it. The power of the central government extended down to the provincial governors and, more tenuously, down to the ispravnik, or chief official of the district, of which each province had several. The ispravnik was elected by the local nobility. Below the level of the district, the administration virtually ceased to operate: the sole authority was the serf owner. If serfdom were to be abolished, some other authority would have to be put in its place, and the existing bureaucratic apparatus was plainly inadequate. The Decembrist conspiracy in 1825 had greatly increased the tsar's distrust of the nobility. He was determined to avoid public discussion of reform, even within the upper class.

The one important exception to the general picture of bureaucratic stagnation was the creation of the Ministry of State Domains, under Gen. Pavel Kiselev (Kiselyov, Pavel Dmitriyevich). This became an embryonic ministry of agriculture, with authority over peasants who lived on state lands. These were a little less than half the rural population: in 1858 there were 19 million state peasants and 22.5 million private serfs. Kiselev set up a system of government administration down to the village level and provided for a measure of self-government under which the mayor of the volost (a district grouping several villages or peasant communes) was elected by male householders. There was also to be a volost court for judging disputes between peasants. Kiselev planned to improve medical services, build schools, establish warehouses for stocks of food in case of crop failure, and give instruction in methods of farming. Something was done in all these fields, even if less than intended and often in a manner that provoked hostility or even violent riots; the personnel of the new ministry was no more competent than the bureaucracy as a whole.

Only minor measures were taken to benefit the serfs on private estates. Opposition to serfdom grew steadily, however, not only among persons of European outlook and independent thought but also among high officials. It seemed not only unjust but intolerable that in a great nation men and women could be owned. Serfdom was also obviously an obstacle to economic development.

Whether serfdom was contrary to the interests of serf owners is a more complex question. Those who wished to abolish it argued that it was, since their best hope of getting the nobility to accept abolition lay in convincing them that their self-interest required it. Certainly in parts of southern Russia where the soil was fertile, labour was plentiful, and potential profits in the grain trade with Europe were high, a landowner would do better if he could replace his serfs with paid agricultural labour and be rid of obligations to those peasants whom he did not need to employ. In other regions, where the population was scanty, serfdom provided the landowner with an assured labour supply; if it were abolished, he would have to pay more for his labour force or see it melt away. In large parts of northern Russia where the land was poor, many serfs made a living from various crafts—in cottage industry or even in factories—and from their wages had to pay dues to their masters. The abolition of serfdom would deprive the serf owner of this large income and leave him with only what he could make from farming and from tenants with rather poor economic prospects. On balance, it seems likely that the short-term interests of the great majority of serf owners favoured the maintenance of serfdom, and, in any case, there is no doubt that this is what most serf owners believed.

Industry (industrialization) and trade (international trade) made slow progress during these years. In the latter part of the 18th century, Russia had been, thanks to its Urals mines, one of the main producers of pig iron. In the next 50 years, it was left far behind by Great Britain, Germany, and the United States. In cotton textiles and sugar refining, Russia was more successful. Count Egor Frantsevich Kankrin (Kankrin, Egor Frantsevich, Count), minister of finance from 1823 to 1844, tried to encourage Russian industry by high protective tariffs. He also set up schools and specialized institutes for the advancement of commerce, engineering, and forestry. Russia's exports of grain increased substantially, though its share of total world trade remained about the same in 1850 as in 1800. The first railways also appeared; rail traffic between St. Petersburg and Moscow was opened in 1851. The road system remained extremely inadequate, as was demonstrated in the Crimean War.

The urban population (urbanization) grew significantly. There were a few prosperous merchants, well protected by the government. Some centres, such as Ivanovo in central Russia, with its textile industry, had the beginnings of an industrial working class. The rest of the inhabitants of the cities consisted of small tradesmen and artisans, together with serfs living in town with their owners' permission as household servants or casual labourers.

Education and intellectual life

Alexander I's School Statute (1804) provided for a four-tier system of schools from the primary to the university level, intended to be open to persons of all classes. Under its provisions several new universities were founded, and gymnasiums (pre-university schools) were established in most provincial capitals. Less was done at the lower levels, for the usual reason of inadequate funds. In the latter part of Alexander's reign, education was supervised by Prince Aleksandr Nikolayevich Golitsyn, head of the Ministry of Education and Spiritual Affairs. In an effort to combat what he believed to be dangerous irreligious doctrines emanating from western Europe, Golitsyn encouraged university students to spy on their professors and on each other; those who taught unacceptable ideas were frequently dismissed or threatened with prison. Under Nicholas I there was some improvement. Count Sergey Uvarov (Uvarov, Sergey Semyonovich, Count), minister of education from 1833 to 1849, permitted a much freer intellectual atmosphere, but he also began the practice of deliberately excluding children of the lower classes from the gymnasiums and universities, a policy continued under his successors.

Nevertheless, in increasing numbers the children of minor officials, small tradesmen, and especially priests were acquiring education. Together with the already Europeanized nobility, they began to form a new cultural elite. Direct political criticism was prevented by the censorship of books and periodicals. Petty police interference made life disagreeable even for writers who were not much concerned with politics. Aleksandr Pushkin (Pushkin, Aleksandr Sergeyevich), Russia's greatest poet, got into trouble with the police for his opinions in 1824; he was also a friend of some leading Decembrists. After 1826 he lived an unhappy life in St. Petersburg, tolerated but distrusted by the authorities and producing magnificent poetry until he met his death in a duel in 1837. The writers Mikhail Lermontov (Lermontov, Mikhail) and Nikolay Gogol (Gogol, Nikolay) were also objects of suspicion to the bureaucrats.

The censorship was not always efficient, and some of the censors were liberal. It became possible to express political ideas in the form of philosophical arguments and literary criticism. Thus, it was partly in intellectual periodicals and partly in discussions in the private houses of Moscow noblemen that the controversy between “Westernizers (Westernizer)” and “Slavophiles (Slavophile)” developed. It began with the publication of a “philosophical letter” by Pyotr Chaadayev (Chaadayev, Pyotr Yakovlevich) in the periodical Teleskop in 1836. One of the most brilliant essays ever written about Russia's historical heritage, it argued that Russia belonged neither to West nor to East, neither to Europe nor to Asia:

Standing alone in the world, we have given nothing to the world, we have learnt nothing from the world, we have not added a single idea to the mass of human ideas; we have made no contribution to the progress of the human spirit, and everything that has come to us from that spirit, we have disfigured.… Today we form a gap in the intellectual order.

Nicholas declared that Chaadayev must be mad and gave orders that he should be confined to his house and regularly visited by a doctor.

It is misleading to represent the Westernizers as wishing to slavishly copy all things Western or the Slavophiles as repudiating everything European and rejecting reform. The chief Slavophiles—Aleksey S. Khomyakov (Khomyakov, Aleksey Stepanovich), the brothers Ivan (Kireyevsky, Ivan Vasilyevich) and Pyotr Kireyevsky, the brothers Konstantin (Aksakov, Konstantin Sergeyevich) and Ivan Aksakov, and Yury Samarin—were men of deep European culture and, with one exception, bitter opponents of serfdom. Indeed, as landowners they knew more about the problems and sufferings of the serfs than did many Westernizers. The leading Westernizers—Aleksandr Herzen (Herzen, Aleksandr Ivanovich), Vissarion Belinsky (Belinsky, Vissarion Grigoryevich), and Mikhail Bakunin (Bakunin, Mikhail Aleksandrovich)—were for their part profoundly Russian. Belinsky was ill at ease with foreigners, and Herzen and Bakunin, despite many years' residence in France, Germany, England, and Italy, remained not only hostile to the world of European bourgeois liberalism and democracy but also strangely ignorant of it.

The difference between Westernizers (Westernizer) and Slavophiles (Slavophile) was essentially that between radicals and conservatives, a familiar theme in the history of most European nations. It was the difference between those who wished to pull the whole political structure down and replace it with a new building, according to their own admirable blueprints, and those who preferred to knock down some parts and repair and refurnish others, bit by bit. Another basic difference was that the Slavophiles were Orthodox Christians and the Westernizers either atheists or, like the historian T.N. Granovsky, Deists with their own personal faith. Belinsky described the Orthodox church in his famous “Letter to Gogol” (1847) as “the bulwark of the whip and the handmaid of despotism.” He maintained that the Russian populace was “by its nature a profoundly atheistic people” and that it viewed the priesthood with contempt. These were but half-truths: the church was indeed subject to the government and upheld autocracy, and priests were often unpopular, but this did not mean that the peasants and a large part of the upper and middle classes were not devoted to the Orthodox faith.

The Slavophiles idealized early Russian history. They believed that there had once been a happy partnership between tsar and people: the tsar had consulted the people through their elected spokesmen in the zemsky sobor. This had been changed by Peter the Great when he sought to copy foreign models and interposed an alien bureaucracy, staffed largely by Germans, between himself and his people. The Slavophiles held that Russia should return to the way from which it had strayed under Peter. They asked not for a legislative body of the Western type, still less for parliamentary government, but for a consultative assembly to advise the emperor. This was quite unacceptable to Nicholas, who was proud of Peter the Great and believed himself his political heir. To the Westernizers, on the other hand, Peter the Great was a symbol of radical change, not of autocracy.

The Russian Empire

Russia in the 19th century was both a multilingual and a multireligious empire. Only about half the population was at the same time Russian by language and Orthodox by religion. The Orthodox were to some extent privileged in comparison with the other Christians; all Christians enjoyed a higher status than Muslims; and the latter were not so disadvantaged as the Jews. The basis of legitimacy was obedience to the tsar: Nicholas expected all his subjects to obey him, but he did not expect non-Russians to become Russians. Admittedly, he detested the Poles, but that was because they had been disloyal subjects and revolted against him.

The idea that Russians, as such, should have a status superior to that of other peoples of the empire was distasteful to Nicholas. Russian nationalism nevertheless received some support from Count Uvarov (Uvarov, Sergey Semyonovich, Count), who, in his famous report to the tsar in 1832, proclaimed three principles as “truly Russian”: Orthodoxy (Orthodoxy, Autocracy, and Nationality), autocracy, and the national principle ( narodnost). In 1833 Uvarov set up a new university in Kiev to be the centre for a policy of spreading Russian language and culture through the schools in the western provinces, at the expense of the Polish. Nicholas approved of this, for the Poles had been guilty of rebellion, but when the attempt was made to Russify the Germans of the Baltic provinces, he objected. The Baltic Germans were loyal subjects and provided admirable officers and officials; they were therefore allowed to preserve their German culture and to maintain their cultural and social domination over the Estonians and Latvians. The young Slavophile and landowning nobleman Yury Samarin, a junior official in Riga, was severely reprimanded by the emperor for his anti-German activities.

The most revolutionary of the Decembrist leaders, Pavel Pestel (Pestel, Pavel Ivanovich), had insisted that all non-Russian peoples of the empire except the Poles should “completely fuse their nationality with the nationality of the dominant people.” Another group of Decembrists, however, the Society of United Slavs, believed in a federation of free Slav peoples (Pan-Slavism), including some of those living under Austrian and Turkish rule. In 1845 this idea was put forward in a different form in the Brotherhood of SS. Cyril and Methodius, in Kiev. This group, among whose members was the Ukrainian (Ukrainian literature) poet Taras Shevchenko (Shevchenko, Taras Hryhorovych), believed that a federation of Slav peoples should include the Ukrainians, whom they claimed were not a part of the Russian nation but a distinct nationality. The society was crushed by the police, and Shevchenko was sent as a private soldier to the Urals; Nicholas himself gave orders that the great poet should be forbidden to write or draw. But Ukrainian (Ukrainian language) national consciousness, though still confined to an educated minority, was growing, and nothing did more to crystallize Ukrainian as a literary language than Shevchenko's poetry.

During the first half of the century, Russia made substantial conquests in Asia. In the Caucasus the kingdom of Georgia united voluntarily with Russia in 1801, and other small Georgian principalities were conquered in the next years. Persia ceded northern Azerbaijan, including the peninsula of Baku, in 1813 and the Armenian province of Erivan ( Yerevan) in 1828. The mountain peoples of the northern Caucasus, however, proved more redoubtable. The Chechens, led by Shāmil, resisted Russian expeditions from 1834 until 1859, and the Circassians (Circassian) were not finally crushed until 1864. In the 1840s Russian rule was established over the pastoral peoples of Kazakhstan (Kazakh). In East Asia, Russian ships explored the lower course of the Amur River and discovered the straits between Sakhalin and the mainland of Asia in 1849. The Russian-American Company, founded in 1799, controlled part of the coast and islands of Alaska.

Foreign policy

At the beginning of the 19th century, Russian foreign policy was essentially concentrated on the three western neighbour countries with which it had been preoccupied since the 16th century: Sweden, Poland, and Turkey. The policy toward these countries also determined Russian relations with France, Austria, and Great Britain.

Russo-Swedish relations were settled during the Napoleonic (Napoleon I) era. When Napoleon met with Alexander at Tilsit, he gave the latter a free hand to proceed against Sweden. After two years of war, in which the Russians did not always fare well, the Swedish government ceded Finland to the tsar in 1809. Alexander became grand duke of Finland, but Finland was not incorporated into the Russian Empire, and its institutions were fully respected. In 1810, when Napoleon's former marshal, Jean-Baptiste Bernadotte (Charles XIV John), was elected heir to the Swedish throne, he showed no hostility toward Russia. In 1812 he made an agreement recognizing the tsar's position in Finland in return for the promise of Russian support in his aim to annex Norway from Denmark. Bernadotte achieved this in the Treaty of Kiel (Kiel, Treaty of) (Jan. 14, 1814), and thereafter the relations between Russia and Sweden, now a small and peaceful state, were not seriously troubled.

Alexander I, influenced by his Polish friend Prince Adam Czartoryski (Czartoryski, Adam Jerzy, Prince), had plans for the liberation and unity of Poland, which had ceased to exist as a state in the 18th century, when it was partitioned among Russia, Prussia, and Austria. After his defeat by Napoleon in 1805, Alexander abandoned those plans in favour of an alliance with Prussia. In 1807 Napoleon established a dependency called the Grand Duchy of Warsaw (Warsaw, Duchy of) and in 1809 increased its territory at the expense of Austria. Alexander's attempts to win the Poles to his side in 1811 and to persuade Austria to make concessions to them failed; when Napoleon invaded Russia in 1812, he had 100,000 first-class Polish troops fighting for him. After Napoleon's defeat, Alexander was not vindictive. He protected the Poles against the demands of Russian nationalists who wanted revenge and sought once more to create a large Polish kingdom comprising the territories annexed by Russia and Prussia in the partitions of the 18th century. He was opposed at the Congress of Vienna in 1814–15 by Austria and Britain; the ensuing kingdom of Poland, which, though nominally autonomous, was to be in permanent union with the Russian Empire, consisted of only part of the Prussian and Russian conquests.

Alexander was popular in Poland for a time after 1815. But real reconciliation between Poles and Russians was made impossible by their competing claims for the borderlands, which had belonged to the former grand duchy of Lithuania (Lithuania, grand duchy of). The majority of the population of this region was Belarusian, Ukrainian, or Lithuanian; its commercial class was Jewish; and its upper classes and culture were Polish. Neither Russians nor Poles considered Belarusians, Ukrainians, or Lithuanians to be nations, entitled to decide their own fates: the question was whether Lithuania was to be Polish or Russian. Russians could argue that most of Lithuania had been part of “the Russian land” until the 14th century, and the Poles that it had been Polish since the 16th. Alexander had some sympathy for the Polish point of view and allowed the Poles to hope that he would reunite these lands with Poland, but the effective political forces in Russia were strongly opposed to any change. The disappointment of Polish hopes for Lithuania was probably the most important single cause of the growing tension between Warsaw and St. Petersburg in the late 1820s, which culminated in the revolt of the Poles in November 1830 (November Insurrection) and the war of 1831 between Polish and Russian armies. It ended in the defeat of the Poles and the exile of thousands of political leaders and soldiers to western Europe. Poland's constitution and thus its autonomy were abrogated, and there began a policy of Russification of Poland.

International reactions to the Russo-Polish war were of some importance. Although the governments of France and Britain had failed to come to the aid of Poland during the war, there was much sympathy for the Poles in these countries; nonetheless, sympathy alone was not sufficient to influence Russian actions. On the other hand, the governments of Prussia and Austria strongly supported Russia. It is arguable that the cooperation among the three monarchies, which continued over the next two decades and was revived from time to time later in the century, had less to do with their eloquently proclaimed loyalty to monarchical government than with their common interest in suppressing the Poles.

Turkey had long been the main object of Russian territorial expansion; through a certain inertia of tradition, the Turkish policy had become almost automatic. It was to some extent reinforced by religious motives—by the romantic desire to liberate Constantinople (Istanbul), the holy city of Orthodoxy—but more important in the second half of the 19th century was the desire to assure the exit of Russian grain exports through the Black Sea. During certain periods, Russia sought to dominate Turkey as a powerful ally; this was its policy from 1798 to 1806 and again from 1832 to 1853. When this policy was successful, Russia supported the integrity of the Ottoman Empire and made no territorial demands. When it was not successful, Russia sought to undermine Turkey by supporting rebellious Balkan (Balkans) peoples or, more directly, by war: this was the case in 1806–12, 1828–29, and 1853–56.

The periods of cooperation were more profitable for Russia than those of conflict. During the first period, a promising foothold was established in the Ionian Islands, which had to be abandoned after the Treaty of Tilsit (Tilsit, Treaties of). During the second period of cooperation, Russia achieved a great success with the 1833 Treaty of Hünkâr İskelesi (Hünkâr İskelesi, Treaty of), which in effect opened the Black Sea straits (Straits Question) to Russian warships. Russia achieved a more limited but more durable gain by the Straits Convention of 1841, signed by all the great powers and by Turkey, which forbade the passage of foreign warships through either the Dardanelles or the Bosporus as long as Turkey was at peace, thus protecting Russia's position in the Black Sea unless it was itself at war with Turkey.

In the periods of hostility between Russia and Turkey, the main object of Russian expansion was the area later known as Romania—the Danubian principalities of Moldavia and Walachia. In 1812 Moldavia was partitioned between Russia and Turkey: the eastern half, under the name of Bessarabia, was annexed to Russia. In the war of 1828–29, Russian armies marched through the principalities and afterward remained in occupation until 1834. In 1848 the Russians returned, with Turkish approval, to suppress the revolution that had broken out in Bucharest. It appeared to be only a matter of time before the two Romanian principalities were wholly annexed to Russia. This did not occur, however, because of Russia's defeat in the Crimean War.

The Crimean War (1853–56) pitted Russia against Great Britain, France, and Turkey. It arose from a series of misunderstandings and diplomatic errors among the powers in their conflict of interests in the Middle East, particularly over Turkish affairs. It has been called “the unnecessary war.” The fact that it was fought in the Crimea was due to Austrian diplomacy. In June 1854 the Russian government accepted the Austrian demand that Russian troops be withdrawn from the Danubian principalities, and in August Austrian troops entered. It is arguable whether, on balance, the presence of Austrian troops benefited Russia by preventing French and British forces from marching on Ukraine or whether it damaged Russia by preventing its troops from marching on Istanbul. The tsar resented the Austrian action as showing ingratitude toward the power that had saved Austria from the Hungarian rebels in 1849. When the British and French were unable to attack in the principalities, they decided to send an expedition to the Crimea to destroy the Russian naval base at Sevastopol (Sevastopol, Siege of). It was there that the war dragged out its course. The war showed the inefficiency of Russia's top military command and of its system of transport and supply. The Russian armies nevertheless won victories over the Turks in the Caucasus, and the defense of Sevastopol for nearly a year was a brilliant achievement.

Hugh Seton-Watson Nicholas V. Riasanovsky

From Alexander II to Nicholas II

Emancipation and reform

Alexander IIDefeat in the Crimea made Russia's lack of modernization clear, and the first step toward modernization was the abolition of serfdom. It seemed to the new tsar, Alexander II (reigned 1855–81), that the dangers to public order of dismantling the existing system, which had deterred Nicholas I from action, were less than the dangers of leaving things as they were. As the tsar said to the nobility of Moscow in March 1856, “It is better to abolish serfdom from above than to wait until the serfs begin to liberate themselves from below.” The main work of reform was carried out in the Ministry of the Interior, where the most able officials, headed by the deputy minister Nikolay Milyutin (Milyutin, Nikolay Alekseyevich), were resolved to get the best possible terms for the peasants. In this they were assisted by a few progressive landowners, chief among whom was the Slavophile Yury Samarin. But the bulk of the landowning class (land reform) was determined, if it could not prevent abolition of serfdom, to give the freed peasants as little as possible. The settlement (Emancipation Manifesto), proclaimed on Feb. 19 (March 3, New Style), 1861, was a compromise. Peasants were freed from servile status, and a procedure was laid down by which they could become owners of land. The government paid the landowners compensation and recovered the cost in annual “redemption payments” from the peasants. The terms were unfavourable to the peasants in many, probably most, cases. In the north, where land was poor, the price of land on which the compensation was based was unduly high; in effect, this served partly to compensate the landowners for the loss of their serfs and also for the loss of the share that they had previously enjoyed of the peasants' earnings from nonagricultural labour. In the south, where land was more valuable, the plots given to the peasants were very small, often less than they had been allowed for their own use when they were serfs.

It is arguable that the main beneficiary of the reform was not the peasant and certainly not the landowner but the state. A new apparatus of government was established to replace the authority of the serf owner. From the ispravnik, the chief official of the district, who in 1862 ceased to be elected by the nobility and became an appointed official of the Ministry of the Interior, the official hierarchy now stretched down to the village notary, the most powerful person at this level, who was assisted by an elder elected by an assembly of householders. The lowest effective centre of power was the village commune (obshchina), an institution of uncertain origin but great antiquity, which had long had the power to redistribute land for the use of its members and to determine the crop cycle, but which now also became responsible for collecting taxes on behalf of the government.

Further important reforms followed the emancipation. A new system of elected assemblies at the provincial and county levels was introduced in 1864. These assemblies, known as zemstvos (zemstvo), were elected by all classes including the peasants, although the landowning nobility had a disproportionately large share of both the votes and the seats. The zemstvos were empowered to levy taxes and to spend their funds on schools, public health, roads, and other social services, but their scope was limited by the fact that they also had to spend money on some of the tasks of the central government. In 1864 a major judicial reform (judiciary) was completed. Russia received a system of law courts based on European models, with irremovable judges and a proper system of courts of appeal. Justices of the peace, elected by the county zemstvos, were instituted for minor offenses. A properly organized, modern legal profession now arose, and it soon achieved very high standards. The old system of endless delays and judicial corruption rapidly disappeared. There were, however, two important gaps in the system: one was that the Ministry of the Interior had power, regardless of the courts, to banish persons whom it regarded as politically dangerous; the other was that the courts for settling disputes between peasants were maintained and operated on the basis of peasant custom. Their institution by Kiselev (Kiselyov, Pavel Dmitriyevich) in the 1840s had been a well-intentioned reform, but their continuation after emancipation meant that the peasants were still regarded as something less than full citizens.

During the first years of Alexander II's reign there was some demand from a liberal section of the nobility for representative government at the national level—not for full parliamentary rule, still less for a democratic suffrage, but for some sort of consultative assembly in which public issues could be debated and which could put before the emperor the views of at least the educated section of the Russian people. The tsar and his bureaucrats refused to consider this, above all because they saw constitutional reform as a slippery slope that would lead to the disintegration of state and empire and to class war between landowners and peasants. The principle of autocracy must remain sacred; such was the view not only of bureaucrats but also of men such as Nikolay Milyutin and Yury Samarin, both of whom rested their hopes for the progressive reforms they so ardently desired on the unfettered power of the emperor. Their attitude was essentially that of Pavel Stroganov at the beginning of the century, that the sovereign must not have “his arms tied” and so be prevented from realizing “the plans which he had in favour of the nation.” The decision against a national assembly in the early 1860s was a negative event of the greatest importance: it deprived Russia of the possibility of public political education such as that which existed, for example, in contemporary Prussia, and it deprived the government of the services of hundreds of talented men.

Revolutionary activities

The emancipation was received with bitter disappointment by many peasants as well as by the radical intellectuals. The serfs' view of their relationship to the landowners had been traditionally summed up in the phrase, “We are yours, but the land is ours.” Now they were being asked to pay for land that they felt was theirs by right. During the 1860s small revolutionary groups began to appear. The outstanding figure was the socialist writer N.G. Chernyshevsky (Chernyshevsky, N.G.); the extent of his involvement in revolutionary action remains a subject of controversy, but of his influence on generations of young Russians there can be no doubt. In 1861–62 revolutionary leaflets were distributed in St. Petersburg, ranging from the demand for a constituent assembly to a passionate appeal for insurrection. The Polish uprising of 1863 strengthened the forces of repression. An unsuccessful attempt on the tsar's life in 1866 led to a certain predominance of extreme conservatives among Alexander's advisers. Nevertheless, there were still some valuable reforms to come. In 1870 the main cities of Russia were given elected municipal government (on a very narrow franchise), and in 1874 a series of military reforms was completed by the establishment of universal military service. This was the work of Dmitry Milyutin (Milyutin, Dmitry Alekseyevich, Count), the brother of Nikolay and like him a liberal, who was minister of war from 1861 to 1881.

In the 1870s revolutionary activity (Narodnik) revived. Its centre was the university youth, who were increasingly influenced by a variety of socialist ideas derived from Europe but adapted to Russian conditions. These young people saw in the peasantry the main potential for revolutionary action. In 1873–74 hundreds of the youth, including women, “went to the people,” invading the countryside and seeking to rouse the peasants with their speeches. The peasants did not understand, and the police arrested the young revolutionaries. Some were sentenced to prison, and hundreds were deported to remote provinces or to Siberia. It became clear that no progress could be expected from overt action: conspiratorial action was the only hope. In 1876 a new party was founded that took the title of Zemlya i Volya (“Land and Freedom”). Some of its members favoured assassination of prominent officials in reprisal for the maltreatment of their comrades and also as a means to pressure the government in order to extract Western-type political liberties. Experience also had shown them that, while the peasants were physically too scattered to be an effective force and were in any case too apathetic, the workers in the new industrial cities offered a more promising audience. This faction was opposed by others in the party who deprecated assassination, continued to pay more attention to peasants than to workers, and were indifferent to the attainment of political liberties. In 1879 the party split. The politically minded and terrorist wing took the name Narodnaya Volya (“People's Will”) and made its aim the assassination of Alexander II. After several unsuccessful attempts, it achieved its aim on March 1 (March 13, New Style), 1881, when the tsar was fatally wounded by a bomb while driving through the capital. All the main leaders of the group were caught by the police, and five of them were hanged.

Shortly before his death the tsar had been considering reforms that would have introduced a few elected representatives into the apparatus of government. His successor, Alexander III (reigned 1881–94), considered these plans. Under the influence of his former tutor, Konstantin Pobedonostsev (Pobedonostsev, Konstantin Petrovich), the procurator of the Holy Synod, he decided to reject them and to reaffirm the principle of autocracy without change. In 1882 he appointed Dmitry Tolstoy (Tolstoy, Dmitry Andreyevich, Graf) minister of the interior. Tolstoy and Pobedonostsev were the moving spirits of the deliberately reactionary policies that followed. Education was further restricted, the work of the zemstvos was hampered, and the village communes were brought under closer control in 1889 by the institution of the “land commandant” (zemsky nachalnik)—an official appointed by the Ministry of the Interior, usually a former officer or a local landowner, who interfered in all aspects of peasant affairs. The office of elected justice of the peace was abolished, and the government was authorized to assume emergency powers when public order was said to be in danger. By this time Russian public officials were better paid and educated, and less addicted to crude corruption, than they had been in the reign of Nicholas I, but they retained their arrogant contempt for the public and especially for the poorer classes. The discriminatory laws against Jews and members of dissenting Christian sects remained a source of widespread injustice, hardship, and resentment.

The repressive policies of Dmitry Tolstoy worked for a time. But the economic development of the following decades created new social tensions and brought into existence new social groups, from whom active opposition once more developed. The zemstvos were in growing conflict with the central authorities. Even their efforts at social improvement of a quite nonpolitical type met with obstruction. The Ministry of the Interior, once the centre of Russia's best reformers, now became a stronghold of resistance. In the obscurantist view of its leading officials, only the central government had the right to care for the public welfare, and zemstvo initiatives were undesirable usurpations of power. Better that nothing should be done at all than that it should be done through the wrong channels. This attitude was manifested in 1891, when crop failures led to widespread famine; government obstruction of relief efforts was widely—though often unfairly—blamed for the peasantry's sufferings. The revival of political activity may be dated from this year. It was accelerated by the death of Alexander III in 1894 and the succession of his son Nicholas II (reigned 1894–1917), who commanded less fear or respect but nevertheless at once antagonized the zemstvo liberals by publicly describing their aspirations for reforms as “senseless dreams.” In the late 1890s moderate liberalism, aiming at the establishment of a consultative national assembly, was strong among elected zemstvo members, who were largely members of the landowning class. A more radical attitude, combining elements of liberalism and socialism, was to be found in the professional classes of the cities, including many persons employed by the zemstvos as teachers, doctors, engineers, or statisticians. The growth of an industrial working class provided a mass basis for socialist movements, and by the end of the century some interest in politics was beginning to penetrate even to the peasantry, especially in parts of the middle Volga valley.