Russia A History

5. The Age of Enlightenment 1740–1801

GARY MARKER

These decades witnessed a flourishing Empire—with ever-expanding borders, demographic and economic growth and a blossoming in aristocratic arts and culture. But it was no golden age for commoners: townsmen suffered from crippling restrictions, serfs became mere chattels, and minorities underwent administrative Russification. The result was widespread unrest and, most dramatically, the Pugachev Rebellion of 1773–75.

AFTER Peter’s death in 1725 and another fifteen years of troubled and ill-defined rule, the next six decades witnessed a self-conscious reassertion of the Petrine legacy. For the remainder of the century, indeed of the old regime, legitimacy was linked to the name and achievements of Peter, officially canonized both as the founder of the All-Russian Empire and its great Europeanizer. Ironically, this epitome of masculine authority, this father of the fatherland, was enshrined and succeeded by strong female rulers, first his daughter Elizabeth (1741–61) and, after the brief reign of Peter III (1761–2), Catherine the Great (1762–96).

The paradox of strong female rule in a patriarchal system of authority added yet another riddle to the enigmas of Russian politics. What did sovereignty and ‘autocracy’ really mean, especially in so vast a realm with so primitive a bureaucracy? What was the relationship between the absolute authority of the ruler and the everyday power of clan patronage? In a country without a fixed law of succession, where the death of every ruler evoked a political crisis that invited court circles and guards regiments to intercede in the choice of a new ruler, it is indeed surprising that ‘autocracy’ should have remained firmly entrenched.

Yet it did, accompanied by a fascination with the precedent of the Roman Empire that reshaped the regime’s own sense of identity. The classical influence found ubiquitous expression—medals and coins depicting Catherine as a Roman centurion, the statue of Minin and Pozharskii (the national heroes of the Time of Troubles) draped in Roman togas, the classical columns on St Isaac’s Cathedral and numerous governmental buildings in St Petersburg, and the odes and panegyrics celebrating Catherine the Great. An exemplar of the latter is an ode by Mikhail Lomonosov, the prominent scholar and patriotic thinker, who sought to pay homage to the new empress: ‘Sciences, celebrate now: Minerva has Ascended the Throne.’

These classical images not only linked Russia to contemporary Europe (where a revival of classical antiquity was in full swing), but also suggested ties to the accepted fount of imperial authority—ancient Greece and Rome. Significantly, classicism functioned to separate Russia’s ‘imperiia’ from the lineage of the contiguous Byzantine and Mongol Empires, which it had traditionally invoked to legitimize territorial claims and even validate the mantle of rulership. But eighteenth-century expansion to the east, south, and west had little to do with the Byzantine and Mongol legacies; hence the soaring leap across space and time to establish cultural ties with classical empires—which had made similar grandiose claims—became an ideological imperative. That impulse lay behind the proclamation in 1721 that Russia was an empire, a claim embraced by Peter’s successors and integral to the new state identity.

However imposing the classical representations of power may have been, they were meaningless if people refused to submit to its will. And in Russia, more so than in many other states, the theatricality of imperial and autocratic power had little relevance to the everyday life of people remote from court and capital. As the historian Marc Raeff has observed, the rulers of eighteenth-century Russia attempted to graft the cameralist order of Central Europe’s ‘well-ordered police state’ onto the apparent sprawling disorder of the empire’s multiple populations. Although the police state could not create social order by itself, it did articulate an institutional and conceptual framework that allowed state institutions to proclaim their sovereignty.

Expansion and Foreign Policy

The navy and the standing army had deteriorated severely in the decade after Peter’s death, but they nonetheless remained a powerful force and consumed most of the state’s revenues—approximately 70 to 90 per cent in any given year during the eighteenth century. Russia concentrated most of its forces along the southern waterways and the borders of the Ottoman Empire, but major resources had to be diverted to deal with other conflicts—for example, those that ended in the defeat of Sweden (1743) and the annexation of the Crimean peninsula (1783).

Of particular import was Russia’s involvement in the Seven Years War (1755–62). Initially, Russia interceded as an ally of Austria and France against Prussia; despite the expense and losses, the campaigns were advancing successfully and, during the final months of Elizabeth’s reign, Russian troops were making steady progress towards Berlin. Peter III, however, suddenly terminated Russia’s participation (whether from blind admiration for things Prussian or from an awareness that the state coffers were empty) and switched sides, to the outrage of his erstwhile allies. Catherine initially repudiated this volte-face in policy, but in a few years took a similar tack—chiefly because the new alignment (including Austria as well as Prussia) provided the only way to secure Russia’s growing interest in Poland.

Prior to the outbreak of war with revolutionary France in the 1790s, however, Russia’s foreign policy focused primarily on the Black Sea. The old chestnut of a primeval Russian ‘urge to the sea’ has long since faded into well-deserved oblivion, but the Black Sea did affect vital national interests—as an outlet to international waters and especially international markets. Although Peter the Great gained a foothold on the Baltic (through the acquisition of Livland and Estonia in 1721), he had had much less success against the Ottoman Empire, leaving the Black Sea out of reach. Thus the strategic waterways that connected the Black Sea with the eastern Mediterranean still traversed territories under Ottoman control. Obviously, any attempt to satisfy these territorial ambitions meant long-term enmity between the Ottoman and Russian Empires. But Catherine did nourish such far-reaching ambitions; at one point, she embraced the vision of southern dominion articulated by her favourite, Prince Grigorii Potemkin, and even spoke of ‘liberating’ Constantinople in the 1780s and making it her new capital.

Fortunately for Russia, however, cooler heads prevailed. Turkish miscalculations helped: when the Grand Vizier declared war on Russia in 1768, he assumed that other European powers would come to his aid. When this assistance failed to materialize and the Porte was left to face Russia on its own, the two powers waged a bloody and exhausting war for six full years. In the end, Russia prevailed and forced the Ottomans to sue for peace at the village of Kuchuk Kainarji on 10 July 1774. The treaty forced Turkey to cede Azov and a small strip of land on the Black Sea to Russia, to recognize the independence of the Crimean peninsula, and to grant passage to Russian merchant ships (but not warships) through the Dardanelle straits. It also empowered Russia to construct a Black Sea war fleet, a concession that greatly enhanced its military firepower on the southern border. The treaty also authorized the Russian ambassador to make representations on behalf of a newly established Orthodox Church in Constantinople, a somewhat vague concession, but one that would loom large in nineteenth-century diplomacy.

Given this sea access to the West both on the Baltic and in the Black Sea, Russian interest in the three partitions of Poland had little to do with sea-power. Rather, it was a reaction to the precipitous decline of a major power, where the domestic political order had been so subverted by external influence that it ceased to be a viable independent state. The decline invited the first partition—by Russia, Prussia, and Austria—in July 1772: Russia obtained mainly what is now Belarus, while Austria and Prussia annexed Galicia and West Prussia respectively, effectively denying sea access for the rump Polish state. The catalyst for the second partition (by Russia and Prussia in January 1793) was a Polish constitution of 1791, which created a hereditary (as opposed to the traditionally elected) Polish monarchy, established an elected legislature, and abolished the liberum veto that had been so destabilizing. After this partition ignited a Polish uprising (led by the hero of the American War of Independence, Tadeusz Kosciuszko), Russia and its allies signed a new series of agreements in 1795 that expunged Poland from the map of Europe.

Population and Social Order

The Russian Empire experienced enormous growth not only in territory, but also in population during the eighteenth century. Natural growth alone accounted for much of this growth—from about ten or eleven million inhabitants in 1700 to about twenty-eight million by the end of the century. The annexation of new territories added greatly to this amount, increasing the total population to over forty million in the 1790s. It was, moreover, an overwhelmingly rural empire: although some estimates run higher, the government’s own censuses consistently show that over 90 per cent of the population belonged to the peasantry and still more lived in rural areas.

These subjects bore multiple identities. All belonged to a specific legal estate (noble, serf, state, peasant, and numerous lesser ones); virtually everyone (the élite excepted) was also attached to a specific location. These social categories, in turn, belonged to one of two large aggregate categories—the podatnye (those disprivileged groups liable for the poll-tax) and the nepodatnye (those exempt). Much more was at stake than the poll-tax: registration in the poll-tax population carried onerous obligations like conscription and corporal punishment that, taken together, formed the great divide in the social order. Women were identified, if at all, by the standing of their fathers or husbands. These identities proliferated unsystematically during the eighteenth century, often leaving little correlation between legal status, wealth, and occupation. Many nobles had neither land nor serfs; most ‘merchants’ neither traded nor produced commodities; and most ‘traders’, juridically were not merchants.

Indicative of the incongruity between juridical status and human activity was the special category of raznochintsy, which literally designated people who fitted none of the accepted ranks or grades. The state employed the category in so many mutually exclusive ways that it was virtually devoid of any coherent meaning; the status, which few voluntarily espoused, was essentially an ad hoc juridical trope that the state invoked when its usual categories, themselves highly artificial, were found to be wanting or inappropriate. In the end, the categories that the state used to classify its population were overlapping, contradictory, often incoherent. Still, these juridical categories provide a useful (if crude) map to the social order, helping to identify groups in terms of their relative rights and obligations.

Townspeople and Merchants

Russia’s urban population was, as already suggested, exceedingly small—some 3 per cent according to the official census of the 1760s, slightly more by the end of the century. The overwhelming majority of urban residents belonged to the legal status of townspeople (meshchane), inscribed in the poll-tax (1.24 roubles—almost twice that of peasants) and liable for the attendant disabilities—most notably, conscription and corporal punishment. The term ‘townsman’ itself was misleading; although many engaged in artisan crafts or petty trades, they also supported themselves through agriculture by tilling garden plots, tending orchards, and raising various kinds of livestock.

The élite in urban society held the rank of merchants (kuptsy), the subject of much legislation in the eighteenth century (which culminated in the ‘Charter to the Towns’ in 1785). It was chiefly for purposes of taxation, not economic regulation, that the state divided merchants into three ‘guilds’ (gil′dy). According to the system in place before 1775, merchants had to have disposable capital of over 100 roubles to register in the first guild, 50 roubles for the second, and 10 roubles for the third. The guild status, in fact, said nothing about the volume or form of their commercial activities; once all internal tariffs were abolished in 1754, merchants—regardless of guild—could engage in whatever trade they chose, with few restraints. Indeed, ‘merchants’ did not necessarily even engage in commerce; by some estimates, 80 per cent of the Moscow merchants registered in the third guild in 1766 did not engage in trade.

The guild status, however, played a critical role in determining status and obligations. Each guild bore specific responsibilities and had to bear a tax based on their declared kapital. The primary urban service was to participate in the urban magistrate (magistrat), the elected (and mostly unpaid) councils obligated to collect (but not levy) taxes, to keep population records, to oversee town services (for example, fire-fighting, public health, and road construction), and to maintain law and order. Given the relative frequency and popularity of drunken mêlées (kulachnye boi), this last responsibility was important. The magistrates also had to deal with major crises like food shortages and epidemics, as in the Moscow plague riots of 1771. In return, guild members had certain privileges—the right to engage in certain types of commerce, display their wares, hang signs, and a few other modest advantages.

Their status was anything but secure, however. If a merchant’s declared capital fell below the specified minimum, he was obliged either to register in the next lowest guild or even to drop from merchant status into the ranks of the common townspeople. Such downward mobility was exceedingly common. As has been recently demonstrated, only a fraction of merchant families in Moscow and provincial towns remained in the first and second guilds for more than a generation; although a few connived to be elevated into the nobility the great majority dropped into the third guild or the common townspeople.

Catherine clarified the legal standing of merchants after 1775 and, in the process, significantly raised the minimum requirements for guild registration. In contrast to the small sums required earlier, merchants now had to declare 10,000 roubles of capital for the first guild, 5,000 for the second, and 1,000 for the third. Those who lacked such capital had to register either in artisanal guilds or in the general pool of urban commoners. Predictably, the new standard caused the massive demotion of merchants unable to meet the new property qualifications: the number of registered merchants plummeted from over 213,053 in 1772 to 24,562 in 1775, a decline of 88 per cent. However, those excluded from guilds could still trade, since the correlation between legal and commercial status was minimal. Still, those who lost guild status became ordinary members of the poll-tax population, with all the attendant disabilities—taxation, conscription, labour, and hindrances to travel.

The few who remained in the merchant guilds, however, enjoyed important new privileges. One was formal exclusion from the poll-tax rolls, although at the price of paying an annual 1 per cent levy on their capital. Moreover, members of the first and second guilds were exempt from the degradation of corporal punishment, could not be consigned to work in onerous places (such as salt mines), and enjoyed important symbols of social status (for example, the privilege of riding in carriages). And they could buy themselves out of military and civil recruitment. Catherine’s legislation also defined their privileged spheres of commercial activity: the first guild could engage in foreign trade, the second in national trade, and the third in local and regional trade.

Catherine also created a further élite category that included trained professionals, businessmen with capital over 50,000 roubles, wholesalers, shipbuilders, and people deemed ‘eminent citizens’ (imianitye grazhdane, i.e. wealthy merchants who had been elected to serve in an official post). This élite, in recognition of their service, enjoyed a host of privileges that ranked them near the nobility in standing, except for the fact that their titles were not hereditary and they could not own serfs. As one might expect, many of these eminent citizens ultimately obtained those privileges by successfully petitioning for elevation into the ranks of nobility.

State Peasants and Interstitial Categories

The category of state peasants was a catch-all term to identify those living on state lands and owing dues to the state rather than to private landlords. Most state peasants lived in agricultural settlements as members of a repartitional commune, but some, like the odnodvortsy (homesteaders) in the south, functioned as family units. As for economic activity, most were primarily engaged in agriculture. In the north, working in heavily wooded territory and handicapped with poor soil and extensive frost, state peasants supplemented—and even replaced—agriculture with other activities, such as fishing, trapping, beekeeping, and logging. In the case of those who lived near waterways and canals, many worked on barges, hauling them downstream with teams of rope-pullers working each side of the river. And state ‘peasants’ living along the White Sea worked mainly as commercial fishermen and whalers. In areas where the state sought to foster industrial growth it assigned some state peasants to factories and plants, where, as ‘ascribed’ (pripisnye) peasants, they had to supply a stipulated amount of labour each year. In short, the umbrella category of ‘state peasant’ was primarily a definition of tax and other obligations, not a coherent economic or social classification.

One important subgroup of state peasants had formerly belonged to the Russian Orthodox Church—primarily monasteries, occasionally to parish churches. Despite recurrent attempts by Peter the Great and his successors to sequester or at least exploit this population, the Church succeeded in retaining ownership and limiting any exactions by the state. In 1762, however, Peter III secularized the Church’s landed estates and transferred its peasants to state jurisdiction. Although Catherine temporarily rescinded that edict, in 1764 she confiscated these lands and peasants once again. She then converted this population into a special category called ‘economic peasants’ (named after the ‘College of the Economy’ established to administer them), essentially just another of the myriad subgroups within the larger aggregate of state peasants.

The peasant population also included a congeries of other smaller social units. One category, bridging the status of state and seigneurial peasant, was the ‘crown’ (dvortsovye) peasants, who lived on crown land, held this hereditary status, and owed dues to the imperial family. A substantial population (over half a million males, or 5 per cent of the peasantry), these peasants were administered by a governmental agency and hence were more approximate to state than seigneurial peasants. Yet another special category was the ‘possessionary’ (possessionnye) peasant, who was ‘possessed’ by a factory or plant: declining to extend the noble privilege of owning serfs to other social groups, the government permitted industrial enterprises (not their owners) to purchase unfree labour.

Regardless of juridical status, most peasants did not occupy themselves exclusively, or sometimes even primarily, with field work. Even in agricultural communities, peasant households spent the long winter months indoors, repairing tools, tending animals, and threshing or milling grain. A substantial proportion of peasants hired themselves out for seasonable labour and participated actively in rural fairs. So many peasants engaged in the local and regional markets that the law designated them as ‘trading peasants’, who legally remained members of the peasantry, but whose long-term presence in commerce had become a recognized fact.

Serfs

If any population did roughly correspond to our conception of the primordial peasant wedded to the land, it was the serfs. According to the poll-tax census of the 1760s, Russia had 5.6 million male serfs (56.2 per cent of the peasant population). For all practical purposes, Russian serfs were invisible to Russian law and justice: subject to their squires (who collected dues, designated recruits, and meted out punishment), the serf had virtually no identifiable status in the imperial system. It is, in that sense, ironic that the Russian term for serfdom—‘serf law’ (krepostnoe pravo)—was distinctive precisely for the absence of ‘law’ to regulate the mutual relations between squire and serf. In this legal vacuum nobles could—and did—modify the obligations of serfs at will, not to mention sell and relocate them. By the late eighteenth century Russian ‘serfdom’ bore less in common with Old World serfdom than with New World slavery.

Some developments did, however, work in the serfs’ favour. In purely economic terms, the poll-tax (set at 70 copecks per male soul in the first half of the century) remained at the same level—notwithstanding the sharp inflation of succeeding decades. In real terms, then, the material burden of the poll-tax declined substantially. In addition, the natural growth of the population diminished the per capita burden of other obligations, especially recruitment, but also such duties as portage and temporary road work. And, given the exigencies of state service, many nobles had little opportunity to meddle in the daily lives of their peasants. If a recent historian’s findings for the village of Petrovskoe in Tambov province are typical, or even widespread, some serfs exercised considerable collective control over their working and life routines.

Still, the second half of the eighteenth century marked a major deterioration in serfs’ legal status. Many squires, as we shall see, had strong incentives and new opportunities to intercede in village life, encroach on its quotidian autonomy and assert new powers of regulation and control. Peasant communities, moreover, had few legal mechanisms of resistance; no longer full-fledged subjects (ceasing, after 1741, to take an oath of allegiance to the sovereign), serfs—in contrast to state peasants—did not even have the right to petition the emperor. Except for serious crimes or disputes involving other estates, the landlord exercised virtual private-law authority on his estate. He had final authority over serf marriages, although as a practical matter these were typically arranged by the peasant families and councils of elders. When an important piece of legislation filtered down to the locality it was often the landlord’s responsibility to have it read aloud by the local priest, bailiff, or scribe. And, in moments of ‘disobedience’ and rebellion, the landlord could summon governmental authorities to send police or troops to restore order and punish the intransigent.

How did the serfs respond to all these changes? At one level, it seems unlikely that serfs were well informed about the law and its impact on what they deemed to be tradition. After all, serf communities had few contacts with anyone from the government and conducted their day-to-day relations mostly within their own institutions—the household and commune. Nor did they have much opportunity to become more familiar with the law: they could not legally file petitions and—in contrast to state peasants—did not participate in the Legislative Commission of 1767–8 (an experience that, especially through the preparation of ‘instructions’, raised the legal consciousness of other groups). Nevertheless, as the ethnographer M. M. Gromyko has argued, serfs probably had some familiarity with law and, with time, increasingly invoked decrees (real or bogus) in the defence of their rights and justice. A higher awareness of the outside world was particularly likely given the peasants’ non-agrarian activities (especially for those who travelled regularly to towns to trade or work) and the geographic dispersion and intermixture of social categories, whereby the most diverse status groups—from serf to state peasant—lived in close proximity. It was, in short, no accident that in the 1770s and subsequent decades, serfs became increasingly restive and exhibited their own judgement on this consummately ‘immoral economy’.

Nobility

Although the nobility stood at the apex of the social pyramid, with claims to pedigree and precedence, its status was uncertain and ambiguous. Significantly, the collective term for nobility, dvorianstvo, did not prevail until the mid-century and lacked precise meaning, much less a clear English-language equivalent. The Petrine Table of Ranks of 1722 compounded this confusion by creating a mechanism to elevate the meritorious to personal nobility and, if they rose high enough, to hereditary nobility. Whether of ancient lineage or parvenu, nobles enjoyed important and distinctive privileges, including exclusion from the onerous poll-tax and its attendant disabilities.

Nevertheless, until 1762 the nobility still owed service to the state, ordinarily in the military. As a practical matter, however, many evaded this obligation, a nonfeasance that actually increased—partly because of the quantum increase in service demands under Peter, partly because of the state’s transparent inability to coerce compliance. Moreover, lifetime service took nobles away from their estates, transforming them into absentee landlords who were obliged to depend upon stewards (often peasant-born estate managers) to oversee day-to-day operations and to mediate social and economic relations with the peasants. Such management was not only expensive (diverting scarce labour from the field) but extremely inefficient and unreliable, riddled with graft and deception. Finally service was financially onerous, even for middling and élite strata—especially the requirement that they maintain two or more residences (for which they received no specific compensation), including one in St Petersburg for the most successful.

Still, for the ambitious and well connected, cosmopolitan service was an absolute necessity, bringing not only status and power, but wealth as well. The nominal salaries, though niggardly for the lower and middle range of servitors, were quite substantial for the upper range of the Table of Ranks. And to that must be added the spoils of service, which, in this venality-ridden order, often far exceeded any legal income. Servitors could always dream of special imperial grants, and in fact rulers transferred over 100,000 peasants and millions of acres of arable land to private hands during the last half of the eighteenth century.

Such largesse was not only desirable but essential, for few nobles found their landed estates to be a source of substantial income. Above all, agricultural productivity lagged far behind that in Western Europe and showed little trace of the concurrent ‘agricultural revolution’. Moreover, most nobles belonged to the category of petty landowners, with scanty resources and meagre incomes. The truly rich with more than 1,000 male souls comprised only about 1 per cent of the hereditary nobility; another 17 per cent (the ‘middling nobility’) owned between 100 and 1,000 male souls. Four out of five noble households owned fewer than 100 male souls, most having fewer than twenty, or even none at all.

Even for those with substantial numbers of serfs, the net return on their estates was uncertain and paltry. Above all, Russian agriculture—with its three-field system, primitive technology, and unfavourable climate—produced far less than the modernizing estates in the West. Peasants consumed the bulk of this scant output (with a diet exceeding 3,000 calories per day, including much protein, according to some research); and another 10 per cent of that was lost through spillage and spoilage. The net yield left little for squire and state.

Compounding agricultural inefficiency was the system of partible inheritance that negated ‘economies of size’. Peter had attempted to impose a system of single inheritance in 1714, but the adverse reaction among nobles ultimately impelled Anna to rescind the law in 1731. Restored in full force, partible inheritance guaranteed real estate to all heirs, including widows, but doomed noble estates to endless division to the point where they ceased to be economically viable. Unless new resources could be secured, this system inevitably reduced a noble family to penury and virtual landlessness within a few generations. Moreover, even in the best of circumstances, estates were fragmented, with individual villages, meadows, lakes, and forests parcelled among several owners. This land ‘system’ gave rise to endless disputes and litigation (lasting decades, sometimes more than a century) over boundaries and ownership. Even when service (whether through grants or purchase) brought new property, the new lands were usually remote from the family estate and gave no opportunity to form a single, large estate.

Given this economy, families that had already achieved hereditary nobiliary status recognized the importance of retaining high standing on the Table of Ranks. Historians have demonstrated that, during the first four or five decades of its existence, old aristocratic families dominated the upper levels of the Table of Ranks and collectively prevented large numbers of parvenus from achieving hereditary noble status. A manifesto by Peter III on 18 February 1762, however, freed the nobility from obligatory service and significantly reshaped service patterns for the nobility. This famous decree, interestingly, has confounded historians as much as it did contemporaries: why did Peter III choose to ‘emancipate’ the nobles from service? After all, the fundamental premiss of the imperial system was an implicit social contract based on universal service: serfs toiled for nobles so that the latter could serve the state. Did the manifesto not nullify one of the principal moral foundations of serfdom? Where indeed was the state to recruit for civil servants and military officers if not from the nobility? And how, without service, were noble clans to remain economically viable?

Although historians have not reached a consensus on these questions, most reject the old canard that the nobility collectively demanded its ‘freedom’ and that this ‘concession’ marked the beginning of a noble oligarchy. Nobles needed service, and service needed nobles—a fundamental symbiosis not to be changed by a mere paper manifesto. It is by no means clear that most nobles welcomed the change. Contemporary tales may have portrayed the roads from St Petersburg as clogged with nobles departing for their family estates, but—according to the few scholarly studies on the subject—most nobles still chose to serve, thereby avoiding the inevitable decline in their family fortunes.

Nevertheless, the manifesto did contribute to the formation of a new noble consciousness of its station in Russian society. The fact that the decision to serve now rested with them (‘unto eternity and to all generations to come’), not with the monarch, seemed to reconstitute the hereditary nobility as a corporate body endowed, in the words of the manifesto, with ‘freedom and liberty’.

But why did the state abolish the service requirement? Contemporary gossips speculated that the manifesto was merely concocted to cover a nocturnal dalliance of Peter III and his mistress. More likely, the manifesto came from the emperor’s personal secretary, D. V. Volkov, who wanted the Table of Ranks to serve state interests, not the nobility. In Volkov’s view, the old élite clans had transformed the service ranks into a facsimile of the medieval system of precedence (mestnichestvo) based on birthright, thereby denying the state an opportunity to recruit, promote, and reward the meritorious with rank, pay, ennoblement, and political influence. Thus the manifesto of 1762 endeavoured to separate service rank from social status, at once enabling the state to replenish its service class with outsiders and to accord a respectable alternative for those who chose not to serve.

State policy for the next two decades, which culminated in the Charter to the Nobility in 1785, sharpened the distinction between service (as a voluntary attribute of nobility) and privilege (as the temporal reward for this historic service). In the event, nobles obtained important and exclusive privileges: to own serfs, to register family patents and heraldry books with local governments, to convene provincial assemblies (which were to provide officials for local government), to appoint local judges, to be exempt from corporal punishment, to travel at home and abroad without special permission, and to ride about in carriages (a symbolic, but important gesture). Most concessions emphasized the provincial locus of noble status; they also provided symbolic and material venues outside the capital and the service system onto which the meaning of nobility could be inscribed.

Nobles also acquired new and weighty economic advantages. Above all, they had a legal monopoly on the ownership of servile labour: they alone could buy and sell serfs, with or without land; they could even break up serf families, send the unruly into hard labour (while deducting the deportees from recruit quotas), and wilfully increase feudal dues (as quitrent, corvée, or both). They could engage in any occupation or trade, and could also open manufactories to exploit the free labour of their serfs. For all these ventures they had exclusive access to cheap credit: they also had special access to the country’s sparse credit reserves through long-term, low-interest (5–6 per cent) loans from the Noble Land Bank established in 1754.

The consequences of the new distinction between service and status were simultaneously momentous and disorienting. From the perspective of the ‘police state’, corporate privilege whetted the aspirations of an élite ‘estate’ now distinguished by its inalienable rights, not its duty to serve. Moreover, with the expansion of state administration, especially at the provincial level, nobles could now retire from the capitals, yet retain the trappings of privilege. Thus many were able to flaunt their status, indulge in conspicuous consumption beyond their means, and open clubs and lodges for their amusement and, on rare occasions, for the discussion of more serious matters.

Some, however, did devote themselves to the development of their estates. At a minimum, they sought to reorganize and manage their estates personally and more effectively—no small task given the diffuse landholding. An audacious few attempted to redesign rural life according to the latest ‘scientific’ methods, even issuing learned ‘instructions’ to their bailiffs on how to run their estates. Some also carried the injunction ‘to administer justice to the peasants without prejudice or oppression’ (in the words of a Soviet historian), but the main impulse was to regulate social and economic life on the estate—not unlike what the enlightened absolutist was attempting to do at a macro level.

Others, however, were only interested in their estate’s output, not its operation, and preferred to give free rein to their poetic imaginations—organizing serf theatres or choruses, constructing English gardens or French waterfalls, and inventing local family festivals to celebrate the virtue and bonhomie of their enlightened paternal vision. Of course, many of these same people remained in service; their periodic visit to the family estate, now inscribed with a poetics of permanence and heritage (which belied the fluid, transitory realities of noble landownership), represented a naïve return to innocence.

Not without cause has Catherine’s era been dubbed the ‘golden age of the Russian nobility’. Never had they been so privileged, so economically advantaged, and so handsomely rewarded for doing so little. In exchange, however, they abdicated nearly all political pretensions. Although they might act on behalf of clan and patronage network, they did not mount a defence of their social estate. In part, that is because they had no need to be institutionally or politically active: they had done quite well vis-à-vis other groups—and without involving themselves collectively in politics or raising an ideological challenge to the autocracy. Hence the vaunted palace coups—which not only installed individual rulers but also resulted in the murder of two sitting monarchs (Peter III in 1762 and Paul I in 1801) and one former monarch (Ivan VI)—did not precipitate a constitutional crisis. At issue was only the person of the nominally all-powerful autocrat, not the system itself. As a result, the aggressive intrigue, the discourse about good rulers and polities, and the ‘legislomania’ of the second half of the eighteenth century rarely proceeded very far towards imposing formal limitations on ruler-ship. Increasingly, the succession crisis of 1730 appeared as an aberration, not to be revisited until the Decembrist revolt of 1825.

All of these material advantages coexisted uneasily with a deepening moral discomfort among the service nobility over the legitimacy of their special privilege. Although most still served, they were no longer bound to do so. Educated and literary nobles freely invoked the language of freedom, rights, and virtue at the very moment when they legally became the sole group in Russian society with the right to hold fellow subjects in virtual slavery. The embryonic provincial assemblies and noble courts were a far cry from French parlements or the manor-based authority of the English peerage. Increasingly, the edifice of hereditary nobility rested upon the precarious claim of historic, ancestral service. This malaise did not, however, precipitate a full-fledged identity crisis during the eighteenth century; most nobles were anything but rootless and alienated. But the discomfort was real and unresolved, evoking a rare but important cri de cœur in the final decades of the century.

A Multinational Empire

From its very outset Russia had included diverse peoples and, as the boundaries of the state expanded, this multi-ethnic character became more pronounced. Coming to terms with these newly acquired ethnicities, cultures, and religions took on both administrative and symbolic importance for Elizabeth, Peter III, and Catherine II. Much of this expansion had been accomplished during the seventeenth century, with the incorporation of the vast Siberian expanses and much of Ukraine, followed by territorial gains in the Baltics and elsewhere during the reign of Peter the Great. But expansion was particularly marked during the reign of Catherine the Great, as the Russian Empire annexed most of Poland (through the three partitions), the Crimea and the northern Caucasus. In the process, the empire came to include large numbers of Poles, Jews, Tatars, and Caucasian peoples.

Recently, the demographic historian V. M. Kabuzan produced estimates of the ethnic distribution of the Russian Empire during the eighteenth century shown in the table.

Although the government was committed to a model (perhaps ‘illusion’ is a more accurate description) of administrative uniformity, relations between St Petersburg and the outlying non-Russian populations varied considerably. In the case where local élites accommodated themselves to Russian rule, willingly swore allegiance to the monarch, and demonstrated their ability to run their territories by keeping order and supplying labour and revenue, these peoples retained considerable autonomy and saw their separate traditions, institutions, and social organizations remain largely intact. Unfortunately, most of the new subjects proved troublesome, either because they believed fiercely in their right to independence (as was true with Poland and the Crimean Tatars) or because they were deemed to be too alien to be trusted (as was the case with Jews in the former Polish territories).

Money, Finances, and Markets

Historians customarily portray the Russian economy as eternally backward, technologically primitive, and fundamentally unproductive. Although these characterizations are not entirely off the mark, they do not accurately characterize the Russian economy in the second half of the eighteenth century. On the contrary, the growth rates in Russia were then comparable to those in England—a remarkable fact given England’s technical superiority and the onset of its industrial expansion. Russia was a net exporter of numerous raw materials, not only the traditional forest products like timber and furs, but also such agricultural products as hemp, rye, and tallow (and—by some accounts—silver).

Ethnic groupings in the Russian Empire, 1760s-1790s (in millions)

The domestic market also became more active and complex. Apart from the seasonal flow of peasants to towns (bringing wares, trade, and food), some areas of the empire provided a ready market for agricultural goods. That was true of cities in general, but especially the newly built capital, St Petersburg, which expanded from nothing to over a quarter of a million inhabitants by the end of the century. Because the surrounding soil was so marshy and infertile, St Petersburg had to plunge its supply lines deep into the empire, with the requisite network of canals and roads. Similar conditions obtained in the dense forest territories of northern Russia, where poor soil and adverse climate made agriculture marginally productive; as a result, the local population had to import food from the south, providing yet another stimulus to internal trade. The robust trade in agricultural products also fostered a proliferation in rural fairs, which expanded in number (from 383 per year in the 1750s to 3,180 in the 1790s), geographic breadth, and commodities exchanged. Although most fairs were seasonal and lasted only a few days, they had nevertheless become a mainstay of the rural economy.

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

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

Quitrent and corvée: serf dues

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

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

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

The Pugachev Rebellion

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Church, Dissenters, and Popular Religion

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

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

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

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

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

Enlightenment and Élite Culture

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

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

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

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

Indeed, journals and publishing circles were the principal foci of secular intellectual activity. As such, they were decidedly noble (dominated by service nobles) and cosmopolitan, housed either in Moscow or St Petersburg. Their audiences, predictably, were also urban and noble; for example, over three-quarters of all subscribers to journals were members of the hereditary nobility. Book readers were less likely to subscribe (hence register their status), but here too the vast majority came from the nobility.

Significantly, the new cultural activity gradually moved intellectual life towards autonomy from state and monarch. Court patronage did remain as an essential feature of literary and cultural life; until 1783, for instance, nearly all secular publications came from institutional presses, mainly the typographies at the Academy of Sciences and Moscow University. Increasingly, however, these presses left editorial decisions to the literati themselves, for they printed most manuscripts with few changes, especially if the author or translator helped pay the bill. Even this modicum of control vanished in 1783, when Catherine gave private individuals the right to own presses without prior approval.

That decree effectively neutralized the monarch’s ability to direct and control literature, not because of any ideological conflict, but because writers could now pursue literature independently of the government. In large measure the literati gained this autonomy precisely because they had not posed a threat to the existing structures of authority, whether formal or informal. In fact, the vast majority of writers shared Catherine’s enlightenment vision of the state as the principal agent of improvement and moral direction; few raised basic questions about the existing social order. All concurred with the empress that Russia was part of Europe, that reinforcing this affinity served the best interests of the fatherland and individual. Some dissented, it is true. Most notably, the great journalist and publisher Nikolai Novikov railed against mindless slavishness towards French fashion (‘Voltairianism’) and launched major publication ventures, such as the Drevniaia rossiiskaia vivliofika (‘Ancient Russian Library’) in twenty volumes, to celebrate Russia’s own antiquity and traditional culture. But even he devoted immense attention to translations and adaptations from contemporary French and English letters. For example, the so-called satirical journals of 1769–74 (The Painter, The Drone, Bits of This and That, and others) included pieces purloined directly from Joseph Addison’s Spectator.

During the 1770s and 1780s, however, the initial concord between writers and empress gradually deteriorated, largely over such issues as French influence and political virtue. Some traditionalist voices, such as M. M. Shcherbatov’s On the Corruption of Morals in Russia, castigated a purported decline of public virtue and respect for fatherland. Others, as in Denis Fonvizin’s play The Minor, raised subtle questions about the erosion of virtue in political leadership. This critical strain reached its most radical expression in the—legal—printing of Alexander Radishchev’s Journey From St Petersburg to Moscow (1790), a scathing attack on Catherine and the Russian social order, serfdom included. The tome outraged the empress, who penned furious rebukes in the margins of her copy, ordered all available copies destroyed, and subjected the author to trial and banishment into Siberian exile.

Radishchev’s views were quite exceptional, however. Far more common were the moral and spiritualist misgivings that pulsated in the Masonic lodges, especially those of the Moscow Rosicrucians around Novikov and his spiritual overseer, Johann Schwartz, a Rosicrucian from Berlin. During the 1780s the Moscow Rosicrucians grew increasingly distressed over the spiritual and religious decline of cosmopolitan Russia, the soulless fashionability and the frivolity that (in their view) permeated élite society. Novikov himself was a major purveyor of the Encyclopaedist Enlightenment and entertaining literature, but his lodge steadily moved away from the celebration of amusement. Even signs of political engagement can be discerned; in 1785, for example, some Rosicrucians developed connections to the court ‘party’ around the Tsarevich Paul; some even entertained the idea of making him emperor before his mother’s death—apparently on the basis of (false) rumours that Paul was more sympathetic to their moral agenda. Whatever the case, the affinity between Rosicrucianism, Paul, free publishing, and geographic distance aroused growing distrust among Catherine’s officials, with a steady chilling in the relations between ruler and writers.

The chill had consequences. In 1785, because of the flirtation with Paul and the publication of religious materials (still a monopoly of the Orthodox Church), the state launched a formal investigation of Novikov’s publications that ended in a mild reprimand. Two years later Catherine ordered an empire-wide raid of book stores to impound dangerous, seditious titles. By the early 1790s, once the violent anti-monarchism of the French Revolution had become a disturbing reality, Catherine (and later her successor, Paul) erected a harsh and repressive censorship, greatly restricting the import of foreign books (banned entirely for a few months in 1800), imprisoning eminent figures such as Novikov, and ultimately closing most private presses. By 1800 publishing had declined to a trickle; literary journalism had all but disappeared; and the international book trade was virtually nil. Although recovery came quickly after the new Emperor Alexander I (1801–25) eased restrictions, state and letters now constituted two separate spheres, with only coercive censorship—not common values—providing the old link between them.

Reign of Paul (1796–1801)

Catherine the Great succumbed to a stroke on 17 November 1796. Her final years were marked by bitterness and political repression, but without any fundamental retreat from the tenets of enlightened absolutism. Her love-affairs, always semi-public, took on the aura of scandal, while unpopular favourites such as Platon Zubov garnered unwonted influence on public policy. The legislative fervour of her earlier reign was gone, and Catherine’s self-construction as a reforming ruler could not adjust to the new political antinomies of revolution and legitimacy. Her son, Paul I, shared none of her commitments to reform and progress; indeed, most accounts describe him as being openly hostile to his mother and everything that she stood for. His five-year reign saw the enactment of numerous decrees that distanced Paul from the powerful families at court, and ultimately turned them against him. His most noteworthy act was to decree, in 1797, that serfs could be forced to work no more than three days per week of corvée—a nominal attempt to curb abuses that had seen some landlords forcing their peasants to work five or six days on estate lands, leaving very little time for them to work on their own fields. This decree apparently had little effect on actual practice, but it deepened the gulf between Paul and his magnates. The unpopular repression of literati and some political figures, as well as the less than successful direction of Russia’s initial clashes with Napoleon, convinced leading court parties that Paul had to be removed. With the tacit agreement of his son and successor, the future Alexander I, a small conspiracy of military leaders and Masonic lodge members arrested and quickly murdered Paul in the bedroom of the newly constructed Michael Castle, on the night of 11 March 1801.

In many respects, the preceding decades had fulfilled the agenda of the Petrine era and set a new one for the nineteenth century. Thus Peter still cast a long shadow over the entire eighteenth century: so much that Peter had decreed but had been unable to implement actually came into existence in the decades that followed his reign. In that sense, his successors not only claimed lineage to Peter to legitimize their power, but also attempted to realize (if in modified form) his ambitions. Much else, however, was new—the changes in noble status, the territorial gains in the south, and the far-reaching acculturation of élites in the two capitals. At the same time, many other issues were still unresolved, most notably the powder keg of serfdom and the role of the Westernized nobility. These and other problems would be the centre of attention in the coming decades of the nineteenth century.