Russia: A History

PETER I is associated with many ‘firsts’ in Russian history. He was the first legitimate Muscovite ruler to have that name in Russian and European languages (Piter in Dutch), the first to use a Roman numeral after his name, the first to travel incessantly by land and water and to venture abroad, the first to be titled emperor and ‘the Great, Most Wise Father of the Fatherland’, the first to inspire radical change in diverse spheres of activity, the first to found urban sites sharing his name, the first to be buried in St Petersburg, and the first to imprint his name on an entire era encompassing the birth of modern Russia in an expanded, European context. His imperious personality impressed his world so emphatically that his impact remains vividly controversial even now. Inscribed ‘Great Hope of the Future’, the medal struck at his birth in the Kremlin on 30 May 1672 announced the dynastic sentiments vested in the huge baby, some thirty-three inches long. This label inaugurated a series pinned on Peter during his busy life (1672–1725) and long afterwards. Many lauded his personal attributes: warrior-tsar, artisan-tsar, tsar-transformer, Renaissance man, the great reformer who gave Russia a new ‘body’ primed for a new ‘soul’. Others deplored negative qualities: Anti-Christ, the ‘Bronze Horseman’, first Bolshevik, brutal despot, cult figure and personification of a totalitarian-style dictatorship bent on forcible expansion—a ruthless ruler likened to such melancholy fanatics as Ivan the Terrible, Lenin, and Stalin. His towering physique—six feet seven inches tall as an adult—overshadowed contemporaries much as his historical shade dominates modern Russian political and cultural discourse. His physiognomy and figure have been depicted in many media and languages over three centuries. Both his fame and notoriety have assumed legendary stature.

It is amazing that the initial offspring of Tsar Alexis by his second wife should have been so precocious and so long-lived in contrast to the sickly sons and multiple daughters of his first marriage. Indeed, this novelty proved crucial in the selection of 9-year-old Peter by an impromptu assemblage to succeed his half-brother Fedor on 27 April 1682. A mere figurehead for a regime of his Naryshkin relatives, Peter’s elevation evoked immediate resistance from his father’s first family, the Miloslavskiis, led by Sofia in defence of the dynastic seniority of Ivan, aged 16. Sofia and her Miloslavskii relatives exploited dissension among the Streltsy to channel animosity towards the Naryshkins; the result was the riot in May 1682, described in the previous chapter, as also are the events of Sofia’s regency.

Young Peter’s marriage to Evdokiia Lopukhina on 27 January 1689 forecast imminent maturity. Although the marriage was unhappy (the groom soon departed for nautical diversions on Lake Pleshcheevo), Evdokiia gave birth to the future tsarevich Alexis in February 1690—another blow to the Miloslavskiis’dynastic interests. Sofia, though styled ‘autocratrix’ on a par with her brothers, was never crowned officially, her authority waning as Peter’s partisans championed his cause anew. Who initiated the final showdown in August 1689 is uncertain, but Peter’s ‘party’ quickly gained greater armed support in ostensibly forestalling a new Streltsy conspiracy while Sofia had to yield Fedor Shaklovityi—her new favourite and head of the Streltsy—for interrogation under torture and execution. At the end of September she entered the Novodevichii Convent as a lay person. After another abortive Streltsy mutiny in 1698 she accepted political extinction by taking monastic vows and died in monastic seclusion in 1704.

Early Travels and the Azov Campaigns

Peter did not, however, immediately assume Sofia’s role in government, relinquishing the more prominent posts to his Naryshkin relatives and their friends, such as Boris Golitsyn, Tikhon Streshnev, and Fedor Romodanovskii. The tsar still resided at Preobrazhenskoe and in the autumn of 1690 participated in elaborate ‘play’ manœuvres featuring a scripted ‘defeat’ of the Streltsy by a combined force of noble cavalry, play regiments, and foreign-style troops. His shipbuilding and sailing on inland waters also continued, as did his fascination with fireworks in company with foreign mercenaries such as Franz Lefort and Patrick Gordon. He began to sign himself ‘Petrus’, to drink heavily, and to smoke tobacco. He ignored his deserted wife’s letters and openly pursued Anna Mons, the daughter of a German wine merchant in the Foreign Suburb. When Peter suffered bloody diarrhoea for two weeks in December 1692, fears of Sofia’s return to power fanned rampant rumours and, allegedly, plans for flight by Lefort and company.

Despite his mother’s misgivings, Peter left Moscow in July 1693 with a substantial entourage to spend seven weeks at Archangel. He became the first Muscovite ruler to see the far north and to sail the open sea. He also helped lay down a seagoing vessel for future voyages. His horizons were widening by the hour. His mother’s death in January 1694 only momentarily interrupted preparations for a longer sojourn at Archangel, from 18 May to 5 September. He made extended voyages; during one he barely survived a storm by landing on the island of Solovki where he planted a cross with a Dutch inscription and European-style date, ‘This Cross was made by Captain Piter anno Domini 1694’—evidence that he knew Dutch and already foresaw reforms in European terms. The budding fleet began using a white-blue-red flag based on the Dutch standard. Upon returning to Moscow, from 23 September to 18 October 1694 Peter organized grandiose military manœuvres involving over 7,000 men. A satirical pamphlet recorded the exercises along with exhibitions such as twenty-five dwarfs marching to military music. With the Streltsy again slated for defeat, ‘bombardier Peter Alekseev’ celebrated his last simulated engagement before real battle with Turks and Tatars. In concert with the Holy League of Austria, Poland-Lithuania, and Venice with financial backing from the papacy, the 22-year-old tsar aimed to mount the international stage by recouping Vasilii Golitsyn’s losses.

Overweening ambition was apparent in Peter’s choice of the primary target: the Ottoman fortress of Azov near the mouth of the Don river. A more difficult objective than the Crimea itself, Azov would require combined land and sea operations. Peter and his senior military advisers sought to avoid Golitsyn’s error of marching across barren steppes by bringing most forces far south by boat. The main attack was also augmented by a thrust westward under the boyar Boris Sheremetev to divert Tatar forces and capture Turkish border forts. Though the siege of Azov began by early July 1695, lack of a flotilla precluded any naval blockade; while the Ottomans reinforced and resupplied their garrison by sea, the attackers suffered great losses from Turkish sallies and the absence of unified command. Peter’s insistence on a desperate storm on 5 August brought huge losses; a mining operation on 16 September harmed only the besiegers; another costly assault the next day barely failed. Lifting the siege on 20 October, the Muscovites sustained further losses—from exhaustion, frosts, and disease—during the retreat.

The campaign taught the impatient tsar several harsh lessons, duly recorded in official journals (preserved for the rest of the reign). But retention of two Turkish watchtower forts (renamed Novosergeevsk) indicated that Peter was already countenancing a new compaign.

The new year began inauspiciously: Peter fell ill for nearly a month and his brother Ivan died suddenly on 29 January. Ivan’s death formally ended the dynastic dualism, affirmed Peter’s sole sovereignty, and cleared the way for an aggressively reformist militarist regime. Health restored, Peter hurried to Voronezh to assemble hundreds of barges and galleys for the new attack. If the first Azov campaign proved more difficult than anticipated, the second brought the fortress’s capitulation with stunning ease on 19–20 July 1696. Austrian engineers assisted in supervising the siege-works. Command of the land forces was centralized under ‘generalissimus’ Aleksei Shein. Ironically, Muscovite sea-power had predetermined the outcome by forestalling Ottoman relief efforts although Cossack boats did most of the fighting at close quarters—not the vessels built so feverishly at Voronezh. Sailing into the Sea of Azov, Peter sought out a site for a new naval station some leagues westward, at a point called Taganrog. Construction began at once as did rebuilding Azov itself; the Muscovites intended to stay permanently. Returning to Moscow in late September, Peter staged a Roman-style triumph with ceremonial gates—the first of many—decorated with Julius Caesar’s aphorism: ‘He came, he saw, he conquered’. A more menacing demonstration transpired at Preobrazhenskoe a week later: the Dutch deserter Jakob Jansen, whose betrayal had dearly cost the first Azov campaign, was broken on the wheel and then beheaded before a huge crowd.

The Grand Embassy to Europe

Amidst these celebrations Peter felt the fragility of Muscovite military and, especially naval power. Even before returning from Azov he began to plan a large diplomatic and recruiting mission to the naval powers of Venice and Holland. This ‘Grand Embassy’ engaged as many as 270 persons (Peter himself incognito among many ‘volunteers’) and huge amounts of baggage, all estimated to have cost the stupendous sum of 200,000 roubles. The main mission spent sixteen months away from Moscow, 9 March 1697 to 25 August 1698, the longest and grandest Muscovite embassy ever. It was related to other missions such as sixty-one courtiers sent to study navigation; it was the first instalment of some twenty-six groups totalling more than a thousand ‘volunteers’ sent abroad systematically for study and training in the period 1697–1725 (other individuals went on their own). A parallel mission was undertaken by the eminent boyar Boris Sheremetev, who recruited foreign officers, lavished gifts wherever he went in Poland and Italy, and also visited the knights of Malta who awarded him the Order of Malta. The linguistically gifted Peter Postnikov, a recent graduate of the Slavonic-Greek-Latin Academy just completing MD and Ph.D. degrees at Padua’s famed university, joined the Grand Embassy in Holland.

Peter tried to keep the Grand Embassy strictly secret at home and employed special invisible ink for sensitive communications. These precautions may have sprung from apprehensions that ‘ill-intentioned’ persons might exploit the tsar’s absence, as earlier Streltsy had allegedly plotted to murder the tsar and restore Sofia and Vasilii Golitsyn. After an investigation by the Preobrazhenskii Bureau (the police organ given national jurisdiction over political crimes in late 1696), Colonel Ivan Tsykler and two supposed boyar accomplices were gruesomely beheaded over the exhumed corpse of Ivan Miloslavskii, dead since 1685. The incident occurred a week before Peter’s departure abroad. The Preobrazhenskii Bureau had also investigated a ‘Missive’ by Abbot Avraamii criticizing state fiscal policies. Though absolved of malicious intent, Avraamii was banished to a provincial monastery and three minor officials accused of assisting him were sent into hard labour. All these punishments were obviously intended to intimidate potential opposition while Peter lingered abroad indefinitely.

In diplomatic terms the Grand Embassy largely failed because of Moscow’s ignorance of current European politics and consequent poor timing. Efforts to buttress the anti-Ottoman alliance proved unavailing: Muscovy’s allies made peace with the Turks at the congress of Karlowitz in January 1699, a step that left Peter livid at Austrian and Venetian perfidy, ‘taking no more notice of him than a dog’. The embassy arrived too late to influence the Treaty of Ryswick of September 1697 ending the War of the League of Augsburg or the treaty between the Holy Roman Empire and France a month later. Still, Peter met several European counterparts, especially the military hero William of Orange (William III of England), Frederick III (elector of Brandenburg and soon to be king in Prussia), Emperor Leopold I, and Augustus II (elector of Saxony and newly elected king of Poland-Lithuania). Peter’s instant friendship with the flamboyant Augustus II, together with Moscow’s vigorous support of his election to the Polish throne, soon translated into an alliance aimed against Sweden. Moreover, the muddled Muscovite diplomacy showed that they must maintain permanent representation at the main European courts and provide longer training for those serving abroad. Dr Postnikov’s linguistic facility and European experience, for example, resulted in appointment to the Muscovite delegation to the congress of Karlowitz and ultimately side-tracked his medical career in favour of diplomatic service in France, where he died in about 1709.

As regards recruitment of skilled manpower, intellectual and cultural broadening, the entire experience reaped manifold rewards and left vivid impressions. The host governments strove to impress the tirelessly inquisitive and shyly charming tsar. His portrait in armour was painted in Holland and England by Aert de Gelder and Godfrey Kneller. He saw all the local sights, from Antony van Leeuwenhoek’s microscopic glasses and Fredrik Ruysch’s anatomical museum to Dresden’s famous Kunstkammer and Isaac Newton’s English mint, hospitals, botanical gardens, theatres, industrial enterprises, government and church institutions. The German polymath Gottfried von Leibniz failed to win an audience, but transmitted ambitious proposals through Lefort’s son. Peter observed mock naval engagements in Holland and England, spent much time in shipyards, drank prodigiously, and twice rammed other vessels while sailing an English yacht on the Thames. The versatile and extravagant Marquis of Carmarthen enthralled the tsar with his nautical innovations and helped obtain a monopoly on importing tobacco to Russia via financial machinations and the gift of the Royal Transport, the most modern experimental ship in the English navy. Furthermore, Carmarthen assisted in recruiting such English ‘experts’ as professor of mathematics Henry Farquharson, shipwrights Joseph Nye and John Deane, and engineer John Perry. All played crucial parts in building the new Russian navy.

Peter’s learned advisers, Jacob Bruce and Peter Postnikov, visited educational, medical, and scientific institutions, bought many books, medicaments, and instruments, and hired several hundred specialists including some sixty military surgeons. The embassy led directly to the hiring of Dr Nikolaas Bidloo, a Dutch physician, and Dr Robert Erskine, a Scotsman educated in London and on the continent. Both spent the rest of their lives in Russia, became close friends of Peter, and advised him on matters medical, scientific, and cultural. A Fellow of the Royal Society, Erskine served as the first imperial physician and head of the entire professional medical faculty; in 1707 Bidloo founded the first permanent hospital and surgical school in Moscow, equipped with an anatomical theatre and a large botanical garden. In preparation for further Europeanizing changes, Peter granted a fifteen-year monopoly on book imports to the Dutch printer Jan van Thessing. The bustling cities and harbours, merchant marines and fleets, armies and industries of Europe and England reinforced his determination to pursue change. While in Vienna in July 1698 Peter aborted plans for lengthy visits to Venice and Rome when he learned of the Streltsy mutiny and attempted march on Moscow.

Though quickly suppressed, the Streltsy mutiny afforded an ideal pretext to purge the despised ‘janissaries’ through ghastly tortures and massive public executions. Several victims were displayed outside Sofia’s convent cell. The Streltsy constituted the first sizeable Muscovite institution that the tsar abolished; others such as the boyar duma, the council of the realm, and the gosti (privileged merchants and state fiscal agents) were already in eclipse or simply not summoned by the militarily preoccupied sovereign. He also divorced Evdokiia by incarceration in a monastery. After supervising almost a thousand Streltsy interrogations and executions, three weeks later Peter left for Voronezh. There he laid the specially designed keel of the 58–gun Predestinatsiia, a harbinger of his soaring ambitions while he privately vowed to dissipate his own ‘dark cloud of doubt’.

His southern nautical ambitions inspired two more sojourns at Voronezh in the spring of 1699, interrupted only by Lefort’s funeral in Moscow and the founding in March of the Order of the Apostle Andrew the First-Called, Muscovy’s first knightly order. After launching the Predestinatsiia on 27 April amid great fanfare Peter reached the Sea of Azov with fourteen ships of the line by early June. Later that summer the tsar’s squadron accompanied the 46–gun Krepost’ (Fortress) to the straits of Kerch demanding passage for his envoy to Constantinople.

Peter soon refocused on the Baltic in anticipation of joining Denmark and Saxony to partition the sprawling Swedish Empire under its boy-king, Charles XII. The warrior-tsar’s levy of recruits in November 1699 raised 32,000 men termed ‘immortals’ and destined for lifetime service. The new century was celebrated on 1 January 1700 by official adoption of the Julian calendar and twenty-four-hour day amid cannon-salutes, fireworks, and festive decorations.

Reforms for War

Eager for action in October 1700 Peter, at the death-bed of Patriarch Adrian, called for educated clergy, military, civil servants, architects, and those who knew ‘the doctor’s healing art’. German-speaking advisers such as Heinrich van Huyssen and the Livonian adventurer Johann Reinhold von Patkul were aware of cameralist notions of promoting prosperity through enlightened administration and good order (‘Police’, a term lacking in the Russian vocabulary). Peter’s manifesto of April 1702 inviting foreigners—military officers, craftsmen, and merchants—to enter his service appeared in Patkul’s German translation and adumbrated an emerging reform programme:

It has been Our foremost concern to govern Our lands in a manner that would bring home to Our subjects Our intention to ensure their welfare and increase. To this end We have endeavoured not only to promote trade, strengthen the internal security of the state and preserve it from all manner of dangers which might harm the common good, but also to institute good order [Polizei] and whatever else contributes to the improvement [Cultur] of a people in order that Our subjects may soon become fit to form all manner of associations and exercise various skills along with other Christian and civilized peoples.

With an artisan’s eye and pragmatic mind, Peter envisioned the transformation of Russia into a great power, its state and society based on technology and an organization aimed at maximizing production. Its hallmarks would be a European-type army and navy (supported by heavy industry to produce arms), planned urban conglomerations after the model of St Petersburg, and large-scale public works, particularly canals linking the major waterways and productive centres into an integrated economic whole. Peter even commissioned Perry to oversee a canal connecting the Volga and the Don, an over-ambitious project not realized until the 1930s.

To supply the armed forces with skilled native personnel, Peter began founding makeshift educational institutions. He put Farquharson and two English students in charge of the Moscow School of Mathematics and Navigation (housed in the former quarters of a Streltsy regiment); its enrolments grew from 200 pupils in 1703 to over 500 by 1711. Farquharson assisted Leontii Magnitskii in compiling the encyclopaedic Arifmetika (1703), one of the first Russian books to use Arabic numerals, and fulfilled diverse duties. He copied out other textbooks for his students, wrote, translated, and edited scientific works, and supervised thirty-eight translations by others. He surveyed the Petersburg to Moscow road, charted the Caspian Sea, and went to Voronezh in 1709 to observe the solar eclipse. Transferred with 305 pupils to the St Petersburg Naval Academy in 1715, he rose to brigadier rank in 1737 and left a library of 600 books (half from the Naval Academy) upon his death. An artillery school was set up in Moscow in 1701, its 180 pupils increasing to 300 within three years, but it led a precarious existence until transferred to St Petersburg with 74 pupils in 1719. Private schools and tutoring continued as usual. Allowed back in 1698, the Jesuits had a boarding-school with about thirty boys until the order was expelled again in 1719. A German gymnasium opened under the Lutheran pastor Ernst Glück with state assistance in 1705; with seven teachers and seventy-seven pupils in 1711, it taught Greek and Latin, modern languages (including Swedish), geography, ethics, politics, rhetoric, arithmetic, deportment, and riding. It closed in 1715.

Little did Peter foresee that the apparently easy war against Sweden would burgeon into two decades of incessant campaigning over huge expanses of land and water between shifting coalitions of powers great and small. The Great Northern War (1700–21), so designated in retrospect, consumed the bulk of his life. His role as warrior-tsar was etched into the marrow of the Europeanizing empire and shaped virtually every institution and policy adopted over its tortuous course. The demands of long-term warfare, most notably during the first years, account for the peculiarly frenzied and economically wasteful character of the early Petrine reforms.

If Peter blithely entered the conflict, he was shocked by Charles XII’s swift victory over Christian IV of Denmark and Augustus II’s failure to seize Riga. The Swedes’ decisive defeat of the Russian siege of Narva compelled the tsar to reconstitute and rearm the army almost overnight. Over the next eight years some 138,000 recruits were raised; the term rekrut began to be used in about 1705, one of some 3,500 foreign terms adopted in Petrine Russia. By the end of the reign twenty-one general and thirty-two partial levies conscripted over 300,000 men for the army and the fleet.

The armed forces became the model for the Europeanized society that Peter doggedly pursued. Utilizing European norms and Muscovite traditions, ‘selfmaintenance’ first of all, he fitfully constructed an integrated force under uniform conditions of service, subject to discipline on hierarchical principles, the officer corps trained in military schools, and the whole managed by a centralized administration guided by written codes. The organization was constantly reshuffled as the ostensibly standing army and expensive fleet showed wanton ways of melting away (or rotting in the case of ships) from continuous mass desertion as well as shortfalls in recruitment and losses to disease and combat.

Despite constant losses from accident, inferior workmanship, poor maintenance, and difficult harbours, the navy grew swiftly, with 34 ships of the line mounting between 46 and 96 cannon, 15 frigates, 4 prams, 10 snows, and almost 100 smaller vessels and galleys deploying 2,226 cannon with crews and troops totalling 28,000 men by 1724. Ship names reflected victories and territorial gains: Standart (banner or rallying-point), Kronshlot, Triumf, Derpt, Narva, Fligel′-de-Fam (Dutch Flying Fame). The first ship of the line launched in 1710 was called Vyborg, and Alexander Menshikov presented Peter with the Dutch-built frigate Sv. Samson (St Samson) in honour of the Poltava victory. Peter personally launched the 54–gun Poltava at St Petersburg on 15 June 1712, while the Hangö victory of 1714 was celebrated in 1719 by the huge 96–gun Gangut.

Exceeding 174,000 men by 1711 and totalling almost 304,000 in 1725, the armed forces engulfed 90 per cent of the state budget in the former year and still 73 per cent in the latter, a time of peace. Service was essentially lifelong for officers and enlisted men alike. Military service enshrined the principle of merit as explicated in the Table of Ranks, the system of fourteen grades (thirteen in practice) applied to all three branches of state service—military, civil, and court. Military ranks enjoyed preference over civil, and all thirteen in the military conferred noble status as opposed to only the top eight in the civil service. Squabbles over precedence and place-seeking did not end, however; the concept of merit involved ambiguous notions of time in grade, individual achievement, education, and potential. Predictably, the great majority of officers came from noble backgrounds, and the two guards regiments constituted specially privileged preserves. An exception was Alexander Menshikov’s Ingermanlandskii Regiment, a unit close in status to the two guards regiments with the highest proportion of non-noble officers (18 of 56). Menshikov, longtime crony of the tsar and energetic soldier-administrator-entrepreneur, came from dubious origins and fabricated a fanciful noble genealogy. Unable to write more than his name, he was promoted to aristocratic rank (Peter obtained for him the honorific title of prince of the Holy Roman Empire) and busily accumulated immense wealth. Having already abolished the rank of boyar and aware that Russian noble titles were devalued by the practice of equal inheritance, Peter introduced two European titles, count and baron, but conferred them infrequently and only for meritorious service. Baron Peter Shafirov, for example, gained his title in 1710; Baron Andrei Osterman obtained his in 1721 for negotiating peace with Sweden.

State service proved burdensome for nobles and their families, as Peter strove to ensure that military service take precedence over civil and that young noblemen fulfil their service obligations. When established in 1711, the Senate was ordered to hunt down and register noble boys as young as 10 so that they could be sent to school before beginning service at 15. Relatives were to denounce those in hiding; in 1722 such youths were outlawed as if bandits. But enforcing these prescriptions in distant provinces was problematical at best; towards the end of Peter’s reign, Ivan Pososhkov decried the ease with which provincial nobles evaded service and concealed fugitives. Efforts to recover deserters oscillated between blandishments and threats, neither achieving much success.

The peasantry furnished the bulk of all recruits, whether for the armed forces, the ‘manufactories’, naval yards, or construction sites. They also provided most of the tax revenues. To guarantee the flow of revenue for the armed forces, the country was divided into huge provinces each of which was to support different regiments. Continual mobilization peaked in the Swedish invasion of 1708–9, by which time the central government had largely disintegrated. The country consisted of satrapies like Ingermanland presided over by Menshikov in St Petersburg; virtually all Peter’s energies focused on the showdown with Sweden.

Prolonged war stimulated Muscovy’s fledgling industry, especially iron and copper production, and to replace Sweden as a major supplier. In 1700 six iron smelters produced around 2,000 tons; by 1710 seventeen provided over 5,000 tons annually, the total redoubling in 1720. By 1725 twenty-four ironworks, eight operated by Tula merchant Nikita Demidov in the Urals, produced more than 14,000 tons: half from Demidov’s plants, almost three-quarters from the Urals. The first silver mines began production at Nerchinsk in south-eastern Siberia. Most iron went to the armed forces as did the output of the other ninety or so manufactories founded in Petrine Russia. After 1715, however, Russian bar-iron and sailcloth became substantial exports. Nikita Demidov gained noble status and accumulated a huge fortune. Because Petrine statistics are so scanty, one cannot confidently assess costs or living standards. Agricultural prices may have more than doubled over 1701–30, whereas industrial employment reached 18,400 by 1725.

Batic Expansion and Victory at Poltava

The Northern War’s first years saw Peter and his generals gradually devise a strategy of nibbling away at Swedish dominion in the Baltic while Charles XII pursued Augustus II into Central Europe. Thus the Russians seized control of the Neva river by the spring of 1703, when the Peter and Paul Fortress was founded in the river’s delta, the centre for a new frontier town and naval base. Further westward a fortress-battery called Kronshlot was hastily erected near the island of Kotlin, where the harbour of Kronstadt would soon be built. Peter and Menshikov personally led a boat attack on two Swedish warships at the mouth of the Neva in early May that brought Russia’s first naval victory, celebrated by a medal inscribed ‘The Unprecedented Has Happened’. Tsar and favourite were both made knights of the Order of Saint Andrew. In 1704 Dorpat and Narva fell to the Russians, as mounted forces ravaged Swedish Estland and Livland. Among the captives taken in Livland was a buxom young woman, Marta Skavronska, soon to become Russified as Catherine (Ekaterina Alekseevna). She enchanted Peter successively as mistress and common-law wife, confidante and soul-mate, empress and successor. Adept at calming his outbursts of rage, she matched his energy and bore him many children.

Peter certainly needed emotional comfort during these years of constant travels to the northern and western fronts, periodic illnesses, and the frazzling turnabouts of coalition warfare and civil war. His own role in government mushroomed so quickly that a personal Kabinet (chancery) was founded around 1704 under Aleksei Makarov whose clerk’s rank soon evolved into cabinet secretary. While the Russians won localized victories in the north-west, exiled Streltsy suddenly seized Astrakhan in August 1705 and threatened to incite other Volga towns and the Don Cossacks. The rebels railed against shaving beards and wearing European clothing, endorsed the Old Belief, and massacred more than 300 persons and the local prefect. After Field Marshal Boris Sheremetev recaptured Astrakhan in March 1706, the Preobrazhenskii Bureau investigated more than 500 individuals (including 401 Streltsy), executed 314 of them, and banished the rest into hard labour. But tranquillity lasted barely a year: a similar outbreak led by the Don Cossack Kondratii Bulavin convulsed the lower Don in 1707–8—just as Charles XII invaded western Russia and Ukraine, where he was joined by Hetman Ivan Mazepa with a force of Ukrainian Cossacks. In the mean time Saxony had left the war, with Augustus II yielding the Polish throne to the Swedish-supported Stanislaus Leszczyńnski. Russia now faced Sweden alone.

Foreseeing prolonged conflict, Peter and his commanders had decided in December 1706 on ‘scorched earth’ tactics to sap the Swedes’ strength and mobility while exploring a negotiated settlement. Peter fell ill several times amidst the constant tension. ‘Severe fever’ laid him low in Warsaw in July 1707, ‘five feet from death’ in delirium; another fever and mercurial medications confined him to bed in St Petersburg in May 1708, dissuading him from rushing to Azov against Bulavin. At Azov in April and May 1709, just before the climactic confrontation at Poltava, the tsar again took ‘strong medicines’ but after his chills and fever broke in August, still felt depressed and weak. A month later he boasted to Catherine of drinking bouts with his Polish allies.

The murderously frigid winter of 1708–9, together with epidemic disease, inadequate clothing, and short rations, conspired to divert the Swedes from Moscow, where earthworks had been thrown up around the Kremlin, and to await supplies and link up with Mazepa in Ukraine. This detour allowed Peter’s flying column to intercept the Swedish relief force at Lesnaia on 28 September 1708: day-long fighting ended in shattering defeat for the Swedes. By the end of the year several thousand Swedes had died from exposure.

The general engagement that Peter had so long postponed and Charles XII had so pursued came at Poltava on 27 June 1709. By then the Swedish army was no match, outnumbered almost two to one and outgunned seventy cannon to four. The predicament was symbolized by the king himself being shot in the foot ten days before (on his twenty-seventh birthday) so that he had to be carried about the field on a litter. He barely escaped capture after his army’s demise. Although Sheremetev was the commander-in-chief, Peter took the field, his hat and saddle shot through. Within two hours the Swedish forces crumbled before the hail of Russian cannonfire, musketry, and Menshikov’s slashing cavalry. The ensuing rout left some 9,000 Swedish dead on the field; 16,000 more surrendered three days later at nearby Perevolochna. Poltava placed a ‘firm stone’ in the foundation of St Petersburg, as the tsar expostulated in relief. Paintings and other artistic media quickly produced portrayals of Peter at Poltava, a favourite theme thenceforth.

The triumph was consolidated within eighteen months. The northern alliance was reconstituted with the addition of Prussia and the dethronement of Leszczyńnski in Poland. Sweden was offered peace on generous terms, but when the absent Charles XII refused to negotiate, Russian forces conquered the Baltic region in 1710 from Vyborg in the north to Reval and Riga in the west and south (despite a widespread plague epidemic that devastated Sweden but largely spared Russian territory). Incorporation of these non-Slavic territories led directly to the proclamation of Russia as a European-type empire. Indeed, Peter began using the designation imperator vserossiiskii (‘emperor of all the Russias’) as early as 31 May 1712 in a charter to his consul in Genoa while Sheremetev styled him ‘Your Imperial Highness’ in a petition of 1 August 1711 as did the merchants of Riga in a petition of 4 September 1712. Notifying Menshikov of his election as honorary fellow of the Royal Society in October 1714, Isaac Newton termed Peter ‘your Emperor, His Caesarian Majesty’.

Peter’s broadening political horizons also led him to arrange marriages of several relatives to foreign rulers. His niece Anna Ivanovna married the duke of Courland in late 1710 and his niece Ekaterina Ivanovna the duke of Mecklenburg-Schwerin in April 1716 in the presence of Peter, Catherine, and Augustus II. Neither marriage proved successful in personal terms; Anna was widowed almost immediately and Ekaterina returned to Russia with her young daughter in 1722. Tsarevich Alexis’s marriage to Charlotte of Wolfenbüttel in October 1711 proved equally painful for the spouses although it did produce a granddaughter and grandson, the future Peter II. All these matches accented Russia’s rising international stature and resolute entry into the European dynastic marriage market.

Cutural Revolution and Europeanizing Reforms

After 1711 Peter could devote more attention and longer consideration to a broader array of affairs. He pursued a number of initiatives that amounted to a ‘Cultural Revolution’ and accelerated the process of Europeanization by introducing the fruits of the Renaissance, the Reformation, the Age of Discovery, and the Scientific Revolution. Renaissance elements may be discerned in the new emphases on education, book-learning, and publishing. The number of presses, for instance, increased from three to ten by 1725, all under state control. Peter endorsed a simplified civil orthography in 1707, but presses and fonts remained so scarce that one-third of the secular titles before 1725 appeared in the old script. The annual number of titles rose from six or seven in the last decades of the seventeenth century to as many as forty-five per year in the first quarter of the eighteenth century. The content of printed material also changed, with government pronouncements, laws, and military writings constituting almost two-thirds of all publications in the period 1700–25. Many were translations from foreign publications; slightly less than one-quarter treated religion, Muscovy’s traditional staple. Still, devotional writings were reprinted so frequently they comprised about 40 per cent of all books published in the Petrine era.

Russia’s first periodical, Vedomosti, began appearing in late 1702 and offered an official selection of ‘news’, celebrating governmental authority and military victories more than general information or commercial reports. The number of issues per year varied wildly, dropping from fourteen annually in 1708–12 to seven in 1713–17 and only one in 1718. Print runs also oscillated oddly—from a high of 875 in 1709 (the year of Poltava) to only 205 in 1712. Readership was obviously small, perhaps declining, and minuscule compared to England or Holland.

Peter personally collected a library of 1,663 titles in manuscript and printed books in Russian and foreign languages. He also purchased the private collections of Dr Robert Erskine and others, which laid the basis for the Library of the Academy of Sciences and, by 1725, comprised some 11,000 volumes. Assisted by Erskine, Jacob Bruce, and other scholars, Peter founded the first public museum, the Kunst-Kamera in St Petersburg, and collected European paintings, chiefly of the Dutch and Flemish schools. Indeed, his picture gallery at Mon Plaisir in Peterhof was the first of its kind in Russia, with about 200 paintings by 1725. To encourage visitation, the Kunst-Kamera charged no entry fee and had a budget of 400 roubles for free refreshments (coffee, wine, vodka, and the like). Renaissance notions likewise stimulated Petrine interest in secular history and the idea of Russia ‘entering a new era’. Peter himself led the way, with a concern to document military affairs and travels, an interest that eventually supported the compilation of an official history of the Swedish War, not complete before his death and published only in 1770–2.

In another exhibition of Renaissance spirit Peter encouraged the liberation of élite women, his own female relatives in the first instance, and their attendance at public receptions called ‘assemblies’. He authorized the first secular public theatre on Red Square in 1701. Opened in 1702 with elaborate sets and stage machinery, this ‘comedy chamber’ presented plays in German staged by a German company from Danzig. An abject failure crippled by a lack of Russian plays, a suitable literary language, and an audience, the theatre disbanded in 1706. Its sets, costumes, and scripts were handed over to Peter’s sister Natalia, who established a court theatre at Preobrazhenskoe in 1707 that was soon transferred to St Petersburg and lasted until her death in 1716. It pioneered the presentation of European plays of chivalry and romance. In Kiev meanwhile Feofan Prokopovich, Ukrainian born and partly educated in Rome, composed the tragicomedy Vladimir while teaching at the Mohyla Academy. A historical drama focusing on Russia’s conversion to Christianity and with many topical politico-cultural overtones, Vladimir was dedicated to Mazepa, who attended the first performance. This dedication had to be dropped after Mazepa’s defection in 1708. Other plays were staged at Dr Bidloo’s surgical school in Moscow including two by Fedor Zhurovskii, Slava Rossiiskaia (Russia’s Glory) and Slava pechal′naia (Grieving Glory), which respectively commemorated Catherine I’s coronation in 1724 and Peter’s death in 1725.

The Reformation informed Petrine efforts to transform the Orthodox Church. In 1694 Peter discontinued the Palm Sunday practice of the tsar on foot leading the patriarch on horseback across Moscow’s Red Square. In 1698 he criticized monks and monasticism, in 1700 reproved Patriarch Adrian for the Church’s failure to educate the young, and in 1701 re-established the Monastery Bureau to manage church lands. Most striking was his radical decision to replace the Patriarchate with a council of hierarchs, the Holy Synod. He personally favoured Bible-reading; his library contained several copies of the New Testament but only one of the Old. Although Peter believed in justification by faith alone, he scorned superstition and discouraged the veneration of icons.

Peter’s penchant for travel celebrated the Age of Discovery as did his absorption in naval and maritime affairs. The Persian Campaign of 1722–3 exemplified an urge for Oriental expansion, also revealed in an abortive secret mission to Madagascar in 1723–4. Themes of exploration and expansion stayed with Peter until the end of his life, when he commissioned the first Bering Expedition to investigate north-east Asia and North America for possible colonization.

The Scientific Revolution had enthralled Peter even before his first journey abroad, and his early acquaintance with foreign and native scholars reinforced ventures in the sciences, arts, and technology. Peter corresponded for more than twenty years with G. W. von Leibniz, whom he put on the payroll in 1711 and ultimately in 1724, founded the Imperial Academy of Sciences and Arts in St Petersburg as the centre of state-organized research in the new Russian Empire. This multi-purpose institution combined research, teaching, and museum functions; it utilized a broad definition of ‘sciences’ encompassing secular knowledge that included arts and crafts, history and literature.

St Petersburg as the New Capital and Renewed Dynastic Disarray

As befitted a new European sovereign, Peter spent much time outside Muscovy’s old borders: a total of almost nineteen months in the years 1711–13 that spanned the disastrous Pruth campaign, two extended visits to Carlsbad for water cures and to witness Alexis’s wedding, and meetings with Leibniz at Torgau, Teplitz, and Carlsbad in 1711. The tsar’s ‘Paradise’ at St Petersburg became the new capital in about 1713 with the transfer of the court and higher government.

In microcosm the city advertised many Petrine ideals. It was European in concept, name, and style—the style synonymous with the newly popular term arkhitektura. Its name and layout, the fortress and cathedral of Peter and Paul and the city crest all pointed to parallels with imperial Rome. Planned for commercial and economic efficiency (Peter even contemplated centring the city on the island of Kotlin in the Gulf of Finland!), security from fire (but not flood), and impressive splendour, the ‘Residenz-Stadt’ grew rapidly thanks to forced labour and forced resettlement in combination with vigorous state patronage and flourishing foreign trade carried in foreign vessels. With the arrival of the court and many state agencies, the state’s presence in the guise of the huge Admiralty establishment, armoury facilities at nearby Sestroretsk, and the army and guards regiments fuelled a boom in local construction. Following the formation of the collegiate system of central administration after 1715, the city’s chief architect, Domenico Trezzini, began in 1722 a huge unitary corpus for the eleven administrative colleges on Vasilevskii Island, a grandiose project only completed ten years later. By 1725 St Petersburg had a population of about 50,000 (with large seasonal fluctuations, as peasant labourers congregated during the spring-to-autumn shipping season), and featured several impressive palaces (Menshikov’s in particular) with even more opulent estates flanking the approaches. The Summer Garden boasted abundant statuary and Peter’s small Summer Palace, but his attempt to organize a zoo complete with elephant and polar bears faltered when the animals died.

Moscow remained the old capital and largest city, but after 1710 Peter visited it sparingly. Much of 1713–14 he passed on board ship co-ordinating the land and sea conquest of Finland, highlighted by the naval victory of Hangö—a nautical Poltava—on 27 July 1714. The European sojourns and campaigns culminated in a second triumphal tour, this time accompanied by Catherine except to France, for twenty months in 1716–17. Off Copenhagen in October 1716 Peter was named honorary admiral of the combined Danish, Dutch, English, and Russian fleets—pleasing recognition of Russia’s new maritime might. Yet the ageing tsar was often mentally distraught, as hinted by twelve nocturnal dreams he recorded in 1714–16. Seriously ill in Holland for a month in early 1717, he later took the waters at Pyrmont and Spa. Both consorts grieved for the baby boy lost four hours after birth at Wesel in Holland on 2 January 1717.

Dynastic distress ensued even earlier with the death of Alexis’s wife in October 1715 shortly after having borne a son (and first grandson), Peter Alekseevich, followed soon by Catherine’s delivery of a son, Peter Petrovich. Peter and Catherine had been privately married in Moscow in March 1711, a ceremony repeated publicly in St Petersburg on 19 February 1712, the tsar joking that ‘it was a fruitful wedding, for they had already had five children’. This tardy marriage to a foreign commoner struck the English envoy as ‘one of the surprising events of this wonderfull age’. Catherine quickly became the focus of a European-type court largely Germanic in cultural terms. At Moscow in February 1722 and St Petersburg the next year Catherine and her ladies donned Amazon costumes to celebrate Shrovetide.

Peter’s relationship with Alexis, never close, became strained as his deteriorating health raised the succession issue. Alexis vowed to renounce the throne and enter a monastery, but did neither and suddenly fled abroad clandestinely—an acute embarrassment to his father. Enticed to return by the wily diplomat Peter Tolstoy, Alexis underwent intensive secret investigation that came to involve dozens of people, including Alexander Kikin (a former confidant of the tsar in disrepute for financial malfeasance), his mother, and Archpriest Iakov Ignatev (the tsarevich’s father-confessor). Kikin was accused of inspiring Alexis’s flight abroad and the others of fostering hatred for his father. All were tortured; Kikin, the archpriest, and several others—including Elena’s acknowledged lover—were all executed. After prolonged interrogation and torture Alexis himself was sentenced to death for treason in June 1718, perishing in prison in disputed circumstances. Although the investigation disclosed close contacts between the tsarevich and many prominent noblemen, the official version blamed Alexis’s treasonous conspiracy on ‘the long beards’, that is, supposedly reactionary churchmen. In fact, many potential sympathizers did not wish to return to old Muscovy but disliked Peter’s capricious despotism on behalf of breakneck change.

Alexis’s demise complicated the succession: Peter Petrovich—the tsar’s son by Catherine, not yet four but already three feet four inches tall—died on 25 April 1719, dealing another dynastic blow. ‘The Czar took the loss of his only son so much at heart, that he run his head against the wall of the chamber and was seized with two convulsion fits’, remarked the English envoy, who speculated that Catherine had passed childbearing age. She had one more daughter, Natalia, born in 1718 who died a month after her father in March 1725, and possibly two more still births. The Alexis affair, reminiscent of Ivan the Terrible’s murder of his son, may have exacerbated Peter’s tendency towards paranoia and alienation from former intimates such as Menshikov and, ultimately, Catherine herself. It also coincided with the formation of a hypercentralized and militarized police regime bent on resolute action dictated by an ageing autocrat disinclined to accept any counsel.

Outwardly the Petrine government went from triumph to triumph with the Peace of Nystadt ending the Great Northern War in 1721 and Peter proclaimed emperor of all the Russias and ‘the Great, Most Wise Father of the Fatherland’. Prussia and Holland recognized the new title the very next year, Sweden and Denmark in 1723 and 1724, but Austria delayed until the early 1740s and Poland only conceded in 1764. Peter captained the triumphal Persian campaign in 1722 that added new territories along the Caspian Sea in emulation of Alexander the Great. A new succession law, announced in 1722, gave the reigning ruler the right to name whomever he chose to succeed him, and Catherine I was proclaimed empress and crowned in Moscow in May 1724.

Peter’s death on 28 January 1725 happened so suddenly that he could not designate an heir. His health had long been in doubt despite visits to the mineral springs at Olonets. He travelled there in January 1719, for example, contracting ‘a violent cold on the road’. He was also tormented by ‘a weakness in his left arm, which was occasioned at first by his being let blood by an unskilful surgeon, who, missing the vein, made an incision in the nerve that lies by it’. Such pains led Peter to take the waters twice in 1724 in February and June. To Catherine he praised the curative qualities of the waters but complained of urinary difficulty and diminished appetite. In St Petersburg later that summer he was bedridden twice for almost two weeks between 16 August and 12 September 1724. He was one of those driven persons who cannot slow down, no matter what the doctors advise.

The condition that caused his death sparked controversy then and now, primarily whether it was venereal-related or not. Recent Russian scholars are split between gonorrhoea or uraemia. Considering the length and incredible tempo of his life, the cause of death may be less significant than the superhuman achievements of the ‘body’ and ‘soul’ involved. After the traditional forty days of mourning Peter’s body was interred in a magnificent casket in a small temporary wooden church amid the still uncompleted Peter and Paul Cathedral—the first Russian ruler to be buried outside Moscow. Feofan Prokopovich pronounced a brief grandiloquent funeral oration that was widely distributed and translated and that compared the late tsar to biblical prophets and kings—Samson, Japhet, Moses, David, Solomon, and Constantine.

Russia without Peter

Catherine succeeded Peter the day of his death via a bloodless palace coup master-minded by Menshikov and backed by the guards’ military muscle. The coup pre-empted the claims of Peter’s grandson, Peter Alekseevich, but Catherine endorsed the traditional right of male succession as personified in the 9-year-old boy. Menshikov and the other Petrine ‘principals’ had apparently talked Catherine out of becoming regent for Peter on grounds that such an arrangement would foster division and discord. Just before his death Peter I had approved the marriage of his eldest daughter, Anna Petrovna, to Karl Frederick, duke of Holstein-Gottorp, a secret article of the contract providing that the Russian ruler might bring back Anna’s male issue as successor to the Russian throne. Considering the late great tsar’s estrangement from Catherine during the final three months of his life (because of a scandal involving William Mons), her actual succession entailed abundant surprise and irony. Most amazingly, Catherine I inaugurated virtually continuous female rule in Russia for almost seventy years. Paradox also abounded in the efforts exerted over her reign of barely twenty-six months to undo several Petrine policies.

Some reaction against the imperious Petrine legacy was probably inevitable. Three decades of unremitting mobilization had engendered widespread crisis in much of the expanded empire, troubles lately compounded by harvest failures, massive peasant flight, and near bankruptcy. Hence Catherine’s first steps included reduction of the poll-tax (from 74 to 70 copecks) and withdrawal of the army from the provinces. Her government also strove to economize the workings of the inflated Petrine administration by abolishing many offices and dispensing with salaries for low-ranking civil servants in favour of restoring the customary practice of charging petitioners for official services. Much wrangling raged over bloated military expenditures in particular.

Though empress and autocratrix in name, Catherine I was so tired and sickly that her reign looked to be short. A new era of ‘clique government’ ensued much like that which had prevailed for almost a quarter century after Alexis’s death in 1676. This oligarchy assumed institutional shape on 8 February 1726 under a new governmental body, the Supreme Privy Council, a six-man council empowered to advise the empress and headed by the masterful Menshikov But he was ageing and so uncertain of his future that he vainly attempted to become duke of Courland. As Catherine’s demise approached in the spring of 1727, Menshikov endeavoured to safeguard his future by purging two rivals, Count Peter Tolstoy and his brother-in-law Policemaster-General Anton Devier, who were sentenced to death for conspiracy and treason before banishment to remote regions. Just prior to Catherine’s death on 7 May 1727 Menshikov oversaw the compilation of her ‘Testament’, which named Peter Alekseevich ‘sukt-sessor’ under a joint regency of nine persons. With a minor on the throne, Menshikov’s dominance seemed assured. He sought to conciliate young Peter by freeing his grandmother, the nun Elena, and arranged his daughter Maria’s betrothal to the future tsar on 25 May 1727. Barely a month later Duke Karl Frederick of Holstein and his wife Anna left for Kiel, removing two more political rivals from the scene. Even so, prolonged illness in the summer of 1727 enabled Menshikov’s rivals led by Ivan Dolgorukii and the crafty Andrei Osterman to rally the Supreme Privy Council against Menshikov’s ‘tyranny’, so the ‘semi-sovereign despot’ was placed under house-arrest on 8 September 1727. Stripped of his honours, jewels, and multiple estates, Menshikov was exiled with his family to Berezov in Siberia, where he died in 1729.

Peter II’s reign proved as brief and uneventful as Catherine I’s. He hardly ‘reigned’, for actual power rested with the Supreme Privy Council until he suddenly died of smallpox as an unmarried minor on 18/19 January 1730. The general domestic tranquillity was underlined by abolition of the Preobrazhenskii Bureau in 1729. Peter II moved the court and several offices to Moscow, where he spent the last two years of his life mainly hunting in silent protest against the rigours of Petersburg life.

Peter II died without issue and without designating a successor, thereby precipitating renewed political crisis. The Supreme Privy Council, now expanded to eight aristocrat-officials—four Dolgorukiis and two Golitsyns—endeavoured to resolve the dynastic dilemma by secretly offering the throne on restrictive conditions to Anna Ivanovna, the widowed duchess of Courland and childless niece of Peter the Great. This move inadvertently inaugurated a month of intense political manœuvring. Led by the widely experienced Prince Dmitrii Golitsyn, the privy councillors sought to establish an oligarchical constitution that would limit monocratic arbitrary rule (autocracy) by making the council permanent and hedging Anna’s sovereignty with restrictions. Failure to publicize the council’s ‘Conditions’ (Konditsii)—a new term in Russian political discourse—and its other proposals for reform fanned rumours of an aristocratic grab for supreme power, inflaming immediate opposition and alternative platforms backed by several hundred aristocrats and lesser nobles in some cases. When the ‘Conditions’ were finally announced at a meeting of about eighty dignitaries on 2 February 1730, additional projects had been put forward, one signed by 361 persons, and Anna had already arrived in Moscow and become the focus of a loose coalition suspicious of the oligarchs and of the effort to abridge the autocrat’s authority. Osterman and Feofan Prokopovich contacted confederates in the guards and even released broadsides attacking the Supreme Privy Council with the spectre of disunity and chaos. Within a few weeks the competing groups had neutralized each other, so that Anna tore up the ‘Conditions’ and proclaimed herself ‘Empress and Self-upholder of All Russia’. She abolished the Supreme Privy Council and gradually dispatched all the Dolgorukiis into exile. Dmitrii Golitsyn remained free, albeit largely silent, until imprisoned in 1737, a year before his death. He accepted responsibility for the constitutional fiasco, remarking: ‘The banquet was ready, but the guests were unworthy’.

From this tumultuous inception, Anna’s reign exhibited familiar elements of ‘clique government’ along with a confusing mix of conservative restoration, continuity with Petrine policies, and occasional reform. Her reign has endured a generally bad press, mostly Petrine in perspective but also animated by antipathy to female rule and Germans. She has often been viewed as a puppet controlled by her ‘German’ favourite, Ernst Johann Biron, her reign later derided as the notorious time of ‘Bironovshchina’ (‘Biron’s repressive regime’). Such crude indictments have recently receded in favour of renewed attention to important continuities in the ruler’s role, foreign policy and territorial expansion, economic development, and institutional change. Whatever Anna’s intimate relationship with Biron, who was named count and senior chamberlain in 1730 and by whom she may have had a son, he held no significant independent status until elected duke of Courland in 1737 and named regent upon Anna’s death. His fragile regency lasted barely three weeks until overthrown by Field Marshal Burkhard von Münnich. Biron’s presumed role behind the scenes and attempt to marry a son to the empress’s niece provoked accusations of dynastic ambitions, like a new Godunov or Menshikov, whereas his love of horses, cards, and theatrical troupes fostered charges of talking to people as if they were horses and to horses as if they were people. In fact, his influence on high policy appears to have been minimal, and the Chancery of Secret Investigative Affairs, as the secret police was renamed in 1730, handled no more than 2,000 cases as compared to 2,478 during Elizabeth’s first decade of rule and about the same number during her second. Foreigners did not enjoy undue preference during Biron’s alleged hegemony, and he had little to do with the persecution of Old Believers, some twenty thousand of whom are supposed to have been exiled during Anna’s reign (a patently inflated statistic). Besides, Anna’s regime was dominated by Russian aristocrats: Chancellor Gavriil Golovkin, Vice-Chancellor Andrei Osterman, Prince Aleksei Cherkasskii, and later Pavel Iaguzhinskii and his successor Artemii Volynskii. The execution of Volynskii on 27 June 1740 on charges of treasonous conspiracy has often been blamed on Biron, though the court that condemned him consisted solely of Russian magnates.

Like her predecessors, the widowed and (officially) childless Anna confronted succession problems throughout her reign. She kept a sharp eye on the orphaned Karl Peter Ulrich in Holstein, Peter the Great’s sole surviving grandson, and on the vivacious Elizabeth and her small ‘Young Court’. To reinforce the dynastic line of her Miloslavskii relatives, she adopted her half-German, half-Russian niece, daughter of the duke and duchess of Mecklenburg and russified as Anna Leopoldovna, upon the death of the latter’s mother in 1733. This princess was converted to Russian Orthodoxy, given a European-style education, and reluctantly married Duke Anton Ulrich of Braunschweig-Wolfenbüttel-Bevern in July 1739. They promptly sired a son, Ivan Antonovich, the future Ivan VI, born on 12 August 1740, just two months before the empress’s own sudden death on 17 October. Regent for her infant son after Biron’s overthrow, Anna Leopoldovna showed little interest in ruling and was easily deposed by the competing dynastic line personified by Elizabeth as the old Miloslavskii-Naryshkin rivalry reappeared.

Anna Ivanovna’s government had adopted several policy changes bruited during the constitutional crisis of her accession. The unpopular Petrine law on single inheritance was abrogated, for instance, and the Noble Cadet Corps was founded in St Petersburg, its graduates entering the military as officers. Officers’ pay was made equal to that of foreigners, and the lifetime service requirement was shortened to twenty-five years with one son entirely exempted. The court returned to St Petersburg in January 1733 amid great ceremony. Links to the interior were improved by completion of the Ladoga Canal, a showpiece supervised by the German military engineer Burkhard von Münnich, whom Anna richly rewarded and promoted to field marshal. He gained a chequered military reputation in leading the Russian armies to victory in the War of the Polish Succession in 1733–5 and the related Russo-Turkish War of 1736–9. Both conflicts involved allied coalitions and gained some success, especially Münnich’s multiple invasions of the Crimea despite substantial Russian losses partly because of a large outbreak of plague. Russia defeated the Turks and the Crimean Tatars, but Austria’s sudden withdrawal limited territorial gains to so-called New Serbia and Azov without the right to fortify the latter. These were Russia’s first triumph over the Turks since Peter the Great’s second Azov campaign and first successful invasion of the Crimea. Another major gain of territory came via the Orenburg expedition, a state-sponsored venture led by Vasilii Tatishchev and others that pushed the Russian frontier into the southern Urals, opening abundant lands to cultivation and mining. The huge Bashkir revolts that greeted this Russian invasion lasted from 1735 to 1740 and resulted in the extermination or resettlement of almost one-third of the Bashkir population. This rich new territory accelerated the economic boom begun in Petrine times and compensated for the loss of the Caspian lands returned to Persia in 1735.

Economic and Cultural Continuities

Indeed, Russian ironworks and copperworks multiplied in the post-Petrine decades, twenty of the former being built in the Urals from 1726 to 1733, thirteen of the latter from 1726 to 1737. Russian exports of iron to England presented serious competition to Sweden and were only one of many commodities regulated by the new Anglo-Russian trade treaty of 1734. St Petersburg blossomed as a major seaport, especially for exports, but Archangel was revived by the fairer tariff of 1731. Most of Russian iron and copper production went to the armed forces, the mint, or for export. The fleet was somewhat revived as the Anna, a huge ship of the line with 140 guns, was launched by the English shipwright Richard Brown in June 1737 with a ball and a banquet.

Post-Petrine Russia also manifested many continuities in cultural affairs. The Imperial Academy of Sciences and Arts, planned by Peter and endorsed by the Senate, officially opened in December 1725 under the presidency of Dr Laurentius Blumentrost, Moscow-born and European educated. On 27 December 1725 Georg Bülffinger, professor of physics at the academy, delivered a speech in Latin (111 pages!) on the value of such institutions and studies, especially on the means of determining longitudes. A copy was sent to the University of Cambridge Library. Catherine I’s son-in-law, Duke Karl Frederick of Holstein, attended the session. Another speech was given on 1 August 1726 by Jakob Hermann on the history of geometry and the perfection of telescopes with a reply by Christian Goldbach. The audience included Catherine I herself, but the preface of the published speech (Petropoli, 1727) explained that most of Hermann’s address was not delivered, while the empress actually heard a German panegyric by Georg Bayer praising her and the origins of the Russian people.

To ensure international recognition, the academy’s protocols were published in Latin until 1734, German until 1741. All the academicians were foreigners, perhaps the most eminent being the mathematician Leonhard Euler who worked in Russia 1727–41 and again from 1766 until his death in 1783. Though the academy developed slowly and unevenly, it attracted some gifted individuals, notably Mikhail Lomonosov, the great polymath from provincial origins, who as a mature student absorbed the best of Muscovite education in Moscow and Kiev before attending St Petersburg’s academic university and then advanced study abroad. In literary affairs Antiokh Kantemir and Vasilii Trediakovskii began to make their mark. Foreign scholars such as G. F. Müller accompanied the Bering expeditions, collected many sources on the history of Siberia, and collaborated in a variety of publications. Outside the academy the versatile engineer and administrator Vasilii Tatishchev began compiling a monumental history of Russia—and in Russian—that was only published decades after his death in 1750. Ballet was initiated under Anna with the work of Jean-Baptiste Landé and the arrival of several foreign theatrical troupes.

If Catherine the Great is usually credited with infusing Russia with ‘soul’, Peter the Great’s earlier efforts merit mention. In 1718 the poet Aaron Hill lauded ‘this giant-genius sent; | Divinely siz’d—to suit his crown’s extent!’ To our late twentieth-century ears Hill’s encomium rings ominously: