Russian History Lexicon

The Azov campaigns (1695–96)

The first steps taken in this direction were the campaigns of 1695 and 1696, with the object of capturing Azov from the Crimean Tatar vassals of Turkey (Ottoman Empire). On the one hand, these Azov campaigns could be seen as fulfilling Russia's commitments, undertaken during Sophia's regency, to the anti-Turkish (Russo-Turkish wars) “Holy League” of 1684 (Austria, Poland, and Venice); on the other they were intended to secure the southern frontier against Tatar raids, as well as to approach the Black Sea. The first campaign ended in failure (1695), but this did not discourage Peter: he promptly built a fleet at Voronezh to sail down the Don River and in 1696 Azov was captured. To consolidate this success Taganrog was founded on the northern shore of the Don Estuary, and the building of a large navy was started.

The Grand Embassy (1697–98)

Having already sent some young nobles abroad to study nautical matters, Peter, in 1697, went with the so-called Grand Embassy to western Europe. The embassy comprised about 250 people, with the “grand ambassadors” Franz Lefort, F.A. Golovin, and P.B. Voznitsyn at its head. Its chief purposes were to examine the international situation and to strengthen the anti-Turkish coalition, but it was also intended to gather information on the economic and cultural life of Europe. Travelling incognito under the name of Sgt. Pyotr Mikhaylov, Peter familiarized himself with conditions in the advanced countries of the West. For four months he studied shipbuilding, working as a ship's carpenter in the yard of the Dutch East India Company at Saardam; after that he went to Great Britain, where he continued his study of shipbuilding, working in the Royal Navy's dockyard at Deptford, and he also visited factories, arsenals, schools, and museums and even attended a session of Parliament. Meanwhile, the services of foreign experts were engaged for work in Russia.

On the diplomatic side of the Grand Embassy, Peter conducted negotiations with the Dutch and British governments for alliances against Turkey; but the Maritime Powers did not wish to involve themselves with him because they were preoccupied with the problems that were soon to come to a crisis, for them, in the War of the Spanish Succession.

The destruction of the streltsy (1698)

From England, Peter went on to Austria; but while he was negotiating in Vienna for a continuance of the anti-Turkish alliance, he received news of a fresh revolt of the streltsy in Moscow. In the summer of 1698 he was back in Moscow, where he suppressed the revolt. Hundreds of the streltsy were executed, the rest of the rebels were exiled to distant towns, and the corps of the streltsy was disbanded.

The Northern War (Northern War, Second) (1700–21)

When it became clear that Austria, no less than the Maritime Powers, was preparing to fight for the Spanish Succession and to make peace with Turkey, Peter saw that Russia could not contemplate a war without allies against the Turks, and he abandoned his plans for pushing forward from the Sea of Azov to the Black Sea. By the Russo-Turkish Peace of Constantinople (Istanbul, 1700) he retained possession of Azov. He was now turning his attention to the Baltic instead, following the tradition of his predecessors.

The Swedes occupied Karelia, Ingria, Estonia, and Livonia and blocked Russia's way to the Baltic coast. To dislodge them, Peter took an active part in forming the great alliance, comprising Russia, Saxony, and Denmark–Norway, which started the Northern War in 1700. This war lasted for 21 years and was Peter's main military enterprise. In planning it and in sustaining it he displayed iron willpower, extraordinary energy, and outstanding gifts of statesmanship, generalship, and diplomacy. Mobilizing all the resources of Russia for the triumph of his cause, constantly keeping himself abreast of events, and actively concerning himself with all important undertakings, often at his personal risk, he could be seen sometimes in a sailor's jacket on a warship, sometimes in an officer's uniform on the battlefield, and sometimes in a labourer's apron and gloves with an axe in a shipyard.

The defeat of the Russians at Narva (1700), very early in the war, did not deter Peter and, in fact, he later described it as a blessing: “Necessity drove away sloth and forced me to work night and day.” He subsequently took part in the siege that led to the Russian capture of Narva (1704) and in the battles of Lesnaya (1708) and of Poltava (Poltava, Battle of) (1709). At Poltava, where Charles XII of Sweden suffered a catastrophic defeat, the plan of operations was Peter's own: it was his idea to transform the battlefield by works of his military engineers—the redoubts erected in the path of the Swedish troops to break their combat order, to split them into little groups, and to halt their onslaught. Peter also took part in the naval battle of Gangut (Hanko, or Hangö) in 1714, the first major Russian victory at sea.

The treaties concluded by Russia in the course of the war were made under Peter's personal direction. He also travelled abroad again for diplomatic reasons—e.g., to Pomerania in 1712 and to Denmark, northern Germany, Holland, and France in 1716–17.

In 1703, on the banks of the Neva River, where it flows into the Gulf of Finland, Peter began construction of the city of St. Petersburg (Saint Petersburg) and established it as the new capital of Russia in 1712. By the Treaty of Nystad (September 10 [August 30, O.S.], 1721) the eastern shores of the Baltic were at last ceded to Russia, Sweden was reduced to a secondary power, and the way was opened for Russian domination over Poland.

In celebration of his triumph, the Senate on November 2 (October 22, O.S.), 1721, changed Peter's title from tsar to that of emperor (imperator) of all the Russias.

The popular revolts (1705–08)

The peasant serfs and the poorer urban workers had to bear the greatest hardships in wartime and moreover were intensively exploited in the course of Peter's great work for the modernization and development of Russia (see below Internal reforms). Their sufferings, combined with onerous taxation, provoked a number of revolts, the most important of which were that of Astrakhan (1705–06) and that led by Kondraty Afanasyevich Bulavin in the Don Basin (1707–08). These revolts were cruelly put down.

The Turkish War (Russo-Turkish wars) (1710–13)

In the middle of the Northern War, when Peter might have pressed further the advantage won at Poltava, Turkey declared war on Russia. In the summer of 1711 Peter marched against the Turks through Bessarabia into Moldavia, but he was surrounded, with all his forces, on the Prut River. Obliged to sue for peace, he was fortunate to obtain very light terms from the inept Turkish negotiators, who allowed him to retire with no greater sacrifice than the retrocession of Azov. The Turkish government soon decided to renew hostilities; but the Peace of Adrianople (Edirne) was concluded in 1713, leaving Azov to the Turks. From that time on Peter's military effort was concentrated on winning his war against Sweden.

The Tsarevich Alexis and Catherine (to 1718)

Peter had a son, the tsarevich Alexis, by his discarded wife Eudoxia. Alexis was his natural heir, but he grew up antipathetic to Peter and receptive to reactionary influences working against Peter's reforms. Peter, meanwhile, had formed a lasting liaison with a low-born woman, the future empress Catherine I, who bore him other children and whom he married in 1712. Pressed finally to mend his ways or to become a monk in renunciation of his hereditary rights (1716), Alexis took refuge in the dominions of the Holy Roman emperor Charles VI, but he was induced to return to Russia in 1718. Thereupon proceedings were brought against him on charges of high treason, and after torture he was condemned to death. He died in prison, presumably by violence, before the formal execution of the sentence.

The Persian campaign (1722–23)

Even during the second half of the Northern War, Peter had sent exploratory missions to the East—to the Central Asian steppes in 1714, to the Caspian region in 1715, and to Khiva in 1717. The end of the war left him free to resume a more active policy on his southeastern frontier. In 1722, hearing that the Ottoman Turks would take advantage of Persia's weakness and invade the Caspian region, Peter himself invaded Persian territory. In 1723 Persia ceded the western and southern shores of the Caspian to Russia in return for military aid.

Death

The campaign along the parched shores of the Caspian obviously put a great strain on Peter's health, already undermined by enormous exertions and also by the excesses in which he occasionally indulged himself. In the autumn of 1724, seeing some soldiers in danger of drowning from a ship aground on a sandbank in the Gulf of Finland, he characteristically plunged himself into the icy water to help them. Catching a chill, he became seriously ill in the winter but even so continued to work; indeed, it was at this time that he drew up the instructions for the expedition of Vitus Bering to Kamchatka.

When Peter died early in the following year, he left an empire that stretched from Arkhangelsk (Archangel) on the White Sea to Mazanderan on the Caspian and from the Baltic Sea to the Pacific Ocean. Though he had in 1722 issued a decree reserving to himself the right to nominate his successor, he did not in fact nominate anyone. His widow Catherine, whom he had crowned as empress in 1724, succeeded him to the temporary exclusion of his grandson, the future Peter II.

Internal reforms

At the beginning of Peter's reign, Russia was backward by comparison with the countries of western Europe. This backwardness inhibited foreign policy and even put Russia's national independence in danger. Peter's aim, therefore, was to overtake the developed countries of western Europe as soon as possible, in order both to promote the national economy and to ensure victory in his wars for access to the seas. Breaking the resistance of the boyars (boyar), or members of the ancient landed aristocracy, and of the clergy and severely punishing all other opposition to his projects, he initiated a series of reforms that affected, in the course of 25 years, every field of the national life—administration, industry, commerce, technology, and culture.

The towns

At the beginning of Peter's reign there was already some degree of economic differentiation between the various regions of Russia; and in the towns artisans were establishing small businesses, small-scale production was expanding, and industrial plants and factories were growing up, with both hired workers and serfs employed. There was thus a nascent bourgeoisie, which benefitted considerably from Peter's plans for the development of the national industry and trade. The reform of the urban administration was particularly significant.

By a decree of 1699, townspeople (artisans and tradesmen) were released from subjection to the military governors of the provinces and were authorized to elect municipalities of their own, which would be subordinated to the Moscow municipality, or ratusha—the council of the great merchant community of the capital. This reform was carried further in 1720, with the establishment of a chief magistracy in St. Petersburg, to which the local town magistracies and the elected municipal officers of the towns (mayors, or burmistry; and councillors, or ratmany) were subordinated.

All townspeople, meanwhile, were divided between “regulars” and “commons” (inferiors). The regulars were subdivided between two guilds (guild)—the first comprising rich merchants and members of the liberal professions (doctors, actors, and artists); the second, artisans (classified according to their vocations) and small tradesmen. A merchant belonged to the first or to the second guild according to the amount of his capital; and those who were also manufacturers had special privileges, coming under the jurisdiction of the College of Manufactures and being exempt from the billeting of troops, from elective rotas of duty, and from military service. The commons were hired labourers, without the privileges of regulars.

Thanks to the reforms, the economic activity and the population of the towns increased. Anyone engaged in trade was legally permitted to settle in a town and to register himself in the appropriate category, and there was a right of “free commerce for people of every rank.”

The provinces and the districts

In order to create a more flexible system of control by the central power, Russia was territorially divided in 1708 into eight guberny, or governments, each under a governor appointed by the tsar and vested with administrative, military, and judicial authority. In 1719 these guberny were dissolved into 50 provintsy, or provinces, which in turn were subdivided into districts. The census of 1722, however, was followed by the substitution of a poll tax for the previous hearth tax; and this provoked a wave of popular discontent, against which Peter decided to distribute the army regiments (released from active service by the Peace of Nystad) in garrisons throughout the country and to make their maintenance obligatory on the local populations. Thus came into being the “regimental districts,” which did not coincide with the administrative. The regimental commanders, with their own sphere of jurisdiction and their own requirements, added another layer to the already complex system of local authority.

The central government

In the course of Peter's reign, medieval and obsolescent forms of government gave place to effective autocracy (absolutism). In 1711 he abolished the boyarskaya duma, or boyar council, and established by decree the Senate as the supreme organ of state—to coordinate the action of the various central and local organs, to supervise the collection and expenditure of revenue, and to draft legislation in accordance with his edicts. Martial discipline was extended to civil institutions, and an officer of the guards was always on duty in the Senate. From 1722, moreover, there was a procurator general keeping watch over the daily work of the Senate and its chancellery and acting as “the eye of the sovereign.”

When Peter came to power the central departments of state were the prikazy, or offices, of which there were about 80, functioning in a confused and fragmented way. To replace most of this outmoded system, Peter in 1718 instituted 9 “colleges” (kollegy), or boards, the number of which was by 1722 expanded to 13. Their activities were controlled, on the one hand, by the General Regulation and, on the other, by particular regulations for individual colleges, and indeed there were strict regulations for every branch of the state administration. Crimes against the state came under the jurisdiction of the Preobrazhensky Office, responsible immediately to the tsar.

Industry

A secondary purpose of Peter's Grand Embassy to western Europe in 1697 (see above The Grand Embassy) had been to obtain firsthand acquaintance with advanced industrial techniques, and the exigencies of his great war against Sweden, from 1700, made industrial development an urgent matter. In order to provide armaments and to build his navy (Russia had virtually no warships at all), metallurgical and manufacturing industries on a grand scale had to be created; and Peter devoted himself tirelessly to meeting these needs. Large capital investments were made, and numerous privileges were accorded to businessmen and industrialists. These privileges included the right to buy peasant serfs for labour in workshops, with the result that a class of “enlisted” serfs came into existence, living in specified areas and bound to the factories. The methods of other countries were further studied, and foreign experts were invited to Russia. The overall result was satisfactory: the army and the navy were supplied with their material needs; a great number of manufacturing establishments were founded (mainly with serf labour); the metallurgical industry was so far advanced that by the middle of the 18th century Russia led Europe in this field; and the foreign-trade turnover was increased sevenfold in the course of the reign.

The armed forces

Peter established a regular army on completely modern lines for Russia in the place of the unreliable streltsy and the militia of the gentry. While he drew his officers from the nobility, he conscripted peasants and townspeople into the other ranks. Service was for life. The troops were equipped with flintlock firearms and bayonets of Russian make; uniforms were provided; and regular drilling was introduced. For the artillery, obsolete cannons were replaced with new mortars and guns designed by Russian specialists or even by Peter himself (he drew up projects of his own for multicannon warships, fortresses, and ordnance). The Army Regulations of 1716 were particularly important; they required officers to teach their men “how to act in battle,” “to know the soldier's business from first principles and not to cling blindly to rules,” and to show initiative in the face of the enemy. For the navy, Peter's reign saw the construction, within a few years, of 52 battleships and hundreds of galleys and other craft; thus a powerful Baltic fleet was brought into being. Several special schools prepared their pupils for military or naval service and finally enabled Peter to dispense with foreign experts.

Cultural and educational measures

From January 1, 1700, Peter introduced a new chronology, making the Russian calendar conform to European usage with regard to the year, which in Russia had hitherto been numbered “from the Creation of the World” and had begun on September 1 (he adhered however to the Julian Old Style as opposed to the Gregorian New Style for the days of the month). In 1710 the Old Church Slavonic (Old Church Slavonic language) alphabet was modernized into a secular script.

Peter was the first ruler of Russia to sponsor education on secular lines and to bring an element of state control into that field. Various secular schools were opened; and since too few pupils came from the nobility, the children of soldiers, officials, and churchmen were admitted to them. In many cases, compulsory service to the state was preceded by compulsory education for it. Russians were also permitted to go abroad for their education and indeed were often compelled to do so (at the state's expense). The translation of books from western European languages was actively promoted. The first Russian newspaper, Vedomosti (“Records”), appeared in 1703. The Russian Academy of Sciences was instituted in 1724.

Beside his useful measures, Peter often enforced superficial Europeanization rather brutally; for example, when he decreed that beards should be shorn off and Western dress worn. He personally cut the beards of his boyars and the skirts of their long coats (kaftany). The Raskolniki (Old Believers (Old Believer)) and merchants who insisted on keeping their beards had to pay a special tax, but peasants and the Orthodox clergy were allowed to remain bearded.

The church

In 1721, in order to subject the Orthodox Church of Russia (Russian Orthodox church) to the state, Peter abolished the Patriarchate of Moscow. Thenceforward the patriarch's place as head of the church was taken by a spiritual college, namely the Holy Synod, consisting of representatives of the hierarchy obedient to the tsar's will. A secular official—the ober-prokuror, or chief procurator—was appointed by the tsar to supervise the Holy Synod's activities. The Holy Synod ferociously persecuted all dissenters and conducted a censorship of all publications.

Priests officiating in churches were obliged by Peter to deliver sermons and exhortations that were intended to make the peasantry “listen to reason” and to teach such prayers to children that everyone would grow up “in fear of God” and in awe of the tsar. The regular clergy were forbidden to allow men under 30 years old or serfs to take vows as monks.

The church was thus transformed into a pillar of the absolutist regime. Partly in the interests of the nobility, the extent of land owned by the church was restricted; Peter disposed of ecclesiastical and monastic property and revenues at his own discretion, for state purposes.

The nobility

Peter's internal policy served to protect the interest of Russia's ruling class—the landowners and the nascent bourgeoisie. The material position of the landed nobility was strengthened considerably under Peter. Almost 100,000 acres of land and 175,000 serfs were allotted to it in the first half of the reign alone. Moreover, a decree of 1714 that instituted succession by primogeniture and so prevented the breaking up of large properties also removed the old distinction between pomestya (lands granted by the tsar to the nobility in return for service) and votchiny (patrimonial or allodial lands) so that all such property became hereditary.

Moreover, the status of the nobility was modified by Peter's Table of Ranks (Ranks, Table of) (1722). This replaced the old system of promotion in the state services, which had been according to ancestry, by one of promotion according to services actually rendered. It classified all functionaries—military, naval, and civilian alike—in 14 categories, the 14th being the lowest and the 1st the highest; and admission to the 8th category conferred hereditary nobility. Factory owners and others who had risen to officer's rank could accede to the nobility, which thus received new blood. The predominance of the boyars ended.

Personality and achievement

Peter was of enormous height, more than six and one-half feet (two metres) tall; he was handsome and of unusual physical strength. Unlike all earlier Russian tsars, whose Byzantine splendours he repudiated, he was very simple in his manners; for example, he enjoyed conversation over a mug of beer with shipwrights and sailors from the foreign ships visiting St. Petersburg. Restless, energetic, and impulsive, he did not like splendid clothes that hindered his movements; often he appeared in worn-out shoes and an old hat, still more often in military or naval uniform. He was fond of merrymaking and knew how to conduct it, though his jokes were frequently crude; and he sometimes drank heavily and forced his guests to do so too. A just man who did not tolerate dishonesty, he was terrible in his anger and could be cruel when he encountered opposition: in such moments only his intimates could soothe him—best of all his beloved second wife, Catherine, whom people frequently asked to intercede with him for them. Sometimes Peter would beat his high officials with his stick, from which even Prince A.D. Menshikov (Menshikov, Aleksandr Danilovich), his closest friend, received many a stroke. One of Peter's great gifts of statesmanship was the ability to pick talented collaborators for the highest appointments, whether from the foremost families of the nobility or from far lower levels of society.

As a ruler, Peter often used the methods of a despotic landlord—the whip and arbitrary rule. He always acted as an autocrat, convinced of the wonder-working power of compulsion by the state. Yet with his insatiable capacity for work he saw himself as the state's servant, and whenever he put himself in a subordinate position he would perform his duties with the same conscientiousness that he demanded of others. He began his own army service in the lowest rank and required others likewise to master their profession from its elements upward and to expect promotion only for services of real value.

Peter's personality left its imprint on the whole history of Russia. A man of original and shrewd intellect, exuberant, courageous, industrious, and iron-willed, he could soberly appraise complex and changeable situations so as to uphold consistently the general interests of Russia and his own particular designs. He did not completely bridge the gulf between Russia and the Western countries, but he achieved considerable progress in development of the national economy and trade, education, science and culture, and foreign policy. Russia became a great power, without whose concurrence no important European problem could thenceforth be settled. His internal reforms achieved progress to an extent that no earlier innovator could have envisaged.

Leonid Alekseyevich Nikiforov Ed.

Additional Reading

Pis'ma i bumagi Imperatora Petra Velikogo, 11 vol. (1887–1964), contains Peter's correspondence as well as valuable documents on Russian history up to 1711. Biographies include M.M. Bogoslovskiĭ, Petr I, 5 vol. (1940–48, reissued 1969), a detailed study up to 1700; Ian Grey, Peter the Great, Emperor of All Russia (1960); M.S. Anderson, Peter the Great (1978); Alex De Jonge, Fire and Water: A Life of Peter the Great (1979); Robert K. Massie, Peter the Great: His Life and World (1980, reprinted 1991); and Henri Troyat, Peter the Great (1987; originally published in French, 1979), a popularized account. Peter's reign and the reforms he instituted are analyzed in Sergeĭ M. Solov'ev, Publichnyia chteniia o Petrie Velikom (1872, reissued 1984), by a famous Russian historian; B.H. Sumner, Peter the Great and the Emergence of Russia (1950, reissued 1972); Reinhard Wittram, Peter I, Czar und Kaiser, 2 vol. (1964), and Peter der Grosse: der Eintritt Russlands in die Neuzeit (1954); Ivan I. Golikov, Dieianiia Petra Velikago, 2nd ed., 15 vol. (1837–43), on his reforms; James Cracraft, The Church Reform of Peter the Great (1971); Alexander V. Muller (ed. and trans.), The Spiritual Regulation of Peter the Great, trans. from Russian (1972); and Evgenii V. Anisimov, The Reforms of Peter the Great: Progress Through Coercion in Russia (1993; originally published in Russian, 1989). J.G. Garrard (ed.), The Eighteenth Century in Russia (1973), provides a collection of essays on different aspects of the Westernization of Russia. Peter's military campaigns and his role as the founder of the new Russian army are explored in the works of a prominent Soviet historian, Evgeniĭ V. Tarle, Russkiĭ flot i vneshniaia politika Petra I (1949), also available in a German translation, Russisch-englische Beziehungen unter Peter I (1954), and Severnaia voĭna i shvedskoe nashestvie na Rossiiu (1958). Foreign relations are described by Leonid A. Nikiforov, Russko-angliĭskie otnosheniia pri Petre I (1950); and B.H. Sumner, Peter the Great and the Ottoman Empire (1949, reissued 1965).Xenia Gasiorowska, The Image of Peter the Great in Russian Fiction (1979), is a study of some 60 historical novels written since Pushkin's time. Nicholas V. Riasanovsky, The Image of Peter the Great in Russian History and Thought (1985), examines Peter's influence and how he has been perceived in Russia from 1700 to 1983.Works that put Peter the Great and his reign into historical perspective include Vasili Klyuchevsky, The Rise of the Romanovs, trans. and ed. by Liliana Archibald (1970; originally published in Russian, 1912); E.M. Almedingen, The Romanovs: Three Centuries of an Ill-Fated Dynasty (1966); John D. Bergamini, The Tragic Dynasty: A History of the Romanovs (1969), based on English- and French-language sources; Ian Grey, The Romanovs: The Rise and Fall of a Dynasty (1970); and W. Bruce Lincoln, The Romanovs: Autocrats of All the Russias (1981).Leonid Alekseyevich Nikiforov Ed.

prince of Russia [1690-1718]

Russian in full Aleksey Petrovich

born Feb. 18 [Feb. 28, New Style], 1690, Moscow, Russia

died June 26 [July 7], 1718, St. Petersburg

heir to the throne of Russia, who was accused of trying to overthrow his father, Peter I the Great.

After his mother, Eudoxia, was forced to enter a convent (1698), Alexis was brought up by his aunts and, after 1702, was educated by the tutor Baron Heinrich von Huyssen. Although he dutifully obeyed his father—participating in the siege of Narva (1704) and directing the fortification of Moscow (1707) during the Great Northern War, studying at Dresden in Saxony (1709), and marrying Princess Sophia Charlotte of Brunswick-Wolfenbüttel (1711)—he never developed an enthusiasm for Peter's wars and reforms and became increasingly hostile toward his father. After Peter's second wife, Catherine (Catherine I), provided the tsar with another male heir in 1715, Alexis was offered the choice of either reforming his behaviour or renouncing his right of succession and becoming a monk.

When Peter later ordered Alexis to join him and the Russian army in Denmark (August 1716), Alexis fled to Vienna, where the Holy Roman emperor Charles VI gave him protection. Peter, fearing that his opponents might support Alexis as an alternative ruler, sent envoys to bring Alexis home. Promising him a full pardon, the envoys persuaded Alexis to return to Moscow (Jan. 31 [Feb. 11], 1718). He soon discovered, however, that his father's forgiveness was contingent upon renouncing his right to the throne and denouncing those who had helped him escape.

Although Alexis accepted these terms, Peter, using extraordinarily cruel methods, conducted an investigation of Alexis' supporters, discovered the existence of a potential movement of reaction for which Alexis might become a rallying point, and concluded that his son was involved in a treasonous conspiracy. Alexis was then forced to confess before the Senate, and a special court tried him and condemned him to death. Before his execution, however, he died in the Peter-Paul Fortress from shock and the effects of torture.

▪ prince of Russia [1904-18]

Russian in full Aleksey, or Aleksei, Nikolayevich

born Aug. 12 [Aug. 25, New Style], 1904, Peterhof [now Petrodvorets], near St. Petersburg, Russia

died July 16/17, 1918, Yekaterinburg

only son of Nicholas II, the last tsar of Russia, and the tsarina Alexandra. He was the first male heir born to a reigning tsar since the 17th century.

Alexis was a hemophiliac, and at that time there was no medical treatment that could alleviate his condition or lessen his vulnerability to uncontrolled bleeding. The mystic healer Grigory Yefimovich Rasputin (Rasputin, Grigory Yefimovich) was summoned to the palace to help the little tsarevich during one of his bleeding episodes, and he achieved marked success in relieving Alexis' suffering. Whether through the hypnotic power of suggestion or the use of drugs or both, Rasputin proved indispensable in helping the boy survive several serious crises. Rasputin's subsequent acquisition of enormous influence at the imperial court was due primarily to the relief and gratitude of the royal couple.

In March 1917 the tsar received from the Duma a demand for his abdication. At first he favoured giving up the crown to Alexis, with his brother Grand Duke Michael as regent, but he changed his mind, feeling that the boy was too fragile. His abdication was made then in favour of the Grand Duke Michael, who, however, refused to accept the crown unless it were tendered to him by the will of the people. The last chance for a regime of constitutional monarchy was thus cut short.

Alexis was killed with the other members of his immediate family in a cellar where they had been confined by the Bolsheviks at Yekaterinburg.

▪ tsar of Russia

Russian in full Aleksey Mikhaylovich

born March 9 [March 19, New Style], 1629, Moscow, Russia

died Jan. 29 [Feb. 8], 1676, Moscow

tsar of Russia from 1645 to 1676.

The son of Michael, the first Romanov monarch of Russia (reigned 1613–45), Alexis received a superficial education from his tutor Boris Ivanovich Morozov (Morozov, Boris Ivanovich) before acceding to the throne at the age of 16. Morozov, who was also Alexis' brother-in-law, initially took charge of state affairs, but in 1648 a popular uprising in Moscow forced Alexis to exile Morozov.

Alexis bowed to the rebels' demands and convened a land assembly (zemski sobor), which in 1649 produced a new Russian code of laws (Sobornoye Ulozheniye), which legally defined serfdom. Morozov's place as the court favourite was taken first by Prince N.I. Odoyevsky and then by the patriarch Nikon. Russia accepted sovereignty over the Dnieper Cossacks in January 1654 and, in the following May, entered into a drawn-out war with Poland. This also involved a conflict with Sweden from 1656 to 1661. By the Treaty of Andrusovo (January 1667), which ended the Polish war, Russia won possession of Smolensk, Kiev, and the section of Ukraine lying east of the Dnieper River.

A notable event of Alexis' reign was the schism in the Russian Orthodox church. The tsar backed Nikon's efforts to revise Russian liturgical books and certain rituals that during the preceding century had departed from their Greek models. Although before long he became estranged from Nikon, whose violent temper and authoritarian inclinations had earned him many enemies, the revisions that Nikon initiated were retained, and the opponents of the reform were excommunicated. After the disgrace of Nikon, A.L. Ordyn-Nashchokin was the tsar's principal adviser until A.S. Matveyev took his place in 1671.

During the reign of Alexis the peasants were tied to the land and to the landlord and were thus finally enserfed; the land assemblies were allowed to fall into gradual disuse; and the professional bureaucracy and regular army grew in importance. Because of Alexis' encouragement of trade with the West, foreign influences also began to crack the hitherto fairly solid wall separating Russia from its European neighbours. Dissatisfaction with his reign centred in the cities (which chafed under the economic competition of foreigners) and among the peasantry (which was deprived of the last vestiges of freedom). This social dissatisfaction expressed itself in frequent rebellions, the most savage of which was the peasant uprising on the eastern borderlands led by Stenka Razin from 1667 to 1671.

Virtually all the sources agree that Alexis was a gentle, warmhearted, and popular ruler. His main fault was weakness; throughout most of his reign, matters of state were handled by favourites, some of whom were incompetent or outright fools.

He was married twice, first to Mariya Ilinichna Miloslavskaya (with whom he had two sons, the future tsars Fyodor III and Ivan V, as well as several daughters), then to Natalya Kirillovna Naryshkina, whose son became Peter I the Great.

Catherine I

▪ empress of Russia

Russian in full Yekaterina Alekseyevna, original name Marta Skowronska

born April 15 [April 5, Old Style], 1684

died May 17 [May 6], 1727, St. Petersburg, Russia

peasant woman of Baltic (probably Lithuanian) birth who became the second wife of Peter I the Great (reigned 1682–1725) and empress of Russia (1725–27).

Orphaned at the age of three, Marta Skowronska was raised by a Lutheran pastor in Marienburg (modern Alūksne, Latvia). When the Russians seized Marienburg (1702) during the Great Northern War, Marta was taken prisoner. She later was handed over to a close adviser of Peter I. A short time later she and the tsar became lovers.

In 1703, after the birth of their first child, she was received into the Russian Orthodox church and rechristened Catherine (Yekaterina) Alekseyevna. Subsequently, she became Peter's inseparable companion, and, in February 1712, his wife. On May 18 (May 7), 1724, she was crowned empress-consort of Russia.

When Peter died (Feb. 8 [Jan. 28], 1725) without naming an heir, Catherine's candidacy for the throne was supported by the guards and by several powerful and important individuals. As a result, the Holy Synod, the Senate, and the high officials of the land almost immediately proclaimed Catherine empress of Russia. In February 1726, however, she created the Supreme Privy Council, named six of Peter's former advisers as its members, and effectively transferred control of government affairs to it, thereby undermining the authority of the Senate and the Synod, which had been Peter's main administrative instruments.

Shortly before her death, Catherine appointed Peter's grandson Pyotr Alekseyevich (reigned as Peter II; 1727–30) as her heir. Later, her daughter Elizabeth (reigned 1741–62) and her grandson Pyotr Fyodorovich (reigned as Peter III; 1762) became Russia's sovereigns.

Naryshkina, Natalya Kirillovna

▪ Russian regent

born 1651, Russia

died 1694, Moscow

second wife of Tsar Alexis of Russia and mother of Peter I the Great. After Alexis' death she became the centre of a political faction devoted to placing Peter on the Russian throne.

The daughter of the provincial nobleman Kirill Naryshkin, Natalya married the tsar in 1671. After she gave birth to Peter, Natalya and her relatives and associates increased their political influence.

Immediately after Alexis' death, Natalya's adherents, known as the Naryshkin party, tried to obtain the throne for Peter. But Fyodor, the eldest son of Alexis by his first wife, succeeded his father, and the Naryshkin party lost influence to Fyodor's maternal relatives, the Miloslavsky family. Nevertheless, during Fyodor's reign (1676–82), Natalya, though living in relative obscurity, gained the additional support of the patriarch of Moscow, Ioakim, and of many boyar and gentry families.

When Fyodor died, Ioakim bypassed Ivan (Ivan V), the late tsar's brother, and secured the throne for Peter, naming Natalya regent (April 1682). But the Miloslavsky family, claiming the throne for Ivan, encouraged the streltsy (sovereign's bodyguard), who were the only organized armed force in Moscow, to revolt. After several members of the Naryshkin family had been killed, the Naryshkin party submitted and recognized Ivan V and Peter as corulers, with Ivan as the senior tsar and his sister Sophia as regent for both youths.

During the period of Sophia's regency (1682–89), Natalya and Peter were effectively confined to Preobrazhenskoye, and the Naryshkin family was again excluded from governmental affairs. But in 1689, when Sophia apparently tried to seize the throne in her own name, the Naryshkins rallied their supporters and forced her to yield the throne to Peter (September 1689). Subsequently, until Peter assumed personal control over the government in 1694, Natalya, aided by her brother Lev and Patriarch Ioakim, played the major role in the Muscovite government.

Matveyev, Artamon Sergeyevich

▪ Russian diplomat

Matveyev also spelled Matveev

born 1625

died May 15 [May 25, New Style], 1682, Moscow, Russia

Russian diplomat and statesman who was a friend and influential adviser of Tsar Alexis of Russia (ruled 1645–76) and did much to introduce western European culture into Russia.

Son of an obscure government clerk, Matveyev rose through the ranks to become chief of the Moscow streltsy (household troops) in 1654. In that year he also was entrusted with the negotiations with the Poles that resulted in their surrender of Smolensk to Russia. In 1669 Matveyev became head of the department for Ukrainian affairs, and in 1671 he was appointed head of the foreign department.

In addition to his activities as a statesman, Matveyev was intensely concerned with western European cultural affairs. He imitated Western custom by holding social gatherings at which his wife participated in the discussions; he also taught his son Latin and Greek. As a well-educated man with broad intellectual interests, he enjoyed the confidence of Tsar Alexis, and in 1671 he gave his ward Natalya Kirillovna Naryshkina in marriage to the tsar. Subsequently, he arranged the first theatrical performance to be presented at the Russian court (1672). Despite Matveyev's low birth, Alexis honoured him by raising him to the rank of boyar.

When Alexis died in 1676, Matveyev advocated the succession of Natalya's son Peter. But Fyodor III, Alexis' eldest son by his first wife, ascended the throne, and Matveyev as a consequence of his indiscretion was accused of black magic and fraud. As head of the government department on pharmacy, he had been preparing a book on drugs and medicines, the text of which was found when his house was searched for incriminating evidence. Matveyev was deprived of his rank and possessions and exiled to the far northeastern section of Russia, where he lived until 1682, when he was pardoned and allowed to live at Lukh. After Peter I the Great succeeded Fyodor (April 1682), Matveyev was recalled to Moscow. Four days after his return, however, he was killed by rebellious streltsy, who were intervening in the contest between Peter and his half brother Ivan for possession of the throne.

▪ tsarina of Russia

Russian in full Yevdokiya Fyodorovna Lopukhina

born Aug. 9 [July 30, Old Style], 1669, Moscow, Russia

died Sept. 7 [Aug. 27], 1731, Moscow

tsarina and first wife of Peter I the Great of Russia.

In 1689 she was given in marriage to Peter, a bridegroom of only 17. Endowed with beauty but lacking intelligence and ambition, she had little in common with the young tsar, whose chief interest was the mechanics of war.

In 1698 Peter sent her to a monastery. There she took vows (1699) but left after six months and resumed life as a laywoman. Following the trial of her son, Tsarevich Alexis, for treason (1718), she was kept in confinement at a fortress east of St. Petersburg on Lake Ladoga. Upon the accession (1727) of her grandson Peter II, she was released and later installed at the Voznesensky Convent in Moscow and provided with a generous allowance. After the death of Peter II (1730), she made a feeble, unsuccessful attempt to succeed him.

Russo-Turkish wars

▪ Russo-Turkish history

series of wars between Russia and the Ottoman Empire in the 17th–19th century. The wars reflected the decline of the Ottoman Empire and resulted in the gradual southward extension of Russia's frontier and influence into Ottoman territory. The wars took place in 1676–81, 1687, 1689, 1695–96, 1710–12 (part of the Great Northern War), 1735–39, 1768–74, 1787–91, 1806–12, 1828–29, 1853–56 (part of the Crimean War), and 1877–78. As a result of these wars, Russia was able to extend its European frontiers southward to the Black Sea, southwestward to the Prut River, and south of the Caucasus Mountains in Asia.

The early Russo-Turkish Wars were mostly sparked by Russia's attempts to establish a warm-water port on the Black Sea, which lay in Turkish hands. The first war (1676–81) was fought without success in Ukraine west of the Dnieper River by Russia, which renewed the war with failed invasions of the Crimea in 1687 and 1689. In the war of 1695–96, the Russian tsar Peter I the Great's forces succeeded in capturing the fortress of Azov. In 1710 Turkey entered the Northern War against Russia, and after Peter the Great's attempt to liberate the Balkans from Ottoman rule ended in defeat at the Prut River (1711), he was forced to return Azov to Turkey. War again broke out in 1735, with Russia and Austria in alliance against Turkey. The Russians successfully invaded Turkish-held Moldavia, but their Austrian allies were defeated in the field, and as a result the Russians obtained almost nothing in the Treaty of Belgrade (Belgrade, Treaty of) (Sept. 18, 1739).

The first major Russo-Turkish War (1768–74) began after Turkey demanded that Russia's ruler, Catherine II the Great, abstain from interfering in Poland's internal affairs. The Russians went on to win impressive victories over the Turks. They captured Azov, the Crimea, and Bessarabia, and under Field Marshal P.A. Rumyantsev they overran Moldavia and also defeated the Turks in Bulgaria. The Turks were compelled to seek peace, which was concluded in the Treaty of Küçük Kaynarca (Küçük Kaynarca, Treaty of) (July 21, 1774). This treaty made the Crimean khanate independent of the Turkish sultan; advanced the Russian frontier southward to the Southern (Pivdennyy) Buh River; gave Russia the right to maintain a fleet on the Black Sea; and assigned Russia vague rights of protection over the Ottoman sultan's Christian subjects throughout the Balkans.

Russia was now in a much stronger position to expand, and in 1783 Catherine annexed the Crimean Peninsula outright. War broke out in 1787, with Austria again on the side of Russia (until 1791). Under General A.V. Suvorov, the Russians won several victories that gave them control of the lower Dniester and Danube rivers, and further Russian successes compelled the Turks to sign the Treaty of Jassy (Jassy, Treaty of) (Iaşi) on Jan. 9, 1792. By this treaty Turkey ceded the entire western Ukrainian Black Sea coast (from the Kerch Strait westward to the mouth of the Dniester) to Russia.

When Turkey deposed the Russophile governors of Moldavia and Walachia in 1806, war broke out again, though in a desultory fashion, since Russia was reluctant to concentrate large forces against Turkey while its relations with Napoleonic France were so uncertain. But in 1811, with the prospect of a Franco-Russian war in sight, Russia sought a quick decision on its southern frontier. The Russian field marshal M.I. Kutuzov's victorious campaign of 1811–12 forced the Turks to cede Bessarabia to Russia by the Treaty of Bucharest (May 28, 1812).

Russia had by now secured the entire northern coast of the Black Sea. Its subsequent wars with Turkey were fought to gain influence in the Ottoman Balkans, win control of the Dardanelles and Bosporus straits, and expand into the Caucasus. The Greeks' struggle for independence sparked the Russo-Turkish War of 1828–29, in which Russian forces advanced into Bulgaria, the Caucasus, and northeastern Anatolia itself before the Turks sued for peace. The resulting Treaty of Edirne (Edirne, Treaty of) (Sept. 14, 1829) gave Russia most of the eastern shore of the Black Sea, and Turkey recognized Russian sovereignty over Georgia and parts of present-day Armenia.

The war of 1853–56, known as the Crimean War (q.v.), began after the Russian emperor Nicholas I tried to obtain further concessions from Turkey. Great Britain and France entered the conflict on Turkey's side in 1854, however, and the Treaty of Paris (Paris, Treaty of) (March 30, 1856) that ended the war was a serious diplomatic setback for Russia, though involving few territorial concessions.

The last Russo-Turkish War (1877–78) was also the most important one. In 1877 Russia and its ally Serbia came to the aid of Bosnia and Herzegovina and Bulgaria in their rebellions against Turkish rule. The Russians attacked through Bulgaria, and after successfully concluding the Siege of Pleven they advanced into Thrace, taking Adrianople (now Edirne, Tur.) in January 1878. In March of that year Russia concluded the Treaty of San Stefano (San Stefano, Treaty of) with Turkey. This treaty freed Romania, Serbia, and Montenegro from Turkish rule, gave autonomy to Bosnia and Herzegovina, and created a huge autonomous Bulgaria under Russian protection. Britain and Austria-Hungary, alarmed by the Russian gains contained in the treaty, compelled Russia to accept the Treaty of Berlin (Berlin, Congress of) (July 1878), whereby Russia's military-political gains from the war were severely restricted.

Catherine II

▪ empress of Russia

Introduction

Russian in full Yekaterina Alekseyevna , byname Catherine the Great , Russian Yekaterina Velikaya , original name Sophie Friederike Auguste, Prinzessin (princess) von Anhalt-Zerbst

born April 21 [May 2, New Style], 1729, Stettin, Prussia [now Szczecin, Poland]

died November 6 [November 17], 1796, Tsarskoye Selo [now Pushkin], near St. Petersburg, Russia

German-born empress of Russia (1762–96), who led her country into full participation in the political and cultural life of Europe, carrying on the work begun by Peter the Great. With her ministers she reorganized the administration and law of the Russian Empire and extended Russian territory, adding the Crimea and much of Poland.

Origins and early experience

Sophie Friederike Auguste von Anhalt-Zerbst was the daughter of an obscure German prince, Christian August von Anhalt-Zerbst, but she was related through her mother to the dukes of Holstein. At age 14 she was chosen to be the wife of Karl Ulrich, duke of Holstein-Gottorp, grandson of Peter (Peter III) the Great and heir to the throne of Russia as the grand duke Peter. In 1744 Catherine arrived in Russia, assumed the title of Grand Duchess Catherine Alekseyevna, and married her young cousin the following year. The marriage was a complete failure; the following 18 years were filled with deception and humiliation for her.

Russia at the time was ruled by Peter the Great's daughter, the empress Elizabeth, whose 20-year reign greatly stabilized the monarchy. Devoted to much pleasure and luxury and greatly desirous of giving her court the brilliancy of a European court, Elizabeth prepared the way for Catherine.

Catherine, however, would not have become empress if her husband had been at all normal. He was extremely neurotic, rebellious, obstinate, perhaps impotent, nearly alcoholic, and, most seriously, a fanatical worshipper of Frederick II of Prussia, the foe of the empress Elizabeth. Catherine, by contrast, was clearheaded and ambitious. Her intelligence, flexibility of character, and love of Russia gained her much support.

She was humiliated, bored, and regarded with suspicion while at court, but she found comfort in reading extensively and in preparing herself for her future role as sovereign. Although a woman of little beauty, Catherine possessed considerable charm, a lively intelligence, and extraordinary energy. During her husband's lifetime alone, she had at least three lovers; if her hints are to be believed, none of her three children, not even the heir apparent Paul, was fathered by her husband. Her true passion, however, was ambition; since Peter was incapable of ruling, she saw quite early the possibility of eliminating him and governing Russia herself.

The empress Elizabeth died on December 25, 1761 (January 5, 1762, New Style), while Russia, allied with Austria and France, was engaged in the Seven Years' War against Prussia. Shortly after Elizabeth's death, Peter, now emperor, ended Russia's participation in the war and concluded an alliance with Frederick II of Prussia. He made no attempt to hide his hatred of Russia and his love of his native Germany; discrediting himself endlessly by his foolish actions, he also prepared to rid himself of his wife. Catherine had only to strike: she had the support of the army, especially the regiments at St. Petersburg, where Grigory Orlov (Orlov, Grigory Grigoryevich, Graf), her lover, was stationed; the court; and public opinion in both capitals (Moscow and St. Petersburg). She was also supported by the “enlightened (Enlightenment)” elements of aristocratic society, since she was known for her liberal opinions and admired as one of the most cultivated persons in Russia. On June 28 (July 9, New Style), 1762, she led the regiments that had rallied to her cause into St. Petersburg and had herself proclaimed empress and autocrat in the Kazan Cathedral. Peter III abdicated and was assassinated eight days later. Although Catherine probably did not order the murder of Peter, it was committed by her supporters, and public opinion held her responsible. In September 1762, she was crowned with great ceremony in Moscow, the ancient capital of the tsars, and began a reign that was to span 34 years as empress of Russia under the title of Catherine II.

Early years as empress

Despite Catherine's personal weaknesses, she was above all a ruler. Truly dedicated to her adopted country, she intended to make Russia a prosperous and powerful state. Since her early days in Russia she had dreamed of establishing a reign of order and justice, of spreading education, creating a court to rival Versailles, and developing a national culture that would be more than an imitation of French models. Her projects obviously were too numerous to carry out, even if she could have given her full attention to them.

Her most pressing practical problem, however, was to replenish the state treasury, which was empty when Elizabeth died; this she did in 1762 by secularizing the property of the clergy, who owned one-third of the land and serfs in Russia. The Russian clergy was reduced to a group of state-paid functionaries, losing what little power had been left to it by the reforms of Peter the Great. Since her coup d'etat and Peter's suspicious death demanded both discretion and stability in her dealings with other nations, she continued to preserve friendly relations with Prussia, Russia's old enemy, as well as with the country's traditional allies, France and Austria. In 1764 she resolved the problem of Poland, a kingdom lacking definite boundaries and coveted by three neighbouring powers, by installing one of her old lovers, Stanisław Poniatowski (Poniatowski, Stanisław), a weak man entirely devoted to her, as king of Poland.

Her attempts at reform, however, were less than satisfying. A disciple of the English and French liberal philosophers, she saw very quickly that the reforms advocated by Montesquieu or Jean-Jacques Rousseau, which were difficult enough to put into practice in Europe, did not at all correspond to the realities of an anarchic and backward Russia. In 1767 she convened a commission composed of delegates from all the provinces and from all social classes (except the serfs) for the purpose of ascertaining the true wishes of her people and framing a constitution. The debates went on for months and came to nothing. Catherine's Instruction (Catherine the Great, Instruction of) to the commission was a draft of a constitution and a code of laws. It was considered too liberal for publication in France and remained a dead letter in Russia.

Frustrated in her attempts at reform, Catherine seized the pretext of war with Turkey in 1768 to change her policy; henceforth, emphasis would be placed above all on national grandeur. Since the reign of Peter the Great, the Ottoman Empire had been the traditional enemy of Russia; inevitably, the war fired the patriotism and zeal of Catherine's subjects. Although the naval victory at Çeşme (Çeşme, Battle of) in 1770 brought military glory to the empress, Turkey had not yet been defeated and continued fighting. At that point, Russia encountered unforeseen difficulties.

First, a terrible plague broke out in Moscow; along with the hardships imposed by the war, it created a climate of disaffection and popular agitation. In 1773 Yemelyan Pugachov (Pugachov, Yemelyan Ivanovich), a former officer of the Don Cossacks, pretending to be the dead emperor Peter III, incited the greatest uprising of Russian history prior to the revolution of 1917. Starting in the Ural region, the movement spread rapidly through the vast southeastern provinces, and in June 1774 Pugachov's Cossack troops prepared to march on Moscow. At this point, the war with Turkey ended in a Russian victory, and Catherine sent her crack troops to crush the rebellion. Defeated and captured, Pugachov was beheaded in 1775, but the terror and chaos he inspired were not soon forgotten. Catherine now realized that for her the people were more to be feared than pitied, and that, rather than freeing them, she must tighten their bonds.

Before her accession to power, Catherine had planned to emancipate the serfs (serfdom), on whom the economy of Russia, which was 95 percent agricultural, was based. The serf was the property of the master, and the fortune of a noble was evaluated not in lands but in the “souls” he owned. When confronted with the realities of power, however, Catherine saw very quickly that emancipation of the serfs would never be tolerated by the owners, whom she depended upon for support, and who would throw the country into disorder once they lost their own means of support. Reconciling herself to an unavoidable evil without much difficulty, Catherine turned her attention to organizing and strengthening a system that she herself had condemned as inhuman. She imposed serfdom on the Ukrainians who had until then been free. By distributing the so-called crown lands to her favourites and ministers, she worsened the lot of the peasants, who had enjoyed a certain autonomy. At the end of her reign, there was scarcely a free peasant left in Russia, and, because of more systematized control, the condition of the serf was worse than it had been before Catherine's rule.

Thus, 95 percent of the Russian people did not in any way benefit directly from the achievements of Catherine's reign. Rather, their forced labour financed the immense expenditures required for her ever-growing economic, military, and cultural projects. In these undertakings, at least, she proved herself to be a good administrator and could claim that the blood and sweat of the people had not been wasted.

Influence of Potemkin (Potemkin, Grigory Aleksandrovich, Prince Tavrichesky, Imperial Prince)

In 1774, the year of Russia's defeat of Turkey, Grigory Potemkin (Potemkin, Grigory Aleksandrovich, Prince Tavrichesky, Imperial Prince), who had distinguished himself in the war, became Catherine's lover, and a brilliant career began for this official of the minor nobility, whose intelligence and abilities were equalled only by his ambition. He was to be the only one of Catherine's favourites to play an extensive political role. Ordinarily, the empress did not mix business and pleasure; her ministers were almost always selected for their abilities. In Potemkin she found an extraordinary man whom she could love and respect and with whom she could share her power. As minister he had unlimited powers, even after the end of their liaison, which lasted only two years. Potemkin must be given part of the credit for the somewhat extravagant splendour of Catherine's reign. He had a conception of grandeur that escaped the rather pedestrian German princess, and he understood the effect it produced on the people. A great dreamer, he was avid for territories to conquer and provinces to populate; an experienced diplomat with a knowledge of Russia that Catherine had not yet acquired and as audacious as Catherine was methodical, Potemkin was treated as an equal by the empress up to the time of his death in 1791. They complemented and understood each other, and the ambitious minister expressed his respect for his sovereign through complete devotion to her interests.

The annexation of the Crimea from the Turks in 1783 was Potemkin's work. Through that annexation and the acquisition of the territories of the Crimean khanate, which extended from the Caucasus Mountains to the Bug River in southwestern Russia, Russia held the north shore of the Black Sea and was in a position to threaten the existence of the Ottoman Empire and to establish a foothold in the Mediterranean. Catherine also sought to renew the alliance with Austria, Turkey's neighbour and enemy, and renounced the alliance with Prussia and England, who were alarmed by Russian ambitions. Yet, during Catherine's reign, the country did not become involved in a European war, because the empress scrupulously adhered to the territorial agreements she had concluded with several western European nations.

Catherine's glorification reached its climax in a voyage to the Crimea arranged by Potemkin in 1787. In a festive Arabian Nights atmosphere, the empress crossed the country to take possession of her new provinces; the emperor of Austria, the king of Poland, and innumerable diplomats came to honour her and to enjoy the splendours of what became known as “Cleopatra's fleet,” because Catherine and her court traveled partly by water. She dedicated new towns bearing her name and announced that she ultimately intended to proceed to Constantinople.

Effects of the French Revolution

Catherine, like all the crowned heads of Europe, felt seriously threatened by the French Revolution. The divine right of royalty and the aristocracy was being questioned, and Catherine, although a “friend of the Enlightenment,” had no intention of relinquishing her own privileges: “I am an aristocrat, it is my profession.” In 1790 the writer A.N. Radishchev (Radishchev, Aleksandr Nikolayevich), who attempted to publish a work openly critical of the abuses of serfdom, was tried, condemned to death, then pardoned and exiled. Ironically, the sentiments Radishchev expressed were very similar to Catherine's Instruction of 1767. Next, Poland (Poland, Partitions of), encouraged by the example of France, began agitating for a liberal constitution. In 1792, under the pretext of forestalling the threat of revolution, Catherine sent in troops and the next year annexed most of the western Ukraine, while Prussia helped itself to large territories of western Poland. After the national uprising led by Tadeusz Kościuszko (Kościuszko, Tadeusz) in 1794, Catherine wiped Poland off the map of Europe by dividing it between Russia, Prussia, and Austria in 1795.

Catherine's last years were darkened by the execution of Louis XVI, the advance of the revolutionary armies, and the spread of radical ideas. The empress realized, moreover, that she had no suitable successor. She considered her son Paul an incompetent and unbalanced man; her grandson Alexander was too young yet to rule.

Assessment

Russians, even Soviet Russians, continue to admire Catherine, the German, the usurper and profligate, and regard her as a source of national pride. Non-Russian opinion of Catherine is less favourable. Because Russia under her rule grew strong enough to threaten the other great powers, and because she was in fact a harsh and unscrupulous ruler, she figured in the Western imagination as the incarnation of the immense, backward, yet forbidding country she ruled. One of Catherine's principal glories is to have been a woman who, just as Elizabeth I of England and Queen Victoria gave their names to periods of history, became synonymous with a decisive epoch in the development of her country.

At the end of Catherine's reign, Russia had expanded westward and southward over an area of more than 200,000 square miles, and the Russian rulers' ancient dream of access to the Bosporus Strait (connecting the Black Sea with the Aegean) had become an attainable goal. At the end of her reign Catherine claimed that she had reorganized 29 provinces under her administrative reform plan. An uninhibited spender, she invested funds in many projects. More than a hundred new towns were built; old ones were expanded and renovated. As commodities were plentiful, trade expanded and communications developed. These achievements, together with the glory of military victories and the fame of a brilliant court, to which the greatest minds of Europe were drawn, have won her a distinguished place in history.

Catherine's critics acknowledge her energy and administrative ability but point out that the achievements of her reign were as much due to her associates and to the unaided, historical development of Russian society as to the merits of the empress. And when they judge Catherine the woman, they treat her severely.

Her private life was admittedly not exemplary. She had young lovers up to the time of her unexpected death from a stroke at the age of 67. After the end of her liaison with Potemkin, who perhaps was her morganatic husband, the official favourite changed at least a dozen times; she chose handsome and insignificant young men, who were only, as one of them himself said, “kept girls.” Although in reality devoted to power above all else, she dreamed endlessly of the joys of a shared love, but her position isolated her. She did not love her son Paul, the legitimate heir, whose throne she occupied. On the other hand, she adored her grandsons, particularly the eldest, Alexander, whom she wished to succeed her. In her friendships she was loyal and generous and usually showed mercy toward her enemies.

Yet it cannot be denied that she was also egotistical, pretentious, and extremely domineering, above all a woman of action, capable of being ruthless when her own interest or that of the state was at stake. As she grew older she also became extremely vain: there was some excuse, as the most distinguished minds of Europe heaped flatteries on her that even she ultimately found exaggerated.

A friend of Voltaire and Denis Diderot (Diderot, Denis), she carried on an extensive correspondence with most of the important personages of her time. She was a patron of literature and a promoter of Russian culture; she herself wrote, established literary reviews, encouraged the sciences, and founded schools. Her interests and enthusiasms ranged from construction projects to lawmaking and the collection of art objects; she touched on everything, not always happily but always passionately. She was a woman of elemental energy and intellectual curiosity, desiring to create as well as to control.

Zoé Oldenbourg-Idalie

Additional Reading

Primary sources.

Mémoires de Catherine II, ed. by Dominique Maroger (1953; Eng. trans. 1955), is of great importance for the history of Catherine's beginnings and for an analysis of her character. This edition is not complete, but it constitutes a choice made among the various versions of the autobiography begun by Catherine; all versions stop very near to the date of her accession to power. Equally important are the Correspondance of Catherine II with Voltaire (published in various editions of the complete works of Voltaire, as well as in the Evdokimov edition of the complete works of Catherine II, 1893); the Correspondance avec le Baron F.M. Grimm (1774–1796), Grot edition (1878), is interesting for its autobiographical character; Grimm was Catherine's confidant. See also Lettres d' amour de Catherine II à Potemkine, Georges Oudard edition (1934), which unfortunately is edited without chronological order.

Works about Catherine II and her reign.

V.A. Bilbassov, Geschichte Katharina II, 3 vol. (1891–93; also published in French as Histoire de Catherine II, 1900), is the most important work written about Catherine II, with quotations from many documents of the period; the last volume was banned in Russia under the tsarist regime. Ian Grey, Catherine the Great: Autocrat and Empress of All Russia (1961), a remarkable work, is a penetrating analysis of Catherine's character and notably of her relationships with Potemkin. Olga Wormser, Catherine II (1957; in French), is particularly interesting for its analysis of the social and cultural situation in Russia. Z. Oldenbourg, Catherine de Russie

empress of Russia

Russian in full Yelizaveta Petrovna

born Dec. 18 [Dec. 29, New Style], 1709, Kolomenskoye, near Moscow, Russia

died Dec. 25, 1761, [Jan. 5, 1762], St. Petersburg

empress of Russia from 1741 to 1761 (1762, New Style).

The daughter of Peter I the Great (reigned 1682–1725) and Catherine I (reigned 1725–27), Elizabeth grew up to be a beautiful, charming, intelligent, and vivacious young woman. Despite her talents and popularity, particularly among the guards, she played only a minor political role during the reigns of Peter II (reigned 1727–30) and Empress Anna (reigned 1730–40). But when Anna Leopoldovna assumed the regency for her son Ivan VI (1740–41) and threatened Elizabeth with banishment to a convent, the young princess allowed herself to be influenced by the French ambassador and members of the Russian court who hoped to reduce German domination over Russian affairs and reverse Russia's pro-Austrian, anti-French foreign policy. On the night of Nov. 24–25 (Dec. 5–6), 1741, she staged a coup d'état, arresting the infant emperor, his mother, and their chief advisers; after summoning all the civil and ecclesiastical notables of St. Petersburg, Elizabeth was proclaimed empress of Russia.

Upon ascending the throne, Elizabeth abolished the Cabinet council system of government that had been employed by her predecessors and formally reconstituted the Senate as it had been created by her father. As a result of this and similar measures, her reign has been generally characterized as a return to the principles and traditions of Peter the Great (Peter I). In fact, Elizabeth's restoration of the Senate as the chief governing body was only nominal (the country really being ruled by her private chancery), and the empress actually abolished some of her father's major reforms. Furthermore, rather than assume a dominant role in government as Peter had done, Elizabeth occupied herself with splendid court and church activities and the purchase of stylish Western clothing. She also encouraged the development of education and art, founding Russia's first university (in Moscow) and the Academy of Arts (in St. Petersburg) and building the extravagant Winter Palace (also in St. Petersburg). She left control of most state affairs to her advisers and favourites, under whose leadership the effectiveness of Russia's government was handicapped by continual court intrigues; the country's financial situation deteriorated; and the gentry acquired broad privileges at the expense of the peasantry.

Simultaneously, however, Russia's prestige as a major European power grew. Guided by Aleksey Bestuzhev-Ryumin, who enjoyed Elizabeth's complete confidence, the country firmly adhered to a pro-Austrian, anti-Prussian foreign policy, annexed a portion of southern Finland after fighting a war with Sweden (1741–43), improved its relations with Great Britain, and successfully conducted hostilities against Prussia during the Seven Years' War (1756–63).

Before Russia and its allies, France and Austria, could force Prussia's collapse, however, Elizabeth died, leaving her throne to her nephew Peter III, who was a great admirer of Frederick II the Great of Prussia and who withdrew Russia from the war.

Orlov, Grigory Grigoryevich, Graf

▪ Russian military officer

born Oct. 17 [Oct. 6, Old Style], 1734, Lyutkino, Tver Province, Russia

died April 24 [April 13], 1783, Neskuchnoye, near Moscow

military officer and lover of Catherine II, empress of Russia from 1762 to 1796. He organized the coup d'état that placed Catherine on the Russian throne and subsequently was her close adviser.

Having entered the cadet corps in 1749, Orlov became an artillery officer and fought in the Battle of Zorndorf (1758) during the Seven Years' War (1756–63). In 1759, after escorting a Prussian prisoner of war to St. Petersburg, he was introduced to the grand duke Peter and his wife, Catherine. Leading a riotous life in the capital, Orlov caught Catherine's fancy, and around 1760 he became her lover.

After Peter ascended the Russian throne (1762) as Peter III, Orlov and his brother Aleksey Grigoryevich planned the coup d'état of July 1762 that overthrew Peter and made Catherine Russia's empress. Catherine then gave her lover the title of count, promoted him to the rank of adjutant general, and made him director-general of engineers and general in chief, but her political mentor, Nikita Panin, frustrated her intention of marrying Orlov. Grigory then began to study natural science and was one of the founders of the Free Economic Society (1765), which was organized to modernize the country's agricultural system.

While Catherine was composing her “Instruction” for the legislative commission that was to devise liberal government reforms and formulate a new legal code, Orlov acted as her consultant, and later, when he was a member of the commission (1767–68), he strongly urged the passage of reforms that would improve the condition of the serfs. The commission, however, adjourned without making any substantial proposals. In 1772 Catherine sent Orlov as her chief delegate to a peace conference to end the Russo-Turkish War that had begun in 1768, but he advocated the liberation of Christian subjects from Turkish rule, as well as the dismemberment of the Ottoman Empire, and thereby failed in his mission; peace was not concluded until 1774.

Around 1772 Orlov also ceased to be Catherine's lover; he subsequently left Russia (1775) and married a cousin (1777). After his wife's death (1782) he lost his sanity and returned to his estate in Russia.

Catherine the Great, Instruction of

▪ Russian political doctrine

Russian Nakaz Yekateriny Velikoy

(Aug. 10 [July 30, old style], 1767), in Russian history, document prepared by Empress Catherine II that recommended liberal, humanitarian political theories for use as the basis of government reform and the formulation of a new legal code. The Instruction was written as a guide for a legislative commission that was intended to consider internal reforms and to devise a new code of laws.

The Instruction generally favoured the creation of a society of free individuals acting in accordance with the law. It maintained that all men should be considered equal before the law; that law should protect the populace, not oppress it; and that law should forbid only acts directly harmful to an individual or the community, leaving the people free to do anything not forbidden. It disapproved of capital punishment, torture, and the perpetuation of serfdom. But it also upheld the principle of absolutism in government, insisting that all political power was derived from the autocrat, who was subject to no law.

The Instruction had little impact within Russia. When the legislative commission adjourned (December 1768), it had neither prepared a legal code nor agreed upon measures for restructuring the government; and Catherine made no further efforts to create legislation to implement her principles. The Instruction did serve, however, as a major stimulus to Russian political thought.

Pugachov, Yemelyan Ivanovich

▪ Russian leader

Pugachov also spelled Pugachev

born c. 1742, , Zimoveyskaya-na-Donu, Russia

died Jan. 21 [Jan. 10, old style], 1775, Moscow

leader of a major Cossack and peasant rebellion in Russia (Pugachov Rebellion, 1773–75).

An illiterate Don Cossack, Pugachov fought in the Russian Army in the final battles of the Seven Years' War (1756–63), in Russia's campaign in Poland (1764), and in the Russo-Turkish War of 1768–74. Following the siege and conquest of Bendery (1769–70), however, he returned home as an invalid. For three years after his recovery, he wandered, particularly among settlements of Old Believers, a dissident religious group that exercised considerable influence over him.

Learning in the course of his travels of the Yaik (Ural) Cossack Rebellion of 1772 and of its cruel suppression, Pugachov proceeded to Yaitsky Gorodok (now Oral), where the Cossacks remained discontented. Although he was arrested there for desertion from the army, imprisoned at Kazan, and sentenced to be deported to Siberia, he escaped and in June 1773 appeared in the steppes east of the Volga River. Claiming to be Emperor Peter III (who had been deposed by his wife, Catherine II the Great, and assassinated in 1762), Pugachov decreed the abolition of serfdom and gathered a substantial following, including Yaik Cossacks, peasant workers in the mines and factories of the Urals, agricultural peasants, clergymen, and the Bashkirs. Planning ultimately to depose Catherine, Pugachov stormed and laid siege to Orenburg, an important commercial and industrial centre of the Ural region (fall 1773). As the landowners of the region, fearing for their lives, fled to Moscow, Catherine recognized the seriousness of the rebellion and sent an army commanded by Gen. A.I. Bibikov against Pugachov (January 1774). In the spring Bibikov defeated Pugachov at Tatishchevo, west of Orenburg, but Pugachov proceeded to Kazan and burned the city (July 1774). He was defeated again several days later, but he crossed the Volga River, intending to gather reinforcements among the Don Cossacks. He captured Saratov (August 1774) and besieged Tsaritsyn (now Volgograd), where Gen. A.V. Suvorov finally defeated him (Sept. 3 [Aug. 23, old style], 1774). Pugachov escaped but was betrayed by some Yaik Cossacks, sent to Moscow, and executed.

serfdom

condition in medieval Europe in which a tenant farmer was bound to a hereditary plot of land and to the will of his landlord. The vast majority of serfs in medieval Europe obtained their subsistence by cultivating a plot of land that was owned by a lord. This was the essential feature differentiating serfs from slaves, who were bought and sold without reference to a plot of land. The serf provided his own food and clothing from his own productive efforts. A substantial proportion of the grain the serf grew on his holding had to be given to his lord. The lord could also compel the serf to cultivate that portion of the lord's land that was not held by other tenants (called demesne land). The serf also had to use his lord's grain mills and no others.

The essential additional mark of serfdom was the lack of many of the personal liberties that were held by freedmen. Chief among these was the serf's lack of freedom of movement; he could not permanently leave his holding or his village without his lord's permission. Neither could the serf marry, change his occupation, or dispose of his property without his lord's permission. He was bound to his designated plot of land and could be transferred along with that land to a new lord. Serfs were often harshly treated and had little legal redress against the actions of their lords. A serf could become a freedman only through manumission, enfranchisement, or escape.

From as early as the 2nd century CE, many of the large, privately held estates in the Roman Empire that had been worked by gangs of slaves were gradually broken up into peasant holdings. These peasants of the late Roman Empire, many of whom were descendants of slaves, came to depend on larger landowners and other important persons for protection from state tax collectors and, later, from barbarian invaders and oppressive neighbours. Some of these coloni (colonus), as the dependent peasants were called, may have taken up holdings granted them by a proprietor, or they may have surrendered their own lands to him in return for such protection. In any case, it became a practice for the dependent peasant to swear fealty to a proprietor, thus becoming bound to that lord.

The main problem with the coloni was that of preventing them from leaving the land they had agreed to cultivate as tenant farmers. The solution was to legally bind them to their holdings. Accordingly, a legal code established by the Roman emperor Constantine (Constantine I) in 332 demanded labour services to be paid to the lord by the coloni. Although the coloni were legally free, the conditions of fealty required them to cultivate their lord's untenanted lands as well as their leased plot. This not only tied them to their holdings but also made their social status essentially servile, since the exaction of labour services required the landlord's agents to exercise discipline over the coloni. The threat, or the exercise, of this discipline was recognized as one of the clearest signs of a man's personal subjection.

By the 6th century the servi, or serfs, as the servile peasants came to be called, were treated as an inferior element in society. Serfs subsequently became a major class in the small, decentralized polities that characterized most of Europe from the fall of the Roman Empire in the 5th century to the initial reconstitution of feudal monarchies, duchies, and counties in the 12th century.

By the 14th century, economic conditions in western Europe were favourable to the replacement of serfs by a free peasantry. The growth of the power of central and regional governments permitted the enforcement of peasant-landlord contracts without the need for peasant servility, and the final abandonment of labour services on demesnes removed the need for the direct exercise of labour discipline on the peasantry. The drastic population decline in Europe after 1350 as a result of the Black Death left much arable land uncultivated and also created an acute labour shortage, both economically favourable events for the peasantry. And finally, the endemic peasant uprisings in western Europe during the 14th and 15th centuries also forced more favourable terms of peasant tenure. Although the new peasants were not necessarily better off economically than were their servile forebears, they had increased personal liberties and were no longer entirely subject to the will of the lords whose lands they worked.

This favourable evolution was not shared by the peasants of eastern Europe. Peasant conditions there in the 14th century do not seem to have been worse than those of the west, and in some ways they were better, because the colonization of forestlands in eastern Germany, Poland, Bohemia, Moravia, and Hungary had led to the establishment of many free-peasant communities. But a combination of political and economic circumstances reversed these developments. The chief reason was that the wars that devastated eastern Europe in the 14th and 15th centuries tended to increase the power of the nobility at the expense of the central governments. In eastern Germany, Prussia, Poland, and Russia, this development coincided with an increased demand for grain from western Europe. To profit from this demand, nobles and other landlords took back peasant holdings, expanded their own cultivation, and made heavy demands for peasant labour services. Peasant status from eastern Germany to Muscovy consequently deteriorated sharply. Not until the late 18th century were the peasants of the Austro-Hungarian Empire freed from serfdom, thus recovering their freedom of movement and marriage and the right to learn a profession according to personal choice. The serfs of Russia were not given their personal freedom and their own allotments of land until Alexander II's Edict of Emancipation of 1861.

Throughout Chinese history, land-bound peasants were considered freemen in law but depended entirely upon the landowner for subsistence. In this system of serfdom, peasants could be traded, punished without due process of law, and made to pay tribute to the lord with labour. All serfs were freed, however, upon the creation of the People's Republic of China in 1949.

Potemkin, Grigory Aleksandrovich, Prince Tavrichesky, Imperial Prince

▪ Russian statesman

born Sept. 13 [Sept. 24, New Style], 1739, Chizovo, Russia

died Oct. 5 [Oct. 16], 1791, near Iaşi [now in Romania]

Russian army officer and statesman, for two years Empress Catherine II's (Catherine II) lover and for 17 years the most powerful man in the empire. An able administrator, licentious, extravagant, loyal, generous, and magnanimous, he was the subject of many anecdotes.

Educated at the University of Moscow, Potemkin entered the horseguards in 1755. He helped bring Catherine II to power as empress and was given a small estate. He shone in the Turkish War of 1768–74 and became Catherine's lover in 1774. Made commander in chief and governor general of “New Russia” (southern Ukraine), he remained friendly with her, and his influence was unshaken despite Catherine's taking subsequent lovers.

Potemkin was deeply interested in the question of Russia's southern boundaries and the fate of the Turkish Empire. In 1776 he sketched the plan for the conquest of the Crimea, which was subsequently realized. He was also busy with the so-called Greek project, which aimed at restoring the Byzantine Empire under one of Catherine's grandsons. In many of the Balkan lands he had well-informed agents.

After he became field marshal, in 1784, he introduced many reforms into the army and built a fleet in the Black Sea, which, though constructed of inferior materials, served well in Catherine's second Turkish War (1787–91). The arsenal of Kherson, begun in 1778, the harbour of Sevastopol, built in 1784, and the new fleet of 15 ships of the line and 25 smaller vessels were monuments to his genius. But there was exaggeration in all his enterprises. He spared neither men, money, nor himself in attempting to carry out a gigantic scheme for the colonization of the Ukrainian steppe; but he never calculated the cost, and most of the plan had to be abandoned when but half accomplished. Even so, Catherine's tour of the south in 1787 was a triumph for Potemkin, for he disguised all the weak points of his administration—hence the apocryphal tale of his erecting artificial villages to be seen by the empress in passing. (“Potemkin village” came to denote any pretentious facade designed to cover up a shabby or undesirable condition.) Joseph II of Austria had already made him a prince of the Holy Roman Empire (1776); Catherine made him prince of Tauris in 1783.

When the second Turkish War began, the founder of New Russia acted as commander in chief. But the army was ill-equipped and unprepared; and Potemkin, in a fit of depression, would have resigned but for the steady encouragement of the empress. Only after A.V. Suvorov had valiantly defended Kinburn did he take heart again and besiege and capture Ochakov and Bendery. In 1790 he conducted the military operations on the Dniester River and held his court at Iaşi with more than Asiatic pomp. In 1791 he returned to St. Petersburg, where, along with his friend A.A. Bezborodko, he made vain efforts to overthrow Catherine's newest and last favourite, Platon Zubov. The empress grew impatient and compelled him in 1791 to return to Iaşi to conduct the peace negotiations as chief Russian plenipotentiary. He died while on his way to Nikolayev (now Mykolayiv, Ukraine).

Radishchev, Aleksandr Nikolayevich

▪ Russian author

born Aug. 20 [Aug. 31, New Style], 1749, Moscow, Russia

died Sept. 12 [Sept. 24], 1802, St. Petersburg

writer who founded the revolutionary tradition in Russian literature and thought.

Radishchev, a nobleman, was educated in Moscow (1757–62), at the St. Petersburg Corps of Pages (1763–66), and at Leipzig, where he studied law (1766–71). His career as a civil servant brought him into contact with people from all social strata. Under the influence of the cult of sentiment developed by such writers as Jean-Jacques Rousseau, he wrote his most important work, Puteshestvie iz Peterburga v Moskvu (1790; A Journey from St. Petersburg to Moscow), in which he collected, within the framework of an imaginary journey, all the examples of social injustice, wretchedness, and brutality he had seen. Though the book was an indictment of serfdom, autocracy, and censorship, Radishchev intended it for the enlightenment of Catherine the Great, who he assumed was unaware of such conditions. Its unfortunate timing (the year after the French Revolution) led to his immediate arrest and sentence to death. The sentence was commuted to 10 years' exile in Siberia, where he remained until 1797.

Radishchev's harsh treatment chilled liberal hopes for reform. In 1801 he was pardoned by Alexander I and employed by the government to draft legal reforms, but he committed suicide a year later. Though his work has slight claim to literary quality, his fame was great and his thought inspired later generations, especially the Decembrists (Decembrist), an elite group of intellectuals and noblemen who staged an abortive rebellion against autocracy in 1825.

Menshikov, Aleksandr Danilovich

▪ Russian statesman

born Nov. 16 [Nov. 6, old style], 1673, Moscow

died Nov. 23 [Nov. 12, O.S.], 1729, Berezov, Siberia, Russian Empire

prominent Russian political figure during and after the reign of Peter I the Great. A gifted general and administrator, he eventually became the most powerful official in the empire, but his insatiable greed and ambition ultimately resulted in his downfall.

Of humble origins, Menshikov became an orderly for Peter I in 1686 and soon became the tsar's favourite. As a commander during the Northern War against the Swedes after 1700, he scored a number of major victories, eventually receiving the title of field marshal. But he also gave increasing evidence of rapacity. As an administrator after 1714, he was under almost continuous investigation for corrupt practices; and, were it not for his indispensable abilities, he would likely have been stripped of power much earlier than he was.

Having fallen into disgrace toward the end of Peter's reign, Menshikov succeeded in having his ally Catherine, Peter's widow, named empress in 1725, at which point he became virtual ruler of Russia. When Catherine became mortally ill two years later he threw his support to Pyotr Alexeyevich, Peter the Great's grandson, and arranged to have his daughter marry the young tsar, now Peter II. However, his enemies managed to turn Peter II against him, whereupon he was arrested, stripped of his rank and property, and sent to Siberia, where he died

Catherine I

▪ empress of Russia

Russian in full Yekaterina Alekseyevna, original name Marta Skowronska

born April 15 [April 5, Old Style], 1684

died May 17 [May 6], 1727, St. Petersburg, Russia

peasant woman of Baltic (probably Lithuanian) birth who became the second wife of Peter I the Great (reigned 1682–1725) and empress of Russia (1725–27).

Orphaned at the age of three, Marta Skowronska was raised by a Lutheran pastor in Marienburg (modern Alūksne, Latvia). When the Russians seized Marienburg (1702) during the Great Northern War, Marta was taken prisoner. She later was handed over to a close adviser of Peter I. A short time later she and the tsar became lovers.

In 1703, after the birth of their first child, she was received into the Russian Orthodox church and rechristened Catherine (Yekaterina) Alekseyevna. Subsequently, she became Peter's inseparable companion, and, in February 1712, his wife. On May 18 (May 7), 1724, she was crowned empress-consort of Russia.

When Peter died (Feb. 8 [Jan. 28], 1725) without naming an heir, Catherine's candidacy for the throne was supported by the guards and by several powerful and important individuals. As a result, the Holy Synod, the Senate, and the high officials of the land almost immediately proclaimed Catherine empress of Russia. In February 1726, however, she created the Supreme Privy Council, named six of Peter's former advisers as its members, and effectively transferred control of government affairs to it, thereby undermining the authority of the Senate and the Synod, which had been Peter's main administrative instruments.

Shortly before her death, Catherine appointed Peter's grandson Pyotr Alekseyevich (reigned as Peter II; 1727–30) as her heir. Later, her daughter Elizabeth (reigned 1741–62) and her grandson Pyotr Fyodorovich (reigned as Peter III; 1762) became Russia's sovereigns.

Ranks, Table of

▪ Russian government

Russian Tabel O Rangakh

(Jan. 24, 1722), classification of grades in the Russian military, naval, and civil services into a hierarchy of 14 categories and the foundation of a system of promotion based on personal ability and performance rather than on birth and genealogy. This system, introduced by Peter I the Great, granted anyone who attained the eighth rank the status of a hereditary noble. It thus caused dissatisfaction among the old aristocracy, which lost its exclusiveness as well as its hereditary right to high office. The Table of Ranks, with minor changes, was used until 1917.

History

The early period

Foundation and early growth

Settlement of the region around the head of the Gulf of Finland (Finland, Gulf of) by Russians began in the 8th or 9th century AD. Known then as Izhorskaya Zemlya or, more commonly, as Ingermanland or Ingria, the region came under the control of Novgorod, but it long remained thinly populated. In the 15th century the area passed with Novgorod into the possession of the grand princes of Moscow. Sweden annexed Ingria in 1617 and established fortresses along the Neva River. During the Second Northern War (Northern War, Second) (1700–21), Peter I (the Great) (Peter I), seeking a sea outlet to the west, constructed a fleet on the Svir River (which connects Lakes Onega and Ladoga) and, sailing across Lake Ladoga (Ladoga, Lake), launched an attack on the fortress of Noteburg (now Petrokrepost), where the Neva flows out of Ladoga. In 1703 Noteburg fell to Peter; afterward he captured the Swedish fortress of Nienshants on the lower Neva, thus gaining control of the delta.

On May 16 (May 27, New Style), 1703, shortly after the fall of Nienshants, Peter himself laid the foundation stones for the Peter-Paul Fortress on Zayachy Island. This date is taken as the founding date of St. Petersburg. In the spring of the following year, Peter established the fortress of Kronshlot (later Kronshtadt), on Kotlin Island in the Gulf of Finland, to protect the approaches to the delta. At the same time, he founded the Admiralty shipyard on the riverbank opposite the Peter-Paul Fortress; in 1706 its first warship was launched. Around the fortress and shipyard Peter began the building of a new city to serve as his “window on Europe.” Just upstream of the Peter-Paul Fortress, the city's first small house was built for Peter himself during the early days of the St. Petersburg's construction (it is preserved as a museum).

Although the first dwellings were single-storied and made of wood, it was not long before stone buildings were erected. The first stone palace (still preserved) was completed in 1714 for Prince Aleksandr Danilovich Menshikov (Menshikov, Aleksandr Danilovich), first governor of the city. From the start the city was planned as an imposing capital, on a regular street pattern, with spacious squares and broad avenues radiating out from the Admiralty. Architects, craftsmen, and artisans were brought from all over Russia and from many foreign countries to construct and embellish the new town. In 1712 the capital of Russia was transferred there from Moscow, although it was not until 1721 that Sweden, in the Peace of Nystad, formally ceded sovereignty of the area to Russia. Members of the nobility and merchant class were compelled by Peter to move to the new capital and to build houses for themselves. Government buildings and private palaces and houses arose swiftly; among the earliest buildings were the Exchange (now the Naval Museum), the Naval Customs House (now the Pushkin House, or Institute of Russian Literature), and marine hospital, together with the Summer Palace. Canals for drainage were cut through the marshy left bank of the Admiralty Side. The first floating bridge over the Neva was constructed in 1727, and soon more than 370 bridges had been built across the many canals and river channels. Marshy, flood-prone land and an inhospitable climate made construction expensive in terms of human life; St. Petersburg, it was later suggested, rested on a swamp of human bones.

A harbour was constructed, and Peter took measures to curtail traffic through Arkhangelsk on the White Sea, previously Russia's major port. In consequence, as early as 1726 St. Petersburg was handling 90 percent of Russia's foreign trade. In 1703 work began on the Vyshnevolotsky Canal in the Valdai Hills, the first link in a chain that by 1709 gave the capital a direct water route to central Russia and all of the Volga River basin. Industry soon began to develop. The original and flourishing Admiralty shipyard was joined by enterprises to supply its needs and those of the growing fleet—a foundry to produce cannons, a gunpowder factory, and a tar works. Merchantmen as well as warships were built, and, before the end of the 18th century, papermaking, printing, and food, clothing, and footwear industries were established; as early as the 1740s a factory was set up to make china. By 1765 the population numbered 150,300, and by the end of the century it reached 220,200, of whom more than a third were in the armed forces or the administration.

The rise to splendour

The growing city displayed a remarkable richness of architecture and harmony of style. Initially the style was one of simple but elegant restraint, represented in the cathedral of the Peter-Paul Fortress and in the Summer Palace. In the mid-18th century an indelible stamp was put on the city's appearance by the architects Bartolomeo F. Rastrelli, Savva I. Chevakinsky, and Vasily P. Stasov, working in the Russian Baroque style, which combined clear-cut, even austere lines with richness of decoration and use of colour. To this period belong the Winter Palace, the Smolny Convent, and the Vorontsov and Stroganov palaces, among others; outside the city were built the summer palaces of Peterhof (now Petrodvorets) and of Tsarskoye Selo (now Pushkin). After a transitional period dominated by the architecture of Jean-Baptiste M. Vallin de la Mothe and Aleksandr Kokorinov, toward the end of the 18th century a pure Neoclassical style emerged under the architects Giacomo Quarenghi (Quarenghi, Giacomo Antonio Domenico), Carlo Rossi, Andrey Voronikhin, and others. The Kazan and St. Isaac's cathedrals, the Smolny Institute, the new Admiralty, the Senate, and the Mikhaylovsky Palace (now the State Russian Museum) are representative of the splendid buildings of this period.

Within this grand architectural setting, cultural life developed and flourished. The University of St. Petersburg was founded in 1724. In 1773 the Institute of Mines was established. Many of the most celebrated names in Russia in the spheres of learning, science, and the arts are associated with the city: Mikhail V. Lomonosov (Lomonosov, Mikhail Vasilyevich), Dmitry I. Mendeleyev (Mendeleyev, Dmitry Ivanovich), Ivan Pavlov (Pavlov, Ivan Petrovich), Aleksandr Pushkin (Pushkin, Aleksandr Sergeyevich), Leo Tolstoy (Tolstoy, Leo), and Fyodor Dostoyevsky (Dostoyevsky, Fyodor), among others. Dostoyevsky's Crime and Punishment was set in the city, and the buildings described in the novel are a focus of tourism. As early as 1738 the first ballet school in Russia was opened in St. Petersburg; in the 19th century, under Marius Petipa (Petipa, Marius), the Russian ballet rose to worldwide renown and produced such dancers as Vaslav Nijinsky (Nijinsky, Vaslav), Tamara Karsavina (Karsavina, Tamara Platonovna), and Anna Pavlova (Pavlova, Anna). In 1862 the first conservatory of music in Russia opened its doors, and there the premieres of works by Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky (Tchaikovsky, Pyotr Ilyich), Nikolay Rimsky-Korsakov (Rimsky-Korsakov, Nikolay), Sergey Rachmaninoff (Rachmaninoff, Sergey), and other composers were performed. Overall, the imperial court stood as the focus and patron of the city's cultural life; its ostentatious splendour and wealth were legendary throughout Europe.

Evolution of the modern city

The road to revolution

The imperial magnificence, centred on the tsarist autocracy, was in sharp contrast to the other side of St. Petersburg's development, the growth of its industrial proletariat. During the 19th century there was much industrial growth in the city, accelerated by improvements in communications and extension of trade. Navigation was opened on the Mariinsky (1810) and Tikhvin (1811) canal systems, which replaced an old and inadequate system. In 1813 the first Russian steamship was built in St. Petersburg, and in 1837 the first Russian railway was constructed from the city to the Summer Palace in Tsarskoye Selo. Five years later work started on the railway to Moscow, opened to traffic in 1851. A line to Warsaw was built in 1861–62, followed by still others. In particular, the cotton textile and metalworking industries flourished, the former using imported raw materials. By the 1840s more than three-fifths of Russian imports were entering by way of St. Petersburg. In 1885 a channel was dredged to give larger ships access to the port. City growth and industrialization were stimulated by the emancipation of the Russian serfs in 1861, which allowed far greater mobility of labour. From 539,400 inhabitants in 1864, the population rose to about 1,500,000 in 1900, largely by migration from rural areas (as late as 1910 only one-third of the population had been born in the city). By 1917 the total had risen to about 2,500,000.

The factory environment in St. Petersburg became a breeding ground for revolution. With the development of metalworking and engineering as the primary industries, there arose a skilled labour force, increasingly alert politically. Moreover, the factory workers, who numbered nearly 250,000 in 1914, tended to be concentrated in plants of far larger size than was usual in Russia; the Putilov (later renamed Kirov) armaments works alone employed about 13,000. It was thus easier for revolutionaries to spread their ideas and for workers' groups to organize than it was elsewhere in Russia. At the same time, the growth of the city was characterized by a belated and slow development of public transport, making it necessary for workers to live close to their place of work, in conditions of appalling overcrowding (more than 180,000 per square mile in the centre), squalor, and lack of sanitation. Throughout the period before 1917 the city administration was lacking in efficiency and often in funds, and the provision of all public services—even a water supply—was inadequate. Outbreaks of serious epidemics were commonplace.

The first serious revolutionary outbreak in St. Petersburg came on Dec. 14 (Dec. 26, New Style), 1825: the Decembrist insurrection, organized largely by liberal aristocrats and army officers seeking a liberal constitution and an end to serfdom. It was ruthlessly suppressed. During the rest of the 19th century, workers' revolutionary activity and unrest steadily increased, with ever more frequent strikes and outbreaks of violence. These culminated in the general strike of January 1905, when some 150,000 workers took part. On what became known as Bloody Sunday, January 9 (January 22, New Style), a mass march to the Winter Palace, bearing a petition to the tsar, was met by troops who opened fire; more than 100 people were killed and hundreds more wounded. The situation developed into revolution (Russian Revolution of 1905), spreading throughout Russia. Although it was again crushed, underground revolutionary activity continued.

The outbreak of World War I in 1914 brought an upsurge of patriotic fervour centred on the tsar. The Germanic form of the city's name was changed to its Russian version, Petrograd. The military disasters of the war and the worsening economic situation, however, revived and intensified discontent. Transport inefficiencies led to severe shortages of food and other supplies. On Feb. 26 (March 11, New Style), 1917, with a general strike in effect, disorder broke out. The authorities were slow to act and lost all control. The Petrograd Soviet of Workers' and Soldiers' Deputies was formed on February 27 (March 12, New Style). On March 2 (March 15, New Style) the tsar abdicated. A provisional government was set up, eventually under the premiership of Aleksandr Kerensky (Kerensky, Aleksandr Fyodorovich). On April 3 (April 16, New Style) Vladimir Ilich Lenin (Lenin, Vladimir Ilich) returned to Petrograd from Switzerland and set about organizing the overthrow of the provisional government. Demonstrations in July were suppressed, but on October 25 (November 7, New Style) Bolshevik-led workers and sailors stormed the Winter Palace, deposing the provisional government and establishing the Bolshevik Party in power.

The Russian Revolution of 1917, which changed the course of history, was spearheaded by the Petrograd proletariat and the sailors from Kronshtadt. In January 1918 a Constituent Assembly met in Petrograd, but the Bolsheviks, who had won only a minority of seats, dispersed it and consolidated their authority.

Poltava, Battle of

▪ Europe [1709]

(June 27 [July 8, New Style], 1709), the decisive victory of Peter I the Great of Russia over Charles XII of Sweden in the Great Northern War. The battle ended Sweden's status as a major power and marked the beginning of Russian supremacy in eastern Europe. It was fought north and west of Poltava, west of the Vorskla River, in the Ukraine, between 80,000 Russian troops under Peter the Great and the general Prince Aleksandr Danilovich Menshikov and 17,000 Swedes under Charles XII. The Swedish invasion of Russia had already failed the previous winter, with the loss of their major supply column to the Russians and their failure to receive expected reinforcements. Despite the severe shortages of men, artillery, and powder, Charles continued the war and besieged Poltava in May 1709. The Russians assembled their forces to raise the siege. They set up entrenchments (a countersiege) within a few hundred yards of the Swedish siege lines, thus forcing the Swedes to attack. Charles planned to charge past the Russian line of redoubts, without stopping to subdue them, and directly assault the main Russian defensive position. This called for extreme mobility and daring. But Charles himself lacked mobility because he had been injured a few days before, and his secondary commanders either lacked daring or failed to understand his plan. The Swedish attack faltered; the Russian counterattack, with 40,000 troops, killed or captured the entire Swedish army, except for Charles and 1,500 followers, who escaped south into Turkish territory.

Paul

▪ emperor of Russia

Russian in full Pavel Petrovich

born Oct. 1 [Sept. 20, Old Style], 1754, St. Petersburg, Russia

died March 23 [March 11], 1801, St. Petersburg

emperor of Russia from 1796 to 1801.

Son of Peter III (reigned 1762) and Catherine II the Great (reigned 1762–96), Paul was reared by his father's aunt, the empress Elizabeth (reigned 1741–61). After 1760 he was tutored by Catherine's close adviser, the learned diplomat Nikita Ivanovich Panin, but the boy never developed good relations with his mother, who wrested the imperial crown from her mentally feeble husband in 1762 and, afterward, consistently refused to allow Paul to participate actively in government affairs.

Having married Sophia Dorothea of Württemberg (Russian name Maria Fyodorovna) in 1776 shortly after his first wife, Wilhelmina of Darmstadt (Russian name Nataliya Alekseyevna), died, Paul and his wife were settled by Catherine on an estate at Gatchina (1783), where Paul, removed from the centre of government at St. Petersburg, held his own small court and engaged himself in managing his estate, drilling his private army corps, and contemplating government reforms.

Despite Catherine's apparent intention to name Paul's son Alexander her heir, Paul succeeded her when she died (Nov. 17 [Nov. 6], 1796) and immediately repealed the decree issued by Peter I the Great in 1722 that had given each monarch the right to choose his successor; in its place Paul established in 1797 a definite order of succession within the male line of the Romanov family. Paul also, in an effort to strengthen the autocracy, reversed many of Catherine's policies; he reestablished centralized administrative agencies she had abolished in 1775, increased bureaucratic control in local government, and sought to impose limits on the authority of the nobles. In the process he provoked the hostility of the nobles, and, when he introduced harsh disciplinary measures in the army and displayed a marked preference for his Gatchina troops, the military, particularly the prestigious guards units, also turned against him.

Confidence in his ability dropped even among his trusted supporters because of a number of actions. He demonstrated an inconsistent policy toward the peasantry and rapidly shifted from a peaceful foreign policy (1796) to involvement in the second coalition against Napoleon (1798) to an anti-British policy (1800). By the end of 1800, he had maneuvered Russia into the disadvantageous position of being officially at war with France, unofficially at war with Great Britain, without diplomatic relations with Austria, and on the verge of sending an army through the unmapped khanates in Central Asia to invade British-controlled India.

As a result of his inconsistent policies, as well as his tyrannical and capricious manner of implementing them, a group of highly placed civil and military officials, led by Count Peter von Pahlen, governor-general of St. Petersburg, and General Leonty Leontyevich, Count von Bennigsen, gained the approval of Alexander, the heir to the throne, to depose his father. On March 23 (March 11), 1801, they penetrated the Mikhaylovsky Palace and assassinated Paul in his bedchamber.

emperor of Russia

Introduction

Russian in full Aleksandr Pavlovich

born Dec. 23 [Dec. 12, old style], 1777, St. Petersburg, Russia

died Dec. 1 [Nov. 19, O.S.], 1825, Taganrog

emperor of Russia (1801–25), who alternately fought and befriended Napoleon I during the Napoleonic Wars but who ultimately (1813–15) helped form the coalition that defeated the emperor of the French. He took part in the Congress of Vienna (1814–15), drove for the establishment of the Holy Alliance (1815), and took part in the conferences that followed.

Early life.

Aleksandr Pavlovich was the first child of Grand Duke Pavel Petrovich (later Paul I) and Grand Duchess Maria Fyodorovna, a princess of Württemberg-Montbéliard. His grandmother, the reigning empress Catherine II (the Great), took him from his parents and raised him herself to prepare him to succeed her. She was determined to disinherit her own son, Pavel, who repelled her by his instability.

A friend and disciple of the philosophers of the French Enlightenment, Catherine invited Denis Diderot, the encyclopaedist, to become Alexander's private tutor. When he declined, she chose Frédéric-César La Harpe (La Harpe, Frédéric-César de), a Swiss citizen, a republican by conviction, and an excellent educator. He inspired deep affection in his pupil and permanently shaped his flexible and open mind.

As an adolescent, Alexander was allowed to visit his father at Gatchina, on the outskirts of St. Petersburg, away from the court. There, Pavel had created a ridiculous little kingdom where he devoted himself to military exercises and parades. Alexander received his military training there under the direction of a tough and rigid officer, Aleksey Arakcheyev (Arakcheyev, Aleksey Andreyevich, Graf), who was faithfully attached to him and whom Alexander loved throughout his life.

Alexander's education was not continued after he was 16, when his grandmother married him to Princess Louise of Baden-Durlach, who was 14, in 1793. The precocious marriage had been arranged to guarantee descendants to the Romanov dynasty, and it was unhappy from the beginning. The sweet and charming girl who became Yelisaveta Alekseyevna was loved by everyone except her husband.

Catherine had already written the manifesto that deprived her son of his rights and designated her grandson as the heir to the throne, when she died suddenly on Nov. 17 (Nov. 6, O.S.), 1796. Alexander, who knew of it, did not dare to disclose the manifesto, and Pavel became emperor.

Ascent to the throne.

Paul I's reign was a dark period for Russia. The monarch's tyrannical and bizarre behaviour led to a plot against him by certain nobles and military men, and he was assassinated during the night of March 23 (March 11, O.S.), 1801. Alexander became tsar the next day. The plotters had let him in on the secret, assuring him they would not kill his father but would only demand his abdication. Alexander believed them or, at least, wished to believe that all would go well.

After the darkness into which Paul had plunged Russia, Alexander appeared to his subjects as a radiant dawn. He was handsome, strong, pleasant, humane, and full of enthusiasm. He wanted his reign to be a happy one and dreamed of great and necessary reforms. With four friends, who were of noble families but motivated by liberal ideas—Prince Adam Czartoryski, Count Pavel Stroganov, Count Viktor Kochubey, and Nikolay Novosiltsev—he formed the Private Committee (Neglasny Komitet). Its avowed purpose was to frame “good laws, which are the source of the well-being of the Nation.”

Alexander and his close advisers corrected many of the injustices of the preceding reign and made many administrative improvements. Their principal achievement was the initiation of a vast plan for public education, which involved the formation of many schools of different types, institutions for training teachers, and the founding of three new universities. Nevertheless, despite the humanitarian ideas inculcated in him by La Harpe and despite his own wish to make his people happy, Alexander lacked the energy necessary to carry out the most urgent reform, the abolition of serfdom. The institution of serfdom was, in the Tsar's own words, “a degradation” that kept Russia in a disastrously backward state. But to liberate the serfs, who composed three-quarters of the population, would arouse the hostility of their noble masters, who did not want to lose the slaves on whom their wealth and comfort depended. Serfdom was a continuing burden on the Russians. It prevented modernization of the country, which was at least a century behind the rest of Europe.

Out of a sincere desire to innovate, Alexander considered a constitution and “the limitation of the autocracy,” but he recoiled before the danger of imposing sudden change on a nobility that rejected it. Moreover, he was a visionary who could not transform his dreams into reality. Because of his unstable personality, he would become intoxicated by the notion of grand projects, while balking at carrying them out. Finally, the “Western” theoretical education of Alexander and his young friends had not prepared them for gaining a clear vision of the realities of Russian life.

Early foreign policy.

Displaying an astonishing inconstancy, Alexander abandoned his internal reforms to devote himself to foreign policy, to which he would commit the major portion of his reign. Sensitive to fluctuations in continental politics, he was a “European” who hoped for peace and unity. He felt that he was called to be a mediator, like his grandmother, who had been called the “Arbiter of Europe.”

As soon as he came to power, Alexander resealed an alliance with England that had been broken by Paul I. He nonetheless maintained good relations with France in the hope of “moderating” Bonaparte by restraining his spirit of conquest. A feeling of chivalry attached Alexander to the king of Prussia, Frederick William III, and to Queen Louisa, and a treaty of friendship was signed with Prussia. Later, he got on good terms with Austria. His idealism persuaded him that these alliances would lead to a European federation.

Napoleon had other ideas. His territorial encroachments, desire for world hegemony, and his coronation in 1804 as emperor forced Alexander to declare war against him. Assuming the role of commander in chief, he relied on the Austrian generals and scorned the counsel of the Russian general Prince Kutuzov, a shrewd strategist. The Russians and Austrians were defeated at Austerlitz, in Moravia, on Dec. 2, 1805, and the emperor Francis II was forced to sign the peace treaty, since his territory was occupied by the enemy. Russia remained intact behind its frontiers. Moreover, Napoleon wanted to spare the Tsar; he hoped to gain his friendship and to divide the world with him. Such a notion did not occur to Alexander, who wanted revenge.

In 1806 Napoleon defeated Prussia at Jena and Auerstädt. Despite the warnings of both his mother and his advisers, the Tsar rushed to the aid of his friend. The battles were fought in east Prussia. After a partial success at Eylau, the Russian Army, under General Bennigsen, was decimated at Friedland, on June 14, 1807. Then occurred the meeting (June 25) of the two emperors on a raft in the middle of the Niemen off Tilsit (Tilsit, Treaties of) (now Sovetsk). The sequel of these events demonstrates that, in the course of the Tilsit interview, it was the Tsar of Russia who deceived the Emperor of the French. Seeking to gain time he used his charm to play the admiring friend. He accepted all the victor's conditions, promising to break with England, to adhere to the Continental System set up by Napoleon to isolate and weaken Great Britain, and to recognize the creation of the Grand Duchy of Warsaw (Warsaw, Duchy of), formed from the part of Poland given to Prussia during the Partition of 1795. In “recompense” Napoleon gave Alexander liberty to expand at the expense of Sweden and Turkey.

From Tilsit to the 1812 invasion.

Most Russians were angered and humiliated by the Tilsit Alliance; they thought that breaking off trade with England would inevitably create a disastrous economic situation, but Alexander kept his plans secret and bided his time. He reorganized and strengthened his armies with the competent aid of Arakcheyev, the instructor from Gatchina who had become his indispensable colleague. Meanwhile, the monarch's popularity dropped; all levels of the population accused him of having uselessly sacrificed Russian blood and of ruining the country.

Alexander once again turned his attention to internal reforms. He placed responsibility for them on a remarkable legal writer, Mikhail Mikhaylovich Speransky (Speransky, Mikhail Mikhaylovich, Graf). Of modest origins, Speransky's talent caused him to rise rapidly. He conceived a vast plan for total reorganization of Russian legal structures and authored a complete collection and a systematically coordinated digest of Russian laws. Only a very small part of his great plan was applied, for once again Alexander withdrew from any practical fulfillment, partly because foreign events distracted him from rebuilding his empire on new foundations.

Despite the strong Russian reaction against France, the Tsar again met Napoleon, at Erfurt in Saxony, in 1808, where he showed himself to have become distant from his Tilsit ally. When a new war broke out between France and Austria in 1809, Alexander, despite his commitments, did not intervene in Napoleon's behalf, contenting himself with feigning a military advance. Napoleon reproached the Tsar for trading with England under cover of neutral vessels and for refusing him the hand of his sister, the grand duchess Anna Pavlovna. For his part Alexander tried in vain to obtain from Napoleon a commitment not to create an independent Kingdom of Poland. When Napoleon annexed the German territories on the Baltic, including the Grand Duchy of Oldenburg, a fief of the Tsar's brother-inlaw, Alexander protested against what he considered a personal offense.

All of this was a pretext for military preparations on both sides. A violent shift of opinion against Napoleon appeared in Russia. The hostility toward France among the court compelled Alexander to exile his legal adviser, Speransky, an admirer of Napoleon and his Code. Changing his opinions yet again, the Tsar adopted the reactionary ideas of a patriotic group dominated by his favourite sister, the grand duchess Yekaterina Pavlovna. He judged that, under the conditions then prevailing, Russia had best keep its traditional institutions.

The defeat of Napoleon.

Napoleon and his Grand Army of 600,000 men invaded Russia on June 24, 1812. The conflict that ensued was justly called the Patriotic War by the Russians; in it, the strong resistance and outstanding endurance of an entire people were displayed. The war transformed Alexander, suffusing him with energy and determination. The French advanced as rapidly as the Russians retreated, drawing them away from their bases. Napoleon thought that, once Moscow was taken, the Tsar would capitulate. But after the bloody Battle of Borodino, Napoleon entered a largely deserted Moscow, which was soon nearly destroyed by fire. The conqueror had to camp in a ruined city where he could not remain, and Alexander did not sue for peace. The Tsar, meanwhile, under pressure of public opinion, had named Kutuzov (Kutuzov, Mikhail Illarionovich, Prince), whom he detested, supreme commander. The old warrior, through brilliant strategy and with the aid of heroic partisans, pursued the enemy and drove him from the country. The retreat from Russia, combined with Napoleon's reverses in Spain, precipitated his downfall.

Alexander had declared, “Napoleon or I: from now on we cannot reign together!” He said that the burning of Moscow had “illuminated his soul.” He called Europe to arms, to rescue the people who had been enslaved by Napoleon's conquests. His enthusiasm, perseverance, and steadfast determination to triumph aroused the King of Prussia and the Emperor of Austria, and the enheartened allies were victorious at Leipzig (Leipzig, Battle of) in October 1813. This “Battle of Nations” could have been decisive, but Alexander wanted no peace until he reached Paris. He entered Paris triumphantly in March 1814. Napoleon abdicated, and the Tsar reluctantly accepted the restoration of the Bourbons, for whom he had little esteem, and imposed a constitutional charter on the new ruler, Louis XVIII. Alexander showed his generosity toward France, alleviating its condition as a defeated country and protesting that he had made war on Napoleon and not on the French people.

He had become the most powerful sovereign in Europe and the arbiter of its destinies, as he had wished. He inspired the convening of the greatest international congress in history in Vienna (Vienna, Congress of), in the autumn of 1814. It was a time of sumptuous feasts and also of diplomatic intrigues and bitter quarrels. The Tsar's allies, whom he had saved, now feared his power and opposed the annexation of Poland to Russia. It was his only claim in reward for what he had done, and he was determined to achieve it.

When Napoleon returned from his exile in Elba and regained the throne, the war resumed, ending with his final defeat by the allies at Waterloo on June 18, 1815. Again the victorious sovereigns met in Paris to frame a peace treaty, and once again Alexander intervened on behalf of France.

The final decade.

This period marked a turning point for the Tsar. Since the invasion of his country, he had become religious; he read the Bible daily and prayed often. It was his frequent visits with the pietistic visionary Barbara Juliane Krüdener (Krüdener, Barbara Juliane, Freifrau von) in Paris that turned him into a mystic. She considered herself a prophetess sent to the Tsar by God, and, if her personal influence was of brief duration, Alexander nevertheless retained his newly found evangelical fervour and came to profess a nondogmatic “universal religion” strongly influenced by Quaker and Moravian beliefs.

Alexander obtained Poland, set it up as a kingdom with himself as king, and gave it a constitution, declaring his attachment to “free institutions” and his desire to “extend them throughout all the countries dependent on him.” These words awakened great hopes in Russia, but, when the Tsar returned home after a long absence, he was no longer thinking of reform. He devoted his entire attention to the Russian Bible Society and to an unfortunate innovation, the military colonies, by which he attempted to settle soldiers and their families on the land so that they might enjoy more stable lives. These ill-conceived colonies brought great suffering to Russian soldiers and peasants alike.

After the Second Treaty of Paris, Alexander I, inspired by piety, formed the Holy Alliance, which was supposed to bring about a peace based on Christian love to the monarchs and peoples of Europe. It is possible to see in the alliance the beginnings of a European federation, but it would have been a federation with ecumenical, rather than political, foundations.

The idealistic Tsar's vision came to a sad end, for the alliance became a league of monarchs against their peoples. Its members—following up the congress with additional meetings at Aix-la-Chapelle, Troppau, Laibach (Ljubljana), and Verona—revealed themselves as the champions of despotism and the defenders of an order maintained by arms. When a series of uprisings against despotic regimes in Italy and Spain broke out, the “holy allies” responded with bloody repression. Alexander himself was badly shaken by the mutiny of his Semyonovsky regiment and thought he detected the presence of revolutionary radicalism.

This marked the end of his liberal dreams, for, from then on, all revolt appeared to him as a rebellion against God. He shocked Russia by refusing to support the Greeks, his coreligionists, when they rose against Turkish tyranny, maintaining they were rebels like any others. The Austrian chancellor, Prince Metternich, to whom the Tsar abandoned the conduct of European affairs, shamelessly exploited Alexander's state of mind.

After his return to Russia, he left everything in Arakcheyev's hands. For Alexander, it was a period of lassitude, discouragement, and dark thoughts. For Russia, it was a period of reaction, obscurantism, and struggle against real and imagined subversion. Alexander thought he saw “the reign of Satan” everywhere. In opposition, secret societies spread, composed of young men, mostly from the military, who sought to regenerate and liberalize the country. Plots were made. Alexander was warned of them, but he refused to act decisively. His crown weighed heavily on him, and he did not hide from his family and close friends his desire to abdicate.

The Empress was ill, and Alexander decided to take her to Taganrog, on the Azov Sea. This dismal, windy townlet was a strange watering place. The royal pair, however, who had been so long estranged, enjoyed a calm happiness there. Soon after, during a tour of inspection in the Crimea, Alexander contracted pneumonia or malaria and died on his return to Taganrog.

The Tsar's sudden death, his mysticism, and the bewilderment and the blunders of his entourage all went into the creation of the legend of his “departure” to a Siberian retreat. The refusal to open the Tsar's coffin after his death has only served to deepen the mystery.

Daria Olivier

Additional Reading

N. Schilder, Imperator Aleksandr Pervy, 4 vol. (1890–1904), in Russian; Grand-Duke Nicolas Mikhailovitch, Le Tsar Alexandre Ier, 2 vol. (1900); and A. Vandal, Napoléon et Alexandre, 3 vol. (1891–96), though old, are still the three most important biographies written since the authors—and especially the two first mentioned—had access to many state and family papers. Two good studies in English are Martha E. Almedingen, The Emperor Alexander I (1964); and Michael Jenkins, Arakcheev: Grand Vizier of the Russian Empire (1969).

Decembrist

▪ Russian history

Russian Dekabrist,

any of the Russian revolutionaries who led an unsuccessful uprising on Dec. 14 (Dec. 26, New Style), 1825, and through their martyrdom provided a source of inspiration to succeeding generations of Russian dissidents. The Decembrists were primarily members of the upper classes who had military backgrounds; some had participated in the Russian occupation of France after the Napoleonic Wars or served elsewhere in western Europe; a few had been Freemasons, and some were members of the secret patriotic (and, later, revolutionary) societies in Russia—the Union of Salvation (1816), the Union of Welfare (1818), the Northern Society (1821), and the Southern Society (1821).

The Northern Society, taking advantage of the brief but confusing interregnum following the death of Tsar Alexander I, staged an uprising, convincing some of the troops in St. Petersburg to refuse to take a loyalty oath to Nicholas I and to demand instead the accession of his brother Constantine. The rebellion, however, was poorly organized and easily suppressed; Colonel Prince Sergey Trubetskoy, who was to be the provisional dictator, fled immediately.

Another insurrection by the Chernigov regiment in the south was also quickly defeated. An extensive investigation in which Nicholas personally participated ensued; it resulted in the trial of 289 Decembrists, the execution of 5 of them (Pavel Pestel, Sergey Muravyov-Apostol, Pyotr Kakhovsky, Mikhail Bestuzhev-Ryumin, and Kondraty Ryleyev), the imprisonment of 31, and the banishment of the rest to Siberia.

tsar of Russia

Introduction

Russian in full Nikolay Pavlovich

born July 6 [June 25, old style], 1796, Tsarskoye Selo [now Pushkin], near St. Petersburg, Russia

died March 2 [Feb. 18, O.S.], 1855, St. Petersburg

Russian emperor (1825–55), often considered the personification of classic autocracy; for his reactionary policies, he has been called the emperor who froze Russia for 30 years.

Early life.

Nicholas was the son of Grand Duke Paul and Grand Duchess Maria. Some three and a half months after his birth, following the death of Catherine II the Great, Nicholas' father became Emperor Paul I of Russia. Nicholas had three brothers, two of whom, the future emperor Alexander I and Constantine (Constantine, Veliky Knyaz), were 19 and 17 years older than he. It was the third, Michael, his junior by two years, and a sister, Anne, who became his childhood companions and intimate lifelong friends.

Paul was extremely neurotic, overbearing, and despotic. Yet it is believed that he showed kindness and consideration to his younger children and that, in fact, he loved and cherished them tenderly. He was killed in a palace revolution of 1801, which made Alexander emperor when Nicholas was not quite five years old. Maria, on the contrary, remained formal and cold in her relationship to the children, very much in keeping with her general character. She belonged, apparently, among those human beings who combine numerous conventional virtues with a certain rigidity and lack of warmth. In the words of a competent observer: “The only failing of this extraordinary woman was her being excessively, one may say, exacting of her children and of the people dependent on her.”

Education.

The future emperor's first guardian and instructor was a Scottish nurse, Jane Lyon, who was appointed by Catherine II to care for the infant and who stayed with Nicholas constantly during the first seven years of his life. From Lyon the young grand duke learned even such things as the Russian alphabet, his first Russian prayers, and his hatred of the Poles (at least he liked later to trace the origin of his bitter antipathy toward that people to the stories told by his nurse about her painful experience in Warsaw in the turbulent year of 1794).

In 1802–03 men replaced women in Nicholas' entourage, and his regular education began. As directed by Gen. Matthew Lamsdorff, it emphasized severe discipline and formalism. The growing grand duke studied French and German as well as Russian, world history, and general geography in French, together with the history and geography of Russia. Religion, drawing, arithmetic, geometry, algebra, and physics were added to the curriculum. Nicholas received instruction also in dancing, music, singing, and horseback riding and was introduced at an early age to the theatre, costume balls, and other court entertainment.

A more advanced curriculum went into effect in 1809, with courses ranging from political economy, logic, moral philosophy, and natural law to strategy. English, Latin, and Greek were added to the language program. Though, on the whole, a belief that Nicholas had not been trained for his role of Russian sovereign is wrong, he did profit little from the instruction, which he found rigid and tedious. He loved only military science, becoming a fine army engineer and expert in several other areas of military knowledge. Moreover, he always remained in his heart a dedicated junior officer.

Circumstances also favoured militarism. Nicholas' education, as well as that of his younger brother, was interrupted and largely terminated by the great struggles against Napoleon in 1812–15. The grand dukes were allowed to join the army in 1814, and, although they saw no actual fighting, they lived through the heady emotions of those momentous years and also enjoyed the opportunities to stay in Paris and other places in western and central Europe. On Nov. 4, 1815, at a state dinner in Berlin, Alexander I and King Frederick William III rose to announce the engagement of Nicholas and Princess Charlotte of Prussia (Alexandra, after she became Orthodox).

The solemn wedding followed some 20 months later, on July 13, 1817. The match represented a dynastic and political arrangement sought by both reigning houses, which had stood together in the decisive years against Napoleon and after that at the Congress of Vienna—the peace settlement following the Napoleonic Wars—and it proved singularly successful. Not only was Nicholas in love with his wife, but he became very closely attached to his father-in-law as well as to his royal brothers, one of whom was later to be his fellow ruler as King Frederick William IV. Beyond that, Nicholas was powerfully attracted by the Prussian court and even more so by the Prussian Army. He felt remarkably happy and at home in his adopted family and country, which for many years he tried to visit as often as he could.

To complete his training, Grand Duke Nicholas was sent on two educational voyages—an extensive tour of Russia that lasted from May to September in 1816 and a journey to England, where the future emperor spent four months late that same year and early in 1817. The Russian trip covered much ground at great speed and was quite superficial, but it has interest for the historian because of the notes that Nicholas, following the instructions of his mother, took on everything seen and heard. The grand duke's observations deal, typically, with appearances rather than with causes and reflect a number of his prejudices, including his bitter dislike of Poles and Jews. Such quick inspection tours later became almost an obsession of the Emperor.

In England, Nicholas stayed mostly in London, although he travelled to a score of other places. While he did attend the opening of the houses of Parliament and in general obtained some knowledge of English politics, his only recorded comments on that score were unfavourable. The future emperor found it much more congenial to examine military and naval centres. His favourite English companion was the Duke of Wellington. Less than a year after his return to Russia and a few months after his marriage, Nicholas was appointed inspector general of the army corps of engineers. In subsequent years he held several other military positions but of secondary significance.

Ascension to the throne.

Alexander I's unexpected death in southern Russia on Dec. 1, 1825, led to a dynastic crisis. Because Alexander I had no direct male successor, Constantine was next in line for the throne. But the heir presumptive had married a Polish woman not of royal blood in 1820 and renounced his rights to the crown. Nicholas was thus to become the next ruler of Russia, the entire matter being stated, in 1822, in a manifesto confirmed with Alexander I's signature. But the manifesto remained unpublished, and Nicholas questioned the legal handling of the whole issue and the reaction in the country, which expected Constantine to succeed Alexander. In any case, Constantine and the Polish kingdom of which he was commander in chief swore allegiance to Nicholas, but Nicholas, the Russian capital, and the Russian Army swore allegiance to Constantine.

It was only after Constantine's unyielding reaffirmation of his position and the resulting lapse of time that Nicholas decided to publish Alexander's manifesto and become emperor of Russia. On Dec. 26, 1825 (Dec. 14, O.S.), when the guard regiments in St. Petersburg were to swear allegiance for the second time in rapid succession, this time to Nicholas, liberal conspirators staged what came to be known as the Decembrist Rebellion. Utilizing their influence in the army, in which many of them were officers, they started a mutiny in several units, which they entreated to defend the rightful interests of Constantine (Constantine, Veliky Knyaz) against his usurping brother. Altogether some 3,000 misled rebels marched in military formation to the Senate Square—now the Decembrist Square—in the heart of the capital. Although the rebellion had failed by nightfall, it meant that Nicholas I ascended the throne over the bodies of some of his subjects and in actual combat with the dreaded revolution.

Personality.

Nicholas I has come down in history as the classic autocrat, in appearance and manner as much as in behaviour and policy. To quote Andrew Dickson White (White, Andrew Dickson), a United States diplomat:

With his height of more than six feet, his head always held high, a slightly aquiline nose, a firm and well-formed mouth under a light moustache, a square chin, an imposing, domineering, set face, noble rather than tender, monumental rather than human, he had something of Apollo and of Jupiter . . . Nicholas was unquestionably the most handsome man in Europe.

Or to refer to Adolphe, marquis de Custine, whose lasting literary fame rests on his denunciation of the Russia of Nicholas I: “Virgil's Neptune . . . one could not be more emperor than he.” In short, Nicholas I came to represent autocracy personified: infinitely majestic, determined and powerful, hard as stone, and relentless as fate. Yet, on closer acquaintance, the other side of the Emperor emerged. The detachment and the superior calm of an autocrat, which Nicholas I tried so often and so hard to display, were essentially a false front. The sovereign's insistence on firmness and stern action was based on fear, not on confidence; his determination concealed a state approaching panic, and his courage fed on something akin to despair. Nicholas' violent hatred could concentrate apparently with equal ease on an individual, such as the French king Louis-Philippe; a group, such as the Decembrists; a people, such as the Poles; or a concept, such as revolution. His impulse was always to strike and keep striking until the object of his wrath was destroyed.

Aggressiveness, however, was not the Emperor's only method of coping with the problems of life. He also used regimentation, orderliness, neatness, and precision, an enormous effort to have everything at all times in its proper place. Nicholas I was by nature a drill master and an inspector general; the army remained his love, almost an obsession, from childhood to the end of his life. But, in every other sphere of activity and existence too, the Emperor insisted on minute and precise regulation, with nothing to be left to chance. Position, circumstances, and his own character placed an almost intolerable burden on his shoulders. Still, he managed to carry it for three decades, sustained by his overwhelming sense of duty and devotion to hard work, by his sincere religious convictions, and by his family. His outlook, however, became ever more pessimistic and fatalistic, until in the disaster of the Crimean War the autocrat declared simply: “I shall carry my cross until all my strength is gone.” “Thy will be done.”

Ideology.

Nicholas' views fitted his personality to perfection. In contrast to Alexander I, he had been brought up at the time of wars against Napoleon and of reaction, which he accepted wholeheartedly as his own cause. Eventually the Russian wing of European reaction, represented by Nicholas I and his government, found its ideological expression in the doctrine of so-called Official Nationality.

Formally proclaimed in 1833 by Count Sergey Uvarov (Uvarov, Sergey Semyonovich, Count), the Emperor's minister of education, Official Nationality rested on three principles: Orthodoxy, autocracy (Orthodoxy, Autocracy, and Nationality), and nationality. Autocracy (absolutism) meant the affirmation and maintenance of the absolute power of the sovereign, which was considered the indispensable foundation of the Russian state; in foreign relations it was transformed into legitimism and a defense of the Vienna settlement. Orthodoxy referred to the official church and its important role in Russia and also to the ultimate source of ethics and ideals that gave meaning to human life and society. Nationality (narodnost) described the particular nature of the Russian people, considered as a mighty and dedicated supporter of its dynasty and government. Whereas Alexander I had never quite abandoned dreams of change, Nicholas I was determined to defend the existing order in his motherland, especially autocracy.

Reign.

Nicholas I's rule reflected in a striking manner both his character and his principles. The new regime became preeminently one of militarism and bureaucracy. The Emperor surrounded himself with military men, to the extent that late in his reign there were almost no civilians among his immediate assistants. Also, he relied heavily on special emissaries, most of them generals of his suite, who were sent all over Russia on particular assignments to execute immediately the will of the sovereign. Operating outside the regular administrative system, they represented an extension, so to speak, of the monarch's own person. In fact, the entire machinery of government came to be permeated by the military spirit of direct orders, absolute obedience, and precision, at least as far as official reports and appearances were concerned. Corruption and confusion, however, lay immediately behind this facade of discipline and smooth functioning.

In his conduct of state affairs, Nicholas I often bypassed regular channels and generally resented formal deliberation, consultation, or other procedural delay. The importance of the Committee of Ministers, the State Council, and the Senate decreased in the course of his reign. Instead of making full use of them, the Emperor depended more and more on special bureaucratic devices meant to carry out his intentions promptly while remaining under his immediate and complete control. As one favourite method, Nicholas I made extensive use of ad hoc committees that stood outside the usual state machinery. The committees were typically composed of a handful of the most trusted assistants of the Emperor; because these were few in number, the same men in different combinations formed these committees throughout Nicholas' reign. As a rule, the committees carried on their work in secret, adding further complication and confusion to the already cumbersome administration of the empire. The failure of one committee to perform its task merely led to the formation of another. For example, some nine committees tried to deal with the issue of serfdom during Nicholas' reign.

The propensities of the autocrat found expression also in the development and the new role of His Majesty's Own Chancery. Organized originally as a bureau to deal with matters that demanded the sovereign's personal participation and to supervise the execution of the Emperor's orders, it acquired five new departments: in 1826 the Second and the Third, to deal with the codification of law and the newly created corps of gendarmes, respectively; in 1828 the Fourth, to manage the charitable and educational institutions under the jurisdiction of the empress dowager Maria; in 1836 the Fifth, to reform the condition of the state peasants (soon replaced by the new Ministry of State Domains); in 1843 the Sixth, to draw an administrative plan for Transcaucasia.

The departments of the Chancery served Nicholas I as a major means of conducting a personal policy that bypassed the regular state channels. Its Third Department, the political police, acted as the autocrat's main weapon against subversion and revolution and as his principal agency for controlling the behaviour of his subjects and for distributing punishments and rewards among them. Its assigned fields of activity ranged from “all orders and all reports in every case belonging to the higher police” to “reports about all occurrences without exception!” The two successive heads of the Third Department—Count Aleksandr Benckendorff and Prince Aleksey Orlov—probably spent more time with Nicholas than did any of his other assistants; they accompanied him, for instance, on his repeated trips of inspection throughout Russia. During his entire reign the Emperor strove to follow the principle of autocracy—to be a true father of his people concerned with their daily lives, hopes, and fears.

Yet Nicholas I could do little for them beyond the minutiae. Determined to preserve autocracy, afraid to abolish serfdom, and suspicious of all independent initiative and popular participation, the Emperor and his government could not introduce in their country the much-needed basic reforms. In practice as well as in theory they looked backward. Important developments took place only in a few areas in which change would not threaten the fundamental structure of the Russian Empire. Thus Count Mikhail Speransky (Speransky, Mikhail Mikhaylovich, Graf) codified law, and Count Pavel Kiselev (Kiselyov, Pavel Dmitriyevich) changed and improved the lot of the state peasants; but even limited reforms became impossible after 1848.

Final years.

Frightened by European revolutions, Nicholas I became completely reactionary. During the last years of the reign the Emperor's once successful foreign policy collapsed, leading to isolation and to the tragedy of the Crimean War. A dauntless champion of legitimism and a virtual hegemony of eastern and central Europe following the revolutions of 1848–49, Nicholas—in part because of his own miscalculations, rigidity, and bluntness—found himself alone fighting the Crescent (the Ottoman Empire), supported by such countries of the Cross as France, Great Britain, and Sardinia.

Although it is unlikely that Nicholas committed suicide, as several historians have claimed, death did come as liberation to the weary and harassed Russian emperor. An ordinary cold picked up in late February 1855 turned into pneumonia, which the once mighty, but now apparently exhausted, organism refused to fight. To the end the autocrat retained lucidity and dignity. His last words to his heir and his family were: “Now I shall ascend to pray for Russia and for you. After Russia, I loved you above everything else in the world. Serve Russia.” Nicholas I was survived by his wife, Empress Alexandra, and their six children: Emperor Alexander II, the grand dukes Constantine, Nicholas, and Michael, and the grand duchesses Maria and Olga. Another daughter, Grand Duchess Alexandra, had died in 1844.

Nicholas V. Riasanovsky

Additional Reading

The leading full account of Nicholas I and his reign, especially valuable on foreign relations and with numerous documentary appendixes, is Theodor Schiemann, Geschichte Russlands unter Kaiser Nikolaus I, 4 vol. (1904–19, reprinted 1969). W. Bruce Lincoln, Nicholas I, Emperor and Autocrat of All the Russias (1978, reprinted 1989), is a valuable scholarly biography with bibliography. A readable popular study is Constantin de Grunwald, Tsar Nicholas I (1954; originally published in French, 1946). Nicholas Valentine Riasanovsky, Nicholas I and Official Nationality in Russia, 1825–1855 (1959, reissued 1969); and A.E. Presniakov, Emperor Nicholas I of Russia: The Apogee of Autocracy, 1825–1865 (1974; originally published in Russian, 1925), with an extended introduction by Riasanovsky, are also useful.

Kutuzov, Mikhail Illarionovich, Prince

▪ Russian military commander

original name Mikhail Illarionovich Golenishchev-Kutuzov

born Sept. 5 [Sept. 16, New Style], 1745, St. Petersburg, Russia

died April 16 [April 28], 1813, Bunzlau, Silesia [now Bolesławiec, Pol.]

Russian army commander who repelled Napoleon's invasion of Russia (1812).

The son of a lieutenant general who had served in Peter the Great's army, Kutuzov attended the military engineering school at age 12 and entered the Russian army as a corporal when he was only 14. He gained combat experience fighting in Poland (1764–69) and against the Turks (1770–74), and he learned strategic and tactical techniques from General Aleksandr Suvorov, whom he served for six years in the Crimea. He was promoted to colonel in 1777 and by 1784 had become a major general.

Although he had received a severe head wound and lost an eye in 1774, he actively participated in the Russo-Turkish War of 1787–91, in which he was again severely wounded. After the war he held a variety of high diplomatic and administrative posts, but he fell into disgrace in 1802 and retired to his country estate. When Russia joined the third coalition against Napoleon three years later, however, Emperor Alexander I recalled Kutuzov and gave him command of the joint Russian-Austrian army that opposed the French advance on Vienna. Before Kutuzov's force could link up with the Austrians, however, Napoleon defeated the latter at the Battle of Ulm. Kutuzov skillfully retreated, after defeating the French at Dürrenstein on Nov. 11, 1805, and preserved his army intact. He proposed to fall back to the Russian frontier and await reinforcements, but Alexander overruled him and engaged the French army in battle at Austerlitz (December 2), suffering a disastrous defeat. Kutuzov was partly blamed for the disaster and was removed from his command. Subsequently Alexander returned Kutuzov to active duty as commander of an army in Moldavia after war had again broken out with Turkey. Kutuzov inflicted several defeats on the Turks and on May 28, 1812, concluded a Russo-Turkish peace settlement favourable to Russia (Treaty of Bucharest).

In June 1812 Napoleon's army entered Russia, and the Russians fell back before him. Under pressure of public opinion, Alexander on August 9 appointed Kutuzov commander in chief of all the Russian forces and, on the following day, made him a prince. Napoleon sought a general engagement, but Kutuzov's strategy was to wear down the French by incessant minor engagements while retreating and preserving his army. Under public pressure and against his better judgment, however, he fought a major battle at Borodino (Borodino, Battle of) on September 7. Although the battle itself was inconclusive, Kutuzov lost almost half his troops and afterward withdrew to the southeast, allowing the French forces to enter Moscow.

Napoleon, having failed to make peace with the Russians and being unwilling to spend the winter in Moscow, left the city in October. He tried to move southwestward, but Kutuzov blocked his attempt to proceed along the fertile, southern route by giving battle at Maloyaroslavets (October 19). By forcing the disintegrating French army to leave Russia by the path it had devastated when it entered the country, Kutuzov destroyed his opponent without fighting another major battle. Kutuzov's troops harried the retreating French, engaging them at Vyazma and Krasnoye, and the remnants of Napoleon's army narrowly escaped annihilation at the crossing of the Berezina River in late November. In January 1813 Kutuzov pursued the French into Poland and Prussia, where he died of disease.

Kutuzov was the finest Russian commander of his day next to Suvorov himself. He typically relied on quick maneuvers and sought to avoid unnecessary battles, husbanding his forces to strike at the proper moment.

Borodino, Battle of

▪ European history

(Sept. 7 [Aug. 26, Old Style], 1812), bloody battle of the Napoleonic Wars, fought during Napoleon's invasion of Russia, about 70 miles (110 km) west of Moscow, near the river Moskva. It was fought between Napoleon's 130,000 troops, with more than 500 guns, and 120,000 Russians with more than 600 guns. Napoleon's success allowed him to occupy Moscow. The Russians were commanded by General M.I. Kutuzov (Kutuzov, Mikhail Illarionovich, Prince), who had halted the Russian retreat at the town of Borodino and hastily built fortifications, to block the French advance to Moscow. Napoleon feared that an attempt to outflank the Russians might fail and allow them to escape, so he executed a crude frontal attack. From 6 AM to noon the fierce fighting seesawed back and forth along the three-mile (five-kilometre) front. By noon the French artillery began to tip the scales, but the successive French attacks were not strong enough to overwhelm Russian resistance. Napoleon, distant from, and perhaps unsure of, the situation on the smoke-obscured battlefield, refused to commit the 20,000-man Imperial Guard and 10,000 other practically fresh troops. Because Kutuzov had already committed every available man, Napoleon thus forfeited the chance of gaining a decisive, rather than a narrow, victory. Both sides became exhausted during the afternoon, and the battle subsided into a cannonade, which continued until nightfall. Kutuzov withdrew during the night, and a week later Napoleon occupied Moscow unopposed. The Russians suffered about 45,000 casualties, including Prince Pyotr Ivanovich Bagration, commander of the 2nd Russian army. The French lost about 30,000 men. Although the Russian army was badly mauled, it survived to fight again and, in the end, drove Napoleon out of Russia.

Constantine, Veliky Knyaz

▪ Russian grand duke

(“Grand Prince,” or “Duke”),Russian in full Konstantin Pavlovich

born May 8 [April 27, Old Style], 1779, Tsarskoe Selo, Russia

died June 27 [June 15], 1831, Vitebsk

son of the Russian emperor Paul I (reigned 1796–1801), younger brother of Alexander I (reigned 1801–25) and elder brother of Nicholas I (reigned 1825–55); he was the virtual ruler of the Congress Kingdom of Poland (1815–30).

Educated by a Swiss tutor under the supervision of his grandmother, the empress Catherine II the Great (reigned 1762–96), Constantine participated in General A.V. Suvorov's campaign in Italy against Napoleon Bonaparte (1799). He was present at the Russo-Austrian defeat at Austerlitz (Dec. 2, 1805), which forced the Austrians to conclude a separate peace with France, and took part in the Russian campaigns of 1807, 1812, 1813, and 1814 against Napoleon.

After the Congress of Vienna (1815) set up the constitutional Kingdom of Poland with the emperor of Russia as its king, Alexander appointed Constantine commander in chief of Poland's armed forces with the powers of viceroy (November 1815). Although Constantine organized the Polish army, he failed to win its support, and he also alienated the Parliament and the general populace with his harsh rule. He nevertheless sympathized with the Poles' desire for autonomy. After his morganatic marriage to a Polish countess, Joanna Grudzińska, May 24 (May 12, Old Style), 1820, he renounced all of his claims to the Russian throne (January 1822).

When Alexander I died (Dec. 1 [Nov. 19], 1825), however, there was confusion over his successor. On the day that the guards were to swear allegiance to Constantine's younger brother Nicholas (Dec. 26 [Dec. 14], 1825), a group of revolutionaries, including many officers (later known as the Dekabrists, or Decembrists), convinced the soldiers to call for “Constantine and Constitution” in an attempt to start a rebellion.

Though Constantine had played no part in the rising, which was swiftly suppressed, differences soon arose between him and Nicholas because Constantine insisted that the Polish army and bureaucracy were loyal to the Russian Empire despite the large role Poles had played in the Decembrist conspiracy. Later, the two brothers also disagreed over Nicholas' foreign policy; because of Constantine's opposition, the Polish army did not participate in the Russo-Turkish War of 1828–29.

Constantine was convinced that the Polish army was loyal, and so he was taken completely by surprise when a Polish insurrection broke out in Warsaw in November 1830. Because of his utter failure to grasp the situation, the Polish army passed over to the side of the rebels, and as the revolution wore on, Constantine showed himself as incompetent as he was lacking in judgment. He did not live to see the uprising suppressed, for he died of cholera in June 1831.

Uvarov, Sergey Semyonovich, Count

▪ Russian statesman

(Graf)

born Aug. 25 [Sept. 5, New Style], 1786, Moscow, Russia

died Sept. 4 [Sept. 16], 1855, Moscow

Russian statesman and administrator, an influential minister of education during the reign of Tsar Nicholas I.

Uvarov served as a diplomat (1806–10), head of the St. Petersburg educational district (1811–22), and deputy minister of education (1832) before being named minister of education in 1833. In an important report to the tsar in 1833 he declared that education must be conducted “with faith in the . . . principles of orthodoxy (Orthodoxy, Autocracy, and Nationality), autocracy, and nationality.” These words were subsequently adopted by various periodicals and associations as articles of faith. The ideology that they came to represent was rooted in loyalty to dynastic rule, traditional religious faith, and romantic glorification of the Russian homeland. Uvarov's subsequent educational policies were reactionary: he restricted the educational opportunities of nonnoble students and tightened government control over university and secondary-school curricula. During his tenure the educational system did expand significantly, however, particularly in the fields of technical and vocational instruction.

Uvarov was minister of education from 1833 to 1849 and president of the Academy of Science from 1818 until his death. He was created a count in 1846.

Orthodoxy, Autocracy, and Nationality

▪ Russian slogan

Russian Pravoslaviye, Samoderzhaviye, I Narodnost,

in Russian history, slogan created in 1832 by Count Sergey S. Uvarov (Uvarov, Sergey Semyonovich, Count), minister of education 1833–49, that came to represent the official ideology of the imperial government of Nicholas I (reigned 1825–55) and remained the guiding principle behind government policy during later periods of imperial rule.

Uvarov presented the phrase in a report to Nicholas on the state of education in the Moscow university and secondary schools (gimnazii). In the report he recommended that the state's future educational program stress the value of the Orthodox Church, the autocratic government, and the national character of the Russian people; he considered these to be the fundamental factors distinguishing Russian society and protecting it from the corrupting influence of western Europe.

As the official ideology became the basis of Russian education, the study of theology and the classics, as well as vocational training, received much emphasis. Philosophy, however, considered to be the main medium through which corrupting Western ideas were transmitted, was virtually eliminated from the curriculum. Outside the schools, strict censorship was imposed on all publications that were critical of the system of autocracy.

Furthermore, official adherence to the slogan “Orthodoxy, Autocracy, and Nationality” gave an impetus (not entirely approved of by the Emperor) to the cause of the Russian nationalists, many of whom were employed in government and other influential positions. Interpreting narodnost to mean “nationalism” rather than “nationality,” they used their authority to institute Russification policies in schools in non-Russian areas of the empire, to pressure non-Orthodox religious groups to convert, and to enact various restrictive measures that suppressed non-Russian nationality groups. The nationalists also encouraged the government to support the efforts of other Slavic peoples to achieve national autonomy and, thereby, contributed to the developing rivalry between Russia and Austria (one of Russia's chief allies) for dominance in the Slavic-populated Balkans.

Third Department

▪ Russian political office

Russian Tretye Otdeleniye, also called Third Section Of His Imperial Majesty's Own Chancery In Russia,

office created by Emperor Nicholas I (July 15 [July 3, old style], 1826) to conduct secret police operations. Designed by Count A.Kh. Benckendorff (Benckendorff, Aleksandr Khristoforovich, Count), who was also its first chief administrator (1826–44), the department was responsible for political security.

It conducted surveillances and gathered information on political dissidents, religious schismatics, and foreigners. It banished suspected political criminals to remote regions and operated prisons for “state criminals.” It was also responsible for prosecuting counterfeiters of money and official documents and for conducting censorship. It functioned in conjunction with the Corps of Gendarmes (formed in 1836), a well-organized military force that operated throughout the empire, and with a network of anonymous spies and informers.

Originally intended to protect the common people of Russia from the exploitation and corrupt practices of the dominant classes, it became a particularly repressive institution. In the 1870s it was responsible for the arrest of many Narodniki (Populists), who had gone into the countryside to improve conditions and agitate politically among the peasantry; it became a major target for revolutionary terrorists, who assassinated its head, Gen. N.V. Mezentsev, in 1878.

The department was abolished in 1880 by Gen. M.T. Loris-Melikov (Loris-Melikov, Mikhail Tariyelovich, Graf), who was appointed by Alexander II to assume many executive responsibilities and to undermine the revolutionary movement by instigating a series of moderate reforms. The department's functions were transferred to the department of the police of the Ministry of Interior.

Benckendorff, Aleksandr Khristoforovich, Count

▪ Russian general and statesman

(Graf)

born 1783, Tallinn, Russia [now in Estonia]

died Sept. 23 [Oct. 5, New Style], 1844, St. Petersburg

general and statesman who played a prominent role in the Napoleonic Wars and later served as Tsar Nicholas I's (Nicholas I) chief of police.

Of Baltic-German origin, Benckendorff joined the Russian army and was one of the officers who assassinated Emperor Paul I in 1801. Between 1806 and 1815 he fought in numerous military campaigns, distinguishing himself particularly when he became commandant of Moscow, joined the pursuit of the French forces as they fled from Russia (1812), and engaged in many battles against the French in Germany and the Low Countries and Belgium.

Benckendorff then served as aide-de-camp to Tsar Alexander I (1819–21) and, having been promoted to lieutenant general, was given command of the cuirassier division of the guards (1821). In 1825, when the liberal Decembrists (Decembrist) attempted to prevent the succession of Nicholas to the throne and to force the establishment of constitutional government in Russia, Benckendorff commanded the troops that suppressed their uprising; later, he played a leading role in prosecuting them. The relentless way in which he and fellow generals of German origin in Russia tracked down members of eminent Russian noble families who had been connected with the Decembrist movement aroused popular belief that the German generals were trying to liquidate their Slav rivals in the government.

In January 1826 he submitted a plan to Nicholas for organizing a department of political police. When Nicholas then created the third section of the imperial chancellery, Benckendorff was placed in charge of both the gendarmerie and the third section, with responsibility for the work of regular and secret police, posts he held until his death.

Loris-Melikov, Mikhail Tariyelovich, Graf

▪ Russian statesman

(Count)

born Jan. 1, 1826, [Dec. 20, 1825, old style], Tiflis, Russia

died Dec. 24 [Dec. 12, O.S.], 1888, Nice, Fr.

military officer and statesman who, as minister of the interior at the end of the reign of the emperor Alexander II (ruled 1855–81), formulated reforms designed to liberalize the Russian autocracy.

Loris-Melikov was the son of an Armenian merchant. He attended the Lazarev School of Oriental Languages and the Guards' Cadet Institute in St. Petersburg before he joined a hussar regiment in 1843. Assigned to the Caucasus in 1847, he served as governor of the Terek region (1863–75) and, while commanding an army corps in Turkey during the Russo-Turkish War of 1877–78, scored notable military victories. For his heroism, he was made a count.

After serving briefly as governor-general of the plague-ridden lower Volga region (1879), Loris-Melikov was transferred to the provinces of central Russia, where he recommended to the emperor a modest scheme of administrative and economic reforms, aimed at alleviating the causes of social discontent and, thereby, combating revolutionary terrorism. Impressed by his suggestions, Alexander appointed him chairman of a special commission that was given authority to use the entire government apparatus to suppress the revolutionary movement and also to prepare a reform program for the country. Six months later Alexander abolished the commission and named Loris-Melikov the new minister of the interior (November 1880).

In this position Loris-Melikov devised a program of moderate reforms that included provisions for locally elected representatives to give the government advice on certain current problems. Although the project was approved in principle by Alexander, the emperor was assassinated (March 13 [March 1, O.S.], 1881) before it was formally enacted. When his successor, Alexander III, rejected the reform program and firmly committed himself to the preservation of the autocracy, Loris-Melikov resigned (May 19 [May 7], 1881), retiring to Nice.

Speransky, Mikhail Mikhaylovich, Graf

▪ Russian statesman

Introduction

(Count)

born Jan. 12 [Jan. 1, old style], 1772, Cherkutino, Russia

died Feb. 23 [Feb. 11, O.S.], 1839, St. Petersburg

Russian statesman prominent during the Napoleonic period, administrative secretary and assistant to Emperor Alexander I. He later compiled the first complete collection of Russian law, Complete Collection of the Laws of the Russian Empire, 45 vol. (1830), leading to his supervision of the Digest of the Laws, 15 vol. (1832–39).

Early life.

Mikhail, or Misha, Mikhaylovich was the son of the village priest of Cherkutino in central Russia. He was sent at the age of 12 to the ecclesiastical seminary in Vladimir, the provincial capital. His lack of a surname (Mikhaylovich indicating simply “son of Mikhail”) was overcome by an imaginative uncle, who dubbed him Speransky, a Russified form of the Latin word for hope. The boy soon distinguished himself by his ability to analyze problems and to express his thoughts with grace and clarity, but he already displayed an aloofness that emphasized his consciousness of his intellectual superiority yet cloaked his very real desire to feel the affection of those whom he respected, a quality that was to be a handicap in his later official career.

As a priest's son, he was sent at government expense to the Main Seminary newly founded in St. Petersburg. On completion of the course, he should have returned to his native diocese as a teacher. But a practice sermon so pleased the Metropolitan of St. Petersburg that the Synod granted permission to retain Speransky as a teacher of mathematics in the Main Seminary. Speransky resisted the urging of the Metropolitan that he take monastic vows, a step that would have opened to him the possibility of rising to the highest offices in the church. Despite his refusal, he was, in 1795, appointed instructor of philosophy and prefect of the seminary.

Secretary to Prince Kurakin.

At this point, Speransky's future prospects were radically changed. Prince A.B. Kurakin took him into his household as secretary. Here he deepened his knowledge of the thought of the French Enlightenment and was introduced to the Idealist philosophy of Immanuel Kant. On the accession of Emperor Paul I (1796), Kurakin was appointed procurator general of the Senate, a post as close as possible in the Russian system of that time to that of prime minister. He was, thus, powerful enough to secure Speransky's release from his priestly status, which enabled him to enter government service. Speransky was pushed rapidly upward through the lower bureaucratic grades; by the end of 1798, still not 27 years old, he had already risen high enough in the Table of Ranks to be entitled to enjoy, on a hereditary basis, all the privileges of “the most ancient nobility.”

In the same year, Speransky met an English girl whose widowed mother had come to Russia as a governess. He became so enamored of her that, although she knew no Russian and he understood no English, a courtship in fractured French led to their marriage. In the following year a daughter was born, but the mother, suffering from tuberculosis, died a few months later. Speransky, completely shattered, disappeared for a time. He never remarried but immersed himself wholly in his work. When Kurakin suddenly fell from favour, Speransky's tact, his evident ability, and his industry enabled him to continue his career.

Secretary to the Emperor.

Under Paul's successor, Alexander I, he was assigned to ever more responsible positions, at first in the new Ministry of the Interior, where he gained invaluable experience in drafting legislation and was the prime mover in founding Severnaya pochta or Novaya Sankt-Petersburgskaya gazeta, Russia's first official newspaper. In 1807 he became intimately associated with the Emperor himself, as his administrative secretary and assistant. In 1808 he accompanied Alexander to his meeting with Napoleon, who described him as “the only clear head in Russia.” Though he proved not yet able to cope successfully with the task of codifying the country's laws, he reorganized the seminaries and secured the establishment of the first Russian lycée (state secondary school).

In 1809 he laid the basis for his own downfall by two measures that outraged the bureaucratic nobility: one required that holders of court titles perform actual service to the state; the other required that all officials must pass examinations in order to be promoted at various stages of their careers. The angry nobles began to refer contemptuously to him as the popovich (“priest's son”). It was in this year, also, that Speransky proposed his new “constitution” (the Plan of 1809). Well aware that Alexander wanted no tampering with the essence of the autocracy or with its basis in serfdom, Speransky prepared complicated plans for dividing the population into three classes with varying degrees of political and civil rights and for creation of elective assemblies, the dumas, and an appointive State Council. The latter was set up on Jan. 1, 1810, but the dumas, innocuous though they would have been, remained on paper.

In these years (1807–12) when he had the Emperor's confidence, Speransky was responsible for a number of financial and administrative reforms designed not to change the essence of the state structure but to improve its functioning. His obvious pro-French leanings, however, added to the hostility of the nobles, whose pocketbooks had suffered by Russian participation in the Continental System, the systematic economic warfare employed by Napoleon against England.

Speransky's aloof personality and his continued association with persons inferior to him in social standing had prevented him from making friends among men with political prestige. He was thus left defenseless against his high-placed enemies at court, including the Emperor's sister, Catharine of Oldenburg. In 1811 the renowned historian N.M. Karamzin (Karamzin, Nikolay Mikhaylovich) attacked him in his well-known memoir, Of Old and New Russia.

Exile.

In March 1812, Speransky was summarily dismissed. Returning to his home at midnight, he found a police carriage waiting at his door. Without even taking leave of his daughter, the fallen minister started on the long journey to exile in Nizhny-Novgorod, whence he was soon transferred to the even more distant Perm, in the Urals.

Two years later he was permitted to return to his estate near Novgorod, but it was not until 1816 and only after he had stooped to appeal to his successor in Alexander's favour, Count A.A. Arakcheyev (Arakcheyev, Aleksey Andreyevich, Graf) (whom the poet Pushkin contrasted with Speransky as Alexander's “evil genius”), that he was permitted to reenter state service—though only as provincial governor in remote Penza. In 1819, however, he was promoted to be governor general of Siberia, where he effected significant administrative reforms. In 1821 he was summoned to St. Petersburg and appointed a member of the State Council, in which he was too prudent to advocate further reforms, lest he again irritate his master.

Work for Nicholas I.

Under Alexander's successor, Nicholas I, Speransky's great talents were again utilized, first as a member of the special tribunal that tried and sentenced the Decembrists, a group of officers who staged a liberal revolt on Nicholas' accession in December 1825. Here he again demonstrated his ability to read an emperor's mind; it was he who drafted the letter to the court that secured a significant reduction of the sentences the tribunal had imposed. In the same year he became, in effect, the head of the Second Division of the Emperor's personal chancellery. Still an efficient workhorse, he took part in the labours of Nicholas' secret committees for study of the peasant problem. His major achievement, however, was the publication, in 1830, of the first Complete Collection of the Laws of the Russian Empire (Polnoye sobraniye zakonov Rossiyskoy imperii). On the basis of this compilation, which began with the Code (Sobornoye ulozheniye) of 1649, he supervised preparation of a Digest of the Laws (Svod zakonov Rossiyskoy imperii). In 1837 he was awarded the highest grade of the Order of Andrew the First-Called and, in January 1839, was accorded the title of count. He died a few weeks later in St. Petersburg.

Jesse Dunsmore Clarkson

Additional Reading

Marc Raeff, Michael Speransky: Statesman of Imperial Russia, 1772–1839, 2nd rev. ed. (1969, reprinted 1981), is an excellent biography. See also his Siberia and the Reforms of 1822 (1956). For Speransky's own early writings (to 1809), see M.M. Speranskii: Proiekty i zapiski, ed. by S.N. Valka (1961).

Arakcheyev, Aleksey Andreyevich, Graf

▪ Russian general and statesman

born October 4 [September 23, Old Style], 1769, Novgorod province, Russia

died May 3 [April 21], 1834, Gruzino, Novgorod province

military officer and statesman whose domination of the internal affairs of Russia during the last decade of Alexander I's (Alexander I) reign (1801–25) caused that period to be known as Arakcheyevshchina.

The son of a minor landowner, Arakcheyev studied at the Artillery and Engineering Corps for Noble Cadets from 1783 to 1787 and was commissioned an artillery officer in the Russian army in the latter year. He became a close associate and adviser to the tsarevich Paul, who, when he became emperor in 1796, gave Arakcheyev the task of reorganizing the entire army. When his harsh disciplinary measures alienated the officers' corps, however, he was dismissed (1798) and was recalled to active duty only after Alexander I ascended the throne. Made an inspector general of the artillery in 1803, Arakcheyev reorganized that branch of the army; he then became minister of war (1808), and in 1809, during the Russo-Swedish War of 1808–09, he personally compelled the reluctant Russian forces to cross the frozen Gulf of Finland and make the attack on the Åland Islands that ultimately resulted in Sweden's cession of Finland to Russia (September 1809).

Arakcheyev generally opposed the liberal administrative and constitutional reforms considered by Alexander, and, when Alexander created the advisory Council of State (1810), Arakcheyev resigned as minister of war. He later accepted a post as head of the council's military department; and, as one of Alexander's most trusted military advisers, he handled all of the emperor's military correspondence and dispatches during the invasion by Napoleonic France in 1812. Afterward, when Alexander became almost exclusively involved in foreign affairs, Arakcheyev was made responsible for supervising the Council of Ministers' management of domestic matters (1815).

For the next decade Arakcheyev dominated the administration of Russia's internal affairs, carrying out his bureaucratic functions with brutal and ruthless efficiency. Despite his basic conservatism, he took part in the emancipation of serfs in Russia's Baltic provinces (1816–19) and also developed a plan for gradually emancipating all of Russia's serfs (1818). In addition, he supervised the creation of a system of military-agricultural colonies, which between 1816 and 1821 housed nearly one-third of Russia's standing army. After Nicholas I succeeded Alexander (1825), Arakcheyev resigned all of his offices (April 1826) and went into retirement.

Alexander II

▪ emperor of Russia

Introduction

Russian in full Aleksandr Nikolayevich

born April 29 [April 17, Old Style], 1818, Moscow, Russia

died March 13 [March 1, Old Style], 1881, St. Petersburg

emperor of Russia (1855–81). His liberal education and distress at the outcome of the Crimean War, which had demonstrated Russia's backwardness, inspired him toward a great program of domestic reforms, the most important being the emancipation (1861) of the serfs. A period of repression after 1866 led to a resurgence of revolutionary terrorism and to Alexander's own assassination.

Life

The future Tsar Alexander II was the eldest son of the grand duke Nikolay Pavlovich (who, in 1825, became the emperor Nicholas I) and his wife, Alexandra Fyodorovna (who, before her marriage to the Grand Duke and baptism into the Orthodox Church, had been the princess Charlotte of Prussia). Alexander's youth and early manhood were overshadowed by the overpowering personality of his dominating father, from whose authoritarian principles of government he was never to free himself. But at the same time, at the instigation of his mother, responsibility for the boy's moral and intellectual development was entrusted to the poet Vasily Zhukovsky (Zhukovsky, Vasily Andreyevich), a humanitarian liberal and romantic. Alexander, a rather lazy boy of average intelligence, retained throughout his life traces of his old tutor's romantic sensibility. The tensions created by the conflicting influences of Nicholas I and Zhukovsky left their mark on the future emperor's personality. Alexander (Alexander I) II, like his uncle Alexander I before him (who was educated by a Swiss republican tutor, a follower of Rousseau), was to turn into a “liberalizing,” or at any rate humanitarian, autocrat.

Alexander succeeded to the throne at age 36, following the death of his father in February 1855, at the height of the Crimean War. The war had revealed Russia's glaring backwardness in comparison with more advanced nations like England and France. Russian defeats, which had set the seal of final discredit on the oppressive regime of Nicholas I, had provoked among Russia's educated elite a general desire for drastic change. It was under the impact of this widespread urge that the tsar embarked upon a series of reforms designed, through “modernization,” to bring Russia into line with the more advanced Western countries.

Among the earliest concerns of the new emperor (once peace had been concluded in Paris in the spring of 1856 on terms considered harsh by the Russian public) was the improvement of communications. Russia at this time had only one railway (railroad) line of significance, that linking the two capitals of St. Petersburg and Moscow. At Alexander's accession there were fewer than 600 miles (965 km) of track; when he died in 1881, some 14,000 miles (22,525 km) of railway were in operation. In Russia, as elsewhere, railway construction, in its turn, meant a general quickening of economic life in a hitherto predominantly feudal agricultural society. Joint-stock companies developed, as did banking and credit institutions. The movement of grain, Russia's major article of export, was facilitated.

The same effect was achieved by another measure of modernization, the abolition of serfdom. In the face of bitter opposition from landowning interests, Alexander II, overcoming his natural indolence, took an active personal part in the arduous legislative labours that on Febuary 19, 1861, culminated in the Emancipation Act (Emancipation Manifesto). By a stroke of the autocrat's pen, tens of millions of human chattels were given their personal freedom. By means of a long-drawn-out redemption operation, moreover, they were also endowed with modest allotments of land. Although for a variety of reasons the reform failed in its ultimate object of creating an economically viable class of peasant proprietors, its psychological impact was immense. It has been described as “the greatest social movement since the French Revolution” and constituted a major step in the freeing of labour in Russia. Yet at the same time, it helped to undermine the already shaken economic foundations of Russia's landowning class.

The abolition of serfdom brought in its train a drastic overhaul of some of Russia's archaic administrative institutions. The most crying abuses of the old judicial system were remedied by the judicial statute of 1864. Russia, for the first time, was given a judicial system that in important respects could stand comparison with those of Western countries (in fact, in many particulars it followed that of France). Local government in its turn was remodeled by the statute of 1864, setting up elective local assemblies known as zemstvos. Their gradual introduction extended the area of self-government, improved local welfare (education, hygiene, medical care, local crafts, agronomy), and brought the first rays of enlightenment to the benighted Russian villages. Before long zemstvo village schools powerfully supported the spread of rural literacy. Meanwhile, Dmitry Milyutin (Milyutin, Dmitry Alekseyevich, Count), an enlightened minister of war, was carrying out an extensive series of reforms affecting nearly every branch of the Russian military organization. The educative role of military service was underlined by a marked improvement of military schools. The army statute of 1874 introduced conscription for the first time, making young men of all classes liable to military service.

The keynote of these reforms—and there were many lesser ones affecting various aspects of Russian life—was the modernization of Russia, its release from feudalism, and acceptance of Western culture and technology. Their aim and results were the reduction of class privilege, humanitarian progress, and economic development. Moreover, Alexander, from the moment of his accession, had instituted a political “thaw.” Political prisoners had been released and Siberian exiles allowed to return. The personally tolerant emperor had removed or mitigated the heavy disabilities weighing on religious minorities, particularly Jews and sectarians. Restrictions on foreign travel had been lifted. Barbarous medieval punishments were abolished. The severity of Russian rule in Poland was relaxed. Yet, notwithstanding these measures, it would be wrong, as is sometimes done, to describe Alexander II as a liberal. He was in fact a firm upholder of autocratic principles, sincerely convinced both of his duty to maintain the God-given autocratic power he had inherited and of Russia's unreadiness for constitutional or representative government.

Practical experience only strengthened these convictions. Thus, the relaxation of Russian rule in Poland led to patriotic street demonstrations, attempted assassinations, and, finally, in 1863, to a national uprising that was only suppressed with some difficulty—and under threat of Western intervention on behalf of the Poles. Even more serious, from the tsar's point of view, was the spread of nihilistic doctrines among Russian youth, producing radical leaflets, secret societies, and the beginnings of a revolutionary movement. The government, after 1862, had reacted increasingly with repressive police measures. A climax was reached in the spring of 1866, when Dmitry Karakozov, a young revolutionary, attempted to kill the emperor. Alexander—who bore himself gallantly in the face of great danger—escaped almost by a miracle. The attempt, however, left its mark by completing his conversion to conservatism. For the next eight years, the tsar's leading minister—maintaining his influence at least in part by frightening his master with real and imaginary dangers—was Pyotr Shuvalov (Shuvalov, Pyotr Andreyevich, Count), the head of the secret police.

The period of reaction following Karakozov's attempt coincided with a turning point in Alexander's personal life, the beginning of his liaison with Princess Yekaterina Dolgorukaya, a young girl to whom the aging emperor had become passionately attached. The affair, which it was impossible to conceal, absorbed the tsar's energies while weakening his authority both in his own family circle (his wife, the former princess Marie of Hesse-Darmstadt, had borne him six sons and two daughters) and in St. Petersburg society. His sense of guilt, moreover, made him vulnerable to the pressures of the Pan-Slav (Pan-Slavism) nationalists, who used the ailing and bigoted empress as their advocate when in 1876 Serbia became involved in war with the Ottoman Empire. Although decidedly a man of peace, Alexander became the reluctant champion of the oppressed Slav peoples and in 1877 finally declared war on Turkey. Following initial setbacks, Russian arms eventually triumphed, and, early in 1878, the vanguard of the Russian armies stood encamped on the shores of the Sea of Marmara. The prime reward of Russian victory—seriously reduced by the European powers at the Congress of Berlin—was the independence of Bulgaria from Turkey. Appropriately, that country still honours Alexander II among its “founding fathers” with a statue in the heart of its capital, Sofia.

Comparative military failure in 1877, aggravated by comparative diplomatic failure at the conference table, ushered in a major crisis in the Russian state. Beginning in 1879, there was a resurgence of revolutionary terrorism soon concentrated on the person of the tsar himself. Following unsuccessful attempts to shoot him, to derail his train, and finally to blow up the Winter Palace in St. Petersburg itself, Alexander, who under personal attack had shown unflinching courage based on a fatalist philosophy, entrusted supreme power to a temporary dictator. The minister of the interior, Count Mikhail Loris-Melikov (Loris-Melikov, Mikhail Tariyelovich, Graf), was charged with exterminating the terrorist organization (calling itself People's Will (Narodnaya Volya)) while at the same time conciliating moderate opinion, which had become alienated by the repressive policies pursued since 1866. At the same time, following the death of the empress in 1880, the tsar had privately married Yekaterina Dolgorukaya (who had borne him three children) and was planning to proclaim her his consort. To make this step palatable to the Russian public, he intended to couple the announcement with a modest concession to constitutionalist aspirations. There were to be two legislative commissions including indirectly elected representatives. This so-called Loris-Melikov Constitution, if implemented, might possibly have become the germ of constitutional development in Russia. But on the day when, after much hesitation, the tsar finally signed the proclamation announcing his intentions (March 1, 1881), he was mortally wounded by bombs in a plot sponsored by People's Will.

It can be said that he was a great historical figure without being a great man, that what he did was more important than what he was. His Great Reforms indeed rank in importance with those of Peter the Great (Peter I) and Vladimir Lenin (Lenin, Vladimir Ilich), yet the impact of his personality was much inferior to theirs. The tsar's place in history—a substantial one—is due almost entirely to his position as the absolute ruler of a vast empire at a critical stage in its development.

Assessment

The modernization of Russian institutions, though piecemeal, was extensive. In Alexander's reign, Russia built the base needed for emergence into capitalism and industrialization later in the century. At the same time, Russian expansion, especially in Asia, steadily gathered momentum. The sale of Alaska to the United States in 1867 was outweighed in importance by the acquisition of the Maritime Province from China (1858 and 1860) and the founding of Vladivostok as Russia's far eastern capital (1860), the definitive subjugation of the Caucasus (in the 1860s), and the conquest of central Asia (Khiva, Bokhara, Turkestan) in the 1870s. The contribution of the reign to the development of what was to be described as Russia's “cotton imperialism” was immense. Here also, the reign of Alexander paved the way for the later phases of Russian imperialism in Asia.

Alexander's importance lies chiefly in his efforts to assist Russia's emergence from the past. To some extent, he was, of course, the representative of forces—intellectual, economic, and political—that were stronger than himself or, indeed, any single individual. After the Crimean War, the modernization of Russia had indeed become imperative if Russia was to retain its position as a major European power. But even within the context of a wider movement, the role of Alexander II, through his position as autocratic ruler, was a highly important one. The Great Reforms, both in what they achieved and in what they failed to do, bear the imprint of his personality. Unfortunately, however, by placing great power in the hands of the influential reactionary minister K.P. Pobedonostsev (Pobedonostsev, Konstantin Petrovich)—whom he appointed minister for church affairs (procurator of the Holy Synod) and entrusted with the education of his son and heir, the future Alexander III—Alexander II, perhaps unwittingly, did much to frustrate his own reforming policies and to set Russia finally on the road to revolution.

W.E. Mosse

Additional Reading

S.S. Tatishchev, Imperator Aleksandr II, 2 vol. (1903), the standard life of Alexander II, is the prerevolutionary official biography. The fullest modern biography is C. de Grunwald, Le Tsar Alexandre II et son temps (1963). A short, concise life of the Emperor is W.E. Mosse, Alexander II and the Modernization of Russia (1958). Two popular biographies are S. Graham, Alexander II: Tsar of Russia (1935); and Martha E. Almedingen, The Emperor Alexander II (1962).

▪ king of Scotland

born August 24, 1198, Haddington, Lothian [now in East Lothian], Scotland

died July 8, 1249, Kerrera Island [now in Argyll and Bute]

king of Scotland from 1214 to 1249; he maintained peace with England and greatly strengthened the Scottish monarchy.

Alexander came to the throne on the death of his father, William I (the Lion; reigned 1165–1214). When the English barons rebelled against King John (reigned 1199–1216) in 1215, Alexander sided with the insurgents in the hope of regaining territory he claimed in northern England. After the rebellion collapsed in 1217, he did homage to King Henry III (reigned 1216–72), and in 1221 he married Henry's sister, Joan (d. 1238). In 1237 Henry and Alexander concluded the Peace of York, an agreement by which the Scots king abandoned his claim to land in England but received in exchange several English estates. The boundary of Scotland was fixed approximately at its present location.

Meanwhile, Alexander was suppressing rebellious Scots lords and consolidating his rule over parts of Scotland that had hitherto only nominally acknowledged royal authority. In 1222 he subjugated Argyll. He died as he was preparing to conquer the Norwegian-held islands along Scotland's west coast.

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also called (until 1061) Anselm of Baggio or Anselm of Lucca , Italian Anselmo da Baggio or Anselmo di Lucca

born , Baggio, near Milan [Italy]

died April 21, 1073, Rome

pope from 1061 to 1073.

At Bec in Normandy he studied under the Benedictine scholar Lanfranc, who later became archbishop of Canterbury. As bishop of Lucca, Anselm worked for the abolition of simony and the enforcement of clerical celibacy. His election as Pope Alexander II was opposed by the German court, which nominated Peter Cadalus of Parma as Honorius II. In 1062 the antipope was dropped by the German regents, and the schism ceased to be important. In cooperation with Hildebrand (later Pope Gregory VII (Gregory VII, Saint)) and St. Peter Damian (Peter Damian, Saint), Alexander promoted the Gregorian Reform movement begun by Pope Leo IX (Leo IX, Saint) in 1049. He also bestowed his blessing on William the Conqueror (William I)'s invasion of England in 1066.

Crimean War

▪ Eurasian history [1853–56]

(October 1853–February 1856), war fought mainly on the Crimean Peninsula between the Russians and the British, French, and Ottoman (Ottoman Empire) Turkish, with support, from January 1855, by the army of Sardinia-Piedmont (Sardinia). The war arose from the conflict of great powers in the Middle East and was more directly caused by Russian demands to exercise protection over the Orthodox subjects of the Ottoman sultan. Another major factor was the dispute between Russia and France over the privileges of the Russian Orthodox and Roman Catholic churches in the holy places in Palestine.

Supported by Britain, the Turks took a firm stand against the Russians, who occupied the Danubian principalities (modern Romania) on the Russo-Turkish border in July 1853. The British fleet was ordered to Constantinople (Istanbul) on September 23. On October 4 the Turks declared war on Russia and in the same month opened an offensive against the Russians in the Danubian principalities. After the Russian Black Sea fleet destroyed a Turkish squadron at Sinope, on the Turkish side of the Black Sea, the British and French fleets entered the Black Sea on Jan. 3, 1854, to protect Turkish transports. On March 28, Britain and France declared war on Russia. To satisfy Austria and avoid having that country also enter the war, Russia evacuated the Danubian principalities. Austria occupied them in August 1854. In September 1854 the allies landed troops in Russian Crimea, on the north shore of the Black Sea, and began a year-long siege of the Russian fortress of Sevastopol (Sevastopol, Siege of). Major engagements were fought at the Alma River on September 20, at Balaklava on October 25, and at Inkerman on November 5. On Jan. 26, 1855, Sardinia-Piedmont entered the war and sent 10,000 troops. Finally, on Sept. 11, 1855, three days after a successful French assault on the Malakhov, a major strongpoint in the Russian defenses, the Russians blew up the forts, sank the ships, and evacuated Sevastopol. Secondary operations of the war were conducted in the Caucasus and in the Baltic Sea.