How Russia Became an Empire
Dominic Lieven on the Rise of a Singularly Remote Global Economy
14
The Romanovs: Dynastic, Russian, European and Eurasian Emperors
The founders of the Russian Empire were the rulers of Moscow, an initially small principality formed in the last decades of the thirteenth century. Moscow’s rulers were descendants of Rurik, the semi-mythical Viking chieftain who had ruled the area around Kiev towards the end of the ninth century. At a pinch one might describe these Vikings as river-borne nomadic war-bands. In the following four centuries Rurik’s dynasty came to rule over much of today’s European Russia, Belarus and Ukraine. Since the Rurikids divided their realms between their sons, by 1200 a maze of mostly tiny principalities covered this vast territory. The most powerful Rurikid by then was the Grand Prince of Vladimir, who dominated the north-eastern territories (‘Great Russia’) which became the core of the Muscovite and then Russian state. Moscow’s princes were a junior branch of the grand princes of Vladimir. For almost 250 years after the Mongol invasions of the 1240s most of the Rurikid lands were part of the empire of Chinggis Khan and his successors. The Chinggisids ruled their Slav subjects indirectly, using the Rurikid princes to extract tribute and transmit it to the ruling khan.
During the fourteenth century Moscow’s rulers emerged as the most powerful princes in ‘Great Russia’. Their position as ‘Grand Princes’ was recognized both by the Tatar/Mongol khan and by the Orthodox Church, whose patriarch (originally located in Kiev) moved to Moscow for good in the first half of the fourteenth century. A crucial factor in Moscow’s rise was the fact that whereas rival principalities were divided among many heirs, over four long generations biological chance kept the whole Muscovite inheritance united. This good fortune ended in 1425 when Vasily I died, leaving his adult younger brother and his ten-year-old son (Vasily II) as rival candidates for the throne. The vicious twenty-year civil war that followed brought anarchy and the intervention of outside rulers, but Vasily II’s final victory established the inheritance of the undivided realm by male primogeniture as the unchallenged ‘law’ of the realm.
In the century that followed Vasily II’s victory Moscow made the first steps towards empire. The fall of Constantinople to the Ottomans in 1453 left Moscow’s rulers the only independent Orthodox monarchs and allowed them to claim the Byzantine imperial heritage. This included the title of tsar (a corruption of ‘caesar’) and Byzantine imperial rituals, symbols and ideology. All the other Rurikid principalities of Great Russia were absorbed by 1520, as was the vast and wealthy trading state of Novgorod. Ivan IV – ‘the Terrible’ (r. 1547–84) – conquered the main successor states to the Mongol Empire in Europe, the Muslim khanates of Kazan and Astrakhan, in the 1550s. His subsequent attempt to conquer Livonia (today’s Latvia and Estonia) and plant Russian power on the shores of the Baltic Sea overstretched his realm’s resources and resulted in economic and political crisis. Ivan’s reaction to this crisis was massive purges of the ruling elite, including the killing of the junior branch of the Muscovite dynasty and – perhaps – of his eldest son and heir. One plausible explanation for his extreme and counter-productive cruelty is that his brain was increasingly affected by the mercury he took to counter a painful and debilitating disease of the spine. Largely thanks to Ivan, in 1598 the Moscow dynasty died out, unleashing two decades of anarchy, civil war and foreign intervention known as the Time of Troubles, which culminated in an attempt to set up the Polish king’s son as ruler in Moscow. The Orthodox and proto-nationalist revolt that ensued drove out the Poles and elected as tsar Michael Romanov, a member of an aristocratic family prominent since Moscow’s creation and one which had intermarried with the reigning dynasty. Memory of the Time of Troubles greatly strengthened the belief that only a powerful and legitimate monarchy could save the Russians from domestic anarchy and foreign domination. This memory was one of the foundation myths of the Romanov dynasty and empire.[1]
Inevitably the political system and traditions of the Muscovite principality were deeply influenced by its geographical setting. No other great sedentary empire in history had a heartland in so northern a latitude, so far from the centres of international trade and culture. Moscow was some 1,300 miles north-east of Constantinople, which was at the centre of trading routes that linked the Mediterranean region to Asia from ancient times. It was even further from the Atlantic, which became the centre of the global economy from the eighteenth century. In civilizational terms Moscow was perched on the furthest periphery of the Orthodox and Byzantine community, which itself by 1450 was much the junior partner in the European and Christian world. Distance from the great trade routes and cultural centres meant relative poverty, few towns and small numbers of merchants, professional men and skilled craftsmen. States able to tap into international trade could place smaller tax burdens on their people. The overwhelming majority of the tsar’s subjects even in 1700 were peasants, whose ‘surplus’ had to sustain the monarchy and its armies. In most of the world’s great ‘agrarian’ empires peasant farmers lived in densely populated and fertile river valleys. In Russia by contrast the peasantry was thinly sprinkled across a vast but infertile zone. Even in 1750 the empire’s population was smaller than that of France. Distance and climate placed a high tax on all the operations of the Russian state, economy and people. Fixing the population to the soil – in other words serfdom – was the only way to sustain the state, its armed forces and the warrior-landholding elite.
The Russian Empire at Its Greatest Extent, 1914
There was nothing at all inevitable in the rise of a powerful state in the Muscovite heartland. If such a state did emerge, however, geography more or less determined how it would seek to expand its power and territory. One reason for the foundation of the city of Moscow was its good water communications with Russia’s greatest river, the Volga, and thereby its links to the Baltic and Caspian seas. Any state rooted in Moscow would seek to control these waterways and their outlets to the sea, in order to stop its trade being constrained, taxed and interdicted by rival powers. Even more elemental was the drive to expand out of the poor soils of the Muscovite heartland towards the much more fertile land of the steppe. Still, the geographical location of the Russian heartland did offer some advantages. Its dense network of rivers flowed slowly across a flat landscape and were in most cases easily managed and navigated by the standards even of the Nile, let alone the Yellow River. The remote and densely forested terrain offered some security against nomadic armies. It was even better security against early modern European infantry and artillery-based armies which found it hard to feed themselves on Russian soil and even harder to move across Russia’s vast distances, especially in spring and autumn when all roads dissolved into mud.
Above all, Russia benefited after 1500 from its peripheral location in the European state system, which facilitated its expansion across the whole of northern Asia. Russia would gain enormous wealth from Siberia’s fur, silver and gold, and other minerals. The Russian military and metallurgical industry was created in the Urals in the reign of Peter I ‘the Great’ (r. 1682–1725) and was based on the region’s vast resources of iron and timber. In comparative imperial terms the native forest peoples of Siberia offered weak opposition to Russian expansion. Already by the end of the seventeenth century the Russians had reached the Pacific Ocean and had achieved a stable compromise with the Qing Empire, which contributed among other things to the rapid demise of Mongol military nomadism. Not until the emergence of Japan at the end of the nineteenth century did Russia face a serious military threat to its Asian territories. Essentially the Russians had moved into the geopolitical void created by the collapse of the Mongol Empire. Comparisons with the Ottoman experience are illuminating. When the Chinggisid Ilkhanate disintegrated in Iran it was in time replaced by the Safavid dynasty, which quickly became a formidable enemy on the Ottomans’ eastern frontier.
The basic geopolitical imperatives of the Muscovite and then Russian state – in other words control of river-borne trade routes and expansion on to the rich soils of the steppe – were far harder to achieve and faced major opposition. Expansion southwards ran head-on into nomadic warrior communities, above all the Crimean Tatars. Scores of thousands of Russians and Ukrainians were netted by the Crimean slave raids that occurred regularly between 1500 and 1650. Europe’s first slave-based sugar plantations were in Cyprus with captured Russians and Ukrainians providing the labour. Most of Moscow was burned down in a Crimean Tatar raid as late as 1571. Building and manning the fortified lines that protected Russian colonization as it advanced across the steppe from the sixteenth to the eighteenth centuries could only be achieved by a state capable of mobilizing resources and manpower on a considerable scale. Behind the Crimean Tartars stood their overlord, the Ottoman sultan. In military terms the Ottoman Empire was more powerful than Russia until the eighteenth century. In 1711 the Ottomans came close to destroying Peter the Great and his army and forced the tsar to make a humiliating peace. Even later in the eighteenth century it took enormous military and logistical efforts to secure Russia’s hold on the northern shore of the Black Sea and thereby make possible the economic development of southern Russia and Ukraine.
For a state rooted in the Moscow region, access to the Baltic was always likely to be an earlier and more credible priority than advancing across the steppe to challenge Ottoman dominance of the distant Black Sea coastline. From early days Russia’s rulers fought on two fronts – northern and southern. Managing diplomatic relations in order to exploit opportunities as they arose in one of these theatres and avoid simultaneous two-front wars required diplomatic skill and experience. In the early eighteenth century Russia fulfilled its long-held goal of establishing its control over the south-eastern shore of the Baltic Sea. Opening up the trade routes to the booming economies of western and central Europe led to enormous economic gains but it also embroiled Russia in direct competition with the European great powers. Right down to 1917 the single greatest priority for Russian tsars was to maintain the empire’s security and status in competition with the economically and culturally more advanced great powers to its west. This continued to be true for the tsars’ communist successors. Any state whose roots lay in the bare Muscovite heartland and which evolved through surmounting these geopolitical challenges was unlikely to be a model of liberty and benevolence.
Once again, comparisons with the Ottomans are to the point. The Russian and Ottoman empires were located on the immediate periphery of Latin Europe in an era (1500–1918) when European power grew enormously and came to dominate the world. The Russian people paid a high price for the creation of an often ruthlessly exploitative state and its military machine. On the other hand, as we have seen, Ottoman failure to sustain the state’s military power led in time to the killing or ethnic cleansing of millions of Muslims in the empire’s northern borderlands and European domination and even colonization of the Islamic heartlands. By the traditional measure of empire – in other words military power and glory – Russia did much better than the Ottomans in the eighteenth century. Leadership was a major factor in Russian success and Ottoman failure in this geopolitical competition. Two longer-term structural factors were also vital to Russian success: first, the creation of an effective but ruthless system to control and mobilize Russian manpower through serfdom and conscription into the armed forces: and, second, the rapid westernization of Russian elites. In long-term historical perspective it is easy to see the awful hatreds and brutality of the Russian Revolution as in part a belated revenge against exploitative but also culturally alien rulers. There were no easy or cheap answers to the geopolitical challenges faced by the Russians or Ottomans in the early modern and modern eras.[2]
The core of the Russian political system was an exceptionally close alliance between a powerful monarchy and the hereditary military and landholding elite. The thirteenth-century prince of Moscow was the perfect example of a war-band leader. By the end of the sixteenth century he had evolved into a distant and divinely appointed emperor surrounded by the rituals of absolute and hereditary monarchy. His territorial conquests had allowed the tsar to create a royal army consisting of cavalrymen granted land in return for military service and a smaller number of full-time, salaried infantry known as musketeers (strel’tsy). The parallels with the Ottoman case are clear.
The ideology, symbols and rituals of Russian imperial monarchy were drawn from the Byzantine Orthodox tradition. In the Byzantine Empire the Orthodox Church’s celebration of absolute and semi-sacred monarchical power was balanced by the political culture inherited from imperial Rome. The dynastic principle was weak, the overthrow of emperors and dynasties by military coup and mass disturbances on the streets of the capital a recurring story. Imported to Russia where the dynastic principle was strong, Byzantine ideology contributed to the formation of a mighty monarchy whose rulers were sometimes depicted in messianic and almost Christ-like terms. Unlike his peers in Latin Europe, the tsar did not face a web of laws, institutions and conventions protecting the lives and property of the elite, and often granting aristocrats a say in legislation and taxation. Peter the Great’s reign showed the awesome power of a very competent and determined tsar. In 1722 he was able simply to decree the replacement of the old rule of male primogeniture by a new law giving the reigning monarch the right to choose his own successor from among the members of the dynasty. No eighteenth-century French king would even have dreamed of abolishing the Salic Law governing succession to the throne. No law or institution had restricted Ivan IV’s reign of terror directed against the Russian aristocracy.[3]
Ironically, Ivan IV’s reign illustrated graphically both the extent and the limitations of autocratic power. The only result of his actions was the destruction of his dynasty and the near-destruction of the Muscovite state. A key lesson learned from his reign and the Time of Troubles was that the political system could only function if tsar and elite collaborated. The new Romanov regime did everything in its power to restore their traditional alliance. A remarkable number of the families supposedly destroyed by Ivan resurfaced within the political and social elite. The fourth Romanov tsar, Peter the Great, was in many ways an astonishingly original and even revolutionary figure, with immense personal charisma. He transformed Russia’s international status, central government institutions, and the mentality and culture of the Russian aristocracy. But Peter had no intention of destroying the traditional elite and would have ruined any chance of achieving his goals had he attempted to do so. His success depended on reforming and strengthening the alliance between the monarchy and Russia’s traditional elites so that it could meet the changing military, political but also cultural requirements of the early modern world.
At Peter’s accession the uselessness of the traditional cavalry regiments risked making the landholding-military elite redundant. Peter’s institutional and cultural reforms transformed this elite into the officer corps of his Europeanized army and state. Henceforth service as an officer in the emperor’s army or fleet became a badge of honour and an expected cultural norm for Russian noblemen. The tsar’s unconventional ‘career’ and mindset allowed him to discover and recruit into his entourage some able individuals from outside the traditional elite. These included both foreigners and Russians from non-elite backgrounds. Nevertheless, the top military and civilian office-holders in 1730 still mostly came from traditional landholding families. Even in the reign of the last Russian emperor, Nicholas II (r. 1894–1917), over one-third of Russia’s ministers, top officials, diplomats, judges, senior generals and admirals came from families belonging to the pre-Petrine Russian elite. The last ‘prime minister’ (i.e. Chairman of the Council of Ministers) of imperial Russia, Prince N. D. Golitsyn, came from a family that had played a key role in the Russian court and politics in the early fifteenth century.[4]
The Russian hereditary, military and landholding elite – obsessed with genealogy and very conscious of a collective elite identity – had far more in common with the European aristocracy than with Confucian bureaucrats or the slave-soldiers who formed the core of the Ottoman ruling elite at the empire’s sixteenth-century highpoint. It had some similarities with the Manchu and Mughal nobilities but was much older, more deeply rooted in its society, and more secure in its possession of landed property. In the fourteenth century the Muscovite aristocracy – meaning the small group of boyar families – owned their land outright and without any service obligations. By the seventeenth century all landholders were obliged to serve in the tsar’s armies if the need arose, but estates which had originally been held as temporary tenures in reward for military service had by now become hereditary family property. Only in the second half of the eighteenth century did landed estates become outright property along European lines and without any legal obligation to serve. This was part of the broader Europeanization of the Russian elites, started quietly under Tsar Alexei (r. 1645–76) and driven forward with enormous gusto by his son Peter the Great. Even in 1789, however, the Russian elite was more geared to serving the state and had fewer legal and political rights than the French, let alone British, aristocracy and gentry.[5]
Such comparisons help to situate Russia and its elites in global history, but they have their dangers. It makes little sense to judge the Russian aristocracy as failing to meet Latin European aristocratic norms that had evolved in a different context. Before the eighteenth century the Russian elites did not measure themselves by European models. They operated according to their own traditions, needs and priorities. The basic point was that an aristocracy that sat on its estates in the bare Muscovite heartland would have doomed itself to poverty and insignificance. On the contrary, the alliance of monarchy and service-oriented aristocracy fuelled Russia’s growth from an impoverished, small principality to an empire that covered one-sixth of the world’s land surface. As a result, the Russian elites acquired not just wealth but also an honoured place in world history. Their literary, musical and artistic culture – combining Russian, European and imperial elements – became one of the ornaments of modern, global civilization. These were no small achievements. On the other hand, the fusion of Western and Russian traditions was the source of tensions which were both creative and at times devastating in their impact.
The Russian Empire reached its apogee in the ‘long eighteenth century’, in other words between 1689 and 1815. Two of its rulers in this era, Peter I and Catherine II ‘the Great’ (r. 1762–96), dominate public perceptions of eighteenth-century Russia and loom almost larger than life. Before looking at these two extraordinary monarchs it is worth pausing to explain the society and political system which they ruled. This makes clear the opportunities, constraints and dangers they faced. It tells us what they could and could not do.[6]
At the centre of the political system stood the autocratic sovereign, unconstrained by laws or institutions, and the source of all legitimate authority. To challenge the Romanov dynasty’s right to rule was unthinkable to members of the eighteenth-century elite. On the other hand, Peter I’s abolition of the old convention of succession by male primogeniture weakened the legitimacy of individual rulers. Although monarchs almost always nominated an heir, succession crises occurred in 1727, 1730 and 1825. In 1741 and 1762 coups overthrew monarchs within a year of their accession. In 1801 Paul I was assassinated after just four years of rule. The muscle for these coups was provided by the regiments of the Guards, whose noble officers were often linked to key figures at court and in the government. Wise rulers knew how to use their ‘autocratic’ power but also to understand its limitations. They were careful not to tread too hard on the interests and sensitivities of the aristocracy, and in particular of key courtiers and Guards officers. A foreign policy perceived by powerful members of the elite to be contrary to Russian interests also played a big role in the overthrow of Peter III in 1762 and of his son, Paul I, in 1801.[7]
The Russian elite was always divided between a group of rich and powerful families which dominated the court and a much larger and poorer group of landholding families whose lives revolved around life on their estates in the provinces and service in the tsar’s armies. It is reasonable to call the former group ‘aristocrats’ and the latter ‘gentry’. The main allies of the monarchy and the chief beneficiaries of its growing wealth and territory were the aristocrats, but competent monarchs made sure never to become the servants of any aristocratic faction. To some extent they balanced not just individuals and factions but also aristocrats and gentry against each other. In 1730 key aristocratic courtiers chose Duchess Anna of Courland, the daughter of Peter the Great’s half-brother Ivan V, to occupy a throne made vacant by the sudden death of the young Peter II. They attempted to impose constitutional constraints on the monarchy, which in practice would greatly have enhanced the power of leading aristocratic families like their own. Anna defeated this attempt in part by appealing beyond the narrow aristocratic elite to a broader gentry group that had gathered in Moscow to greet the new reign. Few members of the gentry welcomed the prospect of court patronage and promotion in the state’s military and civil service falling into the hands of a few aristocratic magnates and their clients. More than just self-interest was involved. Supporters of autocracy pointed out the damage that rule by aristocratic oligarchy was doing to the international power and status of neighbouring Poland and Sweden.
For two hundred years before Peter I’s reign, Russian tsars had usually married women from respectable gentry families. The difficulty of persuading foreign royal brides to convert to Orthodoxy was one constraint on choosing European princesses. To marry Russian aristocrats was both to invite great jealousy within the court elite and to elevate the status of an aristocratic family to possibly dangerous levels. A carefully vetted bride from the gentry was a much safer option. After her marriage, the bride’s close relations would be brought into the court elite. Often, they proved key allies of the tsar, linked by special bonds of blood and dependence. This tradition ended with Peter I. Thenceforth the Romanovs intermarried almost exclusively with European royal dynasties. However, it took some time for this new custom to take root. In 1727 the eleven-year-old Peter II, grandson of Peter the Great, ascended the throne. Prince Alexander Menshikov, one of Peter I’s leading lieutenants and now the dominant figure in government, immediately tried to marry off his own daughter to the young tsar. This grab for power infuriated other key political figures and quickly led to Menshikov’s overthrow. Instead, Peter II was betrothed to Princess Catherine Dolgoruky, whose family were bitter enemies of Menshikov and dominated the government after his fall. Completely unlike Menshikov, who had been promoted by Peter I’s favour despite very humble origins, the Dolgorukys were an ancient princely family descended from Rurik. Had Peter II lived and produced heirs the Dolgoruky family would probably have dominated the court for at least one generation. Conceivably, had the Romanov family died out – which very nearly happened in the eighteenth century – the Dolgorukys might even have succeeded them on the throne. Peter II’s unexpected death from smallpox aged only fourteen wrecked their ambitions.[8]
For all but two of the following sixty-six years Russia was ruled by female monarchs. Empress Anna (r. 1730–40) was a widow. Elizabeth (r. 1741–62), the daughter of Peter the Great, and Catherine II ‘the Great’ were officially unmarried though both may actually have contracted secret marriages to their main favourites, respectively Kirill Razumovsky and Grigorii Potemkin. For an empress officially to marry any man was to grant him enormous power and status, thereby greatly diminishing her own position and infuriating rival courtiers. Favourites and their families often played a role similar to that of the relatives of royal brides in the pre-Petrine era. The favourites were almost always drawn from respectable gentry families but not from the court aristocracy. The families of Elizabeth’s two greatest favourites, Razumovsky and Ivan Shuvalov, played vital roles in politics and government. The same was true as regards Catherine II’s longest-lasting favourites, Grigorii Orlov and Potemkin. The Orlovs were at the centre of the conspiracy that brought Catherine to power in 1762 by overthrowing her husband, Peter III. For the next decade, when her throne remained insecure, their network ensured the loyalty of the Guards regiments. Grigorii’s brother Alexei, the most formidable of his many able siblings, disposed of the imprisoned Peter III on Catherine’s behalf and occupied a variety of positions in her regime, most notably as commander of the Russian fleet which amazed Europe in 1769 by sailing from the Baltic to the eastern Mediterranean and destroying the Ottoman navy. The greatest of all Catherine’s favourites, Potemkin, served as her formidable and totally loyal viceroy of southern Russia – including all the territories newly conquered from the Ottomans – in the second half of her reign.[9]
Placing a mistress in the monarch’s bed had always been a route to power and wealth not just for her but also often for her family. In eighteenth-century Russia this rule still applied but, instead of beautiful young women, handsome young Guards officers now competed to catch the empress’s eye. The job of favourite was not always comfortable. By the 1780s favourites were trying to satisfy the sexual and emotional needs of a woman old enough to be their grandmother, with ‘uncle’ Potemkin from time to time peering over their shoulder in a remarkable menage à trois. On the other hand, even a short spell as favourite brought lavish rewards. Most gentry families could only rise into the aristocracy by distinguished service, especially in the army. The eighteenth-century army fought enough wars and was enough of a meritocracy for some sons of the gentry to win fame, high rank and sometimes wealth. The most famous general in Russian history, Field Marshal Alexander Suvorov, followed this path. Most gentry officers never rose beyond the rank of major and retired after years of service to manage an estate or serve as a middle-ranking official in the provinces. For the usually poor sons of the gentry a military career brought in essential extra income as well as status.
Meanwhile the gentry officer and landowner made a crucial contribution to the state’s effectiveness. In 1763 the Russian government employed 16,500 officials, one thousand more than in Prussia, a country that was just one per cent the size even of Russia-in-Europe. Without the noble landowner – whom one emperor described as the state’s involuntary tax collector and conscription agent in the village – the tsarist regime could not have functioned. Dominated by landed noblemen, the army was also a reliable and irreplaceable force for repressing serf rebellion and maintaining the highly exploitative system of rule on which both the state and the gentry depended. The army and its officers were at the centre of the regime’s legitimacy and system of rule. The officer’s uniform was a badge of noble status and honour. The army’s many victories in the eighteenth century bathed the state’s alliance with the gentry in the prestige and the spoils of success. Like its early modern European rivals, Russia solved the conundrum that had brought down so many other dynasties and empires. Its army was formidable in the face of foreign enemies but its noble officers were fully loyal to their warrior-king and dynasty. Coups in eighteenth-century Russia were kept strictly within the court and the Guards. No Russian general dreamed of marching on St Petersburg in support of a candidate from the Romanov family, let alone of seizing the throne for himself.
When the Romanovs conquered vast new territories in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries their landowning elites fitted snugly into the imperial order. They ran local government and many of their sons joined the imperial army and bureaucracy, in the process becoming loyal servants of monarchy and empire. Sometimes – especially in the case of well-educated Protestant nobles from Russia’s Baltic provinces and abroad – they brought with them skills which were in short supply in Russia. A monarch might also welcome the fact that some of these ‘foreigners’ lived outside the Russian aristocracy and its networks of clients and allies. In a manner dear to all emperors, they were ‘his men’.[10]
Less important to the state than the landowners but still very significant was the Orthodox Church. Above all, the Russian national Church legitimized the monarchy through its prayers, sermons and rituals. Although a pure product of Enlightenment agnosticism, Catherine II spent great time and effort participating in church services and displaying her loyalty and generosity to Orthodoxy in public. She learned a lesson from her husband, Peter III (r. 1762), who had contributed to his downfall by on occasion openly ridiculing the Church. The Orthodox Church in Byzantium and elsewhere had never enjoyed as much autonomy from royal authority as was the case with Catholicism in much of Latin Europe. Peter I increased the Church’s dependence by abolishing the patriarchate and running the Church through a Protestant-style committee of archbishops headed by a royal procurator. The fate of the Church’s vast landed property tells one something about where power lay in imperial Russia. In Protestant Europe during the Reformation most church land was expropriated, usually in time becoming aristocratic property. In Catholic Europe the Church usually retained its lands. Only in Russia did the monarchy (in Catherine II’s reign) expropriate church lands and then just keep them and the peasants who dwelt on them for itself. One result was that by the early nineteenth century roughly half of the Russian peasantry were not private serfs, instead owing all their dues and services to the state or the Romanov family. Over the course of the eighteenth century the taxes and dues paid by these so-called ‘state peasants’ became the single largest source of revenue for the treasury.[11]
Peter the Great created the eighteenth-century Russian system of government though he built on strong and deeply rooted foundations inherited from Muscovite history. Peter’s father, Tsar Alexei (r. 1645–76), died leaving two sons and many daughters by his first wife, Maria Miloslavskaya. Peter was the only surviving son of Alexei’s second wife, Natalia Naryshkina. In the last three decades of the seventeenth century Russian politics to a great extent boiled down to a struggle between the Miloslavsky and Naryshkin factions to control power and patronage. The key to victory was to place ‘your’ prince on the throne. The Naryshkins won in large part due to medical and biological chance. Alexei’s eldest son, Tsar Fedor III, died childless in 1682 at the age of twenty. His younger son Ivan V was severely handicapped both physically and mentally.
Mostly for that reason not just the Naryshkin faction but also the Patriarch of the Orthodox Church and key ‘independent’ aristocrats chose Peter as tsar in 1682, even though he was a ten-year-old child. The Miloslavsky faction struck back by using a revolt by the Moscow musketeer (strel’tsy) regiments to force an alternative arrangement. Peter and Ivan in theory now ruled jointly. Real power belonged to Ivan’s older sister Sophia, the most formidable of Alexei’s daughters by Maria Miloslavskaya. The musketeers occupied a position in Moscow akin to that of the Janissaries in Istanbul. They were by now more or less useless as soldiers but were a powerful force in domestic politics, linked to conservative and xenophobic religious sects and fiercely protective of their own corporate interests. During their revolt in 1682 they terrorized Peter and his mother and they killed some prominent members of the Naryshkin family and faction. Peter did not forget this. After the musketeers staged another revolt in 1698 Peter punished the rebels with great brutality and abolished the musketeer corps.
The 1682 settlement was a compromise, albeit one which favoured the Miloslavskys. Russian court politics was not a zero-sum game. Remembering the horrors of Ivan IV (‘the Terrible’) and the Time of Troubles, the ruling elite sought consensus and the avoidance of bloodshed. The anarchy and murder unleashed by the musketeers in 1682 was potentially a threat to all aristocrats. During Sophia’s regency (1682–9) Peter and his mother lived freely on their estate at Preobrazhenskoe just outside Moscow, surrounded by allies and clients. Sophia does not seem to have even thought of killing Peter, and the Moscow elite would have been appalled had she attempted to do so.
The clock was ticking against Sophia. Once Peter came of age and married, Muscovite convention would make it hard for a female regent to deny him the right to rule. The Miloslavskys’ prospects depended on the decrepit Tsar Ivan producing sons. If he did so, then it might perhaps be possible to destroy the Naryshkin faction and confine Peter to secure but honourable exile in a monastery. Sophia’s chances would be increased given military victory in Russia’s ongoing war with the Ottomans. Praskovia Saltykova, whose family was closely allied to the Miloslavskys, was dragooned into marrying Ivan V in 1684. It is unlikely that poor Praskovia, said to be the most beautiful woman in Russia, much enjoyed this fate. Subsequently, rumour suggested that Ivan was impotent and that Praskovia’s five children were fathered by an Italian doctor whose services the Miloslavskys had procured. In the event the rumour was far less important than the fact that all five of her children were girls. Meanwhile the two campaigns launched against the Ottomans’ Crimean clients in 1687 and 1689 ended in disaster. When Peter reached the age of seventeen and married in 1689 the game was up. When the final confrontation came between the regent and Peter, the Moscow elite backed the tsar. Sophia, not Peter, ended her days in a monastery. With Sophia safely out of the way, Peter and the Naryshkin faction were happy to preserve the facade of dual rulership with Ivan V. From Peter’s personal perspective, Ivan performed a useful role by participating in the lengthy Orthodox and neo-Byzantine ceremonies that enveloped the Russian monarchy and which Peter himself so disliked.[12]
Peter’s unusual childhood and adolescence had an important influence on his reign. Tsar Alexei died when Peter was only four, so the young prince was never subject to a father’s direction or control. From the age of ten, though co-tsar, Peter lived away from the Kremlin at the suburban estate of Preobrazhenskoe. He seems to have enjoyed a remarkably free and untutored adolescence. Always passionately interested in military matters, he poured much of his energy into forming two ‘play’ regiments, named after the neighbouring villages of Preobrazhenskoe and Semenovskoe. Their ranks were filled by a strange combination of the sons of aristocrats from the Naryshkin faction and the estate’s stable-boys and other young servants. Initially playmates, many of these boys (including Alexander Menshikov) subsequently became members of Peter’s inner circle and loyal agents in his drive to transform Russia. Joined in time by foreign mercenary officers, the two units survived until 1917 as the senior regiments of the Imperial Guards and formed the core and model for the new army created by Peter during his twenty-six-year reign.
It was during his adolescent years that Peter forged close links with the many foreigners living in Moscow. Already in Alexei’s reign most of the army was made up of ‘new model’ regiments whose soldiers were Russian conscripts but whose officers were European mercenaries, employed to train their soldiers in European tactics, drill and weapons. Many European merchants also lived in the foreigners’ quarter of the capital, which was located not far from Preobrazhenskoe. Peter’s realization that western Europe was much more advanced than Russia in terms of technology, organization and ideas developed as a result of his immersion in Moscow’s foreign community. His contacts with these foreigners not only had a vital influence on Peter’s thinking, they also had immediate political consequences. Among the many foreign mercenary officers whom Peter got to know in Moscow the most senior was the Scot General Patrick Gordon, who became the tsar’s close and trusted friend. When Moscow’s musketeers revolted in 1698, Peter was in western Europe on his extraordinary eighteen-month expedition to learn first-hand about international relations, modern technology and European culture. The revolt was crushed by the new model regiments, commanded by Patrick Gordon. No Russian ‘Janissaries’ would block Peter’s programme of rapid and radical borrowing from western Europe.
For Peter, military matters were ‘the foremost of worldly activities’. Given his definition of a monarch’s role it was inevitable that the primary focus of his reforming programme was on the armed forces but he soon realized that military reform without parallel changes in government institutions and elite mentalities was impossible. For much of his reign the urgent demands of war imposed short-term responses to emergencies and ruled out a coordinated reform programme. The Great Northern War against Sweden began in 1700 and lasted until 1721. The decision to take Russia to war was Peter’s alone. The context seemed favourable. Denmark and Poland were Russia’s allies. Sweden was isolated and its new king, Charles XII, was only fifteen. In fact, Charles and Sweden proved formidable enemies. The Swedish army was one of the best in Europe and it was sustained by an effective administrative and fiscal system. The war began badly for Peter when his army was routed in 1700 at the battle of Narva. In a series of brilliant campaigns, by 1706 Charles had knocked Denmark and Poland out of the war and was preparing to invade Russia.
Under the enormous strains of the war the Russian administration buckled. Peter and his lieutenants raced from crisis to crisis, overcoming emergencies, sorting out bottlenecks and enforcing obedience by immense personal effort and frequent recourse to coercion. Only as the war began to wind down in the last years of his reign was lasting institutional reform possible. Between 1718 and Peter’s death in 1725 a swathe of reforms transformed central government institutions, the management of the Orthodox Church, the fiscal and military recruitment systems, and the rules governing succession to the throne – to name only the most significant legislation. In 1722 a law for the first time defined what it meant to be a noble in Russia and how men might acquire nobility through service to the state. A new capital city of St Petersburg emerged from the marshes of the Baltic coastline as a symbol and model of the European values and manners that Peter sought to imbed in the Russian elite. His reforms provided the foundations of Russian government and elite culture throughout the eighteenth century and in many respects down to 1917.[13] The superb Russo-European city of St Petersburg is probably the most important monument still in existence to an emperor’s vision and its impact on his country and the world.
One of Peter’s biographers describes him as ‘something of a freak of nature’. At six foot seven inches he towered over most of his contemporaries. Official portraits show him as handsome and regal. The tsar’s eyes were ‘full of fire and animation’. But his small hands and feet and his narrow shoulders were out of proportion with his enormous body. Worse still, his face was subject to frequent strong tics and twitches. They became most alarming when Peter fell victim to one of his terrifying outbursts of anger. Of all the monarchs we have so far encountered in this book, only the Chinese emperor Tang Taizong made the same overwhelming physical impact on those whom he met. For Russians, this impact was all the greater because Peter was without a beard and dressed in European style, breaking radically in this case too with royal precedent. Peter was a man of titanic and volcanic energy, stamina and willpower. Almost all of this he concentrated on his task of defeating the Swedes and transforming Russia’s government, armed forces and elite culture. Unlike most monarchs, he did not even find relief in hunting.[14]
Peter could not sit still. Rather like the Mughal emperor Akbar, if he saw a carpenter or stonemason at work he yearned to join in. Unlike Akbar, there was no contemplative side to Peter and no search for a personal religious truth or aesthetic ideal. In part this was simply a matter of personal character but it also reflected broader realities. Wholly unlike the Persianate or Chinese high cultures inherited by Akbar and Kangxi, pre-Petrine Russia had no secular high culture of note. Its sense of beauty and its search for meaning lay in the icons, the music and the world of contemplation of Russian Orthodoxy. Although Peter remained always a firm but unphilosophical believer in Christ and his teaching, he rejected many Orthodox rituals and conventions as mummery and superstition, not to mention as obstacles to progress. Only well after his death would the revolution he launched lead to the creation of a splendid secular high culture in Russia, though one still often shot through with religious values and motifs.
Peter’s most notorious assault on Orthodox propriety was the ‘All-Mad, All-Jesting, All-Drunken Assembly’ which he set up in 1690 and which met periodically for the rest of his reign. In part this was a private drinking club where Peter let down his hair and indulged his love of alcohol in the presence of trusted friends and associates. A ruler who worked as hard as Peter and who sought to impose radical reform on a conservative society needed relaxation and companionship and felt even more alone than most monarchs. But the Assembly also served as a bonding mechanism which brought together and secured the personal loyalty to Peter of its members, many of whom became his key lieutenants. Heavy drinking and strange rituals play similar roles in officers’ messes and student fraternities. To some extent Peter’s All-Drunken Assembly fulfilled the same role as Charles V’s Knights of the Golden Fleece and Akbar’s imperial Sufi order. Given the enormous demands Peter placed on his lieutenants and the obstacles they faced, the tsar had extra need to secure the loyalty, unity and commitment of his inner group of helpers. The carnivalesque rituals they performed, mocking the Church’s rituals and the stuffy ways of the old boyar elite, were a collective affirmation of loyalty to the tsar and the cause of Westernization.[15]
The behaviour of the All-Drunken Assembly was far from private. It was also only one of the many ways in which Peter shocked the sensibilities of traditional Muscovites. Given the extent to which he angered many members of the Muscovite elite and the great sacrifices he demanded from Russian society it is worth asking why he was not overthrown and how he succeeded in achieving most of his goals. Coercion is a necessary but far from sufficient answer. So too is the great potential power of an unequivocally legitimate tsar. But Peter was not Ivan IV, who would terrorize his subjects in an increasingly random and counter-productive manner. As far as possible, he worked with members of the traditional elite. His overriding goal – defeat of Sweden and establishing Russian power in the Baltic region – was an age-old and often frustrated Russian ambition.
Peter pursued that goal with great intelligence and skill. He proved an excellent diplomat and strategist. He chose effective generals and as he faced the greatest crisis of his reign in 1706 – namely Charles XII’s invasion – he joined with his leading military advisers to devise a defensive strategy which first stymied and then destroyed the Swedish army. Success legitimizes almost any ruler or strategy. A true warrior-king, at the decisive battle of Poltava in 1709 Peter commanded in person with the skill, courage and sang-froid of a heroic warlord. His soldiers loved a monarch who shared their dangers and possessed an ability to bond with ‘ordinary’ men to a degree that was rare among hereditary monarchs. The leading contemporary Western expert on Peter comments that the victory at Poltava and the subsequent surrender of almost the entire Swedish army ‘decided not only the outcome of a war but also the outcome of Peter’s reign, for it enormously strengthened his hand. As for most other monarchs of the early modern era, nothing did so much for his power and prestige as stunning military victory.’ As always, chance played its role too. If the bullet that passed through Peter’s hat at Poltava had been two inches lower his place in history and Russian memory would have been very different.[16]
Perhaps the greatest tribute to Peter was that his legacy survived his death, despite the fact that for the next almost four decades Russia was governed by a succession of mostly mediocre rulers. At least in retrospect, most of the Russian elite gloried in his achievement and absorbed the European culture he had promoted. Most eighteenth-century Russian monarchs made great play of identifying themselves with the emperor and his legacy. During this century Russia grew enormously in population, wealth and power, in large part because of the international trade routes and fertile agricultural regions opened up by the state’s military power. ‘In the Russian empire per capita income of the entire population rose to levels unimagined in Peter I’s time, increasing by 70 per cent between about 1720 and 1762 and by 70 per cent again by 1802.’ As always, prosperity made life far easier for rulers. Allies could be bought and the hostility of potential enemies assuaged. Catherine II rewarded the key conspirators who brought her to power by the coup of June 1762 to the tune of 1.5 million rubles, in other words almost ten per cent of the state’s annual revenue.[17]
Catherine’s life reads like a fairy story. A girl of fifteen from a minor and by no means wealthy German semi-royal family was taken to Russia to marry the heir to the throne. In time she learned to enjoy the luxuries and survive the intrigues of a brilliant but treacherous court. Her husband – boorish and only interested in soldiers – proved a disappointment but she consoled herself by taking three interesting lovers over the course of her first twenty years in Russia: her friends smuggled her into their love-nests dressed as a man. One of these lovers was a handsome, intelligent and refined young Polish aristocrat – Stanislas Poniatowski – whom Catherine subsequently placed on the Polish throne. In 1762, aged thirty-three, Catherine gave birth to a son by (probably) Grigorii Orlov in April, overthrew her husband in a coup in June, and was crowned in a sumptuous coronation in Moscow in September. Subsequently, in her thirty-six-year reign she became famous in the classic role of emperors as law-giver and creator of institutions. Passionately – even obsessively – committed to writing, she produced plays, librettos for opera and satirical essays. The greatest minds of the European Enlightenment such as Voltaire and Diderot corresponded with her and celebrated her genius. Her armies went from victory to victory, conquering immensely valuable territories for her empire.
The apogee of Catherine’s glory came in 1787 when she inspected her newly conquered territories in the south. The first half of the journey took her down the river Dnieper from Kiev in a flotilla of splendid barges. Grandest of all was the empress’s boat, incorporating a superb bedroom suite hung with Chinese silks, a library, a dining room to seat seventy guests and an orchestra. The Prince de Ligne, one of Europe’s most prominent and sophisticated aristocrats, wrote that nothing to equal this had been seen since the time of Cleopatra. Catherine was escorted around her southern territories by their viceroy, Grigorii Potemkin, the greatest of her lovers. Catherine’s taste in men tended to bounce between virile military heroes and sensitive, cultured (but equally handsome) aesthetes. Potemkin was a glorious combination of both, with his own unique and original genius. Ligne encountered many of Europe’s most famous and outstanding people in the course of a long life: he called Potemkin ‘the most extraordinary man I ever met’. Catherine called him ‘my pupil, my friend, almost my idol’, a description which says much about her nature and how it was reflected in her love life. In Crimea, Potemkin led Catherine around ancient Greek ruins and the sub-tropical gardens and exotic palaces of the khans. Here was a combination of Ovid and The One Thousand and One Nights from the Baghdad of the Abbasids. This was in fact a good metaphor for Catherine’s entire life and reign.[18]
If Catherine’s life reads like a fairy story, that in large part reflected its reality. But it also owed something to the fact that Catherine told the story of her life that way in her memoirs and her correspondence. The empress was a child of the Enlightenment. She knew how to craft an autobiography with herself as heroine and she did so with a sharp eye to the audience. She cared greatly for her historical reputation and glory. She was a consummate actress, and one sometimes has the feeling that she was acting herself in the great play of her life and greatly enjoying the role. For a monarch these were priceless qualities. Theatre was intrinsic to great monarchies. A monarch needed to be able to act a role: to charm, woo, persuade, frighten and inspire. It helped enormously if he or she enjoyed the job. Enjoyment contributed to stamina, and stamina was vital for a human being fated to do a job for life. But an effective monarch needed both to be an actor and be able to stand back from the role. Falling victim to the illusions of the royal theatre could be fatal.
Catherine was supremely able to avoid such pitfalls. She was a highly intelligent, tough, self-disciplined and self-aware realist. From her German, Protestant education she imbibed a strong work ethic. As empress she worked hard, rising early every morning and devoting hours to government papers. For a monarch, managing people was even more important than understanding the complexities of policy and administration. As a young woman of no outstanding beauty Catherine had learned how to appeal, listen and please. Life as crown princess had taught her to judge character but conceal her opinions. Experience and sensitivity, combined with a voracious reading of history, helped her to understand people and politics. The empress was justly famous for her choice and skilful use of able lieutenants. It helped that she had not been born on the steps of a throne. She knew that she had usurped the crown not only from her husband but even in a sense from her son, Paul. This bred caution and alertness, valuable traits in any ruler.[19]
Catherine’s programme was summed up in her address to the representatives of the estates and peoples of her empire, a unique gathering which she summoned to Moscow in 1767: ‘Russia is a European power.’ As regards imperial power politics, Catherine faced one insurmountable taboo. In this and all other empires known to me a woman could not command her armies in battle. Actually, she was fortunate to be excused from this temptation since command in the field was a difficult and risky enterprise which lured some male monarchs to their destruction. In the crucial war of her reign, the 1768–74 conflict with the Ottomans, Catherine acted as an effective supreme commander. She set up and chaired a supreme war council. Its members offered the best advice and expertise available in Russia, but in the end it was Catherine who decided. Russian strategy was not blurred by conflicting opinions and ambitions, as had occurred in the Seven Years War. The empress was fortunate in having at her disposal some of the greatest generals in Russian history, but she had to recognize their talents amidst the babble of conflicting factions and she gave them the resources but also the freedom to achieve their victories.
Especially in the second half of the war Catherine came under enormous strain. Alarmed by Russia’s victories, Prussia and Austria threatened to intervene. A devastating plague epidemic struck Moscow. A huge revolt exploded under the leadership of Emelian Pugachev among the Cossacks, serfs and native peoples of the Urals and Volga borderlands. The pressure on Catherine to concede a compromise peace to the Ottomans in order to concentrate on other threats was immense, but she stood firm. Her calculation of the dangers, strengths and weaknesses of her position proved exact. Her favourite, Grigorii Orlov, showed courage and competence in taking command in Moscow and managing the plague epidemic. Even with most of its army at war, the Russian state and social order proved much too strong to fall to peasant and Cossack rebellion. Clever and ruthless diplomacy diverted the Austrians and Prussians towards joining with Russia in the partition of Poland. Catherine’s faith in her generals was justified: their victories in 1774 finally forced the Ottomans to accept her peace terms, which brought Russia crucial prizes.[20]
In domestic policy Catherine pursued but deepened Peter’s agenda of Europeanization. She loved St Petersburg and lavished attention on it, seeing it as a well-ordered, rational and European model for Russia’s future. Like Catherine, many monarchs sought to immortalize themselves in stone. But Catherine’s building projects in her capital were also a statement about Russia’s identity. Her ‘Instruction’ (Nakaz) for the 1767 assembly set out her vision for Russia as a prosperous, tolerant, educated and law-abiding part of the European cultural and political universe. The ‘Instruction’ was always more of a vision than a programme and the more deeply Catherine understood Russian realities, the more this became the case. The empress disliked serfdom but she knew that even the most cultured and European aristocrats at her court would turn against her if she challenged it. Nor did she have any means to replace the serf owners by government police, fiscal or military recruitment officers. The lesson of the Pugachev rebellion was that provincial Russia was drastically under-governed. Kazan province, overrun by Pugachev, had eighty permanent state officials and a population of 2.5 million. Catherine’s top priority came to be the expansion, rationalization and proper funding of local government but she understood that little could be achieved unless local elites were encouraged to play a major role in administration, policing and justice. This was the purpose of the corporate institutions she created for provincial nobles, the role she designed for these bodies in local government, and her efforts to raise the cultural and educational level of the Russian gentry.[21]
The empress was a great traveller. She was brought up in Germany and spent her first seventeen years in Russia confined to the imperial court, so it was vital for her to see first-hand the realities of her empire. She also travelled to show herself to her subjects and inspect how her reforms were progressing. Catherine enjoyed her travels but she worked hard and briefed herself thoroughly in advance about the places and people she would be encountering. Sometimes provincial Russian realities were a great shock. Even more stunning were the non-Russian regions. After visiting Kazan for the first time in 1767 she wrote to Voltaire about the complexities of legislating for an empire: ‘what a difference in climate, peoples, customs and even ideas! Here I am in Asia; I wanted to see it with my own eyes. There are twenty peoples of various kinds in this town, who in no way resemble one another. And yet we have to make a coat that will fit them all.’ The improving and systematizing spirit of the Enlightenment found empire an alluring but also potentially dangerous challenge. Empire in general meant diversity. Its scale usually precluded close surveillance by central government. Trying to impose the Enlightened mix of state-led ‘improvement’ and homogenization on an empire could stir up great opposition. Catherine was too cautious and realistic to push the Enlightenment project to extremes. Nor did she have a government machinery capable of attempting this except in narrow fiscal-military terms. Her friend and ally, the Habsburg Emperor Joseph II, was less constrained and less cautious.[22]
Catherine’s name resonates in the contemporary West above all as a woman with an exciting sex life. Being a female ruler caused few ripples in Russia by the 1760s since for almost all the years between Peter the Great’s death and Catherine’s accession the empire had been ruled by women. The young Princess Sophia of Anhalt-Zerbst was given the name ‘Catherine’ on converting to Orthodoxy in honour of Empress Elizabeth’s mother, Catherine I, the second wife of Peter the Great. In 1725, the court faction that placed Catherine I on the throne faced the unprecedented challenge of legitimizing the rule not just of a woman but also of a woman who was the daughter of an Estonian peasant but had become Peter’s mistress, his closest companion and subsequently his wife. The leaders of state and Church had devised a number of strategies to do this: one of them was to boost the existing cult of St Catherine of Alexandria, the fourth-century martyr. In the Russian society of that era, appealing to precedent and specifically to the Bible made the greatest impact on minds. St Catherine was praised for the manly courage evident in her martyrdom, which made her worthy to rule. Both she and, by association, Empress Catherine I were acclaimed by the church hierarchy for ‘bearing in thy feminine body the manly wisdom of the mind’. As always where Orthodoxy and her legitimacy were concerned, Catherine II was assiduous in cultivating the saint’s cult. In a more mundane manner, the previous empresses’ love lives also created welcome precedents. Empress Elizabeth had been famous for her lovers. She had plucked her greatest love, Kirill Razumovsky, from the ranks of the imperial choir. Catherine wrote that he was probably the most handsome man that she had ever met.[23]
Easy access to all the most beautiful objects of one’s sexual desire was one of the perks of power in almost all political traditions. Catherine had no man above her to stop this rule from applying in her case too. No doubt many divorced grandmothers would enjoy having the pick of handsome young officers as an antidote to loneliness and ageing. Catherine’s upbringing had left her with few sexual inhibitions. At the risk of gross generalization, the sexual mores of Germany’s Protestant upper class depended greatly on whether a family was influenced by Pietism. Emerging in the mid-seventeenth century, the Pietists called for a return to the pristine faith of Luther, to an inner world of spirituality and a life of hard work, charity and sincerity in society. They despised the ‘French’ model of loose morals and luxury. Brought up by a distinctly un-Pietist mother in a court culture that took Louis XIV’s Versailles as its model, the young princess encountered many examples of illicit sexual relationships in her childhood and adolescence. Empress Elizabeth’s court was even more free-wheeling in this respect. A deeply unattractive and indifferent husband necessitated a search for sexual fulfilment – even possibly for an heir to the throne – from other sources. As empress, Catherine never ran anything remotely like a harem. Serial monogamy was more or less her rule. She seems to have had no more than a dozen lovers. Most of her relationships ended when her young lovers sought other women. This must have been increasingly painful as age fed her insecurities, but she always treated her ex-partners generously. The manner in which she overflowed with love and enthusiasm for new partners and the traumas she suffered when these relationships broke down are rather touching.[24]
On the whole even Catherine’s least inspiring favourites did little harm. Amidst the strains of rulership they provided her not just with sexual escape but also with the companionship she craved. Only in her last years were her relationships with men barely older than her grandchildren a source of embarrassment. Her last lover, the empty and pretentious Platon Zubov, interfered in government affairs in unprecedented and annoying fashion. But by then, after more than thirty years on the throne, Catherine’s grip was beginning to weaken. Moreover, ‘Uncle’ Potemkin was no longer alive to provide emotional support and keep bumptious young favourites in their place. Even Zubov was a storm in a very small teacup in comparison to the impact on Ottoman politics of Suleyman’s love for Hurrem. The obsession of the ageing Emperor Tang Xuanzong for the beautiful young consort Yang Yuhuan took one of history’s greatest empires far down the path to destruction.[25]
Probably the fairest and most revealing comparison is with Catherine’s contemporary, King Louis XV of France (r. 1715–74). The fact that Louis had a string of mistresses was hardly unusual in the history of Christian monarchies. The villa he maintained near his palace at Versailles where he entertained many young women, some of them semi-prostitutes, went well beyond Catherine’s behaviour and was a source of scandal. Unable either to obtain absolution from his confessor or to control his sexual desires, Louis no longer ‘touched’ sufferers from scrofula, in the process contributing to the desacralization of the French monarchy. In one respect Louis was unluckier than Catherine. In France there already existed a scurrilous underground press and a civil society avid to read its scandalous tales. Nothing like this yet existed in Russia. The king’s most famous and important mistress was Madame de Pompadour. Intelligent, well-educated and charming, she was in many ways a worthy female equivalent to Potemkin but, as a woman, could not play anything like his public role in war and government. Her male protégés were deeply implicated in creating the unpopular alliance with Austria in 1755–6 and then in leading French armies in some of the most humiliating defeats on the battlefield in the Seven Years War. As bad, Madame de Pompadour was closely linked to a financial group, the Paris brothers, who made fortunes by supplying the French armies amidst these disasters. Her name was associated in French minds with corruption, defeat, libertinism and humiliation. In contrast, Grigorii Potemkin and the Orlov brothers played leading roles in Catherine’s greatest military triumphs.[26]
In November 1796 Catherine died and was succeeded by her son Paul I. He ruled until March 1801 when he was overthrown and killed in a coup which had widespread support among the St Petersburg aristocracy and Guards officers. So far in this chapter we have looked at the Romanov dynasty in the persons of its greatest monarchs. To some extent this bias towards successful emperors exists in other chapters too. It is useful to look at Paul as a case study in failure. In addition, conspiracy and assassination frequently occurred in the history of imperial monarchy. Of course, there were elements in the coup that overthrew Paul that were unique, but the history of his downfall also had aspects that were generic to court politics.[27]
Paul’s personality played a key role in his overthrow. The emperor was not stupid and had been well-educated but his temperament fitted him badly for his job. He could be charming, well-informed and kind but he was subject to strong mood swings. At times these led to terrifying and violent bursts of anger, as well as to a suspiciousness that came close to paranoia. Some emperors we have encountered were also moody. Qing Yongzheng partly cured this through the discipline of Zen Buddhist meditation. Jahangir took opium and other emperors sometimes indulged in debauchery in order to keep their demons at bay. Paul’s refuge was the spartan military mindset and austere self-discipline of his hero, Frederick II of Prussia. As age and the burdens of his office took their toll, it became increasingly obvious that this was not enough to sustain Paul’s inner balance and calm. His violent mood swings affected his policy-making and his management of his ministers, generals and courtiers. Men demoted and disgraced almost on a whim might be restored to favour when Paul’s mood changed. His strong and changeable emotions made the tsar a bad judge of character and loyalty. For example, one senior general whom he had disgraced was Baron Levin von Bennigsen. In a better mood, Paul was persuaded to reinstate Bennigsen and allow his return to St Petersburg. The man who persuaded him to do this was Count Peter von der Pahlen, the Governor-General of the capital and someone the emperor greatly trusted. Bennigsen became one of the key figures in the conspiracy that overthrew and murdered Paul. Pahlen was the conspiracy’s leader.
Emperor Paul lacked not just emotional intelligence but also political nous and wisdom. A wholehearted autocrat and militarist, he took the army and military discipline as his model. The most dangerous illusion for any emperor was to believe the official rhetoric that he was all-powerful. In some respects Paul had the mentality of a corporal: he tried to regulate even what aristocratic ladies wore at private balls in St Petersburg. Paul disliked and distrusted the Russian aristocracy. He once said that there were no grands seigneurs in Russia except for men who were talking to the emperor and even they lost this status when the conversation ceased. He was partly correct: the Russian aristocracy was more dependent on the monarchy than was the case in France, let alone England. But he was also partly wrong and he paid for his mistake with his life. His arbitrary demotion and disgrace of key members of the elite hit their careers and ambitions but his behaviour also infringed their personal and corporate sense of honour and dignity. For example, he ended nobles’ exemption from corporal punishment and reduced the role of elected nobles in local government. Paul’s efforts were in direct conflict with the policy of earlier rulers to inculcate European culture and values into the Russian elite. They also conflicted with even older assumptions among the Russian aristocracy that they had the right to be their emperor’s closest counsellors.
Paul’s third key failure was in the realm of diplomacy and war, which in Russia as in most imperial monarchies was an emperor’s core policy-making responsibility. Alarmed by growing French power, in 1798 Paul had gone to war against the French Republic in alliance with Britain and Austria. When the war went badly, the emperor blamed his allies and withdrew from the coalition. By late 1800 he had gone to the other extreme and was on the verge of allying Russia to France. He banned all trade with Britain, a devastating potential blow to the Russian economy and the state’s finances since the British were by far Russia’s most important export market. In a bizarre echo of an earlier nomadic era of warfare, he ordered a Cossack expeditionary corps to march through Afghanistan and threaten British rule in India. Most of Paul’s advisers believed with good reason that his policy of alliance with France was contrary to Russia’s interests and was bound to fail. General Bennigsen subsequently set out the reasons why this was the case in an intelligent, well-informed and convincing paper. Years later in his memoirs he wrote that he was moved by the sight of Paul’s young daughters weeping over the body of their dead father and kissing his hand. But for the military and political elite of this (and any other) empire, raisons d’état might often compete for first place against personal and group interests but very seldom with sentiment.[28]
The best insider account of the events leading to Paul’s overthrow is that of Countess Dorothea von Lieven. She lived at the heart of the imperial court and knew its secrets. Her mother had come to Russia from their native Wurttemberg with Paul’s fiancée, the future Empress Marie, as lady-in-waiting and intimate. Dorothea’s mother-in-law was Countess Charlotta von Lieven, the empress’s closest friend and the governess of the imperial children. Catherine II had appointed this Pietist Baltic German noblewoman to this plum position because she believed that Charlotta would protect her grandchildren from the vices and temptations of the court. Dorothea’s husband, Christopher, was the head of Paul’s military secretariat. Since Paul ran the army personally and with obsessive attention to detail, Christopher was in most respects his chief military adviser and spent more hours with him every day than almost any other person. Christopher Lieven had good reason for gratitude to Paul. Among other things, the emperor had appointed him to his extremely powerful position at the age of twenty-two. Family tradition also pushed in the direction of loyalty. Along with much of the rest of the old feudal warrior-landowning class, in the seventeenth century many Lievens had become officers in a royal army, in their case the army of the Swedish kings. They prided themselves on having the loyalty unto death of a war-band leader’s bodyguard. Among a whole menagerie of generals in the family, their paragon was an ancestor who, in the era before they became Russian subjects in 1721, had thrown himself in the path of a cannonball to save the life of his chief, the Swedish king.[29]
Christopher Lieven was tugged in opposite directions by his loyalty to Paul on the one hand and his fundamental disagreement with his policies on the other. Christopher was a professional soldier with a Lutheran conscience. He disliked the alliance with Napoleon. The orders despatching the Cossacks to India went out under his name and he hated the knowledge that he was sending most of them to their deaths on a futile adventure. Moreover, the Lievens were loyal to the Romanov dynasty as much as to Paul. Since the Romanovs were at war with themselves this posed problems. By 1800 Paul’s paranoia had grown to include suspicion of his wife and his eldest son, the Grand Duke Alexander. One of Paul’s first acts as emperor had been to promulgate a law of succession establishing the principle of male primogeniture and naming Alexander his heir. However, by the winter of 1800 he was muttering dark hints about the fate of Peter the Great’s son, Alexei, whom the tsar had imprisoned and tortured to death. Paul now appeared to be cultivating his thirteen-year-old nephew, Prince Eugene of Wurttemberg, as a possible alternative heir. Charlotta Lieven was deeply loyal to the empress and was a positive tigress in defence of her charges, the imperial children. Christopher Lieven was close to the Grand Duke Alexander and was an officer in his regiment, the Semenovsky Guards. In the end he resolved the conflict of loyalties by taking to his bed with a surprisingly incurable illness in the hope that matters would resolve themselves before he needed to re-emerge. This happened on 11 March 1801 in the shape of Paul’s overthrow and murder.
In the event, staying in bed proved the wisest tactic. No conspiracy to overthrow a tsar had any hope of success unless it could secure the support of a plausible successor. In 1801 the only possible successor was Alexander. After some hesitation he had lent his backing to the coup. Alexander was much less ambitious for power than his grandmother had been before the coup of 1762. For him the crown was a fate, not a choice. He had even dreamed of escaping his fate and living privately near the Rhine with his wife. But he was horrified by Paul’s despotism and the disasters towards which his foreign policy was leading Russia. Alexander had insisted that his father’s life must be spared and that he must be allowed a comfortable retirement. Pahlen had agreed, knowing full well that this promise could never be honoured. A living Paul would remain a mortal threat, not least because of his popularity among the ordinary soldiers of the Guards, whom he had often treated generously. No doubt some of them rather liked seeing their officers subjected to the arbitrary despotism which was often their own lot.
Alexander felt deep remorse at his father’s death and never forgave the conspirators. A man like Christopher Lieven whose role in the affair was almost as equivocal as Alexander’s own was much more acceptable to him, and even more so to the Dowager Empress Marie, whose opinions counted for much with the new tsar. Lieven remained a key military and diplomatic adviser to Alexander throughout his reign. The emperor died in 1825, to be succeeded by his younger brother, Nicholas I. When Charlotta Lieven died in the following year Nicholas was one of her four pall-bearers. Famous for his austere self-discipline, this was one of the very rare moments when he shed tears in public. All Dorothea’s former charges were devoted to her. The Grand Duchess Anna, later queen of the Netherlands, recalled that it was Charlotta’s ‘unique privilege to scold the family . . . this is granted neither by decree nor by hereditary title’. Even as an adult Nicholas I called her Mutterkins. Like most empresses in history, Marie had been a cool and remote mother to her young children. Charlotta had filled the emotional void. At its innermost core imperial monarchy was a family affair. Intimate relationships with members of the family counted immensely.[30]
For the true courtier, an emperor’s tears were more recognition than the highest of orders or decorations. They took on some of the odour of the holy oil with which the monarch was anointed at his coronation. For some courtiers monarchical recognition and closeness became an end in itself and almost a devotional cult. But most courtiers in history were a hard-headed crew. They believed that tears would be followed by more tangible rewards. This certainly happened in the Lievens’ case. From Catherine II to Nicholas I, four Romanov monarchs in succession lavished estates, titles, ‘pensions’ and positions on them. By the end of this wave of extravagance they were probably the richest landowners in the Baltic provinces, first-rank princes, and owned in addition big estates in Russia itself and the core of what became the Ukrainian coal-mining industry. The Lievens were an old family, who had been chieflings worshipping pagan gods in the forests of Livonia before the German knights arrived. By the time their homeland was annexed by Russia in 1721 they had become respectable barons and occasionally counts, but the imperial monarchy of the Romanovs was their El Dorado. The keys to El Dorado lay in the love of a mother and her children for their ‘nanny’. To which one might add – in parenthesis – that the emotional balance of an emperor and solidarity among his siblings were key factors in the stability of hereditary monarchies. A governess who helped to achieve this played a more than purely private role. By dynastic standards, Nicholas I’s relationship with his brother and predecessor, Alexander I, and his son and successor, Alexander II, were exceptionally warm and trusting.[31]
Alexander I ruled for twenty-four years. He was one of the most intelligent, complex and fascinating rulers in Russian history. His childhood and education were dominated by his grandmother Catherine II. She poured on to him her long-repressed maternal instincts and oversaw his education on the most advanced Enlightenment principles. It was Catherine who chose as his chief tutor the Swiss republican Frederick La Harpe. La Harpe gave Alexander a splendid education based above all on classical history and philosophy with some room too for French literature. His philosophy of education owed much to Rousseau. La Harpe’s aim, as he explained to Catherine, was to teach Alexander as much of the humanities and sciences as was necessary to understand their basic principles and their importance but above all to make him aware that he must be ‘an honest man and an enlightened citizen’. The heir must be educated to understand that power was given to him only in order for him to provide justice, liberty and security to his subjects and to do everything possible to increase their prosperity. La Harpe’s greatest hero and role model was Marcus Aurelius. Here was the most just and public-spirited of emperors, who would have restored the republic had the Rome in which he lived made this possible. The parallels to an Enlightened Russian emperor living amidst autocracy and serfdom were clear. Alexander remained close to La Harpe for his whole life, commenting that ‘I owed him everything’ and once even saying ‘had there been no La Harpe there would have been no Alexander’. La Harpe’s principles dominated Alexander’s plans for reforming Russian government and society.[32]
By 1810 Alexander’s mind was beginning to turn towards religious answers to life’s puzzles and problems. The immense strains which this sensitive and highly strung man bore with courage and steadfastness in the face of Napoleon’s invasion of 1812 took him deeper in his search for religious truth and meaning. His was a search for a personal faith: it owed little to Orthodoxy or the official Church. Instead, it was based on intense reading of the Bible and of the writings of Christian mystics, most of whom were Catholics. Many people in Alexander’s generation trod a similar path from Enlightenment to renewed Christian commitment. In part this was a reaction to the furies unleashed by the French Revolution and the following twenty-five years of international and civil war. Alexander’s promotion of the Holy Alliance had much in common with Woodrow Wilson’s crusade in 1918–19 for the League of Nations. After years of carnage both men sought ethical and institutional guarantees of international peace and security. Alexander’s quest for a personal faith also paralleled Emperor Akbar’s Sufi mysticism and the attraction of many Chinese emperors to Buddhist meditation. In Alexander’s day it was still almost impossible for a European to move beyond the tradition of Christian thought and practice but within that tradition the emperor’s views were ecumenical. He once wrote: ‘Let us practice the Gospel – that is the main point. I do believe that all communions will one day be united.’ In the last months of his life he was in secret communication with the Vatican as regards the coming together of the Catholic and Orthodox faiths.[33]
Alexander was a complicated man who lived in an era of immense conflict and change. Of course, his life and reign had many twists and turns. But two patterns running through the study of emperors provide some insights. Like many young monarchs, Alexander came to the throne aged twenty-three with interesting ideas and the best of intentions. He was steeped in the late-Enlightenment culture of simplicity, sensibility and friendship. His mother warned him that his simple and friendly behaviour had its dangers. A young monarch facing experienced and wily ministers needed to cultivate distance and to protect himself by the ‘magic of grandeur’ that surrounded his office. La Harpe reminded him that ‘the emperor has to have an air’ and that ‘it was impossible for him to have true friends’. In 1801–5 Alexander gathered a tiny group of like-minded friends – the so-called Unofficial Committee – to advise him on a programme of radical reform, but the young men had no experience of turning ideas into policies and little understanding of how the government machine worked. Since the ideas they were discussing – the abolition of serfdom and the introduction of a constitution – were revolutionary in the Russian context their discussions had to remain a total secret, which was a further obstacle.
Also like many young monarchs, Alexander yearned for military glory. From his earliest days, he had been reminded that he had been named partly after Alexander of Macedon. In 1805 he accompanied his army on campaign. At the battle of Austerlitz against Napoleon he listened to the advice of bumptious young aristocrats in his entourage and overrode the cautious, defensive strategy of his commander-in-chief, Mikhail Kutuzov. The result was disaster.[34]
The middle period of Alexander’s reign was his time of greatest achievement, as was often the case with monarchs. Rulers by that point had gained experience of men, institutions and politics. Naïve enthusiasm had dissipated but exhaustion and disillusion had not yet replaced it. In Alexander’s case these years saw the implementation of major and lasting reforms in central government and education, as well as the emperor’s skilful and courageous leadership in the struggle to defeat Napoleon and create a stable international order in Europe.
After 1815 Alexander became increasingly exhausted and frustrated by the business of government. It was rather a comedown from liberating and reordering Europe to coping with the nitty-gritty of domestic administration and the difficulties of achieving results in the teeth of bureaucratic incompetence and powerful vested interests in society. Alexander’s major domestic initiative in the last decade of his reign was an attempt to transform military conscription. The system he inherited wrecked the lives of countless peasants and their families by forcing young men into lifelong military service. Hundreds of thousands of potentially productive young men were removed from the economy in peacetime. Meanwhile when war came Russia had no trained reservists to mobilize. By settling much of the army into so-called military colonies and turning them into part-time farmers Alexander attempted to solve these problems. He had grandiose plans to introduce schools and welfare services in the colonies. The initiative collapsed in the face of resistance by both peasants and soldiers, and the frequent incompetence and brutality of the officials tasked with its implementation. There were similarities with the failure of the Song bureaucracy to implement the equally sweeping goals of the ‘New Policies’ in China seven hundred years before. The abject collapse of what Alexander saw as a rational and benevolent policy fed into his growing pessimism about human beings and the possibility of improving their lot by government policies. In this book we have encountered earlier emperors experiencing similar exhaustion and frustration, and a similar turn to religion and the inner world in response: Emperor Tang Xuanzong in the early eighth century comes immediately to mind.
After only two months on the throne Alexander had written to La Harpe that ‘what gives me most difficulty and work is to reconcile individual interests and hatreds, and to make everybody cooperate for the single goal of generally being useful’. Very many leaders of large corporations and almost all heads of government no doubt felt and feel the same. But Alexander was less thick-skinned and power-hungry than most leaders who fight their way to power. Doomed to do the job for life, he felt the strain of leadership with increasing despair. After 1815 the emperor came increasingly to prefer female company to male, not in search of sex but simply because he found most men he encountered to be obsessed by ambition, rank and favour whereas women in his experience were more inclined to sincerity, emotion and the inner life. In 1819 he told his brother Nicholas, ‘more than ever Europe needs young sovereigns with all their energetic strength; for me, I am no longer what I was, and I believe it my duty to retire before it is too late’. In Alexander’s case, this was not posturing. The longing to escape was genuine but Russian precedents and political realities made abdication very difficult.[35]
As always, the key problem was the succession. Alexander and his beautiful wife, Princess Louise of Baden, had been married aged sixteen and fourteen and a half respectively. In time adolescent love cooled and Alexander looked to other women. True to his principles of sincerity and friendship (but also to the practices of his grandmother’s court) he was indulgent when his wife – known in Russia as Empress Elizabeth – took lovers. When she bore a girl by her great love, a young Guards officer, Alexander recognized the child as his own, heaving a sigh of relief that it had not been a son, with all the consequences that might have had for the succession. The inner circle of family and courtiers knew the truth. The heir to the throne was Alexander’s brother, the Grand Duke Constantine. He seems to have arranged the murder of his sister-in-law’s lover to avoid possible further complications. Matters grew more confused when Constantine himself married a Polish noblewoman and resigned his rights to the throne in favour of Paul’s third son, the future Emperor Nicholas I. Nothing in the empire’s laws permitted such an abdication and the matter was kept a close secret. When Alexander died suddenly and far from his capital in 1825 chaos ensued. A group of radical Guards officers attempted to stage a coup. Some wanted to impose a constitutional regime on the Romanovs, others to establish a republic. The coup was crushed but its memory hung over the whole thirty-year reign of Nicholas I. Had it succeeded, a tradition of military putschism might have entered Russian politics – as was happening in these years in Spain. In that case, Russian history might have taken a very different path.[36]
Like many emperors, Alexander found it easier to achieve success in external affairs. The levers of foreign policy – his army and diplomats – were relatively simple and under his exclusive control. He used them with great skill to achieve the defining triumph of his reign, the destruction of Napoleon’s empire and the creation of a European order which made Russia far more secure than at any time since 1793. The emperor was personally responsible for formulating the grand strategy and conducting the diplomacy that made this victory possible. He believed that the only way to destroy Napoleon’s huge army was to lure it deep into the Russian interior, wearing it down in a war of attrition that played to Russian strengths and Napoleon’s vulnerabilities. This was the first stage of Alexander’s two-stage strategy. He knew that simply expelling the French from Russia would not bring lasting security. If Napoleon was given respite to recover from the disaster of 1812 and retain his hold on Germany and central Europe, then in even the medium run Russia would lack the resources to protect herself against his mighty empire. Therefore, Alexander immediately advanced into central Europe in 1813 and drew Austria and Prussia into a victorious coalition that drove the French back across the Rhine and then toppled Napoleon. Both stages of Alexander’s strategy were unpopular among Russian elites. It took all of his intelligence, resolution and subtlety to execute his plans but it also required the power of an autocrat.[37]
Alexander’s strategy for domestic reform was much less successful. By now the ‘progressive agenda’ he imbibed from La Harpe had gone well beyond the Enlightened Despotism of Catherine’s day and looked to the end of serfdom and the creation of a constitution. Alexander believed in both principles but the challenge was obvious since autocracy and serfdom were the foundations of his regime. Most of his ministers and senior officials owned serfs. In the provinces the government still depended on the help of the landowning class to police, tax and administer the population. Even the supposedly autocratic monarch in practice often had great difficulties in getting his policies executed in the enormous expanses of Russia. His administration was riddled with factions. Would not the creation of an independent elected legislature further weaken the monarch and enhance faction and division? The landowning aristocracy and gentry were by far the richest, most cultured and most powerful groups in Russian society. They would dominate any legislatures that constitutional reforms created. They were precisely the groups most committed to the defence of serfdom. The failure of Alexander’s reform agenda was owed to objective circumstances. It increased his growing sense of exhaustion and disenchantment after 1815.
In key respects Alexander’s defeat of Napoleon ended a cycle of Russian history that had begun with Peter the Great or even before. Peter’s overriding goal had been to modernize Russia so that it could compete with the European great powers. In 1815 Russia had achieved this goal. Most observers recognized it as the most powerful state on the European continent. At a high level of generalization one could even make some comparisons between the regime of Nicholas I of Russia (r. 1825–55) and that of Emperor Qing Qianlong of China after the elimination of the nomad threat from the north. In both cases governments that felt confident in their geopolitical security had no reason to engage in potentially destabilizing radical reforms.
Unfortunately for both regimes, the onset of the Industrial Revolution in the first half of the nineteenth century revolutionized warfare and transformed the European and global balance of power. The Qing dynasty learned this first in the Opium War and the Romanovs in the Crimean War of 1854–6. Russia’s enemies, the French and British, moved, fought and communicated with the technology of the industrial era. They travelled to the Crimea by railway and steamship. Russian reinforcements arrived there by the old pre-industrial method – in other words they walked or rode. Across the whole gamut of sources of power – from weapons to financial resources and communications technology – Russia was revealed as backward. The rulers of Russia’s empire had no wish to follow the Mughals, the Ottomans and the Qing into decline and likely partition at the hands of the European powers. After 1856 they launched a programme of modernization that began with the abolition of serfdom. This programme was essential to their survival but it propelled them into a modern world that posed great new challenges both to empire and to hereditary monarchy. As empires go, the Romanovs’ empire had been a great success. The problem now was to transform a successful pre-modern empire into a viable modern polity.
