Читать книгу Russia: People and Empire: 1552–1917 - Geoffrey Hosking - Страница 15

In spite of the radicalism of Peter the Great’s reforms and the widespread opposition to them in the church and among the common people, there was never any serious question of going back on them, even during the succeeding decades (1725–1762) of relatively weak rulers, disputed successions and attempted coups. Fundamentally, that was because they proved successful at promoting Russia’s great power status, by making it possible to raise, equip and finance an army and navy.

They were also in the interests of the ruling class, the newly consolidated dvorianstvo, which, after some initial foot-dragging, was well aware of the fact. Many of the families which dominated Russia before Peter’s reign continued to do so afterwards, and continued to exploit the influence of their kith and kin. The early stages of meritocratic reform often prove to be in the interests of existing elites, since their wealth and connections secure them access to the best education and to the vital early stages of a high-flying career (the Northcote-Trevelyan reforms in the nineteenth-century British civil service had the same effect).

Those elite families were sorely needed, owing to the ambivalence of Peter’s reforms. On the one hand, impersonal raison d’état was proclaimed, on the other personal intervention was constantly needed to ensure its application in practice. Rational rule had to be implemented by personal authority, or nothing would work as intended. So the ‘state’, if it existed at all in this period, consisted of changing but not wholly unstable constellations of powerful clans, given legitimacy by promotion on merit, and held together by kinship, by symbolic devotion to the autocrat, by military uniforms, a new semi-Germanic administrative terminology and an increasingly exclusive culture borrowed from the royal courts of Europe.¹

It would be wrong, however, to overestimate the effectiveness of Russian state authority in the mid-eighteenth century. In most respects the ‘state’ (to use what may be too pretentious a word) was still like a rickety framework in a howling gale, subject to all the chance cross-winds of court intrigue and kinship feuding. It was a mere skeleton whose flesh and sinews consisted of the clannish interests of the great families who provided its continuity and its motive power. As for local government, it was notional only, feeble to the point of being non-existent: for lack of suitable personnel to staff its offices, it lapsed back into the hands of the arbitrary and venal military governors from whom Peter had tried to rescue it.

Nor was there a consistent code of laws, only the chancery records of a succession of hasty, sometimes contradictory and often ill-worded decrees. In these circumstances law was, in the words of a popular saying, ‘like the shafts of a cart: wherever the horse pulls, that’s where it goes’ – the horse being anyone in authority. To make matters worse, Peter himself had neglected to apply the elementary adhesive of a binding law of succession. In the absence of stable laws or institutions, not only peasants, but nobles as well could not feel fully secure in their persons or properties unless they had protection from a powerful patron, a member of one of the leading families, with access to the court.

That is why the forty years after Peter’s death were so insecure and turbulent, with a succession of monarchs dependent on the fortuitous constellation of power in the capital’s Guards regiments. The Guards regiments were the kernel of Imperial Russia in the eighteenth century. Stationed in the capital, with unbroken access to the court even for junior officers, they constituted for much of the century a police force as well as a personal bodyguard and a crack military formation. They were the nurseries of the power and patronage which not only decided crucial questions of domestic and foreign policy, but which made and broke rulers themselves. Controlling the disposition of physical force in the capital city, they took a decisive part in every monarchical succession from the death of Peter the Great in 1725 to the assassination of Paul I in 1801. They were the mechanism by which the leading families ensured that autocracy worked on the whole in their interests and not against it.

The one serious attempt to challenge the autocratic superstructure came in 1730, on the sudden death of the adolescent Peter II. Members of the Supreme Privy Council (which had been set up in 1727, in the absence of a dominating monarch, to coordinate the executive) offered the crown to Peter the Great’s niece, Anna, Duchess of Kurland, on certain konditsii (conditions): the monarch must not marry or appoint her own heir, and in future must obtain the consent of the Council before deciding questions of war and peace, raising taxes, spending revenue, making high appointments in government or court, and making land grants. Members of the nobility were not to be deprived of life, honour or property without trial.

In the longer term, these konditsii might have formed the basis on which a constitutional monarchy could have evolved: analogous charters had had this effect in several European countries from the late middle ages onwards. Their immediate effect, however, would have been to subject Russia to oligarchic rule, with the monarch dependent on the few well-placed families which dominated the Supreme Privy Council, currently the Golitsyns and Dolgorukiis. Most of the service nobility was opposed to the idea, not only because they did not want to have to crawl to the Golitsyns and Dolgorukiis, but also because they were mindful of Russia’s vulnerability when plagued by the feuds of boyar clans. With their support Anna demonstratively tore up the konditsii and assumed the throne as an autocrat.²

There was no other attempt in the eighteenth century to limit the monarchy nor till after 1762 to reform the institutions of state. Even during the relatively protracted reign of Empress Elizabeth (1741–62) power remained in the hands of aristocratic clans and their associated Guards regiments, unrestrained by the rule of law or powerful social institution.

The first ruler who tried to continue Peter the Great’s work and to provide Russia with institutions more able to bear the weight of a huge empire was Catherine II – who, however, came to the throne in time-honoured fashion as beneficiary of a coup directed against her husband, Peter III. She saw the weaknesses of the Russian polity clearly enough. The voracious if indiscriminate reading which filled the vacant evenings of a loveless marriage had taught her that the remedy lay in promulgating good laws and founding good institutions. It is true that these laws and institutions took on a subtly different purpose in her mind from the one she found in her texts. The French and Italian Enlightenment theorists she studied – Montesquieu, Beccaria, Diderot – were thinking in terms of countries with old established institutions whose legal rights needed to be reaffirmed and buttressed about by liberal theory against the threat of an increasingly assertive monarchy. In Russia, however, law and intermediate institutions were so weak that, far from resisting the monarchy, they scarcely had backbone enough even to act as a passive transmitter of the ruler’s will. To strengthen law and institutions was above all else to strengthen the monarchy, and this was Catherine’s purpose.

For her this was doubly important because of her parlous individual situation. She occupied a throne to which she had no legitimate claim and so she urgently needed to broaden the circle of her supporters beyond the coterie of Guards officers who had acted on her behalf, beyond even the social class of which they were members. The best way to do this was to create institutions which would outlast the designs of even the most tenacious court clique, and laws which would be widely acceptable and might become permanent.

It so happened that P.I. Shuvalov, principal adviser to Empress Elizabeth, had convened a Law Codification Commission in 1754 to try and bring order to Peter Ps peremptory and improvised lawmaking and coordinate it with the preceding Law Code (Ulozhenie) of 1649. Shuvalov’s commission had been intended to examine the state of the law and make recommendations in four areas: (i) the rights of subjects according to their estate; (ii) court structures and procedures; (iii) property and contract law; (iv) punishments and penalties. The commission completed its work on the last three subjects and reported to Elizabeth, but its recommendations were not followed up, for reasons which are unclear, and the commission was abolished shortly after Catherine came to the throne.³

It is not clear that Catherine even read the materials of the commission, yet when she began her own work of codification in 1767, the principles she enunciated were very similar to its findings, and she herself called an analogous commission, with the same name and same remit. She composed for its consideration a Nakaz, an Instruction, really a set of principles, which reflected her own opinions on the political and legal structure desirable for Russia, though she did not release the final draft till she had had time to consult her advisers about the text.

Citing the Christian principle of doing ‘all the Good we possibly can to each other’, she declared it ‘the Wish of every worthy Member of Society to see his Native Country raised to the highest degree of Prosperity, Glory, Happiness and Peace’, and ‘to see every Individual of his fellow-Citizens protected by Laws, which so far from injuring him, will shield him from every Attempt against his Welfare, and opposite to this Christian Precept’.⁴

Her version of law was a restricted and étatiste one compared with that of her Enlightenment mentors. In her eyes law was not an impersonal force adjudicating between autonomous and sometimes competing social institutions, but an instrument through which the ruler exercises his or her authority and through which moral precepts are put into practice. ‘In a State, that is in a Collection of People living in Society where Laws are established, Liberty can consist only in the Ability of doing what everyone ought to desire, and in not being forced to do what should not be desired.’⁵ This was the version of law and statehood propounded not by the French philosophes, but by the German cameralists, especially by Leibniz and Wolff. In this vision, the aim of law was to enable the authorities to provide for the well-being and security of their subjects. For the same purpose, subjects were to have their own functions, and would belong to social institutions which would enable them the better to fulfil those functions and to partake of the general well-being. There was no notion here of natural law, of inherent freedom or of a social contract.⁶

The members of Catherine’s Law Code Commission were elected in local gatherings of the relevant estates: the nobility, townsfolk, state peasants, Cossacks, odnodvortsy (descendants of the militarized peasants who had manned the frontier lines) and non-Russians. Conspicuous by their absence were the serfs and the clergy. One might argue that the serfs were represented by their landlords, but the absence of the clergy can only mean that Catherine did not regard them as members of secular society, an astonishing lapse in view of the fact that she had just deprived them of the means – their landed wealth – of maintaining a separate, spiritual arm of government. [See chapter on church, p. 231]

Catherine’s agenda was to draw up a law code along the lines indicated in her Nakaz. Now the deputies brought with them their own nakazy or ‘cahiers’, requests and statements of grievance originating from their electors. When the Commission first met in July 1767 to discuss them, it soon transpired that there was little meeting of minds. Each social estate concentrated in its presentation on its own narrowly conceived interests, insensitive to the broad vision of creative statesmanship laid before them by their monarch. The nobility wanted to restrict entry to its own estate, strengthen its property rights, secure its monopoly of higher civil and military posts and be freed from corporal punishment. Merchants requested a monopoly of trade in the towns and the right to own serfs. The peasants asked for relief from taxation and other burdens. Few deputies displayed an awareness of the overall structure of the state, which in any case most of them clearly expected to remain unchanged: their efforts were thus directed at obtaining what they could within the existing system rather than recommending fundamental reform.⁷ The contrast is striking with the French Estates-General, which, meeting only some twenty years later, came up with radical programmes of reform, while the ‘third estate’ projected a vision of itself as the bearer of popular sovereignty, as ‘the nation’.

For most of its sessions the Commission was divided into subcommittees, one of which was specifically charged to look into how a ‘third estate’ or ‘middle sort of people’ might be created. These sub-committees carried out some useful work in assimilating existing laws and drafting new ones. But the General Assembly ceased its sessions late in 1768, with the outbreak of war against Turkey: since many of the deputies belonged to the army, they had to report for service. Many of the sub-committees continued their work for a year or two longer, and some of them completed drafts on their sphere of legislation. Although there was now no General Assembly to refer these drafts to, they were not necessarily wasted, since Catherine later made use of them in elaborating laws. Furthermore, their materials were employed in a ‘Description of the Russian Empire and its Internal Administration and Legal Enactments’, drawn up by the Procurator-General and published in 1783: this was the closest thing Russia had to a law code for the next fifty years.⁸

Although the Turkish war genuinely precipitated the suspension of the Commission, it did not necessarily entail its abolition. Catherine let it fade away because she was disappointed by its work, especially perhaps by the fact that its members showed so little awareness of the needs of society as a whole and so little readiness to exercise self-restraint for the general good. She decided, probably rightly, that, before positing common interests which did not exist, she should put more backbone into a fragmented society by creating institutions which would enable citizens to work together at least within their own estates and orders. In a sense she was endeavouring actually to create social institutions which had hitherto been embryonic or non-existent.

With that in mind, during the rest of her reign she did much to impart substance to what had been an atomized society and polity, laying the foundation for what she herself called a ‘civil society’. Like Peter, she believed that the monarch should make laws, but unlike him that the monarch should also be bound by laws once made, supervising the general process of administration, but not interfering with it at every step, and intervening only if urgency or the complexity of the issues demanded it. She did something to stimulate a science of jurisprudence in Russia, so that law and administrative practice could become regular and stable, a permanent factor which citizens could rely on in their daily activity, especially in economic affairs where predictability is so important. She read and annotated Blackstone’s ‘Commentary on the Laws’: he saw the guarantee of legality as lying not so much in representative institutions as in having rational laws backed up by strong and stable authorities.⁹ She sent young nobles abroad, mainly to German universities, to study the theory and practice of jurisprudence there (among them, as it happened, was Alexander Radishchev, who derived from his studies much more than she bargained for – an indication of the ambiguous results of her initiative).

To the same end she strengthened the Senate’s role as supervisor of the administration and the law, though without going so far as to make it a ‘repository of law’ on the model of the French parlements, as she had once contemplated. Even more important was her strengthening of local government. European Russia was divided into gubernii (provinces), with a population of 200,000–300,000 and uezdy (districts) of 20,000–30,000. Each guberniia was to be overseen by a governor responsible to the Senate and having the right of personal report to the Emperor; he would be assisted by a provincial administrative board to handle matters like tax-collection, policing and trade monopolies. The higher administrative staff of these institutions was to come from the nobility, a provision intended to guarantee their probity and professional competence. To fortify the nobles’ pride and corporate identity she granted them a Charter freeing them from corporal punishment and giving them the right to organize in local associations at the provincial and district level: these associations would then elect key local government officials. [For other provisions of the Charter, see Part 3, Chapter 1.]

Catherine promulgated a similar City Charter [see Part 3, Chapter 5]. This was part of a complex of measures aimed at encouraging manufacture and trade, reducing their direct dependence on the state and facilitating their penetration throughout the empire. Before her accession internal tariffs had been abolished (in 1753), and Catherine followed this up by measures to improve the provision of credit through a law to introduce bills of exchange, improve roads and canals, ease passport restrictions and enable both nobles and peasants to trade more widely (a measure which was however much resented by the merchants, since it infringed their monopoly of urban trade).¹⁰ Nobles were given more secure property rights not only to the topsoil of their land, but to mineral resources which might be found below. All these measures were an important contribution towards making the empire an economic unit, and towards giving all classes of the population access to trade and manufacture on the basis of secure property rights.

She also contemplated a Charter for the State Peasants, which would have given them corporate status through their village communities, as well as secure property rights and the possibility of defending them before law courts. The draft was completed and ready to be promulgated: why it was never issued remains uncertain, though it seems likely that Catherine was deterred by the thought that its promulgation was bound to awaken dangerous hopes among the private serfs.¹¹ It was potentially extremely important, for it would have been the first occasion on which a Russian monarch accorded full property rights to peasants. Taken together, Catherine’s Charters constitute her version of a society ruled by law; but this makes the exclusion of the state peasants (not to mention the serfs) an even more glaring anomaly.

The disordered and unpredictable condition of the laws was matched by the state of the empire’s finances, which proved a lasting obstacle to attempts to mobilize the resources of population and territory. The fundamental problem was that, at least until the late eighteenth century, Russia was straining itself to the utmost to sustain the role of European great power, and could do so only by exploiting the population in ways which prevented them from deploying their own economic enterprise.

Like most eighteenth-century European states, Russia had no unified state budget, merely a collection of estimates or recorded expenditures for various departments, which could be enlarged for the requirements of the court and imperial favourites, and were occasionally reduced by loans from them. From the information we have, at the time of Peter’s death in 1725 military and naval expenditure made up about 70% of the treasury’s outgoings (6.5 million rubles out of 9.1 million). Most of the new expenditure arose from the introduction of the recruitment system, the creation of large infantry regiments and the introduction of improved firearms, ammunition and artillery.¹²

The introduction of the poll tax had been essential to cope with these unprecedented expenditures. It both simplified the tax system and made it much more productive, increasing revenues appreciably. Local branches of the Kamer-Kollegiia were set up all over the country, and local landowners and army officers were mobilized for the task. Since landowners were now in effect agents for both taxation and recruitment, their practical powers over the serfs were greatly augmented. Army units were used to back them up with coercion, when that was needed, as was frequently the case.

This was a remarkably centralized fiscal system for a country with such tenuous communications, and it is scarcely surprising that it did not always function as planned. Arrears and late payments were normal. Peasants and posad people (townsfolk) quite often refused point-blank to pay the levies due from them and were sometimes prepared to bolster their cause by armed resistance. Alternatively, following a long tradition, they might abandon their holdings and flee to the frontiers of south and east, to fill the ranks of Cossacks, odnodvortsy (single householders) and Old Believer communities.¹³ Thus heavy-handed tax-collecting undermined the very wealth it was supposed to tap.

By the middle of the century, when expenditure increased sharply, especially during the Seven Years’ War, it was obvious that more money could not be raised through the poll tax, and the authorities decided instead to cover the chronic deficits by increasing indirect taxes, the most remunerative of which was on alcoholic liquor, and by issuing paper money. These two methods – debauching the people and debauching the currency, Keynes might have called them-proved addictive [!] and lasted in one case well into the nineteenth century, in the other right up to 1917.

Apart from brief and not very successful experiments at direct administration, the state liquor monopoly was farmed out, and was a source of enrichment to its agents – officials, landowners, merchants and publicans – right up to the 1860s, when it was replaced by an excise levy. Between 1724 and 1759, the revenue from the sale of liquor rose from 11% to 21% of the state’s income, while by the 1850s it had reached about 40% of the total, declining to about a third in the 1880s.¹⁴

It would be an exaggeration, but not an absurd one, to say that the empire was kept financially afloat on the proceeds of the drunkenness of the people. It was naturally far easier to raise revenue from thirsty drinkers than by means of punitive expeditions from reluctant poll-tax payers. Russian popular custom demanded bouts of heavy drinking at times of celebration, whether christenings, weddings and funerals or public festivals. Not to consume huge quantities of alcohol on such occasions, often over several days, was to render oneself liable to ridicule or worse. With the growth of towns and of migratory work during the nineteenth century, a new and probably more pernicious drinking culture took hold, involving casual heavy consumption in taverns with workmates on pay day, without the relatively long periods of abstinence in between such as marked rural customs. The state deliberately took advantage of these habits to augment its income – which meant in turn that it came to have a stake in popular drunkenness and even alcoholism.

It also had a stake in the corruption of its own officials. The liquor farm was auctioned out every four years, on which occasions the prospective farmers (otkupshchiki), to win the franchise, would undertake to sell vodka at approved (low) prices while generating maximum revenues for the state. In practice it was impossible for them to keep these promises without resorting to illegal methods, for example, adulteration, shortweight or claiming to have only expensive liquors in stock when by law they were obliged to have ordinary ones always available for sale. Provincial officials often considered bribes from publicans for indulgence over unavoidable abuses a normal and regular part of their income, which in many cases roughly doubled their meagre official salaries. As one commentator put it, ‘the police officials are themselves farmed out to the tax farmers’.¹⁵

The Ministry of Finance admitted as much in a circular of 1859, which instructed governors to turn a blind eye to abuses. ‘A certain increase in the sale of improved beverages at higher prices does not breach the tax farm regulations and should not be regarded as an abuse on the part of the farmers, but is rather the consequence of the calculations necessary for the successful transfer to the Treasury of 366,745,056 silver rubles, which the farmers are obliged to surrender over the present four-year period.’¹⁶ As Herzen remarked, ‘Who can buy from the government a fixed quantity at a fixed price, sell it to the people without raising its price, and pay the government ten times as much? Of course, having made such deals with the tax farmers, the government not only cannot prosecute them for abuses, but is actually obliged to protect them … The government is consciously robbing the people, and then dividing up the spoils with the tax farmers and others who have participated in the crime.’¹⁷

Corruption, then, was not just a side-effect of the liquor tax system. It was a necessary consequence of the state’s desperate need to raise cash in a still largely natural economy. One should not regard these expedients as all that unusual: both ancient Rome and 17th-18th century France relied on tax-farming for much of their income. But in both cases this reliance was damaging, and in Russia too it obstructed both economic growth and the state’s ability to mobilize real wealth in the interests of the population as a whole. In the words of Charles Tilly, Russia was a state being formed by means which were highly ‘coercion-intensive’, because the country was so poor in capital. The poll tax, paper money and the farming of the liquor; monopoly were natural methods to adopt in the circumstances.¹⁸ That does not alter its obstructive effects.

Paper money (assignaty) was introduced in 1769, and inevitably public confidence in it fell fairly rapidly: by 1801 a paper ruble was worth 66k in silver, by 1817 after the outlays of the Napoleonic war, only 25k. Between 1817 and 1823 the state tried to treat paper rubles frankly as state debt and to buy them back for metal and destroy them, but had not enough bullion to complete the exercise. Another more successful attempt was made between 1839 and 1843, this time issuing bills of credit against them. For a time, gold and silver were the basic means of exchange, but the huge debts of the Crimean War were again covered by the issue of assignaty. Another attempt at monetary reform in the early 1860s ran aground on the expense of suppressing the Polish rebellion.¹⁹

The inflated paper money, the excessive taxation, the reliance on heavy popular drinking, the absence of budgetary discipline: all these evils were symptoms of a state which was straining itself beyond what the resources of land and people would bear at the current level of technology. Its demands, moreover, were obstructing the development of an internal market and investment such as might have raised the level of that technology. There was no shortage of proposals about how those resources might be more efficiently and less damagingly mobilized, but the pressure of immediate needs and the dead hand of serfdom ensured that they were never properly followed up.

In some ways Catherine’s most successful economic measures were connected with the colonization of newly opened or under-populated territories, in the Volga basin and the Urals, and especially along the coast of the Black Sea, in so-called Novorossiia or ‘New Russia’, annexed from Turkey between 1774 and 1792. Here, presented with a tabula rasa, the combination of cameralism and mercantilism came into its own, in the absence of competing privileged social groups or corporate organizations. In territories largely unpopulated Catherine was able to attract immigrants both from within Russia and from more crowded European countries, especially from Germany, by offering them land, guarantees of religious toleration, favourable loans and a period of relief from taxation.²⁰

The conquest and successful colonization of this region freed Russia from many of the chronic disadvantages it had suffered for centuries while hemmed in among the forests and on the poor soils of the north. It provided secure and fertile soil and reliable all-year communications with Europe and the Middle East. During the early nineteenth century the production of grain and other agricultural goods from these regions decisively ameliorated the economic situation of the whole empire: in effect they underwrote Russia’s great power status for another century.

The success of the policy was due to the way in which the Russian authorities could easily combine military and civilian arms of government, subordinating both to a rational vision of political economy untrammelled by inherited custom or ethnic prejudice.²¹ Here the absence of intermediate associations with their own interests and privileges was a positive advantage.

The military campaigns necessary to conquer these regions imposed, however, a grievous burden on the population, nobles as well as peasants. Catherine’s Turkish wars entailed calling up many able-bodied male peasants, requisitioning horses and grain stores, raising taxes, inflating the currency and in other ways undermining the productive potential of both noble estates and peasant holdings. Perhaps the most dangerous opposition Catherine ever faced was from groups of courtiers and writers centred first around Nikita Panin and later A. R. Vorontsov, and including the heir to the throne: they contended that her aggressive southern policy (which tactfully they identified with court favourites rather than with her personally) was both ruinous to the economy and exposed the northern regions, including the capital city, to strategic dangers, especially from Sweden. While they never gained a predominant influence, these thinkers – who included writers like Shcherbatov, Fonvizin, Radishchev and Novikov – presented a more ‘organic’ alternative to the expansive military and imperial policies of Catherine.²²

THE PUGACHEV REBELLION Rationalism and disdain for tradition were the very characteristics which rendered the imperial regime so alien to many of its peoples. The Pugachev rebellion was the last and most serious in a long series of risings which broke out on the south-eastern borders of the Russian state, in that open and ill-defined region where Old Believers and other fugitives from imperial authority rubbed shoulders with non-Russian tribesmen of the steppes, and where Cossacks mounted defence of the Tsar’s fortresses and stockades, while continuing to dream of the brigands’ licence which they had been accustomed to enjoy.

By the mid-eighteenth century the region was being slowly but surely brought under firm imperial control. In fact, one may regard the Pugachev rebellion as the last – but powerful – spasm of peoples whose untrammelled way of life was incompatible with distinct and definite state authority. Nobles were being awarded new estates along and beyond the Volga, and peasants who already lived there were becoming serfs, while new ones were being imported. Obrok (dues in money or kind) was being raised or converted into barshchina (labour dues) by landlords anxious to maximize their revenues and to take advantage of fresh and lucrative trading opportunities. A census and land survey undertaken soon after Catherine II came to power fixed and perpetuated these still relatively unfamiliar arrangements. Also new market opportunities were opening up along the Volga and in the south, putting pressure on more traditional and less productive enterprises.²³

A special group in the area were the odnodvortsy, survivors of the peasant-soldiers sent to man the Volga frontier during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and most of them Old Believers. Still in theory freemen, they suffered from the economic competition of the nobles, feared losing their independence and falling into the regular taxpaying estates as state peasants.

The rebellion began among the Yaik Cossacks, whose situation reflected the changes wrought by the ever more intrusive Tsarist state. They had long enjoyed the freedom to run their own affairs, to elect their own leaders and to hunt, fish and raid along the lower Yaik (Ural) River as they chose, in return for acknowledging the Tsar’s ultimate suzerainty and rendering him service when required. A change in this status came in 1748, when the government decreed the establishment of a Yaik Army of seven regiments to man the Orenburg Line currently being built to keep out the Kazakhs and divide them from the Bashkirs. A few Yaik Cossacks among the starshyna (officer class) reacted favourably to this idea, hoping that it would give them secure status within the Table of Ranks; but most rank-and-file Cossacks opposed integration into the Russian army as an infringement of their freedom and of their elective democratic institutions. They also feared being enlisted as common soldiers. Their suspicions were deepened by the proposal in 1769 to form a ‘Moscow legion’ from the smaller Cossack hosts to fight against the Turks. This implied wearing regular uniform, undergoing parade-ground drilling, and worst of all having beards shaven, a prospect deeply repugnant to Old Believers.

Emel’ian Pugachev was discovered and put up as a front man by the disaffected Yaik Cossacks. A Don Cossack by origin, he had deserted from the Russian army and become a fugitive: several times captured, he had always contrived to escape. He assumed the title of the dead Emperor Peter III and espoused the Old Belief. This ruse may have been suggested to him by a Yaik Cossack, but he took on his invented roles with conviction and panache, and he became a figure far outstripping the Cossacks’ ability to manipulate him.

Peter III had aroused hopes among peasants and religious dissidents by some of the measures he had adopted during his brief period as Tsar. He had expropriated church lands and thereby converted ecclesiastical and monastic serfs to the more favourable status of state peasants. He had prohibited the purchase of serfs by non-nobles and halted the ascription of serfs to factories and mines. He had eased the persecution of Old Believers and pardoned fugitive schismatics who voluntarily returned from abroad. His emancipation of the nobility from state service, though not itself of direct benefit to the serfs, seemed to hold out the hope that they too might soon be emancipated from equivalent obligations.

At any rate, the sudden dethronement of Peter III aroused the strongest suspicions among ordinary peasants, especially since his successor was a German, popularly held not to be truly an Orthodox believer. Pugachev was not the first to profit from his reputation by claiming to be the suffering and wandering deposed Peter, ready to lead his people to the restoration of the true faith and of their traditional freedoms. There were a dozen or so such figures between 1762 and 1774. But he was much the most successful, partly by luck, partly by personality and partly because of the breadth of support he received.

The epidemic of pretenders in those years invites reflection. A pretender was a symptom of a serious disorder in the body politic, a disorder which could not be corrected through any institutional procedures, or through the clash of corporate and representative bodies, for these did not exist. For most Russians, if the state was pursuing fundamentally misguided policies, then that was a sign that the Tsar was not really Tsar – that he was an impostor, who had usurped the throne, unordained by God. It followed that the logical mode of opposition was to find the ‘real’ Tsar, the one who carried God’s seal of approval (often thought to be discernible as an actual mark on his body) and to support his claim to the throne. It will be remembered that Ivan IV, when faced with a fundamental challenge to his rule, himself played the comedy of abdicating his royal powers, and even handing them over to another, in order to prove that he was in fact entitled to exercise divinely-ordained authority.²⁴

Pugachev augmented his popularity by projecting an image of a suffering Christ-like leader, who had meekly accepted his dethronement, and instead of resisting had left St Petersburg to wander sadly among his people, learning of their sufferings and grievances. He also claimed to have visited Constantinople and Jerusalem, buttressing his sanctity and authority by these contacts with the second Rome and with the site of Christ’s crucifixion.

The circumstances in which Catherine came to power were calculated to provoke speculation about her legitimacy. She deepened resentment by curbing the freedom of the Cossacks and oppressed still further the already meagre rights of the serfs – for example by forbidding them to present petitions to the sovereign.

Pugachev’s first manifesto, addressed to the Yaik Cossacks and to Tatar and Kalmyk tribesmen, situated his appeal to them within the Muscovite tradition of state service as a legitimate corollary of their freedoms and privileges. He invoked the blood their fathers and grandfathers had shed in the service of previous Tsars, and in return for equivalent service promised them ‘Cossack glory … forever’, forgiveness of sins, and return of their material privileges: ‘the river from the heights to the mouth, and the land and grasses, and money, and lead, and powder, and provision of grain’.²⁵

The major cause of Pugachev’s success was his capacity to appeal not just to any one social group, but to a wide variety of the empire’s discontented, finding enough in common in their grievances and aspirations to forge a sense of common purpose, however temporary it proved to be. The central feature of this appeal was the promise to restore a simplified, just and personalized service state of the kind which since the time of Peter I was gradually being replaced by more distant, impersonal and bureaucratic procedures. He certainly did not renounce autocracy: indeed, his improvised state offices were headed by a War College, on the Petrine model, while he himself granted notional estates and even notional serfs to his favoured followers.²⁶ The key to his appeal was his rejection of secularism in church and state and his campaign of hatred against the nobility, with their Westernized ways.

The adoption of the Old Belief set the seal on this projected image of an older and better Russia, for it evoked the ancient myth of national unity which the imperial state had disavowed. In his manifesto of 31 July 1774 Pugachev set forth the ideal which he knew would have most appeal to the common people. ‘By God’s grace We, Peter III, Emperor and Autocrat of all the Russias … with royal and fatherly charity grant by this our personal ukaz to all who were previously peasants and subjects of the pomeshchiks to be true and loyal servants of our throne, and we reward them with the ancient cross and prayer, with bearded heads, with liberty and freedom and to be for ever Cossacks, demanding neither recruit enlistment, poll tax or other money dues, and we award them the ownership of the land, of forests, hay meadows and fishing grounds, and with salt lakes, without purchase and without dues in money or in kind, and we free peasants and all the people from the taxes and burdens which were previously imposed by the wicked nobles and mercenary urban judges.’ He further accused the landlords of ‘violating and abusing the ancient tradition of the Christian law, and having with pernicious intent introduced an alien law taken from German traditions, and the impious practice of shaving and other blasphemies contrary to the Christian faith.’²⁷

Pugachev’s use of the symbols of the Old Belief is worth dwelling on, since recent research shows that few members of Old Believer communities actually participated in the rising.²⁸ His appeal was rather to the numerous Old Believers among the Cossacks and odnodvortsy, and to Russian peasants generally, who he knew would respond strongly to evocations of the ancient Russian myth. The synthesis of Old Believer and Cossack ideals provided an alternative model of Russian nationhood which was deeply attractive in those unsettled regions.

This common appeal overarched specific promises made to each social group that enrolled under his banners: to the Cossacks the restoration of their traditional freedom and their democratic procedures, to the Bashkirs and Kalmyks the return of their tribal lands, to the possessional and ascribed serfs of the Urals factories either a release from their bonded manual labour or an improvement in then-pay and conditions, to the state peasants the easing of burdens and to the private serfs the ousting (and murder) of their landowners.

The Bashkirs were a special case. Their grievances at this time were deep and persistent. They were gradually losing their grazing lands both as a result of peasant settlement, the establishment of factories and of government attempts to persuade or compel them to settle down and take to agriculture. Like the Cossacks, they were being pressed into military service on the frontier, under conditions which were not always congenial. These grievances had stimulated bitter and tenacious armed rebellions in the first half of the eighteenth century.

The diversity of his appeal meant that when Pugachev suffered a serious setback, as he did in the spring of 1774, with the failure to capture Orenburg, and in the summer with the loss of Kazan’, he was able to move into a new area and raise large numbers of fresh supporters with a speed which took the authorities by surprise. His success in the final stages of his campaign, along the mid-and lower Volga, was especially remarkable, for here he managed to spark off a general peasant rising, a jacquerie of French 1789 proportions, merely by his general presence in the region. This was ‘Pugachevsh-china without Pugachev’, as one historian has called it.²⁹

In the towns, as Pugachev’s host approached, the local clergy would come out with the principal townsmen to greet their new ‘Tsar’ with icons, bell-ringing, bread and salt. They would celebrate divine service in honour of their lord Peter Fedorovich, after which the rebels would plunder the state salt and liquor monopoly warehouses, handing out their contents to the citizens, and open up the jails, recruiting fresh troops, or ‘Cossacks’, from among the inmates.

In the villages, minor emissaries sufficed, calling themselves ‘Cossacks of Peter III’, or even the mere rumour that Pugachev was in the vicinity. Peasants would gather at the sound of the tocsin, seize whatever weapons they could lay their hands on – scythes, pitchforks, clubs, and perhaps a musket or two – and march on the local manor house or state kabak. Several thousand nobles and their families, as well as stewards, publicans, tax officials and sometimes clergymen, lost their lives, or would flee at the approach of trouble, only to have their property confiscated and their homes rendered uninhabitable. Pugachev’s emissaries would pronounce the peasants freed from private serfdom and exempt from the poll tax and military recruitment for the next seven years. The odnodvortsy also took a lively part in this stage of the rebellion.

In spite of the destruction he caused, and the fear he inspired both in landowners and the government, Pugachev succeeded in capturing only two major cities (Kazan’ and Saratov) and was unable to hold either for more than a few days. His army, at times numerically quite formidable – at least 10,000 during the siege of Orenburg³⁰ – was effective against small garrisons and against other disaffected Cossacks. But it proved unequal to the task of countering sizeable units of the regular army. Here the wisdom of the government’s policy of recruiting peasants for life manifested itself fully. Soldiers in the regular army were almost totally immune to Pugachev’s appeals: they did not identify themselves with the serfs’ grievances, still less the Cossack ones, and they were constrained by a harsh and all-embracing discipline. Pugachev’s lightning campaign along the lower Volga, for all its success in attracting peasant support, was in reality a headlong flight before a pursuing army which he knew he could not defeat.

What is perhaps more surprising is that the Don Cossacks also failed to back Pugachev when he approached their region at the end of his campaign. The explanation may be that, since Pugachev was by origin a Don Cossack, they knew very well that he was not Peter III. Furthermore, they had been in revolt themselves a few years earlier, so that their energy had expended itself, and they were under particularly attentive official supervision.

It is significant that, although the Don Cossacks mostly withheld their support from Pugachev, they subsequently celebrated his memory no less than other Cossacks and peasants in songs and folklore.³¹ As Marc Raeff has commented: ‘They exemplified the discontent and rebelliousness of a traditional group in the face of transformations wrought (or threatened) by a centralised absolute monarchy. Like the feudal revolts and rebellions in the name of regional particularism and traditional privileges in Western Europe, the Cossacks opposed the title of rational modernisation and the institutionalisation of political authority. They regarded their relationship to the ruler as a special and personal one based on their voluntary service obligations; in return they expected the Tsar’s protection of their religion, traditional social organisation, and administrative autonomy. They followed the promises of a pretender and raised the standard of revolt in the hope of recapturing their previous special relationship and of securing the government’s respect for their social and religious traditions.³²

The rebellion deeply troubled Catherine. She tried in her correspondence with foreign powers to belittle it by contemptuous references to ‘le. Marquis Pougatchev’, but actually she feared that, if the movement found a leader from among Russia’s elites, it might succeed in overthrowing her. From the way she had come to the throne she had good cause to know the fragility of her courtiers’ loyalty. She followed the progress of the rebellion closely and took an alert interest in the capture and interrogation of its leaders. In her manifestoes to the population, she displayed a shrewd sense of their psychology by using the old pre-Petrine alphabet.³³ It is uncertain what effect the rebellion had on her later policies, since the reforms she carried out in the later 1770s and 1780s were already being planned before it erupted. It probably reinforced her determination to integrate the Cossacks thoroughly within army and administration, a process which she carried through systematically in the remaining years of her reign.

There can be not much doubt that the rebellion intensified her caution and her distrust of all possible sources of internal disaffection. It had the same effect on her successors too: fears of a possible pugachevshchina figured among the arguments advanced over a possible emancipation of the serfs right up to 1861, nearly a century later.

Perhaps unnecessarily: the evidence suggests that peasants cannot rebel without leaders from outside their ranks. With the Cossacks tamed, no other potential leaders offered themselves for nearly a century. Before Bakunin, no educated Russian, even those grimly opposed to the autocracy, advocated peasant revolution as a way of overthrowing it. Most would have concurred with Pushkin’s sentiment: ‘God preserve us from a Russian revolt, senseless and merciless.’

Yet in another sense, Russia’s officials and nobles were right not to forget Pugachev. For he had revealed just how wafer-thin was the loyalty of some of the non-Russians, and above all of the Russian peasants, to the regime which ruled over them and to its agents, their own lords. The nobles would not lightly forget the image of burnt-out manor houses, with the corpses of their former occupants hanging from the gates. It was a sharp reminder of the gulf – now perhaps at its widest – which separated the ordinary people from their superiors.³⁴

EDUCATION AND CULTURE It was natural that a ruler so conscious of the need to change society should be passionately interested in education. It was indeed one of Catherine’s constant preoccupations. She read a lot about it in the fashionable works of the time, but professed herself unimpressed with Rousseau’s Emile: probably its emphasis on the free formation of the personality clashed with her own greater interest in social order. On the other hand, she had a broader conception of education than did Peter I, wanting it to penetrate beyond the elites to the whole of society. She did her best to make the court a nursery and propagator of culture. In this she was continuing and broadening the initiative already taken by Elizabeth, who had established an excellent tradition of court theatre, music and ballet.

Perhaps her most remarkable initiative was the founding of a society journal, on the model of the London Spectator. Entitled This and That (Vsiakaia vsiachina), it was edited by Catherine’s secretary, G. Kozitskii, but contained frequent editorial contributions by a certain Babushka, who was widely known to be Catherine herself. Perhaps she wanted in its pages to revive the debate she felt she had not achieved through the Legislative Commission; perhaps she aimed through satire and pleasant reading to disseminate good moral principles and modern European cultural examples.

She pursued the same aim in her demonstrative promotion of links with some of the leading European thinkers of the time. She founded a Society for the Translation of Foreign Books into Russian, which she endowed with two thousand rubles. She corresponded with Voltaire, who applauded her resolute action against the Catholic Church (in Poland). She offered Diderot a press and publishing facilities for the Encyclopédie in Riga when he was having difficulties with the authorities in France and she invited him to St Petersburg, where they had long conversations in private. For an ambitious and politically committed thinker like Diderot, Russia, unencumbered by ancient institutions and privileges, appeared to offer enticing scope for an enlighted reformism which was continually frustrated in France. At any rate, he urged Catherine to issue a proper law on the succession, to keep the Legislative Commission in being as a ‘repository of the laws’ and to institute a free and compulsory system of primary education.³⁵

She would have known that the last suggestion was impracticable (though Prussia attempted it in 1763), but she concurred with the sentiment, and did want to make a start on making general education more widely available than merely to the nobility. In 1786, after a commission under her ex-favourite, P.V. Zavadovskii, had examined the subject, she issued a National Statute of Education, which provided for a two-tier network of schools: secondary at the guberniia, and primary at the uezd level, free of charge, co-educational, and open to all classes of the population except serfs.

Not the least significant feature of the proposed new network was that it did not build in any way on the existing church schools, the only ones which were at all widespread. The new schools were to be secular, free of charge and co-educational, with the government providing the initial capital expenditure, and local boards of social welfare meeting the running costs. They were intended to instil ‘a clear and intelligent understanding of the Creator and His divine law, the basic rules of firm belief in the state, and true love for the fatherland and one’s fellow citizens’. Pupils were to be issued with a guidebook outlining the ‘Duties of Man and Citizen’, whose tone was that of the authoritarian secular state, as in the injunction to obey one’s superiors. Those who give orders know what is useful to the state, their subjects and all civil society in general, [and] they do not wish for anything but what is generally recognised as useful by society.³⁶

In 1764 Catherine set up a Foundling Hospital in Moscow, under her personal supervision, the first of several. It was to take orphans – the children most dependent on the state – and fashion them according to the latest educational theories as good citizens. In a sense, this was another of Catherine’s initiatives to create a ‘third estate’. In the same year she established the Smol’nyi Institute for Noble Women, which emphasized socially useful attainments, such as music, dancing and French. The new Institute was a token of her conviction that a more broadly-based society and culture required an informed input from women. Both were intended to advance her purpose of creating a secular civil society as a support for the state.

Catherine’s educational initiatives were undoubtedly ambitious, perhaps too much so: many of the new schools had few pupils and relied on poorly paid and poorly qualified foreigners to provide the bulk of their teaching staff. By the end of the century scarcely more than one in a thousand inhabitants was receiving any kind of schooling. All the same, a basic network had been created on which Catherine’s successors were able to build, and the principle had been accepted that education was not the preserve of the privileged or of males, but should eventually be open to all, free of charge. This principle passed into the life-blood of Russia’s educationalists, giving them a bias towards a democratic, open-access system which survived all nineteenth-century attempts to narrow it.³⁷

Catherine also did something to continue the drive to provide Russia with a scientific and research base outside as well as inside the Academy. She lifted the state monopoly on printing, enabling private entrepreneurs to enter the field, provided only that they registered their presses with the police. She encouraged the foundation of the Free Economic Society, which aimed to investigate techniques and practices in the field of agriculture and industry and to disseminate them as widely as possible. It was not an official institution, but was run by aristocrats and academics, and it sponsored experiments and studies, as well as the regular reading and publication of reports. On Catherine’s suggestion it investigated the relative productivity of free and serf labour, but it does not seem that she paid much attention to its verdict in favour of the former. Even if its influence was not always great, however, the Free Economic Society survived right through to 1917 as a learned society genuinely independent of the state.³⁸

Its work was supplemented by some of the earliest scientific expeditions to investigate the minerals, flora and fauna of the empire’s immense territories, as well as their human potential. These expeditions were organized by the Academy of Sciences, which was the only institution in a position to coordinate all the disciplines involved: geography, ethnography, medicine, geology, zoology, botany, mineralogy. The results were made available in huge publication projects deposited in the Academy library, a mine of information to the present about all aspects of Russian life. Such information was essential to the eventual exploitation of the empire’s full potential – still a long distant goal.³⁹

CONCLUSIONS At the end of Catherine’s reign, Russia was undoubtedly stronger militarily, culturally and economically than when she acceded to the throne. Both the state and society had taken on more palpable sinews, and the influence of European manners and culture had both broadened and deepened among the elites. Russia had become not only a European great power, but a successful one. Senior soldiers and statesmen, and people of high culture, would later look back on her years in power with nostalgia.

All this had not been achieved without cost, however. Catherine had shown that social estates could be created from above as well as from below, but that the process was slow, painful and contradictory. In strengthening the corporate status of the strong, it further undermined the already feeble defences of the weak. As one of Fonvizin’s characters remarks: ‘What use is the freedom of the nobility if we are not free to whip our serfs?’⁴⁰ Probably that is why she hankered throughout her reign after a ‘third estate’, which would be educated and fit for official employment without the divisive privileges held by the nobility.

Perhaps also that is why Catherine never promulgated her Charter of the State Peasants: it might have underlined the utter legal helplessness of the private serfs. It would have been her most ambitious attempt to extend civil rights to large numbers of the population. At any rate, she drew back, leaving one with the suspicion that civil society could only be created at the expense of deepening the civic and ethnic rift within the Russian population, between the elites and the masses.