Europe: A History (133 page)

Praetorian revolutions became a habit with the Romanovs, as with the Romans. Legal succession by the dynastic heir was a rarity. Catherine I (r. 1725–7), alias Skovorotska, a Latvian peasant girl and Peter’s second consort, overthrew him on his deathbed. Peter II (r. 1727–30) succeeded through a forged will; the Empress Anne (r. 1730–40), Duchess of Courland, through a ploy of the Privy Council; Ivan VI (r. 1740–1), the infant Duke of Brunswick, through a scheme of Baron Biron; the Empress Elizabeth (r. 1741–61), sometime fiancée of a Bishop of Lübeck and
fréquentée
of the guards’ barracks, through a straightforward
coup de force;
Alexander I (r. 1801–25), through the assassination of his father. Paul I (1796–1801), a would-be reformer-Tsar, was long held to be mentally unbalanced by official historiographers, obviously for being sane. When Paul insisted on exhuming the body of his murdered father, Peter III, and on reburying his parents in the cathedral of Peter and Paul, the aged Count Orlov was obliged to carry the imperial crown behind the coffin of the victim, whom he had killed 35 years before. This grisly act of reconciliation well symbolizes the fraud, fear, and violence which surrounded the court of St Petersburg and all its works.

Muscovy took its giant leap out of the shadows during the second or Great Northern War, 1700–21. This 20-year contest centred on the rivalry of Peter the
Great, who had set envious eyes on Swedish possessions at the head of the Baltic, and the youthful Charles XII of Sweden, who was eager to attack all his neighbours at once. It began in August 1700 with Charles’s adventurous landing near Copenhagen and with Peter’s disastrous attack on Narva, a Swedish fortress on the Gulf of Finland. But it was largely fought out on the intervening territory of Poland-Lithuania, whose King (Augustus, Elector of Saxony) had formed a private alliance with Peter. In the end, Poland-Lithuania was to be an even greater casualty than Sweden (see below).

After the initial clashes Charles XII took the initiative on the mainland. He first aimed to punish Peter’s Saxon ally, and in 1704 succeeded in replacing Augustus on the Polish throne with a leader of the pro-Swedish faction, Stanistaw Leszczyñski. In so doing, he gave Peter the chance to grab the Swedish provinces of Livonia and Ingria, where in 1703 the foundation of the new city of St Petersburg was immediately proclaimed. In 1707 he turned east, counting on support from Livonia and from Mazeppa, Hetman of Ukraine. He was deceived on both scores. In the winter of 1708–9, harassed by peasant guerrillas, he was forced to abandon the original plan of a march on Moscow and to turn south. On 27 June 1709, at Poltava in Ukraine, he was comprehensively beaten and driven to take refuge in the Ottoman domains. The triumphant Muscovite armies swept westwards. Warsaw was occupied and Augustus II restored. The Baltic provinces remained in Muscovite hands. No shortage of vultures was found among the German princes to join Denmark and Prussia in preying on Sweden’s more westerly possessions. Charles XII was killed in action in November 1718, besieging the fortress of Frederikshald on the Norwegian-Swedish frontier. A diplomatic congress held on the Aland Islands preceded the Russo-Swedish Treaty signed at nearby Nystadt (1721). Sweden was humbled. Peter was left the arbiter of the North, the proud possessor of his ‘Window on the West’. In 1721 he promoted himself from the style of Muscovite ‘Tsar’ to that of Emperor—a title not generally recognized in his lifetime,
[PETROGRAD]

As Muscovy assumed its imperial mantle, far-reaching reforms were imposed to turn the new Empire into a modern, Western state. In the eyes of Peter I, in particular, reform was equivalent to ‘Westernisation’. The Tsar made two lengthy visits to Western Europe, in 1696–8 and in 1717, taking notes on the techniques of everything from naval construction to face-shaving. But it was the Great Northern War that served as Russia’s taskmaster. First and foremost came the Tsar’s demand for a standing army, and for the financial and social institutions required to support it. The old Muscovite state had been monstrously inefficient. A ragbag army, which melted away in winter, was consuming the produce of two-thirds of the population and, in bad years like 1705, up to 96 per cent of the state’s revenues. By the end of Peter’s reign a permanent force of over 300,000 trained men was supported by a poll-tax or ‘soul tax’, which had tripled revenue, by peasant conscription, and by the reorganization of the nobility.

Few stones were left unturned. A key statute, the
Preobrazhensky Prikaz
(1701), regulated the system of political police. Important changes were made by the
division of the country into
guberniyas
or ‘provinces’ (1705); by the creation of a senate and of administrative colleges within the central administration (1711); by the introduction of municipal government (1718–24); by the state promotion of trade, industry, education, literature, science, and the arts. In 1721 the Patriarchate was abolished, subordinating the Russian Orthodox Church to the state-run Holy Synod. Priests were ordered to betray the secrets of the confessional. From 1722 the table of ranks tied an enlarged nobility into a hierarchical caste system wedded to state service and landed privileges. The creation of so many new institutions involved what one authority has called ‘the partial dismantling of the Patrimonial State’ and the first realization in Russia of the distinction between ‘state’ and ‘society’.
³⁰
This occurred even though no significant changes were made in the political sphere and the nobles themselves were held in abject servitude. They were subject to public flogging and
shelmovanie
(outlawry) for evading education or service. Most historians would now agree, in fact, that the Petrine reforms were not quite what contemporaries imagined. They did not act as a great unifying force; on the contrary, they divided the loyalties of the Tsar’s subjects, especially in matters of religion and nationality. Equally, they were apt to introduce the form of Western institutions whilst ignoring the substance. Peter could not turn Muscovites into Europeans by ordering them to shave their beards and to dress in powdered wigs.

Catherine II cared more about the substance. Once again, despite the enlightened rhetoric, there was no tampering with the foundations of autocracy or serfdom. But her famous instruction to the legislative commission of 1766–8 aiming at a modern legal code, her centralizing and ‘russifying’ tendencies in provincial administration, and, above all, her acceptance of the ‘freedom of the nobility’ made lasting modifications to the system. The Charter of Nobility (1785), which confirmed an earlier decree granting limited rights of noble assembly and self-government in the provinces, complemented the table of ranks; and ancient restrictions on the sale of serfs as chattels were eased. The final product was a compromise, half-old, half-new: a hybrid whereby the autocratic monarchy was gradually rendered dependent on the service nobility which it had created, whilst the nobility could not transmit to central government the power which they wielded over the mass of the population in the localities. ‘Paradoxically, by their insistence on the monopoly of political power, the Russian autocrats secured less effective authority than their constitutional counterparts in the West.’
³¹
The old Muscovite tyranny was at least consistent. The new Russian Empire contained the seeds of its own destruction,
[EULER]

None the less, Russia’s remorseless expansion continued (see Appendix III, p. 1277). A country that already possessed more land than it could usefully exploit kept on indulging its gargantuan appetite. In the west, Russia ate up the larger part of Sweden-Finland and of Poland-Lithuania. In the south, starting with Azov (1696), it swallowed up the whole of the Ottomans’ Black Sea provinces and Crimea (1783), before moving against Persia, the Caucasus, and Central Asia. In the east, having crossed Siberia to the Pacific, from the 1740s it explored the shores of Alaska, where a permanent settlement was built on Kodiak Island in 1784.

Russian historians have rationalized their country’s expansion in terms of ‘national tasks’ and ‘the gathering of the lands’. In reality, Russia and its rulers were addicted to territorial conquest. Their land-hunger was the symptom of a pathological condition born of gross inefficiency and traditional militarism. It is highly ironic that the world’s largest country needed an ever-growing supply of land and people to offset its sense of insecurity, to execute operations which others achieved with far smaller resources, and to reward the overblown machine which guarded the Romanovs’ throne. Here, if ever, was an extreme case of
bulimia politica
, of the so-called ‘canine hunger’, of gross territorial obesity in an organism which could only survive by consuming more and more of its neighbours’ flesh and blood. Every successful Russian officer needed an estate run by hundreds or thousands of serfs, to support his family in the accustomed style. Of 800,000 such conquered ‘souls’ redistributed by Catherine II, no fewer than 500,000 came from Poland-Lithuania alone. Significantly, whilst the German nobility of the ex-Swedish ‘Baltikum’ were permitted to retain their privileges, the ex-Polish nobility of Lithuania and Ruthenia (Byelorussia and Ukraine) were not.

Within the expanding Russian empire, Ukraine upheld its separate identity for more than a hundred years. From 1654 to 1783 the ‘Hetman State’ of Ukraine was ruled, under Tsarist supervision, by the heirs of the Dnieper Cossacks who had first sought the Tsar’s alliance against Poland. Their bid to break free under Hetmán Mazeppa during the Swedish invasion of 1708–9 (see above) came to nothing. Their suppression coincided with the annexation of Crimea and the end of their usefulness as a buffer against Tartars and Ottomans,
[RUS’]

Thereafter, the historic distinction between Ruthenia and Russia was officially suppressed. Ukraine was renamed Malorossiya (Little Russia), and all traces of its separate traditions were erased. Its Cossacks were denied the same degree of autonomy granted to their Russian counterparts on the Don or the Kuban. Its rich lands were subjected to intense russification and colonization. The ‘wild plains’ of the south, Europe’s last frontier, were settled with peasant immigrants, mainly Russians and Germans. The monopoly of the Russian Orthodox Church among the Slavs was enforced, as was the public use of the Russian language. Any remaining Uniates were removed. Russian immigrants began to change the complexion of the cities, especially Kiev, now presented as an ancient Russian city. Ukrainian, Polish, and Jewish culture steadily lost ground. The Ruthenian (Ukrainian) language, which survived in the countryside, was officially described as a Russian dialect The magnificent new port of Odessa, founded in 1794 as capital of the province of’New Russia’, opened an outlet for the growing corn trade, a window to the south,
[POTEMKIN]

The Republic of Poland-Lithuania was the principal European casualty of Russia’s expansion. Indeed, the Republic’s demise was the
sine qua non
of the Russian Empire’s success. Like its former province of Ukraine, the Republic was the object first of Muscovite penetration and then of alternating periods of indirect and direct rule. Muscovite influence rose steadily after the death of Sobieski in 1696.