The New Penguin History of the World (117 page)

Peter threw this tradition aside. He wanted experts – shipwrights, gun-founders, teachers, clerks, soldiers – and he gave them privileges accordingly. In administration he broke with the old assumption of inherited family office and tried to institute a bureaucracy selected on grounds of merit. He set up schools to teach technical skills and founded an Academy of Sciences, thus introducing the idea of science to Russia, where all learning had hitherto been clerical. Like many other great reformers he also put much energy into what might be thought superficialities. Courtiers were ordered to wear European clothes; the old long beards were cut back and women were told to appear in public in German fashions. Such psychological shocks were indispensable in so backward a country. Peter was virtually without allies in what he was trying to do and in the end such things as he achieved had to be driven through. They rested on his autocratic power and little else. The old Duma of the boyars was abolished and a new senate of appointed men took its place. Peter began to dissolve the tie between land ownership and state power, between sovereignty and property, and launched Russia on a march towards a new identity as a multi-ethnic empire. Those who resisted were ruthlessly broken, but it was less easy for Peter to dispose of a conservative cast of mind; he had at his disposal only an administrative machine and communications that would seem inconceivably inadequate to any modern government.

The most striking sign of successful modernization was Russia’s new military power. Another was the virtual reduction of the Church to a department of state. More complicated tests are harder to come by. The vast majority of Russians were untouched by Peter’s educational reforms, which only obviously affected technicians and a few among the upper class. The result was a fairly westernized higher nobility, focused at St Petersburg; by 1800 its members were largely French-speaking and sometimes in touch with the currents of thought which arose in western Europe. But they were often resented by the provincial gentry and formed a cultural island in a backward nation. The mass of the nobility for a long time did not benefit from the new schools and academies. Further down the social scale, the Russian masses remained illiterate; those who learnt
to read did so for the most part at the rudimentary level offered by the teaching of the village priest, often only one generation removed from illiteracy himself. A literate Russia had to wait for the twentieth century.

Her social structure, too, tended more and more to mark off Russia. She was to be the last country in Europe to abolish serfdom; among Christian countries only Ethiopia, Brazil and the United States kept bonded labour for longer. While the eighteenth century saw the institution weakening almost everywhere, in Russia it spread. This was largely because labour was always scarcer than land; significantly, the value of a Russian estate was usually assessed in the number of ‘souls’ – that is, serfs – tied to it, not its extent. The number of serfs had begun to go up in the seventeenth century, when the Tsars found it prudent to gratify nobles by giving them land, some of which already had free peasants settled on it. Debt tied them to their landlords and many of them entered into bondage to the estate to work it off. Meanwhile, the law imposed more and more restrictions on the serf and rooted the structure of the state more and more in the economy. Legal powers to recapture and restrain serfs were steadily increased and landlords had been given a special interest in using such powers when Peter had made them responsible for the collection of the poll-tax and for military conscription. Thus, economy and administration were bound together in Russia more completely than in any western country. Russia’s aristocrats tended to become hereditary civil servants, carrying out tasks for the Tsar.

Formally, by the end of the eighteenth century, there was little that a lord could not do to his serfs short of inflicting death on them. If they were not obliged to carry out heavy labour services, money dues were levied upon them almost arbitrarily. There was a high rate of desertion, serfs making for Siberia or even volunteering for the galleys. About a half of the Russian people were in bondage to their lords in 1800, a large number of the rest owing almost the same services to the Crown and always in danger of being granted away to nobles by it.

As new lands were annexed, their populations, too, passed into serfdom even if they had not known it before. The result was a huge inertia and a great rigidifying of society. By the end of the century, Russia’s greatest problem for the next hundred years was already there: what to do with so huge a population when both economic and political demands made serfdom increasingly intolerable, but when its scale presented colossal problems of reform. It was like the man riding an elephant; it is all right so long as he keeps going but there are problems when he wants to get off.

Servile labour had become the backbone of the economy. Except in the
famous Black Earth zone, only beginning to be opened up in the eighteenth century, Russian soil is by no means rich, and even on the best land farming methods were poor. It seems unlikely that production ever kept pace with population until the twentieth century though periodic famine and epidemics were the natural restoratives of balance. Population nearly doubled in the eighteenth century, about seven million of the thirty-six million or so at which it stood at the end having been acquired with new territories, the rest having accumulated by natural increase. This was a faster rate of growth than any other European country. Of this population, only about one in twenty-five at most lived in towns.

Yet the Russian economy made striking progress during the century and was unique in utilizing serfdom to industrialize. Here, it may be thought, was one of Peter’s unequivocal successes; though there had been beginnings under the first two Romanovs, it was he who launched Russian industrialization as a guided movement. True, the effect was not quickly apparent. Russia’s starting level was very low, and no eighteenth-century European economy was capable of rapid growth. Though grain production went up and the export of Russian cereals (later a staple of Russian foreign trade) began in the eighteenth century, it was done by the old method of bringing more land under cultivation and perhaps by the more successful appropriation of the surplus by the landlord and tax-collector. The peasant’s consumption declined. This was to be the story throughout most of the imperial era and sometimes the load was crushing: it has been estimated that taxes took 60 per cent of the peasant’s crop under Peter the Great. The techniques were not there to increase productivity and the growing rigidity of the system held it down more and more firmly. Even in the second half of the nineteenth century the typical Russian peasant wasted what little time was left to him after work for his lord by trudging around the collection of scattered strips which made up his holding. Often he had no plough, and crops had to be raised from the shallow scratching of the soil which was all that was possible.

None the less, this agricultural base somehow supported both the military effort which made Russia a great power, and the first phase of her industrialization. By 1800 Russia produced more pig-iron and exported more iron ore than any other country in the world. Peter, more than any other man, was responsible for this. He grasped the importance of Russia’s mineral resources and built the administrative apparatus to grapple with them. He initiated surveys and imported the miners to exploit them. By way of incentive, the death penalty was prescribed for landlords who concealed mineral deposits on their estates or tried to prevent their use. Communications were developed to allow access to these resources and
slowly the centre of Russian industry shifted towards the Urals. The rivers were crucial. Only a few years after Peter’s death the Baltic was linked by water to the Caspian.

Manufacturing grew up around the core of extractive mineral and lumber industry which ensured Russia a favourable balance of trade for the whole century. Less than a hundred factories in Peter’s reign became more than 3000 by 1800. After 1754, when internal customs barriers were abolished, Russia was the largest free-trade area in the world. In this, as in the granting of serf labour or of monopolies, the state continued to shape the Russian economy; Russian industry did not emerge from free enterprise, but from regulation, and this had to be, for industrialization ran against the grain of Russian social fact. There might be no internal customs barriers, but nor was there much long-distance internal trade. Most Russians lived in 1800 as they had done in 1700, within self-sufficient local communities, depending on their artisans for a small supply of manufactures and hardly emerging into a money economy. Such ‘factories’ as there were seem sometimes to have been little more than agglomerations of artisans. Over huge areas labour service, not rent, was the basis of tenure. Foreign trade was still mainly in the hands of foreign merchants. Moreover, though state grants to exploit their resources and allocations of serfs encouraged mine-owners, the need of such encouragement shows that the stimuli for maintained growth, which were effective elsewhere, were lacking in Russia.

After Peter, in any case, there was a notable flagging of state innovation. The impetus could not be maintained; there were not enough educated men to allow the bureaucracy to keep up the pressure once his driving power had gone. Peter had not named a successor (he had his own son tortured to death). Those who followed him faced a renewed threat of hostility from the great noble families without his force of character and the terror he had inspired. The direct line was broken in 1730 when Peter’s grandson died. Yet factional quarrels could be exploited by monarchs, and his replacement by his niece, Anna, was something of a recovery for the Crown. Though put on the throne by the nobles who had dominated her predecessor, she quickly curbed them. Symbolically, the court returned to St Petersburg from Moscow, to which (to the delight of the conservatives) it had gone after Peter’s death. Anna turned to foreign-born ministers for help and this worked well enough until her death in 1740. Her successor and infant grand-nephew was within a year set aside (to be kept in prison until murdered more than twenty years later) in favour of Elizabeth, daughter of Peter the Great, who relied on the support of the Guards regiments and Russians irritated by foreigners. She was succeeded in 1762 by a
nephew who reigned barely six months before he was forced to abdicate. The mistress of the overmighty subject who subsequently murdered the deposed Tsar was the new Tsarina and widow of the deposed victim, a German princess who became Catherine II and known, like Peter, as ‘The Great’.

The glitter with which Catherine subsequently surrounded herself masked a great deal and took in many of her contemporaries. Among the things it almost hid was the bloody and dubious route by which she came to the throne. It may be true, though, that she rather than her husband might have been the victim if she had not struck first. In any case, the circumstances of her accession and of those of her predecessors showed the weakening the autocracy had undergone since Peter. The first part of her reign was a ticklish business; powerful interests existed to exploit her mistakes and for all her identification with her new country (she had renounced her Lutheran religion to become Orthodox) she was a foreigner. ‘I shall perish or reign,’ she once said, and reign she did, to great effect.

Though Catherine’s reign was more spectacular than that of Peter the Great, its innovatory force was less. She, too, founded schools and patronized the arts and sciences. The difference was that Peter was concerned with practical effect; Catherine rather to associate the prestige of enlightened thinkers with her court and legislation. The forms were often forward-looking while the reality was reactionary. Close observers were not taken in by legislative rhetoric; the reality was shown by the exile of the young Radischev, who had dared to criticize the regime and has been seen as Russian’s first dissentient intellectual. Such reforming impulses as Catherine showed perceptibly weakened as the reign went on and foreign considerations distracted her.

Her essential caution was well shown by her refusal to tamper with the powers and privileges of the nobility. She was the Tsarina of the landlords, giving them greater power over the local administration of justice and taking away from their serfs the right to petition against their masters. Only twenty times in Catherine’s thirty-four-year reign did the government act to restrain landlords abusing their powers over their serfs. Most significant of all, the obligation to service was abolished in 1762 and a charter of rights was later given to the nobility which sealed a half-century of retreat from Peter’s policies towards them. The gentry were exempted from personal taxation, corporal punishment and billeting, could be tried (and be deprived of their rank) only by their peers, and were given the exclusive right to set up factories and mines. The landowner was in a sense taken into partnership by the autocracy.

In the long run this was pernicious. Under Catherine, Russia began to
truss herself more and more tightly in the corset of her social structure at a time when other countries were beginning to loosen theirs. This would increasingly make Russia unfit to meet the challenges and changes of the next half-century. One sign of trouble was the scale of serf revolt. This had begun in the seventeenth century, but the most frightening and dangerous crisis came in 1773, the rebellion of Pugachev, the worst of the great regional uprisings which studded Russian agrarian history before the nineteenth century. Later, better policing would mean that revolt was usually local and containable, but it continued through almost the whole of the imperial era. Its recurrence is hardly surprising. The load of labour services piled on the peasant rose sharply in the Black Earth zone during Catherine’s reign. Soon critics would appear among the literate class and the condition of the peasant would be one of their favourite themes, thus providing an early demonstration of a paradox evident in many developing countries in the next two centuries. It was becoming clear that modernization was more than a matter of technology; if you borrowed western ideas, they could not be confined in their effect. The first critics of Orthodoxy and autocracy were beginning to appear. Eventually the need to preserve an ossifying social system would virtually bring to a halt the changes which Russia needed to retain the place that courageous and unscrupulous leadership and seemingly inexhaustible military manpower had given her.