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Hello, and welcome to Revolutions.
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Last week we did a big sweep through about 700 years of early Russian history, from the founding of Kiev Rus to the founding of the Romanov dynasty. This week, we are going to blast through another 200 odd years of Russian history, and just as last week, we saw the principality of Moscow become the tsardom of Russia.
This week, we are going to see the tsardom of Russia transform into the Russian empire. And we will focus specifically on two of the greatest leaders in Russian history, Peter the Great and Catherine the great. They would help transform the Russian state from an old style, personal despotism into a new style absolutist monarchy, and along the way, dramatically expand the power and prestige of Russia on the world stage.
So we ended last time with the election of 16-year-old Mihail Romanov as tsar of Russia in 1613. This was at the tail end of the Time of Troubles, and within a few years the rebellions, civil wars, marauding bandits, foreign invaders, and general chaos subsided. To drastically oversimplify things in the interest of keeping things moving, the rest of the 1600 saw a stabilization of the tsardom of Russia. The nobility was interested in working with the new Romanov dynasty to avoid the catastrophic conflicts that had characterized the Time of Troubles. The government in Moscow was thus able to centralize its power under a permanent bureaucracy paving the way for future political reforms, and in 1649, the first big written law code was published. On the other end of the political spectrum during these years enserfment of the peasants permanently entrenched itself, and the economy remained based on the agricultural work done by the serfs who were bound to their land and occupations in perpetuity. The burdens and repression of the lower classes was not taken lying down, and Moscow itself was hit by the salt riot in 1648, copper riot in 1662, and the great Moscow uprising of 1682. This is to say nothing of a major revolt by Cossacks and runaway serfs in 1670 and 1671 orchestrated by a rebel leader named Stenka Razin. But none of these were serious challenges and Russia continued to expand its size and power. Russians moved East across the Ural mountains into Siberia where they pretty easily subdued the local tribes, and then they just kept pushing east until they hit the Pacific Ocean, bringing Siberia permanently under Russian hegemony. In the West meanwhile, Poland was sinking just as Russia was rising, and during these years, the Russians advanced back to Smolensk and Kiev.
As the 1600s drew to a close, the Romanovs were hit by some convoluted dynastic inheritance problems that I could spend all day trying to explain, but instead I’m going to not. The upshot is that after ousting his regent of an older half sister in 1689, 17 year old, Peter Romanoff started wielding power as tsar in his own right. Now it would be nearly impossible for his contemporaries to predict that in the future, we would be calling him Peter the Great, and the reason this would have struck contemporaries as so surprising and unpredictable is that young Peter showed almost no interest in court life. He was an odd duck who didn’t quite fit in. Physically, he grew to be nearly seven feet tall, and mentally he was gifted with a mathematical mind that was particularly interested in sailing and shipbuilding, so he had no interest in the boring formalities and petty backbiting of court life. He wanted to spend his day sailing, thinking about sailing, and drinking with his friends. So his powerful mother managed to maintain something resembling a normal court routine until she died in 1694, at which point Peter just stopped showing up altogether. 200 years of traditional court routine that had begun under Ivan the Great simply perished of neglect. A new day was dawning for Russia, due simply to the force of Peter’s personality. He would not be molded by anyone or anything. He would do the molding.
Ruling now through a few trusted favorites rather than the established court apparatus that had defined the years since the Time of Troubles, Peter set out on a bold new path. His personal obsession with all things maritime would dominate his foreign policy outlook as he saw landlocked Russia as being held back from true greatness until it stopped being landlocked. To satisfy his ambitions, Peter turned his attention south towards the Sea of Azov, which sits perched, atop the Black Sea, and which at that time was dominated by the Ottoman Empire. Peter sent his army and a newly built up navy manned by Italian, French, and dutch officer south down the Don River. In 1696, the Russians successfully captured the port city of Azov, and while this was a great victory for Peter, he did not yet have the strength to push out any further than that. The Ottomans were able to block any further access to the larger Black Sea and prevent the Russians from putting into port with their merchant vessels. So Peter had his port, but he couldn’t go anywhere.
After his first expansion south. Peter’s attention then turned to the west. Far to the West. Peter was supremely dissatisfied with what he considered to be the backwardness of Russian science culture and society. This was the age of Newton and Leibniz and Baroque rationalism, and Peter himself was always drawn to this world of new discoveries.
So as the first conflict with the Ottomans was wrapping up, Peter packed his bags and headed west in 1697. But as was his style, Peter did not want to travel around as the tzar of Russia, which would bog him down in endless protocol. Instead, he went incognito as simply a member of a diplomatic mission, ostensibly touring Europe to drum up support for further Russian advances against the Ottomans. This embassy went from Riga to Berlin, and then onto the intended destination of Amsterdam. And while drumming up diplomatic support for Russia was all for the good, this was really in the service of getting Peter into personal contact with, and getting training and tutelage from, the great Dutch engineers and ship builders of the day. And then from this base in the Netherlands, Peter also popped up to England to visit and tour facilities and talk to leaders and experts, and it included a trip to the famous Greenwich observatory. While in the west, Peter’s mind was filled with visions of turning Russia towards this future that now lay before him.
Peter’s absence from Russia and disdain for the old beliefs did not go unnoticed by the nobility back in Russia. And in 1698, Peter had to return home to handle the fallout from an aborted noble revolt that got going while he was away. Now more determined than ever to have his way, Peter forged ahead with a kind of personal rule. He did not call any formal council of nobles or use any of the old provincial institutions of power. Instead, he had a small group of friends and favorites who dealt with the government on a very improvised and ad hoc basis. And as if it wasn’t bad enough that the old nobility was basically being cut out of power, Peter also decided that the Russian nobility needed to get with the times and adopt western looks and clothing, or they were going to look hopelessly backwards anytime anybody laid eyes on them. So he decreed that nobleman had to shave their beards, and women had to wear western style dresses, which most of them hated. Peter also wanted to break the independent power of the Orthodox Church. And when the patriarch of the church died in 1700 — that’s just the leader of the Russian Orthodox church — Peter reclined to nominate a successor, He then annexed vast monastic estates, bringing under his control extensive land and serf holdings.
He also then turned his attention to the army and navy and began reforming them along European lines: command structure, strategy, tactics, armory, drilling, training, all of it. He imported European officers and engineers to bring the Russian army and navy Into the modern age. He wanted to make the Russian military a true modern power to be reckoned with, so kind of across the board, Peter is just changing everything.
Now a lot of these domestic reforms were initiated simultaneously, with an in service to, what would become Peter’s greatest foreign entanglement, the Great Northern War. In 1699, the King of Poland invited the Russians and the Danes into a secret alliance against the Swedes. Now everyone had their own reasons for joining this anti Swedish coalition, but Peter had one single burning obsessive reason: the singular goal of his reign, which was to win a window to the seas. Specifically, he wanted a port on the gulf of Finland that would give Russia access to the Baltic Sea, and from there, access to the whole world. Unfortunately, there was a lot of gross miscalculating going on inside this anti Swedish alliance. The King of Poland, for example, thought he was far stronger than he actually was, and then it turned out none of them were much of a match for Charles the 12th of Sweden, who was one of the great military commanders of his age, or really any age.
So instead of a quick and decisive offensive by Poland, Denmark, and Russia to push Sweden out of some territory that they all coveted, it became a 20 year long seesaw conflict called the Great Northern War. The first eight years of this war were defined by Sweden hammering Poland into submission, and then forcing the King of Poland’s abdication and getting a Swedish puppet placed on the Polish throne. After the success, Charles the 12th turned to Russia in the hopes of doing the same thing, and he just assumed that noble grumbling about Peter and peasant grumbling about, y’know, everything would make it very easy to induce Peter’s overthrow. Instead, Charles the 12th found the Russians unwilling to dance to Swedish numbers and discovered Peter’s reformed and retrained military was a much better fighting force than he expected. An attempted invasion of Russia in 1708 and 1709 ended indecisive failure. And though the war would keep going until 1721, by 1710, the resulting post-war dynamic was already settling into place: that Russia was now a power to be reckoned with, maybe the great power of Northeastern Europe.
In the early days of this war, Peter resolved to move quickly in order to secure his window to the sea. Now, technically Russia already had one window to the sea, the far northern port of Archangel, which was built at the mouth of the northern Dniper River on the coast of the White Sea. A passage through the White Sea had been mapped and opened by the English and Dutch way back in 1555, but Archangel was iced up nine months out of the year. Peter had visited the port twice and found it ultimately unsatisfying for his greater vision of the future. So in 1702, he marched the Russian Army down the Niva River and they captured a Swedish town and fortification at the mouth. And here, Peter ordered a fortress built, which would become the St. Peter and St. Paul fortress, which was meant to be the initial defender of his grand vision of the future. By 1703, not even waiting for the war to end in peace settlements to make Russian claims official, Peter ordered construction of what would become the great legacy of his reign: the city of St. Petersburg, which was naturally named after his own namesake.
St. Petersburg was meant to be a naval base, a shipyard and a center of commerce and shipping to integrate Russia better into European markets. But Peter wanted even more. He was going to make his new city the new capital of Russia. He himself relocated there and built the first winter and summer palaces, though these initial palaces were quite modest affairs. And then he ordered the nobility to relocate as well, forcing them to leave their ancestral mansions in Moscow and build new ones in this kind of swampy boom town on the Gulf of Finland. They were not very happy about it, and a lot of this smacks of Louis the 14th, making the French nobility come attend to him at Versailles. This relocation meant they had to spend a fortune building up residences in Peter’s city and live there on his home turf rather than on their home turf back in Moscow. It also forced them to look towards Europe rather than revel in the aloof insularity of inner Russia. With this forced infusion of wealth and residence St. Petersburg was on its way to becoming one of the great capitals of the world.
So with the Great Northern War turning in his favor, Peter instituted another new slate of reforms. To get going on this project, in 1715, in the midst of still fighting with Sweden, Peter sent a spy into Sweden to study their administration and state apparatus. And when that spy returned, Peter transformed Russian administration along Swedish lines, with various departmental colleges staffed by both Russian and foreign experts running their individual departments. Then in 1722, he introduced the table of ranks, which spelled out the ranks and positions and titles of the nobility, and which would be in place right up to the moment of the 1917 revolution. He also put the church under even more from state control by creating a government senate to run it, all of the members of which would be appointed by the tsar. And he also made up for something that had been conspicuously lacking from Russian cultural life, and that was secular philosophy and scientific expertise, so he created an academy of science in St. Petersburg to open up Russian intellectual life to science and natural philosophy. It was not quite a full university, but it was a step in the right direction.
Now in 1721, the great Northern war finally ended after twenty years, with an exhausted Sweden suing for peace. The result was that the Baltic territories Peter had seized were confirmed, along with new lands in Livonia and Ukraine, and those Livonian territories brought German Lutherans under the sovereignty of the tsar for the first time. To celebrate all this. Peter made the grand proclamation that transformed the state officially from the Tsardom of Russia into the Russian Empire.
Now, Peter the Great is remembered today as one of the great leaders in Russian history, and certainly in Europe, he is considered the ideal tsar. But partly this is because he flattered European egos by always following their lead. But there has always been a healthy group in Russia at the time and now who resented this quote unquote modernizer and westernizer, who’s so brazenly attacked traditional Slavic culture and old ways of life in the Orthodox Church. Peter wanted them to be European, but they were not European and they did not want to be European, but almost by sheer force of personal will, Peter linked Russia permanently to European affairs, and the Russian empire would forever loom large in all future international calculations. His reforms also transformed the lives and cultural pursuits of the Russian aristocracy, but it is worth noting that they really only affected the upper classes. The peasants were all but untouched, most of them were still just serfs, toiling away for the benefit of the lords, generation after forgotten generation.
So Peter the Great died in 1725 and his death opened up another convoluted succession crisis inside the Romanov family that I am also not going to explain. In fact, I just want to move very quickly through the 37 year period between the reigns of Peter the Great and Catherine the Great. There was some attempt to undo much of what Peter had done in the years after his death, which is understandable, but a lot of it just kind of stuck in place. Peter’s niece Anna wound up reigning as Empress from 1730 to 1740, and then after her another convoluted succession crisis that I’m not going to tell you about left Peter’s daughter Elizabeth reigning as Empress from 1741 to 1762. She reinstated most of her father’s program and then shepherded Russia from the age of Baroque rationalism into the age of Enlightenment. This is the point at which educated Russians started getting really into the French philosophes and enlightenment era thinkers like Voltaire. It’s also when the Russian nobility started using French as the standard language amongst themselves. This early Russian enlightenment was embodied by a Renaissance man polymath named Mihail Lomonosov, who on top of many scientific and artistic accomplishments spearheaded the compilation, regularization, and formalization of the Russian language as we know it today. And he also founded the first university in Russia, the University of Moscow, in 1755.
Now neither Empress Anna nor Empress Elizabeth had children of their own, and so the Romanovs had to go looking outside the immediate family for an heir. So in 1742, Elizabeth selected the son of her sister who had been married to a German Duke of Holstine, and yes, I am talking about that Holstine. The boy was brought over to Russia, formerly rechristened Peter, and he converted to Orthodox Christianity. Now the selection of Peter was a part of Elizabeth’s policy of trying to keep Prussia happy, and then she kept going in this vein when it was time to select a bride for Peter. She went out and found a German princess from a small principality in the Prussian orbit named Sophia. 15 year old, Sophia came to Russia in 1744, where she too formally converted to Orthodox Christianity and was rechristened… Catherine.
Peter and Catherine were a terrible match. Peter turned out to be immature and dull and had no interest in his future responsibilities. Catherine, meanwhile, was endlessly curious and intelligent bordering on brilliant. From the outset, the two lived totally separate lives, and when Catherine gave birth to an heir named Paul in 1754, it was the son of her lover, not Peter, though that was a closely held secret at court. Catherine had plenty of ambition and she recognized pretty early on that she better study up because she was very likely going to be spending her husband’s reign covering up for his idiotic childlessness. So she studied the latest in enlightened political and economic theory come out of the West, she read everyone and everything she could and especially liked Montesquieu. And though she was a German princess, Catherine embraced Russia, wanted what was best for Russia, and when she got the chance, she planned to rule with the interest of Russia always foremost in her mind.
Peter was not like that, and when the Empress Elizabeth died in 1762, and Peter became tsar, he immediately made peace with his Prussian cousins and then induced them to attack Denmark on behalf of Peter’s interest in Holstine, which was very far removed from Russian interests. This and other changes at court, and Peter’s reputation for being a worthless dilettante, led a large chunk of the military and the nobility to wonder about his wife who had a pretty sterling reputation. Catherine had completely written her husband off as being even remotely capable of the job of running Russia, and she signaled to these nobles and members of the military that she was fine with, you know, whatever.
So evidence of a plot to overthrow Peter started to seep out in June of 1762, and Catherine was told if you want to do this, we have to act now today. So Catherine wrote into St. Petersburg where a regiment of elite guard swore to support her. Then after requiring further support from more elite guards, she dramatically donned to soldier’s uniform and rode off to find and capture her husband, who had gone into hiding. But the hunt did not last very long, as Peter surrendered. He was arrested by Catherine’s loyalists and taken off to an estate, where he turned up dead just a few days later. The verdict of history is that Catherine did not actively order this assassination, it was just the initiative of the guy who happened to be holding Peter, but it’s all very won’t someone please rid me of this troublesome priest territory. So Catherine was crowned Empress of Russia, though there was kind of an unspoken understanding that she would be reigning as a regent in place of her eight year old son, Paul.
So Catherine came to power at the age of 33, and she would rule Russia for the next 34 years. During this time she would establish herself as the prototypical enlightened despot, the living embodiment of the age of enlightenment. And remember when we talked all about this in the early episodes of the French Revolution, democracy and civil rights were not what many of the early enlightenment philosophes had in mind when they talked about making political reforms. They wanted wise platonic philosopher-kings patrons of the arts and sciences, and with the power and wisdom to reign for the good of humanity without all the troublesome politics. And that’s what Catherine wanted for Russia. And so she took up a regular correspondence with the great minds of the day, she wrote regularly to Voltaire and to Diderot, and like Peter the Great, she saw Russian empire as needing reform on all fronts to bring it to its full potential. So in 1767, she called together an assembly to digest the contents of a volume of excerpts of political theory she had compiled, and then they would make commendations for how best to reform and modernize the administration and law of the Russian Empire.
But these early domestic reforms were interrupted by foreign affairs. The year after Catherine took power, the King of Poland died, and Catherine managed through bribery and coercion to get one of her old lovers on the throne. And through him, she pushed Russia’s interests and pushed especially for religious tolerance inside Poland, which rankled the mostly Catholic nobility. In 1768 these Catholic lords revolted against Catherine’s influence over their affairs. When Russia intervened in Poland, the French induced the Ottomans to attack Russia’s underbelly to take heat off of their ally Poland. This opened up the Russo Turkish war that would last from 1768 to 1774. But at this point, the once mighty Ottomans are fading and Russia is steadily rising, and the upshot of this war is that Russia proved that it was rising while the Ottomans were fading. As this war started to wind down, Frederick the Great proposed a solution to the Polish question. Prussia, Austria, and Russia should simply annex a bunch of Polish territory for themselves. Catherine agreed to this reluctantly, but was mollified because her man did stay King of Poland.
So in 1772, we get the first partition of Poland, and the Russian Empire grew some more, and as it so happened, brought the first Jewish subjects into the Russian Empire. Then down south, the Ottomans capitulated on Catherine’s terms in 1774, and Catherine’s terms were a completion of fulfillment of Peter the Great’s dream. This meant breaking off a large chunk of territory in Crimea and along the Black Sea coast, and technically these lands would be independent, but they would be under Russian hegemony. And then Catherine forced through Russian rights to trade and commerce in the Black Sea. So now they could build a Black Sea fleet and have Black Sea merchants, which is what Peter had always dreamed of.
But just as this foreign war was wrapping up in Russia’s favor, they were rocked by a massive domestic revolt. Out beyond the Volga River towards the Ural mountains, a charismatic deserter from the Russian army named Yemelyan Pugachev started riding around in 1773, claiming that he was the dead tsar Peter who had returned to be the true, just, and honest tsar who would defend his people against the horrible tyranny of Catherine and the prevailing aristocracy. Pugachev opened up a huge revolt of Cossacks and peasants and serfs, and for the rest of 1773 and 1774, the whole of the Volga basin was in let’s lynch the landlord rebellion, and wherever serfs were liberated, they joined in the fight enthusiastically and with bloody-minded wrath.
But in 1775 Pugachev was captured and executed, and the revolt was brutally suppressed by the Russian army. But Pugachev’s rebellion, and that earlier peasant revolt I mentioned, the one that was led by Stenka Razin, would both be name-checked in the future by Bakunin as proof of the revolutionary potential of the peasantry.
With Poland settled for now, peace with the Ottomans, and the end of the rebellion, there entered a period of about a decade where Catherine could go back to advancing her enlightened despotism. In 1783, she outright annexed the Crimean lands acquired from the Ottomans and they dubbed it new Russia. And Catherine wanted to make it a showcase for what enlightened rural could do. She put her lover and brilliant advisor Grigori Potemkin in charge of a political and economic development project that was meant to push out the old nomadic inhabitants and replace them with Prussian settlers, who would be promised freedom without serfdom. And she wanted them to implement more advanced agricultural techniques and then build up trade and commerce on the Black Sea.
Meanwhile, back in old Russia, Catherine restarted the project of political reform that had stalled out back in 1768. But again, all of these reforms hardly reached below the middle class. The peasants and serfs in their villages remained a distant concern. As long as they paid their taxes, their rent, and they did not revolt, they hardly counted at all. Catherine also continued as a great patron of the arts and culture, theater, academic journals, literature, drama, poetry, music, all of which befit herself image as an enlightened despot. And cultural life in St. Petersburg and Moscow flourished. Catherine’s reputation also spread across Europe as she continued her personal correspondence with, and patronage of, great philosophers and thinkers and artists. She also played host to many admirers, including as we know the Spanish American adventurer Francisco de Miranda, who came round in 1787, and ever after never corrected anyone when it was said that the two had a brief affair.
Now down south in 1787, Catherine toured her territory in new Russia to show it off to foreign ambassadors, to show off how great things were, and this gave rise to what is probably a mythical account of the Potemkin villages, which were allegedly constructed mobile facades, which would race ahead of the Imperial entourage to make the region look far more prosperous than it actually was, but unfortunately for a good story, this all seems pretty exaggerated and overblown, and what deception may have existed was aimed at the foreign ambassadors, not the Empress. Now unhappy with Russian conduct in Crimea, and suspecting further encroachment was calming the Turks once again declared war later in 1787. And this war would have a far reaching impact. When an embassy of Polish nobles was called to support the Russian war effort, those nobles went rogue and revolutionary, with cynical support from the Prussians. But Catherine’s Russia was undaunted by all these challenges. The hero of the Russo-Turkish War was undoubtedly the great Russian general Suvorov who won a series of great victories. In 1791, the Turks again capitulated and Russia advanced yet further, this time to the Dniester River, where they acquired the port of Odessa.
The polish question though, was still very troublesome indeed. But by now European attention was turning towards France where some kind of reform effort had turned into a revolt that was getting way out of hand. But as we discussed in the early episodes on the French Revolution, the other great powers of Europe at first saw the collapsing Bourbon monarchy as a blessing, not a curse. But as her war with the Turks was winding up, Catherine started getting news out of France that was darker and more troubling, and though Russia itself was not directly affected by the conflict now erupting out of France, Prussia and Austria were both drawn into war in 1792. And then came the shocking news that Louis the 16th had gotten his head chopped off.
The effect of all this in Russia was a severe cooling of its Enlightenment period. French culture and ideas had been all the rage through most of Catherine’s reign, and now suddenly access to ideas and literature and philosophy coming out of France was under severe restriction. All of that high minded age of reason stuff had turned the people against their king, and we can’t have that, now can we? But that said, every crisis is an opportunity, and Catherine agreed to take advantage of a weak France by joining Prussia and Austria for a second partition of Poland in 1793. This partition led the great revolutionary patriot Kościuszko to revolt in 1794, which started out well enough for the Poles, but then ended with General Suvarov capturing Warsaw, and letting it be looted and burned, which resulted in 20,000 dead.
The upshot for Russia was the third and final partition of Poland in 1795, and with it, the final death of the power that had been Russian’s most regular rival for centuries. This final partition brought in five and a half million new subjects and territory in Western Ukraine, Lithuania, and Belarus. And with these final acquisitions, almost all of old Kiev Rus was now a part of the Russian Empire.
And that empire had seen its population explode over the last few years. In 1720, the population had been 15 and a half million, it was now 37 million and the Russian Empire was also further confirmed as a multi-ethnic empire, with 70% of the population being ethnically Russian and 30%, some kind of national minority. They were also no longer a landlocked principality. Russia now had ports and fleets on the Baltic Sea, the Black Sea, the White Sea and the Pacific Ocean. The Russian Empire was a great power.
Now the arrival of the French Revolution marked the dawning of a new age of revolution for Europe. This would be an age during which Russia was destined to play a large role, but as we will start to see next week, Russia’s large role would not be as a revolutionary vanguard, but rather as the great backstop of conservatism. Because for Russia, the age of revolution was the age of reaction. .