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Hello, and welcome to Revolutions.
Okay, welcome back. We have completed our introduction to Marxism and anarchism, and it is now time to turn our attention to Russia. And I am not unaware of the fact that we are now nine episodes into a history of the Russian Revolution and Russia itself has hardly been mentioned. Well, that ends today.
So, what we are going to do is commence with a run of five episodes that will give us the historical background we need to understand Russia’s descent into revolutionary chaos at the end of the 19th century, as the absolutist tsars tried to fend off a huge array of challenges from liberals, nationalists, socialists, communists, and anarchists. Now this is necessarily going to be concise summaries of Russian history, and if you’re interested, there is a straight up Russian history podcast called The Russian History Podcast that will go into far more detail than I will here. He’s 45 episodes into it, and only at Alexander Nevsky, an amount of historical material that I am about to dispense with here today in about seven total minutes. So by all means, go check that out if you want to know more.
It’s tough to tell where to even start with all this, but by most accounts, the cultural and political identity we today call Russia started coming together in about the 880s. Now we know from the history of Rome that the 300s to 600s were a time of great population migration that severely disrupted civilizations all over Eurasia and the Mediterranean. As things reordered and reconfigured a socio-linguistic group called the Slavs started to spread from a suspected origin point around what is today the borderland between Belarus and the Ukraine. These early Slavs spread west towards Poland and Bohemia south into the Balkans, and the group that interests us are those who went east and northeast into the forested interior of what we today call Russia. Geographically what these East Slavs were settling into was the eastern portion of the great east European plane, which stretches from Poland in the west all the way to the Ural mountains. These lands were dominated by dense forest interspersed with long rivers that mostly pointed themselves south towards the Black Sea or the Caspian sea. So these main rivers, the Dnieper, the Don, the Volga, and the lakes and tributaries that fed them, were the basic settlement zones. In the northern latitudes, the forest were evergreen pine with light sandy soil which gave way to deciduous forest and richer soil as you moved south. But if you kept moving south, the ecology changes dramatically as the great forests give way to the great steppe that lay north of and between the Black Sea and the Caspian Sea. The steppe is unbroken semi-arid grassland and savanna well-suited for horse based pastoral nomads civilizations. The steppe lands in proximity to Russia were in fact simply the Western most extension of the great Eurasian steppe, which reaches all the way from Romania in the West to Manchuria in the far east. It was the home and origin point for the great Eurasian horse civilizations, most famously up to this point, the Huns. But these nomadic peoples mostly stuck to their migratory circuits on the steppe and ventured north into the forest only on raids for plunder and slaves. But their presence kept the eastern Slavs set back from direct contact with the great Mediterranean civilizations of the day, the Byzantine empire and the Arab caliphate.
We first get to the origin point of modern Russia in the mid 800s with the establishment of a medieval society historians now call Kiev Rus. The origins of Kiev Rus as a political entity is a mix of myth and legend and archeology that is still being argued about today. But this period is the great age of the Vikings, and the basic account is that a group of Scandinavian warriors moved across the Baltic Sea towards Lake Onega and set themselves up as a small, but dominant force in the region. The legend goes that in the mid 800s, the quote unquote native Slavic and Finnic tribes expelled these intruding Vikings. But then without the unifying leadership the Scandinavians provided, all the tribes fell back into rivalry and warring with each other. And so they invited a group of Scandinavians to come back and be their rulers, to reimpose the peace and order that they so desperately needed. Specifically the Slavs of the far north invited this guy Rurik and his two brothers to come rule them in the 860s. Which I got to tell you, as post-hoc historical propaganda to legitimize a ruling dynasty goes, this smells a lot like post-hoc historical propaganda to legitimize a ruling dynasty.
So the legendary Rurik and his followers then raided down as far as Constantinople with some of his men capturing the well situated city of Kiev along the way. Kiev was so well situated as a key point in the north-south trade route along the Dnieper River that the heirs of Rurik moved their capital there permanently a few years later. Now though Rurik himself is a somewhat quasi legendary figure, his heirs would take the dynastic name Rurikovich and they would be the dynasty that ruled various parts of Russian lands all the way until they died out in the time of troubles and pass the baton to the Romanoffs. With their capital in Kiev, historians call this new political entity Kiev Rus, which connected through feudal obligations other cities in the region, with the main access being the thousand mile or so route linking Kiev in the South to the city of Novgorod in the north.
The common people and peasants of Kiev Rus were mostly tied up in subsistence agriculture, and given the terrain and ecology, the whole region remained pretty thinly populated. But the real source of wealth was in trade. The territory Kiev Rus controlled, occupied key links in the north-south trade routes between Scandinavia and the Byzantines. And they also controlled parts of two different east-west routes that linked Europe in the West to the Arab caliphate in the south east and China in the far east. Their own contribution to this global trade network was forest products, furs and pelts, wax, honey, and of course as always slaves.
Now in the beginning, the people of Kiev Rus were still pagan, until we get to their great conversion to Christianity. This would be the moment Russia went from pagan to Christian. Now contact with the Byzantines had brought the leaders of Kiev Rus into contact with Orthodox Christianity. According to the official story, Prince Vladimir the Great, who reigned from 980 to 1015, was contemplating a religious conversion, and he sent an embassy around to visit the representatives of the Catholics and Muslims and Jews, finding each intern to be unsatisfactory. In particular, it is said that he rejected conversion to Islam because drinking was simply too much a part of their native culture to accept Muslim prohibition of alcohol.
Eventually this embassy wound up in Constantinople, where they took a service in the Hagia Sophia, and were so impressed that Vladimir converted and was baptized as an Orthodox Christian in 988. As part of this conversion process, the leaders of the Orthodox Church in Constantinople sent a metropolitan, which is kind of roughly the equivalent of an arch bishop to Kiev. This began the long and deep connection between Russia and Orthodox Christianity. And while this story is fun, when you consider the critical trade ties to the Byzantines was really the lifeblood of the Kiev Rus economy, their adoption of Orthodox Christianity makes a lot of sense.
So the reigns of Vladimir the Great and his son Jaroslav the Wise, who reigned until 1054, represented the peak of Kiev Rus as a medieval civilization. Other towns and cities and territories paid tribute and homage to the grand prince of Kiev who could claim such dependents as to make his territory one of the largest geographically in the world at the time, covering some 500,000 square miles. There was a collection of distinguished lords who would meet in a council to help the grand prince rule, administration started to become more regularized and centralized, laws and legal codes began to replace old methods of just personal vengeance. Economically, they did pretty good business, controlling and managing trade routes and kicking in their own products, and they also connected politically to the rest of the world as Yaroslav the Wise married his sisters and daughters and granddaughters across the reachable world. The princesses of Kiev were married to the Kings of France, Poland, Hungary, and Norway, as well as the Holy Roman emperor. But after the death of Jaroslav in 1054, Kiev Rus as a coherent political entity started to fracture. Other cities like Vladimir — the city, not the person — exerted their own autonomy, and persistent dynastic fights led to a slow decline of the region back into being merely a loose confederation of city states who happen to share a similar language and religion.
Now the decline of Kiev Russi unity could not have come at a worst time, because it led them straight into the monumental global event of the late 12th and early 13th centuries. And I know you all listen to Dan Carlin, so I know you know that I’m talking about the rise of the Mongol Empire and its march across the Eurasian steppe. The advance of the Mongols from the east freaked out the nomadic groups of the far Western steppe, so much so that they made a defensive alliance with the principalities of Kiev Russi. In 1223, their combined army stood against the Mongols at the river Kalka, and they were blown out of the water, they just didn’t stand a chance. Following this first encounter, Batu Khan, one of Genghis Khan’s grandsons and yes, I know Genghis Kahn is a horrible anachronism, but I just want you to know who I’m talking about, invaded the region in force in the late 1230s, bringing nothing less than the apocalypse to Kiev Rus. Every major city was overrun and sacked, Kiev fell and was raised to the ground. The death, displacement, and enslavement of the native population over the next five years was enormous, hundreds of thousands were killed and enslaved. This was a massively traumatic event for Russia. The destruction, though, was at the very end of the Mongol advance west, and famously they were approaching the Gates of Vienna in 1242 when they learned that the Great Khan back home had died and they all pulled back and went home. In Europe, the Mongol invasion is treated as one of the great what if moments in history. In Russia, it is not, there is no what if, there is only, what happened.
So after 1242, the Mongol Empire reorganized into four broad political units, with the western most unit, the part that bordered Russia, becoming known locally as the Golden Horde. The Golden Horde set up a capital city near modern Volgorad, and then continued a semi nomadic circuit along the main river valleys while requiring everyone in the vicinity to pay them tribute. And they briefly experimented with direct rule over these northern forest people, but quickly settled into a system of recognizing leaders of various tribes and cities whose recognition was contingent on collecting the requisite tribute. The Golden Horde itself was not ethnically Mongol except for an inner circle aristocratic dynasty, the rest of its population had been absorbed and incorporated subject peoples, mostly Turkic, and they collectively became known as the Tatars. But Tatars of the Golden Horde would be the ascendant power in the region for the next 200 years.
But the apocalyptic arrival of the Golden Horde was not the only thing our proto Russians were facing in the 1200s because coming out of the west, we have Catholic crusaders who are fired up with religious fervor. With the breakdown of the crusades against the eastern Muslims falling apart, some Germanic Teutonic knights turned their attention northeast, and they wanted to expand into the Baltic, against the native population that was either still pagan or Eastern Orthodox Christian. So just as the Mongols were arriving in force in the 1230s, the people around the Baltic Sea faced what is known as the Northern crusaders. In these Northern reaches of old Kiev Rus, the battle against Western Catholic encroachment was taken up by a young Prince of Novgorod named Alexander. Now, Novgorod was so far to the north that it had escaped the direct Mongol apocalypse, but Alexander still needed to acquire recognition and pay tribute to the Golden Horde, which he was fine with because he considered them the lesser of two evils as he went to face off against these invaders to the west. Now the Swedes came in first, but at the Battle of the Neva in 1240, a 19-year-old Prince Alexander drove them back, which was such a great victory that he became known forever after as Alexander Nevsky. Then a few years later he did it again, winning the Battle of the Ice in 1242 to stop the advance of the northern crusaders. The successes of Alexander Nevsky against the Germanic and Nordic invaders is what kept the future Russia firmly Orthodox rather than Catholic, and for his work, Alexander Nevsky remains one of the great national heroes of Russia.
Now setting Novgorod aside, just about every other major city of old Kiev Rus had been sacked and depopulated in the wake of the Mongol invasion, and so new cities naturally rose to fill the vacuum. The most important being: Moscow. The area where Moscow now sits had been inhabited for at least a thousand years, and mentions of a town or small city called Moscow come as early as 1100, but it was a son of Alexander Nevsky who built Moscow up and set it on its road to destiny. The grand duchy of Moscow or the principality of Moscow, depending on which book you’re reading, started out as a vassal of the city of Vladimir, and ultimately they all paid tribute to the Golden Horde. But by the mid 1300s, Moscow was becoming a stronger player through a series of deft marriages and land acquisitions, feudal alliances, and military conquests. But one of the great boons to the fortunes of Moscow was when the metropolitan of Kiev, the head of the Orthodox Church in the region, moved out of Kiev in 1299, going first to Vladimir, but then ultimately moving again to settle permanently in Moscow. And the princes of Moscow were thrilled to find themselves the host and protector of the Orthodox Church. Through the 1300s, Moscow kept growing in power and prestige and importance, so much so that in the 1370s, Grand Prince Dimitri Evanovich challenged a raiding party from the Golden Horde, challenging in effect the hegemonic power the horde had over Russian affairs. Dimitri Evanovich defeated this raiding party, and then a second force that was sent to punish him in 1380. Now in 1382, the Horde came back again even stronger end Dimitri Evanovich was forced to retreat and Moscow was burned, but the city quickly bounced back, and now stood on the brink of becoming the leading city of Russia.
So moving into the early 1400s, Moscow’s dynastic reach was coalescing just as the Golden Horde was beginning to fracture. Internal disputes left the Tatars unable to impose their will as effectively as they had in the past. And by the 1430s, the Horde was still claiming nominal sovereignty over the Russians, but in practice, many of the northern cities were breaking away, and there was nothing the horde could really do about it. This disintegration in the power of the Golden Horde came along just as the once mighty Byzantine empire was gasping its dying breaths. In 1453, the Ottoman Turks completed their envelopment and conquest of Constantinople. This not only redrew the political map of the world, it upended the trade and cultural connections that the Russians had down to their religious brethren in the Byzantine empire. And with the fall of Constantinople, the Orthodox Church lost its great capital city. So unmoored from Mediterranean power and influence, the Orthodox Church fathers in Moscow dealt with the crisis by electing their own leadership. And thus did the Russian Orthodox Church transform into its own separate and autonomous religious entity, and the princes of Moscow further relished being in direct protective alliance with the independent religious apparatus of all the Russian people. And it gave the princes of Moscow further pretensions to greatness; it made them think that maybe they should be more than that just mere princes.
So after the fall of Constantinople, we can look at the map of Eurasia and the Mediterranean world surrounding Russia and see it shaping into what would define its history right up to World War I and the Revolution. The Golden Horde of the steppe was breaking up and disappearing. The successor nomad groups would never again be powerful enough to dominate Russia politically. Down in the South, the Islamic Ottoman Turks permanently replaced the Orthodox Byzantines, but they mostly turned their attention west to the Holy Roman Empire rather than north into Russia. In the west, we begin to see the rising unified power of Poland Lithuania, who would become Russia’s great rival in the west, but not quite yet. What this meant was it in the latter 1400s, Russia was relatively free of outside encroachment, and the princes of Moscow could consolidate their rule and transform their mere principality into something greater.
So this was a transformation that really gets going under grand Prince Ivan the third, or as he is otherwise known Ivan the Great. Ivan became grand Prince of Moscow in 1462 at the age of 21, and during his long reign he really solidified central rule of Russia by Moscow. He successfully brought along all the boyars, which is the term for Eastern European landed nobles, into a functional unified system of government. Now, to ensure the continued loyalty of the boyars, and elevate loyal subjects, and enhance the defensive capabilities of his principality, Ivan doled out huge land grants, especially towards the southern reaches that approached the steppe. And though serfdom was not yet at hand, part of Ivan’s political settlements with the boyars involved more restrictions on the movement and freedom of peasants. Then he formed the nobility into their first duma or ruling council, and created a stable and permanent bureaucracy. Ivan also completely remade the Kremlin, which had been just a standard Russian citadel palace in the middle of Moscow. Well, Ivan imported, Italian architects and engineers to build something new and grand, and they built the Kremlin that we know today, which is the seat of government as we understand it today. All of this laid the permanent foundation for what would become the modern Russian state. Now during his reign, Ivan also aggressively expanded his territorial claims, nearly tripling the size of the principality of Moscow in his lifetime. And if there is a moment that you can point to and say, this is the birth date of Russia as a state, as opposed to the principality of Moscow, it was 1478 when Ivan annexed Novgorod. This unified under his rule the two most important political, economic, and cultural cities of the North. Then two years later in 1480, an army of the last remnants of the Golden Horde approached the Ugra River, still claiming nominal sovereignty over the Russians. But Ivan took an army out to meet them. After staring at each other for a few days, the horde army concluded it just wasn’t worth it, and they turned around. This event, called the Standing at the Ugra, was the end of even nominal claims to sovereignty over the Russians by the Tatars. By now, Ivan the Great was referring to himself not just as Grand Prince of Moscow, but the ruler of all Russia.
Now as often happens in cases like this, the princes of Moscow then started to get a touch of the old destiny about them. Now, Ivan the Great died in 1505 and he was succeeded by his son, Vassily. And it was during the early reign of Vassily that we get a great prophecy that became very important to later imperial legitimacy. An Orthodox monk wrote to the new Grand Prince of Moscow: “Two Romes have fallen, the third stands, and there will be no fourth. No one shall replace your Christian Tsardom.” Moscow and Russia was now on its own track of destiny. The protector of the one true faith, standing now independently and strong against Catholics and Muslims, straddling the lands between Europe and Asia, between the Mediterranean and the Arctic, Russia was its own unique thing with its own unique destiny. They were the third Rome.
This destiny would be truly consummated by the middle of the century. In 1533 young boy prince Ivan, grandson of Ivan the Great, inherited power. Too young to rule in his own right, his sovereign lands were run by his mother, and a regency council of boyars. But when Ivan came of age and was crowned in his own right, he was not crowned simply Grand Prince of Moscow, but Tsar of Russia.
Now the name tsar, of course, traces back all the way to Caesar, I mentioned this actually in the History of Rome, and it was the name the Russians had previously used for other great imperial rulers, it’s what they had called the emperor of the Byzantine Empire and the khan of the Golden Horde, and it is now what they would call their own leader. No longer grand princes, but tsars, the equals, possibly even superiors, of all the other great monarchies of the world. And the principality of Moscow was now the Tsardom of Russia.
Now you probably know of this particular Ivan of which we have been speaking, this first official tsar of Russia, because he is known in the English speaking world as Ivan the Terrible. But he was not called Ivan the Terrible during his lifetime, and even when the Russian word grozny was attached to him, the word was meant to mean awe inspiring, not terrible, as in, you know, terrible, and that’s always been a mistranslation. Now, the reign of Ivan the Fourth, Ivan the Terrible, would itself be, I don’t know, a 50 episode podcast in its own right, so I’m not going to get lost in the weeds, I just want to highlight a few things. In terms of foreign affairs and territorial growth, the Russians now moved east and south onto the steppe, taking over territory formerly controlled by the tatars and advancing the tsardom of Russia toward the Urals and Caucasus, and this brought into the tsardom of Russia a population of Muslims, without any great effort to convert them going along with it, or even make them give up their way of life or language or religion. This makes the tsardom of Russia not some national kingdom of Russian speaking Eastern Slavs, but a multiethnic, multilingual, and multi religious enterprise, which it would remain for the rest of its existence. In fact, it would only get more multi-ethnic, multi-lingual, and multi-religious. In the West, Ivan started a war in 1558 to annex Lavonia, which is modern Estonia and Latvia, triggering a long and costly war with Poland Lithuania that would be an ongoing struggle for the rest of his life and beyond. And the Russian rivalry with Poland Lithuania would be the main foreign policy concern of Russia for the next couple of centuries.
Now when the Lavonia war started to go badly, some of the boyars turned against Ivan and joined Poland in an attempt to overthrow him. This led Ivan, who was prone to fits of rage and paranoia, to completely upend the existing political order, and what he did was carve out a large administrative area he called the oprichnina in 1565, which he would control personally and use as a base of personal wealth and military power. This process involved forced relocation of entire populations, as well as the exile and murder of suspected nobles or dissenters. Ivan created a super loyal force that grew to become 6,000 strong that acted as a kind of quasi political army slash police to root out, execute, and torture anyone who opposed the tsar. This culminated in 1570 with the Massacre of Novgorod, where at least 2000 people were killed and according to some accounts, the figure was 10 times that. Now after about seven years of terrible and bloody purges, really a kind of reign of terror that was going on, Ivan abruptly abandoned the oprichnina in 1572, but it left a lasting scar on the country, so, you know, Ivan the Terrible, it’s not a totally undeserved moniker. Now, Ivan then probably set the stage for the next generation of chaos and trouble when in a fit of rage, he beat his daughter-in-law into a miscarriage, and then turned on his son, fracturing his son’s skull with a staff in the midst of a fight, and his son died a few days later. This murderous fit meant that when Ivan died three years later in 1584, the son and heir to the throne was his weak-willed and possibly mentally unfit younger son Fyodor. And this would be the beginning of the end of the Rurikovich dynasty in Russia.
Now, before we move on to the final act of this week’s episode, I have to pause and drop in the great social and economic transformation that reached its conclusion shortly after the death of Ivan the Terrible, and that is enserfment. Restrictions on the legal rights and physical mobility of the Russian pageantry had grown up organically since the reign of Ivan the Great, and it continued through the reign of Ivan the Terrible, and it reached permanent formal codification in the 1590s. Serfdom as a legal concept boils down to the peasant being bound to the land upon which they were born. Leaving that land made you a fugitive liable for criminal prosecution. So serfdom is just one steppe up from legal slavery, and it’s not a very big steppe at all. In Russian real estate transactions, just as important as the number of acres were the number of serfs that went with it. And the measure of a noble’s wealth and holdings always included the number of serfs that they owned. By 1600, probably 75% of Russian peasants were legally bound serfs.
So this leads us into the final act of this week’s introductory episode, and that is the Time of Troubles. And let me tell you, if you live through a period that later historians call the Time of Troubles, I do not envy you. Now, the Time of Troubles could probably be, oh, another 50 episodes on their own, but basically we have the death of Fyodor in 1598, giving way to twenty years of internal noble civil war over who should succeed him, which played out against the backdrop of an increasingly disastrous war with Poland Lithuania that saw Polish armies twice occupy Moscow. There was also a massive peasant uprising in the south, as those peasants sought to resist the spread of serfdom, and basically all state coherence broke down, and various armed bands of dubious political legitimacy just roamed around. Some of these claimed to be real armies of the true tsar, of which there were several men making that claim, and some of them were just bandits. It was… a time of troubles.
Now, eventually the peasant rebellion burned out and the nobility rallied to a unified national defense against the invading Poles and with Lithuanians and a volunteer army, with the help of some Swedish mercenaries, pushed them out of the country. In the midst of all this, an assembly of the land came together in 1613, with nobles and church leaders representing more than 50 different cities of the tsardom of Russia to elect ones tsar that they could all agree to follow. Now this was not about sorting out who had the best claim necessarily, so much as who they could all agree to live with on a practical basis. And the guy they landed on was a 16 year old named Mikhail Romanov. And when Mikhail Romanov was elected in 1613, that would be the beginning of the dynasty that would rule as emperors and empresses of Russia for the next 300 years. Mikhail would see Russia out of the Time of Troubles, then point them towards a coming golden age of a new Russian empire.
And next week we will talk more about that further transition and expansion from the tsardom of Russia into the Russian Empire, and next week’s episode will be bookended by a discussion of Peter the Great at the beginning, and Catherine the Great at the end. And those two great leaders would help transform russia into a great power.