Peter the Great assumed the title of Imperator (emperor) in 1721, but as Tsar (Caesar) of Muscovy he already ruled over a state which had begun its conquest of non-Russian peoples as far back as the 1550s. By 1740 Russia was the largest state in Europe, claiming dominion over Siberia as far as the Pacific, but also possessing a Baltic coastline since 1710, the so-called Hetmanate of Ukraine or left-bank Ukraine, including Kiev, and a toehold on the Black Sea at Azov. Of an estimated total population in 1719 of 15.7 million, 70 per cent were ethnic Russians, 13 per cent were Ukrainian and about 3 per cent were Belorussians. The remaining 14 per cent comprised Estonians and Latvians, Tartars and other nomadic steppe peoples. By 1795, however, the balance had shifted radically against the ethnic Russians, who now constituted only 53 per cent of a population of 37 million. Nearly half the Empire's peoples were non-Russian.1
In the eighteenth century neither the tsars nor the vast majority of their subjects were concerned about this. The Romanov dynasty saw the expansion of the state as necessary for its own sake, given Russia's vulnerability to foreign invasion in the past; the more territory and population the Empire could accrue, the safer and more powerful it would be, and 'extensive territory was a source of state pride and self-definition'.2 Among the peoples conquered, local elites in some cases acquiesced, and in others resisted, for reasons which occasionally had their origins in a dawning national consciousness, but which generally had more to do with how far Russian rule either preserved or undermined their own position. The peasant majority were oblivious to such a consideration as nationality: for them the only issue that mattered was whether their conditions of service were bettered or worsened.
It is impossible to understand Russia's role in Eastern Europe since the eighteenth century without appreciating what Geoffrey Hosking has called 'its hybrid position as Asiatic empire and European great power'.3 A legatee of three centuries of Mongol domination, and the conqueror of diverse agrarian and nomadic peoples, Russia was a genuine autocracy, with a wide gap between ruler and ruled. As an emerging European power, however, Russia was entering a world where states were becoming synonymous with nationhood and hence cultural homogeneity. Down to the present day Russia has arguably never overcome this internal tension between empire and nation-state.
In Russia, autocracy had real meaning, in that all subjects, including nobles, were 'in complete subjection to the Tsar'; there was nothing comparable to the feudal relationship of mutual obligation between monarch and noble that had obtained in Western European societies.4 Instead, Russian nobles constituted a 'service nobility': all their status and privileges, including land tenure, derived from the service, military or bureaucratic, which they rendered the state. Individual nobles or noble families could wax powerful, but this was more the result of temporary weakness in the autocracy, or the autocrat's favour, than proof of the strength of the nobility as a class.
Under Peter the despotic nature of the Russian state was if anything intensified; however, the programme of modernisation he embarked on had profound consequences. It was Peter who acquired Russia's 'window on the West' by conquering territory at the head of the Gulf of Finland and then Estland and Livland (most of today's Estonia and northern Latvia) from Sweden. This in turn was possible only because of the modernisation, or rather westernisation, of Russia's military. Peter both prized the contribution foreigners could make to Russian modernisation and copied the principle that the state must patronise the arts and sciences in order to create its own skilled workers and intellectuals. He tirelessly promoted industry, and in St Petersburg, founded in 1703 on a Baltic swamp, he created a European-style capital through the labour of conscripted serfs, thousands of whom died in the process.
Peter saw himself as a servant of the state, but by extension so was everyone else. In particular Peter tightened the conditions of noble service, which had implications for the rest of Russian society. In a state where the nobility were virtually the only instrument of control at local level, Peter was determined to make them the shock troops of modernisation, but this was to be an elite based entirely on service and merit, not birth. Service meant that Russia's nobility were utterly dependent on the tsar for status as well as employment. They were expected to serve years in the army or navy, or the imperial bureaucracy, without sight of their own estates; they were expected to supply recruits for the armed forces from their own serfs. Small wonder that Peter's successors found it increasingly difficult to enforce such strict conditions, although the fundamental subjection of nobles to the autocrat's will remained.
The quid pro quo for noble service was ever tighter subjection of Russia's peasant population. Russian peasants were already effectively the chattels of their landlords; this was to ensure a supply of cheap labour on noble estates and thereby safeguard the nobles' ability to render service. Peter's reign only increased the burdens on the serfs. From 1723 peasants were liable to the hated poll tax as well as forced labour in state mines, factories and construction sites, not to mention conscription.
The increasing miseries of serfdom resulted in two phenomena characteristic of eighteenth-century Russia: serfs sought refuge in flight, or they revolted in terrifying, elemental bloodbaths like the Pugachev rebellion of 1773—4. Much of the territory eventually taken over by the Empire to the south and southeast, in the Ukraine and the Volga basin, was the refuge of escaped peasants, and where Russian rule was established and land parcelled out to new noble owners, the peasant population frequently proved recalcitrant. The expansion of Russia in the eighteenth century, which increased the wealth and resources of the state and facilitated great power status, thus rested on a paradox: because it also entailed the extension of serfdom, expansion perpetuated Russia's backwardness. Modernisation was the driving motive behind the policy of every Russian ruler from Peter the Great on, but no society based on serfdom could modernise beyond a certain point.
A final legacy of Peter's obsession with modernisation was the further division of Russian society. By importing not just western technology but western fashions, dress and manners, the tsar drove a wedge between his westernised, cosmopolitan noble elite and the mass of Russian, and other, peasants. The Empire's enlargement did little to bridge this gap between the 'two Russias'. Although some local elites, such as the Polish szlachta or the Baltic German nobility, had something socially at least in common with their Russian counterparts, to the majority of peasants, of whatever nationality, the state and nobility were seen as an alien, godless culture. The Pugachev revolt in the 1770s, for instance, specifically appealed to the Cossacks' hatred of the secular, westernised, centralising state; it 'showed how wafer-thin was the loyalty of some of the non-Russians, and above all of the Russian peasants, to the regime'.5
Russia after Peter continued to expand. Under Peter's niece Anna (1730—40), who was also duchess of the Polish fiefdom of Courland, the sole territorial acquisition was the recapture of Azov from the Ottomans in 1739. Peter's daughter Elizabeth (1741—61) annexed a further slice of Finnish territory from Sweden in 1743. But it was in the reign of Catherine II (1762—96) that the most significant expansion took place. The First Partition of Poland was in 1772. Russian domination of the Black Sea, including an 'independent' Crimea, naval bases and the right of merchant ships to sail in and out, was secured in 1774. In 1783 the Crimea was formally annexed; in 1791 more Ottoman territory north-west of the Black Sea was added, and the dismemberment of Poland—Lithuania was completed in 1793—5.
This access of territory and population made Russia feared among European powers, and Catherine and her advisers were in no doubt that this was desirable in itself. Nor was there much concern about the takeover of huge non-Russian populations. Nevertheless towards the end of Catherine's reign a debate was stirring as to whether expansion was either necessary or desirable, as well as how to deal with the people thus conquered. This debate was possible only because something like a Russian nationalism was beginning to emerge, a product of the elite's westernisation.
Historians are still arguing as to whether Russian nationalism could exist even in the nineteenth century, let alone the eighteenth, given the impossibility of identifying the Empire with any one nationality. However, if there was such a beast it had to start with the nobility. Under Anna nobles had won the freedom to travel abroad. Peter III (January—July 1762), before his murder by the noble conspirators who put his consort Catherine on the throne, issued a series of edicts which effectively emancipated the nobility, making their service to the state voluntary. Catherine's reign saw a proliferation of Enlightenment high culture, the importation of foreign learning and even more extensive travel. The result, well before the turn of the century, was a genuinely cosmopolitan aristocracy, many of whose members spoke better French than Russian. Nevertheless, this was also the period in which Russian itself became a literary language, an amalgam of the old Church Slavonic and the spoken tongue, and it was the literary language which facilitated nationalism.
A key figure in shaping modern Russian was the polymath Mikhail Lomonosov, who was influential in founding Moscow University in 1755 and also produced the first Russian grammar in 1757. Lomonosov's historical work was pathbreaking because it took issue with the view, current among the largely German scholars of the Academy of Sciences, that the founders of the Russian state were Vikings, invited to rule Russia by its Slav inhabitants. To Lomonosov such a version of events, which suggested that Russians were dependent on outsiders to build a state, was a denial of Russian character tantamount to 'political subversion'.6 An emerging generation of ethnic Russian scholars saw it as their task to emphasise the essentially Russian origins of the state and the strength of Russian culture, and to downplay the role of foreigners in Russian greatness.
The implications of this for the Empire's non-Russian subjects were problematic. Russian intellectuals increasingly tended to equate the state with being Russian and especially to assume that all East Slavs, in other words Russians, Ukrainians and Belorussians, were one people. Such an assumption was facilitated by the common Orthodox faith of all three peoples, although the persistence of the Uniate confession among Ukrainians remained a problem. The language used by Russian governments from Catherine on reflects this, speaking of 'Russian' in the sense of 'inhabitants of the state'. Even with peoples such as Tartars, Poles and Balts, the assumption was that Russian culture would eventually assimilate them. In the words of one scholar, 'the uniformity of state organization wisely helps to bring this along by leading our rude peoples by giant steps toward the common goal of general enlightenment in Russia, of a wonderful fusion of all into a single body and soul'.7 In the eighteenth century the apotheosis of this glorification of the Russian Empire as a nation-state in the making was provided by Ivan Boltin, who first advanced the dubious argument that Russian expansion had been largely peaceful and that peoples like the Ukrainians and Belorussians had requested inclusion. However much violence this interpretation did the facts, Boltin's vision of an Empire of voluntary subjects proved a powerful one among Russian thinkers in the nineteenth century.
In the eighteenth century it is true to say that some of the peoples in tsarist Russia were more voluntary than others. A special and privileged position was occupied by the Baltic German nobility of Estland, Livland and the Duchy of Courland. The latter, although formally a vassal state of Poland—Lithuania, was effectively ruled from St Petersburg, especially once its Duchess Anna became tsarina in 1730. These provinces had been ruled for centuries, at local level, by associations of nobles, or Ritterschaften, descendants of the medieval crusaders, and in the German-speaking towns corporations of burghers existed. Peter the Great guaranteed these elements of self-government, together with the free exercise of the Lutheran faith, precisely because he could see the utility of the Baltic Germans.
Self-governing, educated at German universities, productive landowners and prosperous traders, the Germans were just the sort of subjects Peter wanted. Baltic German nobles rapidly established themselves throughout the imperial bureaucracy, in the armed forces and in the diplomatic service: Russia's subsequent foreign policy is littered with names like Nesselrode, Benckendorff and Lieven. By the reign of Anna some 30 per cent of Russian officials were non-Russian, most of them German.8 Anna herself brought her Baltic German lover, Count Ernst Johann von Buhren, with her to St Petersburg and then in 1737 made him Duke of Courland, where he commissioned a magnificent palace at Mitau.
Such ubiquity on the part of Germans was a major factor in the development of a Russian national consciousness. Yet the Baltic Germans were in fact the ideal servants of empire. They were loyal, identifying their own interests with those of the dynasty and state, and regarding their privileged position as a safeguard against their own Estonian or Latvian peasantry. Even here the Baltic German role was arguably a progressive one: not only did the Lutheran faith enjoin on its practicants a duty to provide an education for all, including peasants, that they might seek religious improvement, but also the Baltic provinces were the only part of the Empire, starting in 1785, where a 'limited regulation of peasant services' was enacted.9 In this way the traditional German elite in these lands paved the way not only for Russia's painful nineteenth-century modernisation but also for the eventual development of Estonian and Latvian nationalism.
The Estonian and Latvian peasants of the Baltic provinces were largely passive subjects of the tsars in this period, tied to their German lords' estates like serfs elsewhere in the Empire. Estonians and Latvians were unusual, however, in that the beginnings of their literary languages went back to the Reformation, when conscientious German Lutherans had troubled to print prayer books and the like in the languages of their flocks. In 1803 the University of Dorpat in Livland was refounded and, although the language of instruction was German, it rapidly became a beacon of Enlightenment, where the history and folk culture of the Baltic peoples were studied, offering the possibility at least of an education to the sons of Estonian and Latvian peasants.
Any description of the medley of peoples inhabiting, in the eighteenth century, what is present-day Ukraine calls for careful qualification. The vacuum to the south of Muscovy was first filled by the Grand Duchy of Lithuania, which in the late Middle Ages expanded into virtually all of today's Belarus and most of Ukraine. Matters were further complicated by the union of Poland and Lithuania and the transfer to the Polish Korona, in 1569, of Lithuania's Ukrainian lands. Finally, the great rebellion in the Ukraine against Polish—Lithuanian rule, in the 1640s and 1650s, meant the division of Ukraine and the establishment, in the eastern half, of an autonomous Ukrainian Hetmanate, under Russian protection. The fact that this Hetmanate sided with Sweden against Russia was one of several reasons for the gradual restriction and eventual abolition of Ukrainian autonomy in the eighteenth century.
From an ethno-linguistic viewpoint, even the term 'Ukrainian' is problematic in the eighteenth century. 'Ukraine' means literally 'on the border', in short a frontierland, but in the eighteenth century the area was generally referred to as Malorossiia or Little Russia. The Slavic-speaking population of the region customarily called themselves Rus, but in ecclesiastical circles the convention had gradually arisen of referring to Muscovy, seat of the Russian Orthodox Patriarchy, as 'Great Russia' and the Ukrainian lands as 'Little Russia'. The common people undoubtedly spoke the variant of East Slavonic known today as Ukrainian, but the literary language until the nineteenth century was the ecclesiastical Church Slavonic. The nobility consisted in part of the old Polonised szlachta from Polish—Lithuanian times, but the majority of the social elite were Cossacks.
The Cossacks were a group almost impossible to assign to any ethnic or linguistic category, but who played a major role in both the establishment of the Hetmanate and the expansion of Russia. The term 'cossack' means 'nomad soldier' or 'freebooter' and was applied to the Tartar horsemen who occasionally went over to the Slav, Christian side in the shifting border warfare with the Tartar khanates. With time, Christians adopted the same mobile marauding tactics and came to be called Cossacks too. Cossacks were thus a defence force against the Islamic enemies to the south, but they were also, increasingly in Russian history, escapees from the servile conditions of labour in Muscovy, who sought land and freedom in Siberia, in the steppelands north of the Black Sea and the dangerous borderlands of the Don basin. In the Polish—Lithuanian Commonwealth, similarly, the Orthodox Slavs sought refuge from the onerous manorial system in the lands 'beyond the rapids' of the River Dnieper (in Ukrainian, za porohamy) and hence became known as the Zaporozhian Cossacks, to distinguish them from the Don Cossacks and others.
Cossack society was warlike, jealous of its independence and essentially egalitarian, although the Cossacks accepted the authority of their leader or Hetman.) elected by a council of officers. By the seventeenth century this officer class had become the social elite of Ukrainian society, and in the early eighteenth century the Cossack nobility retained its special status and identity. The Cossack-led Hetmanate was thus an important stage in defining what it meant to be Ukrainian; it was the potential nucleus of the modern Ukrainian nation-state. The Cossack elite, moreover, were the first to articulate a separate sense of Ukrainian identity, although in the eighteenth century their most common term for this was 'Little Russian'. Their sense of themselves as a nation, however, had more in common with the gentry nationalism of the Polish szlachta or the Hungarian nobility. This put the Ukrainian elite on a collision course with Catherine II, who saw the unruly Cossacks as an obstacle to modernisation and abolished Ukrainian autonomy in 1782—6, despite passionate Ukrainian protests. Nevertheless, incorporation in the main body of the Russian Empire offered certain advantages to the Ukrainian elite: most of them received the right to full noble status, they were allowed to enserf their peasants completely and they had careers in the imperial service open to them.
By the reign of Paul I (1796—1801), the traditional elite of the Ukraine had become indistinguishable from the Russian nobility, speaking Russian instead of colloquial Ukrainian. As such they were now an alien presence among the mass of Ukrainian peasants and townspeople; one noble went so far as to argue in print, early in the new century, that Ukrainians were in fact Russians. At most the Ukrainian nobility confined themselves to a romanticisation of the past glories of the Hetmanate, but otherwise their identification with the Russian state was complete by the turn of the century. The Russification of the Ukrainian nobility thus delayed the emergence of an ethnic Ukrainian nationalism by several generations; it was only later in the nineteenth century that enough of a Ukrainian middle class existed to support a modern sense of nationhood.
The Polish Partitions brought yet more Ukrainians, Latvians and Germans into the Russian Empire, but also Belorussians, Lithuanians, Poles and some 400,000 Jews — 'the largest Jewish community in Europe'.10 Altogether more than 7 million people were added to Catherine the Great's domains, but in addition to the problem of nationality there was a confessional obstacle to assimilation, in that most of the Belorussians and Ukrainians were Uniate, while Lithuanians, Latvians and Poles were Catholic, and Germans Lutheran. Socially the new subjects were mostly peasants, but Polish and German nobles, and German, Jewish and Polish burghers complicated the task of integration.
From the point of view of securing physical control, a prime object of the tsarist government was to co-opt local elites where possible. In Courland the de facto Russian hegemony exercised through the German nobility continued. Although the Polish lands were immediately incorporated into the Russian system of provinces, at a local level there was no practical alternative to relying on the Polish nobility. This applied even in the easternmost areas annexed in 1772. Here Russian became the language of administration and the courts, but Polish nobles still filled the local administrative jobs. In the territories annexed in the 1790s, consolidation was disrupted by the uncertainties of the French Revolutionary period. Here, in Lithuania and the Polish Korona, including right-bank Ukraine, most administrators at all levels were Polish and the language of administration and justice was Polish.11
The Polish szlachta's response to Russian rule varied. Some resisted and fled into exile or refused to cooperate with Russian authorities. The majority, conscious of the need to preserve their privileged status and lands, preferred to work with the regime, some reluctantly, others in a spirit of constructive, if self-interested, resignation. Their willingness was doubtless expedited by the determination of the Russian government to whittle down the number of Polish nobles, which in comparison with the Russian nobility was huge. Despite the culling of landless nobles, Polish nobles continued to constitute a majority of the nobility in the Empire as a whole for generations: 66 per cent in 1795.12 The szlachta even profited, after years of economic blockade by Prussia before the final Partitions, from the ability to export grain via Russia's Black Sea ports.
The Russian government practised toleration vis-a-vis the Catholic Poles and Lithuanians, as well as the Baltic German Lutherans, but towards the Uniate Ukrainians and Belorussians, regarded as renegade Orthodox, its attitude was frankly hostile. Uniate bishoprics were abolished, and as early as 1796 1.8 million Uniates had been 'converted' to Orthodoxy.13 The Jews were an unprecedented problem, in that Russia had not had any before 1772. Catherine Il's government took an initially enlightened approach, hoping to utilise alleged Jewish economic skills for the good of the Empire. All freedoms enjoyed in the old Commonwealth were guaranteed, although the Jews' separate legal status was abolished, and the specifically Jewish organ of local self-government, the kahal, was continued. However, the government soon ran into the entrenched prejudices of the Christian population, Catholic and Orthodox, over the economic role especially of rural Jews. A policy was adopted in the 1780s of moving Jews to urban areas, sometimes forcibly. The prejudice against Jews in towns proved no less, nor were most Jews keen on assimilating. In the end, in 1804 the government of Alexander I (1801—25) created the Pale of Settlement: Jews were banned from living outside the former Polish lands, left-bank Ukraine and the 'New Russian' territories down to the Black Sea. They were also required to abandon Jewish dress and to keep their business accounts in Russian, Polish or German rather than Yiddish. In return, the Jews' freedom of worship was again confirmed, as was their access, in theory, to state education and their right to maintain their own schools. In practice, many of the 1804 statute's liberal provisions remained a dead letter, while the visible restrictions on Jewish freedom of movement, as well as the prejudice against them, remained.
Polish culture continued to be dominant in the annexed territories. Alexander I, in drafting his own educational reforms, even relied on the Polish experience in setting up the 1773 Commission of National Education and on enlightened Polish aristocrats like Prince Adam Jerzy Czartoryski. The six school regions created for the Empire in 1802 were modelled on the 1773 legislation. The University of Wilno, founded in 1803, became the first serious institute of higher education in this part of the Empire, and although the language of instruction was Polish it did much to promote the discovery of the Lithuanian language as well. The collaboration with the imperial regime of nobles like Czartoryski, who briefly rose to be Alexander's foreign minister (1804—6), reflects the dilemma most patriotic Poles found themselves in: only by helping to modernise and liberalise Russia itself, so they reasoned, could Poland hope for its own eventual liberation.
Beneath the level of the nobility few inhabitants of the Russian Partition could expect much improvement in their circumstances. Baltic German ports and cities like Riga and Mitau experienced a trade-related prosperity, and there was a certain agricultural revival in the Polish grain-growing regions. But urban centres in most of the Russian Partition languished, affected by increased taxation and the general inefficiency of the Russian economy; what meagre manufacturing had arisen in the old Commonwealth, cut off from its original sources of raw materials, withered. For the mass of peasants, whether Polish, Lithuanian, Ukrainian or Belorussian, Russian rule arguably made things worse: labour service was increased almost everywhere, and peasants were treated more as transferable property than hitherto, paid more tax and were now liable to 25 years' service in the army.
In conclusion, Russia succeeded in imposing a uniform administrative structure on its new East European territories, although anomalies like the Baltic Germans' privileges survived. It was also on the whole successful in co-opting local elites into the task of running the Empire, at the minor expense of conceding the privileged position, socially and economically, which they had hitherto occupied. With regard to the peoples of the new territories, Russian governments were not militantly assimilationist; Russian rulers and ministers assumed that the chief duty of the conquered peoples was to be obedient and productive subjects. The difficulties of ruling, and if need be repressing, recalcitrant non-Russians were to become apparent only in the new century.
World History
