Russia

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Peter’s Successors

Peter’s strong rule was followed by a period of weakness on the throne. His son, Alexis, had been charged with treason and died in prison in 1718, probably from torture. The throne went to Peter’s second wife, Catherine I. After her death in 1727 it passed to a succession of rulers as a result of intrigues and coups, often engineered by the palace guards. Peter II, the son of Alexis, was chosen Emperor after Catherine; he was succeeded in 1730 by Anna Ivanovna, daughter of Ivan V. Anna, a Duchess of Courland, firmly established the court at St Petersburg and filled it with her Prussian favourites; she ruled as a despot. She was succeeded in 1740 by Ivan VI, an eight-week-old grand-nephew. A palace conspiracy the next year placed Elizabeth Petrovna, youngest daughter of Peter the Great, on the throne. Under her rule (1741-1762) a national revival took place. In a war with Sweden (1741-1743), Russia gained a portion of Finland. The Empress also joined Austria and France in the Seven Years’ War (1756-1763) against Prussia. Her nephew and successor, Peter III, was an admirer of King Frederick II of Prussia, and at his accession in 1762 concluded a separate peace with Frederick. Peter was swiftly deposed and murdered in the same year. His wife, a German princess (named Sophie) by birth, ascended the throne as Catherine II; she became known as Catherine the Great.

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Catherine the Great

Catherine was the first of the successors of Peter the Great to understand and further his policies. With striking success, she carried out ambitious plans for Russian expansion. Her campaigns took two main directions. First, she turned her armies against the Ottoman Empire in order to acquire warm-water Black Sea ports necessary for Russian commerce. In the Russo-Turkish War of 1768 to 1774, Russia acquired territory in the Crimea, and the Tatar Crimea region was annexed to the Russian Empire in 1783. In the Russo-Turkish War of 1787 to 1792 Russia acquired all the territory west to the Dniester River, including the Black Sea port of Ochakov. The second phase of Catherine’s wars dealt with territories in the west; there, as a result of the three partitions of Poland (1772, 1793, 1795), Russia gained 468,000 sq km (180,000 sq mi) of land with about 6 million inhabitants. Catherine’s domestic policies echoed the westernization of Peter’s reign. She chose French culture as a guide and spared no expense to fill the St Petersburg court with the cream of European talent; it was after her reign that the city was first called “the Venice of the North”. For a time she appeared to be interested in the liberal theories espoused by such French writers as Voltaire, with whom she corresponded. In 1767 Catherine issued an outline of proposed legal and administrative reforms, particularly in regard to serfs, but they were not carried out because of the opposition of the nobility. Her own opposition was stirred by a Cossack and peasant uprising led by the Zaporozhian Cossack Yemelyan Ivanovich Pugachov. The rebellion, the worst of the agrarian uprisings that studded Russian history, was suppressed in 1775; Pugachov was executed and the Zaporozhian Cossacks liquidated. Catherine, instead of relaxing the oppressive serf laws, strengthened them. Such changes did not prevent peasant revolts, which continued sporadically through most of the rest of the imperial era, but they did serve to constrain Russia even more tightly within a social structure that was becoming increasingly outdated and incapable of meeting the challenges and changes of the emerging modern world. After the beginning of the French Revolution in 1789, the empress discarded her liberal views entirely.

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Paul I and Alexander I

Catherine was succeeded in 1796 by her son Paul I. He inaugurated some reforms in the treatment of serfs, limiting their obligatory work for landowners to three days a week. In foreign affairs he joined Austria, Britain, Naples, and the Ottoman Empire in the Second Coalition against France. A despotic and unbalanced ruler, he was assassinated in his palace in 1801 by a conspiracy that was led by the nobility.

His son, Alexander I (1801-1825), had been Catherine’s favourite grandson. Imbued with the liberal policies of her early reign and educated by the Swiss thinker Frédéric César de La Harpe, Alexander began his reign by granting amnesty to political prisoners, projecting a constitution for the empire, and repealing many of his father’s restrictive measures. His advanced domestic policies, however, were soon abandoned because of involvement in foreign wars. In 1805 Russia joined Britain, Austria, Sweden, and Naples in the Third Coalition against Napoleon I. After French armies crushed Prussia in the Battle of Jena on October 14, 1806, and defeated Russia at Friedland on June 14, 1807, Alexander changed sides and allied Russia with France by the Treaty of Tilsit (1807). Under this agreement, which divided Europe into French and Russian spheres of interest, Alexander, in return for helping France against Britain, was allowed freedom of action against Sweden and Turkey. After the Russo-Turkish War of 1806 to 1812, Russia received Bessarabia from Turkey. The Russo-Swedish War of 1808 and 1809 ended with Russian acquisition of the Åland Islands and all of Finland. In 1806, as a result of war with Iran following the Russian annexation of Georgia in 1801, Russia had also acquired Dagestan, Baku, and other areas. Meanwhile, relations with France were deteriorating in the face of Napoleon’s ambition to control all of Europe and Alexander’s desire to extend Russian territory to Constantinople; the problems took a personal turn when Alexander refused Napoleon the hand of his sister. On June 24, 1812, Napoleon invaded Russia with 600,000 troops. Initially his efforts to conquer Russia appeared successful, culminating in the Battle of Borodino on September 7, 1812. Ultimately, however, the campaign was a disaster for the French emperor. The Russian generals, led by General Kutuzov, opting to “lose Moscow and save the army”, retreated to regroup their forces and plan the engage-and-avoid campaign that was to prove Napoleon’s downfall. His troops entered Moscow on September 14, but the city was deserted and much of it had been burned by the Russians. Napoleon’s repeated requests for negotiations were ignored, and, increasingly starved of supplies and an enemy to engage, his forces began to disintegrate into bands of marauders as discipline collapsed. On October 19, Napoleon abandoned Moscow and the French were forced to fall back in a retreat which quickly became a rout. Exposed to hunger, cold, and Kutuzov’s constant guerrilla attacks in a country devastated by the Russian “scorched-earth” policy only 30,000 French troops made it back across the ice of the Berezina River, the western border of Russia. After the French retreat from Moscow, Alexander, who entered Paris on March 14, 1814, at the head of the Russian army, became a central figure in the alliance that accomplished the overthrow of Napoleon. In 1815, at the Congress of Vienna, most of the duchy of Warsaw was awarded to Russia.

Although the last decade of Alexander’s reign was marked by reaction and repressive measures, closer intellectual intercourse between Western Europe and Russia resulted in the radicalization of many members of the Russian intelligentsia, particularly students, the upper middle class, and the younger landed nobility. Exposed to the economic, social, and political changes in the rest of Europe, they increasingly viewed Russia as a despotic state with an intricate, corrupt bureaucracy, that was little concerned with the oppressed masses. They began to form secret political societies demanding, among other things, the abolition of serfdom. The revolutionary tradition that culminated in the Russian Revolution of 1917 was thus initiated.

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Nicholas I

After Alexander’s sudden death in 1825 without issue, the throne passed to his youngest brother, Nicholas I. Taking advantage of some uncertainty regarding the succession, a group of young officers and nobles organized on December 14, 1825, a revolt in an effort to form a constitutional monarchy, or even a republic. Nicholas suppressed the revolt within hours, and ordered the immediate execution of the leaders of the Decembrists, as the conspirators became known; another 120 were exiled to Siberia. The conspiracy confirmed Nicholas’s distrust of liberalism, and he reacted by decreeing further reactionary measures, including a new secret police to compel complete obedience to the emperor, strict censorship of all publications, and removal of all material regarded as politically dangerous from school texts and curricula. The revolutionary fervour that gripped western Europe in 1848, was also felt in Russia. Another revolutionary secret society, known as the Petrashevists, was formed. The young Fyodor Dostoyevsky was a member of this group, which advocated emancipation of the serfs though an uprising. The secret police uncovered their activities, and they were arrested and sentenced to penal servitude in Siberia, including Dostoyevsky. Afterwards Nicholas began a vigorous campaign against liberal ideas in education and in intellectual circles in general. University chairs of history and philosophy were abolished as potentially dangerous, and student bodies were reduced to 300 in each university. Despite such repressions, the first half of the 19th century was a period of considerable artistic, literary, and scientific achievement.

Nicholas made some efforts to expand the empire. This expansion took three directions: south-west towards the Mediterranean, involving interference in the Balkan provinces of Turkey; south into the Caucasus and Central Asia; and east to the Pacific Ocean. A war with Iran began in 1826 and ended two years later with the Russian acquisition of part of Armenia, including the strategic city of Yerevan. At the same time Nicholas espoused the cause of the Greek revolutionaries, and a Russian fleet joined the British and French vessels that destroyed the Turkish fleet in the Battle of Navarino on October 20, 1827. In the resulting Russo-Turkish War of 1828 and 1829, Turkey was defeated. The Treaty of Adrianople (September 14, 1829) gave Russia suzerainty over the peoples of the Caucasus and the Emperor a protectorate over Moldavia and Walachia, with rights of interference.

A major Polish revolt against Russian rule began in 1830. Polish nationalists expelled their Russian governor and organized a provisional government. Russian troops forced the capitulation of the rebel leaders the following year. As a result, scarcely any autonomy was left to Poland.

Increasing Russian power in the Middle East was regarded as a threat by other European powers, particularly after Russian forces appeared in the Dardanelles by agreement with Turkey in 1833. Britain, France, Prussia, and Austria formed a bloc to circumvent Russian plans for eventual mastery of Constantinople. In 1853, after Nicholas invaded the Danubian principalities, Turkey declared war on Russia. In the Crimean War (1853-1856) that followed, Russia was faced by British, French, and Sardinian, as well as Turkish, troops and was utterly defeated.

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Alexander II

Nicholas died in 1855, and peace was concluded a year later by his son, Alexander II. Russia was compelled to relinquish Kars and part of Bessarabia, the Black Sea was neutralized, and the Russian protectorate over the Danubian principalities was abolished. This setback in the south-west, however, had little effect on Russia’s continuing advance to the Pacific Ocean and towards the Persian Gulf. Russia had completed the conquest of Siberia in the 1650s, and subsequently the search for new lands further east began in earnest. Initially led by explorers like Ivan Moskvilin and Vasily Poyarkov, Semyon Dezhnev, and Yerofey Khabarov, it was followed by the start of settlement. The Kamatchka peninsula had been conquered at the end of the 17th century. In 1850, following the establishment of the first settlements on Kamatchka in the previous century, a Russian settlement was established on the estuary of the Amur River. The northern half of the island of Sakhalin was occupied in 1855. Three years later the entire Amur region and the coast south to the city of Vladivostok (founded in 1860) was annexed. In Central Asia the empire was extended south almost to the border of India, with the annexations of Toshkent (1865), Bokhara (1866), Samarqand (1868), Khiva (1873), and Kokand (1876). Merv (now Mary) was annexed in 1884, three years after Alexander’s death.

Domestically, Alexander’s early reign was an era of reform, made necessary by the debacle of the Crimean War, which had exposed the archaic nature of Russia’s political and social institutions. In 1861 he decreed the emancipation of the serfs. This necessitated a reform of local government, and in 1864 zemstvos, or elected district assemblies, were introduced in European Russia to deal with local issues such as education, public welfare, agricultural development, road-building, and health services. Each zemstvo was elected indirectly by three separate electoral colleges: nobility, townsmen, and peasantry. The nobility inevitably dominated, and in 1890 the right of peasant election was virtually abolished. Zemstvos were subsequently set up in other areas, but not in the frontier regions or the main towns (which had their own municipal councils from 1870). With no central representative parliament before 1805, the zemstvos played an important role in the formation of the political intelligentsia; many deputies and officials held radical views.

The judicial system was also revised and trial by jury instituted for serious criminal offences. Other changes included the encouragement of secondary education and university reform, and changes in army administration and the substitution of conscription for an inequitable forced levy. The emperor refused, however, to countenance a constitution or the organization of a representative national assembly. Revolutionary movements increased and adopted definite policies and aims. One prominent group advocated nihilism, which aimed to tear down the basis of the existing society and build a new (but indeterminate) one on its ruins. The narodniki, a populist movement, worked for a peasant uprising. Revolutionaries were also prominent in Poland, and in 1863 the Poles rose in a second major rebellion against Russia. After it was quelled, Poland was deprived of the last vestiges of its autonomy and was extensively Russified. Such developments, combined with an assassination attempt in 1866, led Alexander to give way to reactionary elements in the court, and return to the despotism of the past.

Russia resumed its expansionist policies during the 1870s. The overthrow of Napoleon III, a principal opponent of Russian interference in the Balkans, enabled Russia to widen its sphere of influence there. When Serbia and Montenegro revolted against Turkey in 1876, Russia intervened on their behalf. After the Russo-Turkish War of 1877 and 1878, Alexander obtained major concessions from Turkey, but these were largely negated by a conference of the European powers at Berlin, fearful of Russian domination of the Dardanelles.