Economic and Cultural Continuities
Indeed, Russian ironworks and copperworks multiplied in the post-Petrine decades, twenty of the former being built in the Urals from 1726 to 1733, thirteen of the latter from 1726 to 1737. Russian exports of iron to England presented serious competition to Sweden and were only one of many commodities regulated by the new Anglo-Russian trade treaty of 1734. St Petersburg blossomed as a major seaport, especially for exports, but Archangel was revived by the fairer tariff of 1731. Most of Russian iron and copper production went to the armed forces, the mint, or for export. The fleet was somewhat revived as the Anna, a huge ship of the line with 140 guns, was launched by the English shipwright Richard Brown in June 1737 with a ball and a banquet.
Post-Petrine Russia also manifested many continuities in cultural affairs. The Imperial Academy of Sciences and Arts, planned by Peter and endorsed by the Senate, officially opened in December 1725 under the presidency of Dr Laurentius Blumentrost, Moscow-born and European educated. On 27 December 1725 Georg Bülffinger, professor of physics at the academy, delivered a speech in Latin (111 pages!) on the value of such institutions and studies, especially on the means of determining longitudes. A copy was sent to the University of Cambridge Library. Catherine I’s son-in-law, Duke Karl Frederick of Holstein, attended the session. Another speech was given on 1 August 1726 by Jakob Hermann on the history of geometry and the perfection of telescopes with a reply by Christian Goldbach. The audience included Catherine I herself, but the preface of the published speech (Petropoli, 1727) explained that most of Hermann’s address was not delivered, while the empress actually heard a German panegyric by Georg Bayer praising her and the origins of the Russian people.
To ensure international recognition, the academy’s protocols were published in Latin until 1734, German until 1741. All the academicians were foreigners, perhaps the most eminent being the mathematician Leonhard Euler who worked in Russia 1727–41 and again from 1766 until his death in 1783. Though the academy developed slowly and unevenly, it attracted some gifted individuals, notably Mikhail Lomonosov, the great polymath from provincial origins, who as a mature student absorbed the best of Muscovite education in Moscow and Kiev before attending St Petersburg’s academic university and then advanced study abroad. In literary affairs Antiokh Kantemir and Vasilii Trediakovskii began to make their mark. Foreign scholars such as G. F. Müller accompanied the Bering expeditions, collected many sources on the history of Siberia, and collaborated in a variety of publications. Outside the academy the versatile engineer and administrator Vasilii Tatishchev began compiling a monumental history of Russia—and in Russian—that was only published decades after his death in 1750. Ballet was initiated under Anna with the work of Jean-Baptiste Landé and the arrival of several foreign theatrical troupes.
If Catherine the Great is usually credited with infusing Russia with ‘soul’, Peter the Great’s earlier efforts merit mention. In 1718 the poet Aaron Hill lauded ‘this giant-genius sent; | Divinely siz’d—to suit his crown’s extent!’ To our late twentieth-century ears Hill’s encomium rings ominously:
He breath’d prolific soul, inspir’d the land, And call’d forth order, with directive hand. Then, pour’s whole energy, at once spread wide, And old obstruction sunk, beneath its tide. Then, shad’wing all, the dread dominion rose, Which, late, no hope, and now, no danger knows.
5. The Age of Enlightenment 1740–1801
GARY MARKER
These decades witnessed a flourishing Empire—with ever-expanding borders, demographic and economic growth and a blossoming in aristocratic arts and culture. But it was no golden age for commoners: townsmen suffered from crippling restrictions, serfs became mere chattels, and minorities underwent administrative Russification. The result was widespread unrest and, most dramatically, the Pugachev Rebellion of 1773–75.
AFTER Peter’s death in 1725 and another fifteen years of troubled and ill-defined rule, the next six decades witnessed a self-conscious reassertion of the Petrine legacy. For the remainder of the century, indeed of the old regime, legitimacy was linked to the name and achievements of Peter, officially canonized both as the founder of the All-Russian Empire and its great Europeanizer. Ironically, this epitome of masculine authority, this father of the fatherland, was enshrined and succeeded by strong female rulers, first his daughter Elizabeth (1741–61) and, after the brief reign of Peter III (1761–2), Catherine the Great (1762–96).
The paradox of strong female rule in a patriarchal system of authority added yet another riddle to the enigmas of Russian politics. What did sovereignty and ‘autocracy’ really mean, especially in so vast a realm with so primitive a bureaucracy? What was the relationship between the absolute authority of the ruler and the everyday power of clan patronage? In a country without a fixed law of succession, where the death of every ruler evoked a political crisis that invited court circles and guards regiments to intercede in the choice of a new ruler, it is indeed surprising that ‘autocracy’ should have remained firmly entrenched.
Yet it did, accompanied by a fascination with the precedent of the Roman Empire that reshaped the regime’s own sense of identity. The classical influence found ubiquitous expression—medals and coins depicting Catherine as a Roman centurion, the statue of Minin and Pozharskii (the national heroes of the Time of Troubles) draped in Roman togas, the classical columns on St Isaac’s Cathedral and numerous governmental buildings in St Petersburg, and the odes and panegyrics celebrating Catherine the Great. An exemplar of the latter is an ode by Mikhail Lomonosov, the prominent scholar and patriotic thinker, who sought to pay homage to the new empress: ‘Sciences, celebrate now: Minerva has Ascended the Throne.’
These classical images not only linked Russia to contemporary Europe (where a revival of classical antiquity was in full swing), but also suggested ties to the accepted fount of imperial authority—ancient Greece and Rome. Significantly, classicism functioned to separate Russia’s ‘imperiia’ from the lineage of the contiguous Byzantine and Mongol Empires, which it had traditionally invoked to legitimize territorial claims and even validate the mantle of rulership. But eighteenth-century expansion to the east, south, and west had little to do with the Byzantine and Mongol legacies; hence the soaring leap across space and time to establish cultural ties with classical empires—which had made similar grandiose claims—became an ideological imperative. That impulse lay behind the proclamation in 1721 that Russia was an empire, a claim embraced by Peter’s successors and integral to the new state identity.
However imposing the classical representations of power may have been, they were meaningless if people refused to submit to its will. And in Russia, more so than in many other states, the theatricality of imperial and autocratic power had little relevance to the everyday life of people remote from court and capital. As the historian Marc Raeff has observed, the rulers of eighteenth-century Russia attempted to graft the cameralist order of Central Europe’s ‘well-ordered police state’ onto the apparent sprawling disorder of the empire’s multiple populations. Although the police state could not create social order by itself, it did articulate an institutional and conceptual framework that allowed state institutions to proclaim their sovereignty.