Chapter 12b, Russia to 1825

I - The Rise of the Slavs

In Chapter 4 we took time out an look at the world as it began to shrink and humans increased contact and interaction with each other. We surveyed a large portion of the world in same the same time context: the end of the Classical Period and the beginning of the Medieval Retrenchment. In this chapter we will examine one civilization, the Russian, its roots, its development, its mystery and finally its rise and interaction among the nations of Eurasia. In Chapter 4 we looked at the world laterally across time; in this chapter we will examine the world lineally through the lens of Russian Civilization and march down through time making interconnections and drawing parallels.

In classical antiquity, the steppes of Southern Russian were known as Scythia and stretched from Eastern Europe to Central Asia. Since the 8th century B.C.E., the Ancient Greeks traded and even established settlements on the Crimean Peninsula. The Russians are Slavs, an Indo European group of peoples whose roots lie further to the east and who began westward migrations later than the Greeks, Romans, Celts and Germans. The Slavs are divided into three groups: Southern, Western and Eastern. The Southern Slavs wound up settling in the Balkans and became the modern Bulgarians, Bosnians, Serbians, Croatians and Slovenians. The Western Slavs settled to the west of the Eastern Slavs and became the modern Poles, Czechs, Serbs and Slovaks.

The ancestors of modern the Russians are the East Slavs who are also the ancestors of the modern Ukrainians and Byelorussians or White Russians. Their original home seems to have been in the wooded areas of the Pripyat Marshes in modern Belarus. Relatively little is known about the Eastern Slavs prior to approximately 859 AD when the first written records were made. These East Slavs first practiced Slash and Burn agriculture and were roughly divided into three areas: one group settled along the Dnieper River in what is now Ukraine and Byelorussia; a second group spread northward to the northern Volga valley, around modern-day Moscow; and the third north and west near the modern city of Novgorod.

The rise of the Russian state begins in the southern grasslands. Using the Russian river systems, Viking merchants created trading routes between the Byzantium and Scandinavia. (It is interesting that the word Russia comes from the Greek word for red (rus) because so many Slavs and Vikings had red hair) In the seventh and eighth centuries C. E., the Slavs were still quite backwards, so Scandinavian traders gradually established trading settlements along the major trade routes, the most important of which was at Kiev. As time passed, the Scandinavian ruling minority gradually mixed with the Slav majority and slowly a small state with a monarchy emerged. According legend the first king of Kiev was Rurik, a Danish Viking chieftain.

The early Slavic states were heavily influenced by Byzantium. In 864, two missionaries, Cyril and Methodius, were sent into the Balkans where they worked to convert the Slavs. They were not particularly successful, but  they devised a written script – based on letters from their native Greek – for the Slavic language, called Cyrillic. The Cyrillic Alphabet represented the sounds of the Slavic languages more accurately than Greek and so it became very popular among the Slavs. In some places, such as among the Hungarians, Poles, Czechs and Slovaks, the Roman Catholic Church was more successful and the Latin alphabet was mostly adopted. But for most Eastern Europeans (Bulgarians, Rumanians, Serbians, Ukrainians, Moldavians and Russians) the combination of the Cyrillic alphabet and Orthodox Church’s allowing the Liturgy to be celebrated in native tongues (instead of the mandatory Latin in the Roman Catholic Church) caused most of them to convert to Orthodoxy. 

The creation of written language also enabled the Slavic peoples to organize more complex societies and political structures. It allowed them to write down their oral traditions and organize their reflections of thought and oral tradition. Schools organized by missionaries not only gave religious instruction but increased basic literacy. All this laid the foundation for Byzantium becoming the mother civilization to the Slavs. The Southern Slavs, especially the Bulgarians, were the first affected and – in spite of tense relations and warfare (remember Basil II’s victory over the Bulgarians at the Battle of Kleidon) but it would be the Eastern Slavs (and ultimately the Russians) who would build a state that would, after the fall of Constantinople, call itself, the Third Rome. The Russians would remain Slavs but would also consider themselves the heirs of ancient Rome and Byzantium.

II - The Rise and fall of Kiev
Around 989, a Varangian (Viking) prince, Vladimir of Kiev, converted to Orthodox Christianity and, like Clovis in Gaul (four hundred years earlier), expected his subjects to do the same – and they did. Vladimir was no saint. He was the son of Sviatislov I of Kiev and his housekeeper, Malusha, who is described in the Norse sagas as a prophetess who lived to the age of one hundred.  He became to power in 980 and was anything but a Christian as he took eight hundred concubines (besides numerous wives) and erected pagan statues and shrines to gods. But as time went by, he became convinced that his crimes, especially violent executions and human sacrifices, would condemn him the hell. So he converted to Orthodox Christianity. Legend had it that Vladimir feared Roman Catholicism because it was too demanding both liturgically (in demanding the use of Latin) and politically (because of papal interference) and he rejected Islam because he would not convert to a religion that forbade alcohol.

After his conversion, Vladimir and his successors established a Caesaropapist Orthodox Church and Byzantine influences flowed rapidly into the Kievan state. As Kiev grew in the tenth and eleventh centuries, it became a conduit for the spread of Byzantine culture and freely borrowed Byzantine (Roman) law and culture, especially in religious thought, art and architecture. Icons helped spread religious piety and the famous onion domes of Russian churches (built on the Greek Cross floorplans) dominated the landscape. In the Eleventh century it was said that Kiev had over four hundred churches and eight large market places. In short, by the early twelfth century,  Kiev had became the largest Christian State in Europe with a population near thirty thousand and over six hundred churches.

Small farmers were generally free peasants, although the Russian landed aristocrats, called Boyars, were beginning to gain political power over the peasants (code for stealing the peasant’s land). The Boyars eventually helped to break down Kievan authority in the twelfth century. It was the familiar pattern of warlord mentality: rival princes setting up regional kingdoms and the royal family squabbling over succession. Nomadic invaders from Asia (the Mongols whom we met in Chapter seven) caused a further weakening. Moreover, the decline of Byzantium after Manzikert (1071) and the Fourth Crusade (1204) reduced trade and therefore income. So by 1200, the Kievan state was so weak and divided that it was an easy prey for Russian princes. Finally in 1240, a Mongol army, led by Batu Khan besieged sacked the city in 1240.

From 1241 to 1361, the princes of Kiev were forced to pay tribute (a payment to show submission or price of protection) to the Khanate of the Golden Horde. In early 1320s, a Lithuanian army defeated a Kievan army and conquered the city. The Mongols, who also claimed Kiev, retaliated in 1324–1325, so that, although Kiev was ruled by a Lithuanian prince, it had to pay a tribute to the Golden Horde. For 200 years - from 1362 to1569 - Kiev became joined to the Grand Duchy of Lithuania. Finally from 1569 to 1667, Kiev and the Ukraine became part of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. Due to Polish-Roman Catholic influence, a large (but still minority) Catholic community grew. We will return to the Ukraine and its capital Kiev in 1667 when it becomes part of the Tsardom of Russia.

III - The Gathering in of the Russian Land
As Kiev weakened and fell, there lived to the north another group of East Slavs, the Russian Slavs, who survived the Mongol invasions and who also had to pay tribute to the Khans of the Golden Horde. But even under Mongol domination, the Russians retained the memory of Byzantine (and – by extension - Roman) glory. And it is important to understand that, just when Constantinople fell in 1453, it was just at that point that Russia was beginning to assert its independence from the Mongols. And the man who made it happen was Ivan III, the Grand Prince of Moscow.

In 1480, Ivan III (1462-1505) took a daring gamble; he stopped paying tribute to the Mongol Khan. This declaration of independence and defiance of a Khan too weak to enforce obedience marked the beginning of a phenomenon called the Gathering of the Russian Land. Ivan continued this policy and molded Moscow into a strong, centralized state. His goal was to bring Russian-speaking peoples under his authority and - by his efforts - he was able to more than tripled the size of his Principality of Moscow stretching from the Polish-Lithuanian border to the Caspian Sea and from the Dnieper River to the Ural Mountains. His most important acquisition was in 1471 when he absorbed that important trading city of Novgorod (a hub for the fur trade and a member of the Hanseatic League, which stretched from Novgorod across the Baltic to London).

Ivan was determined to consolidate his territorial acquisitions by a unique system of recruiting soldiers. Ivan’s soldiers were called Cossacks, who were drawn from the ranks of the peasants and lured into military service when Ivan offered them their freedom and the opportunity to settle in recently conquered territories in return for their service. (Cossack is a Turkish word meaning “free man”) It is not surprising that the Cossacks were fiercely loyal to Ivan and his successors and undertook their own campaigns of expansion, pushing Russian influence south and east into the steppes and the Volga River Valley. As we saw in chapter nine, Ivan’s Cossack forces captured the Khanates of Kazan and Astrakhan (remnants of the old Khanate of the Golden Horde). In time, they would cross the Ural Mountains into Siberia.

Ivan drew much inspiration from the old Byzantine Empire. In 1472, he married Sophia Palaeologus, the niece of the last Byzantine Emperor, Constantine XI, and in 1503, Ivan claimed the title of Emperor of Eastern Orthodoxy [his grandson, Ivan IV, would take the title Tsar (or Czar, i.e., Caesar) of the Russians]. He made the Byzantine double-headed eagle the symbol of his authority [the eagle that looked both east and west] and he adopted the elaborate, complex ceremonial of the Byzantine Court. Under the influence of Sophia, he commissioned Italian architects to rebuild the Kremlin, or the fortress that stood in the heart of Moscow. Ivan’s message was clear. He intended Russia to be the Third Rome. He supported Orthodox Christianity and – in Caesaro-papist style -considered himself not only head of the state, but also the head of the church. The Orthodox Church in Russia supported him in his claim, and so, like the Byzantine emperors of old, he believed that his authority came directly from God.

Although history gave Ivan III the title of Ivan the Great and his reign was one of the longest in Russian history (1462-1505), his autocracy and policies of expansion did not please the Russian nobility (elite, military aristocracy), or Boyars, who, like the dukes and princes of Medieval Europe and the daimyo in Japan, resisted any policy of centralization, in favor of their relative independence.
Their resistance climaxed during the rein of Ivan III’s grandson, Ivan IV, better know to history as Ivan the Terrible. Ivan IV reigned from 1533 to 1584 and is one of the most curious and compelling figures in Russian history. He was three when his father died. He was neglected as his mother and the boyars controlled state affairs until he managed to seize power and was crowned at age sixteen. He also married Anastasia Romanova of the powerful Romanov family.

At first Ivan IV followed in the footsteps of Ivan III and undertook many reforms to strengthen the state. He revised the law code, created a standing army with gunpowder weapons (Streltsy), and established a council of the nobles (the Zemsky Sobor) which the book calls the “Assemblies of the Land.” Ivan used the Zemsky Sobor to avoid Boyar rivalries by creating representatives who could inform him of local conditions throughout Russia. He subordinated the church to the state and his goal was to create a government that functioned independently of personal whims.

But Ivan had a dark side. From boyhood he was suspicious of the Boyars and suspected them of murdering his wife. He abdicated the throne in 1564, claiming that the Boyars were blocking his reforms. When a large delegation of panic stricken subjects appealed to him to return, he agreed on the condition that he receive powers to deal with the treacherous Boyars. In effect they agreed that he be the absolute ruler of a vast portion of Russia, which he called Oprichnina or the land apart. This new power allowed him to confiscate the Boyar’s estates and redistribute them to his supporters. Thus Ivan made his supporters a new aristocracy, the Oprichniki. From them he recruited a private army whose members dressed in black and wore insignia displaying a dog’s head and a broom, symbolic of their function to hunt down treason and sweep it out of Russia.

The Oprichniki then launched Ivan’s reign of terror, as they laid waste to many civilian areas, including Novgorod. Ivan’ revenge was terrible:  human sized frying pans, skinning and gouging out the eyes of the architects of St. Basil’s Cathedral. Ivan eventually turned on the Oprichnikias well, subjecting them to the same terrible punishments. Perhaps Ivan was clinically mad. Perhaps there was also a clinical reason. A 20th century autopsy attests he had a debilitating spinal disorder and that he turned to drugs and alcohol for relief, all of which could account for his behavior. Moreover an autopsy of Anastasia shows that Ivan was right and that she really was poisoned.

When Ivan died in 1584, he left no capable heir. (He had personally killed his oldest son, Ivan, in a fit of anger) Another son Feydor became tsar, but was incompetent and turned over daily rule to his brother-in-law Boris Godunov, who, after Feydor’s death in 1598, was made tsar. At first Gudonov was popular and ruled well. He anticipated Peter’s the Great’s desire to catch up with the west and was the first tsar to import foreign teachers. But his paranoia led to persecutions of the Boyars and political instability. Then Russia fell into a terrible civil war, which helped bring a terrible famine. Poland and Sweden took advantage and invaded Russian territory. This so-called Time of Troubles lasted fifteen awful years from 1598 to 1613. An uprising led by a former slave and two pretenders, both claiming to be the dead Tsar’s murdered son, added to the disorder. In 1610, when Polish and Swedish armies invaded Russia, volunteer armies rallied to expel the invaders.

An assembly of Boyars then selected Mikhail Romanov, a young relative of Ivan IV’s first wife, as the new Tsar who ruled from 1613 to 1645.  He defeated Sweden and Poland, restored a shattered and dilapidated Moscow and reestablished centralized authority. One of his greatest accomplishments was to replace corrupt Boyars who held governmental posts with competent administrators.

Beginning with the reign of Mikhail Romanov, the Russians would begin to expand across Siberia and encroach on no less than 26 ethnic groups who lived by hunting, fishing or herding reindeer. Some of these readily accepted Russian occupation and commercial opportunities brought by the Russians, while others resisted. The Yakut people were one group that resisted and were brutally persecuted for 40 years as in retaliation. Between 1642 and 1682, the Yakut lost 70% of their population from pillaging and European diseases. Most of the other indigenous groups suffered also from European diseases and suffered similar population losses. Orthodox Christianity was also introduced did not spread rapidly as the surviving Siberians retained belief in their Shamans.

Mikhail’s successor son, Alexis Romanov (1645 – 1676), continued to strengthen the Tsar’s authority. Alexis abolished the assemblies of the Boyars and managed to acquire Kiev and the Ukraine. The Romanov dynasty would sometimes be ruled by weak or incompetent Tsars but – over time – this dynasty would be quite successful and rule Russia until it was overthrown in 1917.

The establishment of the Romanovs brought the problem of succession to an end but did not bring political stability. The biggest problem facing Russia was the question of westernization and technology. The Tsars were more and more aware that Western European countries were seeped in the Enlightenment and were continuing to develop economies, technologies and political organizations that far outstripped their own.

But awareness and action are always two different realities. Opposition would come from the Boyars, merchants and many church officials who all opposed westernization. So the question became: how to transform Russia from an agricultural, multicultural and decentralized country into an industrialized, centralized and modernized Empire that looked to forward not backward. The solution – such as it was – would come from Peter the Great and Catherine the Great.

IV - Peter the Great turns to the West
In 1682 the grandson of Mikhail Romanov, Peter I, or Peter the Great, became czar and reigned till 1725. His remarkable reign can be summarized in one sentence: He carried out a policy of modernization and expansion that transformed Russia from a decentralized, agricultural state into a three billion acre Russian Empire and a major European power. At first he reigned with Ivan, a sickly, older half-brother with his older, half sister Sophia as regent. In 1689, just as Peter came of age, Sophia tried to launch a coup against him, but Peter pushed her aside (confining her to a convent) and took full power. Ivan “conveniently” died in 1695.

As a boy Peter spent much time in a place in Moscow called Germantown. Germantown was home to thousands of Germans living in Moscow. Among these Germans Peter became fascinated with their advanced knowledge of technology, especially military tactics, siege craft and shipbuilding. He grasped the importance of science and western learning and what it could do for Russia. He knew that if Russia were to compete with Europe, it would have to catch up and come out of its medieval lethargy and cultural insularity. After taking the throne, Peter instituted a policy of forced and rapid modernization. He sent Russians abroad to learn in European countries and he himself went (in disguise) on his own tour of Germany, the Netherlands, and England to learn about Western industrial and military technology. Peter set out to reform Russia in three major areas:

1. The Military: Peter reformed the army by offering better pay and drafting peasants to serve for life as professional soldiers. He provided his soldiers with better training and modern European weapons. He demanded his officers (aristocracy) study geometry so as to use artillery effectively. By his death he had built the largest army in Europe which proved its worth by defeating Sweden in the Great Northern War, which lasted 22 years. Peter was also determined to build a modern navy, which could dominate the Baltic Sea. Moreover he knew how important it was to build a modern merchant fleet and not rely on other nations to engage Russia in global trade. 

 

1. Governmentally: Peter overhauled the government to make it more efficient in tax collecting and directing industrial output. Because agrarian Russia had few major cities, he required the nobles to serve as government officials. He established the Table of Ranks, in which officials advanced through 14 levels of bureaucracy according to merit, not hereditary privilege. He underscored the duty of citizens to serve the state and (like Frederick the Great) set the example of himself as an energetic servant, not a privileged parasite, thus making an abstract political concept a political reality.
2. Socially: Peter intended to bring Russia out of its dark ages and westernize Russia. He abolished the Terem (harem), which kept upper class women secluded from men outside their own families. Peter demanded social mixing of the sexes, especially in cities and towns. He also required men to shave their beards and wear Western clothing. The conservative nobility resisted Peter’s reforms and Peter got into their faces, so to speak, and personally shaved men’s beards. By sheer force of will and offering to let men pay a tax to keep their beards, he either got his way or made money.

Peter also simplified the Russian alphabet, established technical schools and reformed the calendar. He reformed the Russian Orthodox Church, taking away much power from the patriarch and forbidding men to become monks before the age of fifty (so they could be useful servants of the state). Soon after the Great Northern War he was titled the Great, Father of His Country, Emperor of All the Russias. 

But his greatest westernizing policy was the city of St. Petersburg, his “Window to the West” and new capital, which he began to build in 1702 on the Baltic Sea. The city rose near the site of a Swedish fort captured during the Great Northern War and named after his patron saint. It cost thousands of serf’s lives to build and so was later called “the city built on bones.” Yet the city provided a haven for Russia’s new navy and offered access to western European lands through the Baltic Sea. Peter made St. Petersburg the center of an efficient government. He literally moved the government into new buildings, in a city designed by Italian architects. After Peter, Russia had two capitals: Moscow in the Russian heartland and the new administrative and home of the czar on the Baltic.

Peter the Great was succeeded by his wife, Catherine I, the first woman to be Tsarina of Russia. She continued the westernization of her husband, worked well with government ministers and reduced many burdens on the peasants, earning her a reputation among the peasants as just and fair. She died in 1727 and was succeeded by Peter II, the son of Peter the Great’s son who had died in 1718. Peter II died of smallpox in 1730 and was succeeded by Anna, a niece of Peter the Great. She died in 1740 and was succeeded by Ivan IV, an infant and her grand nephew. He was replaced that same year by Elizabeth, (1741–1762), the daughter of Peter the Great who vigorously led her country into the War of Austrian Succession and the Seven Years' War. Elizabeth was succeeded by her nephew, Peter III, who was an admirer of the Prussian military. He immediately withdrew Russia’s support from the war and allowed Frederick the Great to win the war. A few weeks later he was assassinated and succeed by the most able of Peter the Great’s successors, Catherine II, better known to history as Catherine the Great.

V - Catherine the Great
Catherine the Great (reigned 1762-1796) was not Russian at all; rather she was a German princess, Sophia  of Anhalt-Zerbst, born in 1729 in Stettin in Pomerania on the Baltic. She was married to Peter III before the death of Elizabeth in an arranged marriage. It was an unhappy marriage and many think that she was part of the conspiracy to overthrow Peter. Whether or not that is true, Sophia, who became Catherine when she was received into the Orthodox Church, became more Russian than the Russians and became determined to serve her people making the Russian language and religion her own. Most importantly, she was determined to continue the westernizing reforms of Peter the Great.

Catherine increased the effectiveness of her governmental bureaucracy by appointing officials steeped in western European education and outlook. She organized Russia into fifty administrative provinces, each headed by a governor answerable to her. She made crystal clear the position of the nobility and the urban classes in the Charter of the Nobility and the parallel Charter of the Towns. Catherine was a child of the Enlightenment but like Frederick the Great was also a determined autocrat who guarded her power jealously. It is important to understand that even though she pushed for political and economic advances, she had no intention of sharing her autonomy. She kept this balance by keeping the nobility happy by confirming their privileges especially their medieval style domination over the peasants.

Catherine was enamored with the philosophes and had enormous admiration for western European culture and especially France. She herself was well educated and formed friendships with many leaders of the Enlightenment, especially Diderot, Voltaire and Montesquieu. As a result, Catherine came to play a key role in what has come to be called the Russian Enlightenment which encouraged the arts and sciences, the first Russian university, library, theatre, public museum, and relatively independent press. Yet with all these accomplishments and reforms, Catherine did not want any reforms that might endanger her authority. She pointed out to Diderot, You write on paper, but I have to write on human skin, which is far more ticklish.

Now as much as Catherine was an Enlightened Despot and infatuated with the progress and reform, towards the end of her reign she cooled dramatically. Two events led Catherine to cool and eventually end her flirtation with enlightened reforms. The first was in 1773 when a Cossack, Emelian Pugachev, led a rebellion in the steppes north of the Caspian Sea. The rebels (peasants, Cossacks, exiles and serfs) wanted an end to taxes, government intrusion, the draft and went on a rampage in which they killed thousands of noble landlords, governments officials and Orthodox priests. Their army was destroyed in 1774 and Pugachev was taken to Moscow in chains. (Drawn & quartered and displayed as a warning).

The second was the French Revolution of 1789 which we shall discuss in the next chapter. The horror and bloodshed of this uprising, which was inspired by the thinking of men like Denis Diderot and the philosophes, so horrified Catherine that it might happen in Russia, that she completely abandoned both westernization and reform in Russia. After her death, Russia would fight between westernization and cultural isolation like China, Japan and the Islamic Empires. These ultra conservative polices (reactionary is a better word) would lead to Imperial Russia’s inability to meet the challenges of the early 20th century, the fall of the Romanov dynasty in 1917 and the subsequent Communist Revolution.

VI - Alexander I
Catherine died in 1796 and was succeeded by her son, Paul. Paul lived an unhappy childhood under the strong hand of his mother and grew into a morose and mean individual. During his short reign, he was oppressive to sons and tyrannical to those closest to him. So in 1801, Paul was assassinated and succeeded by his son, Alexander. Like his grandmother, Catherine the Great, Alexander was a child of the Enlightenment. In the first half of his reign his was a reformer. Alexander created a State Council to be an advisory body to the Tsar and, although the council could only make recommendations to the Tsar, its purpose nevertheless was to improve the legislative process and serve as a model for a true legislature in the future. Alexander eased censorship, promoted education and founded universities. And he allowed all classes (the serfs excepted) to own land (the privilege that was previously confined to the nobility) and even talked about freeing the serfs.

Alexander fought well in the Napoleonic wars and even though the Russian armies were among the best in Europe and acquitted themselves well, Napoleon defeated the Russians at the Battle of Austerlitz in 1805 and Alexander was forced to into a somewhat unwilling alliance with Napoleon even though, when the two met at Tilsit (on an elaborate raft on the Niemen River) he was charmed by Napoleon and held the French emperor in high esteem. But that alliance fell apart in 1809 and Napoleon invaded Russia in 1812. And when French soldiers desecrate the Kremlin, his admiration for Napoleon disappeared. 

After Napoleon’s defeat and the Congress of Vienna, there was a decided change in Alexander. He became gloomy, deeply religious, mystical and suspicious of people.  More seriously for Russia, however, he allowed Russia to fall terribly behind in industrialization, the military sciences and technology. In 1825, he mysteriously died in the Crimea.  

 

Since the 1960’s much scholarship has focused around a holy man or steretz who lived in Siberia from the 1830s to 1860, Feodor Kuzmich. Testimony from many sources has hinted that Kuzmich might have been Alexander. Alexander did die under quite unusual circumstances. He appeared in Siberia with no known past. He was surrounded by mystery and led a hermit’s existence. Many stories about him give intriguing clues. Once he was visited by the archbishop of Irkutsk. The two men kissed each other’s hands, bowed to each other and talked alone for a long time in a “strange language” (i.e., French, the court language). On more than one occasion he was recognized by old soldiers.

Once in an unguarded moment, Kuzmich reminisced about old Russian field marshals who fought the Turks and defended Russia against Napoleon’s 1812 invasion. He was able, for example to describe in detail, a meeting held with Napoleon on a raft on the Niemen River. He would always ask those who recognized him not to tell anyone who he was. He was visited by the Grand Duke Nicholas who became Nicholas II, the last Tsar.

And the most tantalizing clue of all is the finding of a small sachet of Kuzmich’s that contained a note written in cipher (which was not translated until after World War I): We have discovered a terrible flaw in our son. We must hide tonight. It was written by his father Paul the night he was assassinated. The theory is that Alexander had carried the guild his entire life. Whether or not Kuzmich was Alexander, the Tsar Nicholas II had a small but beautiful chapel built over his grave and, when the Bolsheviks opened Alexander’s grave during the 1920s, it was empty.

VII - The Russian Empire in Europe

As we have studied, Russian expansion began under Ivan the Great and led to the creation of an empire that was not dissolved until 1991 with the breakup of the Soviet Union. From Ivan’s reign on,  Russia pushed westward at the expense Poland, Lithuania and the Ottoman Empire. Russian Cossacks won control of the entire Volga River Valley and begun an eastward movement over the Ural Mountains and across Siberia to the Bearing Strait. When the Khanate of the Golden Horde declined, the Lithuanians united with Poland and created a state that stretched from the Baltic to the Black Seas.

During the reign of Ivan IV, the Poles and the Lithuanians organized a dual republican state with separate legal and administrative systems, but ruled in common by an elected king and parliament. In theory, it was a good government, but in reality, it was not able to meet the challenges posed its varied population and Russia. Poland and Lithuania were Roman Catholic, but all the other Slavs, such as White Russians in modern Belarus and the Ukrainians were Orthodox.

It is important to understand the idea of the Gathering in of the Russian Land and Russian anger against Poland because of the Polish incursions into Russia during the Time of Troubles and the different cultural and religious traditions within the Polish-Lithuanian state. A Ukrainian adventurer, Bogdan Khmelnitsky, angry because Poland killed his son, united the peasants of Ukraine against their Polish rulers and sought union with Moscow because of common cultural and religious identity. In 1655, war broke out and ended in 1667 with the Ukraine and its capital of Kiev being returned to Russia and tsar Alexis, just about 10 years before Peter the Great inherited the Russian throne.

The Fate of Poland: Poland’s woes and Russia’s anger would not go away. The Polish parliament operated under a crippling handicap of requiring unanimous consent to make laws. The policy created such instability and weakness in the Polish state that it could not defend itself against its predatory neighbors. Three times, in 1772, 1793 and 1795, Prussia, Russia and Austria partitioned (divided up) Poland, each time slicing another chunk for each of them, until Poland was wiped off the map. Poland would not regain independence until 1918.

As Russia annexed more Polish Territory, she absorbed large a number of Jews. Poland had become a refuge for Jews since the mid 13th century. Catherine the Great created The Pale of Settlement in 1791 which was a border region of in which Jews were allowed to live. The Pale included much of present-day Latvia, Lithuania, Belarus, Poland, Ukraine, and parts of western Russia. It did not, however, include the key imperial cities of Moscow or Saint Petersburg, which were declared off-limits to Jews. Catherine’s intent was to prevent Jews from joining the growing Russian Middle Class. Jews were also forbidden to live in agricultural centers and towns such Kiev, Sevastopol and Yalta; and forced to move to small provincial towns where they formed small communities. The Pale caused much suffering among the Jewish communities.

One particular torment was the Pogrom in which the police/military either stood by or spearheaded local Russians to attack and even kill Jews. Such policies caused many Jews to emigrate in the late-nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, mainly to the United States.

During the later decades of the eighteenth century, Russia expanded south into Ottoman territories in Europe. Russian troops poured into the Balkans and annexed the Crimea outright from what was left of the Khanate of the Golden Horde. The Russians were planning to capture Istanbul, but France and Britain, fearing a destabilization of the area and a rise of Russian hegemony halted the Russian advance. Catherine the Great even named a grandson Constantine in the hope that Istanbul would become Russian.
VIII - The Russian Empire in Asia
The Khanates: Russia also began expanding to the east and southeast into less densely populated and less technologically developed areas of central Asia and Siberia. The Mongol empires had broken into separate khanates of Kazan, Astrakhan and the Crimea. In 1552, Ivan IV occupied Kazan in the upper Volga River Valley and then annexed Astrakhan in the lower Volga River Valley near the Caspian Sea. These conquests opened Safavid Persia to trade and open the way to Central Asia and the Caucasus. It also meant that significant numbers of Islamic and Turkish peoples were coming under Russian hegemony. In Chapters 17 and 18, we shall see how the British and the Russians played the “Great Game” of espionage and diplomatic intrigue in the decades leading up to World War I.

The Caucasus: In 1783, Georgia, a country in the Caucasus that traced it royal lineage to king David of Israel, fearing the Ottoman Turks, sought the protection of the Russians and signed a treaty whereby the Russians guaranteed to protect Georgia.  But not only did the Russians not defend Georgia but in 1801 also occupied Georgia. Georgia with its lush countryside and breathtaking mountain scenery became a favorite of the Boyars and still remains today a favorite vacation spot for modern Russians. In 1813, Russia absorbed Azerbaijan and, shortly after the death of Alexander I, Armenia would be absorbed as well.

Siberia: Russian expansion also moved eastward into the dense forests and tundras of Siberia. Some say that Siberia is derived from the Tatar for sleeping land; others that it is connected to the Sabir people. In 1581, the wealthy Stroganov family of merchants employed free-lance adventurer named Ermak to capture a khanate named Sibir in the Ural Mountains. The Stroganovs, just like the FEDs in North America, wanted access to Siberian furs and the wealth they would bring. Soon, the Russians were building small settlement-forts throughout Siberia and forcing the native peoples to supply fur pelts as tribute. Siberia was home to at least twenty-six ethnic peoples (Yakut, Yenets, Nenets, Huns, Scythians, and Uyghurs) who lived by hunting, trapping, fishing and reindeer herding. They were varied in language and religion and responded to the more technologically advanced Russians in many ways. Some accepted European tools, textiles, foodstuffs and liquor and readily exchanged them for furs. Others resisted Russian occupation and encroachment on their lands.

The Yakut people of the Lena and Aldan River Valleys resisted the most strongly and revolted in 1642. The Russian reprisals were terrible and continued for forty years forcing the Yakut out of their communities and reducing their population by almost seventy percent. The Yakut and most of the other native peoples also suffered population declines due to smallpox and other European diseases to which they had not built up immunities. As the violence increased and the fur trade declined, the Russian government came to recognize that it was in their own best interests to protect the indigenous peoples of Siberia.

A strong parallel can be made with the decline of the Encomendia and Repartimento systems in Latin America and their being replaced by less-unjust economic, closer-to-free-market system (i.e., happy workers are more productive than unhappy workers).

The Russians took Orthodox Christianity with them into Siberia; Peter the Great first sent missionaries in hopes of converting the indigenous peoples of Siberia to Orthodoxy and bringing them into mainstream Russian society. But few indigenous peoples were interested or converted even though it meant that they were no longer had to pay the fur tribute. This is in stark contrast to the Spanish and Portuguese who actively and forcefully brought Native Americans into the Roman Catholic Church and more along the lines of the French. Those Siberians who did convert did so mostly to serve the needs of the Russians. But the bottom line was that most Siberians continued to practice their native religions led by the shamans.

As time went by the European population of Siberia grew: trappers, Cossacks and other soldiers, social misfits and criminals, and even prisoners of war. Many were discouraged by the challenging terrain and climate – especially the brutally cold winters. But one great advantage was that Siberia was far from Moscow’s authority. Serfdom never crossed into Siberia which attracted peasants looking for a new start. By 1763, there were about 425,000 Russian migrants which was about twice the size of the ethnic populations. The government in Moscow also began the prototype of the twentieth century Soviet Gulags of the U.S.S.R. to exile prisoners to Siberia - like the Old Believer priest, Avvakum.

North America: In the Eighteenth Century the Russians continued to look east and commissioned the Danish sailor Vitus Bering to undertake two expeditions (1725-1730 and 1733-1742) to determine first how far east the Siberian mainland extended, since it was still unknown whether Asia and North America were connected; and second to push further and explore Alaska. Bering discovered the strait that separates Siberia from Alaska which is named for him, the Bering Strait, and explored northern Asia as far as the Kamchatka Peninsula. Later Russians explorers settled in Alaska and proceeded south as far south as western Canada and northern California establishing an outpost in Northern California, Fort Ross. In 1867, the Russians would sell Alaska to the United States.

The Pacific and Hawaii: By 1800, Russian sailors were sailing the Pacific and even built a small fort-trading post on the island of Kauai in the Hawaiian Islands.

Japan: In the Far East, Russians became active in fur-trapping in Kamchatka and in the Kuril Islands. This spurred Russian interest in opening trade with Japan for food and supplies. In 1783 storms drove a Japanese sea-captain ashore in the Aleutian Islands. Russian authorities helped his party, and the Russian government decided to use him as a trade envoy. In 1791, Catherine granted him an audience and in 1792 the Russian government dispatched a trade-mission to Japan. But even though the Tokugawa government received the mission, it continued to adhere to its foreign policy of Sakoku (locked country) and negotiations failed.

 

IX - Russian Society
When Ivan the Great adopted the Byzantine Double-Headed Eagle as the symbol of Russia, he symbolically described the Russian land which was overwhelmingly agricultural, thirty times larger and France or Spain, home to millions of inhabitants and having traditions that were rooted in the east and the west. It is important to understand that the traditions of the east and the lack of technological growth would hold Russia back and we have already seen how Peter the Great tried to force Russia to modernize and look to the west.

Peasants traditionally lived in extended families and the male heads of household often gathered to make decisions for small villages. They allocated land and negotiated with the Boyar landowners and tax collectors of the Tsar. Peasant women did domestic work and were responsible for arranging marriages. Unlike many women in contemporary societies around the world, Russian women retained control of their dowries and enjoyed more financial independence and respect.

Although most peasants east of Ural Mountains were free, most European peasants were serfs bound to the land owned by the Boyars, the Orthodox Church (mostly monasteries) or the Tsars. During the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries the conditions of the serfs became increasingly difficult. They were forced to work for the nobility who constantly pressured the Tsars to limit the serf’s right to marry or move off the land.

Under Alexis Romanov, the government passed the Law Code of 1649 under which the serfs were placed under the strict control of the landlords and – in effect – established a rigid, caste-like social order that kept the serfs on the lands and discouraged any kind of mobility.  The code further required artisans and merchants to register their new born children into their father’s occupations and raise them into their father’s trade.

The Law Code of 1649 clearly favored the nobility and gave them the ability to force the peasants to work for them, both as a labor force and cultivating their lands to that they could derive agricultural income from their estates.

We have already seen how Catherine the Great – in order to cement her power – gave the nobility a free hand over the serfs. She wanted the nobility to support her centralizing policies and her opening the government bureaucracies and military to men seeped in the Enlightenment. In return she gave the nobility a free hand over their peasants. They could deploy laborers as they saw fit, levy fees and taxes and administer punishments, often cruel such as cutting off noses or ears. Catherine strengthened her position, but betrayed her people and helped to lay a root of bitterness that would blossom horribly after Russia’s defeat in World War I.

X - Trade and Industry
Trade with the west formally began during the reign of Ivan IV when a 1551 English expedition searching for a northwest passage to Asia was able to go no further east than the site of modern city of Archangel on the White Sea.  Ivan had the crew escorted to Moscow and offered them concessions to trade in Russia and the resulting company, the Muscovy Company, was chartered in 1505 and had a monopoly on trade between England and Russia until 1698 surviving as a trading company until the Russian Revolution of 1917.  Shortly later, Dutch traders began trading in Northern Russia and the port/trading city of Archangel was founded in 1584 where it became a center were Russian furs, leather and grain were traded by European armaments, textiles, paper and silver.

As they expanded into South Asia, the Russians traded with the Gunpowder Empires. Astrakhan at the delta of the Volga River became a southern Archangel and home to merchants from as far away as Mughal India. Some Indian merchants even sailed up the Volga River and traded in Moscow. Russian merchants were not as well organized and resented foreign merchants making profits so the Tsars required foreign merchants to reside and conduct their business within the Russian Empire. This is why there was Germantown in Moscow where Peter the Great explored as a child. Foreign merchants were also forbidden to trade in tobacco and alcohol. But the bottom line was that foreign merchants were an integral part of the Russian economy.

Peter the Great was responsible for the first wholesale attempt to industrialize Russia. He sought out engineers and other experts to help industrialize Russia. He recruited shipbuilders, military officers, teachers and industrial specialists; he offered loans, subsidies, tax breaks and tariff protection to those willing to establish factories in Russia. His efforts created about two hundred new factories and industrial plants specializing in iron production, armaments, textiles, glass, paper and leather goods. In a decree of 1721, Peter permitted factory owners to buy serfs to work in their factories. Peter’s efforts accomplished much but did not bring Russia anywhere near England or the Netherlands as an industrial power. Nevertheless, Peter had taken the first step and cities grew in size to keep pace with growing economic growth.

XI - Crisis in the Church
Westernization also caused crises in the Russian Orthodox Church in the Seventeenth Century as a group of religious reformers arose who wanted to make the Russian Church more in sync with the Greek Orthodox and other European Orthodox churches which they felt practiced a more correct form of Orthodoxy. The most influential of the reformers was the Patriarch Nikon. Nikon (1605-1681); he was the son of a peasant and rose to prominence in the church under the patronage of the Tsar Alexis I. In 1652 he was elected Patriarch of Moscow and became leader of the reform party. He consulted the most learned Orthodox prelates from Greece, Constantinople and Kiev, conferred with them; and finally became convinced that the Russian liturgical books and ceremonies were often heterodox. He and the reformers established schools and academies that offered instruction in Latin and Greek as well as Church Slavonic (which was the ritual language of the Russian Church) and began to build churches in the Byzantine style.

The goal of the reformers was to eliminate the discrepancies between Greek and Russian liturgy and theology. The reformers wanted corrections made in spelling, text of the Nicene Creed and other texts which to us seem trivial. But the most explosive was a change in the way the Sign of the Cross was made. It was made a requirement for Russians, especially the clergy, to make the Sign of the Cross with the first two fingers joined with the thumb in a point rather than the old Russian way of two fingers, pointing finger straight and the middle finger bent. Trivial it may seem to the modern mind, this requirement cause great resentment among conservatives, many of whom resisted fiercely. The Solovetsky Monastery near Archangel, for example, used gunpowder canons to hold out against the Tsar’s army for seven years before they were overcome in 1676.

The religious conservatives found their own champion in Avvakum who saw Nikon’s reforms as a corruption of the Church, which he and the conservatives considered to be the "true" Church. Avvakum, once a friend of Tsar Alexis, argued that Constantinople fell to the Turks because it had adopted the very heretical beliefs that Nikon called reforms. Thus he and the conservatives feared that the reforms would endanger their eligibility to receive God’s grace and threaten their salvation. For his opposition, Avvakum was repeatedly imprisoned. For the last fourteen years of his life he was imprisoned in a sunken, log-framed hut before finally being burned at the stake.

The religious conservatives came to be called the Old Believers and they fiercely rejected all innovations, and the most radical amongst them maintained that the official Church had fallen into the hands of the Antichrist. Nevertheless, at the Synod of 1666 they, their old books and the old rites were anathematized. From that moment, they officially lacked all civil rights. The State church had the most active Old Believers arrested, and executed several of them. Perhaps the most famous was Feodosia Morozova, who joined the Old Believers' and secretly took monastic vows with the name Theodora. Brutally treated, she was starved to death in a cellar of a monastery. At least forty groups of Old Believers martyred themselves by boarding boats and setting fire to the boats as they burned to death along many of Russia’s rivers.

Nevertheless, the Old Believers, even though they fragmented in many groups, and never established any coherent system of beliefs, remained about twenty to twenty-five percent of Russia’s Orthodox population.  In 1905, Tsar Nicholas II gave them religious freedom and in 1971 the Moscow Patriarchate revoked the anathemas against them. It is interesting to note that most of early twentieth century Russia’s most prominent politicians, industrialists and patrons of the arts, came from the ranks of the Old Believers.

The Old Believer Schism weakened the Russian Orthodox Church, but strengthened the Russian state. Peter the Great continued the Ceasaropapist trend and simply made the Russian Orthodox Church another department of state. Peter thus displaced much of the authority the Patriarch of Moscow and established a state council to supervise church affairs. The council was forced to do the Tsars bidding and they named bishops handpicked by the Tsar. By controlling appointments of the Bishops, the Tsar was able to control the clergy in an effective manner.

XIII - Westernization and the Enlightenment in Russia
Peter and Catherine added new wrinkles to Russian cultural life by sponsoring the introduction of western European art, Literature, and ideas. Inspired by French Ballet, Peter brought it to Russia and it soon took on a vibrant Russian identity that endures to this day. Peter was also deeply interested in Education. Before Peter the Great, education was the monopoly of the Russian Orthodox Church, and, outside of seminaries, there was no advanced education. In 1714, Peter created a system of elementary schools that taught reading, writing, and basic science in Russia’s provincial capitals. Ten years later, in 1724, he founded an Academy of Science, which offered University level education along Western European lines.

Catherine continued Peter’s interest in fostering increased education in Russia, mostly by expanding Peter’s elementary school system into a vast network of primary education to educate all children, except serfs.  She even opened the first Russian school for girls. In spite of few trained teachers, she helped to lay the foundation for widespread literacy in Russia.

Catherine founded the Hermitage Museum and commissioned impressive architecture all over Russia. Catherine also sponsored Enlightenment ideas in Russia. Peter had looked to Western Europe for technology, but Catherine looked to Western Europe for Philosophy. She harnessed and introduced the cultural forces of the Enlightenment for the benefit of her country. She herself translated a little bit of Shakespeare and wrote several plays. She had herself inoculated against smallpox (a daring step) and two million Russians followed her. She patronized the arts, especially artists, playwrights, and poets. Her efforts helped to turn Russian into a modern, creative language – and Russian Literature began to flourish.

Catherine’s encouragement of cultural experimentation facilitated the emergence of an intellectual class known as the Intelligentsia. Although writers and critics who composed the intelligentsia had no legal status, they enjoyed recognition as an unofficial social estate and worked strenuously to influence public opinion and state policy. They produced Thick Journals, which were monthly publications with news on the latest developments in science, philosophy and the arts. These provided the basis for political and cultural debate and the taking of Russian society into modern times.

XIII - Summary: Westernized but Not Western
Between Ivan III and the death of Alexander I, Russia had asserted its independence among Slavic and non Slavic peoples and had created a strong, centralized state in which the nobility and their interests dominated the political and economic structures of society. Russia had westernized but had not become western. Under Peter and Catherine,  Russia had imported western military organization, technology, bureaucratic methodologies, law codes and Enlightenment ideas, but the elite of Russia were not willing to reform serfdom or truly transform Russia’s giant agricultural economy into an industrial one. The gap between the peasant and the elite continued to grow and create tensions which – 120 years after Catherine’s death – would bring down the Romanov dynasty and the old order.