Russian History: A Very Short Introduction

Catherine II (the Great, r. 1762–96) attempted to broaden the social and cultural basis of the monarchy and to give it a foundation of legality, as that was understood in 18th-century Europe. She herself came to the throne through a Guards coup against her husband, Peter III, and so needed extra legitimation. This is not the only explanation of her concern for institutions, however. She was an eager student of European Enlightenment political thinkers, and in 1767 she undertook an unusually bold experiment to establish a ‘legal monarchy’: she convened an elected Legislative Commission to create a new Law Code. This was not just a return to the Muscovite practice of occasional consultation with elites: Catherine’s Commission was broadly elected and represented state officials, nobles, merchants, Cossacks, state peasants, and non-Russian communities; the only absentees were serfs and clergymen. As in France two decades later, deputies brought with them from their electors petitions and proposals for reform. Catherine never intended the Commission to limit her power; as she stated in the lengthy document she put before it, she believed in absolute rule since ‘there is no other authority . . . that can act with a vigour proportionate to the extent of such a vast domain’. But she did want it to establish law as a basis for that absolute rule.

In the event, she was disappointed. The proposals of the various estates displayed a predominant concern with their own narrowly conceived interests, rather than with the needs of the state or the population as a whole. It was difficult to fashion a new Law Code out of them, and at the outbreak of the Turkish war in 1768 Catherine prorogued the sessions. She never reconvened the Commission, but did use its materials in further lawmaking. She correctly discerned that Russia’s greatest need was for ‘intermediate’ institutions between the state and the population. She tried to provide for them by creating new local government institutions, provinces (gubernii) and districts (uezdy), in which the nobility would play the main role. Peter III had already freed the nobility from the obligation to perform state service. She went further: her Charter to the Nobility (1785) guaranteed its property, freed it from corporal punishment, and allowed it to set up its own assemblies in each guberniia and uezd, with power to appoint local officials.

6. A contemporary portrait of Catherine the Great

She issued a parallel charter to the cities. Together, they fixed the form of local government and much of provincial social and political life until the 1917 revolution. The nobles became the only estate to have guaranteed rights, and this fact meant that serfdom became even more arbitrary: serfs had no legal protection against abuse. Russia was now run by a ruling class with its own defined rights, with a Europeanized culture and complete power over the persons of its serfs. This internal cultural and social gulf defined Russian life for the next century. The serfs, for their part, were perfectly capable of discerning that, while they still had state obligations, their superiors had none.

The brief reign of Emperor Paul (r. 1796–1801) illustrated what happened when an Emperor broke the convention that he should rule with the consent of the elite. Paul took the view, which would have been applauded by most peasants, that the nobles’ privileges were unjustified. He abolished their exemption from state service, closed down their provincial associations, and instead appointed local officials himself. He decreed that their estates should be taxed on the same basis as peasant land. He ended their freedom from corporal punishment, and curtailed their right to travel abroad and to receive foreign literature. At the same time, he gave peasants the right to petition him personally about mistreatment at the hands of their lords.

There is little doubt that Paul’s personality was unbalanced. He was given to sudden changes of mood and uncontrollable attacks of rage, when he would insult even his highest officials and advisers. The same, though, had been true of Peter the Great. In 1801, however, a group of Guards officers, led by the governor-general of St Petersburg, deposed Paul, with the consent of his son, Alexander. They then went on to murder him – something to which Alexander had not consented. Paul’s innovations were then quietly retracted.