The rebellion of 1773

Pugachev Administering Justice to the Population. Painting by Vasily Perov

The rebellion of 1773 was not confined to a single group of malcontents. Its leader, Emelyan Pugachev, united under his banner without discrimination members of every social and religious group which complained of the indifference St Petersburg had shown to the aspirations of the common man in Russia since the days of Peter the Great. The rising began among the Cossacks of the Yaik (Ural), where the hatred of the rank-and-file Cossack for his' elders' (most of them nominees of St Petersburg) had been intensified by Catherine's decision to put an end to the autonomous status of the Cossack hosts in 1772. Defeated in their first encounter with government troops, the rebels were reorganised by Pugachev, himself a Don Cossack and a deserter from the Russian army. In the autumn of 1773 Pugachev proclaimed that the report of Peter Ill's death was an official fabrication, and that he himself was the former emperor. By this ruse he gained thousands of new supporters to his cause, the Cossacks now being joined by peasants working in the factories of the southern Urals, by non-Russian elements in the local population, such as the Kirghiz and Bashkirs, and by groups of Old Believers. The fate of the Old Believers had varied greatly since the beginning of the eighteenth century. Peter the Great's policy of conditional tolerance had been abandoned by his immediate successors, and under Elizabeth the authorities had organized military expeditions to convert dissenters to the official faith. Peter in, on the other hand, shocked the Synod by condemning persecution on religious grounds: and, though Catherine imposed no penalties on the Old Believers, it was her husband's name that they associated with religious freedom.

By the end of October 1773 Pugachev's motley army was at the gates of Orenburg, and the surrounding countryside was entirely in his hands. A force of 1500 government troops from Moscow failed to dislodge him, and it needed a full-size army under Prince Bibikov to raise the siege of Orenburg. Defeated here, Pugachev moved north into the Bashkir region, promising the inhabitants he would drive the Petersburgers out for ever. Defeated again, he outflanked the government force, moved westward towards the Volga, captured the stronghold of Kazan and thereby turned his Cossack revolt into a peasant war. In the countryside around Kazan serfs rose up against their masters and plundered their estates, and it was expected that the rebel army was about to march on Moscow. Defences were erected around the ancient capital and Alexander Suvorov, fresh from his victories in Poland and Turkey, was dispatched to engage the rebels in battle. But Pugachev had overreached himself, and, instead of making for Moscow, he turned southward to his home country, the valley of the Don. On the march his army was decimated by desertions; the Don Cossacks refused to give him any further support; and by January 1775 he had been betrayed to Suvorov's forces, tried and hanged.

In the final stages of the campaign Catherine had moved to Moscow to form a clearer picture of the military situation, to discover how it was that the rebellion had spread so far and so fast, .and to decide how a recurrence could be prevented. In the first place, she felt it necessary to make clear where her own sympathies lay in the conflict between serf and landowner, and issued a public statement that the welfare and security of the nobility were inseparable from those of the empire as a whole. Secondly, the rebellion had revealed the shortcomings of the existing system of local government. The haphazard methods which had prevailed since the reign of Peter II, and by which each provincial governor was permitted to administer his province virtually as he wished, led to evasion of responsibility, difficulties in obtaining reliable information and delay in organising countermeasures; and Catherine decided to lay the foundations of a more stable and reliable system as soon as possible. Some work on drafting a new local government statute had already been done by one of the surviving committees of the 1767 commission. The empress took over the uncompleted draft from the committee and, with the help of Jacob Sievers, Governor General of Novgorod, she composed most of the final text herself. Inspiration for the new statute, she said, came from Blackstone's Commentaries on the Laws of England, which she had read in a French translation early in 1774. Her purpose, she alleged, was to allow the Russian nobility to play the same role in local government as the gentry in England. But for the greater part of the statute the true source was to be found much nearer home. In their petitions of 1767 the nobility had asked for properly established administrative councils and law-courts in the provinces, and had suggested that some posts in the new system of local government be filled by their own elected representatives. Catherine decided to accede to this request by extending over the whole of European Russia the system of administration which already existed in the Baltic provinces acquired from Sweden in 1721.

Russia 18th Century – Catherine the Great’s continues Peter the Great’s Reforms

Empress Catherine The Great 1787.

In the fifty years between the founding of St Petersburg and the end of the Seven Years War, the river fortress and business capital planned by Peter the Great had been transformed into a rambling showplace of luxury and leisure. The Russian nobility, conscripted by Peter into lifetime service in the armed forces or the administration, had since 1735 evaded more and more of their responsibilities. In February 1762 they had been relieved of their obligation to serve the state at all: and, while many of them were content to slip backward into the unimaginable idleness of provincial life, families which remained at court and in the capital seemed determined to spend their way into extinction. The modest buildings erected by Peter's architects had been surrounded and outnumbered by new palaces for monarch and members of the court alike, designed on more expansive lines by Rastrelli and his compatriots from Venice. Thrift was not highly regarded as a virtue in a period when unspent fortunes might be confiscated overnight after a palace revolution.

But St Petersburg was only the shop-window of the new empire. For the trappers scattered in settlements along the northern rivers, for the peasants who struggled to win a livelihood from the unyielding soil of central Russia, life had changed little from the days of Muscovy, except that taxes were higher and each village had to surrender more of its menfolk for the army. Peter's plans to create a new system of local government, new law-courts and a country-wide network of elementary schools had all been abandoned through indifference or lack of funds. Even in Moscow, where a new university had been founded in 1755, 'the streets still lay three arsheens deep in ignorance'. The new freedom acquired by the landowners was not matched by any corresponding concessions to their serfs, though the landowners' obligation to serve the tsar had long been regarded as a moral justification for serfdom. On the contrary, most landowners were demanding higher rentals or more labour from their serfs. The College of Mines had been unable to make a profit from the state iron-foundries in the Urals, and by 1740 nearly all of them had been let out to private operators. For a short period during the 1750s Russia had been producing and exporting more iron than any other country in Europe, but by 1763 output was already declining. Prospectors were unable to find coal and iron-ore in reasonable proximity in Russia and, as the Russian operators could not change over from charcoal to coke smelting, they were soon to lose their predominating position to Britain. While Peter the Great had taken pride in his feat of keeping the budget balanced throughout the Great Northern War, none of his successors even attempted to follow his example. In spite of new and ingenious forms of indirect taxation, and though state revenue had been swelled by the appropriation of income from church lands since 1757, the treasury was exhausted when Russia withdrew from the Seven Years War. For eight months in 1762 Russian soldiers in Pomerania had not received a single copeck of their pay.

Nothing then would have served the Russian people better than four or five decades of peace in which to revive and consolidate Peter's efforts to create the sinews of a modern state: but for some time to come peace at least was not vouchsafed to them. In 1762 providence instead provided Russia with the most civilised, but at the same time the most ambitious and most prodigal ruler she had ever had. At the time of Catherine's accession no one in Russia or abroad foresaw that she was to reign longer than any of her predecessors since Peter the Great.

Before the end of the 1760s Catherine was to test, and abandon, two other methods of achieving a radical alteration in the character of the Russian people. In her studies of Russia as a young woman she had been particularly struck by the fact that Peter the Great's initiative in founding a country-wide network of secular schools had been abandoned by his successors, and after her accession she aimed not only to bring Peter's plan to fulfilment but also to refashion the educational system in such a way as to create 'a new breed of people'. In this project she was supported by Ivan Betsky who, as President of the Academy of Arts and Director of Public Works and Gardens, was also responsible for the embellishment of St Petersburg. Betsky was convinced that bad morals were merely the result of bad family upbringing and bad schooling, and that 'noble citizens' could be produced without difficulty by removing young children altogether from parental influence and educating them by special methods in conditions which precluded any contact with the outside world. After experiments with a school for foundlings in Moscow, both the gymnasium attached to the Academy of Sciences in St Petersburg and the Cadet Corps of the Nobility were opened to children aged 4-5 years, who followed a special curriculum designed by Betsky to inculcate moral virtues rather than learning. At the same time Catherine founded a society for the education of young noblewomen (later known as the Smolny Institute) which was to be run on identical lines.

For a short time, too, Catherine herself assumed the role of preceptor by offering moral guidance to the educated society of St Petersburg in the pages of a satirical journal. At the time social satire was a relatively new feature of Russian journalism. Its first exponent was the dramatist Sumarokov, whose Busy Bee (1759) had tilted at the arrogance and ignorance of the country nobility. Catherine, in her Omnium Gatherum (Vsyakaya Vsyachind) which first appeared in 1769, tried to improve the manners of her readers. She complained, for instance, that women spoke too loud in society, that they discussed unsuitable topics in front of their children. In one issue an imaginary correspondent, probably Catherine herself, asked the editors to distinguish between 'inborn and Russian' and 'evil and Tartar' habits. The editors replied that it was a Tartar habit to break promises, an ancient Russian custom to observe them. Impoliteness, greed and envy were all Tartar habits. Five or six other journals of this type appeared during 1769. Some of them played the role of admiring pupil to Catherine's Omnium Gatherum, trying to show how well her lessons had been learnt: but one, The Drone, had stronger meat to offer. Its editor, Nikolay Novikov, had been secretary of one of the committees in the commission of 1767, and in The Drone he criticised the nobility for their attitude to the merchants and their treatment of the serfs. Catherine's journal reproved him for striking too serious a note. Their first literary skirmish lasted barely a year, but it was to be resumed in earnest before the end of the reign. The empress's abandonment of her venture into journalism marked the end of her preoccupation with good principles as the best recipe for good living and good government.

18th Century Russian Naval Power

When he made his country a Baltic power, Peter the Great had largely founded the first Russian navy with English and Dutch assistance. This navy fell into neglect after his death, until it was revived by Catherine II for her Turkish and Swedish wars. A large proportion of its officers were still of foreign extraction, but the Russians were by this date building more of their own ships, often under the supervision of foreign technicians. Of the British contingent of officers Sir Charles Knowles, John Elphinston and Samuel Greig were the most distinguished. On the conclusion of the American war, many half-pay officers entered the Russian service, though when it was proposed to employ Paul Jones as their commander in the Baltic they threatened to resign rather than serve under a man whom they regarded as a renegade; Jones was consequently employed for a short time in the Black Sea. Samuel Bentham, originally a colonel in the Russian army and later Inspector General of the Royal Navy, played an important part in fitting out a galley fleet against the Turks in the Crimea, and in 1787 a gun foundry was established near Lake Ladoga where British engineers introduced the carronade and other new forms of artillery.

In 1769 Russian ships first appeared in the Mediterranean, where the fleet was commanded by Admiral Orlov, though it was Greig's conduct of the fireships which defeated the Turks at Tchesma. By the outbreak of the second Turkish war in 1787 Russia had acquired bases in the Crimea, so that a Black Sea fleet, first under Voinovitch and then under Ushakov, was now a possibility. This fleet increased from seven to twenty-one of the line in four years. The larger Baltic fleet of fifty-four of the line (though only a quarter of these were in commission) was used at the same date for the war against Sweden. Its commander, Greig, was killed in the only outstanding victory at Hogland, the success at Viborg in 1790 being due rather to the inefficiency of the enemy than the energy of Tchitchagov, the new commander-in-chief. At the conclusion of the war Russia became the dominant Baltic power, and therefore the chief threat to the supply of vital naval stores to the West in the event of an Armed Neutrality.

There was a rapid increase in the size of the Baltic navies between 1780 and 1790—the Danish fleet increasing from 14 to 40, the Swedish from 15 to 27 and the Russian from 22 to over 50—on account of the alarms aroused by the Armed Neutrality and by the Spanish (or Nootka Sound) and Russian crises. Nevertheless, on 17 February 1792 the situation was such that Pitt could advise a reduction of the naval estimates on the ground that 'unquestionably there never was a time in the history of this country when, from the situation in Europe, we might more reasonably expect fifteen years of peace than we may at the present time'.