A Concise History of Russia

Accessible to students, tourists, and general readers alike, this book

provides a broad overview of Russian history since the ninth cen-
tury. Paul Bushkovitch emphasizes the enormous changes in the
understanding of Russian history resulting from the end of the
Soviet Union in 1991. Since then, new material has come to light
on the history of the Soviet era, providing new conceptions of
Russia’s pre-revolutionary past. The book traces not only the politi-
cal history of Russia, but also developments in its literature, art, and
science. Bushkovitch describes well-known cultural figures, such as
Chekhov, Tolstoy, and Mendeleev in their institutional and his-
torical contexts. Though the 1917 revolution, the resulting Soviet
system, and the Cold War were a crucial part of Russian and world
history, Bushkovitch presents earlier developments as more than
just a prelude to Bolshevik power.

Paul Bushkovitch is a professor of history at Yale University, where

he has taught for the past 36 years. He is the author of Peter the
Great: The Struggle for Power, 1671–1725 (Cambridge 2001); Reli-
gion and Society in Russia: The Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries
(1991); and The Merchants of Moscow, 1580–1650 (Cambridge
1980). His articles have appeared in Slavic Review, Russian Review,
Jahrbücher für Geschichte Osteruopas, and Kritika. He is a member
of the editorial board for the Cahiers du Monde Russe.
“For any student trying to get a grasp of the essentials of Russian
history this book is the place to start. To cover everything from the
origins of the Russian people to the collapse of the Soviet Union in
one short book requires great skill, but Paul Bushkovitch is one of
the leading experts on Russian history in the world and he manages
this task with great insight and panache.”
– Dominic Lieven, Trinity College, Cambridge University
“This is a lively and readable account, covering more than a thou-
sand years of Russian history in an authoritative narrative. The
author deals perceptively not only with political developments, but
also with those aspects of modern Russian culture and science that
have had an international impact.”
– Maureen Perrie, University of Birmingham
“If you want to understand Russia, and the story of the Russians,
you can do no better than Paul Bushkovitch’s A Concise History
of Russia. Bushkovitch has performed a minor miracle: he’s told
the remarkably complicated, convoluted, and controversial tale of
Russian history simply, directly, and even-handedly. He doesn’t get
mired in the details, lost in the twists and turns, or sidetracked by axe
grinding. He tells you what happened and why, full stop. So if you
want to know what happened and why in Russian history, you’d
be advised to begin with Bushkovitch’s masterful introduction.”
– Marshall Poe, University of Iowa
“Both learned and accessible, this short history of Russia’s troubled
passage to the present tells a story of a state and a people who
created an empire that much of the world saw as a threat. Whether
as the ‘Gendarme of Europe’ or the ‘Red Menace,’ Russia and its
Soviet successor (even Putin’s Russia today!) have been as much
misunderstood as they have been feared. Paul Bushkovitch brings
us a sober reading of Russia’s difficult rises and falls, expansions
and contractions, reforms and revolutions. Rather than seeing the
preceding millennium as a prelude to the seventy years of the Soviet
Union, he gives us a rounded portrait of a country hobbled and hum-
bled by its own geography, institutions like autocracy and serfdom,
and grandiose plans to create utopia. Judicious in its judgments,
this gracefully written work ranges from high politics to music and
literature to open a window through which a reader might begin or
renew an acquaintance with the enigmas that were Russia.”
– Ronald Grigor Suny, University of Michigan
 CAMBRIDGE CONCISE HISTORIES

This is a new series of illustrated “concise histories” of selected indi-

vidual countries, intended both as university and college textbooks
and as general historical introductions for general readers, travelers,
and members of the business community.

Other titles in the series:

A Concise History of Australia, 3rd Edition

stuart macintyre
A Concise History of Austria
steven beller
A Concise History of Bolivia, 2nd Edition
herbert s. klein
A Concise History of Brazil
boris fausto, translated by arthur brakel
A Concise History of Britain, 1707–1975
w. a. speck
A Concise History of Bulgaria, 2nd Edition
r. j. crampton
A Concise History of the Caribbean
b. w. higman
A Concise History of Finland
david kirby
A Concise History of France, 2nd Edition
roger price
A Concise History of Germany, 2nd Edition
mary fulbrook

Series list continues following the Index.

A Concise History
of Russia
PAUL BUSHKOVITCH
Yale University
 cambridge university press
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Singapore, São Paulo, Delhi, Tokyo, Mexico City
Cambridge University Press
32 Avenue of the Americas, New York, ny 10013-2473, usa
www.cambridge.org
Information on this title: www.cambridge.org/9780521543231


C Paul Bushkovitch 2012

This publication is in copyright. Subject to statutory exception

and to the provisions of relevant collective licensing agreements,
no reproduction of any part may take place without the written
permission of Cambridge University Press.

First published 2012

Printed in the United States of America

A catalog record for this publication is available from the British Library.

Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication data

Bushkovitch, Paul.
A concise history of Russia / Paul Bushkovitch.
p. cm. – (Cambridge concise histories)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
isbn 978-0-521-83562-6 (hardback : alk. paper) – isbn 978-0-521-54323-1
(pbk. : alk. paper)
1. Russia – History. 2. Soviet Union – History. 3. Russia (Federation) –
History. I. Title.
dk37.b86 2011
947–dc23 2011026272

isbn 978-0-521-83562-6 Hardback

isbn 978-0-521-54323-1 Paperback

Cambridge University Press has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of

urls for external or third-party Internet Web sites referred to in this publication
and does not guarantee that any content on such Web sites is, or will remain,
accurate or appropriate.
 CONTENTS

List of Figures page ix

Abbreviations xi
Acknowledgments xiii
Prologue xv

1. russia before russia 1

2. moscow, novgorod, lithuania,
and the mongols 19
3. the emergence of russia 37
4. consolidation and revolt 59
5. peter the great 79
6. two empresses 101
7. catherine the great 117
8. russia in the age of revolution 138
9. the pinnacle of autocracy 155
10. culture and autocracy 172
11. the era of the great reforms 186
12. from serfdom to nascent capitalism 208

vii
viii Contents

13. the golden age of russian culture 228

14. russia as an empire 249
15. autocracy in decline 272
16. war and revolution 293
17. compromise and preparation 318
18. revolutions in russian culture 334
19. building utopia 351
20. war 371
21. growth, consolidation, and stagnation 393
22. soviet culture 413
23. the cold war 429

Epilogue: The End of the USSR 447

Further Reading 461
Index 473
 LIST OF FIGURES

1. Vladimir Cathedral of the Dormition (Twelfth

Century) page 14
2. Birchbark Document 210 25
3. Kirillov Monastery (15–16 centuries) 30
4. “Kremlenagrad” 44
5. Peter the Great 89
6. Bashkirs 124
7. Catherine the Great 127
8. St. Petersburg c. 1800 144
9. Village Council 158
10. Alexander II 190
11. Russian Peasant Girls 217
12. Ilya Muromets 221
13. Tchaikovsky 235
14. Repin/Tolstoy 246
15. Nomadic Kirghiz 268
16. Witte 277
17. Nicholas II 278
18. Lenin and Colleagues 307
19. Stalin and Others at Gorky’s funeral 364
20. Ilyushin II 384

ix
 ABBREVIATIONS

BRBML Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library

LOC Library of Congress
LOC PG Library of Congress, Prokudin-Gorsky Collection
NASM Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum
NYPL New York Public Library
YCBA Yale Center for British Art

xi
 ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

The first chapters of this book were written at the University of

Aberdeen, Scotland, during a semester of residence with the support
of the Carnegie Trust for the Universities of Scotland. Without the
Carnegie Trust and Aberdeen University the beginning would have
been much more difficult. I owe a particular debt of gratitude to
Paul Dukes, Robert Frost, Karin Friedrich, Jane Ohlmeyer, and
Duncan Rice, in their different ways my hosts for an eventful time.
Over the years my colleagues have kindly read and commented on
many of the chapters, letting me know when I was on the right
track and when I was not. For reading as well as discussion and
bibliographical help, I thank Nikolaos Chrissidis, Laura Engelstein,
Hilary Fink, Daniel Kevles, John MacKay, Edgar Melton, Bruce
Menning, and Samuel Ramer. Many years of conversation about
Russian culture with Vladimir Alexandrov, Katerina Clark, Nikolai
Firtich, Harvey Goldblatt, Vladimir Golshtein, Andrea Graziosi,
Charles Halperin, Moshe Lewin, Alexander Schenker, and Elizabeth
Valkenier made many chapters much richer than I could have made
them alone. Valerie Hansen and Frank Turner provided more help
than they ever realized. As ever, Tatjana Lorkovic was invaluable.
I would also like to thank Tom Morehouse of the New England
Air Museum, Kate Igoe of the Smithsonian National Air and Space
Museum, Maria Zapata of the Haas Art Library of Yale University,
David Thompson and Maria Singer of the Yale Center for British
Art, and Kathryn James and E. C. Schroeder of the Beinecke Rare

xiii
xiv Acknowledgments

Book and Manuscript Library of Yale University. Their courtesy and

professionalism were invaluable in the search for suitable images.
Maija Jansson suffered through the long gestation and birth pains
of the book, putting up with a distracted and often crabby author.
She read the whole manuscript, some of it several times, and kept
reminding me that it would come to an end, and so it did. To her I
dedicate the result.
 PROLOGUE

Russia is not an idea. It is a specific country, with a particular

place on the globe, a majority language and culture, and a very
concrete history. Yet for most of the twentieth century, outside of its
boundaries, it has been an idea, not a place – an idea about socialism.
Tremendous debates have raged over its politics, economics, and
culture, most of them conducted by and for people who did not
know the language, never went there, and knew very little about
the country and its history. Even the better informed wrote and
spoke starting from presuppositions about the desirability or un-
desirability of a socialist order. Some were crude propagandists,
but even the more conscientious, those who learned the language
and tried to understand the country, began by posing questions
that came from their assumptions about socialism. The result was a
narrow agenda of debate: was a planned economy effective or not?
How many political prisoners were there? How could the Soviets put
a man in space? Should the system be called socialism, communism,
or totalitarianism? Was “communism” a result of Russian history?
Did the Russian intelligentsia prepare the way for communism,
unintentionally or not? Did the gradual modernization of Russia
make 1917 inevitable? In all these debates the history of Russia up
to the moment of the revolution was just a preface.
In Russia the collapse of the Soviet Union brought to light a
flood of historical publications. These publications include numer-
ous monographs on a great variety of topics, many biographies,
and a massive quantity of publications of the various records of the
xv
xvi Prologue

Soviet regime, including the deliberations of its leaders. The aim

of these publications was to illuminate the areas previously closed
to investigation, and naturally the first post-Soviet writings were
devoted to the most controversial or mysterious issues. Books on
the Ribbentrop-Molotov pact of 1939, collectivization, and famine;
publications of Stalin’s private correspondence; and other issues
were first on the agenda. Western historians participated in these
publications, which gave a whole new understanding of the con-
tentious issues of Soviet history. Yet the result is far from perfect.
As the document publications and monographs continue to pour
out in Russia and abroad, they pose more and more questions that
historians used to the politicized debates of the Cold War era never
thought about. Paradoxically, it seems harder rather than easier
to understand the story of the Soviet era of Russian history. The
present work reflects this difficulty, and the reader will find many
questions left unresolved.
The collapse of the Soviet Union, paradoxically, has had as much
or more effect on the writing about Russia’s history before 1917.
Now the earlier history is not just a preface but a millennium of
time that no longer ends in the Soviet experience, however impor-
tant that may be. The flood of new publications, in this case mainly
from historians in Russia, includes virtually every period and aspect
of Russian history before 1917. There are now not just biographies
of tsars and empresses, but also of major and minor political figures
and fairly ordinary people. Local history has come into being, pro-
viding the kind of concrete knowledge of the variety of the country’s
history that has been routine in other countries for a long time.

Russia in its history and in its present is a mix of many different

elements. Until the fifteenth century the people called themselves
and their land “Rus,” not Russia (“Rossiia”), and it included many
territories not now within Russian boundaries. From its inception it
contained peoples who were not Russian or even Slavic, but whom
Russians understood as integral parts of their society. By 1917 the
tsars and millions of Russian settlers in the steppe and Siberia had
acquired a territory far beyond the original medieval boundaries,
and the Soviet state conserved most of that area. Consequently its
history has to extend beyond the boundaries of today’s Russian
 Prologue xvii

Federation and incorporate the various incarnations of Russia as

well as its diversity.
A society economically backward until the twentieth century,
Russia shared many traits with nearly all pre-industrial societies –
primitive agriculture, small and few cities, mass illiteracy. Russia’s
historical fate was to become the largest contiguous political unit
in the world and eventually expand over the whole of northern
Asia. It was a realm equally distant from Western Europe and from
the Mediterranean world. It covered huge areas but was extremely
thinly populated until the end of the seventeenth century. For the
first seven hundred years its peripheral status was strengthened by its
adherence to Europe’s minority Christian faith, Orthodoxy, rather
than any of the Western European churches. Then, with Peter the
Great, Russia entered European culture within a single generation
and participated in all phases of European cultural life onwards,
starting with and including the Enlightenment. Cultural evolution
was easier and faster than social and political change, creating a
society with a modern culture and an archaic social and political
structure. The rapid industrialization of Russia after 1860 in turn
created tensions that led to the spread of Western ideas that were
not necessarily the dominant ones in the West. Thus for most of
the twentieth century Marxism, an ideology born in the Rhineland
out of the philosophy of G. W. F. Hegel combined with British
economics and French utopian socialism, reordered Russian society
while remaining marginal in the lands of its birth.
In the West itself, Russia was simply remote. For the English poet
John Milton it was “the most northern Region of Europe reputed
civil.” Milton’s view reflected the way Europeans perceived Russia
from the Renaissance onward, as part of Europe and as “north-
ern” rather than “eastern.” It is only in the nineteenth century that
Russia became “eastern” to Europeans, and to many Russians as
well. In nineteenth-century Western Europe, “eastern” was not a
compliment: it implied that Russia, like the lands the West was then
colonizing, was barbaric, despotic, and dirty, and the people proba-
bly were inferior in some way. Europeans did not learn Russian, and
they did not study the country, and neither did Americans, until the
beginning of the Cold War. Even when Tolstoy and Tchaikovsky
had become part of the Western pantheon, the country as a whole
xviii Prologue

was still a mystery, as Winston Churchill insisted. The uniqueness

of the Soviet order only increased that element of mystery. In con-
trast, when the French Revolution occurred, it took place in the
center of Western Europe among a people whose language had
become the principle language of international communication. The
Russian Revolution took place in a far country, and few outside
Russia knew the language or had any understanding of the country
and its history. Even though the Bolsheviks created a new society
following a Western ideology, it necessarily remained an enigma in
the West.
Had the Russian Revolution found no followers abroad, perhaps
Soviet society would have remained a peculiar system studied only
by a few devoted scholars. Its impact however, was enormous, and
remains so to this day. China, the world’s most populous country
is still ruled by a Communist Party that shows no signs of sharing
power, whatever its economic policies. Communism was the central
issue of world politics for two generations of the twentieth century.
The inevitable consequence was that commentators in the West,
journalists or scholars, even ordinary tourists looked at an idea, the
Soviet version of socialism, not at a specific country with a specific
history. With the end of the Soviet Union, Russian history no longer
has to be the story of the unfolding of one or another idea. It has
become the continuous history of a particular people in a particular
place. The present book is an attempt to reflect that change. It seeks
above all to tell the story and explain it where possible. In many
cases explanations are hard to come by, but it is the hope that the
reader will find food for reflection in a history that is nothing if not
dramatic.
 ARCTIC OCEAN

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0 100 200 300 400 500 600 km

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Map 1. Kievan Rus’ in the Eleventh Century.

xix
 0 200 400 600 km White Sea

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Map 2. Russia in the First Half of the Sixteenth Century.

xx
 0 200 400 600 800 km

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Map 3. Russia at the Time of Peter the Great.

xxi
 0 200 400 600 km
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0 100 200 300 miles E Boundary of territory acquired between 1725 and 1762
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xxii

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Map 4. Russia in 1796.

 A R C T I C O C E A N

East Siberian
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xxiii

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Map 5. Russia in 1913.

 0 200 400 600 800 km

0 100 200 300 400 500 miles

Murmansk

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Map 6. Soviet Union in the Second World War, 1941–5.

xxiv
 1
Russia before Russia

Russian history begins with the polity that scholars have come to
call Kiev Rus, the ancestor of modern Russia. Rus was the name
that the inhabitants gave to themselves and their land, and Kiev was
its capital. In modern terms, it embraced all of Belarus, the northern
half of the Ukraine, and the center and northwest of European Rus-
sia. The peoples of these three modern states are the Eastern Slavs,
who all speak closely related languages derived from the East Slavic
language of Kiev Rus. In the west its neighbors were roughly the
same as the neighbors of those three states today: Hungary, Poland,
the Baltic peoples, and Finland. In the north Kiev Rus stretched
toward the Arctic Ocean, with Slavic farmers only beginning to
move into the far north.
Beyond the Slavs to the east was Volga Bulgaria, a small Turkic
Islamic state that came into being in about AD 950 where modern
Tatarstan stands today. Beyond Volga Bulgaria were the Urals and
Siberia, vast forests and plains inhabited by small tribes who lived
by hunting and gathering food. The core of Kiev Rus was along
the route that ran from northern Novgorod south to Kiev along the
main rivers. There in the area of richest soil lay the capital, Kiev.
Even farther to the south of Kiev began the steppe.
The lands of Kiev Rus lay in the forest zone of the great East Euro-
pean plain. There are no mountains or even large ranges of hills to
break this plain between Poland and the Urals. The forest zone is
deciduous in the south around Kiev – oak, beech, chestnut, and
poplar trees, while farther north the predominant forests were and
1
2 A Concise History of Russia

are composed of the northern coniferous trees: pine, fir, and birch.
The best soil, dark and moist, was in the south, where fields opened
out among the trees closer to the steppe. In the northern part of
the forest zone the soil was sandy and marshes were frequent, thus
agriculture was rarer and concentrated around lakes and along the
great rivers. The great rivers were the arteries of life. The Dniepr,
Western Dvina, Volga, Oka, and the smaller rivers around Nov-
gorod (the Volkhov and others) provided routes to the south and
east via Lake Ladoga to the Baltic Sea. Along them princes and
warriors, merchants and peasant farmers could move freely, at least
in the summer months when the rivers were not frozen.
In the west and east of Kiev Rus the boundaries were those of
political control and ethnicity. In the south the ethnic and political
boundary was at its basis an ecological boundary. South of the
Kievan lands to the Black and Caspian Seas lay the great steppe – flat
grasslands with few trees and the “black earth” – dry but not arid.
The long grass concealed enormous numbers of animals, including
antelopes, wild horses, and even panthers, while the rivers supported
myriad ducks and wild geese as well as sturgeon and other fish.
Centuries later, the Russian writer Gogol wrote of the steppe: “The
farther along in the steppe the more beautiful it became . . . The
plow had never touched the infinite waves of wild growth. Only
the horses that hid in the grass as in a forest had stamped it down.
Nothing in nature could have been better. The whole surface of
the earth was like a green and gold ocean, on which millions of
various flowers splashed” (Taras Bulba). This steppe was actually
the western extension of the great Eurasian steppe that extended all
the way to Manchuria, which covers today’s Mongolia, northern
China, Xinjiang, and Kazakstan. From time immemorial it was the
land of the nomads and the great nomadic empires – first the Iranian
Scythians and Sarmatians of classical antiquity, who were then later
replaced by the fearsome Huns and then wave after wave of Turkic
peoples. These nomads did not wander aimlessly over the landscape,
but instead they followed a regular annual migration over a greater
or lesser area. They kept close to the valleys of the great rivers – the
Danube, Dniepr, Don, and Volga – where they found winter and
summer pastures for their animals. The nomads did not try to settle
in the forests, but they used them as a source of booty and slaves,
 Russia before Russia 3

and when they could, they also laid tribute on the settled peoples.
For centuries this had been the relationship of nomad and farmer
throughout northern Asia and beyond. The steppe and its nomads
were to form a crucial element in the history of Kiev Rus, and later
Russia, into the eighteenth century.
Archeology tells us a great deal about the settlement and life of
the early Eastern Slavs. They were certainly the predominant group
along the central axis of Rus from Kiev to Novgorod by at least AD
800, and were still moving north and east, settling new lands. They
had built many villages and fortifications of earth with wooden
palisades, and they buried their dead with the tools and weapons
necessary for life in the next world. From other sources we have
some idea of their gods: Perun, the god of thunder and the sky, was
apparently the chief god, but there was also Veles, the god of cattle;
Stribog, the wind god; and the more shadowy fertility gods, Rod
and Rozhanitsa. Around Kiev there were round spaces formed of
stones that seem to have been sites of the cult, but Slavic paganism
never had any written texts (or none that survived) to give us a
glimpse of their actual beliefs.
Reconstructing the political history of the early Slavs is equally
complicated. Legend says that the Viking Rurik came from over the
sea with two brothers to rule Novgorod in AD 862. This is a classic
foundation legend found in many cultures and as such was crucial
to the self-consciousness of the subsequent ruling dynasty. The text,
the Kievan Primary Chronicle of 1116, which recounts the legend,
is vague about the establishment of Rurik’s descendants in Kiev.
Supposedly the Viking Oleg went down the rivers and took the city
in 882, but his relationship to Rurik was not specified. Did either
of them even exist? Prince Igor, allegedly Rurik’s son, was a real
person who did rule from Kiev (913–945), until a rebellious tribe
killed him. The clan ancestor remained Rurik, who thus gave his
name to the ruling dynasty, the Rurikovichi.
The Rurikovich dynasty was originally Scandinavian, as legend
and the early names suggest: Oleg from Norse Helge and Igor from
Ingvar. Our unique written source, the Primary Chronicle, called
them Varangians, one of the names for Scandinavians used in Byzan-
tium. In other places it said they were called Rus, not Varangians.
Further on, the text localized Rus in the Kiev area, but most it often
4 A Concise History of Russia

called the whole state and people Rus. The author was serving
his rulers, identifying princes and people, and leaving the historian
with a muddle virtually impossible to sort out. In any case the first
Rurikovichi were undoubtedly Scandinavian and their appearance
in Rus was part of the expansion of the Scandinavian peoples in
the Viking age. Unfortunately the archeological evidence does not
fit the legends in the Primary Chronicle very well. Viking finds are
concentrated for these early centuries around the southern rim of
Lake Ladoga and in the town of Old Ladoga. The chronicle stories
tried to place them in Novgorod, but Novgorod did not even come
into existence until about AD 950, after the dynasty of Rurik was
already established in Kiev. And in Scandinavia itself there were no
sagas of Viking triumphs and wars in Russia to match those recount-
ing the conquest of Iceland and the British Isles. In the lands that
were once part of Kiev Rus, there are no runestones memorializing
the great warriors and their deaths, such as those that cover Scandi-
navia and the western islands where the Vikings roamed. All we can
say for sure is that a group of warriors whose base was probably
Ladoga, with its Scando-Slavic-Finnish community, came to Kiev
around AD 900 and began to rule that area, quickly establishing
their authority over the whole vast area of Kiev Rus.
The world of AD 950 looked very different from how we might
imagine it today. Western Europe was an impoverished collection
of weak petty kingdoms and local dynasties. The great Carolingian
Empire was now a century in the past and the classic feudal society
of medieval Europe was just coming into being. In France the great
regional lords and barons owed only the most theoretical obedience
to their king. The greatest power in the north for the moment was
Denmark, as the Danish kings controlled much of England and the
Vikings had small kingdoms in Ireland and Scotland. The Emperor
still reigned in Germany, and in Italy the papacy was still under his
thumb, while the regional rulers of Germany and Italy grew more
and more independent. Most of the Iberian Peninsula was under
Arab rule, with a few tiny Christian principalities hanging on in the
north.
The great powers and centers of civilization were the Arab
Caliphate and the Byzantine Empire. Only a few centuries earlier
the Arabs had taken Islam to the far corners of western Eurasia,
 Russia before Russia 5

to Central Asia and Spain, and the Abbasid Caliphate in Baghdad

was now the center of that world. These were the great centuries of
medieval Arab culture – the time of the translations of Aristotle and
other works of Greek learning and of the Islamic commentary and
development of Greek ideas and Greek science. The Caliphate was
immensely rich, and the many coin hoards found on the Rus lands
testify to its trade with northern neighbors. Even more important
to Kiev Rus was Byzantium. The Greeks had recovered from the
immense shock of the Arab conquests of the seventh and eighth
centuries, and by AD 900, a revived Byzantium was master of Ana-
tolia and the southern Balkans. Theirs was a complex civilization,
a Christian society with a rich monastic culture and at the same
time the heir of classical antiquity. While monks spent their days in
liturgy and contemplation, their relatives and patrons were reading
Homer and Thucydides, Plato and Demosthenes. Laymen wrote the
empire’s history not as monkish chronicles in simplified language
like those of Western Europe, but in pure Attic Greek following the
models of the ancients. The Byzantine Empire was also a bureau-
cratic state on the late Roman model, dependent on written Roman
law and paper documentation. Boys were set to learn all this mate-
rial from a young age, following the sequence of subjects and texts
already laid down in Roman times. For the Byzantines did not call
themselves Greeks but Romans, Rhomaioi, and their country was
to them still Rome.
The Byzantines were not the immediate neighbors of Kiev Rus
and communication was difficult. The most intimate contact was
with the Turkic nomads of the great steppe. From about AD 750,
the steppe was ruled by the Khazars, a nomadic people whose center
was on the lower Volga and who laid tribute on the southern Rus
tribes. The Khazars were a unique people, for their rulers, their
kagans, had converted from Turkic paganism to Judaism and had
copies of the Hebrew Bible. Nomadic empires were short-lived, and
in the middle of the tenth century the Turkic Pechenegs replaced
the Khazars, only to be supplanted about a century later by another
Turkic people, the Kipchaks – or Polovtsy, as the Rus called them.
In the steppe the Kipchaks lived in a series of large groups, each
on one of the main rivers, the most important to Rus being those
on the Dniepr, Northern Donets, and Don. Their annual migration
6 A Concise History of Russia

between winter and summer pastures involved great herds of horses,

cattle, sheep, and even camels, with the Kipchaks following them in
felt tents mounted on carts. Their religion was the ancient Turkic
paganism centered on the sky and the ancestors. Farther east the
Kipchaks spread to the lower Volga and the Caucasus and traded
with the Byzantine cities in the Crimea. For long periods the Rus
and the Kipchaks raided one another’s lands almost annually, each
group seizing animals, slaves, and hostages from the other. Relations
were not only hostile, for the Rus princes took wives among the
daughters of the Kipchak chiefs, who in turn took an active part in
the internal feuds of the Rurikovich dynasty. Some of the Kipchaks
eventually adopted Christianity, apparently from Rus or the Greeks.

warriors and christians

In the tenth century, Kiev Rus was hardly a state at all. Rather it
was an assembly of tribes – Poliane/Rus around Kiev, Slovene in
Novgorod, Krivichi and Viatichi in between, and several others –
ruled from Kiev by a prince of the dynasty of Rurik and his war-
rior band or druzhina. The tribes paid tribute to the Kiev princes,
who visited them occasionally for that purpose. Otherwise the vast
majority of the people were peasant farmers scattered in the clear-
ings of the forests and owning no master but the princes of Kiev.
This was still a pagan world, as the legend of the death of Prince
Oleg suggests. The story was that a wizard predicted that his horse
would cause the prince’s death. Oleg put the horse out to pasture
and forgot the prophecy, but years later he heard that the horse was
dead and remembered it. Oleg went out to see the skeleton of the
horse as it lay in a field. As he placed his foot on the skull to lament,
a poisonous snake crawled out and bit him. Thus the prophecy was
fulfilled.
These Kiev princes spent their time on wars that were essentially
raiding expeditions against the Khazars, their successors the Pech-
enegs, and the richest prize of all, the Byzantines. In log boats they
could follow the coast to Constantinople itself, and they raided
it several times before they made treaties with the emperor regu-
lating their status as traders. Princess Olga, the widow of Prince
Igor, became a Christian about this time, perhaps after a journey to
Constantinople. She ruled the land until about AD 962, but her son
 Russia before Russia 7

did not follow her beliefs. Sviatoslav, the son of Igor, was the last
pure warrior chieftain in Rus; he spent his time fighting the Greeks
and other rivals on the Danube and in the steppe. On his campaigns
he slept on the ground with his saddle for a pillow and cut strips of
raw horsemeat to roast for his food. He met his death in the steppe
coming home from a raid on Byzantium, and the Pechenegs made a
drinking cup of his skull.
His son Vladimir (AD 972–1015) at first followed in his father’s
path. He too was a great warrior, and he maintained control over
the Kiev lands by placing his many sons to rule over distant territo-
ries. He tried to organize their pagan beliefs and set up a temple in
Kiev to Perun, the god of thunder, and other deities. Soon, however,
he turned to the religion of his grandmother Olga, the Christian-
ity of Constantinople. The chronicle records several stories of his
conversion, probably none of them true, but they remain a part of
Russian conceptions of the past to this day. One story was that the
decision grew out of a raid on the Byzantine town of Chersonesus in
the Crimea. The raid ended in a compromise, according to which the
Greeks kept their town but Vladimir married a Byzantine princess
and became a Christian. Another story was that his neighbors pro-
posed that he adopt their religion. First a Muslim came from Volga
Bulgaria and seemed very persuasive until Vladimir learned of the
prohibition on alcoholic drinks. “The joy of Rus is drinking,” he
told the Bulgarian, and sent him away. Then Vladimir turned to
Rome, and the rituals and fasts seemed attractive but the objection
was that the ancestors of the Rus had rejected Latin Christianity.
Then a Khazar Jew came, but Judaism failed because of the exile
of the Jews, clearly a sign of God’s wrath. Then a Greek “philoso-
pher” came and explained Christianity, giving a brief account of
the Old and New Testaments, emphasizing the fall and redemption
of man. He was very convincing, but the prince wanted final proof
and sent a delegation to Bulgaria, Rome, and Constantinople. The
services of the Muslims and Latins failed to win approval, for they
lacked beauty. Then the Rus went to Constantinople and attended
the liturgy in Saint Sophia, the great cathedral built by Justinian,
and reported that they were so impressed that they did not know if
they were on earth or in heaven. The choice was for Christianity as
understood in Byzantium, and it determined the place of Kiev Rus,
and later of Russia, in European culture for centuries.
8 A Concise History of Russia

Vladimir ordered the people of Kiev to be baptized in the river

Dniepr, but the new religion caught on slowly outside the major
centers. Vladimir himself put away his concubines and married the
Byzantine princess, but in many of his values he remained part of
the pagan world of the warrior prince. Once, several years after the
conversion (AD 996), his warriors began to complain to him that at
banquets they had to eat with wooden spoons, not with silver. The
prince replied, “it is not for me to get warriors with silver and gold,
I shall get silver and gold with my warriors, as my father and his
father did” – hardly a sentiment for a Christian ruler. In and around
the greater towns, however, Christianity gradually made its way.
The Greek clergy in Constantinople supplied the heads of the new
church, the metropolitans of Kiev, but other bishops were mostly
natives. The founding of the Kiev Monastery of the Caves in the
1050s, dedicated to the Dormition of the Virgin, provided Rus with
its first monastery, the key institution for Byzantine Christianity.
The monastery produced not only its own saints in its founders
Antonii and Feodosii but also the bishops for the eparchies outside
of Kiev. The Caves Monastery and the others that soon arose around
Kiev and Novgorod also provided the libraries and writing skills that
produced the Primary Chronicle and other records, but of course
their main role was spiritual. It was the monks who provided the
charisma to spread a new religion.
The new religion had to be made to fit a society very different
from the sophisticated urban world of Byzantium. The introduction
of Christianity did not bring with it other aspects of Byzantine
civilization, for the tradition of the eastern churches was one of a
vernacular liturgy. In Kiev Rus the mass was not in Greek but in a
ninth-century Bulgarian dialect scholars call Old or Church Slavic.
At that time the Slavic languages were all very similar to one another,
so this was a readily comprehensible language in Kiev. The use of
Church Slavic implied that the liturgy, the scriptures, and other
holy books had to be translated into Slavic, an arduous task but
one that removed the need to learn Greek for all but a few learned
monks. Much Christian literature and all of the secular literature of
Byzantium remained unknown in Kiev Rus and later societies. The
Russians would discover Greek antiquity in the eighteenth century
from the West.
 Russia before Russia 9

The relations of Rome and Constantinople in these early centuries

were complicated. The famous mutual anathema of the Pope and
the Patriarch of Constantinople of 1054 was not the decisive break
that it seemed to later historians, and the people of Rus were barely
aware of it. One of Kiev’s Greek metropolitans did write a short
tract denouncing the Latins, but native writers did not join him
and the Primary Chronicle is silent on the events. It was only with
the Fourth Crusade, the destruction and conquest of the Byzantine
Empire by the crusading armies from Western Europe in 1204,
that the people of Rus took notice of the division and where their
loyalties lay. The Rus chroniclers covered this event in extensive
and bloody detail – the massacre of the people and the desecration
of the churches. The Rus people were not just Christians, they were
Orthodox Christians.
Orthodox Christianity would determine the character of Russian
culture until the eighteenth century and in some ways beyond it. For
the Western observer, it has always presented a problem, seeming
familiar, but actually not. Most Westerners know more about Bud-
dhism than about Orthodoxy, as the latter forms no part of daily
experience nor is it encountered in the course of a normal educa-
tion. Analogies do not help much. Orthodoxy is not Catholicism
with married priests.
The differences between Orthodoxy and the Western Catholic
church that emerged during the Middle Ages were of a different
order than those that later divided the western church at the time
of the Refomation. Theological issues were not central, and were to
some extent exaggerated to provide more convincing explanations
for the hostilities. The difference over how the doctrine of the Trin-
ity should be expressed in the Nicene Creed, that is, the Catholic
addition of the words filioque (“and the son”) to the mention of the
“Holy Ghost, which proceedeth from the father” does not signify
any important difference in the actual understanding of the Trin-
ity. The main issue in 1054 was one of church governance. The
eleventh century was the time of the gradual emancipation of the
papacy from the power of the Holy Roman emperors, and the path
chosen was the centralization of ecclesiastical power in the person
of the pope. The traditions of the eastern patriarchs were those of a
conciliar church. Only the assembled patriarchs and the rest of the
10 A Concise History of Russia

higher clergy could determine doctrine or matters of church govern-

ment. The Patriarch of Constantinople was not a pope. The papacy
also managed to assert its independence from the emperors and
other rulers in matters of church government and certainly in doc-
trine, whereas the Eastern Church operated with the more nebulous
notions of “symphony” of emperor and patriarch. Lesser matters,
like the celibacy of the parish clergy in the west, flowed from these
basic decisions. A celibate clergy was free of the entanglements of
secular powers; a married priest was part of his local society.
Many differences between the eastern and western churches arose
in matters that are hard to pin down and included differences of
culture and attitudes rather than dogma and basic belief. The notion
of the church building and the liturgy as the meeting points of the
divine and human worlds, of spirit and matter, was and is central to
Orthodox life and devotion. Preaching and the minute examination
of behavior in sermons and in the confessional were not central, even
if practiced to some extent. Orthodox monasticism was much less
organized, as the monasteries did not form orders with a recognized
head and the rules were much less detailed and specific. At the same
time, Orthodox monasticism had a prestige and charisma in the
east that even the most revered Catholic orders did not approach.
For most of the history of Rus until the sixteenth century, we know
far more about monasteries than bishops, many of whom are only
names to us. By contrast, the western medieval church’s annals
are filled with saintly and powerful bishops. Finally, the Eastern
Church had a rather different attitude toward learning. For the
Catholic church of the Middle Ages, the great intellectual enterprise
was the interpretation of Aristotle’s corpus of writings in the light
of revelation and the teachings of the church. The Orthodox, save
a few late Byzantine imitators of the West, did not bother with
philosophy or Aristotelian science. These were exterior knowledge,
not bad in itself but not the final truth. The truth was in Christianity,
best studied by monks in isolation from the world, not only from its
temptations but also from its secular writings. This attitude fit well
into Byzantine society, with its flourishing secular culture, but less
so in Rus. In Rus, and later in Russia, there was no secular culture
of the Byzantine type, so it was only the Christian monastic culture
that flourished.
 Russia before Russia 11

druzhinas and princes

Vladimir’s son Iaroslav “the Wise” ruled Kiev Rus from 1016 until
his death in 1054 after a contentious and violent beginning in which
two of his brothers, princes Boris and Gleb, perished at the hand of
their elder brother, Iaroslav’s rival. They became the first Russian
saints. Iaroslav’s state was no longer the primitive band of warriors
of the previous century ruling over distant tribes. Kiev had become
a substantial town with a princely palace and Iaroslav ruled over
the land with his retinue, the druzhina and various “distinguished
men,” his boyars. All of them lived in Kiev, though they seem to have
had lands around it and elsewhere. The druzhina, the old warrior
band, seems to have become more organized and settled down and
behaved more like an army and a group of advisors than simple
warriors. They were not alone on the political landscape, for the
people of Kiev occasionally played a part as well, assembling on the
town’s main square to form a veche, or popular assembly.
We know a certain amount about the society and legal system of
Kiev Rus because shortly after Iaroslav’s death his sons put together
a list of laws and regulations called “Rus Justice,” a brief but illu-
minating document. Most of the provisions seem to have reflected
existing traditions, but in the first articles Iaroslav’s sons began
with an innovation: they banned blood revenge in cases of mur-
der. Instead they substituted an elaborate system of payments. The
murderer was to pay a certain amount if he killed a boyar or man
of distinction, less for a member of the druzhina, still less for an
ordinary person or a peasant, and least of all for a slave. Gener-
ally, for killing a woman the criminal had to pay half of the fine
for killing a man of the same status. The laws gave much space to
listing the payments for insults of all kind, ranging from slandering
a woman’s virtue to harming a man’s beard. The judges of these
and other cases were to be the administrators of the princely estates
who thus took on a much larger role than that of simple economic
administrators. The “Rus Justice” must have been written for them,
as much of it was taken up with complex rules for debt-slavery,
various forms of temporary or limited bondage, and relations with
the village community. This was a law code entirely appropriate
for Rus society, one that, needless to say, bore no relationship
12 A Concise History of Russia

whatsoever to Byzantine law. Nor did the Kievan state establish

a hierarchy of administrators relying on written documents in imi-
tation of Byzantium. In Rus the basic laws might be written down,
but administration was in the hands of a tiny group of servants of
the prince’s household relying on oral communications, tradition,
and only a very few written texts like the “Rus Justice.”
Iaroslav’s reign represented a high point of stability in Rus. Nor-
wegian princes took refuge with him from civil wars in their home-
land, and one of his daughters married the king of France. In the
1030s he inflicted a decisive defeat on the Pechenegs that kept the
steppe frontier quiet for a generation. He was patron of the building
of the Saint Sophia cathedral and the Caves Monastery, as well as
other foundations. His sons and nephews ruled distant territories
without much contention. Relations with the Greeks were regular,
if occasionally unharmonious. The first (and last for a long time)
native metropolitan of Kiev, Ilarion (1051–1054), praised him as
a new Constantine and a new David. The apparently idyllic calm
would not last for long.
After Iaroslav’s death more disputes arose, but unity was soon
restored and persisted throughout the reign of Iaroslav’s grandson
Vladimir Monomakh (1113–1125) and his son Mstislav (1125–
1132). In the middle of the twelfth century several centers of power
began to emerge, although Kiev itself and the land around it were in
decline. The city and title of Grand Prince of Kiev became the prize
for contending regional powers. In the northeast, the core of the later
Russia, the principality of Vladimir emerged as the main power, and
in 1169 its ruler prince, Andrei Bogoliubsky, sacked Kiev and took
the title of Grand Prince of Kiev. He fell victim to a conspiracy of his
own boyars in 1174. Through Andrei’s brother Vsevolod (1176–
1212) the Vladimir dynasty would rule the northeast for the next
several centuries. For the time being, their attention was elsewhere,
for the Vladimir princes had rivals in the west and south, especially
in Galich near the Polish border. The territories of Kiev Rus were
growing apart.
The increasing vitality of local centers also produced a town
unique in Russian medieval history, Novgorod. Novgorod had been
the second center of Kiev Rus, legendarily the first stop of the
Viking dynasty. It was an important city that traded in the Baltic in
 Russia before Russia 13

the eleventh century, and its wealth was reflected in the Novgorod
cathedral of Saint Sophia, built around 1050. Early Novgorod was a
typical princely city, and the Kiev princes often sent their eldest sons
to rule in their names. In the twelfth century, however, Novgorod
set out on its own path. The Novgorodians expelled their prince
in 1136 and chose another. From that moment on, they treated
the prince as an elected general rather than a ruler. Before 1136
the princes had appointed a deputy with the title of posadnik, and
now the popular assembly, the veche, elected the posadnik from
among the boyars of the town. In 1156 the people even elected the
archbishop, choosing from among three candidates proposed by the
local clergy. This practice was contrary to Byzantine canon law, but
the metropolitan of Kiev never challenged it.
Thus Novgorod developed into a unique polity among the
princely states of medieval Rus. Novgorod was not a commer-
cial republic, such as medieval Florence or the Flemish cities, for
it was not merchants, bankers, and cloth manufacturers who sat in
the city’s council. Merchants and artisans in Novgorod remained
humble folk, present in the veche but with little real influence. The
city’s elite consisted of boyars, rich landholders with large houses in
the town and extensive possessions in the surrounding countryside.
Many of the richest also controlled the northern forests, for it was
the forests that were the real source of Novgorod’s wealth. After
1200 the Novgorodians ceased to travel west with their goods, as
the league of north German trading cities, the Hansa, had come to
dominate the trade of all countries around the Baltic Sea. The Ger-
mans journeyed to Novgorod to buy furs, beeswax for candles, and
other forest products. The furs ranged from simple squirrel skins
to the sables of the northern forests that fetched high prices in the
west. In return, the Novgorodians bought Flemish and English cloth
and a host of smaller items from the western towns.
By 1200 Kiev Rus was a single state in name only; the ruler
of Kiev itself was either an outsider or a minor princeling. Other
than Novgorod, each territory had a local princely dynasty spring-
ing from the old Kiev dynasty of the Rurikovichi. Because Kiev
Rus did not know primogeniture, each of a prince’s sons had to
be provided for, and in any case the eldest uncle could also be
considered the rightful ruler. Thus, innumerable small principalities
14 A Concise History of Russia

Figure 1. The Twelfth Century Dormition Cathedral in Vladimir (c. 1900).

emerged, though at the same time several regional centers of power –

Vladimir, Smolensk, Chernigov, and Galich – maintained control
over lesser princes. These were agrarian societies, each with a small
boyar elite that ruled the peasants and advised the prince, though
some of the towns, especially Smolensk, had wider commercial ties.
The towns were becoming wealthier, for in the regional centers like
Vladimir, magnificent stone churches arose and monasteries with
stone churches and walls were also founded near the towns. Builders
and icon painters came from Byzantium, and the Rus people began
to learn their skills.
Byzantine contacts were easy, for the one single institution re-
maining was the church. As Metropolitan of Kiev, a Greek usually
headed the church that oversaw the whole breadth of the land. The
Greek clergy and the priests and monks of the Rus had their hands
 Russia before Russia 15

full with the Christianization of the people and the creation of a

new culture that went with the new religion. The Christianization
of the people went slowly, and outside of the towns there were few
churches. While Kiev rapidly became a major center of the new
faith, provincial towns still celebrated burials in which warriors
were put to rest with their weapons, horses, slaves, and food for
their journeys to the other world. In 1071 there was a wave of
incidents of revolt and resistance led by pagan priests in Novgorod
and in some of the towns of the northeast. In these circumstances the
clergy concentrated on very basic issues. From a series of questions
put to the mid-twelfth century bishop Nifont of Novgorod, we
know some of these concerns. The clergy tried to enforce the rules
of Christian marriage (that dictated which cousins could be married
to each other) and rules governing sexual behavior. Many of these
questions were about timing, that is, if intercourse between man and
wife was proper during Lent or when it was proper for priests. Ritual
purity for both clergy and laity figured more largely than sex itself.
Which animals were “clean” and which not and the prohibition
on eating the meat of strangled animals were prominent issues in
these questions. For all of the various sins, the punishments were
denial of communion and penance for greater or longer periods.
The exposition of Christian doctrine to the laity remained on a very
elementary level.
Even Christian works in this situation retained pre-Christian
elements. The Primary Chronicle, the work of Christian monks,
denounced the pagan customs of the early people of Rus but in
the same pages glorified its pre-Christian rulers, recounting stories
like the death of Oleg without comments. The princes of the ruling
dynasty were generally known by their pagan names until about
1200. For most princes we do not even know the baptismal names.
At the very end of the Kievan period, the Igor Tale, a brief story of
an unsuccessful raid on the Kipchaks, called the Rus the children
of Dazhbog, the sun god, but ends with praise of the princes and
warriors who fought for the Christians against the pagans. The old
ways had power almost to the end of Kiev Rus.
The new culture that came with Christianity brought with it writ-
ing and various types of Byzantine devotional literature. The most
widely disseminated, and anchored in the liturgy (and thus open to
16 A Concise History of Russia

the illiterate) were the lives of the saints. Alongside the lives of the
Byzantine saints, Rus itself very quickly began to glorify its own
holy men, and these works more than any other give some insight
into the religious world of Kiev Rus.
The first saints were Princes Boris and Gleb, younger sons
of Vladimir murdered in 1015 by their brother Sviatopolk “the
Cursed” during the succession struggle after the death of Vladimir.
By the end of the eleventh century, the two brothers were the objects
of reverence and their bodies moved to a shrine near Kiev. Com-
memoration of the brothers began to appear in the liturgy, and the
monk Nestor of the Caves Monastery wrote an account of their lives
and death. Boris and Gleb were unlikely Christian saints. Though
they led a blameless life and died young, it was their death that made
them saints, but they were not martyrs for the faith. Sviatopolk was
not challenging Christianity, merely eliminating potential rivals in
a political struggle. The message of Nestor’s text is the humility and
meekness of the two boys, the wickedness of their murderer, and by
implication, the need for harmony and virtue in the ruling dynasty.
More conventionally Christian were the accounts of the lives of
the founders of the Kiev Monastery of the Caves, Saints Antonii
and Feodosii. Antonii’s life was that of a hermit seeking salvation
and nearness to God by prayer, tears, and fasting. Feodosii’s por-
trait was that of the abbot, hegumen in the Eastern Church, who
also fled the temptations of the world but built a great institution to
make this path possible for others. It was he who sought out a rule
of liturgical observance and monastic life from the great monastery
of the Studiou in Constantinople and it was he who built the church,
the monastery walls and buildings, and supervised the monks until
his death. The Caves Monastery, like its prototype in Constantino-
ple, was not physically remote from the city of Kiev: today it is well
within the city boundaries and Feodosii’s monks withdrew from the
world, in part, to serve it better. In later accounts the monks per-
form acts of heroic asceticism, but also demonstrate to the people
of Kiev the superiority of Orthodox Christianity by predicting the
future and healing the sick, often in direct competition with repre-
sentatives of the Latin faith, Armenian Christianity, and Judaism,
as well as pagan sorcerers. In Nestor’s account of Feodosii’s life the
hegumen was not shy in condemning acts of the Kiev princes that
 Russia before Russia 17

he thought to be unjust. In 1073 Princes Sviatoslav and Vsevolod

expelled the rightful ruler, their elder brother Iziaslav. The usurpers
sent for Feodosii to join them at a feast to celebrate their victory, but
the holy monk replied, “I will not come to the table of Beelzebub
and eat food soaked with blood and murder.”
In Kiev, Vladimiir’s son Iaroslav built the cathedral of the Holy
Wisdom, Saint Sophia, in 1037. The dedication was in imitation of
the great church of Constantinople, the sixth century cathedral of
the Emperor Justinian. Later rebuilding conceals the original look
of the exterior, which probably followed the Greek norms of the
time. The basic plan was a nave and transept of equal length (the
“Greek cross”), which gave the building a squarish look, and
the roof surmounted with round drums supporting the domes. These
would have been the Byzantine hemispherical domes, not the char-
acteristic onion shape of later Russian churches. The Kievan Saint
Sophia was also a much more modest creation than its grand pro-
totype and followed middle Byzantine style in using several smaller
domes instead of the enormous central dome created by Justinian’s
architects.
The Kievan Saint Sophia was also connected with the prince’s
palace by galleries, with a special place reserved for the prince and
his family – a Byzantine touch later abandoned in Rus. The mag-
nificent mosaics and frescoes, still extant today, also followed the
Greek prototype, with inscriptions everywhere in Greek. At the top
was (presumably) Christ as Pantocrator, the ruler of the universe,
below him the extant images of the apostles, the Mother of God,
and then the Eucharist. On the walls were the life of Christ and his
Mother, prophets, and saints. This order put Christ in heaven, then
symbolically depicted his movement down from the world of the
spirit to the earth. The path lay through his Mother, his apostles,
and the Eucharist, three ways in which the spirit of Christ reached
the material world and thus to all men. The physical structure of the
church signified the presence of Christ in the world in consequence
of the Incarnation.
The Kievan Saint Sophia, like Greek and other Rus churches of
the time, presumably had a row of icons along the altar rail. This
row was not yet the high icon screen of later Russian churches,
and thus the cathedral may have contained only a dozen or so
18 A Concise History of Russia

images. Few icons exist today that can be surely dated to Kievan
times, and none can be placed with any certitude in Kiev’s cathedral.
The twelfth century is richer in surviving icons, the most famous
example being the image of the Vladimir Mother of God, a Greek
(probably Constantinople) icon that found its way to Vladimir in
the northeast, where it rested in the Cathedral of the Dormition of
the Mother of God in that city. It is a typical work of the period,
with Mary in fine dress holding the infant Christ in her arms, again
the visible image of the Incarnation and the presence of Christ in the
world that is the center of the Orthodox understanding of his role.
The physical image itself was crucial to belief in Christ’s presence.
As the Byzantine monk Saint Theodore of the Studiou monastery
put it: “If reverence toward the image of Christ is subverted, then
Christ’s incarnation is also subverted”.

As the peasants cleared the land and tended their crops, and the
princes built churches and warred on one another, a cloud was gath-
ering on the horizon. In 1223 a new and strange people appeared on
the southern steppes, and the Kipchaks hastened to assemble allies
from among the Rus princes. The combined army went out to meet
the newcomers and found them on the River Kalka, just north of the
Sea of Azov. The strangers were the Mongols, who utterly destroyed
the Kipchak/Rus army and went on to raid the area of Kiev. “They
returned from the river Dniepr and we know not whence they came
or whither they went. Only God knows whence they came against
us for our sins,” said the Novgorod chronicler. They would come
again.
 2
Moscow, Novgorod, Lithuania,
and the Mongols

After the gradual disintegration of Kiev Rus, the regional powers

that supplanted it began to grow apart. In these centuries the terri-
tories of Novgorod and the old northeast began to form a distinct
language and culture that we can call Russian. Though the older
term Rus persisted until replaced by Russia (Rossiia) in the fifteenth
century, for this period we may begin to call the area Russia and the
people Russian. In these centuries, Russia, like the other territories
of Kiev Rus that would fall to Lithuania, experienced a cataclysm
in the form of the Mongol invasion, one that shaped its history for
the next three centuries.

The Mongol Empire was the last and largest of the nomadic empires
formed on the Eurasian steppe. It was largely the work of Temuchin,
a Mongolian chieftain who united the Mongolian tribes in 1206
and took the name of Genghis Khan. In his mind, the Eternal Blue
Heaven had granted him rule over all people who lived in felt tents,
and he was thus the legitimate ruler of all inner Asian nomads. The
steppe was not enough. In 1211 Genghis Khan moved south over
the Great Wall and overran northern China. His armies then swept
west, and by his death in 1227, they had added all of Inner and
Central Asia to their domains.
The astonishing success of the Mongols came from their ability
to balance the advantages of nomadic society with the benefits of
sedentary civilizations. The basic unit of Mongol society was the
clan, and in each clan the women tended to the animals and the men
19
20 A Concise History of Russia

learned the arts of war. Genghis Khan mobilized the whole of his
people for war, and the Mongols were superb horsemen, disciplined
and skilled warriors, and ruthless conquerors. They could not take
cities with cavalry, however, and thus the Mongols recruited men
from China and Central Asia who knew how to make and use
siege engines. This combination was unbeatable. Rich cities like
Khwarezm in Central Asia that tried to resist were exterminated.
Spreading terror before them, the Mongol armies overwhelmed Iran
and Iraq and took the rest of China. A typhoon prevented them from
taking Japan, but only in Viet Nam was human resistance strong
enough to defeat them.
The battle on the Kalka had been part of a reconnaissance. In
1236 the full force of the Mongol army moved west under the
command of the grandson of Genghis Khan, Batu, son of Jochi.
With perhaps a hundred thousand warriors at his disposal, Batu
first subdued Volga Bulgaria and the Kipchaks, and then during the
years of 1237 through 1240, in a series of campaigns, he smashed
Vladimir and the other northeastern towns. He razed Kiev to the
ground, wiping out the people or selling them into slavery. The
old center of Kiev Rus was gone, and would not recover for a
century and a half. Batu continued on to the west, defeating a
hastily gathered army in eastern Germany, and then turning south
to Hungary, a suitable terrain for a nomadic host. There Batu’s army
wintered over and Europe was in panic. Suddenly in the spring of
1242 the supreme Khan Ogedei died, and the army returned home
to Mongolia to participate in the succession, never to return.
The great Mongol empire soon split into four large domains (or
ulus): China, Central Asia, Iran with Iraq, and the western steppe.
The last was the ulus of Jochi in Mongol terminology, the heritage
of Jochi’s son the conqueror Batu. The Persians and later scholars
would call it the Golden Horde, while the Russians just referred to
it as the Horde (or Orda, a military camp, in Mongol). The Golden
Horde was a nomadic state whose center lay on the lower Volga,
in the city of Sarai, near the later Stalingrad. As a nomadic state, its
people followed the annual migration, wintering near the mouths
of the rivers and moving north with the melting snows. This had
been the pattern of the Kipchaks and the Khazars before them, but
the Golden Horde was on a much grander scale. It stretched from
 Moscow, Novgorod, Lithuania, and the Mongols 21

Rumania in the west to the eastern parts of Kazakstan and included

Khwarezm in Central Asia, the latter a bone of contention with
the Central Asian ulus of Chagatai. Like most nomadic states, the
Golden Horde included agricultural lands along the borders. One
of these was Khwarezm, others were the land of the Volga Bul-
garians, the Crimea, and the Rus principalities, both in the south-
west and the northeast. In the Rus principalities the khans exper-
imented with their own tax collectors, but eventually they simply
required the Grand Prince of Vladimir, the nominal supreme ruler
of the northeast, to send the annual tribute to Sarai. The Horde
demanded tribute and obedience, nothing else. The center of atten-
tion of the Khans of the Golden Horde was not on the Rus lands
but on the south, and on the contested borderlands with Central
Asia (Khwarezm) and Persia (Azerbaidzhan). These were rich ter-
ritories that also included important trade routes. By comparison,
the northern pine forests of Rus, with their sparse population, were
not much of a prize.
Thus the Rus principalities, and especially those of the north-
east and Novgorod, were included on the fringes of a vast Eurasian
empire. Historians often speak of this period as one of “Mongol
rule,” but the term is misleading, for the actual population of the
Golden Horde included almost no actual Mongols outside of the
khan’s household. Batu had incorporated the Kipchaks and other
Turkic peoples into his army and soon all that remained of the
Mongols was the name Tatar, the name of one of the leading Mon-
gol clans. In Russian it came to signify the nomads of the Horde
and the peoples who descended from them. The language of the
Horde was not Mongolian but Kipchak Turkic, the lingua franca
of the steppe and of the Horde’s winter capital at Sarai. Sarai was
a great city, with much of it made of felt tents and considered an
important waystation on the trade route from Europe to Inner Asia
and China. The population of the city included all sorts of people:
Tatars, Greeks, Latins, Armenians, Persians, and many of the Mus-
lims of Central Asia. There was even an Orthodox bishop of Sarai,
which became an eparchy of the metropolitanate of Kiev. The Mon-
gols had been tolerant of various faiths, and the Horde continued
this policy even after its conversion to Islam under Khan Uzbek in
the 1330s.
22 A Concise History of Russia

During the succeeding centuries, life continued much as before

for the people of the former Kiev Rus. The princes feuded with one
another over land and power, the cities slowly came back and the
churches were rebuilt. The tribute to the Horde must have been a
burden, but not enough to prevent the recovery of the devastated
areas. In the northeast, the main prize of political contest was the
Grand Principality of Vladimir, which not only gave control of that
town and its lands but a theoretical overlordship of the whole area
and even of Novgorod. The Grand Principality of Vladimir was
now in the gift of the khan in Sarai. Thus, Alexander Nevsky, who
ruled in Vladimir (1252–1263), came to the throne after more than
a decade as Novgorod’s elected prince. He went to Sarai to the
khan for confirmation of his title and power. From 1304, however,
Vladimir ceased to be an independent center of power, and like
Kiev earlier, it became the prize in the struggle for power among the
northeastern princes of Tver and Moscow. Ultimately the Moscow
dynasty would secure the Vladimir land and title for itself, forming
in the process the Russian state. Medieval political rivalries make
dull reading for the modern reader, for they were an endless chain
of petty conflicts, military and diplomatic; appeals to higher author-
ities; and short-lived and quickly reversed alliances.
Moscow first appears in written sources in 1147 as a small
fortress, but it seems to have been Daniil, Prince of Moscow
(circa 1280–1303) and grandson of Alexander Nevsky who con-
solidated the small territory along the Moscow River. His son Iurii
Danilovich expanded that territory, but his power was limited by
Prince Michael of Tver’s acquisition of the Vladimir throne in 1305.
From that moment Moscow and Tver were locked in a bitter strug-
gle for that throne that included the Moscow-inspired execution of
Michael of Tver in 1318. Eventually Michael became a saint, hon-
ored most of all in Moscow. The murders and denunciations to the
Horde continued until Iurii’s son Ivan (“Kalita,” the Moneybag)
finally secured the Vladimir throne from Khan Uzbek in 1328 and
held it until his death in 1340. His success guaranteed Moscow the
leading position among the northeastern princes, and with time his
descendants came to be the Grand Princes of Moscow and Vladimir.
The new town had eclipsed Vladimir and Ivan proceeded to fortify
Moscow with the first wooden Kremlin.
 Moscow, Novgorod, Lithuania, and the Mongols 23

It was not only the Vladimir title and suzerainty over the Rus-
sian princes of the northeast that came to rest in Moscow. The
Mongol conquest and destruction of Kiev had left the Metropolitan
of Kiev, the head of the church, without a home until Metropoli-
tan Maximos, a Greek, moved his residence to Vladimir in 1299.
His successor was Peter (1306–1326), not a Greek but a nobleman
from southwest Rus, who identified himself with Moscow and on his
death was buried in the Kremlin’s Dormition Cathedral. Ivan Kalita
convinced his successor, the Greek Theognostos, to remain in
Moscow as well. The Moscow princes now had at their sides the
Metropolitans of Kiev and All Rus.
By the middle of the fourteenth century Moscow was in a secure
enough position to dominate the politics of the area. It had incorpo-
rated a number of lesser principalities and exerted hegemony over
almost all others. Only Novgorod had real freedom of action. The
limit to the power of the Moscow princes came not from their neigh-
bors but from the Khans of the Golden Horde; however, here as well
the situation was changing, if only gradually, and it was chang-
ing in Moscow’s favor. Dmitrii Ivanovich, the grandson of Ivan
Kalita, inherited these advantages when he came to the Moscow
and Vladimir throne in 1359. His early years were spent building
a new white-stone Kremlin in Moscow and on rivalries with other
Rus princes and Lithuania. Then in 1378 he defeated a raiding party
from the Horde. At that moment the Horde had its own internal
problems – for the Emir Mamai, commander of the western wing
of the Horde, had come to overshadow the khan himself. Mamai
set out against Dmitrii to restore his own and the Horde’s prestige
and power over their unruly vassal. Instead, the battle on Kulikovo
field, near the upper Don River, in 1380 was a resounding victory
for Dmitrii, who was ever after known as Dmitrii Donskoi.
Later writers greatly inflated the significance of this battle, for
it did not liberate Russia from the Horde, even if it was the first
important victory over the Tatars since 1240. Mamai’s defeat led to
his elimination from the politics of the Horde, and in 1382 the new
Khan Tokhtamysh led a massive army toward the north. This time
Dmitrii chose to retreat, and Tokhtamysh took Moscow and burned
it to the ground. Dmitrii did not live long enough to see the outcome,
for he died in 1389. Two years later the great conqueror Tamerlane,
24 A Concise History of Russia

already master of Central Asia, turned against the Golden Horde

and defeated Tokhtamysh. This was a mortal blow, coming at a
time of increasing dissension among the various chiefs and tribal
groupings within the Horde. Raids and even major campaigns by
the Tatars continued, but without great success. In the 1430s the
Horde began to break up, although the theoretical supremacy of
the senior khanate over Russia lasted until 1480.

The principalities of northeastern Rus which ultimately came under

the rule of the Moscow princes were not the only components that
formed the Russian state. The other was Novgorod, which had
already begun to form its own style of government in the twelfth
century. Its distinctive economy, founded on the forests of the north
and the commercial tie to the German Hansa, gave it a wealth
that its neighbors must have envied. In addition, its location meant
that subordination to the Golden Horde remained very theoretical.
During most of the thirteenth century the Novgorodians chose to
recognize the sovereignty of the Grand Prince of Vladimir, who
sent a viceroy to lead the city-state’s army, but they now made a
formal treaty with their sovereign. In the 1290s Novgorod’s people
further altered the balance of power. From then on they elected their
posadnik, their mayor, for a term of one year from the “Council
of Lords,” which was formed of representatives of each of the five
“ends” of the town. As the same man could be reelected, the new
system made the city’s government even more oligarchic but also
more independent of the prince or his deputies.
The political history of Novgorod is recorded in its chronicles and
those of its neighbors, but the daily life of the city is also known
to us as that of no other medieval Russian town. Starting in the
1930s Soviet archeologists made it into one of the most extensive
medieval sites ever excavated, unintentionally aided by the German
Wehrmacht, which destroyed most of the modern city in World War
II. Dozens of medieval houses and workshops, barns, and midden
heaps have given a remarkable picture of the life of medieval Nov-
gorod. The water-logged soil of the site preserves organic material,
including the log-paved roads that crisscrossed the town. Leather
shoes, wooden vessels and tools, as well as objects of stone, glass,
and metal have come to light. The log roads also provide the
 Moscow, Novgorod, Lithuania, and the Mongols 25

Figure 2. A Child’s Writing Exercise from Medieval Novgorod (Birch Bark

Document 210).

archeologist with an invaluable tool: a sequence of logs that form

a database for dendrochronology (dating by tree-rings). As such,
finds can be dated in Novgorod with a great degree of accuracy.
Perhaps the most remarkable and wholly unexpected find came in
1951, when a student working on the site found a round cylinder of
birchbark encased in mud. Her presence of mind led to the discovery
that the bark, when unrolled, had writing on it, which was incised
with a sharp pointed stylus. This was the first of the birch bark let-
ters, of which thousands now exist from Novgorod and hundreds
from other medieval Russian sites. These were not literary compo-
sitions but simply letters, orders to servants, reminders from wives
to their husbands, labels for baskets (such as “rye” or “barley”),
and records of debts.
All of these finds show us a thickly populated town. Houses
were built in yards enclosed by wooden fences with a larger house
for the master and often several smaller huts of servants or arti-
sans. Each house had barns and storage sheds for animals, fodder,
and the tools of the household. Houses of great boyars and their
dependents were jumbled together with humble homesteads with
a workshop to sustain a smith or carpenter. Children’s toys and
26 A Concise History of Russia

the ever-present spindles record the occupations of children and the

spinning and weaving of the households’ women. Some of the birch
bark documents are more exotic, depicting the exercises of children
learning to write and occasional prayers and letters between nuns.
They reveal a society with a certain basic literacy, where men and
women could write simple letters, even if most could not copy or
read complex religious texts in Church Slavic.
Novgorod was a major cultural center, and the considerable
manuscript production of its cathedral clergy and monasteries
remain to this day as testimony of their activity. Church building
reflected Novgorod’s wealth as did its patronage of icon painters
from faraway Byzantium, like Theophanes the Greek (circa 1350–
1410). Theophanes is responsible for some of the more remarkable
frescoes from medieval Novgorod, as far as we can judge from what
has escaped the ravages of time, warfare, and politics. His images
create a sense of mystic light around his subjects, perhaps the influ-
ence of the mystical teaching among Byzantine monks known as
hesychasm.
Novgorod’s location put it in a different international context
from Vladimir and Moscow. A generation before the Mongol inva-
sion, Novgorod was confronted with enemies as fierce and perhaps
ultimately more dangerous than the nomads of Inner Asia, the Chris-
tian Crusaders of western Europe. They came in two groups. The
larger, but perhaps the less dangerous to Novgorod, were the Ger-
man crusading orders, the Teutonic Knights, and the Swordbearers.
These were monastic orders of celibate warriors, formed into a
community to fight against the opponents of Christianity. At the
end of the twelfth century, pushed out of Palestine by the victorious
Muslims, they turned their attention to the east shore of the Baltic
Sea, where several of the native peoples of the area, the Old Prus-
sians, Lithuanians, Latvians, Estonians, and Finns remained pagans,
untouched by Christianity in either western or eastern form. There
the Teutonic Knights received land on the border of the Prussian
lands from a sympathetic Polish duke and built their first castles.
Systematically they subdued and exterminated the Prussians in the
name of Christ, bringing German peasants to settle in their place.
Within two generations Prussia, the East Prussia of twentieth cen-
tury politics, was a German territory ruled by the order.
 Moscow, Novgorod, Lithuania, and the Mongols 27

Prussia would eventually develop into a problem for Poland, but

for Novgorod it was their allies that were the threat. Around 1200
German knights landed near Riga and began to subdue the lands
of today’s Latvia and Estonia, turning the natives into their tenants
and eventually serfs. All power rested in the hands of the arch-
bishop of Riga and the order of the Swordbearers. The Swordbear-
ers joined the Teutonic Knights in 1237 as the subordinate Livonian
order, cementing German rule. The resultant social and ethnic hier-
archy lasted through various political changes into the twentieth
century.
For the moment the Novgorodians found a new and dynamic
neighbor in place of the weak Estonian tribes of earlier centuries.
To makes things worse, another crusade was afoot. Sweden was
also moving east, gradually conquering the Finnish tribes. As they
moved east along the coast of Finland, the Swedes began to threaten
Novgorod’s vital trade route to the Hansa that ran through the Gulf
of Finland and the Neva river. In 1240 the Swedish Earl Birger, a
man more powerful than the King of Sweden himself, landed an
army in Novgorod’s territory on the south bank of the Neva. The
local Finnish tribe, the Ingrians, sent south to Novgorod for help,
and the city’s newly elected prince, Alexander of Vladimir, came
out to fight. The Swedes were driven into the sea, and Alexander
for ever after was known as Alexander of the Neva, or Alexander
Nevsky. Two years later he defeated the Livonian knights on the ice
of Lake Chud, on the Estonian border, in a battle that was of little
significance at the time, but eventually made great twentieth century
cinema: Sergei Eisenstein’s 1938 epic with Sergei Prokofiev’s music.
The medieval Novgorodians, however, knew what was important.
Prince Alexander’s epithet remained Nevsky, in memory of the truly
crucial defense of Novgorod’s trade, while his defeat of the knights
was relegated to a few lines in the chronicle. The Livonian knights
had other concerns, which distracted their attention away from the
rich and powerful Novgorod. This concern was Lithuania, the main
enemy of the knights in both Prussia and Livonia.
Of the peoples of the eastern Baltic, Lithuania alone managed to
retain its independence. As the Teutonic Knights moved inexorably
over their new territories, the Lithuanian tribes came together under
one prince. Grand Prince Gediminas (1316–1341) transformed
28 A Concise History of Russia

Lithuania into a major power. He established his capital in Wilno,

closer to his new territories, lands that today comprise the whole of
Belarus. His even more successful son Algirdas (1341–1377) added
Volhynia, Kiev, Chernigov, and parts of the Smolensk lands to his
domain. Lithuania had become in extent, if not by population, the
largest country in Europe. The Lithuanian princes of the house of
Gediminas now ruled more than half of the former lands of Kiev
Rus, excepting only Novgorod and the northeast under the Vladimir
princes, and Galicia in the southwest, which the kings of Poland had
recently taken.
The Lithuanian polity was an unusual amalgam of cultures, lan-
guages, and religions. The Lithuanian language had as yet no alpha-
bet and was neither written down nor used by the new state for
recordkeeping. Instead, the Lithuanian chanceries used a variant
of the East Slavic language of Kiev Rus. In religion the Lithua-
nian rulers and people remained pagans, though the conquest of the
Orthodox lands to the south introduced a new element. The Lithua-
nian princes placed their kinsmen and other Lithuanian nobles in
charge of the new lands and many of them converted to Orthdoxy.
These new Orthodox Lithuanian princelings and nobles formed a
new elite on the territory of the old Kiev Rus, with the old boyars
falling to the status of local squires. Yet the Grand Duke of Lithua-
nia himself remained pagan, and as such the object of the crusading
zeal of the Teutonic Knights.
The Knights were a threat not just to Lithuania, but also to
Poland, newly reunited by the efforts of Casimir the Great (1333–
1370). In 1385 the Poles faced a dual dilemma: increasing pressure
from the Knights and the succession to the throne. Poland’s ruler
Jadwiga, styled “King” of Poland, as yet had no husband, and the
nobles then chose Jogailo (Jagiełło), the Grand Duke of Lithuania
to be her husband and their king. Jogailo would provide invalu-
able aid against the Teutonic Order, but he first had to become
a Catholic Christian. The conversion and marriage, accompanied
by an agreement of union in 1385–6, produced a new polity, the
Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, that would dominate the poli-
tics of Eastern Europe until the seventeenth century. It was a per-
sonal union of the two states, each preserving its own institutions
and administration under the same monarch. The more immediate
 Moscow, Novgorod, Lithuania, and the Mongols 29

impact of Jogailo’s election as king of Poland was to create a state

capable of defeating the Teutonic Order. Poland and Lithuania’s
victory came at the battle of Grunewald (Tannenberg) in 1410.
This was the turning point in the long struggle, and by the middle
of the fifteenth century the Teutonic Order was reduced to a minor
vassal of the Polish crown.
Jogailo’s marriage fundamentally reordered Lithuania. A bishop
was appointed to Wilno and the conversion of the Lithuanian peo-
ple to Catholicism began. The vast majority of the Slavic popula-
tion remained Orthodox, and Orthodox nobles and princes retained
their positions for the ensuing decades. The religious division within
the Lithuanian state would have far-reaching consequences in the
coming centuries, but for the moment, the main result was to
encourage the formation of the Belorussian and Ukrainian nation-
alities, like the Russians born out of the earlier Kiev Rus. With
the growing strength of Lithuania, the lands around Kiev revived
and once again began to form a center of Orthodox culture. The
city of Kiev and the Kiev Monastery of the Caves came back to
life. The Ukrainian monks of Kiev and other centers recovered their
traditions by sending to Moscow and Vladimir for copies of the
old Kievan texts, the Primary Chronicle, and the stories of the
Cave Monastery. Thus a new religious and cultural center came
into being, one that eventually would have a profound impact on
Russia.

The political and military struggle with its many rivals was not
the only concern of the Moscow dynasty. From 1354 to 1378 the
see of the Metropolitan of Kiev and All Rus was in the hands
of Saint Aleksei, born to a boyar family in Moscow as Fyodor
Biakont. Aleksei’s long metropolitanate coincided with a movement
of monastic revival that enjoyed his patronage as well as that of the
Moscow princes.
Kiev Rus had supported many monasteries, for almost every
major town had several – as did some minor towns. In 1337
the monk Sergii of Radonezh decided to establish a hermitage in
imitation of the desert fathers of late antiquity and the monks of
Byzantine Mount Athos. He found a forest some thirty miles north
of Moscow and soon other hermits joined him. Eventually they
30 A Concise History of Russia

Figure 3. Monastery of the Dormition of the Mother of God (Kirillo-

Belozerskii) around 1900.

founded a monastery dedicated to the Holy Trinity with Sergii as its

leader. The new monastery stressed the importance of the common
life of the monks: common prayer and attendance at liturgy, com-
mon meals, and common work. All gifts to the monastery went to
the community, which was supervised by a hegumen (an abbot in
Western terminology), who directed the community with firmness
and humility. This revived form of monasticism with strong Byzan-
tine inspiration spread rapidly throughout the northeast of Russia.
By the time of Sergii’s death in 1392 he had inspired many follow-
ers, and they went on to found numerous new communities such as
the monastery of Saint Kirill (Sergii’s pupil) in northern Belozero.
Later in the fifteenth century Saints Zosima and Savvatii traveled
 Moscow, Novgorod, Lithuania, and the Mongols 31

all the way to the Solovki islands in the White Sea to build Russia’s
third great monastery.
Russia was now beginning to acquire its own saints, for in addi-
tion to the Saints Boris and Gleb came the holy metropolitans Peter
and Aleksei, and especially Saint Sergii of Radonezh. The relics
of the two metropolitans in the Kremlin’s Dormition cathedral and
those of Saint Sergii in the Trinity Monastery were already the object
of pilgrimage and the subjects of stories of miraculous events. Soon
all three entered the liturgy as saints and Moscow now had its
own saints to rival those of Kiev and Vladimir. The three saints
raised Moscow’s prestige, particularly the rather political cults of
the metropolitans. The sainthood of Sergii, Kirill of Belozero, and
other monastic saints represented a less political piety, centered
on the monasteries and the relics of their saints. The monasteries
were the charismatic center of Orthodox piety and for the next two
hundred years, almost all new Russian saints were holy monks or
metropolitans.
The monastic ideal even permeated writings about laymen. The
fifteenth century Oration on the Life and Death of Prince Dmitrii
Donskoi praised him not so much for his great victory over the
Tatars but for his exemplary Christian life, his abstinence from
sexual intercourse after his children were born, his fasts, and his all-
night vigils in church. These were monastic, not princely, virtues,
and the text is a far cry from the earlier lives of saintly princes,
such as Boris and Gleb, Michael of Tver, or especially Alexander
Nevskii. Yet the Oration on Dmitrii was the example for all later
accounts of virtuous princes to the end of the sixteenth century.
The greatest achievement of the monastic revival, and perhaps the
only one to arouse enthusiasm in modern times, was the impulse
it gave to architecture and icon painting. The monastery churches
were at first rather modest, with a square plan and a roof supported
by four interior columns. The design was ubiquitous, and it com-
bined necessary simplicity with economy of resources. It also easily
provided for the high icon screen, which came into practice at this
time in Russia’s monastery churches. The high icon screen soon
became universal, running up from the floor of the church nearly
to the ceiling and cutting off the altar from the congregation. In
the middle were doors, or “royal gates” (tsarskie vrata), through
32 A Concise History of Russia

which the priest came after the consecration of the bread and wine
for the Eucharist. The order of the icons was not random. On the
lowest tier, at or just below eye level, were the “local” icons, to the
right of the doors stood the image of the saint or feast to which
the church was dedicated. Thus, a church of Saint Nicholas would
have an image of that saint, and a church of the Resurrection would
have a depiction of the resurrection of Christ. The next – above eye
level, and thus most visible to a standing congregation – was the
“deesis tier,” the centerpiece of the whole screen. In the middle over
the doors, the usual image was Christ in Majesty, which depicts
Christ seated on a throne surrounded by symbols of glory. By his
sides were John the Baptist and Mary; the three together formed
an image of the Incarnation, as well as of the ensuing intercession
of Christ for sinful humanity. Mary and John slightly bow before
Christ as a gesture of appeal to his mercy. On either side of this cen-
tral composition were the four apostles. Above these large icons was
the “festival tier,” which depicted the main festivals of the Christian
year, starting with the Annunciation in March (not with Christmas,
as might be expected). Above these, again, in larger format were the
Old Testament prophets and patriarchs, sometimes forming two
tiers. At the center was usually another icon of the Mother of God,
flanked by David and Solomon, and the prophets. The basic idea of
these images was the presence of Christ in the world and his incar-
nation to save mankind. The icon screen, like the church around
it, was the meeting point of the world of the spirit and the visible
world. This was not a new idea in Orthodoxy, but the monastic
movement had found a way to express it with even more depth and
clarity.
Thus icons became both more numerous and, if possible, more
important. Theophanes the Greek came to Moscow from Novgorod
in the 1390s and worked with local painters. The most important of
these was the monk Andrei Rublev (circa 1370–1430), whose work
hung on the icon screens of many monasteries around Moscow and
eventually even in the Kremlin’s Annunciation Cathedral. Rublev’s
icons display less of the hieratic stiffness of the older schools and
portray a certain warmth in the face of Christ and in the faces
of saints that seems to accord well with the inwardness of the
newer monastic piety. Like other forms of that piety, Rublev’s icons
 Moscow, Novgorod, Lithuania, and the Mongols 33

provided an example for his pupils and imitators, and the new style
spread far beyond the monasteries. The work of Rublev and his con-
temporaries was a new departure that laid the basis of the Russian
icon of the succeeding centuries.

During the fourteenth century Moscow had established hegemony

over the northeast – but only hegemony. At the death of Vasilii I
(1389–1425), Tver remained a thorn in its side. Novgorod pursued
its own policies and a number of the principalities of the northeast
remained effectively independent. Lithuania continued to play an
important role and often a hostile one, in spite of Vasilii’s marriage
to a Lithuanian princess. Nevertheless, Vasilii held on to power and
even expanded the territory directly subject to Moscow. The mech-
anism of expansion was simple: when Moscow annexed a territory
the local elite, the local boyars and landholders were co-opted into
Moscow’s army and administration, and their landholdings were
confirmed. If resistance was unusually strong, land was confiscated
or the local elite moved elsewhere and were given new land, but such
extreme measures were unusual. Moscow could usually count on
the loyalty of the new recruits, who exchanged local autonomy for
a share in the rewards of serving a growing and successful power.
Moscow’s success and the loyalty of its boyar elite were tested
to the limits in the stormy and bloody events of the reign of Vasilii
II (1425–1462). Vasilii II was only ten years old at the time of his
father’s death and his right to rule was immediately challenged by
his uncle Iurii in northern Galich. Iurii’s challenge set off a civil
war that quickly brought him victory and rule in Moscow. The vic-
torious Iurii ordered the young Vasilii exiled to Kostroma on the
Volga river. Then the Moscow boyars showed their hand. Many
moved to Kostroma with their retinues, while others just aban-
doned Iurii. Isolated in the Kremlin, Iurii fled back north and died
in 1434. His eldest son Vasilii Iur’evich “the Squint-eyed” took
up the cause, proclaiming himself the rightful heir to the throne.
After much marching and counter marching, Grand Prince Vasilii
defeated his cousin Vasilii Iur’evich in 1436 and had him blinded
as well. This act of cruelty was not the end, for Iurii’s second son,
Dmitrii Shemiaka, replaced his brother as leader of the rebels. An
unexpected defeat of Grand Prince Vasilii at the hands of a Tatar
34 A Concise History of Russia

raiding party in 1445 gave Shemiaka a chance, and he took Moscow

and blinded Vasiliii in revenge for his brother. Again the Moscow
boyars, initially friendly, switched their allegiance back to Vasilii
and Shemiaka fled north. He made a last stand in 1450, lost again,
and then fled to Novgorod. There he died in 1453, according to the
chronicle story, from a poisoned chicken fed to him by an agent of
the Grand Prince.
These dark and confused struggles could take place in compara-
tive isolation because great changes were taking place in the Horde.
Fatally weakened by Tamerlane’s campaigns, the Horde began to
disintegrate. In 1430 Crimea broke off and in 1436 Kazan’ formed
an independent khanate on the middle Volga. Like the earlier Volga
Bulgaria, it was an agricultural society with a nomadic fringe on the
south and a Muslim culture with religious ties to Central Asia. Of
the Golden Horde remained only the “Great Horde,” a small group
of nomadic tribes that raided Russian and Lithuanian territory, but
was no longer capable of ruling Moscow. Vasilii II even established
his own dependent khanate at Kasimov on the Oka river southeast
of Moscow, whose Tatar warriors served the Moscow dynasty for
the next two hundred years.
The rule of the Mongols, or more properly the Golden Horde,
over Russia had lasted a little over two centuries. Initially the con-
quest had been extremely destructive, but its later economic effects
were largely confined to the payment of tribute. The inclusion of
Russia in the Horde’s domain may have even strengthened Rus-
sia’s trade with the east, judging from archeological evidence, the
coins and pottery of the Horde and its eastern and southern neigh-
bors found in Russian towns. The Mongol episode also provided
material for endless speculation in modern times on the imagined
effect of the “Mongols” on Russia. For racial theorists in Germany
and elsewhere it made Russia “Asiatic.” In fact, the Horde had little
traceable effect on Russian society. Religion provided a cultural bar-
rier on both sides, and the two societies were incompatible: Russia a
rather simple sedentary society and the Horde a state with relatively
complex institutions specific to nomadic society. In China, Central
Asia, and Persia, the Mongols moved in among the sedentary peo-
ples and were assimilated into them, but not in Russia. Russia’s
geography prevented that outcome. Some modern historians have
 Moscow, Novgorod, Lithuania, and the Mongols 35

made much of the “oriental” character of the Russian state, again

an alleged legacy of the Mongols. The problem with such theories
is that they lack empirical foundation. The words and institutions
that may have entered Russian from Mongolian via Turkic (such
as tamga, for a sort of sales tax and yam, for the messenger system
that relied on villages with special status to provide the riders and
their horses) were marginal institutions. These were only extra bits
in a state formed by the prince’s household ruling an agricultural
society. Finally, the notion of Mongol influence at the basis relies
on the notion of innate Asiatic slavishness and despotism, and it
is neither an accurate description of the Mongol polity nor, as we
shall see, of the Russian state that emerged after 1480.
The events in the Orthodox church were as momentous as the fall
of the Horde. After the death of metropolitan Aleksei, the Greek
church chose the Bulgarian Kiprian to succeed him. Kiprian’s mis-
sion was to keep together under his jurisdiction the Orthodox lands
of Lithuania, Moscow, and Novgorod, as they had been in Kievan
times. This was not an easy task, for both Lithuania and Moscow
wanted control but Kiprian was a powerful figure in the church as
well as in politics, and it was a cultural force, to boot. On his death
in 1406 the Greek Photios received the see and largely identified
his interests with Moscow. Photios died in 1431, right at the start
of Moscow’s dynastic turmoil. His death deprived Grand Prince
Vasilii of a crucial ally at the worst possible moment. Unfortunately
his replacement was another Greek – Isidoros – who arrived in
Moscow in 1434. Exactly at that time the Byzantine Empire was
in its last agony, reduced to the city of Constantinople and a few
islands. In a vain effort to secure aid from Western Europe, Emperor
Constantine XI agreed to discuss church union with Rome. Isidoros
quickly left Moscow for Italy to join the Greek prelates in discus-
sion. In reality, Rome proposed simple surrender, and at the council
of Florence in 1439 the Greek bishops, including Isidoros, gave in
under pressure from the Emperor. They accepted the supremacy
of the pope and the Latin position on the filioque. Among the
Greeks, the news provoked a firestorm of opposition, especially
in the monasteries, since the fourteenth century renewed centers of
Orthodox piety. The surrender at Florence divided and weakened
Byzantium rather than strengthened it, and in any case Western aid
36 A Concise History of Russia

never came in sufficient quantity. In 1453 the army of Mehmed the

Conqueror breached the walls and gates of Constantinople and put
an end to a millennium of Byzantine civilization. In its place the
Sultans built Istanbul into the great capital of an Islamic empire.
Justinian’s church of Saint Sophia became a mosque.
When the news of the fall of Constantinople reached Moscow,
the affairs of the Russian church were long settled. Isidoros had
traveled back to Moscow with the news of Florence, and in 1443
the Russian bishops met with him to consider the situation. They
unanimously rejected subjection to Rome, deposed Isidoros, and
elected in his place, Bishop Iona of Riazan at the direction of Grand
Prince Vasilii. The Orthodox church in Russia was now separated
from the Greeks, for it had elected a leader without reference to
Constantinople, which was now in the hands of unionists. Russia’s
autocephaly, as its ecclesiastical independence is called, was not
planned. It was the result of necessity, the only solution to the
dilemma presented by the apostasy of the Greeks at Florence. In
his testament Iona specified that when Orthodoxy was restored
in Constantinople, even if under the Turks, Russia would return
to obedience to the Greek bishops. This was a pious hope that
remained unfulfilled, for the Russian church continued to choose
its own metropolitan. For the Moscow princes this was a great
opportunity, as it meant that they would be the only secular rulers
with a voice in the affairs of the church in Russia.

Grand Prince Vasilii II died at the age of forty-seven in 1462. He

had emerged the victor in a ruthless struggle with his own uncle
and cousins and maintained the hegemony of Moscow. He had
encouraged the church to assert its orthodoxy and its independence
from the Greeks. His eldest son Ivan was already twenty-two, old
enough to rule in his own right. As the future would soon reveal,
the young prince was ready to seize the opportunity that his father
had left him.
 3
The Emergence of Russia

At the end of the fifteenth century, Russia came into being as a

state – no longer just a group of related principalities. Precisely
at this time in written usage the modern term Rossia (a literary
expression borrowed from Greek) began to edge out the traditional
and vernacular Rus. If we must choose a moment for the birth of
Russia out of the Moscow principality, it is the final annexation
of Novgorod by Grand Prince Ivan III (1462–1505) of Moscow
in 1478. By this act, Ivan united the two principal political and
ecclesiastical centers of medieval Russia under one ruler, and in the
next generation he and his son Vasilii III (1505–1533) added the
remaining territories. In the west and north, the boundaries they
established are roughly those of Russia today, while in the south
and east the frontier for most of its length remained the ecological
boundary between forest and steppe. In spite of later expansion, this
territory formed the core of Russia until the middle of the eighteenth
century, and it contained most of the population and the centers of
state and church. The Russians were still a people scattered along
the rivers between great forests.
In the south and east, mostly beyond the forests and out in
the steppe, Russia’s neighbors remained the Tatar khanates that
emerged in the 1430s from the breakup of the Golden Horde: Kazan,
Crimea in the Crimean peninsula, and the Great Horde ruling the
steppe. The Great Horde in turn broke up around 1500 to form the
khanate of Astrakhan on the lower Volga and farther east the Nogai
Horde. Farther east the khanate of Siberia held sway over the tiny
37
38 A Concise History of Russia

population of the vast plain of the Ob’ and Irtysh rivers. These states
were complex social organisms. Kazan’ was the only one to occupy
part of the forest zone, and its people settled along the rivers and
farmed the land like the Russians but with a nomadic appendage
where the steppe began to the southeast. The Nogais were pure
nomads. Crimea and Astrakhan’ were somewhere in between, their
population made up of mostly steppe dwellers, but Astrakhan’ was
a town and Crimea had towns and garden agriculture. Its location
meant that it had a lively trade and close political ties with its great
neighbor to the south, the Ottoman Empire.
At this moment the Ottomans were at the peak of their power,
for in 1453 Mehmed the Conqueror, already master of most of
Anatolia and the Balkans, took Constantinople, the ancient capital
of Byzantium. In 1516 the Turks moved south, quickly capturing
the Levant and Egypt, north Africa and Mesopotamia. Thus the last
great empire of western Eurasia was born, and it soon turned its
attention to central Europe. In 1524 the defeat of Hungary at the
battle of Mohacs laid open the road into Germany and in 1529 the
Ottomans laid siege to Vienna itself. For the moment, the Ottoman
Turks paid little attention to Russia. Their great opponents were
Iran and the Holy Roman Empire, and in any case the Crimeans,
from 1475 Ottoman vassals, stood between Russia and the Turks.
The Sultans in Istanbul wanted the Crimean cavalry for the Turkish
wars in Hungary and Iran and did not want to waste them in raids
against a minor state far in the north. At the same time the Sultans
gave their Crimean vassals considerable freedom of action, and Ivan
III was able to establish an understanding with the Crimeans that
lasted into the sixteenth century. Russia continued to play a major
role in the politics of the steppe, sending and receiving envoys back
and involving itself in the endless feuds and rivalries among the
ruling dynasties and clans.
To the west Russia had only one major rival, Lithuania, now
united with Poland. The resultant Polish-Lithuanian state was the
hegemonic power of Eastern Europe, more populous than Russia
and more powerful than any of its neighbors. Poland, having van-
quished the Teutonic Knights and fended off the Tatars and Turks
to the south, had only Russia as a rival left. Poland’s power came
not only from the weakness of most neighbors, but also from its
 The Emergence of Russia 39

political structure, for the growing role of the diet provided a major
role for the magnates and nobility. The diet gave its elites an impor-
tant stake in the prosperity of the state but a strong king still guar-
anteed basic order and direction. That constitution would lead to
ruin later, but in 1500 it was more durable than that of its neigh-
bors’, and Poland’s armies could dominate the field against most
enemies.
Russia’s other neighbors to the west were of little account. The
Livonian Order was too small and too decentralized to matter much
in political affairs, and Sweden (including Finland) was part of the
united kingdom of Denmark, Norway, and Sweden until 1520. The
center of gravity of the three kingdoms was in Denmark, which
was too far to the west to pay much attention to the remote border
of Finland and Russia. Trade continued through both Livonia and
Finland, and even increased in importance, but with little overall
political effect.
The situation of its neighbors allowed Russia to emerge onto the
stage of European politics at an exceptionally favorable moment.
The Tatar khanates were preoccupied with one another and the
Ottomans, while Livonia and Sweden for very different reasons
scarcely impinged on Russia’s consciousness. Russia had only one
important rival, Poland-Lithuania, the primary focus of its foreign
policy. That rival was powerful enough to provide a challenge to
the new state of Ivan III, a challenge which he handled with great
skill.

The new Russian state that emerged at the end of the fifteenth cen-
tury was much larger and more complex than the medieval Moscow
principality even in its later phases. A new state required new insti-
tutions and terminology. The Grand Prince began to style himself
“Sovereign of All Rus” or even “autocrat,” the latter to signify his
new independence from the Horde and any other claimants. Ivan
III did not rule alone, any more than did his predecessors. Russia’s
ruling elite now included princelings and boyars from the newly
acquired territories, Iaroslavl’ and Rostov princes, and Lithuanian
Gediminovichi – all of whom formed an expanded ruling elite
around the prince of Moscow. This new elite was small for the
time being, for in Ivan III’s time it comprised only eighteen or so
40 A Concise History of Russia

families, growing to about forty-five by 1550. Most of the senior

men from these clans made up the duma, or council of the Grand
Prince, and held the rank of boyar, or that of a sort of junior boyar
with the untranslatable title “okol’nichii.”1 Just barely a formal
institution, the duma met with the prince in the palace and dis-
cussed the major issues of law and administration, war and peace.
The men of these ruling clans attained the rank of boyar and other
ranks and offices by tradition and a complex system of precedence
(Russian “mestnichestvo”) that regulated their place in the court,
military, and government hierarchy. The precedence system man-
dated that no man should serve the prince at a lesser rank and office
than had his ancestors.
The Grand Prince had some leeway with the precedence system,
for it did not dictate exactly who in each clan should receive what
rank. The system required only that some of the men from each of
the great families should receive certain ranks, and that the greatest
should sit in the duma and receive the rank of boyar. In theory
the princes could appoint anyone to the duma, but in practice they
chose members of the same families year after year, adding new ones
only occasionally. These men were not just servants of the prince,
but also immensely wealthy aristocrats with great landholdings –
the pinnacle of a much larger landholding class. The Russian noble-
man’s primary duty was service in the army, mainly on the frontier,
for the administration of the state was in the hand of a tiny group
of officials and princely servants.
Some of these officials were great boyars, like the treasurers, usu-
ally chosen from the Greek Khovrin clan, or the major domo and the
equerry, who managed the Kremlin palace and the prince’s house-
hold. To assist these aristocrats there were also secretaries, men of
lesser status from the prince’s household who were sometimes of
Tatar origin. Most of them served in the Treasury, where a dozen
or so clerks and copyists kept the records of foreign policy and
the charters and testaments of the princes, carefully preserved with
the furs, jewels, tax receipts in silver, and other treasures in the
basement under the palace church of the Kremlin, the Cathedral
of the Annunciation. In the time of Ivan III there were only a few

1 From okolo (around, about); that is, someone “around” the person of the prince.
 The Emergence of Russia 41

dozen such secretaries, and the state was still essentially the prince’s
household, its offices being rooms in his palace.
For all their dominant role in Russian politics, the Kremlin and
its elite were not the whole of Russia. Several million of peasants,
almost all of them still free and most of them tenants only of the
crown, made up the great mass of its population. They grew the
food, raised cows and chickens, and supplemented their meager fare
from the berries, mushrooms, and wild game of the great forests.
Their status as tenants of the crown, however, was rapidly coming to
an end as the great monasteries and the boyars encroached on their
lands. The Grand Princes needed to reward loyal supporters, espe-
cially in newly annexed territories, and to maintain a cavalry army
as well. The army had to live off its own, from the private lands of
the cavalrymen. The princes so far lacked cash to pay them, and thus
it was not merely to curry favor that the princes granted lands. The
only restriction that they could put on such grants was to give them
with the proviso that the estate could not be sold or willed with-
out the knowledge of the prince. This type of grant was called
pomest’e, and great boyars as well as humble provincials received
such lands. The landholding class of cavalrymen fell into two broad
groups: the “Sovereign’s court” who served in Moscow (at least in
theory) immediately below the boyars, and the “town gentry” of
the provinces. The “town gentry” normally held their lands mainly
in one local area and served together in the cavalry. The elite of the
army was the Sovereign’s court. The growth of the state and its army
meant constant tinkering with the organization of the landholding
gentry, but the basic outlines that began to form late in the fifteenth
century remained until the end of the sixteenth. Then the pomest’e
system spread to the southern borders, considerably enlarging the
landholding class at the expense of the peasant freeholders. This
new situation contributed greatly to the upheavals of the ensuing
decades.
The gentry resided mainly in the towns, most of which were
small, and the boyars lived in Moscow. A few centers, Moscow,
Novgorod, and Pskov were real cities that supported merchants who
traded with Western Europe or the Near East. Though a largely
agrarian economy, Russia was not bereft of crafts or commerce,
nor was it a land of subsistence peasants cut off from any markets.
42 A Concise History of Russia

The sheer size of the country and the sparse population dictated
exchange among regions: almost all salt, for example, came from
saline springs in the northern taiga belt until late in the seventeenth
century. The men who boiled down the water to make salt and ship
it south made great fortunes. Most notable were the Stroganovs,
who amassed a fortune large enough to finance the first steps in
the conquest of Siberia. Novgorod and its neighbor Pskov remained
important centers of trade with northern Europe through the Baltic
Sea, but their capacity was limited by the small rivers and absence
of large harbors at the east end of the Gulf of Finland. Then in 1553
the English sea captain and explorer Richard Chancellor made his
way around Norway into the White Sea, landing at the mouth of the
Northern Dvina River. With this voyage a direct path for large ships
opened to Western Europe, and Tsar Ivan the Terrible encouraged
the English Muscovy Company to bring their ships every summer to
the northern port. The Dvina and other rivers made possible the long
journey from Moscow to the new port of Archangel, and the English
were soon joined by the even more enterprising Dutch. Moscow
itself was the hub of all Russian trade, and the city grew rapidly
throughout the 1500s. Commerce with Russia was not minor for
the Dutch and English, for by 1600 the Dutchmen engaged in the
Archangel trade had made so much money that they could form
a new company, the Dutch East India Company, which then set
out to conquer what is today Indonesia. The Russian trade partly
financed Holland’s greatest commercial adventure.
Against this background of social change and economic evolu-
tion the rulers of Russia and their court did not remain idle. For the
whole of his life Ivan III conducted a relentless struggle to expand
the power and territory of the grand princes of Moscow. The annex-
ation of Novgorod was his greatest victory, but not the only one. He
exploited the dissatisfaction of the regional princelings of Lithua-
nia along his western border so as to encourage several of them
to accept his sovereignty, and he rounded out and confirmed these
acquisitions by war. He absorbed Moscow’s ancient rival Tver’ in
1485 and established his influence over the last two independent
territories of Riazan’ and Pskov so that his son could later annex
them without effort. Equally important, he put an end to the two
and a half centuries of Russian dependency on the Tatar Hordes.
 The Emergence of Russia 43

In 1480 the Khan of the Great Horde sent its army north toward
Moscow. Ivan and many of his boyars hesitated, unsure whether
they should meet the Tatars or just flee north. With some encour-
agement from the church, he went out to meet them at the Ugra
river, a small tributary of the upper Don. After a few days of watch-
ing one another, the two armies departed for home. This event, the
“standing on the Ugra,” was ever after seen in Russia as the end
of Tatar overlordship. Ivan moved aggressively into the space left
by the fragmentation of the Horde, involving himself in Kazan’s
dynastic politics. With time, Ivan’s intrigues with the Tatars would
have great consequences.
Ivan III of Moscow began to call himself the ruler of “All Rus,”
but his new larger state demanded a better defended and more
adequate capital. For this Ivan turned to Italy, the center of Euro-
pean architecture as well as engineering and fortification. He had
already been in contact with Italy from the time of his marriage in
1473 to Zoe Paleologue, the daughter of the last Byzantine ruler of
the Peloponnesus, for Zoe had taken refuge from the Turks at the
papal court. There were other Greeks in Moscow as well, who had
extensive contacts with their compatriots and relatives in Italy, and
through them Ivan sent for architects and engineers to rebuild the
Moscow Kremlin and its churches. The result was that the Krem-
lin, the quintessentially Russian place to the modern eye, with its
ancient churches and pointed towers in dark red brick, was not the
work of Russians at all, but with few exceptions the product of
Italian masters.
The earlier Kremlin of the fourteenth century had had white stone
walls in the usual native style of Russian fortresses, and within the
walls were wooden dwellings for princes and boyars as well as
stone churches. Ivan did not want to modify the basic form of the
churches. That form had a spiritual meaning that a Western plan
could not have. Aristotele Fioravanti of Bologna solved the problem
by building a new and larger Dormition Cathedral in the Kremlin
with Italian technique but Russian form. Then he and others, Marco
Ruffo and Pietro Antonio Solari from Milan, Aloisio da Caresano,
and others went to work on the walls. One of the builders wrote
back to a brother in Milan that the prince of Moscow wanted a
castle “like that of Milan” (referring to the Sforza castle), and that
44 A Concise History of Russia

Figure 4. The Moscow Kremlin in a Seventeenth Century Atlas. The draw-

ing shows the towers with low roofs after the example of the Sforza Castle.
The high-pointed roofs on the towers that are so familiar today were added
in the 1670s.

is more or less what the prince got. They also began a new palace in
the north Italian style, parts of which still survive. Only the churches
were built in the traditional Russian style, albeit by Italian builders,
with the sole exception of the Annunciation Cathedral, the palace
chapel. Today the Italian work is visible only in the walls and the
“House of Facets,” one of the main audience chambers. The other
fragments of the old palace and the Renaissance elements in the
churches were heavily “russified” by later repairs. The seventeenth-
century addition of pointed roofs to the towers along the wall effec-
tively concealed the Milanese model, but in 1520 the palace and the
walls must have looked very Italian indeed.
The new Russia with its Italianate Kremlin may have taken its
architecture, if only for a generation, from Italy, but it remained
 The Emergence of Russia 45

Orthodox in religion and its culture remained firmly religious. The

context of Orthodoxy, however, had altered, for the emergence of
the new state had come rapidly on the heels of a major change in the
status of the Orthodox church, the establishment of autocephaly in
1448. The new situation of the church and of Russia required a new
conception of Russia’s place in the divine plan of salvation, and as
early as Ivan III’s “standing on the Ugra” of 1480 the church found
the answer. Russia was to be understood as a “new Israel,” and the
Russians were a new chosen people with their capital in Moscow,
the new Jerusalem. Like the ancient Israelites, the Russians were the
one people on earth chosen by God to receive the correct faith. Like
ancient Israel, Russia was beset on all sides by unbelieving enemies,
the Catholic Swedes and Poles to the west and the Muslim Tatars
to the south and east. Critical to their survival, as for ancient Israel,
were firm adherence to the correct faith in God and punctilious
obedience to God’s commandments. Such faith and behavior would
guarantee survival, for God would deliver their enemies into their
hand, as he had done for King David. If they could remain faithful,
they would avoid the fate of ancient Israel until Christ came again
to earth.
Holding to the correct faith in last years of the reign of Ivan III
had become, however, a serious problem. For the first time since
the conversion of Saint Vladimir in 988, the Russian church found
itself confronting opponents from within and was beset by internal
disputes over the system of belief. In Novgorod a small group of
clergy began to question the Orthodox formulation of the notion
of the divinity of Christ, the common forms of devotion involving
icons, and monasticism as well. As they seem to have questioned
the Christian notions of the Trinity, their opponents, mainly Saint
Joseph of Volokolamsk, labeled them Judaizers, exaggerating their
dissent and slandering them as enemies of Christianity. The group
acquired some followers in Moscow, even among the officials of the
Kremlin offices, before it was suppressed in 1503, and the leaders
were burnt as heretics. These were the first such executions for
heresy in Russian history. The church could find no defense of
such actions in its traditions, and had to turn to the West, to a
description of the Spanish inquisition taken from the words of the
Imperial ambassador, to justify the executions.
46 A Concise History of Russia

More widespread was the controversy over monastic life that

arose at the same time and lasted for a generation. This dispute
was far from an arcane debate among monks, for monasticism
was still central to Orthodoxy as it emerged from the medieval
period. The Kremlin itself included the monastery of the Miracle
of Saint Michael the Archangel and the Convent of the Ascension,
the activities of both of which formed integral parts of the life of
the court. The city of Moscow had dozens of small monasteries
within its walls, and several great ones just beyond them. Only a
day’s journey north, Saint Sergii’s Trinity Monastery was the annual
site of the pilgrimage of the whole court for the saint’s festival in
September. Every Russian town of any consequence boasted one
or two monasteries in or around it. For much of the first half of
the sixteenth century Russian monks discussed the proper type of
monastic life, some stressing individual asceticism and common life.
Both styles were part of Orthodox tradition, exemplified in the
work and teaching of Saint Joseph of Volokolamsk and Nil Sorskii.
Eventually some of Nil’s posthumous followers came to question
the very idea of monastic landholding as an obstacle to a holy
life.
This controversy was purely Russian, but the church was not
entirely isolated from the world. Orthodox brethren still made up
most of the population of the Balkans under Turkish rule, and the
great monasteries on Mount Athos provided spiritual leadership.
The most prolific writer on religious topics in early sixteenth-century
Russia was actually a Greek named Michael Trivolis (1470–1556),
in monastic life he took the name Maximos. Maksim the Greek, as
he was known in Russia, had spent his youth in Venice and Florence,
but ultimately came to reject the Renaissance secular culture for
Orthodox monasticism. In this decision he imitated Savonarola,
with whose teaching he was acquainted. In Russia he provided
an encyclopedic collection of tracts and essays on topics from the
errors of Islam to the correct stance on monastic landholding. His
mild critique of that practice and other deviations from the then
dominant notions among the higher clergy led to his condemnation
and exile in the 1530s, but even in exile he remained a major figure in
the church and ultimately the young Ivan IV ordered him released.
 The Emergence of Russia 47

His writings were widely copied and remained authoritative on

many subjects for the ensuing century.

Ivan III’s successor, Vasilii III (1505–1533), came to the throne not
as the eldest son but as the result of Ivan’s decision to give it to him.
He was the son of Ivan’s second wife, the Greek Sophia Paleologue,
and Ivan chose him, after some hesitation, over his grandson by
his first wife (his son by the first wife had died). Much of Vasilii’s
effort was to go to maintaining and expanding Russia’s position in
the world. The territorial rivalry with Poland-Lithuania ended in a
war that was successful for Russia with the capture of Smolensk in
1514. Smolensk was the last ethnographically Russian land outside
the rule of Moscow, and in addition its conquest provided the state
with a major fortress far to the west of Moscow. Though the war
ended only in a truce, it fixed the Russo-Polish boundary for a
century. Relations with the Tatar khanates, in contrast, involved a
bewildering chain of intrigue and counter-intrigue as well as endless
Tatar raids for slaves and booty on the southern frontier. About
this time Vasilii adopted the practice of mobilizing the army on
that southern frontier every summer, whether a formal state of war
existed or not, for there was no other way to prevent the annual
raids that formed an important part of the nomadic economy.
Vasilii’s greatest challenge, however, came not from the Tatars
or Poland but from his own dynastic problems. For his first wife
he had taken Solomoniia Saburova, not a foreign princess like his
mother but the daughter of a prominent boyar. The marriage was
successful in all but one crucial respect: no children were born. After
much controversy and consultation with the church, he pressured
Solomoniia into entering a convent and finally dissolved the mar-
riage in 1525. Vasilii then married princess Elena Glinskaia, the
daughter of a Lithuanian prince whose clan had taken refuge in
Moscow after it had failed to successfully challenge its own sover-
ereign. The Glinskiis had remained a powerful family in Russian
exile, and claimed descent from the Tatar emir Yedigei, a great
warrior who had fought Tamerlane himself in the early fifteenth
century. In 1530 Elena gave birth to a son Ivan, who would be
known to history as Ivan the Terrible.
48 A Concise History of Russia

ivan the terrible

Like so many such epithets “Terrible (grozny)” was a product of
later romanticism, not of the sixteenth century. Even Ivan’s most
determined Russian opponents never used it, and indeed in the
language of the time the Russian word grozny would have meant
“awe-inspiring” (the English is a traditional mistranslation) and
so it had mildly positive connotations. Be that as it may, Vasilii’s
untimely death in 1533 put the child Ivan on the throne of the
Grand Prince of Moscow and all Rus, a situation that required a
regency consisting of his mother and several prominent boyars to
run the country. The great boyar clans, the Glinskiis and Shuiskiis,
Bel’skiis and Obolenskiis, competed for power at the court and did
not hesitate to exile and execute the losers. The death of Ivan’s
mother in 1538 spurred on the intrigues, and only the marriage and
majority of the young prince imposed a certain calm on the political
waters.
Shortly after his marriage to Anastasiia, the daughter of the boyar
Iurii Romanov-Koshkin, Ivan was crowned by Makarii, the head of
the church as Metropolitan of Moscow, in 1547 in the Kremlin’s
Dormition cathedral. Makarii crowned him not just Grand Prince,
like his father, but also Tsar, a title derived ultimately from the
name of Caesar. Tsar was the popular name among the Slavs for the
Roman and Byzantine emperors, and thus conveyed a proclamation
of equality in rank with those rulers as well as the Holy Roman
Emperor in the West. Tsar was also the Russian word for title of the
Khan of the Golden Horde and his successors in Kazan’ and Crimea
as well as of the Ottoman Sultan. Most important, it was the title
of David and Solomon in the Slavic Old Testament. In case anyone
missed the point, Ivan had the walls of the audience chambers of
the Kremlin palace decorated with Old Testament scenes. There the
Old Testament kings (“tsars” to the Russians) surrounded Joshua’s
conquest of the land of Canaan. Henceforth Russia’s rulers were
tsars, the equals of the Western Emperor, the Sultan, and the Old
Testament kings.
Thus began a reign of unprecedented activity that lasted thirty-
five years, full of drama and victory, bloodshed, and defeat. Untiring
in pursuit of his goals, Ivan left his mark on generations to come.
 The Emergence of Russia 49

Within a short time of his coronation, he set out on the first of

his great enterprises. In the years of the regency, Moscow’s influ-
ence in Kazan’ had slipped, permitting Kazan’ once again to fall
to hostile khans. Ivan set off to end the threat by installing a pro-
Moscow khan, but after repeated failures to take the city, he simply
annexed it when it fell to the Russian army in 1552. Ivan was only
twenty-two years old, and he did not stop there. His armies went
on down the Volga to Astrakhan’ and seized it and its territory
as well. These conquests presented the Russians with a new situa-
tion, for never before had any substantial non-Christian population
existed within their borders. On the capture of Kazan, Ivan ordered
the Tatars remaining in the city to move out beyond the fortress
walls, subsequently building a cathedral and settling Russians in
their place in the city. Some of the Tatar elite entered Russian ser-
vice, most of whom eventually converted to Orthodoxy, but many
more fled to Crimea. The tsar enrolled thousands of Tatars in his
army with the status of military servants. Other lesser landholders,
townspeople, and peasants as well as the other nationalities of the
khanate, the Chuvash, Mari, and Udmurt peasants, now acquired
a special status. In place of the usual Russian taxes they paid yasak,
a sort of tribute, to the tsar. Beyond these measures, the Russians
did nothing to further subjugate the Tatars and other Volga peo-
ples. There was no attempt at mass conversion. Virtually all Tatars
and Bashkirs remained Muslims, visiting their mosques for Friday
prayers, sending young men to Samarkand and other Central Asian
towns to acquire the knowledge to become imams, and reading
the Koran and other religious literature as before. There was no
equivalent to the expulsion of the Moors from Spain after the end
of the Reconquista.
With Astrakhan’ came control of the whole of the Volga basin
and surrounding lands. By the 1560s the Russians had a fort on the
Terek river at the foot of the Caucasus, looking up at the high moun-
tains. Ivan established relations with the Circassian mountaineers of
the Caucasus and the Circassians’ lesser dependents, the Chechens
and other peoples. The conquest of the Volga, a response primarily
to the local situation on the border with Kazan’, put Russia into
a new geopolitical situation. Its control of the Volga for the first
time in history cut off the western part of the Eurasian steppe from
50 A Concise History of Russia

the main body to the east. Nomadic peoples continued to cross the
Volga back and forth until the eighteenth century, but now they
crossed under Russian control.
In the course of the 1550s Ivan acquired experience and maturity.
In 1553, to be sure, he suffered a grave illness and some of the boyars
were unwilling to accept his son as the rightful heir. This crisis, how-
ever, passed and peace returned to the court. Ivan governed with
the boyars and apparently under the influence of his spiritual father
Silvestr, the priest of the palace church, the Annunciation Cathe-
dral, and his favorite Aleksei Adashev, a man of low rank in the
landholding class but capable and able to work with the great boyar
clans. The tsar and his government seem to have worked together
fairly harmoniously. Together they expanded the state apparatus
in Moscow and the provinces and reorganized the army. Peace
did not last long: in 1558 tsar Ivan began a war with the aim
of the annexation of Livonia, a war that would continue after his
death and have profound effects on Russia. Livonia in 1558 was
a country in crisis, which was brought on by the Reformation and
the end of the Livonian Order that had ruled since the thirteenth
century. As the state dissolved, various groups of knights began to
turn to neighboring powers for support: the first group turned to
Poland. Ivan had long advanced claims to the area based on spurious
dynastic arguments, and indeed he claimed Livonia as the territory
of his ancestors, which it had never been. In the winter of 1558, he
decided on a preemptive strike to counter possible Polish involve-
ment. The Russian army moved into Livonia and quickly captured
Dorpat (Tartu) and the important port of Narva just across the
Russian border. These two towns, and particularly Narva, seem to
have been Ivan’s primary goals. At the lowest ebb of his military
fortunes in coming years, he offered to give up everything else if he
could keep Narva.
In the beginning, fortune favored the Russian armies, but their
very success inevitably aroused the opposition of Poland-Lithuania.
While the Russians were successful and English merchant ships
began to come to Narva, Ivan cultivated the friendship of Queen
Elizabeth of England, even proposing various marriage schemes. As
the years wore on, however, Russia proved unable to sustain the
necessary military effort. The Polish army defeated the Russians at
 The Emergence of Russia 51

several important battles, and to complicate matters, the nobles of

northern Estonia turned to Sweden for help. The Swedish forces
landed in Reval in 1561, turning the war into a three-way contest.
In this situation the political harmony at the Russian court began
to evaporate. It seems that Adashev and Silvestr had always har-
bored doubts about the Livonian enterprise, and with Russian
defeats some of the boyars, the most important being Prince Andrei
Kurbskii, went over to Poland. Ivan’s wife, Anastasiia, died in 1560,
and Ivan chose for his second wife the daughter of the Circassian
prince Temriuk, the new tsaritsa taking the name Maria in baptism.
Metropolitan Makarii’s death in 1563 removed the last restraining
influence over the tsar. Ivan grew suspicious of many of the great
boyars, whom he suspected of disloyalty to his policies and perhaps
even his person. He had several of them executed or exiled. Many of
them, he would claim, had been reluctant to support his young son
as heir to the throne during his illness in 1553. In December 1564,
Ivan suddenly left the Kremlin, taking with him only his family,
his immediate and trusted servants, and the treasury. First he went
south to one of the small suburban palaces and then turned north-
east, circling around the city and coming to stay at Aleksandrovo, a
small town some hundred miles to the northeast of Moscow. There
he stayed several weeks, remaining out of all communication with
the capital. He then sent a messenger to Moscow with an announce-
ment that must have come to the population like a thunderbolt. The
Tsar of all Russia announced that he was angry at the treason and
misdeeds of the boyars and he abdicated the throne. Only the pop-
ulace of Moscow was exempted from his suspicions: toward them
he had no anger. After a few days, the people and the boyars, led
by the church, sent a delegation out to Aleksandrovo, begging him
to change his mind. Ivan consented and returned to Moscow.
The winter journey to Aleksandrovo and back was the beginning
of five years of bloodshed and upheaval, the period that marked Ivan
for later generations as “the Terrible.” Sergei Eisenstein’s famous
film of of 1944 about Ivan ended its first part precisely at this
moment, the petition of the people at Alexandrovo. Eisenstein’s
portrait was notably ambiguous and historians have never ceased
to debate Ivan’s policies and personality. Some have even argued
that he was paranoid, but there is too little evidence to analyze his
52 A Concise History of Russia

personality. We know only what he did, not his inner thoughts and
feelings.
On his return from Alexandrovo, Ivan divided the country and
the state into two parts, reserving the income and administration
of the north, Novgorod, and much of central Russia to himself, as
the “Oprichnina.”2 The Oprichnina was a separate realm within
the state, with a separate boyar duma and Oprichnina army. The
remainder of the country he left to the boyars and the old boyar
duma. Partly a military measure, the Oprichnina served Ivan as a
political base from which to strike at the boyars whom he consid-
ered unreliable. Executions followed gruesome torture, and whole
communities, like the landholders of the Novgorod area, were sent
into exile on the Volga frontier. Protestations from the church were
to no avail, and in 1568 Ivan had Metropolitan Filipp deposed and
soon afterwards killed. Compliant churchmen were appointed in his
place and the places of his supporters. Eventually some of the lead-
ers of the Oprichnina were themselves killed, and finally in 1570
Ivan executed nearly two thousand people in Novgorod, including
nobles and townspeople. Then, as suddenly as he had begun, he
terminated the whole policy in 1572, prohibiting even the use of the
name Oprichnina.
After the end of the Oprichnina, Russia’s internal politics were
relatively quiet, broken only by bizarre episodes like Ivan’s tempo-
rary abdication in 1575 in favor of Semen Bekbulatovich, a scion
of the Astrakhan’ khans who had converted to Orthodoxy, or the
death of Ivan’s heir, Ivan Ivanovich, in 1581. The story, perhaps
true, was that Tsar Ivan struck his son in a rage and the heir died on
the spot. Toward the end of his life Ivan compiled long lists of his
victims and sent large gifts to the great monasteries with orders to
pray for the souls of those who had perished at his orders. The war
in Livonia stagnated, but by 1580, Stefan Bathory, the newly elected
king of Poland managed to expel the Russians and divide Livonia
with Sweden. The only success for Ivan was Bathory’s subsequent
failure to take Pskov after a long siege.
In 1584 Ivan died while playing chess in the Kremlin palace. He
had nothing to show for the Livonian war but a country ruined

2 From old Russian oprich’, meaning “separate” or “apart from.”

 The Emergence of Russia 53

by overtaxation to support a failed war. His earlier successes were

overshadowed by the disorder and bloodshed of the Oprichnina
years, though his conquests on the Volga remained as a permanent
and crucial acquisition. In the very last years of Ivan’s life another
rather different expedition enlarged Russia even further. In 1582–
1583 the Cossack Yermak, perhaps sponsored by the Stroganovs
rather than Ivan himself, crossed the Urals into western Siberia,
following the rivers to the capital of the Tatar khanate of Siberia.
There a few thousand Tatars ruled other native peoples of the Urals
and subarctic regions. Yermak took the city, established a Russian
fort nearby to be called Tobol’sk, and proclaimed Russian rule in
the name of the tsar. Ivan and his successors quickly moved to send
a small garrison and a governor, and the western third of Siberia
was theirs. Russia now extended east to the longitude of modern
Karachi, and by the 1640s further exploration and conquest brought
Russia to the Pacific Ocean. The true importance of all this was far
in the future, but for the time it meant a seemingly inexhaustible
supply of sable and other furs to sell to the Dutch and English – all
to the great profit of the northern Russian merchants and the tsar’s
treasury.

the time of troubles

On Ivan’s death the country was slowly recovering from the dis-
asters of the last twenty-five years of his reign. He had two
surviving sons, the eldest Fyodor from Anastasiia and Dmitrii (born
1582) from his fourth wife, Mariia Nagaia. Fyodor, who appears
to have been limited in both abilities and health, was married to
Irina Godunov, the sister of Boris Godunov, a boyar who had risen
from modest origins in the landholding class through the Oprich-
nina. With the accession of his brother-in-law to the throne, Boris
was now in a position to become the dominant personality around
the tsar. First, however, he had to get rid of powerful boyar rivals
who saw their chance to restore their power at the court. Indeed at
the beginning of Fyodor’s reign virtually every boyar clan that had
suffered under Ivan returned to the duma if they had not already
done so. Boris lost no time in marginalizing them one by one and
forcing some into exile. His second problem was the presence of the
54 A Concise History of Russia

tsarevich Dmitrii, for Fyodor and Irina had only a daughter who
died in infancy. Boris imported doctors from the Netherlands to
examine Irina, but to no avail. Thus after Fyodor’s death the throne
would presumably pass to Dmitrii, but in 1591 he perished, suppos-
edly because he accidentally stabbed himself with a toy sword while
playing. This was the conclusion of the official investigation. Natu-
rally the rumor persisted that Boris had secretly ordered him killed,
and the mystery has remained unsolved to the present. Certainly
Dmitrii’s death made possible all that came later.
In 1598 Tsar Fyodor died. His reign had been one of modest
success under the guidance of Godunov. A short war with Sweden
recovered the originally Russian territory on the Gulf of Finland lost
in the Livonian war. This outcome produced no gains in Livonia
itself, but at least Russia was back to the pre-1558 status quo.
Godunov’s government also reinforced the standing of the church by
convincing the Greek Orthodox patriarchs not only to recognize the
autocephaly of the Russian church but also to give the Metropolitan
of Moscow the title of Patriarch in 1588–9. In the long run, far
more important, and indeed fateful, were the changes in Russian
rural society. In spite of the opening of new lands in the south and
a booming trade, Russia acquired a new and ominous institution,
the serfdom of the peasantry. Virtually all peasants in central and
northwestern Russia lost their personal freedom at the end of the
sixteenth century and became the bondsmen of the landholding
class, boyars and lesser gentry, as well as of the church. The details
of the serf’s status were never defined in Russian law, other than by
the provision that their owners might recover them if they fled. At
first this right of the owner could be exercised only for a few years,
but from 1649 it became perpetual. Other relations between master
and serf were in the realm of custom. Peasants paid rent as they had
before, in kind or in cash, but labor services also became for a time
nearly universal. Fortunately for the peasants most landlords were
far away, in the towns or even in Moscow itself, and only the great
boyars could afford numerous stewards of their estates. The absence
of resident masters left the village community to manage payments
and services itself, as well as most other affairs. Nevertheless the
serfs came under the thumb of the landlord whenever he chose to
exercise his power. In the north and on the eastern and southern
 The Emergence of Russia 55

borders where there were few or no landholders, the peasants –

some twenty-five percent of the Russian peasantry – remained free,
but even there they were fearful of the future.
With Fyodor dead Boris was determined to take full power. The
death of all the heirs of Ivan had extinguished the dynasty that had
ruled since the time of Prince Vladimir of Kiev. There were other
princes of the line of Rurik, but rather than work out the geneal-
ogy and find an heir, the Russian elite chose to elect a new tsar.
The Patriarch called an Assembly of the Land that included the
boyars, the senior clergy, and representatives from the provincial
gentry, and the Moscow merchants. There were several possible
candidates among the boyars, including the Romanov clan, promi-
nent boyars for two centuries and the relatives of Ivan the Terrible’s
first wife Anastasiia and Tsar Fyodor. Instead, Boris managed to
garner enough support in the duma, the church, and other circles
to support his own candidacy, and soon the Assembly of the Land
proclaimed Boris Godunov the tsar of all Russia.
This was to prove a hollow victory. Among the first acts of Tsar
Boris was to exile the Romanovs and their allies. He ordred Fyodor
Nikitich, the senior Romanov, to take monastic vows, removing him
from politics, and he also forced Fyodor’s wife to enter a convent.
The duma soon consisted only of Boris’s relatives and clients and
a few others too timid or cowed to resist. Perhaps Boris could
have waited out the palace intrigues and eventually restored a more
harmonious court, but he did not have the chance. In the early 1600s
famine struck the land, which created hardship and unrest, and the
free peasants and Cossacks of the southern border began to grow
restive. Then a new element arrived with the person of Grishka
Otrep’ev, a defrocked monk from a minor landholding family who
claimed that he was the tsarevich Dmitrii miraculously preserved
from death and had hidden since 1591. Otrep’ev had gone to Poland
some years before and told his story there, convincing the powerful
magnate Jerzy Mniszech of his prospects and receiving Mniszech’s
daughter Marina in marriage. Otrep’ev collected an army of Polish
nobles discontented with their own king and ready for adventure
as they crossed into Russia at the end of 1604. At first he made
little progress, other than inspiring some of the local peasantry
and Cossacks to join him. Boris sent out an army to capture the
56 A Concise History of Russia

pretender, but early in 1605 the commanders of the army went

over to the False Dmitrii, as he was known thereafter. Boris still
had plenty of resources on which to draw, but his sudden death
changed everything. The way to Moscow was open, and Grishka
Otrep’ev entered the Kremlin in June 1605, as Tsar Dmitrii with an
entourage of Poles and the support of many of the Russian boyars as
well as the Cossacks. The story of Boris would later inspire Pushkin
and Mussorgsky to great artistic heights, but for contemporaries his
reign inaugurated a decade and a half of upheaval and war – the
Time of Troubles.
The Time of Troubles (smuta, or “confusion” in Russian) was
the result of the acceleration and unusual violence of the factional
battles at the tsar’s court after Ivan IV’s death combined with the
rebellions of the Cossacks and peasants. These agrarian revolts cen-
tered along the southern border since the new settlers came primarily
from villages in the interior where the peasantry had recently been
enserfed. In the south the peasantry and Cossacks were still free but
had reason to fear that serfdom would soon catch up with them.
To make matters worse, many of the new gentry landholders in the
south, settled there to provide cavalry on the border, were equally
discontented, fearful of falling into the peasantry and convinced
that state policy favored the boyars over them. These two conflicts
at the top and bottom of Russian society were not the whole story
of the Troubles, for the result of the initial events was a general
collapse of order in Russian society. The central government lost
control of the situation, and the provinces were left to themselves,
some choosing to obey the governors sent from Moscow, some not.
The governors soon found that even with some local support they
were on their own, improvising matters as best they could. Large
numbers of armed bands began to roam the country, including
some Poles and Ukrainians who had come to Russia with Dmitrii
and some Russian Cossacks, many of them just local bandits. The
various short-lived governments in Moscow tried to put together a
viable army to control the situation, but to no avail.
The reign of “Tsar Dmitrii” was short. Within a year the pop-
ulace of Moscow rebelled and stormed the Kremlin, tearing the
pretender to pieces and killing many of his followers. They burned
his body and shot the remains out of a cannon pointed at Poland.
 The Emergence of Russia 57

Marina saved her life by hiding under the skirts of one of her ladies
in waiting, but she was soon captured. Prince Vasilii Shuiskii and
other boyars were behind the riot, and Vasilii himself ascended the
throne in May 1606. Vasilii Shuiskii’s seizure of the crown with the
support of only a small group of boyars only worsened the chaos,
for in opposition a vast peasant rebellion enveloped the south of
the country and new pretenders arose. After Vasilii managed to
defeat the peasants the next year, the “thief of Tushino,” another
pretender, took up residence in the village of that name west of
Moscow and besieged the capital. Marina Mniszech and her father
turned up in the Tushino camp and pretended to recognize him as
the true Tsar Dmitrii once again having been miraculously saved
from death. The thief of Tushino was no longer just a peasant
rebel, for he had the support of several Polish regiments and had
attracted a number of Russian boyars to his camp. The elite had
split once again, and to make matters worse King Sigismund of
Poland appeared before Smolensk with a great army. In desper-
ation Tsar Vasilii Shuiskii turned to Sweden, making a treaty in
1609 that gave him the mercenary army he wanted although under
Swedish command, but ceded the Russian territory on the Gulf
of Finland to his new ally. The Poles defeated the Russians and
the Swedish mercenary army, which then went over to Sigismund.
Shuiskii’s regime collapsed in 1610 and seven of the boyars formed
an interim government in Moscow. At this point many of the boyars
and the gentry, realizing Poland’s strength, decided to support the
candidacy of Sigismund’s son Wladyslaw for the Russian throne.
Negotiations with the King of Poland grew increasingly difficult
for the Russian boyars and some began to resist his conditions.
Sigismund responded by throwing them in prison. The Polish army
occupied Moscow, while the surrounding anarchy reached its nadir.
The King’s army only added its forces to the already numerous
Polish bands of soldiers who roamed the countryside, competing for
booty with ever more Russian Cossacks, peasant rebels, and simple
bandits. For the population it was difficult to tell these bands apart,
as their aims and methods were essentially the same. In many areas
the inhabitants fled to the forests or farther away looking for safety.
Some areas of the country resisted the Polish-sponsored regime.
The Trinity Monastery endured months of siege rather than
58 A Concise History of Russia

recognize the new order in Moscow. The Volga and the North
began to rally with the encouragement of the church. In Nizhnii
Novgorod and elsewhere the merchant Kuzma Minin and the local
gentry formed a volunteer army and provisional government. By the
summer of 1612 the army, under the command of Prince Dmitrii
Pozharskii, was strong enough to move toward Moscow and in
October they defeated the Poles before the city wall. Soon they were
able to enter the Kremlin, and while war and anarchy still raged,
the leaders of the army, the remaining boyars and higher clergy
called an Assembly of the Land to choose a new tsar. Once again
they rejected the dynastic principle in favor of the consensus of the
elite and the population as a whole. The Cossacks were particularly
vocal, and the choice fell on the sixteen-year-old Michael Romanov,
the son of Boris Godunov’s erstwhile enemy Fyodor Romanov, who
had become the monk Filaret. Tsar Michael was crowned in July of
1613. As his father Filaret was in prison in Poland, the leadership of
the new government fell to Michael’s mother, the nun Marfa, and
her relatives, favorites, and the boyars who had finally come to sup-
port Minin and Pozharskii. Five more years were necessary to defeat
the Poles and expel the Swedes from Novgorod and the northwest.
In the south rebellion only slowly receded. The first false Dmitrii’s
wife, Marina, took up with the Cossack chieftain Ivan Zarutskii and
the two terrorized the lower Volga region for years until the new
tsar’s army finally defeated them and executed Zarutskii. Marina
soon died in prison. Russian society had been smashed, Smolensk
lost to Poland, and the Russian coast of the Gulf of Finland ceded
to Sweden at Stolbovo in 1617. Huge areas were devastated and
depopulated. The Troubles, however, were over, and a new era
began.
 4
Consolidation and Revolt

The end of the Time of Troubles brought peace to Russia and a

new dynasty of tsars, one that would remain on the throne until
1917. The decades that followed the Troubles saw the restoration
of the social and political order that had existed before, so that
Russia looked very much the same as it had on the day that the
Assembly of the Land elected Boris Godunov tsar. Yet under the
surface of restored customs and institutions, earlier trends gathered
speed and new developments appeared. Serfdom provided a rigid
framework that determined the life of most Russians and slowed,
but did not preclude, economic changes and growth. At the other
end of Russian society, at the court and among the higher clergy,
shifts in religious sentiment and cultural changes were taking place
that would have far-reaching effects.
Rapid population growth meant greater prosperity and also made
it possible for Russia to absorb and preserve the new acquisitions
in Siberia and on the southern steppes. Growing integration into
the burgeoning European markets meant wealth for merchants and
townsmen. The rebuilding of the government was not limited to
the restoration of the old system and old institutions. The creaky
apparatus of the Moscow offices of state managed more or less
to maintain control over a huge area and an unruly population.
Control, in the Russian context, was always a relative matter, for
this was also the “rebellious” century of Russian history: with not
just the Troubles but urban riots in Moscow and elsewhere, the first
great Cossack and peasant revolt of the legendary Stenka Razin,
59
60 A Concise History of Russia

and the politically crucial revolts of the musketeers at the end of

the century. Each time, however, the authorities eventually restored
order and, after 1613, the state did not collapse.
In the long run, more important even than economic growth
or political success were the cultural changes. These are difficult
to describe, for they lack the drama of the later transformation
under Peter, and they were all still within the limits of a predomi-
nantly Orthodox culture. These changes within Orthodoxy were a
response to Russian religious, social, and political needs, but they
came by way of close interaction with the Orthodox church of Kiev,
with mainly Ukrainian monks and clergy and the books and new
ideas they brought to Moscow. For half a century, from the 1630s to
the 1690s, Kiev was a major center of influence on Russian thought
and life. At the same time, political events in Poland – the revolt
of the Ukrainian Cossacks – brought Russia into war with Poland
and ultimately changed the political balance in Eastern Europe in
Russia’s favor. For most of the seventeenth century the politics and
culture of Poland and its peoples were crucial to Russian affairs.
None of these developments were visible in the years immediately
after 1613 at the court of the first Romanov, Tsar Michael (1613–
1645). Michael resumed appointments to the duma and other offices
following the precedence system, as did his predecessors. The court
was not quite the same, for the experience of the Time of Trou-
bles seems to have taught the boyars the need for consensus, and
for sixty years the court intrigues lost the desperate and murder-
ous quality that had marked the previous century. Michael’s father
Filaret returned from Polish captivity in 1619 and was immediately
named Patriarch of the church. Within a few years he was the de
facto regent of Russia, co-sovereign with his son. Patriarch Filaret’s
main goal was to exact revenge on Poland, a goal that the boyars
did not share. At his urging in 1632 Russia tried to retake Smolensk
by relying on mercenary regiments hired in Western Europe. The
war was a disaster and in 1633 Filaret died, allowing the tsar and
the boyars to end the war. Tsar Michael, now ruling without his
father’s supervision, turned to other matters.
The restoration of order and peace allowed the countryside to
recover, and by Michael’s death, most of the damage from the
Troubles had been repaired. The great accomplishment of the reign
was the construction of several lines of forts at the main river fords
 Consolidation and Revolt 61

and on the hills along the southern frontier. In the woods between
the forts, workmen felled trees and left them in a tangle to keep out
the Tatar cavalry. The defenses were a huge undertaking running
over a thousand miles from the Polish border to the Urals. The
purpose was to keep out the Tatar raiders, and it worked well
enough to allow the peasantry and gentry to move south, for the
first time farming the rich black earth of the steppe in large numbers.
The tsar gave land to the settler-soldiers to maintain the line of
fortifications. A whole society of petty gentry and peasant-soldiers
grew up along the line of forts, and beyond the new line, out in
the steppe facing the Tatars, were the Cossacks along the southern
rivers, the Don, the Volga, and the Iaik farther east. A hundred
years after Ivan the Terrible’s conquests, the southern steppe finally
began to add to Russia’s wealth and power.

The seventeenth century was also the first full century of serfdom,
yet Russia’s agriculture and population rapidly recovered from the
Troubles and trade boomed. The resettlement of areas devastated
by the Troubles brought agriculture back to feed an expanding
population, and over the century, in spite of a general European
rise in prices and growing demand, food prices in Russia remained
virtually static. We know little about the life of the Russian peasant
in this century beyond these larger facts, but it seems that the village
community known from later times had taken final form by the end
of the century. The peasants held the land from their lords as a
village, and themselves managed the distribution of land among
households. Craft production grew and spread, not only in the
towns but even in the villages, and at the end of the century men
who were peasant serfs in legal status began to enter the ranks of
the merchants and entrepreneurs. Siberia came under as effective
Russian control as it ever would, and its border with China was
defined by treaty in 1689 to run along the Amur river. Every year
a caravan of Chinese goods that was modest in extent came to
Moscow, but over the years the annual trade brought profit to
merchants and tsars alike.
The growth of population, commerce, and the state meant that
Moscow swiftly became a major city. By the middle of the seven-
teenth century it contained within its walls perhaps one hundred
thousand inhabitants. Half of these Muscovites were part of the
62 A Concise History of Russia

army or the palace complex: the soldiers of the elite regiments of

musketeers (some 10,000 to 15,000 of them) and their families,
and the servants and dependents of the tsar’s household. These
palace servants formed whole neighborhoods that supplied the tsar
with cloth and silverware, took care of his hundreds of horses,
and cooked the food for his giant banquets. Several thousand Mus-
covites were the bond servants of the great aristocrats, the richest
of whom by 1650 had several hundred in their Moscow houses.
The other half of the city’s population were the true urban popu-
lation, the great merchants and innumerable artisans of all types,
along with clergy, wage laborers, beggars, and all the variety of
folk that peopled a great city. All of them lived on narrow wind-
ing streets lined with wooden houses that made the city vulnerable
to frequent fires. Only the more important churches were stone,
and only boyars and a few great officials or merchants built houses
of stone or brick. These larger houses were set deep in courtyards
surrounded by high wooden fences and jammed with stables and
storehouses filled with food and drink brought from the country by
the master’s serfs. Boyars built their houses according to traditional
Russian form, not European architectural norms, and divided them
into separate women’s and men’s quarters.
Outside the city walls to the northeast was a whole settlement
of foreigners, the “German suburb” that was composed of mer-
chants, mercenary officers, and the many others who supplied their
needs. Established in 1652 on the initiative of the church, which
feared foreign corruption, the German suburb was a small replica
of northern Europe, with a brick Lutheran church with a pointed
spire and regular streets with brick houses, taverns, and a school.
The “Germans” (who included also Dutchmen, Englishmen, and
Scots) were the most numerous of the foreigners, ultimately to be
the most important, but Moscow was a rather cosmopolitan city.
Ukrainian monks and priests found homes in Moscow’s churches
and monasteries, bringing a new variant of Orthodoxy to Rus-
sia. The Greeks also had their own monastery, and Greek mer-
chants mixed with Armenians and Georgians from the Caucasus.
More exotic peoples came from the southern borders and farther
east: Circassians serving the tsar, Kalmuks and Bashkirs bringing
huge masses of horses every year to sell, Tatars of all sorts, and
 Consolidation and Revolt 63

even “Tadzhiks,” the merchants from Khiva and Bukhara in far-off

Central Asia.
Economic prosperity went hand in hand with the recovery and
development of the state. By the end of the century several hundred
clerks now staffed dozens of offices that tried to administer the vast
Russian land. They had developed complex procedures and prac-
tices, keeping records of the tsar’s decrees that defined their actions
and recording their own decisions on innumerable rolls of paper
housed in their archives. Like most early modern states, Russian
administration concentrated on the collection of taxes, the admin-
istration of justice, and (when needed) on military recruitment. In
Russian conditions these were daunting tasks. In order to collect
taxes from the peasants, Moscow attempted to discover and record
how much land each peasant household had and how good it was.
The central authorities had the resources to survey the population
for tax purposes every fifteen or twenty years at best, and then not
in the most efficient of ways. Given the paucity of local adminis-
trators, Moscow sent its officials to a few district centers and relied
on the gentry and village elders to provide them with information
about each village and household. Obviously everyone, landholder
and peasant alike, had an interest in underreporting assets, and the
officials could check on them only in the most obvious cases of
evasion. Again it was the village elders who actually brought in the
taxes, many of which were still paid in kind. The only sure source
of revenue was the sales tax and the tsar’s monopoly on the sale
of vodka and other alcoholic drinks, sure because it was collected
in towns and markets and was often farmed out to merchants and
other entrepreneurs.
The attempts to administer justice were no easier. Russia before
Peter was not a lawless land of arbitrary rule as later liberals
often portrayed it. Indeed the officials of the Moscow offices who
administered justice erred as much or more by legal pedantry than
arbitrariness. They followed the Law Code of 1649, and indeed
the Code circulated in the provinces as well, among officials and
gentry alike. The greatest problem was that the Moscow offices
(and then the tsar) were the only real courts for most cases, with
provincial governors and officials often acting more as investigators
than judges. The life of these governors was not easy, and in the
64 A Concise History of Russia

investigation of criminal cases they and their few subordinates relied

largely on polling the neighbors of the accused and the victim, in
order to find evidence. Provincial governors were required to rule
areas the size of small European countries with a handful of assis-
tants and no effective armed force. Only on the distant borders
did Moscow send out enough men and soldiers to run things effec-
tively and maintain order. Local governors and central offices tried
to provide a court of first instance for disputes over land owner-
ship and decisions regarding major crimes, but the lack of officials
outside of Moscow and a few provincial capitals on the borders
forced the government to rely on the cooperation of local inhab-
itants, which lead to mixed results. Even with extra manpower,
the far borders were still difficult to control, often with disastrous
consequences.

At Michael’s death in 1645 the boyars and clergy quickly acclaimed

his eldest son Aleksei as his successor. Again the tsar was young,
only sixteen years old, as he was born in 1629. The constellation of
boyars around him at court determined the course of events for the
first decade or so. Tsar Aleksei soon married Mariia, the daughter
of Ilya Miloslavskii, an ally of the young tsar’s tutor, the powerful
boyar Boris Morozov. Morozov in turn married Mariia’s sister,
consolidating his position at court and his influence over the young
tsar. Morozov’s taxation schemes, which involved substituting a
high tax on salt for the usual sales taxes, soon created a crisis. In July
1648, the Muscovites rioted, killed several prominent boyars and
officials, and demanded Morozov’s head. Aleksei was able to save
him, and the unrest subsided. Part of the resulting compromise was
a new Assembly of the Land – this one to confirm a new law code,
and in 1649 the printing presses issued Russia’s first compilation of
laws, the Conciliar Code of 1649. Morozov returned to the court,
but it was Ilya Miloslavskii, Aleksei’s father-in-law, a man whom
the tsar feared rather than loved, who held sway. Soon Miloslavskii
had a rival in Patriarch Nikon, who ascended the patriarchal throne
in 1652. Nikon would set in motion changes in the church that
ultimately led to a schism, but his political role outside of the church
was no less important. For Russia was already faced with a new
crisis, and this time it was a foreign crisis.
 Consolidation and Revolt 65

Russia was not alone in defending its southern frontier with bands
of Cossacks. Poland-Lithuania as well maintained such a force of
irregular troops on the Dniepr river facing the Crimeans. The Cos-
sacks settled beyond the frontier in the islands below the rapids
(Zaporozh’e). These Cossacks were largely Ukrainian peasants in
origin and thus Orthodox in religion. They had come to the border
much like Russian Cossacks fleeing serfdom at home, but in this
case they fled religious oppression as well, for the usually tolerant
Poland did not extend this favor to the Orthodox. The surrender
of the Orthodox hierarchy in Poland-Lithuania to Rome in 1596
formed a new Catholic Uniate church on the basis of the previous
Orthodox church. The king declared Orthodoxy illegal, confiscated
Orthodox church buildings and property, and handed them over to
the Uniates. In 1632 a new King of Poland partially reversed his
father’s policy and declared a compromise, allowing an Orthodox
metropolitanate in Kiev and Orthodox worship in some areas. The
compromise was not enough, for the enserfed Ukrainian peasants
saw religious as well as social oppressors in their mainly Polish
masters. Then in the winter of 1648 the Ukrainian Cossacks elected
a new hetman, or commander, without the king’s approval. The
new hetman, a minor nobleman named Bohdan Khmel’nyts’kyi,
and his Cossack host began to move northwest out of Zaporozh’e,
proclaiming relief from religious and other oppression. The hastily
gathered Polish army was utterly annihilated and the Ukrainian
lands exploded in revolt; peasants and Cossacks alike murdered
and expelled the Polish gentry, the Uniates, and the Jews.
Khmel’nyts’kyi could defeat the king’s army in the field, but he
knew that soon he would need allies. At first he allied with Crimea,
but this alliance was difficult to maintain as the interests of the
two parties differed greatly. The hetman turned to Tsar Aleksei,
begging him to support his Orthodox brethren. This message was
not welcome news in Moscow. The Ukrainian Cossack emissaries
arrived soon after the 1648 riot in Moscow, and neither Aleksei nor
the boyars had any desire to support peasant rebels in neighboring
countries. Besides, Tsar Michael (in his last years) and his son Alek-
sei had been trying to come to an agreement with Poland to form
an alliance against the Crimeans. Aleksei hesitated for five years,
offering vague promises to the Cossacks and sending peace feelers
66 A Concise History of Russia

to the king of Poland. In the spring of 1653, the hetman sent yet
another embassy to Moscow and offered Aleksei overlordship of
the Ukrainian Cossack host. This time the tsar agreed, apparently
at the prompting of Patriarch Nikon. Shortly afterward in January
1654, an embassy from the tsar signed an agreement at Pereiaslav
in the Ukraine with the hetman to take the Cossacks and their land
“under his high hand” while affirming their newly-won autonomy,
now within Russia. The agreement also committed Russia to war
with Poland, a war that fundamentally reshaped the balance of
power in Eastern Europe.
The war was to last for thirteen years, until 1667. Aleksei had a
new army, for he had hired western officers to form regiments of
Russian soldiers on European lines. In the first years of the war the
Russian army quickly recaptured Smolensk and went all the way
to Wilno. After considerable back-and-forth, and Khmel’nyts’kyi’s
death in 1656, Russia and Poland signed a treaty in 1667. Poland
regained most of its territory, but the treaty was nevertheless a dis-
tinct Russian victory: Smolensk remained Russian and the Ukraine
east of the Dniepr with the city of Kiev continued to form an
autonomous hetmanate under the tsar. Though even the Russians
did not yet realize this, Poland’s time as the great power of East-
ern Europe was over, for the Cossack revolt and the war had done
too much damage to the social and political fabric of the Polish-
Lithuanian state. Its economy and population stagnated for the
next hundred years, leaving the field to Russia.
Russia had not escaped entirely unscathed. The war had led to an
adulteration of the silver currency with copper coins that moved the
people of Moscow to riot in the “copper revolt” of 1662. The tsar
had to call out the new-style infantry regiments officered by foreign
mercenaries to restore order. Far more serious was the ferment
on the Don that broke out as the great Cossack revolt of Stenka
Razin in 1670. Similar in some respects to the Ukrainian revolt,
the Russian events lacked the religious and ethnic element; indeed,
many of the native peoples of the southern border joined Razin. The
Russian Cossacks were also more plebeian than the Ukrainian, who
included minor gentry among their leaders. They struck terror into
the tsar’s court, capturing Astrakhan’ and other Volga towns with
the slaughter of nobles and officials alike. Tsar Aleksei’s armies
 Consolidation and Revolt 67

finally defeated and captured Razin in 1671 and brought him to

Moscow, where he was executed. As the revolt showed, expansion
into the southern steppe added enormously to Russia’s territory,
its agricultural potential, its population, and its power, but it also
added to the tensions in Russian society.
The southern steppe and its peoples were only one part of the
larger complex of territories and peoples that made Russia an
increasingly multi-national society. The territory lost to Sweden
in 1619 meant the loss of some smaller Finnish groups, the Ingrians
and part of the Karelians who had inhabited part of the Novgorod
lands from the beginning of recorded history. Swedish attempts to
force the Orthodox Karelians into the Lutheran faith and the arrival
of Swedish landlords in villages of free peasants brought a sizeable
migration across the Russian border into the lands around Lake
Onega and even south towards Tver’. Lesser Finno-Ugrian peoples
continued to populate parts of the Russian north, but until 1654
the largest of the non-Russian peoples included the Tatars, Bashkirs,
Chuvash and other Volga peoples brought under Russian rule in the
sixteenth century. They continued to live under a separate status as
payers of yasak rather than the usual Russian taxes. This separate
status continued after the establishment of serfdom, with the para-
doxical result that the Tatar peasantry was not enserfed. The Rus-
sian authorities continued to accept but not encourage Islam, and
they staged no organized attempts at conversion. Conflicts were over
land, as Russian peasants settled more and more among them, pri-
marily among the Bashkirs, who mounted several small rebellions.
Farther south the arrival in the 1630s of the Kalmuks, a Mongolian
Buddhist people fleeing internal strife in their homeland, disrupted
the relations among the nomads just beyond Russia’s border. As
Buddhists the new arrivals had poor relations with the Crimean and
other Muslim peoples in the area. The Kalmuks formed important
allies for the Russian tsar, accepting his general overlordship and
providing him troops in foreign wars and internal disturbances. The
Circassians were loyal as well, siding with the tsar against Razin’s
rebels.
The Pereiaslav treaty of 1654 brought into the Russian state a
new element in the form of the Ukrainian Hetmanate. The originally
democratic Cossack host quickly turned into a society ruled by a
68 A Concise History of Russia

hereditary elite of Cossack officers. Under the Pereiaslav agreement

the Cossacks continued to elect the hetman who in turn appointed
the officers, administered justice (according to the old Polish laws),
managed his own treasury, and commanded the Cossack army, all
this without consulting the tsar. The tsar maintained garrisons in
Kiev and other principal towns, whose commanders also exercised
control over the towns, though those retained their elected urban
governments. The Ukrainian church was more complicated, as the
Metropolitan of Kiev was not under the jurisdiction of Moscow but
rather of the Greek patriarchate of Constantinople, which accepted
the Moscow Patriarch as its head only in 1687.

The inclusion of the Ukrainian hetmanate in Russia had such pro-

found effects because it strengthened the ties between Kiev and
Moscow at a time when changes were taking place in the Russian
Orthodox church. These changes led the elite of the Russian clergy
to turn to Ukrainian models of piety, but also sparked a religious
upheaval that ultimately led to schism. Even in the time of Tsar
Michael there had been symptoms of renewal in the church. Voices
arose among the clergy complaining that Russian priests did not
do enough to bring Orthodox teaching to their congregations. No
one challenged the centrality of the liturgy, but the reformers called
for more systematic preaching and that meant a more learned clergy
and a more varied religious literature. By the accession of Tsar Alek-
sei to the throne, the leader of the new trend was his spiritual father
Stefan Vonifat’ev, and the group included Nikon, the Metropolitan
of Novgorod, and Avvakum, a village priest from the Volga area
who had risen to become archpriest in one of the main Moscow
churches. They had the favor of the tsar, but until 1652 they made
little headway.
Increased contract with the Orthodox in the Ukrainian lands
had given the Russians new ideas, as the Ukrainians were engaged
in a continuous battle to defend Orthodoxy by reinforcing it in
the minds and hearts of the believers. In the Kiev Academy the
Ukrainian clergy had a new type of education, unknown in Russia,
derived from Jesuit models. It emphasized language and rhetoric,
the arts of persuasion, as well as philosophy. The Kiev Academy
taught its pupils not just Slavonic but also Latin, which was still the
 Consolidation and Revolt 69

language of scholarship in both Catholic and Protestant Europe. In

1649 Tsar Aleksei brought the first group of Ukrainian monks to
Moscow to teach and also to help with the editing and publication
of liturgical and devotional texts. Then Patriarch Iosif died in 1652,
and with prompting from the tsar, the clergy elected Nikon to be
his replacement. Patriarch Nikon took with particular fervor to the
examination of the service books, and in 1653 he began to issue
service books with corrected texts. These corrections were made so
as to bring the Russian texts in line with the Greek (and Ukrainian)
versions, which he considered more authoritative. The new ver-
sions also mandated a few changes in daily devotional practices,
such as the manner of making the sign of the cross. For some cen-
turies Russians had done this holding straight the index and middle
finger (symbolizing the dual nature of Christ) and folding the other
three, while the Greeks held folded together the first two fingers and
the thumb (for the Trinity). Nikon, however, commanded the Greek
practice, arguing that the Russian version slighted the Trinity. As the
Russian (and older Greek) tradition asserted that the entire liturgy
and all associated practices recreated the sacrifice of Christ rather
than merely reminding one of it, these small actions were of critical
importance. Some of Nikon’s former allies in the reform movement
under the leadership of the archpriest Avvakum, however, refused
to conform. Avvakum recounted later that he heard of the changes
during Easter week in 1653 and “we saw that winter was on the
way – hearts froze and legs began to shake”. Since Avvakum per-
sisted in his refusal to conform and began to preach against the new
books, Nikon and the tsar sent him and his followers into exile, as
far away as possible into Siberia to the east of Lake Baikal.
The exile in 1655 of Avvakum and his few followers among the
clergy seemed to put an end to the controversy. Nikon’s reforms
of the liturgy and his sponsorship of the Ukrainian teachers and
scholars in Moscow continued. Nikon was a powerful figure and a
personality who brooked no opposition or perceived slight. In 1658
one of the tsar’s favorites insulted Nikon’s servant at a reception
for a visiting Georgian prince, and Nikon announced that he was
leaving the patriarchal throne. Perhaps he expected an apology from
the tsar and the boyar in question, but they were not forthcoming.
Nikon retired to his newly founded Monastery of the New Jerusalem
70 A Concise History of Russia

to the west of Moscow and remained there. His actions produced

a crisis, for he had not abdicated the office of patriarch, he had
merely left its duties. Tsar Aleksei sent emissaries to persuade him
to return, but he refused.
While Nikon sulked, the remaining church authorities continued
to produce new versions of the texts with the help of the Ukraini-
ans. They published new translations of the Greek fathers of the
church, this time working from Western printed editions of the
Greek texts rather than Byzantine manuscripts. The Ukrainians
preached at major court occasions and the principal holidays of
the Orthodox calendar, and taught a few Russian clergy their skills.
All of this innovative activity took place in and around the court,
while at the opposite end of Russian society a storm was brewing.
In the provinces the new books began to produce discontent, and
local priests and monks remembered Avvakum and his protest. The
dissidents began to pick up wider support among the groups of
ascetics that had arisen since the 1640s in the upper Volga towns
and villages. Aleksei and the bishops were forced to take action.
In 1666–1667, just as the Polish war was coming to a close, they
called a council of the Russian church, which two of the Greek
Orthodox patriarchs and other Greek clergy also attended. The
council formally deposed Nikon and selected a successor, though
Nikon refused to acknowledge its its authority. The Greek patri-
archs also tried to convince Avvakum of his errors, reminding him
that in the whole world the Orthodox crossed themselves with three
fingers. This argument had no effect, for Avvakum replied that the
faith of the other Orthodox peoples was impure: only the Russians
had kept the true faith. The council condemned him and approved
the changes in the texts. Nikon went into exile in the northern Fer-
apontov Monastery, but his cause of reform had triumphed. The
new books became the standard texts, and most Russians adopted
the new rituals. That is, most people – those among the bishops,
the clergy, and the population of central Russia – but the dissidents
did not disappear. Avvakum went into exile to Pustozersk, a small
fort north of the Arctic Circle, but he did not stop writing until
his execution in 1680. His teaching began to spread in the northern
villages, in the Urals and Siberia as well as the Don and the southern
frontier. Tsar Aleksei and his successors sent soldiers to try to force
them back to Orthodoxy, and in 1678 in remotest Siberia some of
 Consolidation and Revolt 71

the Old Believers, as they came to be known, tried a new tactic.

When the soldiers approached, the entire community assembled in
a wooden church and set it on fire, burning themselves to death.
This tactic made persecution extremely difficult, for church and
state could declare victory only if the Old Believers came back to
Orthodoxy. Their deaths, while still unreconciled, signified failure.
The result was a standstill, and the Old Belief continued to spread.
Its followers already numbered in the tens of thousands and the
movement continued to find new adherents. As they grew in num-
bers they also disagreed among themselves on many issues, some
condemning the mass suicides, others not. The more radical groups
formed entire dissident churches with no priests or bishops and
held simple services led only by an “instructor.” Some Old Believer
communities resembled Orthodox monasteries; others were indis-
tinguishable in all but ritual from their Orthodox neighbors. All
the Old Believers rejected the authority of church and state, some
proclaiming that the Romanov dynasty was the visible Antichrist.
Pacific rather than rebellious, the Old Belief nevertheless struck fear
into the hearts of tsars and bishops alike for the next two hundred
years. An undeniably native tradition of dissent and resistance had
been born.
The council of 1666–1667 had restored order in the church every-
where but in the remote wilderness where the Old Believers took
refuge. At the court in Moscow the changes in religious practice
deepened and spread, bringing with them new cultural forms. In
1664 a new figure appeared at court, the Kiev-trained Belorussian
monk Simeon Polotskii. Simeon very quickly won the favor of the
tsar and many boyars, and Aleksei appointed him tutor to the heir
to the throne, Tsarevich Aleksei. When the boy died in 1669 Simeon
remained an important figure, preaching in and around the court,
writing celebratory verse for court occasions as well as panegyrics
and consolatory verse for great boyars. He ran a school where the
children of clergy and officials studied Latin and Church Slavic
and learned to write and preach by the rules of classical rhetoric.
Simeon’s work was symptomatic of the cultural shift in the Russian
elite. Starting in the 1660s or 1670s a few boyars began to have their
sons taught Polish and Latin and books no longer exclusively reli-
gious, began to circulate among the small court elite, the officials,
and a few of the Moscow clergy. Books of physical and political
72 A Concise History of Russia

geography, sacred history as understood in the West, and other

tracts brought new vocabulary and new concepts to Russia, even
if they lacked the intellectual apparatus that brought them forth
in Europe. The readers of these texts among the clergy cultivated
the styles of writing that were fashionable in Warsaw and Kiev –
panegyric and religious verse, sermons, and other forms. The ser-
mons, especially the printed sermons of Simeon Polotskii, began to
find an audience outside of Moscow and the court elite. In the last
years of the reign of Tsar Aleksei, the tsar and his favorite and for-
eign minister, Artamon Matveev, sponsored a court theater which
presented examples of Baroque drama in Russian. The playwright
was the Lutheran pastor Johann Gregory from the German Suburb
and the boy actors were only the pupils from his school, but the
texts were in Russian and the performances even included ballet
interludes. Tsar Aleksei’s interests extended beyond theater, for he
asked the Danish ambassador for a telescope, or as the tsar put it,
“a tube of the invention of Tycho Brahe.” The theater ceased after
Tsar Aleksei’s death, but his son and successor Fyodor (1676–1682)
provided Simeon Polotskii with ample support, even allowing him
to set up his own printing press where he printed his sermons and
his rhymed Psalter.
By the 1680s the new cultural forms were well ensconced. Patri-
arch Ioakim (1675–1690) sponsored in 1685 the establishment of
the Slavo-Greco-Latin Academy, the first more or less European
school in Russia. Ioakim had very definite views of the West, as he
was a firm opponent of Catholicism and the Protestant churches.
Part of his reason for supporting the school was to combat what
he saw as Catholic tendencies among the Russian and Ukrainian
followers of Simeon Polotskii in Moscow. To teach and manage
the school he appointed two Greeks, the brothers Sophronios and
Ioannikios Likhudes, who taught what they had learned in Italy and
the Greek schools of the Ottoman lands – that is to say, the Euro-
pean Jesuit curriculum founded on philology and the explication of
Aristotle. The Greeks brought Western culture to Russia as much
as did the Ukrainians.
All these innovations in culture and religion were the work of the
court and ecclesiastical elite, and only slowly spread to the rest of
the population and the provinces. The new culture does not seem
 Consolidation and Revolt 73

to have been the work of any one faction or group, rather it was
common to the elite as a whole, though more prominent in the
lives of some individuals than others. Religion and culture failed to
produce discord in the court, but other factors made it the scene of
great political drama. The relative harmony of the decades after the
Time of Troubles began to come apart by 1671.
In the early years of the reign of Tsar Aleksei the dominant figures
at court were his erstwhile tutor and brother-in-law Boris Moro-
zov, his father-in-law Ilya Miloslavskii, and in 1652–1658 Patri-
arch Nikon. Morozov’s death in 1661 left Miloslavskii the single
dominant figure, but as Aleksei grew and matured he relied less on
his father-in-law, whose behavior was often abrasive. Miloslavskii
died in 1668, after Aleksei had signed the peace with Poland against
the wishes of many of the boyars. He appointed the architect of
that peace, Afanasii Ordin-Nashchokin, to head the Ambassadorial
Office. Ordin-Nashchokin, a provincial nobleman who knew for-
eign languages and had the tsar’s favor, received boyar rank. He
and the tsar both shared the aim of turning the peace with Poland
into real cooperation against the Ottomans. Some such alliance was
all the more necessary since the establishment of Russian overlord-
ship in the Ukraine and the Russian garrison in Kiev put Russia in
a new position in Eastern Europe, now facing Crimea across the
steppe. The country faced the full might of the Turks, and the tsar
and his minister wanted Polish allies, something upon which the
boyars looked with suspicion. Unfortunately Ordin-Nashchokin’s
arrogant manner of implementation of the policy of reconciliation
with Poland in the Ukraine led to rebellions and Ordin-Nashchokin
fell from favor. In 1670 Tsar Aleksei found a new head for the
Ambassadorial Office who understood the need for alliances against
the Turks but who also got along well with the Ukrainians. He chose
the musketeer Colonel Artamon Matveev, several times a successful
emissary to the Cossacks and now the tsar’s new favorite.
The need for a new man to direct foreign policy came at the same
time that a major dynastic issue arose. In 1669 the heir to the throne,
Tsarevich Aleksei Alekseevich, died, an event followed swiftly by
the death of his mother Mariia. The second son was Fyodor (born
1661), a capable and intelligent boy but extremely sickly. The third
surviving son Ivan (born 1666) was both physically and (it seems)
74 A Concise History of Russia

mentally handicapped. In addition, Aleksei had already lost several

children, mostly boys, and without a new wife he could not be sure
of the succession. The new wife, whom Aleksei married in 1671,
was to be Natalia Naryshkina, the daughter of a colonel of one of
the musketeer regiments. The Naryshkins were clients of Aleksei’s
new favorite, Artamon Matveev, with whom they had served in
Moscow and other places. Natalia bore the tsar a son on May 30,
1672, and baptized him Peter. Peter was a healthy boy, and Matveev
had now another reason to enjoy the tsar’s favor and maintain allies
in the tsaritsa’s family.
Matveev was not only in favor through his connections with
the Naryshkins. He managed the complicated relations with the
Ukrainian Cossacks, Poland, and Russia’s other neighbors, and
appointed his clients to almost all the major offices of the Rus-
sian state. He faithfully executed the tsar’s wishes, if disagreeing
with him on occasion, and arguing his and the tsar’s views in the
duma. Aleksei did not give him a monopoly of power: the palace
administration and the tsar’s household remained under the aegis of
Bogdan Khitrovo, the tsar’s other major favorite in his later years,
though Khitrovo seems to have avoided major political issues. In the
words of the Danish ambassador, Matveev was Russia’s “kinglet.”
Such a rise to power could not fail to provoke the jealousy of the
boyars, but as long as the tsar lived, Matveev remained supreme.
Then, in January 1676, Tsar Aleksei died suddenly at the age of
forty-seven.

The accession of Tsar Fyodor, only fifteen years old and sickly, put
power back into the hands of the senior boyars. Within weeks they
ousted Matveev’s clients from the main offices and engineered the
exile of Matveev himself. Prince Dolgorukii and Ivan Miloslavskii,
the cousin of the tsar on his mother’s side, were the most influen-
tial, and behind the scenes Tsarevna Irina, the young tsar’s aunt, was
the most powerful of all. As Matveev slowly moved toward Siberian
exile, his enemies lodged a charge of sorcery against him. The accu-
sation was a wild combination of dramatic charges from former
servants that came down to his reading of a book borrowed from
the Apothecary’s Office, probably containing chapters on medicinal
astrology. Then some of Tsaritsa Natalia’s Naryshkin brothers were
 Consolidation and Revolt 75

accused of attempting to kill the tsar several years before during a

session of archery practice. Gruesome torture of the Naryshkin ser-
vants and clients yielded extensive testimony but confirmed noth-
ing substantial. At the widowed Tsaritsa Natalia’s intervention
Tsarevna Irina put a halt to the proceedings. Matveev went back
to an even more remote exile and several of the Naryshkins were
exiled to their estates. For the next few years Matveev’s enemies
at court reigned supreme, forming a sort of boyar regency over the
young tsar. Tsaritsa Natalia remained in the background, raising
her son and looking to the future.
Fyodor was physically weak but surprisingly strong-willed. On
Irina’s death in 1680 he married for the first time and began to
emancipate himself from the tutelage of the boyars. His new wife
even appeared in Polish dress, and Fyodor’s health seemed to revive.
When she died during childbirth a year later, all seemed to be lost,
but instead Fyodor moved on, reforming court dress and then at
the end of 1681 moving to reform the army and abolish the prece-
dence system that in theory had ruled the court, administration, and
army for two centuries. He had his own favorites and relied in his
military reforms on Prince V. V. Golitsyn, one of Russia’s great-
est aristocrats. Fyodor allowed Matveev to return to his estates
near Moscow and lifted the exile of the Naryshkins. In February
he married Marfa Apraksina, a young girl from provincial gentry,
a marriage that brought to the court her younger borothers Petr
and Fyodor, still boys now on the way to greater things. The tsar’s
health worsened and on April 2, 1682, he died, plunging Russia
into a crisis.
The crisis again arose from the problem of succession. Fyodor
had no children, and his eldest brother, Ivan, was fifteen years old,
but weak and unhealthy. None of the boyars seem to have consid-
ered him fit to rule, nor did Patriarch Ioakim. The alternative was
Peter, then nine years old. The choice of Peter would mean that the
Miloslavskii clan, the maternal relatives of Ivan, would lose their
chance for power, for Peter’s mother was a Naryshkin and an ally
of Matveev, who had recently returned from bitter exile.
The death of Tsar Fyodor coincided with murmurs of discon-
tent among the musketeers – the soldiers who guarded the Kremlin
and had provided the core of the infantry army before the advent
76 A Concise History of Russia

of European style regiments. Their discontent was aimed at the

oppressive practices of their colonels, but someone convinced them
that their real enemy was the Naryshkins and Matveev. The mus-
keteers stormed into the Kremlin and demanded that their enemies
be turned over to them. Terrified, the boyars advised surrender,
and Matveev was hurled from the stairs onto the upturned pikes
of the musketeers. Several of the Naryshkins were hunted down
and killed, though Natalia was able to save her father and eldest
brother. The soldiers rampaged through the city, killing two of the
Princes Dolgorukii and others who were suspected of favoring Peter
and his family. After a few days the clergy and boyars met together
and proclaimed Ivan and Peter co-tsars. The disturbances ceased,
but two new stars had risen on the horizon, Prince Ivan Khovanskii
and Tsarevna Sofia.
Khovanskii made himself the darling of the soldiers, and for a
tense summer he seemed to be poised to assert supreme power
behind the façade of the two boy tsars. Khovanskii, however, was
outmaneuvered, and it was Sofia, Ivan’s sister and Peter’s half-sister,
who assumed power. In September, when the musketeers had qui-
eted down, she had Khovanskii arrested and executed, and for the
next seven years she ruled as regent of Russia. Her favorite and,
effectively, her prime minister was Prince V. V. Golitsyn, who had
recently come to prominence under Tsar Fyodor.
From the very beginning Sofia presided over a court riven by fac-
tion. Early on she managed to sideline her Miloslavskii relatives
and rule with Golitsyn alone, though in the mind of Peter, then
and later, it was the Miloslavskii clan that was his and his mother’s
enemy. For Natalia did not cease to aspire to claim full power for
her son. As he grew up, she acquired allies among the boyars, Prince
Boris Golitsyn (the cousin of V. V. Golitsyn) and the more exotic
Prince Mikhail Alegukovich Cherkasskii, a boyar but by origin a
Circassian from the north Caucasus serving the Russian tsars. Rela-
tions were tense, and Cherkasskii even brought out a knife during a
dispute with V. V. Golitsyn – in the yard of the Trinity Monastery
no less.
Peter was still too young to participate in the intrigues and the
arguments, and he spent these years outside of Moscow at Preo-
brazhenskoe, a village to the east of Moscow where his father had
 Consolidation and Revolt 77

built a small wooden house for the summer. There Peter began to
“play” soldiers, forming his servants and courtiers into European
style infantry regiments and having them drilled by European offi-
cers. Peter was fascinated by artillery and he learned how to use it
in these years as well. Soon he had a trained force of several hun-
dred men, his own personal regiment. Even more significant was his
encounter with boats.
He told the story himself, many years later. In an old barn Peter
happened to notice a small boat, one that was constructed differ-
ently from Russian boats. Peter was already studying mathematics,
probably for military purposes, with Frans Timmerman, a Dutch
merchant and amateur astronomer, and he asked Timmerman why
the boat did not look like typical Russian boats. The answer was
that it was built to sail against the wind. Peter was amazed by the
answer, and Timmerman found a Dutch sailor who put the boat in
order and showed the young tsar how to tack into the wind. Peter
was captivated immediately, and took the boat to a nearby lake to
practice. He also asked the young Prince Iakov Dolgorukii, who
was about to leave for France on a diplomatic mission, to bring
him back navigational instruments. Dolgorukii returned in 1688
with an astrolabe, and thus began Peter’s love affair with boats and
navigation – an affair that would last his whole life.
In the mean time Sofia had committed Russia to a new for-
eign policy. She wanted to continue the policy of confronting the
Ottomans, in this respect following Matveev, but unlike him she
decided to do it in close alliance with Poland. The opportunity had
come with the foundation of the Holy League in 1682 by Austria,
the Papacy, Venice, and Poland, with the aim of a united strug-
gle against the Turks. After long and tiresome negotiations, Sofia
joined the League in 1685–6 and entered into military collabora-
tion with Jan III Sobieski, the King of Poland and the victor at the
great siege of Vienna of 1683. Russia’s part in the coalition was to
defeat Crimea. Thus, in 1687 Golitsyn took a large Russian army
south from the Ukrainian hetmanate across the steppe to Crimea.
The Tatars burned the waterless steppe, depriving his horses of fod-
der and he had to retreat. His only accomplishment was to replace
Hetman Samoilovych, a Naryshkin ally and an opponent of the
war, with the compliant Ivan Mazepa, a name that would return.
78 A Concise History of Russia

A repeat of the campaign in 1689 brought the same result, and

rumors even circulated that Golitsyn had made a secret deal with
the enemy. On his return, Sofia tried to portray the campaign as a
success, rewarding the troops and ordering triumphal liturgies, but
Peter would have none of it.
Peter was now seventeen, and he stayed away from the Kremlin
in Preobrazhenskoe. Suddenly on August 7, 1689, one of his cham-
berlains was arrested in Moscow and the rumor swept the city that
Sofia was going to have Peter killed. One of the musketeers rode out
to warn Peter, who got out of bed in his shirt and jumped on a horse.
With his closest servants and courtiers he rode through the night
to the Trinity Monastery, soon to be joined by his mother and her
boyar allies. The next weeks were a standoff, but by the end of the
month it was clear that most of the boyars, Tsar Ivan’s household,
the patriarch, and the foreign mercenary officers were on Peter’s
side. Even the musketeers would not back Sofia. Peter returned to
Moscow in triumph and sent Sofia to the Novodevichii Convent on
the southwest side of Moscow. Peter, with his Naryshkin relatives,
was now securely in power, for Ivan presented no challenge and
died in 1696. No one could have then predicted it, but Russia was
poised for a fundamental transformation.
 5
Peter the Great

The reign of Peter the Great saw the greatest transformation in

Russia until the revolution of 1917. Unlike the Soviet revolution,
Peter’s transformation of Russia had little impact on the social
order, for serfdom remained and the nobility remained their mas-
ters. What Peter changed was the structure and form of the state,
turning the traditional Russian tsardom into a variant of European
monarchy. At the same time he profoundly transformed Russian
culture, a contribution that along with his new capital of St. Peters-
burg has lasted to the present day.

The first few years of Peter’s rule gave little indication that such
great events were coming. The removal of Sofia in 1689 gave con-
trol to Peter’s mother and her Naryshkin relatives and their allies,
who seem to have gotten along poorly with one another once in
power. A son Aleksei was born in 1692 to Peter’s wife Evdokiia, so
the succession seemed assured. Peter himself remained in the back-
ground training his soldiers, drinking with the foreign officers in the
German suburbs, and sailing his boats. Peter had many eccentric-
ities, and they appeared early. He was nearly seven feet tall, but
was thin-boned with narrow shoulders and rather fine features.
He shaved his beard early but left a thin moustache. His capacity
for alcohol was gigantic and this perhaps had some relationship
to the endless “colics” and other stomach disorders that plagued
him all his life. He sometimes flew into tremendous hysterical rages

79
80 A Concise History of Russia

that only his wife (his second, Catherine) was able to calm. His
relations with women were surprisingly restrained. His greatest
recreation was anything that involved boats, leading him to go
north to Archangel in 1693 to see the ocean for the first time. His
mother Natalia sent him a letter ordering him not to go out to the
dangerous open sea and he obeyed. Then in February 1694, she
died. Right away Peter ceased to appear at any of the Kremlin cer-
emonies, and the whole ritual of the Russian court, now over two
centuries old, came to an end. Then Peter went to Archangel again,
and this time he went out to sea on a Dutch ship.
During these years Peter made two acquaintances in the German
suburb who were to shape his policy for the next few years. One was
Patrick Gordon, then in his fifties, a Catholic Scot who had served in
the Russian army since 1661, primarily as a specialist in fortification
and artillery. Gordon was a firm proponent of the Turkish war and
played a crucial role in training the new European style regiments
of the army. The other was Francois LeFort, a Geneva Swiss who
was also a mercenary officer, but whose relationship with Peter was
more personal than Gordon’s. LeFort was the ringleader of many
of the drunken parties, and it was LeFort who introduced Peter
to Anna Mons, the daughter of a German tavern keeper. These
relations were not just friendships, as Gordon and LeFort were the
young tsar’s favorites and informal political advisors, and Anna
cemented the influence of LeFort.
When Peter returned to Moscow from his first brief sea voyage
in the fall of 1694, he decided to renew Russia’s efforts against
the Turks, largely in abeyance since he came to power. The boyars
were not happy with this decision, but he simply ignored them, and
moved an army south down the Volga and Don rivers to Azov,
the Turkish fort at the mouth of the Don on the Sea of Azov. The
siege was unsuccessful, largely because the Turks could resupply the
fort from the sea; so Peter built a navy. He built it at Voronezh on
the Don, far inland, with Dutch carpenters and ship builders. He
brought officers from the Netherlands, Venice, and France, and in
the spring of 1696 his fleet sailed down the Don and with its help he
took the fort, which was his first victory. He celebrated his victory
not just with the traditional prayers, but also with a triumphal
 Peter the Great 81

procession into Moscow in full Baroque style, with arches bearing

images of Hercules and one with Julius Caesar’s “I came, I saw, I
conquered” in Church Slavic. So that the public would understand
these strange gods, he had a pamphlet printed to explain it all.
Peter then prepared for an action far more strange than his
Baroque triumph – a journey to Western Europe. He quickly settled
the affairs of the new territories and the navy and appointed a small
committee of boyars to govern in his absence, only to find that there
was a conspiracy to replace him afoot among other aristocrats. The
conspirators were few in number but Peter saw them as growing
from the seed of the old factions that had opposed his mother in the
1680s. The conspirators were mainly concerned about their own
positions in the hierarchy of offices, but some were also shocked at
his trip abroad and even more at his plans to send young boyars to
Holland and Venice to learn foreign languages and the art of nav-
igation. The conspirators were executed, and Peter left Moscow,
stopping at Riga and Berlin before he arrived in Amsterdam, which
was his chief goal.
Peter traveled incognito as a member of the Russian embassy
headed by the boyar Fyodor Golovin and Lefort, an embassy with
the charge of strengthening the coalition against the Ottomans.
While Golovin and LeFort negotiated, Peter took instruction in
carpentry and ship building in the shipyards of Zaandam. There
the Dutch told him that in England they built ships differently,
relying on mathematics and not just their eyes to shape the hull.
Peter quickly set off for London, where he visited the shipyards but
also spoke to astronomers at the Greenwich observatory, attended
a Quaker meeting, inspected the Royal mint, and talked to Anglican
clergymen. Then he began the journey home, reaching Vienna by
spring. As he rode through Central Europe, however, the political
horizon was changing rapidly. Austria had reconquered huge parts
of Hungary and was low on resources, as were the other allies.
They wanted peace, and Peter learned this in Vienna. He had to
now extricate Russia from the war with the Ottomans, and he
eventually succeeded after two years of hard negotiation. Peter was
disappointed, but the end of the war was actually a relief, for more
pressing concerns had arisen.
82 A Concise History of Russia

In the summer of 1698 he had news from Moscow that the mus-
keteers had revolted once again, demanding better conditions, and
apparently they were in some sort of contact with the imprisoned
Sofia. Peter rushed home, only to find that the boyars had already
executed the leaders over the advice of the generals. Peter was furi-
ous, and ordered a relentless and gruesome interrogation of the
prisoners under torture. Hundreds were eventually executed with
the participation of the tsar and the boyars. Peter never got to the
bottom of the musketeers’ motives, and he suspected the boyars,
even those to whom he had entrusted the government, of conceal-
ing evidence or worse. As the interrogation drew to a close, Peter
decided that he could no longer work with the boyars because they
were too quarrelsome among themselves and unreliable. Henceforth
he would rely on his favorites.
Peter had returned from Europe with two new favorites, Golovin
and a junior officer of bombardiers, Alexander Menshikov. Gordon
and LeFort wanted Peter to maintain his alliance with Austria
and prepare for another Turkish war, but he had other plans,
and in any case both Gordon and LeFort died about this time.
Golovin came from an old boyar family and was well educated.
He had negotiated the treaty of Nerchinsk that delimited their
mutual border with China, and had succeeded in part because he
could speak to the Jesuits at the Chinese court in Latin. Menshikov
was the exact opposite, the son of a falconer at the court who
had served in Peter’s play regiments, which became his guards.
Menshikov had little education, though he had acquired enough
“soldier’s German” to speak to foreigners who lacked Russian.
Menshikov was also LeFort’s replacement at the drinking parties
and Peter’s close personal friend. They also both supported Peter’s
divorce from his wife Evdokiia, the mother of his son Aleksei. Most
important, they both supported Peter’s new project, the war with
Sweden.
The war with Sweden would occupy most of the rest of Peter’s
reign. On its eve Peter decreed the first of his reforms, mandating
that men of the upper classes must shave their beards, and that both
sexes of the gentry must henceforth wear Western clothing in place
of traditional Russian dress. He also ordered the year to be dated
from the birth of Christ, not the creation of the world so that Russia
 Peter the Great 83

would be in keeping with the educated world as he saw it. These

decrees aroused a certain amount of discontent, especially the new
dress. Boyar women in particular did not like the new clothing, as
it meant that their hair was not covered (and thus their new dress
was immodest) and they could not manage the stockings and high
heels. Many of them wore the new clothes only at court, switching
back to traditional dress at home.
Peter also began to reorder the state. The collecting of taxes from
townspeople was taken from the provincial governors and put in
the hands of the urban elites, and he imposed a stamp duty on
official papers. These were experiments, eventually abandoned, but
a more basic change was silent. Peter ceased to create boyars and
call the boyar duma. Similarly, when the patriarch of the church
died in 1701, Peter allowed no new patriarch to be chosen and
appointed the Ukrainian abbot Stefan Iavorskii as “conservator of
the patriarchal throne.” Thus the traditional and canonical head of
the Orthodox church in Russia simply disappeared. To make mat-
ters worse, Peter also took control of the revenues of the monastic
estates, keeping most of them and doling out a stipend for the use
of the monks. Peter wanted to ensure revenue for his war, and did
not want any interference from the aristocracy or the church.
The war with Sweden was a response to Peter’s disappointment
in the outcome of the Azov campaigns. He had taken the fort to
be sure, and gained an outlet to the Black Sea, more or less, but
the Turks would not permit the Russians to trade on the Black Sea
much less pass the Bosporus into the Mediterranean. Russia had
reentered the war too late to derive much benefit from its victory. As
Peter was returning from Vienna in 1698 to deal with the musketeer
revolt, he had a long meeting with the new king of Poland, Augustus
of Saxony. Augustus had large ambitions and considered himself
a great military commander. He wanted to seize Sweden’s Baltic
provinces, an old demand of the Polish nobility, but he also wanted
to use them to strengthen his very shaky position in Poland. His
natural allies against Sweden, the hegemonic power of northern
Europe, were Denmark and Russia, and he was able to recruit Peter
to his cause.
As is so often the case in war, all the initial calculations were
wrong. Augustus’ small army tried to take Riga in 1700, but failed
84 A Concise History of Russia

ignominiously. The young king of Sweden Charles XII, a born

battlefield commander, knocked Denmark out of the war in a mat-
ter of weeks, and then shipped his army to the Baltic provinces.
Peter had moved his newly trained European-style army to besiege
the town of Narva in Swedish Estonia. Charles marched swiftly to
the attack, landed on the unprepared Russians in the middle of a
snowstorm and routed them. Only Peter’s guards regiments were
able to withdraw in order, and most of the foreign and Russian offi-
cers were captured. Peter had to begin all over again. Fortunately,
Charles had other plans. Contemptuous of Russian capabilities,
he turned his attention to Poland, spending the next eight years
dethroning Augustus and setting up a Swedish puppet in his place.
Peter had a breathing space and he used it well.
What was Peter trying to accomplish in going to war against Swe-
den, a power that everyone thought virtually invincible? Officially
he announced that he was recovering the territory lost at the end
of the Time of Troubles, that is, the eastern part of the Gulf of
Finland where St. Petersburg now stands. This was ancient Russian
territory (that was true) and thus his patrimony. At the same time
Peter wanted a port for Russia more convenient for trade and com-
munication than distant Archangel. Azov had not worked out, and
the only other option was the Baltic shore. Indeed Narva had been
the object of Ivan the Terrible’s wars a century and a half earlier.
Peter had no way of knowing that the war would turn into an epic
duel that would change the face of northern and eastern Europe,
and it seems that his initial aims were modest. Again like so many
wars, the conflict acquired a logic of its own and ended in ways that
no one could have imagined.
For the time being, the war absorbed all his energies and those of
the state. Administration was concentrated in the hands of Peter’s
favorites Golovin and Menshikov, but this arrangement meant that
government was essentially improvised. During this period Peter
had no court, for he spent most of his time with the army or in
his small houses around Moscow, especially the residence in Preo-
brazhenskoe. His style of life at this time and ever after was unique
for a Russian or European monarch. He went about the country
and the army with no guards and no suite, but he took his lathe and
 Peter the Great 85

woodworking tools with him everywhere. The absence of a court

suited him perfectly, as he hated any sort of ceremonial and the
court amusements that were usual in most of Europe. His idea of
a good time was to arrange a great drunken celebration with his
officers or Dutch sea captains and end the evening with fireworks.
The scene of these amusements, and of the government as well,
was increasingly in his new city, St. Petersburg. The city was the
result of his persistence after the defeat at Narva. Peter rebuilt his
army and sent it into the Baltic provinces, in effect training it under
fire in many small engagements with the enemy. In 1702 he felt
confident enough to move against a larger objective, the Swedish
fort on the Neva River, Nöteborg. He took it after a short siege
and renamed it, ignoring the previous Russian name and calling
it Schlüsselburg, in German the “Key Castle.” The next year he
moved down the Neva and quickly seized the small Swedish town
at its mouth, where he immediately began to build a new fortress,
the fortress of St. Peter and Paul, to defend the area from sea and
land. Around the fortress he began to build a new city as a naval
base and a potential commercial port for Russia on the Baltic. He
was not waiting for the war to end, and through the years to come
in the darkest moments of the war, it was St. Petersburg that was
his one unshakeable demand.
There were plenty of dark moments. By 1706 Charles had man-
aged to force Augustus to abdicate the Polish throne and in the
next two years the Swedish king gradually moved east through
Poland to expel Augustus’s remaining supporters and the Russian
army. Charles was fresh from a long series of victories and hailed
in Europe as one of the world’s great commanders, so it is not
surprising that he had far-reaching plans to rely on boyar and pop-
ular dissent to overthrow Peter and establish a weak and compli-
ant government in Moscow. His assumption was that Peter’s army
could not effectively oppose him. As the Swedes moved toward the
Russian border, however, their situation rapidly deteriorated. The
Russians had stripped most of the land of food and fodder and
Charles’s army was low on supplies. To make things worse, each
encounter with the Russian army revealed that Peter’s officers were
learning their profession, and Swedish successes came harder each
86 A Concise History of Russia

time. Then Charles reached the Russian border and stopped to rest,
hoping that his manifestos had caused discontent to boil over among
the Russian boyars and people, but nothing happened. Russia was
quiet, and winter was coming on. Charles decided to turn south
into the Ukrainian Hetmanate, but first he hoped to join up with
a Swedish relief army coming from Riga that had fresh supplies.
At Lesnaia Peter struck. Moving his dragoons rapidly through the
forest he fell on the relief army, driving it from the field and seizing
its supplies. Charles now had more men but no fresh supplies.
For the moment his hope was in the Ukrainians. He had long
been in secret correspondence with the Ukrainian Hetman Ivan
Mazepa, who promised to rebel against the Russian tsar and bring
over the whole Ukrainian Cossack host. When Charles arrived in
the Ukraine, however, only some of the Cossack generals and a few
thousand men joined him. The rank and file Cossacks would not
follow and remained loyal to the tsar. Thus the Swedes settled down
for the winter, finding adequate food but no military supplies. When
spring came, the Swedish king moved northeast toward Moscow,
but stopped to besiege the fortified town of Poltava so as not to
leave enemy troops in his rear.
Peter decided to make his move. He marched his army toward the
town but instead of attacking, he constructed a fortified camp on
the outskirts and waited. Charles would have to attack him soon,
for clouds of Cossacks made foraging impossible. On the morning
of June 27, 1709, the invincible Swedish army marched through the
morning mist toward the Russian camp and turned right, ready to
attack. Peter brought his artillery out to meet them, and about ten
o’clock the Swedes moved forward in frontal attack, a maneuver
that had so often brought them victory. This time it failed. Peter’s
guns cut them to pieces, and the Swedish line stuck fast in close
combat with the Russians, and then broke. By noon Charles’s army
was a mass of refugees heading west for the Dniepr River, and
Russia had become a great power.
The victory at Poltava was the turning point of Peter’s reign,
for it ensured that eventually he would emerge the victor and keep
St. Petersburg. It also radically changed his and Russia’s position in
Europe. Charles had already given the final blow to Polish power
and prestige, and now Peter had done the same to Sweden. He
 Peter the Great 87

was free to concentrate on securing his conquests, and in 1710

he wrapped up the Baltic provinces and took the Finnish town of
Viborg, thereby ensuring his new city, soon to be his new capital,
of a protective belt of territory as well as several new ports for his
empire.
The war with Sweden dragged on until 1721, for Charles was
much too courageous and too stubborn to give up, even when he had
lost all of Sweden’s possessions in Germany, the Baltic provinces,
and Finland. To defeat him Peter had to maintain his army and use
it and create a navy in the Baltic Sea, based in St. Petersburg. The
navy in particular was extremely expensive, though vital to pressure
Sweden to make peace. When peace came at last, Peter returned
Finland to Sweden, minus Viborg, but kept the Baltic provinces.
St. Petersburg was secure.
The strain of the war very soon required Peter to think more
carefully about the structure of his state. Golovin’s untimely death
in 1706 made change urgent. In 1708 he formally replaced both the
traditional central offices as well as the improvised chancelleries of
his favorites with the governors of eight huge provinces that took
over most of the business of taxation, recruitment, and the courts.
The new arrangement was not just a change in formal structure,
for Peter appointed men from old aristocratic families (such as the
Golitsyns and Streshnev) as well as his in-laws (the Apraksins), and,
of course, “Aleksashka” Menshikov to run St. Petersburg and the
huge province around it. The resulting decentralization left a gap in
the center, so in 1711 he established the Senate as a coordinating
body, particularly to work when he was away. Prince Iakov Dol-
gorukii, fresh from a daring escape from Swedish captivity, was its
president, and aristocrats and their clients were prominent among
its members. Peter had created a new balance in the government,
combining great aristocrats with his favorite Menshikov. The bal-
ance was further enhanced by the appearance of a new favorite and
Menshikov’s rival, Prince Vasilii Dolgorukii (Prince Iakov’s cousin).
The prince held no major office, but was always present at court
and employed in a series of delicate and confidential matters.
Peter now had the beginnings of a court again in St. Petersburg.
He also ordered the government offices to the new city, and required
the aristocracy and many merchants to move there and build houses.
88 A Concise History of Russia

This was not a popular idea, for the new capital was expensive,
damp, subject to flooding, and far from the Russian heartland. The
merchants could not trade easily as long as the war continued, and
the aristocracy was particularly unhappy with the need to leave
their warm and comfortable Moscow mansions for the banks of the
Neva. Peter himself built no great palace in his new city, no Russian
Versailles. His Winter and Summer “Palaces” in St. Petersburg
were essentially six-room houses suitable for a modest country gen-
tleman. Peter’s new court was small and unostentatious, in keeping
with his residences. Moreover the physical center of the new city
was not the tsar’s palace but the Admiralty, the administrative
center of the navy and its principal site for shipbuilding. The main
avenue of the new city, Nevsky Prospect, began at the Admiralty,
not the palace, and the radial avenues laid out after Peter’s death
began at the same place. In Peter’s final plan, the government would
have its seat on Vasil’ev Island on the north side of the river, across
the water from the Winter Palace and the Admiralty. The island
would also serve as the main center for commerce. The main harbor
was still at Kronstadt, as the waters were too shallow near the city.
The country villas of the tsar and elite stretching along the Gulf of
Finland to the southwest were an integral part of the new city. These
were modest houses with extensive gardens, modeled on the Dutch
villas along the Vecht River near Utrecht. Among the villas stood
the ancestor of the now magnificent Peterhof, then a modest country
house for the tsar notable only for the fountains and gardens. Men-
shikov’s palace at Oranienbaum farther along the coast was much
larger and grander. Peter’s plan was in fact too modest, and the
government gradually moved south to be near the tsar in the Winter
Palace. The architecture of the city after his death quickly grew very
much grander. The city that would become a great imperial capital
with Roman arches and classical architecture and ornament started
its existence as a modest port and royal residence in north European
style.
Peter built his new city and court with a new wife at his side.
This was Catherine, and her story was perhaps the strangest of the
whole era. When the Russian armies began to move into the Baltic
provinces, one of the local Lutheran pastors had a maid named
Marta, and she with the rest of the family was taken off to Moscow
 Peter the Great 89

Figure 5. Peter the Great. Engraving after the equestrian statue of Peter by
Etienne-Maurice Falconet erected at the order of Catherine the Great in
1782.

as part of the policy of harrying the area. There her master set
up a school. Marta came to the attention of Peter around 1704,
and she became his mistress in place of Anna Mons. When Marta
accepted Orthodoxy and took the name Catherine, Peter married
her in 1712. By this time they already had several children, all girls,
one of them, born in 1709, who would be the future empress Eliz-
abeth. Catherine was a strong and important figure in the court,
generally allied with Menshikov but also working to keep har-
mony when crises threatened, and to moderate Peter’s anger when it
overflowed.
90 A Concise History of Russia

In this new city Peter set about once more to reorder the structure
of church and state. In 1715 he sent one Heinrich Fick, a German
jurist, as a spy to Sweden, whose mission was to study the Swedish
administrative system. Fick returned with detailed knowledge, and
on this basis Peter began the process of recreating a central govern-
ment to be headed by Colleges, each run by a committee consisting
of Russian officials and foreign experts. Peter was also increas-
ingly discontented with Stefan Iavorskii, who had strong notions
of episcopal power and believed that Russia needed to exterminate
heretics. Iavorskii came into conflict with both the tsar and the Sen-
ate over the case of an obscure religious dissident in Moscow, and
though Peter partially conceded to Iavorskii’s demands for execu-
tions, he decided to place the church under a new system. Another
Ukrainian bishop, Feofan Prokopovich, recently arrived in Peters-
burg, had the task of finding a suitable arrangement.
These were major changes and they took time to elaborate, espe-
cially with the continuing war with Sweden. Other concerns were
equally prominent in the tsar’s mind. In the autumn of 1714 Peter
discovered the extent of corruption on the part of Menshikov and
many other major officials. The building of St. Petersburg was a
particular gold mine for corruption, as thousands of peasants were
conscripted every year to work; feeding and paying them was an
obvious area for padding the work rolls and underpaying the work-
men. The guilty officials were whipped and sent into exile, and
Menshikov was sentenced to return literally millions of rubles to
the treasury. He kept his position as governor of St. Petersburg, but
lost the tsar’s favor. At court the Dolgorukiis and their allies were
triumphant. Menshikov was not the only problem. Peter’s son by
his first wife, Aleksei Petrovich, was now in his twenties, and had
proved a serious disappointment to his father. Peter had given him
a Western education, had him taught German and French, history
and geography, but he did not take to it very well. A German wife
(sister to the Emperor Karl VI’s wife) did not help either, as Alek-
sei treated her with coldness and contempt and found a mistress
among his servants. Aleksei was lazy, uninterested in learning, pol-
itics, or warfare and preferred drinking with his circle of servants
and clergy. Stefan Iavorskii began to see him as a future advocate of
church interests, perhaps wrongly, but he let his views be known.
 Peter the Great 91

Relations between father and son worsened, and the existence of

Peter’s second wife Catherine meant that other heirs to the throne
might be born. Finally, in 1715, both Catherine and Aleksei’s wife
gave birth to sons almost simultaneously. There were now two
possible heirs if Peter chose to bypass his eldest son. The tsar wrote
to Aleksei chiding him for his indifference to the qualities needed
for a future ruler, and Aleksei responded by offering to enter a
monastery. Peter gave him another warning, and then went off to
Western Europe to look after the continuing war and to do more
traveling, this time to France.
While Peter was away a crisis arose in the supply of the Russian
army in Finland, and the Senate, with its aristocratic supporters,
dragged their feet. Peter was furious and sent order after order,
but nothing happened. Menshikov stepped in to commandeer ships
and send the supplies, thus instantly restoring himself to favor. His
crimes were forgiven. A few weeks later, Aleksei Petrovich, the heir
to the Russian throne, disappeared from Petersburg. For several
weeks, no one knew where he was. Finally Peter’s emissaries found
him in Vienna, where he had gone to take refuge with Emperor Karl,
Aleksei’s brother-in-law, a man seriously unhappy with Peter’s rise
to power and his potential influence in Germany. The Emperor
gave him shelter, and Aleksei proposed to Karl’s ministers that he
be given an army to overthrow his father. This was a tall order,
and the Austrians feared Peter’s reaction, so they hid the tsarevich,
first in the Tirol and then in Naples. There Peter sent one of his
diplomats, Peter Tolstoi, to bring him back, and Tolstoi succeeded,
in the process laying the foundation of the fortunes of the Tolstoi
family for two centuries.
Aleksei returned to Moscow in January 1718. Thus began a long
interrogation during which the extent of Aleksei’s support among
the aristocracy and church became evident, not least because the
tsarevich himself informed on them all. His sympathizers included
the other favorite, Prince Vasilii Dolgorukii, Stefan Iavorskii, and
many great aristocrats. As far as Peter could tell, they had not
planned anything specific, but they also had known of Aleksei’s
flight to Vienna. Peter faced a dilemma: either he could punish
them all in imitation of Ivan the Terrible, or he could minimize the
whole affair by punishing a few and thus cover it up. With some
92 A Concise History of Russia

persuasion from his wife, he chose the second alternative. A dozen

or so persons of low rank were executed. Prince Vasilii Dolgorukii
and others were exiled, and Aleksei brought before the assembled
Senate, ministers, generals, and high clergy for trial. The laymen
voted for the death penalty, with dozens of men named by Aleksei
as his supporters signing the document. Before Peter made a final
decision about execution, the tsarevich died, probably from the
aftereffects of judicial torture, but no information that is reliable
exists about the cause of death.
Be that as it may, Peter’s problem was solved. He decreed that
henceforth the tsar could choose his successor at will. He then pro-
ceeded to implement the new form of government, the Colleges,
and to place over the church a new institution, the Holy Synod, a
committee of clergy and laymen with a lay “Ober-procuror” as its
head. This structure came from Prokopovich’s reading of Swedish
legislation for the Lutheran church, and was a sharp break with
Orthodox tradition. In the new arrangement the tsar became the
“protector” of the church, and in practice he appointed the mem-
bers of the Synod. The church would no longer be able to play a
role in politics and oppose his reforms.
The seven years from the death of Aleksei to the death of Peter
himself in January 1725 saw the culmination of Peter’s reorder-
ing of government, culture, and his foreign policy. The end of the
Swedish war was a great relief, but he did not rest on his laurels.
He immediately set off to use the momentary political confusion in
Iran to seize some of its northern provinces, a scheme abandoned
after his death but revealing of Peter’s thinking. The motivations
here were purely commercial: control of the silk-producing areas of
Iran, greater access to the Iranian market, and further on to the mar-
kets of the Near East and India. Utterly impractical, the plans show
the extent to which Peter wanted to graft commercial appendages
onto his agrarian empire.
With the restoration of central government, Peter established a
Table of Ranks to replace the old court and military ranks he had
allowed to lapse. It established an equivalency of civilian and mil-
itary ranks, and provided for ennoblement of plebeians whose tal-
ents allowed them to advance. As a framework for the Russian
state administration it lasted until 1917. In the same years Peter also
 Peter the Great 93

tried to reorganize Russian provincial administration, redrawing the

large provinces into fifty small ones, with subdivisions and a sep-
aration of administration and the judiciary all based on a Swedish
model. Russia, however, lacked the resources for such a system, and
after Peter’s death the number of provinces was reduced to four-
teen, with another crucial administrative layer below the provincial
governors. All this tinkering did not solve the problem of ruling a
vast state with limited resources.
Peter’s victories added a new element to the Russian state in the
form of the Baltic provinces of Estland and Livonia. For the first
time Russia had territories with a powerful local elite that was not
Orthodox. The loss of their privileges and lands to Swedish abso-
lutism had led many of the German nobility of the area to support
Peter and when he finally pushed out the Swedes in 1710 he granted
the nobility their old privileges, including local courts, diets, and
control of the Lutheran church on their estates. Elected town gov-
ernment was restored in the hands of the urban German merchants.
In the Ukrainian Hetmanate, Peter took a stronger hand, for he engi-
neered the election of Ivan Skoropadskii to replace the pro-Swedish
Mazepa in 1708, and then, on Skoropadskii’s death in 1722, abol-
ished the office of hetman altogether. He left, however, the rest of
the Hetmanate’s political and legal structure intact and it survived
until the 1780s. Thus Russia had not only new territories and peo-
ples, but distinct legal and local political systems in Livonia and the
Ukrainian Hetmanate, both differing from the Russian structure.
In both places traditional privileges and a system of local elections
kept power and wealth in the hands of the local nobility, while the
tsar appointed governors to exercise general supervision.
Peter’s intervention in the border provinces was limited. In the
inner Russian provinces he proceeded with more new and reformed
institutions. After 1718 he replaced the old Russian tax system and
his own innumerable financial improvisations with a single tax,
the “soul tax,” to be paid by all non-nobles, which also structured
finance and social relations until the 1860s. Some of these measures
lasted and some did not, but all of them meant that the Russian
state now had its basic institutions, their powers and duties, spelled
out in law for the first time. The laws were published and provided
with elaborate prefaces giving out the rationale for each measure.
94 A Concise History of Russia

The new system of government now looked formally more or less

the same as that of the rest of Europe’s monarchies.

Along with the new form of government came a new culture. Peter
did not suppress the old religious culture, he merely began to import
a new one – the secular culture of contemporary Europe. He sent
hundreds of young noblemen abroad, encouraged and sometimes
directed the translation and printing of European books – not great
classics but the textbooks of history, architecture, mathematics,
geography, and other subjects. In the last years of his life he sent
his personal librarian abroad to recruit scientists for an academy of
sciences to be established in St. Petersburg, instructing the librarian
to particularly look for mathematicians and physical scientists. The
project was on the point of realization when he died, but his wife
and successor formally established the academy in his memory. The
result was the Russian Academy of Sciences, founded in 1725. Peter
was not only interested in science and art, but he also wanted to
Europeanize Russia’s social habits. In the european thought of the
time, a cultivated and polished people were necessary for an orderly
state. Thus in 1719, Peter decreed that the nobility was to change
its forms of socializing. The all-male banquets of the old days were
to end, and in their place the nobility were to hold a sort of open
house (known as “assemblies”) on particular days, and invite their
acquaintances including those of lesser rank. Amusements were to
be cultivated – music, dancing, and card-playing – and most impor-
tant, the assemblies must include women. Like so many of Peter’s
cultural decrees, it required what had already come into fairly gen-
eral practice, As the diplomats immediately realized, the assemblies
were also a perfect point of exchange of information about politics
and simply the news of the day.
Almost the last thing he did before he died was to order the
translation of the German jurist and historian Samuel Puffendorf’s
book, On the Duties of Man and the Citizen. A widely read popular
account of the nature of the state, it founded government ultimately
on natural law and a contract among men in the state of nature.
Puffendorf also stressed the ruler’s duty to work for the general
good, not just his own, and the citizen’s duty of obedience without
any sort of rebellion. He thought natural law was the work of God,
 Peter the Great 95

but otherwise he strictly separated the state and its laws from divine
commands. For Peter this meant that the tsar was still the sovereign,
but the character of his rule was based on natural and human law,
not merely tradition and the ruler’s personal piety. Western political
thought had entered Russia.

Peter the Great, with his personal eccentricities and the scale of his
accomplishment was a ruler unique in Russian history. For most
of the eighteenth century he was the great ideal of the Russian
monarchy and its supporters at home and abroad. As time passed,
Peter’s image changed, for already in Catherine’s time conserva-
tive noblemen began to complain, echoing their ancestors of Peter’s
time, that Peter had imported foreign ways to Russia, undermining
its ancient religion and morality. In the nineteenth century a full-
blown quarrel broke out about this issue, pitting liberal and radical
Westernizers against Slavophile admirers of Russian tradition – that
is, Peter’s admirers were pitted against his detractors. This was a dis-
pute fraught with metaphysics and national pride, but the question
remains: What did Peter really accomplish?
The most obvious answer has to do with religion. The adminis-
trative subordination of the church to the tsar was only one side
of the changes Peter wrought, however important. Peter was deter-
mined to put the church in its place, but he was not irreligious. He
attended the liturgy at least once a week in St. Petersburg and more
often during Lent and Easter week. His style of religious obser-
vance in other respects deviated from traditional Orthodoxy. After
his mother’s death, he never made a pilgrimage to any of the many
shrines of miraculous relics and icons. In his new capital there was
only one monastery, in contrast to the dozens in Moscow, and it was
founded only in 1714. Peter went there on occasion, but the attrac-
tion was the sermons of the Ukrainian monks, which Peter sought
out and seems to have enjoyed. The monastery was dedicated to
Prince Alexander Nevskii, certainly a saint in the Orthodox Church,
but one known mainly for his military victories, including that over
the Swedes on the Neva. In case the significance of the choice was
not clear enough, Peter ordered the celebration of the saint’s feast
day moved from the traditional November 30 to August 23, the day
of the conclusion of the treaty of Nystad that ended his own war
96 A Concise History of Russia

with Sweden. Peter knew his scripture and liturgy, and could trade
biblical quotations with his correspondents, but his personal piety
was the outgrowth of the cultural changes in Russian Orthodoxy
of the seventeenth century, the emphasis on sermons and learning
over miracles and monasticism.
The key here is the change in emphasis: Peter did not abolish
monasteries or suppress the devotion to miracle-working relics. Sim-
ilarly Peter was not out to eliminate religion. The consequence of his
policies was to end the universal domination of religion in Russian
culture, and to reduce it to the place it held in the mental life of
early modern Europe after the Renaissance: a foundational belief
system in a society whose high culture was already secular. Thus
he accomplished in thirty-six years a change in Russian culture that
took centuries in Western Europe.
The new secular culture imported into Russia in Peter’s time was
undoubtedly European. At the time, no one thought of it that way.
Neither Russians nor Europeans used the terms “Westernization”
or “Europeanization.” They thought Peter had brought education
and culture in place of ignorance, light in the place of darkness.
Moreover, the term “European,” can be misleading, as it conceals
the choices Peter as well as other Russians made among the great
variety of European culture. Peter’s personal tastes were unusual to
say the least. He had what some contemporaries called a “math-
ematical mind,” meaning that he was interested in what was then
understood to be mathematics. That meant not just a theoretical
science of numbers, but also mechanics, hydraulics, fortification,
surveying, astronomy, architecture, and many other sciences and
techniques that employed more or less mathematics. There were
no European monarchs who shared these tastes and they were
unknown among Russian aristocrats at his court. He also had a
passion for the Dutch, their language, their ships, their engineer-
ing and architecture, and their painting. In general his personal
culture took its inspiration from Protestant northern Europe, and
from there he borrowed his laws and administration, his navy, the
engineering for his new capital, and much more. His architects,
however, were more German or Italian, in spite of his Dutch lean-
ings, and his sculptors were Italian. His choices were eclectic as
 Peter the Great 97

were those of the other Russians, mostly aristocrats, whose cultural

interests in Western Europe we can trace. Many of the aristocrats,
and apparently all of Peter’s opponents, were more attracted by the
culture of Catholic southern Europe and Poland – by the Baroque
grandeur of Rome and the aristocratic constitutions of Venice and
Poland. Some parts of European culture had not yet arrived in
Russia, jurisprudence, medicine, and the scholarly study of the clas-
sics. For the time being the result was a strange mixture of Baroque
Europe and the early Enlightenment, a combination of disparate and
sometimes contradictory elements derived from European thought
and culture.
Part of the cultural transformation of Russia was a new concep-
tion of the state. The traditional Russian state’s goals were very
simple: maintenance of the power of the tsar and his government at
home and abroad and the conservation of the state by the just and
Christian behavior of the rulers. Peter introduced a secular goal,
the good of the state (including its subjects) as well as the means to
achieving that goal, that is, the establishment of good and legal order
and the education of the elite in European culture. It was the latter in
particular that Peter’s spokesmen repeatedly stressed, proclaiming
that he had brought light (learning) into darkness (ignorance), and
that is also how Peter’s European contemporaries saw his achieve-
ment. Equally important was the creation of explicit written and
legal foundations of governmental institutions, not a constitution
in the modern sense, but a sharp break with the customary, unwrit-
ten, foundations of previous Russian government. The structure he
created was noticeably similar to European monarchies, and was
accepted as such in the West. It shared with many European states
one fundamental contradiction, that the monarch was the source of
all law. That being the case, how could the legal order be preserved
if the ruler chose to ignore it? Eventually this contradiction in the
continental European states could only be resolved by the French
Revolution and its consequences, but for the time it seemed to
work.
The Russian state looked like Europe, but it had its peculiar-
ities. Russia lacked one important institution that was universal
in European states, a trained legal profession. Russia was not to
98 A Concise History of Russia

get a university with a law faculty until 1755, and a trained legal
profession came only in the nineteenth century. Another typically
Russian problem with Peter’s state was that its new features were
concentrated in St. Petersburg. The tsar’s reform of provincial
administration had never been very effective, languished for lack
of suitable personnel, and was abolished after his death. Unlike
European monarchies, Russia lacked an administrative structure
dense enough and well trained enough to execute the sovereign’s
will on provincial society. Unimpeachably enlightened measures
formulated in the capital did not affect the provinces, and just to
collect taxes Peter often had to rely on specially delegated mili-
tary officers. To some extent the new state floated in the air over
a society that was not changing with the pace of the capital or
even Moscow. For the peasants, relations with the state had hardly
changed.
With all these limitations, however, Peter succeeded and trans-
formed his country forever. He did not do this without the aid of
some previous changes, particularly in the culture of the church and
the boyar elite in the last decades of the seventeenth century. His
reordering of the state, however, had no precedent, and came out of
his early improvisations and the decision to adopt Swedish models
of administration. Peter did not do all of this alone. A major part
of his success was his political skill in managing a reluctant aristoc-
racy that inevitably lost part of its power in the new arrangements.
The aristocrats, legends aside, were not boyars in long beards try-
ing to restore Orthodox Russia as it was in 1650. They too were
European, but with different goals and interests from the tsar, and
Peter managed them by including enough of them in the new gov-
ernment, army, and diplomatic corps to keep them quiet if not fully
satisfied. Peter also had popular discontent to contend with, and
that did have an element of cultural conservatism. When this dis-
content turned into rebellion, he suppressed it with savage punish-
ments, to the approval of Europe. No one supported rebels against
the crown. With the aristocrats Peter worked entirely differently,
pretending to ignore their sympathy for his son and keeping them
in the center of government along with his favorites and West-
ern experts until the end of his reign. Thus Peter kept the elite
together and allied with him and his policies. His mastery of court
 Peter the Great 99

politics was as important as his relentless determination and iron

will.

Peter’s death in January 1725, plunged Russia into a political crisis,

for one of the many paradoxes of his reign is that he did not carry
out the provisions of his decree permitting the tsar to nominate
his heir. Therefore at his death there were several possible alterna-
tives: his wife Catherine, crowned his empress the previous year; his
ten-year-old grandson Peter by the unfortunate Aleksei; and sev-
eral daughters by Catherine. The latter were too young or married
abroad, and the choice came down to Catherine or Peter under a
regency. The ruling elite split over the choice, but after considerable
pressure from the guards regiments, the Senate opted for Cather-
ine. For the first time the guards made their wishes felt and opted
for a woman. Though Catherine had a reputation as a very strong
personality (“the heart of a lion,” said the French ambassador), she
did not prove an effective ruler, and very soon state business went
to Menshikov and a Supreme Privy Council formed to manage the
state. Then Catherine died in 1727. Menshikov seemed poised for
supreme power with a boy tsar, but the aristocrats proved too pow-
erful, and the Supreme Privy Council exiled him to Siberia, where
he died. The Princes Dolgorukii and Golitsyn were masters of the
government and they signaled a new course, moving the capital
back to Moscow. They cemented their position by marrying the
young tsar to a Dolgorukii princess. Then fate intervened. Suddenly
in 1730 Peter II died of smallpox. The aristocrats had to find a new
monarch, and they did not choose Peter’s remaining daughter Eliz-
abeth but his niece, Anna, the daughter of his erstwhile co-tsar Ivan
V. Anna ruled in Baltic Kurland as the widow of the Duke, and was
quickly summoned to Moscow. At the same time the aristocrats
decided to hold on to power by compiling a series of conditions
that Anna would have to sign to ascend the throne, conditions giv-
ing power to the sitting members of the Supreme Privy Council, the
Dolgorukiis and Golitsyns. Here they made a fatal error, for the
conditions gave power not to the aristocracy as a whole, but to a
clique of families. As the English ambassador reported, the Russian
aristocrats “have no true notions of a limited government.” When
Anna came to Moscow, she quickly sized up the situation and with
100 A Concise History of Russia

the support of the other aristocratic clans, the rank and file nobility,
and the guards, she tore up the conditions and restored autocracy.
Russia was back on the road Peter had mapped out, but with
another woman on the throne who had no direct heirs, male or
female. No one knew that for the next sixty-six years Russia’s rulers
would be women, like Anna, put on the throne by male aristocrats
and guards officers.
 6
Two Empresses

With the restoration of autocracy, Anna came to the throne as

Empress of Russia, and after a time she sent the leaders of the
Golitsyn and Dolgorukii clans into exile. The ten years of Anna’s
reign in the memory of the Russian nobility was a dark period of
rule by Anna’s German favorites – particularly her chamberlain –
Ernst-Johann Bühren (Biron to the Russians), who was allegedly
all-powerful and indifferent to Russian interests. That memory was
a considerable exaggeration. After a brief interlude, Empress Eliza-
beth, Peter the Great’s daughter and a capable and strong monarch
succeeded her (1741–1761). Underneath all the drama at court,
Russia’s new culture took shape, and Russia entered the age of the
Enlightenment. In these decades we can also get a glimpse of Rus-
sian society that goes beyond descriptions of legal status into the
web of human relations.
Politically Anna’s court was not a terribly pleasant place, though
the story of “German domination” is largely a legend. Anna was
personally close to Biron, who had served her well in Courland,
where she had lived since the death of her husband the duke in
1711. She entrusted foreign policy to Count Andrei Ostermann and
the army to Count Burkhard Christian Münnich, but the three were
in no sense a clique. Indeed, they hated one another and made
alliances with the more numerous Russian grandees in the court
and in the government. The truth was that Anna relied on them
and a few others and she did not consult with the elite as a whole.
The Senate languished. Not surprisingly, Anna was terrified that
101
102 A Concise History of Russia

there would be plots against her in favor of Elizabeth, Peter’s eldest

surviving daughter, or other candidates for the throne, and she used
the Secret Chancellery to try to uncover them. The darkest episode
of the reign was the trial and execution of her minister Artemii
Volynskii in 1740 on the charge of insulting the Empress. This was
an excuse: the real reason for his death was Volynskii’s loss of favor
with Biron and Ostermann and his own ambitious plans, which
frightened Anna and many others in her entourage.
Anna’s reign was by no means a failure. She restored much of
Peter’s work that had been rejected by the oligarchy in the time of
Peter II. She returned the capital to St. Petersburg and abolished the
Supreme Privy Council. She did not restore the Senate to power,
ruling with a Cabinet of Ministers dominated by her favorites. Her
government tried to reduce the burden on the country of the large
military and naval establishment that Peter had created, but found
that they could not. Instead, Russia fought a successful war in
Poland to keep France from placing a king on the Polish throne
who would be hostile to Russia and Austria – and then Russia went
to war with Turkey. Münnich proved a highly capable commander,
and Russia was able to return the fort at Azov that was lost in 1711.
Since Anna’s husband had died before they could produce chil-
dren, she remained childless. In accord with Peter’s 1722 succession
law she chose her heir, albeit on her deathbed: a two-month-old
infant who was given the name Ivan VI. The baby’s connection
with the Russian throne was remote. He was the grandson of Anna’s
elder sister Catherine, who had married the Duke of Mecklenburg
in 1716. Catherine’s daughter, also named Anna, in turn married
the Duke of Brunswick-Bevern-Lüneburg, and Ivan was their first
son. In other words, the tsar of Russia was actually a minor Ger-
man prince with only the most tenuous connection to the country
he was supposed to rule. The baby tsar obviously had to have a
regent to rule for him, a fact that brought the conflicts among the
grandees into the open. At first Biron was in charge, but Münnich
quickly ousted him, only to fall victim to Ostermann and the infant
tsar’s parents. Complicating matters was a Swedish declaration of
war during the summer of 1741, an attempt by the Swedes to get
revenge for their earlier defeats. Not surprisingly in this situation
an elaborate plot came into being with all sorts of international
 Two Empresses 103

ramifications (the French ambassador was one of the leaders) and

in November 1741, the guards overthrew the regency and carried
Elizabeth on their shoulders into the Winter Palace. Ivan VI and the
Brunswick family were sent into exile in northern Russia, Ivan to
perish in the Mirovich affair of 1764 and his family to be released
only some twenty years later.
Elizabeth’s reign brought a renewed sense of normalcy to Rus-
sia. The remaining Golitsyns, Dolgorukiis, and alleged confederates
of Volynskii were returned from exile, their lands and position
restored. The Senate was restored to the position that it had under
Peter. The Russian army defeated the Swedes, quickly ending the
war in 1743. Elizabeth was intelligent and capable, but rather lazy
and self-indulgent. The number of her dresses was legendary, and
in a modest way she followed her father’s taste for banquets and
drink. Secretly she married her lover, originally a Ukrainian choir-
boy named Aleksei Razumovskii, who became a major figure at
court. He was clever enough to not try to overshadow the others,
and for most of the reign affairs were in the hands of the Shuvalovs,
the brothers Peter and Alexander, and the chancellor (foreign min-
ister) Aleksei Bestuzhev-Riumin. All of these men, like their rivals
the Vorontsovs, came from families of ancient nobility but far from
the great aristocracy, who now settled into secondary positions
in government and diplomacy. Elizabeth’s grandees were relatively
new men who owed their positions to Peter’s promotion of talented
young men from outside the small circle of old aristocratic families.
Bestuzhev-Riumin was an experienced diplomat, and the Shuval-
ovs had been part of Elizabeth’s personal entourage in the 1730s.
Though they owed their rise to their personal connection with the
new empress, they proved energetic and intelligent. They were the
first since Peter’s time to systematically turn their attention to
the economic development of Russia, primarily toward strength-
ening its commerce. In 1752 they convinced Elizabeth to abolish all
internal tolls and modestly raise the tariff, so that trade would be
freer but the state revenue would not suffer. Less happy was their
scheme to increase revenue through the state vodka monopoly by
raising the price. There were other ideas, the most important to pro-
duce a new law code, and the plan to secularize monastery lands,
though neither were realized. They also introduced their young
104 A Concise History of Russia

cousin Ivan Shuvalov to Elizabeth, and he became a major force

in Russian culture.
Elizabeth’s decision to join Austria against Prussia in the Seven
Years War (1756–1763) put any reform plans on the shelf. Russia’s
army performed well against the supposed military genius of the age,
Frederick the Great, and even briefly occupied Berlin in 1760. The
death of the Empress on Christmas day 1761 in the Julian calendar,
however, put an end to Russia’s participation in the conflict, and
simultaneously set the stage for yet another drama.

While the court alternated between routine governance, dangerous

intrigue, and dramatic palace revolutions, Russia gradually inte-
grated the cultural changes that were the result of Peter the Great’s
turn toward European culture. It is not the case that the Empresses
and the court elite played no role in the development and deepening
of Russian culture. Empress Anna was paradoxically one of the most
important innovators. It was in her reign that Russia finally aban-
doned the simplicity of Peter’s time and acquired a court like those
of other European states with the usual cultural institutions. Anna
was the first to establish a court theater, beginning with an Italian
Commedia dell’arte troupe, and then a regular French and German
theater. She also brought an opera company, with its composer-
director, the Neapolitan Francesco Araya. Anna replaced Peter’s
tiny Winter Palace with a new one, more in keeping with the status
of Russia’s rulers. Anna’s government was not only concerned with
the court, for she also founded the Infantry Cadet Corps, using the
old buildings of Menshikov’s palace. The Cadet Corps later evolved
into an elite military school, but in the eighteenth century it was the
main institution for the education of young Russian noblemen and
had a broad curriculum that was borrowed from the academies
for young nobles common in central Europe. The school taught
military subjects, but also stressed modern languages, history, ele-
mentary jurisprudence, and mathematics. Not just officers, but also
government ministers and many writers studied at the Cadet Corps.
Elizabeth continued in this direction, and it was she who ordered
Bartolomeo Rastrelli to build the magnificent Winter Palace that
stands to this day. Finally St. Petersburg had a residence for the
monarch that rivaled or even outshone those of other European
 Two Empresses 105

capitals. Elizabeth loved the theater even more than Anna, and in her
court there were performances of the opera and the French theater
two or three times a week. Araya kept his position to the end of her
reign, writing his own operas and producing the work of other then
prominent composers. In 1749 for the first time her theater put on
a Russian play, Semira, by Alexander Sumarokov (1718–1777), a
recent graduate of the Cadet Corps. Semira was a typical classical
drama in verse in five acts, following the classical unities of time
and place and imitating the French theater, Racine, Corneille, and
Voltaire (then considered a great playwright and poet more than a
thinker). Today it seems wooden and dull, with unexciting verse and
an eminently predictable plot pitting duty against love. It was good
enough, however, to enchant Elizabeth and her court, performed as
it was by the boys of the Cadet Corps taking both male and female
roles. Russians had no objection to female actors, the problem was
that the theater was so new there simply were not any available, nor
was there yet a school for girls equivalent to the Cadet Corps. The
appearance of a Russian play, quickly followed by many others,
required Russian actors, and by the end of the 1750s Russia had
its first native theaters, the court theater as well as some short-lived
enterprises outside the court network. Russia also had no school to
train visual artists, and in 1756 Ivan Shuvalov founded the Academy
of Arts in St. Petersburg. For the next century it would be the main
center for Russian painting and sculpture.
Russia, however, still lacked a university. Peter’s academy of sci-
ences had included a university, but that aspect of the academy was
too small to make much impact. Again it was Elizabeth’s favorite,
Count Ivan Shuvalov, who set out to correct the situation. The
empress decreed the foundation of a university in Moscow that
opened its doors in 1755. The university was very much on the Ger-
man model, with a heavily German faculty and lectures frequently
in Latin the first years, but it worked. It had two gymnasia attached
to it to prepare the students – one for nobles and one for pupils
from humbler stations in society. The new university had faculties
of law and medicine as well as arts and sciences, and the very first
graduates were to make major contributions to Russian culture.
Shuvalov had the political skills to pilot the university through
the government’s offices, but he turned for the programmatic details
106 A Concise History of Russia

to the Academy, and particularly to Mikhail Lomonosov (1711–

1765), who had been pressing the idea in vain for some time.
Lomonosov was in many ways the last man of the era of Peter,
for he was the son of a wealthy merchant of the far north who
owned fishing boats, but who was legally a peasant. Lomonosov had
walked south to Moscow to enter the Slavo-Greco-Latin Academy
in 1731. After graduation he was sent to Germany to study min-
ing, but eventually opted for chemistry and related sciences. He had
to leave Marburg University in a hurry, as his landlord’s daughter
was pregnant, and he threw himself on the mercies of the Russian
ambassador in Holland. Fortunately the ambassador sent him back
to St. Petersburg, where he found a position in the Academy and was
able to bring his German mistress to become his wife. Lomonosov’s
most important scientific achievement was an early version of the
law of conservation of matter and energy that was later formu-
lated by Lavoisier in France, but Lomonosov was something of a
polymath. He was a major poet, producing many odes for court
occasions, an important genre at the time, for the odes were often
declaimed at court occasions before the empress herself. These were
not just flattery, for Lomonosov used them to present a program of
enlightened and powerful monarchy that reflected his priorities and
also those of Elizabeth and the court elite. He also took time off
from his chemistry to engage in disputes over Russian history, and
most important, to codify Russian grammar. This apparently simple
contribution was fraught with consequence, for the cultural changes
of Peter’s time had left the Russian literary language in a quandary.
The old literary language had been formed by the Church and it
was a combination of Old Church Slavic and vernacular elements.
Peter’s reign had seen the introduction of thousands of new words
and concepts and the restriction of the church language to tradi-
tional religious texts. Lomonosov’s contribution was to regularize
all this, declaring the Church Slavic elements to be appropriate for
high-style literature, but not necessarily ordinary speech or writing,
and to provide a grammar for the normal written language that was
essentially the spoken vernacular. Together with his own poetry and
other writings, he laid the foundation for the literary language of
Pushkin and Tolstoy.
 Two Empresses 107

Russia may not have had a university, but it certainly had a

church. The time of Elizabeth was the high point of the domination
of the Orthodox Church by Ukrainian bishops, who were trained
in Kiev and elsewhere on Western, and to a large extent, Catholic
models. They brought Latin and Western devotional literature to
the Russian clergy, and continued the effort to bring their teachings
to the population through sermonizing and attempts to educate
the clergy. What they could not do was interfere in the process
of absorption of Western secular culture. The Church in Russia,
under the power of the state through the Synod, lacked the ability
to ban books or interfere in the educational process. Boys in the
Cadet School certainly had religious instruction, but the curriculum
was entirely in the hands of laymen. As the European Enlighten-
ment flowered, this Russian peculiarity meant that works banned in
France or Italy found their way to Russia without interference from
the clergy.
Starting around 1750, the Enlightenment came to Russia. For
men of Lomonosov’s generation, formed in the earlier part of the
century, the European culture they absorbed was essentially that
of seventeenth-century rationalism. The predominant philosophy
at the Academy in Lomonosov’s youth was that of Georg Christian
Wolff, a follower and systematizer of the work of Gottfried Leib-
niz and Peter’s advisor on the Academy of Sciences. Wolff taught
a deductive rationalism that depended on mathematics and logic,
not sense experience, for its conclusions. Though many Lutheran
theologians saw him as a threat, Wolff had no quarrel with revealed
religion and was equally respectful of absolute monarchy. This was
the worldview that the philosophy faculty of Moscow University
propagated as well, not surprisingly, since it still held sway in
German universities until the 1770s and beyond. During the mid-
dle years of the century, however, newer ideas from France and
indirectly from England began to penetrate into Russian libraries
and bookstores. Voltaire’s plays, some performed in Russia, illus-
trated classic themes of the French enlightenment, religious toler-
ance, enlightened monarchy, and the struggle against superstition
and the clergy. As the French language began to replace German
at court in these years, French writers acquired a public in Russia
108 A Concise History of Russia

for the first time. In 1756 the first of Voltaire’s essays appeared in
Russian translation and three years later his novel Zadig, the first
major text of the mature French Enlightenment to be translated.
This small stream grew into a flood in the next reign.

The political and cultural efforts of the state and the court rested on
the shoulders of the Russian peasantry, seventy percent of whom
were serfs. About half of all peasants were the property of the gentry,
another fifteen percent were serfs of the Orthodox monasteries,
and the rest relatively free. Monastery serfs had been the object of
government policy since the time of Tsar Aleksei, who had already
taken control of church lands to shore up state revenues. Peter had
imitated him, but after his death, control of the land went back to
the church. In the 1750s the Shuvalovs decided on a more radical
measure: the state would confiscate the monastery lands and make
the peasants into tenants of the state. In practice this would mean
the end of serfdom for monastery peasants, but the war with Prussia
intervened and the reform was delayed.
The fifty percent of peasants that were the property of the gen-
try varied in their economic position considerably. In the old Rus-
sian heartland of central Russia and the northwest, by 1750 most
peasants rarely performed labor services, though the gentry could
demand them at any time. Mostly the peasants paid some sort of
rent and managed the affairs of the village themselves under the
supervision of an often distant estate steward and an even more dis-
tant owner. The peasant economy of these regions was a complex
mix of food crops, small-scale stock raising, and more specialized
pursuits like market gardening for the Moscow and St. Petersburg
population, both of which were growing rapidly. Some peasants also
grew flax to make linen and canvas or hemp for ropes. To the north-
east of Moscow and on the upper Volga in particular, there were
whole villages and even districts emerging where the peasants were
scarcely farmers at all. Here they made frying pans and other iron
implements, wove coarse cloth, made wooden spoons and dishes,
and even produced more sophisticated items, such as painted chests,
toys, and even icons on wood and metal. Herein lay the origins of
the Palekh icon painting of the nineteenth century, and the later
production of painted lacquer boxes. In these villages the richest
 Two Empresses 109

artisans were merchants as well, who attended all the local fairs like
the great fair near Nizhnii Novgorod or who went to Moscow and
St. Petersburg. Some such peasant traders even came to Archangel
as early as Peter’s time. Many of these were monastery villages, but
some were the property of great magnates like the Sheremetevs. In
later times the Sheremetev villages would grow into great industrial
cities.
South of the Oka River, where the steppe began with its black
earth, a different sort of serf economy emerged. These areas were
still open to Crimean slave raids, but since the 1630s the Russian
state had steadily strengthened its defenses in the south, so that
the area was relatively secure by 1750. The seventeenth century
defensive lines had relied on armed peasants, Cossacks, and local
noblemen, but Peter’s regular army replaced them in large part,
leaving land open for normal peasant settlement. Noblemen began
to move farther and farther south, buying or receiving larger and
larger estates as grants from the crown. Many of them were devoted
at first to sheep and cattle raising, as this was easier to manage in
remote and thinly settled areas, but soon the area began to shift
to grain production and the nobles began to set up estates largely
worked by labor services. This system demanded the presence of a
nearby steward to give orders to the peasants or even the residence
of the landowner. Labor services were much more oppressive to
the peasantry, and were balanced only by the greater fertility of the
southern soil.
The peasantry, however, under either system was not ground
down into abject and universal poverty. Eighteenth century Russian
peasants probably ate as well as their counterparts in France or
Germany, at least in years of normal harvest, and they owned their
own animals, ploughs, and other agricultural tools as well as modest
material goods. The oppressive nature of the serf system lay not in
the diet or the lack of material possessions of the peasants, but
rather in the nature of the social relations that defined serfdom.
Serfdom was never defined in written law, though by custom the
master had nearly complete power over the serf. He could demand
any sort of labor services or payments, forbid marriages, reorder the
land allotments of the village community, or move whole villages to
different parts of the country. Short of torturing or killing the serf,
110 A Concise History of Russia

he could do anything. In practice radical mistreatment was not in

the master’s interest, but not all masters understood that, and in any
case the threat of arbitrary exactions or commands hung over the
serf for the whole of his life. The only real limit to the landowner’s
power was the threat of revolt or personal revenge, and this was a
very real possibility given the lack of effective state power in rural
areas. Yet that option meant that the peasant burned his bridges
and had to flee, which was not desirable for most peasants. It was
better to put up with the master and hope for the best.
Fortunately not all Russian peasants were serfs. About thirty per-
cent of the peasantry had no master and paid only taxes and an
additional “rent” to the state. These were the peasants of the north,
the Urals, and Siberia, as well as many on the southern frontier. All
Cossacks, who increasingly farmed the land, were also free. These
areas were not unimportant, and indeed from the sixteenth to the
end of the eighteenth century the north was a land of great prosper-
ity, founded on the fur trade with Siberia and the salt springs that
supplied most of Russia’s needs. The Stroganov family had made its
fortune as early as the sixteenth century on salt, so much so that the
tsar granted them a separate legal status of their own – not noble
but higher than all other merchants. Their houses in the north had
been a major center of not only trade, but also of book production
and icon painting. At the beginning of the eighteenth century the
collection of salt from surface deposits around the mouth of the
Volga took the profits out of the salt trade, but the Stroganovs
turned to iron manufacturing in the Urals, along with the Demi-
dovs, a peasant-merchant family from central Russia and a few
other families. From Peter’s time onward the state granted them
the right to use corvée labor by the peasantry to supply the iron
foundries with wood for fuel, and the iron mines prospered. The
Urals mines and foundries were very remote, and the iron had to
be floated down the rivers on barges during the spring floods to
reach the Volga where it went on to Moscow and St. Petersburg.
Much of it was even exported to England and elsewhere in West-
ern Europe. Though a technically rather primitive industry, it made
enormous fortunes for the owners, and both the Stroganovs and
Demidovs entered the nobility. The profitability of the iron works
rested on the unpaid labor of the state peasants “assigned” to them,
 Two Empresses 111

and their peasants fell into a sort of semi-serfdom, which in time

proved highly explosive.
The Urals and the Volga River were areas with a population that
included many nationalities other than the Russians. At the time of
Peter the Great’s death, the Volga-Urals area had about a million
people, half of them Tatars, Chuvash, Bashkirs, among others. In
the seventeenth century half or more of the Tatars had served in
the Russian army, while the remainder, along with the other Volga
peoples, continued to pay the old yasak tax. As serfdom spread, the
tax defined their status as non-serfs. From Peter’s time the yasak-
payers and the Tatar soldiers were almost all converted to state
peasants like the Russian peasants of the north. A continuous flow
of Russian peasants and nobles came into the area, avoiding the
agricultural Tatar and Chuvash territories but taking much land
from the nomadic Bashkirs, leading to predictable revolts in 1705,
1735, and 1755. Altogether Russia was still about ninety percent
Russian, the largest minority being the Ukrainians (who made up
five percent), with the Volga peoples and the Baltic provinces mak-
ing up the remaining five percent. The Baltic nobles retained their
privileges, as did the Cossack nobility of the Ukrainian Hetmanate.
There the office of hetman itself was restored in 1727, abolished
again in 1734, and then subsequently restored by Elizabeth. The
empress appointed Kirill Razumovskii, the brother of her Ukrainian
lover Aleksei, to the post. He would be the last hetman.
If Elizabeth was happy with local autonomy in the Hetmanate
and the Baltic provinces, she was not tolerant of religious variation.
She had come to power with the support of the bishops of the Ortho-
dox Church, most of them Ukrainians who had absorbed Catholic
notions of the need for religious uniformity. Empress Elizabeth initi-
ated a new wave of persecution of the Old Believers, and supported
the efforts of the Bishop of Kazan’ and others to convert the Mus-
lims. Hundreds of mosques were destroyed and various forms of
enticement and coercion were applied to the Tatars to get them to
accept Orthodox Christianity. These attempts were an abject fail-
ure, for only a small percentage abjured their faith, and those in
large numbers returned to Islam after the death of the empress.
Russia remained an overwhelmingly agrarian society, and few
exceptions aside, peasant labor and landowning were the basis of
112 A Concise History of Russia

the wealth of the nobility. The growth of the population and the
cultivation of virgin land in the south brought enormous prosper-
ity to the nobility. They demonstrated it for all to see not only
in mansions in Moscow and St. Petersburg, but also in their new
country houses. Traditionally Russian boyars had lived in towns,
maintaining only small houses on their estates for their infrequent
visits. At the end of the seventeenth century they began to build
more magnificent residences around Moscow – whole complexes
with churches in the new semi-baroque style of the time – but these
were few and near the capital. Only in the middle of the eigh-
teenth century did the newfound prosperity of the nobility lead to
the construction of country houses with Baroque and later Classical
architecture, far from the cities. These were real country houses with
elaborate gardens, natural and artificial ponds, sculpture and pavil-
ions for dining, and entertainment outside. The great aristocrats like
the Sheremetevs and Golitsyns had entire theaters built into their
house, suitable for drama or ballet. Some of them formed theatri-
cal troupes from their serfs, who were taught to read, play music,
and dance or act in performances that replicated European models.
One of the Sheremetevs even married one of his serf ballerinas. For
the average noble family such luxuries were unattainable, but all
over the country noblemen built one or two story wooden houses
with at least one room large enough for dances and entertainment.
By 1800, obligatory style included a portico with classical columns
around the house’s main door. These houses became one of the
centers of the life and culture of the nobility in its last century, to
be memorialized in countless stories and novels of the great Russian
writers from Pushkin onwards: Evgenii Onegin, Fathers and Sons,
and War and Peace.
With the noblemen serving in the army and civil service (and
legally obliged to do so from 1714 to 1762), much of the manage-
ment of the estates fell on the women. One of the many paradoxes
of Russian society was that noblewomen had much stronger legal
rights to property and much more control over it than their coun-
terparts in almost all Western societies of the time. Their control of
their dowrer property after marriage was virtually complete in law
(if not always in fact), and widows usually retained control of their
husbands’ estates. The absence of primogeniture in Russia meant
 Two Empresses 113

that among the nobility a widow was often the ruler of the family
when her sons were long-time adults with important careers. These
were the ancestors of the strong women found in the classic novels
that were set in the country estates a century later.

Empress Elizabeth, like her predecessor Anna, had to provide for

a succession to her throne, as she had no children of her own.
She chose her nephew, Karl Peter Ulrich, the Duke of Holstein-
Gottorp and the son of her older sister Anna Petrovna, who had
married the then Duke in 1725. Elizabeth’s idea was to keep the
succession in her family, not in the family of Empress Anna. The
Holstein connection also had diplomatic advantages in relation to
Sweden and the German states, especially Prussia. Elizabeth brought
the boy to Russia in 1742 with a large suite of Holsteiners and
he converted to Orthodoxy with the name Peter in honor of his
grandfather, Peter the Great. The young Peter was not a particularly
promising boy, and Elizabeth decided that he needed a wife. She
chose Sophie, the daughter of the Duke of Anhalt-Zerbst – Anhalt-
Zerbst being a small German principality in the Prussian orbit.
Sophie’s mother was also from the Holstein family, so that Sophie
and Peter were cousins and were both related to the then King of
Sweden. The family also had the support of Frederick the Great
of Prussia, victorious in war with Austria (1740–1748), and whom
Elizabeth opposed but wished to placate. In 1744 Sophie came to
Russia with her mother and there was instructed in Orthodoxy,
eventually taking the name Catherine at conversion. Thus at the
age of fifteen the future Catherine the Great took up her position at
the Russian court as the wife of the heir to the throne. The young girl
was lonely, and her mother’s intrigues only increased their isolation.
The one bright spot for the princess was that she got along with the
Empress well on a personal level.
At first the marriage was uneventful, a tepid friendship rather
than a real marriage, and no heir appeared. As the years passed both
Peter and Catherine found other interests, and as Catherine matured
she found her husband’s childish behavior and coarseness increas-
ingly irritating. She also began to have political worries, for Peter
stuck close to his Holstein entourage and displayed little interest in
the country he was to rule. Catherine was already acute enough to
114 A Concise History of Russia

realize that this was a dangerous characteristic in a future tsar.

Finally Catherine had her first love affair with the young aristocrat
Sergei Saltykov, and in 1754 she gave birth to a son whom Empress
Elizabeth had baptized Paul. Russia now had an heir, whom Cather-
ine in her later memoirs would make clear was the son of Sergei
Saltykov, not her husband Peter. Paul’s presumed parentage was a
well-kept secret, even in the gossipy world of the court.
As she recovered from childbirth, Catherine began to read. She
had always been more of a reader than was typical in court circles.
Her choices had ranged from romances to serious works like Henri
Bayle’s Dictionary, a classic of early Enlightenment thought. Now in
her momentary isolation she turned to Voltaire, Tacitus, and most
important for her later conception of government, Charles-Louis de
Montesquieu’s Spirit of the Laws, which was published in 1748.
Not all of her reading was so heavy, for she appreciated Voltaire’s
wit as much as his ideas, but most of it seems to have been books
she thought valuable for the wife of a future emperor of Russia. For
whatever she thought of her husband, he seemed certain to inherit
the throne.
Peter had his own mistress by now, and Saltykov was sent abroad.
Catherine soon took up with a young Polish nobleman, Stanislaw
Poniatowski, who came to Russia with the English ambassador,
but politics soon removed him as well. The politics of Elizabeth’s
court did not just affect Catherine’s private life, but her political
status as well. Russia had entered the Seven Years War in 1756
under the foreign policy leadership of Bestuzhev-Riumin, who had
maintained an alliance with England and Austria against France
and Prussia. Unfortunately for Bestuzhev-Riumin, as well as many
of his colleagues throughout Europe, the Austrian chancellor count
Wenzel Anton Kaunitz engineered a major reversal of alliances in
1756. Austria allied with France in order to get revenge on Prussia.
England allied with Prussia, for in London the main enemy and
rival was always France – in India and the New World, as well as
in Europe. Russia had to choose, and Bestuzhev-Riumin persuaded
Elizabeth to remain with Austria and join it in fighting Prussia
when war broke out in 1756. At the same time Russia did not
declare war on England, nor did England on Russia. This tangle led
to Bestuzhev-Riumin’s fall in 1758, and the rise of the Vorontsov
 Two Empresses 115

family (whose sympathies were with France, not England) to power

at court. Hence they accused Bestuzhev-Riumin of lack of zeal in
the war and convinced the empress to oust him. As the Seven Years’
War progressed and the Russian army kept Frederick the Great
on the defensive, Peter’s pro-Prussian sympathies became more and
more of an irritant to Elizabeth and made him unpopular in the
army and much of the court. As his wife, Catherine incurred the
empress’s suspicions. Personal conflicts added fuel to the flames,
though Catherine was able to appeal personally to the empress
through several crises.
In this delicate and potentially dangerous situation Catherine
encountered Grigorii Orlov in the summer of 1760. Orlov was one
of five brothers, all of them officers in the guards and very popular
in that milieu. This was a powerful romantic attachment, but also
politically quite important, for it was the guards who had already
decided three times who would rule Russia. She also found her first
real woman friend, Princess Elizabeth Dashkova. Dashkova was
much younger than Catherine, but was a woman of intelligence and
fortitude, and moreover was the sister of Peter’s mistress, one of the
Vorontsovs. In spite of this family tie, Dashkova had developed an
intense personal dislike of Peter and shared the general discontent
with his political orientation. The tutor to Catherine’s son Paul,
count Nikita Panin, a shrewd and experienced diplomat, also dis-
trusted Catherine’s husband. Though Peter was still the heir, he was
acquiring many enemies.
Then, just at the moment when Prussia seemed about to collapse,
Empress Elizabeth died. In January 1762, the Duke of Holstein-
Gottorp ascended the Russian throne as Peter III. His first act was
to make peace with Prussia, negating all of Russia’s efforts and
sacrifices over the previous five years. To add insult to injury, he
persuaded Prussia to help him to attack Denmark, a traditional
Russian ally, to recover territory he believed to rightly belong to
Holstein. He even ordered Prussian style uniforms for the guards,
and drilled them endlessly after the Prussian fashion. No moves
could be more precisely calculated to insult the Russian army and
the court elite. It did not matter that peace allowed him to take up
some of the old proposals of the Shuvalov group and to abolish
the requirement that noblemen serve in the army or civil service
116 A Concise History of Russia

(which once again made service voluntary). Peter had hopelessly

ruined his relations with his most important constituency in
St. Petersburg.
Catherine and the Orlovs began to plan a way to remove him and
proclaim Catherine empress in her own right. Peter had suspicions
that he had enemies, and one of the conspirators was arrested.
Grigorii Orlov’s brother Aleksei decided that the time had come and
on June 28, 1762, he came at dawn to Peterhof and told Catherine
they had to strike. She had no hesitation and with Dashkova rode
into St. Petersburg. Orlov took them to the barracks of the Izmailov
guards, and the soldiers fell on their knees, swearing loyalty to
Empress Catherine II. Catherine and her party went to the two
other guards regiments, who joined her, ending at the Winter Palace
by ten o’clock in the morning. A manifesto was readied, officially
proclaiming her the sovereign and ordering the army and people to
swear the oath of allegiance.
Peter III still remained with his Holstein hussars and German
advisers at Oranienbaum, the suburban palace on the Gulf of Fin-
land west of Peterhof that Menshikov had built decades before.
Catherine donned the uniform of the oldest guards regiment, the
Preobrazhenskii guards, and riding like a man on a white horse,
moved out of the city toward Oranienbaum with the troops to
capture her husband. Peter completely collapsed in fear, and sur-
rendered after feeble attempts at escape. Catherine had him sent to
one of his nearby estates to await incarceration under the watch of
Aleksei Orlov and there on July 6, he perished. The public announce-
ment was that he died of colic, and there was a sumptuous public
funeral, but Catherine privately knew that Aleksei Orlov had taken
matters into his own hands. The murder may have been unplanned,
for everyone at the scene, including Peter, was drunk – but what-
ever the case, the murder was done. Aleksei Orlov secretly wrote
to Catherine begging her forgiveness, and she kept the letter locked
in her desk to the end of her life. With Peter out of the way, the
once obscure German princess was now – at the age of thirty-three –
Catherine II, the empress of Russia.
 7
Catherine the Great

Catherine’s first task on ascending the throne was to secure her

power and deal with the unfinished business of her husband’s reign.
She quickly confirmed his decree abolishing compulsory service
for the nobility, but she delayed the decree confiscating monastery
lands. She had proclaimed herself the defender of Russian interests
and of Orthodoxy, and she knew that the church was not happy
with the move. Furthermore count Panin had plans to reorganize
the central government around a state council that would have some
sort of power alongside the monarch. The new empress, after a delay
of more than a year, and after deposing the obstreperous and very
rich bishop of Rostov, decreed the secularization of church lands
in 1764. Nearly a fifth of the Russian peasantry ceased to be serfs.
Regarding Panin’s plans she was more cautious, merely ignoring
them and keeping him to head the College of Foreign Affairs and
supervise the education of her son and heir Paul.
Foreign policy demanded Catherine’s attention for much of the
first decade of her reign, even though she had been preoccupied with
notions of reform of state and society from the time of her reading
of Montesquieu and others in the 1750s. Unfortunately, Catherine
could not control events and in the autumn of 1763 the king of
Poland died. His death created a serious problem and Catherine
had to act. From the last years of the Northern War, Poland, the
onetime great power of Eastern Europe, had succumbed to a declin-
ing economy and population and an anarchic constitution. It had
a weak elected king, all-powerful magnates, and a diet of nobles
117
118 A Concise History of Russia

whose main aim was the conservation of traditional law and priv-
ileges above all else. Its neighbors, Prussia, Austria, and especially
Russia liked this situation, and however absolute at home, their
rulers were intent on preserving the “Golden Freedom” of the Pol-
ish nobility. A weak Poland with a tiny army suited them all and
their ambassadors directed the Polish state.
The death of the king in 1763 came at a time of slowly return-
ing prosperity and calls for modest constitutional reform. Catherine
decided to support some of these calls, and with the aid of Polish
allies, intimidation of their opponents, and simple bribery, placed
her former lover, Stanislaw Poniatowski, on the throne of Poland.
Poniatowski and his allies were able to enact some of their very
modest proposals, but Catherine wanted a practical guarantee of
continued Russian influence, and she found it in the issue of politi-
cal rights of dissidents (non-Catholics) in Poland. Poland possessed
a sizable Protestant minority (who mostly spoke German) in the
northwest and a more numerous Orthodox minority in the east and
southeast. The Protestants included a number of noble families as
well as townsmen, but were excluded from political representation
and most offices. The Orthodox were mostly Ukrainian peasants,
and had no spokesman but the one Orthodox bishop, a Ukrainian
from the Russian side of the border. Both groups, but especially the
Orthodox peasants, were subject to continuous harassment from
Catholic clergy and nobles. Catherine, through her ambassador,
ordered Poniatowski and his allies to enact legal toleration of the
religious dissidents. The ultimate result in 1768 was a revolt of
Catholic nobles against the Russians and the king, and this involved
the Russian army in the internal dissensions of Poland. Catherine
knew that her intervention in Poland could have dangerous conse-
quences, but she had formed a firm alliance with Prussia and hoped
for the best. Unfortunately the Ottomans, prompted by France and
understandably disturbed by the specter of even greater Russian
influence in Poland, declared war on Russia at the end of the year.
Russia was again at war with a major power possessing a huge – if
sometimes unwieldy – army; this was a war that would have to be
fought across vast and largely empty steppes very far from Russia’s
home bases.
 Catherine the Great 119

The war with Turkey also put an end to one of Catherine’s pet
projects, the Legislative Commission. For decades the government
had been aware of the confused state of Russian law, based as
it was on the 1649 law code, Peter’s legislation, and hundreds of
decrees on particular issues that often contradicted more general
statutes. Catherine saw the opportunity to carry out a thorough
review and revision and to establish some general principles. To
this end in January 1765, she began to compile an Instruction, a
guideline for reform. The result was a volume of several hundred
pages, compiled (as she freely admitted) of passages translated from
her beloved Montesquieu; the Italian law reformer Cesare Beccaria;
and German writers on finance and economics, such as the now
forgotten Baron J. F. von Bielfeld. In the text she began with the
principle that Russia was a European state, and it was a monar-
chy, not a despotism. That is, its government was based on law,
not the arbitrary will of the monarch. At the same time, following
Montesquieu, she argued that a state the size of Russia required an
absolute monarch who would have the necessary vigor and power
to rule effectively. Without that, lawlessness and chaos would ensue.
The Instruction was not a series of specific recommendations about
particular issues but a description of general principles for laws
regulating social status, law courts, and the encouragement of pop-
ulation growth, agriculture, commerce, and industry. It concluded
with a series of principles for what was then called “police” in
Europe. These principles were ordinances not concerned so much
with crime as they were with cleanliness, communication, fire pre-
vention, and general good order in town and country. The text was
remarkable enough, but even more remarkable was the use to which
she put it.
At the end of 1766 she issued a manifesto that announced that
various local communities were to choose representatives to come to
Moscow to discuss the reform of the law, and a few months later she
published her Instruction and ordered it distributed throughout the
country. Thus an extensive compilation of Enlightenment political
thought was to be distributed openly to the population at large,
and this was to be the basis for the deliberations of the Legislative
Commission in Moscow.
120 A Concise History of Russia

The Commission opened on July 30, 1767, with 428 of the 564
delegates already present. The most important group comprised
the 142 deputies from the nobility and the 209 deputies from the
cities (many of them also noblemen). There were also 29 delegates
from the free peasants and 44 Cossack deputies. From the various
Volga peoples, Tatars and others came 54 deputies – 22 deputies
represented the Ukrainian Cossack nobility of the Hetmanate, and
the Baltic provinces had their deputies among the nobles. Even the
free Finnish peasants of the Vyborg area had their representatives.
Some nobles tried to challenge their presence, but Catherine upheld
them on the basis of the Swedish law of this conquered territory. The
only group that was not represented consisted of the serf peasants of
Russia and the Baltic provinces, who together made up more than
fifty percent of the population of the state.
The process of choosing representatives was hardly a modern
ideal election, for in many remote areas the nobles simply failed
to show up or did so in very small numbers. In the towns it was
hard to achieve consensus, and the free peasants also seem to have
seen the process as a chance to petition the monarch rather than
to suggest law. Nevertheless, they all did show up in Moscow and
with some prompting from the empress, got down to work assem-
bling and examining existing legislation and compiling proposals
that would serve as the basis of general statutes for regularizing
the status of the various groups in society in judicial institutions.
The delegates were not a parliament and were not there to pass
laws – they had assembled to make proposals to Catherine that
she could choose to follow or not. They were also supposed to fol-
low the guidelines of her instruction, and they generally did, but not
without considerable discussion. Opinions were exchanged remark-
ably freely, and some of the more conservative nobles rejected the
implications of the Instruction that were favorable to peasants and
townspeople. As time passed, the various subcommissions delib-
erated slowly and Catherine decided to move them to St. Peters-
burg. By the summer of 1768, the nobles were ready with a pro-
posal, itself the object of considerable wrangling, especially over
issues like the conditions for promotion of commoners to noble
rank and crimes against nobles by serfs. Catherine was getting a
very rapid lesson in the values and ideas of the various classes of
 Catherine the Great 121

Russian society, and it was fairly clear that reform of state and
society would meet considerable obstacles among a large part of
the nobility. The Turkish declaration of war intervened before she
had to make difficult decisions. Most of the noble deputies were
also army officers, and now full mobilization was necessary to deal
with both Turkey and the Polish situation. The Commission was
dissolved. Its work, however, was not in vain, as later events would
prove.
The war with Turkey was the first serious test of Catherine’s gov-
ernment, for the Ottoman Empire was still a formidable opponent
and the Russians would have to cross vast expanses of southern
steppe even to engage the enemy. In the end, the Russian army
proved itself capable of the task, slowly but systematically advanc-
ing into Crimea and the Balkan Peninsula. The Russian navy sailed
from St. Petersburg around Europe under the command of Alek-
sei Orlov and the British Admiral John Elphinstone, destroying the
Turkish fleet in the harbor of Chesme in 1770. In spite of the dis-
traction of the Polish conflict, Catherine’s forces made their way
into Bulgaria and forced the Ottomans to make peace on her terms
at the small village of Kuchuk Kainardzha in 1774.
The treaty came just two years after a seemingly permanent set-
tlement of the Polish situation. With Russia fighting two wars at
once, Frederick the Great of Prussia saw his chance and proposed
to Catherine that they both solve the problem by taking Polish ter-
ritory. Austria would have to be conciliated as well, and the result
would be a smaller Poland that would be less threatening, should
reform succeed. Catherine agreed to this proposal after some hes-
itation, for she still hoped to maintain influence over the whole
of Poland, but eventually she gave in. The result was the partition
treaty of 1772, which gave large and valuable districts to Austria
and Prussia. Catherine took a large but thinly populated slice of
eastern Belorussia that provided better Russian river communica-
tions with Riga. A byproduct of the new border was the inclusion
of Jews in the Russian state for the first time. For Catherine the
outcome was a qualified success, as Poniatowski remained king
and made modest reforms that strengthened the state and Pol-
ish prosperity while ultimately remaining subservient to Russian
interests.
122 A Concise History of Russia

Two years later Catherine was ecstatic with joy to learn of the
peace with the Ottomans, for it came at a difficult moment. The
victory itself was reason enough to celebrate, for it brought great
prestige and power to Russia and to its empress, but there was more.
Russia received huge territories in the south all the way to the Black
Sea coast and Crimea ceased to be a Turkish dependency, instead
becoming nominally independent under Russian control. Russia’s
ministers and Catherine herself had been aware for decades of the
economic potential of the area both as a site for new commercial
ports and for agricultural settlement. The treaty not only gave the
area to Russia, but also granted the right to commerce in the Black
Sea and to build a navy there. Russia’s position on the southern
border had changed radically: there were no more Tatar slave raids
and a vast territory was ready for development. The legislation for
the new lands, to be called Novorossia, or “New Russia,” was care-
fully worked out to encourage settlement but discourage the spread
of serf agriculture. The new lands were to be a settler colony with
flourishing cities and ports, not just an extension of the backward
agriculture of the serf estates of Central Russia. Catherine had not
read her Enlightenment writers for nothing.
Her right arm in transforming the new lands was to be her new
lover, general Grigorii Potemkin, whose instant rise to favor took
place in the first months of 1774. Potemkin was the only one of
Catherine’s many lovers who was her mental and political equal. If
less intellectual, he was well enough educated to understand her and
had the political skills to work with her. It was a great partnership
and lasted long after the passion had cooled, until Potemkin’s death
in October 1791.
For the time being both the empress and her favorite faced daunt-
ing challenges. Ever since Catherine’s coup of 1762, there had been
symptoms of discontent. The first had been the Mirovich affair. The
former baby Tsar Ivan VI of 1740–1741 had grown up, and Eliza-
beth had confined him in the fortress of Schlüsselburg in the hope
that he might some day enter a monastery, and if not, he would be
politically harmless. Peter III had confirmed her decisions, including
the secret order to kill him if an attempt to free him was made, and
Catherine confirmed these orders as well, though the codicil with
 Catherine the Great 123

the order to kill bore only Panin’s signature. In July 1764, a restless
and probably somewhat unstable Ukrainian guards officer named
Vasilii Mirovich made a mad attempt to free Ivan and proclaim
him emperor, and the soldiers guarding the ex-tsar carried out their
standing orders. Mirovich’s execution put an end to the affair, but
it was not a good sign. Over the years there were a series of inci-
dents, all involving small numbers of officers and nobles who spoke
of replacing Catherine, but they were quickly exiled and their talk
came to nothing. The background to these incidents, however, was
the worrisome issue of the heir to the throne, Tsarevich Paul. Paul
was nineteen in 1773, and thus in principle old enough to reign, but
his mother had no intention of giving up power. Part of her reason
was her increasing disappointment with her son and his associa-
tion with the Panin party at court, whose cautious foreign policy
had not provided the expected dividends. Catherine proclaimed her
son an adult and began marriage negotiations, but kept the throne.
This step terminated Panin’s role as the heir’s tutor, and the count
gradually withdrew from the court in disfavor.
The new star, Potemkin, came at just the right time, for Russia
was now in the grips of the greatest popular upheaval it would expe-
rience before the twentieth century. The source of the uprising lay
in the Cossack frontier of the southeast, as it had so often before.
This time it did not begin on the Don but on the Iaik, the smaller
river flowing from the Ural Mountains into the Caspian Sea to east
of the Volga. In these decades the Russian government was trying
to establish greater control over the Cossacks, restricting their priv-
ileges and particularly their custom of electing their officers. Recent
measures to this end seemed successful, until Emelian Pugachev
appeared in the settlements near the provincial capital of Orenburg
early in 1773. He had served in the wars, deserted, and had various
adventures when he arrived and told the people that he was actu-
ally Catherine’s husband Peter III. He had come to restore justice to
the Cossacks and protect the Old Belief. The Cossacks believed, or
professed to believe him and he quickly assembled a band of several
thousand men, reinforced by the neighboring Bashkirs and Tatars
as well as the peasants attached to the Urals iron works. They laid
siege to Orenburg and other larger forts without success, but they
124 A Concise History of Russia

Figure 6. Bashkirs, from Atkinson, Picturesque View.

overran the lesser stations and massacred all who refused to join
them. A huge area, most of the Urals and the Volga basin, was
now in rebel hands. The reaction was swift. An army came from
Moscow to suppress the revolt, and by the end of the year it was
largely successful, though Pugachev himself had eluded the army.
Then the next year he made a comeback and even managed to seize
the important town of Kazan’ for a few days. This was the high point
of the rebellion, for Russian regular troops reached the town after a
desperate forced march and crushed the rebel army. Pugachev now
turned south toward the Don, and to reach it he passed through
areas of serf agriculture. Here the region exploded; the serfs with
rebel help exterminated the local nobility, including women and
children. Unfortunately for Pugachev, the Don Cossacks did not
move, and he recrossed the Volga, escaping to his base among the
Bashkirs. There the troops finally caught up with the rebels and
crushed them. Some of the Bashkirs remained loyal to Pugachev to
the end, but the Cossacks eventually betrayed him. The revolt was
 Catherine the Great 125

over, and in 1775 Pugachev was executed in Moscow. Peace had

finally come, at home and abroad.

Catherine’s reading not only gave her a series of ideas about justice
and administration but also about economic development and social
status. The Enlightenment writers believed that society required
a civilized population to flourish, and that came from education
and culture. The new empress came to the throne at a propitious
time, for the efforts of the Cadet Corps, the Academy, and Moscow
University were beginning to show results. The generation that came
to maturity with Catherine was the first to have absorbed European
culture in full, and the first to include many men and even women
who had also been abroad long enough to begin to understand
European society.
Catherine was determined to speed this process along. Though
by birth and culture she was German, for most of her reign she
was at the center of Russian culture, unlike any monarch after her
and more so than even Peter himself. She was not merely a reader,
but an active participant in Europe’s cultural life. She corresponded
with Voltaire from 1763 until his death in 1778. She also had cor-
respondents among the French Encyclopedists, Denis Diderot, and
Jean d’Alembert, as well as the German Baron Friedrich Melchior
Grimm. Grimm was a sort of literary journalist reporting from
Paris, and after a visit to St. Petersburg in 1773–74 he was Cather-
ine’s chief correspondent and epistolary confidant until her death.
Catherine did not merely correspond with the great men of the
Enlightenment. When she heard of Diderot’s financial problems she
bought his library, granted him the use of it for life and paid him a
salary as her librarian.
Catherine’s cultural projects were numerous. Behind the scenes
she was the instigator of the Free Economic Society, a group of
noblemen moved by reading Enlightenment literature to form a soci-
ety for the discussion of economic (especially agricultural) topics.
This was an association independent of state institutions although
it enjoyed the favor of the empress. The society sponsored an essay
contest on the issue of peasant land ownership that inevitably raised
the issue of serfdom, and it awarded a prize to a Frenchman’s essay
that unambiguously stated that prosperity could only flow from
126 A Concise History of Russia

the full property of the peasant in his land. By implication serfdom

could not create prosperity. The essay was published in Russian
and French for all to read. She continued to support the university,
the academies, and the schools with money and encouragement. The
first Russian girls’ school, the Smol’nyi Institute in St. Petersburg for
young noblewomen was planned by Empress Elizabeth and came
into being in 1764, and the empress reorganized and expanded the
Cadet Corps. These were elite schools, but with the 1775 provin-
cial reform came a system of schools in the provinces, which was
expanded again in 1786 by a decree establishing secondary schools
in all provincial capitals and a network of primary schools. Progress
was slow, but by 1800 there were already over 300 schools, twice
the number in existence in 1786. Later Russian secondary schools
had their origin in these laws.
Even the church had its role in the process of enlightenment. At
Catherine’s accession most of the bishops were still Ukrainians with
a strong, almost Catholic, sense of the importance of the clergy.
Empress Elizabeth had begun the process of replacing them with
Russians, and under Catherine a whole new generation came into
power in the church. Catherine also put into law the secularization
of monastic lands formulated under Elizabeth in opposition to the
views of the older Ukrainian bishops. The new generation, like
Platon Levshin, Metropolitan of Moscow from 1775 to 1812, had
been educated on Lutheran religious scholarship and with a strong
orientation toward preaching. Their goal was to bring the truths of
Orthodox Christianity to the people rather than cultivating an ideal
asceticism. This emphasis coincided with Catherine’s, for she saw
religion as the foundation of good citizenship, which was another
Enlightenment precept.
Catherine’s court kept up the theaters founded by her predeces-
sors, and those theaters remained at the center of the performing
arts in Russia. She eased Araya into retirement and replaced him
with a series of distinguished musicians starting with the Venetian
Baldassare Galuppi. Sumarokov continued to direct the stage and
provide plays, and Catherine and the court usually attended one of
the theaters several times a week. In 1768 she founded a society for
the translation of foreign books, which sponsored a whole series
 Catherine the Great 127

Figure 7. Catherine the Great with the Goddess Athena. Engraving by

Francis Bartolozzi after Michele Benedetti. From a painting by Alexander
Roslin.
128 A Concise History of Russia

of important translations, learned works, and works of entertain-

ment for the Russian public. She also published her own magazine,
Vsiakaia vsiachina (All Sorts of Things), in 1769. The idea was to
imitate Addison and Steele’s Spectator, something Sumarokov had
tried a few years earlier with mixed success. The journal, like its
prototype, was to combine entertainment with edification without
heavy-handed moralizing – a type of publication wildly popular in
Catherine’s native Germany and other parts of Europe. Catherine
kept her role secret, though it was widely known in St. Petersburg.
The most lively response to her journal came from Nikolai
Novikov (1744–1818), who launched a series of journals of his
own, establishing the first important private publishing enterprise
in Russia. Better written and bolder than the empress’s journal,
Novikov’s publications acquired considerable popularity but not
enough to provide much of an income, and he soon turned to
publishing books for Moscow University, which assured him an
indirect subsidy from the state. In Moscow, Novikov also increas-
ingly joined in with the Freemasons, a group with a wide net-
work and considerable impact on Russian culture at the time. The
Masons were not just a social club, but a movement of ideas with
defined, if nebulous, aims. Most of them had been reading the Euro-
pean mystical literature that was increasingly popular in the later
eighteenth century, and they saw themselves as committed to self-
improvement, contemplation of God and his works, and most of all,
active philanthropy and the encouragement of progress in the world.
Unfortunately for them, the Masons aroused all sorts of suspicions.
Conservative churchmen saw them as the propagators of an alter-
native and pernicious religion, while many enlightened nobles took
them for obscurantists. Catherine herself saw them in this way and
wrote several short comedies satirizing them. The Masons were also
an international society with ties to foreign dynasties in Prussia and
Sweden that were unfriendly to Russia, and most serious of all, the
Masons had recruited the heir, Tsarevich Paul, as a patron. This
last element made them deeply suspect in the mind of Catherine, for
Paul was unhappy with his marginal role in court and government
and increasingly hostile to his mother as the years passed.
In spite of setbacks, Catherine did not give up sponsoring Russian
literature, and in 1782–1783 she appointed her old friend Princess
 Catherine the Great 129

Dashkova to head both the Academy of Sciences and the new

Academy of Letters. Dashkova, who had met Benjamin Franklin
in Paris, was the first woman member of the American Philosoph-
ical Society in Philadelphia. From these positions Dashkova was
able to publish another series of literary journals and other pub-
lications and organize a committee to produce the first Russian
dictionary. A decree of 1783 explicitly authorized private printing
and publication, subject to censorship of the chiefs of police in the
capitals.
The main problem for private publishers was not censorship or
the attitude of the state but the lack of a broad audience. Only the
gentry and a small body of teachers and scholars had the education
to be interested in books and journals, and many of the gentry
either lived on remote estates or in provincial towns and preferred
French literature to Russian. The writers were less affected by this
situation than the publishers, for most of the important writers were
noblemen employed in state service of one sort or another, and were
not therefore dependent on the sales of their work for their income.
Many nobles even looked down on Novikov for trying to live from
the profits of literature. State service, however, involved writers in
the court factions and in a complex relationship to the empress
herself.
Thus the two most important writers of the time, the playwright
Denis Fonvizin (1744–1792) and the poet Gavriil Derzhavin (1743–
1816) were both enmeshed in a network of personal and political
loyalties at the court. Fonvizin spent his early career as a client of
count Panin, which meant that toward the end of his life he was part
of the patronage network centered on Paul, the heir to the throne.
This affiliation made him unpopular with Catherine, but it was she
who ordered the first performance of his best play, The Adolescent,
at the court theater in 1782. Nevertheless the final resignation of
Panin from all offices in 1781 contributed to Fonvizin’s failure to
get authorization for a journal in later years.
Fonvizin and Novikov were both graduates of Moscow Univer-
sity, while the poet Derzhavin came from a provincial gentry family
and had only finished the Gymnasium in Kazan’. Unlike so many of
his contemporaries, he never properly learned French, his only for-
eign language being the German he learned in Kazan’. His early
130 A Concise History of Russia

career was in the army, and he played a minor and somewhat inglo-
rious role in fighting Pugachev’s rebels. At that time he came to the
attention of Potemkin, and remained the favorite’s client as he pur-
sued a career in civil administration, both in St. Petersburg and the
provinces, living long enough to briefly occupy the post of minister
of justice under Alexander I. Derzhavin’s poetry made him famous
in the 1780s, as he produced odes in honor of Catherine and her vic-
tories as well as satires of courtiers and their foibles, following the
model of Horace and European classicism. Like Fonvizin, he had a
command of language that allowed his work to survive for Russian
readers in spite of the eclipse of the eighteenth century genres that
he employed.
In Russian literature, drama, poetry, and prose, a public inde-
pendent of the court was just barely coming into existence at the
end of Catherine’s reign. Other art forms remained closely tied to
the patronage of court and nobility. The court musical theater and
orchestra was largely the preserve of imported musicians, and the
centrality of the court in cultural life meant that the nobility heard
an extensive range of European music. Native traditions remained
in church music, a particular specialty of Ukrainians associated
with the choirs in the imperial chapels. The most successful of these
Ukrainians was Dmitrii Bortnyanskii (1751–1825), Russia’s first
composer, who was equally comfortable with European concerti
and Russian choral singing. None of the musicians were noblemen,
a fact that hampered their acceptance as serious artists. A similar
situation obtained in the visual arts, where the Academy of Art
dominated the scene. Catherine reorganized the Academy to give
it more autonomy and better financing while retaining its mainly
French instructors, and she secured for the artists a more privileged
social status to fit their profession. The Russian students were all of
non-noble and sometimes even serf origin, who were intended to go
on to provide art for the palaces of the empress and the nobility as
well as the church. The Academy also provided stipends for the stu-
dents to spend time in Paris and Rome, enormously broadening the
training and experience of its students. In retrospect its worst defect,
other than its very “official” character, was its precise copying of
European models that accorded ill with Russian possibilities and
traditions. As in the European art academies, the most prestigious
 Catherine the Great 131

genre was historical painting in the style of classicism. Attempts

to depict Russian history in this style found praise at the time but
produced pictures that to later taste were wooden at best and often
comic. Ancient Russians appeared in fantastic armor more remi-
niscent of the Romans than medieval Russia. More attractive to
later taste were the portrait painters, who ironically had little or no
ties to the Academy. The first to gain a name was Ivan Argunov
(1727–1802), a serf of the extremely wealthy Sheremetev family.
His successors included Fyodor Rokotov, a serf of the Repnins, and
two Ukrainians, Dmitrii Levitskii (Argunov’s pupil), and Vladimir
Borovikovskii, the only nobleman among them. Their charming
portraits of noble men and women as well as of Catherine herself
filled Russian palaces and country houses and were comparable in
quality to many of the French and English portraits of the time, if
less inventive than the latter.
Catherine’s time marked the beginning of Russian classicist archi-
tecture, which transformed St. Petersburg into the city familiar
today. She was firmly against the Baroque exuberance of her prede-
cessor Elizabeth’s chief architect Rastrelli. Catherine and her con-
temporaries built with unmistakable Roman allusions, a proper
architecture for a great imperial capital and its elites. Strict sym-
metry, Roman columns and triumphal arches were the order of
the day. The crowning achievement of the age was the monument
to Peter the Great, the “Bronze Horseman” in Pushkin’s immortal
phrase. The work of the French sculptor Etienne Maurice Falconet
and his wife, it displayed Peter in the garb of a Roman emperor
on horseback standing on a giant rock with the simple inscription
“Catherine the Second to Peter the First” in Latin and Russian.
Unveiled in 1782 to great ceremony, the statue remains Catherine’s
most powerful contribution to the city of St. Petersburg.

The years after Pugachev were not just filled with artistic projects
and court entertainments, for these were the years of extensive
reform of Russian government and society. Finally the Legisla-
tive Commission bore fruit, albeit indirectly: Catherine knew how
the nobility thought about the issues and what might prove use-
ful while not antagonizing them. The first task was to reorder
the administration of the provinces and the towns, which involved
132 A Concise History of Russia

creating a new court system. Catherine’s 1775 decrees broke up

the large administrative units into some forty new provinces, which
in turn divided into five or six smaller units. At the level of these
smaller units government essentially stopped, leaving the country-
side to the nobility and the peasant communities. The most powerful
local figure was the provincial governor appointed by the empress.
These were invariably noblemen, sometimes including great aristo-
crats but more often military men. In the same decree Catherine
established courts for the nobility that were to combine appointed
judges with local noblemen elected to assist them. These were courts
for nobility only. In areas where free peasants predominated there
were also to be courts with peasants elected alongside officials to
provide justice. As ever, it was the village level that was weakest
and where state power often existed only on paper. In the towns,
Catherine also established courts, for the townspeople alone, that
consisted of appointed judges and elected assessors. Thus justice was
divided among special courts for each social group and combined
state-appointed judges with elected assessors.
The new legislation implied greater responsibility on the part of
the nobility and the elite of the townspeople, yet many basic aspects
of their status and relationship to the state remained undefined. The
answers to this problem were the 1785 Charters of the Nobility
and of the Townspeople. The Charter of the Nobility confirmed
and broadened the rights already in practice from Peter’s time and
added others, including the 1762 decree on freedom from obliga-
tory state service. Nobles could not be deprived of life and property
without a trial by a court that was composed of their peers. Their
nobility was hereditary, and could not be terminated without a
conviction in court of specified crimes like murder or treason. They
were not subject to corporal punishment, and the right to own land
and serfs was guaranteed to them alone. Nobles in each province
were to come together to form a provincial Assembly of Nobility,
electing its own marshal and determining its own membership. The
marshal was to act as the leader of the local gentry, conveying its
wishes to the capital and the government’s orders to the nobility.
The marshals had little formal power, but as the chief representa-
tives of the local nobility, and often with powerful connections in
St. Petersburg, they were formidable figures. Provincial governors,
 Catherine the Great 133

in spite of their formal power, found it wise to cultivate the marshals

of the nobility. In the towns Catherine’s decrees divided the town
population by simple wealth, and put most of the administration,
like the courts, in the hands of the town elites. The population was
to elect a governing body from among the wealthier citizens to man-
age the business side of town life, leaving the courts and police as
specified in the 1775 provincial reform. Townspeople were also not
to be deprived of life and property without conviction in a court of
their peers. Lesser townsfolk were subject to corporal punishment.
There was also elaborate sumptuary legislation that specified limits
to ostentatious display by the lower orders. Though restricted to
the upper and middle classes, the Charters were the first fruit of
Enlightenment thought about the rights and duties of the citizen to
be enacted into Russian law.

As Catherine and her ministers were reordering Russian government

they did not lose sight of the situation on the southern border. The
Ottomans were reluctant to ignore Russian gains, and the “auto-
nomy” of Crimea under Russian stewardship proved an unstable
arrangement. In 1783 Catherine annexed the territory to Russia,
adding it to the vast areas of New Russia under the firm hand of
Potemkin. Catherine and Potemkin began to develop larger plans
of conquest in the south, tempting Austria to join them with the
“Greek project,” a proposal for the partition of the Balkans and
restoration of a Greek monarchy with Russian princes on the
ruins of the Ottoman Empire. Finally in 1787 Turkey declared
war. Russian troops began to advance into the Balkans, but else-
where the situation deteriorated. The Austrian Emperor Joseph
II honored his treaty with Russia and his army began to move
south too, but he was rapidly defeated by the Turks. King Gus-
tavus III of Sweden attacked Russia as well, hoping for revenge
for earlier losses and to strengthen his hand at home. Catherine
had hoped for Polish troops to support the Russian effort, but
when Stanislaw Poniatowski called the diet to discuss the issue,
it swiftly turned into a revolutionary assembly that proceeded to
throw off Russian domination and elaborate a reformed constitu-
tion. To make matters worse, Prussia cynically supported the Polish
effort with a view to its own future aggrandizement in Poland.
134 A Concise History of Russia

Catherine had no one to rely upon but Potemkin and her army and
navy.
Catherine showed the steel nerves that had brought her to the
throne thirty years before. Hearing the guns of the Swedish fleet
from her palace windows, she continued to work without giving
them any notice. Progress in the south was slow, especially at first,
but the new Black Sea fleet (with some help from the American
naval hero John Paul Jones) was victorious and the army relent-
lessly pushed the Turks into the Rumanian principalities. Gustav
III made little progress and found himself the object of a conspir-
acy of Finnish officers discontented with Swedish absolutism. His
resources exhausted in spite of modest success on the sea, Gustav
made peace in 1790. Turkey remained in the war.
To complicate Russia’s situation still further, Britain, with its own
imperial ambitions rapidly growing, began to worry about Russian
movement toward the Mediterranean and adopted a hostile stance.
Catherine needed success, and at the end of December 1790, general
Alexander Suvorov gave it to her, taking the fortress of Izmail near
the mouth of the Danube. He took the fort by frontal assault with
great casualties, but he took it. In the next spring the Russians
moved south toward Bulgaria, and by the end of the summer the
Turks capitulated. Russia’s borders now extended to the Dniestr
River, including the site of future city of Odessa. Catherine had
played her cards with great skill, and she had won. At that moment,
Potemkin died. Catherine continued to have lovers and favorites,
but none of them ever had the love and trust that Potemkin had
inspired.
The wars with Turkey and Sweden had required the complete
attention and resources of the Russian government, but they were
aware that Europe was increasingly in crisis. The French Revolu-
tion was transforming European politics daily, and closer to home
the Polish diet’s reformed constitution of May 3, 1791, meant that
Russia would soon have a hostile and more powerful neighbor.
There was little Catherine could do about France, but Poland was
a different case. She intrigued with aristocratic opponents of the
new constitution, and as soon as the Turkish war ended she and
her Polish allies moved against Poniatowski and the new govern-
ment. The small Polish army was easily swept away, and Catherine
 Catherine the Great 135

arranged with Prussia to make a new partition. This was not her pre-
ferred option, for all along she wanted a united compliant Poland,
but she realized that the new order was too popular among Polish
nobles to be reversed, and that she had to conciliate Prussia and
Austria.
Thus a much reduced Poland acquired a conservative constitu-
tion supported by Russian bayonets, but it did not last. In 1794
Tadeusz Kosciuszko led a rebellion in southern Poland that quickly
spread to Warsaw and scored a few modest successes. Catherine
was convinced that French Jacobinism was behind it, and sent in
Suvorov at the head of a Russian army. Suvorov took Warsaw with
great slaughter, and the partitioning powers agreed to put an end
to Poland’s existence. Prussia and Austria carved up the areas with
predominantly Polish populations, while Russia took the Western
Ukraine, the rest of Belorussia, and Lithuania.
Russia now had become a truly multi-national empire. The five-
and-onehalf million new subjects brought the proportion of Rus-
sians in the state from some eighty-five percent down to perhaps
seventy. Catherine did not fight the war to reunite the Eastern Slavs,
but she had in fact brought into her empire virtually the whole ter-
ritory of the medieval Kiev Rus.

If Catherine could do little to affect the progress of the French Rev-

olution, she was no less frightened by its increasing radicalism, and
the Russian nobility shared her fears. The policy of toleration and
enlightenment gradually came to an end. Especially after the procla-
mation of the republic and execution of Louis XVI, the importation
and circulation of new French books and even long-familiar Enlight-
enment writers now faced serious restrictions. In 1792 Novikov was
arrested after investigation but there was no trial and he was ordered
to be confined in prison indefinitely. The Masons were shut down
and fell under increasing suspicion as potential supporters of the
French revolutionaries. In 1796, only a few weeks before her death,
Catherine established the first Russian system of state censorship,
no longer depending on the Academy of Sciences or the local police
to do the work.
The most spectacular case of dissent and its repression, however,
had already come in 1790. In that year Alexander Radishchev,
136 A Concise History of Russia

a nobleman and minor civil servant, published a book called A

Journey from St. Petersburg to Moscow. Using the then-popular
genre of the fictitious journey, he described the villages and towns of
Russia and interspersed his own reflections on society and politics.
His portrait of serfdom was unflattering to the extreme – in his
view a system that corrupted master and serf alike was morally
indefensible and economically ruinous. His political ruminations
were vaguer, but they clearly suggested that autocracy was not
the best way to govern Russia. Catherine read the book herself and
made many marginal notes, and ultimately had Radishchev arrested.
Interrogated in the Secret Department of the Senate, Radishchev
was convicted in the St. Petersburg criminal court of sedition and
lèse majesté and was condemned to death. Catherine commuted
the punishment to exile in a remote Siberian fort, and Radishchev
went off, though with a substantial stipend from one of Catherine’s
grandees, who interceded with the empress on his behalf.
The French Revolution and Catherine’s death in 1796 brought
Russia’s eighteenth century to a close. For a century the state, or
more accurately the monarchs and their courts, had labored to
transform the country along European lines and bring European
culture to Russia. In this task they had largely succeeded. Russia had
institutions and laws copied from European models, and Western
diplomats, merchants, and travelers felt at home in St. Petersburg, if
not everywhere else in Russia. The new state structure had provided
the basis for the rise of Russia to the place of a great power, and
helped the growth of commerce and industry, education and science.
Settlement of new areas in the south contributed to an ongoing
population explosion that was rapidly making Russia the largest
country in Europe, even without newly annexed territory.
The cultural transformation was profound. By the end of the
century educated Russians, most of them still nobles, had absorbed
most of the major ideas and artistic achievements of modern Europe
and they were beginning to offer their own still modest contribu-
tions. Russian political thought had the same elements and was
based on the same writings as that farther west. If Russian noble-
men did not admire Rousseau’s democratic musings, they did absorb
the teachings of Puffendorf and Montesquieu as well as those of a
 Catherine the Great 137

host of minor writers. Monarchy in Russia was understood in much

the same way as in France or Prussia, Austria or Sweden.
Russian reality imposed limits to both state-building and cultural
progress. Russia was still too poor to support an extensive educa-
tion system and all local government suffered from chronic lack of
funds and staff. Outside of the capitals, large towns, and aristo-
cratic country estates, life remained much as it had before, a round
of rural labor punctuated by Orthodox liturgy. Areas of economic
progress existed in the Urals and the trading villages and towns of
central Russia, but it was still an overwhelmingly agrarian society.
Moreover, it was an agrarian society, half of whose peasant farm-
ers were serfs. This was an issue Catherine and her enlightened
friends could neither change nor even confront. She disliked the sys-
tem and knew it was pernicious, not least to agricultural progress,
but was aware that virtually all noblemen, on whom her throne
depended, saw it as the basis of their wealth and position in society,
as indeed it was. Russia was not alone in the serf system at the end
of the century, it persisted in Poland and Prussia, and Joseph II had
only just begun to dismantle it in Austria.
Just at the moment when Russia seemed to have achieved a stable
and European order, the French Revolution changed all the rules of
the game. It would now have to try to respond to a whole series of
new challenges, international and domestic, cultural and political.
Eventually its very survival would be at stake. It was a new and
dangerous era.
 8
Russia in the Age of Revolution

On his mother’s death Paul came to the throne, the first undisputed
and male inheritance in seventy years. His first act was to rebury
Peter III, whom he believed to be his father, in the church of St. Peter
and Paul with the other rulers of Russia from Peter onwards. His
next act was to replace most of Catherine’s ministers and officials,
and send a number of them into exile. Thus began the brief and
often bizarre reign of Tsar Paul.
Paul’s reign began just at the moment that the French revolution,
having passed through its most radical phase, began to turn out-
ward, and the new tsar had to respond to the apparent danger from
his first days on the throne. Far more conservative than his mother,
he made it his priority to strengthen the power and authority of
the state. He recentralized the government, reestablishing some of
the colleges and reviving the Council of State. He also enlarged the
Senate, and saw to it that it exercised more effective supervision of
law and administration. To this end he issued an enormous number
of new laws, orders, and regulations. In Paul’s mind, everything
needed a regulation and his job was to compose one where it did
not already exist.
Even greater than the changes in institutions were the changes in
style. Paul took every opportunity to assert his personal authority
in matters no matter how petty. From his youth he had spent much
of his time drilling the troops under his personal control, living
away from his mother in the suburban palace of Gatchina, which
he turned into a military camp on the style of the Prussian army
138
 Russia in the Age of Revolution 139

so beloved by his father. Thus his reassertion of authority began

with the army. He ordered the Russian army to switch to uniforms
on the Prussian model and adopt Prussian drill and training, to the
intense irritation of officers and soldiers alike. The French revolu-
tionary armies had already shown the old Prussian methods to be
outmoded, but Paul did not see this in his pursuit of strict hierarchy
and mindless obedience. His new orders went far beyond the mil-
itary, for he required anyone, of any age or sex, who encountered
any member of the imperial family on the street to dismount and
kneel no matter what the weather. Officers were cashiered or even
exiled for minor cases of neglect of duty, details of drill, or even
just court etiquette. He prescribed the details of dress for court and
other occasions and enforced them with pedantic thoroughness. To
many noblemen and officers, his behavior was both insulting and
bizarre, but to Paul the enforcement of regulation was part of the
restoration of discipline and morality that he regarded as crucial
after the laxities of Catherine’s rule and the threat of revolution
from France. With these ends in mind he revoked many of the pro-
visions of the Charter of the Nobility and reduced and downgraded
the elective element in provincial government. Part of this program
of counter-reform was the restoration of the old privileges of the
nobles of the Baltic provinces and the Ukraine, and an attempt to
reach some reconciliation with the Polish gentry. Thus Kosciuszko
and other Polish prisoners of war were released, and the legal sys-
tem of the formerly Polish provinces was maintained. He did not
notice the contradictions.
Perhaps the contradictions came from his obsession with revers-
ing the actions of his mother. Though terrified of the French Rev-
olution and convinced that “Jacobinism” was multiplying every-
where in Europe and Russia, he released Radishchev from exile and
Novikov from prison. At the same time Paul prohibited the wearing
of clothing in the new French style, requiring the old three-cornered
hat and knee breeches for men. Enamored of European notions of
medieval knighthood and chivalry, he distrusted the self-indulgent
and greedy gentry that, he thought, his mother’s reign had created.
Thus he decreed a limit of three days per week that serfs could be
required to perform labor services. It was typical of Paul’s measures
that it was largely useless, for in many parts of the country the new
140 A Concise History of Russia

limit was actually higher than the norm. One of the actions of his
mother that he did not reverse was the establishment of state cen-
sorship, which restricted Russian publications and the importation
of Western books. On Paul’s orders even French music fell under
suspicion.
Had Paul reigned in calmer times, he might have lasted for years
as an irritating and petty despot who aroused contempt more than
fear. The times, however, were anything but calm, even though
Russia was far from the center of the drama in Paris. Since the fall
of the Jacobin dictatorship in 1794 the Directory had directed the
energies of the French nation outward to the conquest of Belgium,
the Rhineland, and northern Italy. Just as Paul came to the throne,
Napoleon Bonaparte was winning his first victories against Austria
in northern Italy and instantly became a great hero in France. His
next project was the conquest of Egypt, which brought Russia into
the war. It was not that St. Petersburg had any particular interest in
Egypt, but for a few months the Russians thought that he was really
going not to Egypt but to Constantinople, which was an obvious
threat. Paul was also enraged by Napoleon’s capture of the island
of Malta on his way east in 1798. Malta was just as far as Egypt
from Russian interests but the rulers of the island, the Knights of
Malta, had just sent a mission to the tsar. They appealed to Paul’s
ideals of chivalry and his desire to combat the hydra of revolution,
so he became the protector of the Order of Malta. With the island
in French hands, some of the knights even offered to make Paul the
commander of the order. Contrary to papal wishes, the Orthodox
tsar now led the exiled Catholic order, but with the French army
at his door the pope was in no position to object. The Malta inci-
dent and other French actions led Paul to join Austria, Britain, and
other powers in a coalition against the French. General Suvorov
was called out of forced retirement (Paul had rightly associated him
with Potemkin and Catherine) and sent to Italy to command an
Austro-Russian army. This he did with such force and energy that
he chased the French out in a few months, and stood ready to invade
France. Instead, defeats on other fronts and Austrian insistence on
invading France from Switzerland forced Suvorov to move north
and then retreat through hostile French forces in an alpine winter to
safety in southern Germany. Enraged by these events and a botched
 Russia in the Age of Revolution 141

Russian-British attempt to invade the French-dominated Nether-

lands, Paul broke off all relations with the coalition and made over-
tures to France. With Napoleon’s coup d’etat in November 1799,
Paul felt that France had a ruler committed to order, not further
revolution, and with whom he could talk. By the end of 1800, war
with Britain seemed a real possibility. Events dictated otherwise.
Discontent with Paul had been growing almost since he came
to the throne among the court and military elite of St. Petersburg.
Paul had several sons, the eldest Alexander, born in 1777, was an
agreeable and well-educated young man. Furthermore, Paul had
replaced Peter the Great’s succession law with his own in 1797, a
law that prohibited women from taking the throne and specified
primogeniture in the male line. Thus in the event of Paul’s removal
or death, the succession was secure.
Paul himself was afraid of assassination, and he built an entire
new palace – the Castle of St. Michael – on the bank of the Fontanka
River and surrounded by newly dug canals to make it inaccessible
except by drawbridge. The “castle” was a strange combination of
classical style and elements meant to recall a medieval Western
castle, a conceit that delighted the tsar. He moved in at the end of
1800. In one sense, his fears were not in vain, for removal of the tsar
was exactly what several of the officers of the guards had in mind.
Their leader was the Baltic German Count Peter von der Pahlen,
whom Paul had earlier exiled for trivial offenses, then forgiven and
appointed military governor of St. Petersburg. Paul was too self-
centered to realize what others thought of him, and regularly took
friends for enemies and vice versa. In this case his mistake was to
be literally fatal.
Pahlen had long harbored resentment and fear of the tsar since
his earlier disgrace, and he had like-minded associates, chief among
them Count N. P. Panin, the nephew of Paul’s old tutor. Panin was in
disgrace for opposing the rapprochement with Napoleon and Pahlen
was afraid not only for himself but for the rest of the imperial family.
He believed that Paul was so far alienating the nobility that disorder
might ensue, a frightening possibility in the unstable condition of
Europe. As the plot thickened, Alexander became aware of it and
did nothing to stop it. On the night of March 11, 1801, after an
evening of heavy drinking, the conspirators made their way into the
142 A Concise History of Russia

Castle of St. Michael. They found Paul after he tried to hide and
arrested him: a struggle ensued and one of the officers strangled the
tsar. It was the last and most violent palace coup in Russian history.
A public announcement asserted that Paul had died of apoplexy and
Alexander was now the tsar. The rejoicing was universal throughout
St. Petersburg.

Alexander I ruled Russia for the next quarter of a century, a time

full of drama. His personal imprint on the age was considerable, not
least because he was the last of Russia’s tsars to display a personal
desire to keep Russia in step with the rapidly changing political
world to the west. After Alexander, Russia’s rulers opposed any
political change or allowed it only under extreme duress. Toward
the end of his life Alexander too began to move away from his early
liberalism, but until the eve of the Napoleonic invasion of 1812
Alexander pursued a distinctly reformist policy.
Much of Alexander’s liberalism was a matter of attitude rather
than institutional reorganization. Censorship was radically relaxed
and in 1804 a new statute appeared that established relatively mild
rules and gave the task of censorship over to university professors
under the Ministry of Education. New publications began to appear,
such as the writer Nikolai Karamzin’s journal Messenger of Europe,
which was to remain the country’s leading literary and intellectual
voice for several decades. A writer of sentimental novellas and an
account of his travels in Europe, he used the journal to publish
on a wide variety of topics, from the latest in French literature to
the revolution in Haiti. It so impressed the tsar that in 1803 he
appointed Karamzin the official historian of Russia, charged with
composing a history of Russia that was scholarly but in readable
prose. Alexander’s initiatives were a major step forward for Russian
higher education, for he founded new universities in Kazan’ (1804),
Khar’kov (1805), and St. Petersburg (1819), at the side of the older
university in Moscow. In largely Polish Wilno the academy was
transformed into a university and the German university in Dor-
pat (Estonia) was revived. The Imperial Lycée founded in Tsarskoe
Selo under the eye of the tsars became one of the principal seed-
grounds of Russian culture. All of these initiatives flowed from the
 Russia in the Age of Revolution 143

rather nebulous liberalism taught the young tsar by his former tutor,
Frederic LaHarpe of Switzerland. LaHarpe was later execrated by
conservatives as the evil genius of Alexander’s reign, but in fact the
tutor simply provided his pupil with the standard reading and ideas
of the late Enlightenment, ideas that were still championed in the
heir’s boyhood by his grandmother Catherine. Alexander’s youth
coincided with the French Revolution, but unlike his father he did
not see it simply as a threat to be confronted. He took it as part
of vast changes sweeping European society and also as a warning
to monarchs who failed to move with the times. His response was
to try to reform the Russian state in line with the new Europe but
keeping the power of the monarchy intact.
Alexander’s youthful friendships were with young noblemen who
shared these views and they were to play a major role in the early
years of the reign. He appointed five of them, Pavel Stroganov,
Nikolai Novosil’tsev, the Polish Prince Adam Czartoryski, and oth-
ers, to an unofficial committee to advise him on the type of reform
that Russia needed. After some initial discussion of constitutions
and the evils of serfdom, the talk moved more in the direction
of strengthening the administration and legal order. To this end
Alexander radically reshaped the Russian government, abolishing
the old colleges and other structures left from the time of Catherine
and Paul and putting in their place ministries. The new ministries,
modeled on those of Napoleonic France, were headed by a single
minister, not a committee, and were given a large staff and wide
areas of administrative control, if no legislative power. With this
new structure Alexander created the bureaucratic state that was to
rule Russia under the tsar until 1917. His ministries were supposed
to and largely did follow legal guidelines, though the power of the
tsar to make law at will introduced a major element of arbitrary
power that also lasted until the end of the old regime. The lack of a
legal culture was a further obstacle to legal order, but the law fac-
ulties of the new universities and the private Demidov law school in
Iaroslavl’ were designed to remedy this defect and in time did so, to
some extent. The young graduates of these institutions with profes-
sional legal education began to replace clerks that operated simply
by knowledge of existing practice and the old grandees with their
144 A Concise History of Russia

Figure 8. Central St. Petersburg with the Winter Palace from Four
Panoramic Views of St. Petersburg, by John Augustus Atkinson, London,
1802.

general cultures derived from French literature. Alexander placed

the Senate over all these institutions, now that it had been trans-
formed into a place for administrative review and a supreme court.
The reform process was significantly aided by the appointment
of Michael Speranskii to the position of state secretary to the tsar.
Speranskii was as a parvenu (his father was a priest, not a nobleman)
who had worked his way up by sheer intelligence and hard work.
His bland exterior concealed an inner fire, fed by mystical religious
beliefs and devotion to the law. He came from a successful career in
the new Ministry of Justice to work directly with Alexander at legal
reform. In 1809 he compiled a constitution for Russia that included
a limited representative legislature and some checks on the tsar’s
power. This project never came into existence, but he did manage
to establish a Council of State (again on the Napoleonic model) to
provide a central locus of power at the side of the tsar. Henceforth
new laws were generally discussed in the Council of State before
the tsar made a final decision. Speranskii was also instrumental in
the granting of a constitution to Russia’s new acquisition, Finland.
As a result of fears for Petersburg and foreign policy complica-
tions, Russia annexed Finland from Sweden in 1809, in the process
 Russia in the Age of Revolution 145

giving the country its own government for the first time, if only an
autonomous one within the Russian empire. Thus autocratic Rus-
sia acquired a constitutional unit within the empire that lasted as
such until the empire collapsed. In Finland, the Russian tsar was a
constitutional ruler.
Speranskii and his innovations were not popular with the gen-
try, who hated him and considered him a plebeian and supporter
of “French” political ideas. In fact Speranskii was not nearly as
radical as his opponents believed, for he never wished to challenge
the power of the tsar, only to continue the process of legalizing
the power and regularizing the process of consultation. He was also
rather conservative in other ways, a religious mystic who was hardly
the rigorous ideologist of the Enlightenment as his critics claimed.
The center of the opposition to Speranskii and Alexander’s liberal
course was the salon of his younger sister, Grand Duchess Ekaterina
Pavlovna, where the leading mind was Nikolai Karamzin, now hard
at work on his history. In 1811 he presented Alexander with a long
memorandum criticizing the reforms as alien to the Russian spirit,
which consisted in autocracy and loyalty to tradition. For Alexander
it was unacceptable, but such ideas would have a greater following
in years to come. For the moment, Karamzin was too intellectual
for most of the conservative nobility, who had simpler fears that
the French might free the serfs and challenge their privileges. Sper-
anskii’s fall came in the spring of 1812, as Napoleon prepared his
attack on Russia and Alexander needed the support of conservatives
among the gentry in the moment of supreme crisis. Ironically the
more modern institutions that Alexander and Speranskii had taken
over from the French example gave the state a solidity that stood
up to the French onslaught.

Alexander’s internal reforms took place against the background of

the titanic struggle of Napoleon with the rest of Europe. At first the
new tsar held back. The assassination of tsar Paul had put an end to
the notion of joining France in war against England, and Alexander
seized on the opportunity for neutrality – a neutrality that allowed
him the space for the first reforms.
Russia’s relationship to the expanding Napoleonic Empire was
necessarily complex, as Russia was far away from the center of
146 A Concise History of Russia

French expansion. For almost a century Russia’s own imperial ambi-

tions had been directed to the south, toward the Ottoman Empire
and Transcaucasia, areas of secondary interest to the French. At the
same time Russia was intimately involved in the politics of Europe,
and could not simply ignore Napoleon’s conquest and reorganiza-
tion of Central Europe. Thus in 1805 Russia joined Britain, Aus-
tria, and Sweden in challenging Napoleon’s might. The first result
was a disaster, for Napoleon quickly moved into the center of the
Austrian Empire. Alexander overrode the advice of his commander
Mikhail Kutuzov and, with the Austrians, gave battle at Austerlitz
in December 1805. It proved one of Napoleon’s greatest victories.
Then Prussia joined the alliance, but Napoleon smashed the suppos-
edly great Prussian army at Jena the next year. Prussia, which unlike
Russia had not begun to reform itself, collapsed. As the Prussians
retreated east, Russia was left facing the French almost alone, but
it managed to defeat them at Preussisch Eylau, one of Napoleon’s
rare defeats in these years. He recovered and at Friedland in June
1807, inflicted enough damage on the Russian army that Alexander
decided to make peace. He met the French emperor on a raft at Tilsit
in East Prussia, making peace and even an alliance with France.
The alliance with France meant joining Napoleon’s boycott
of English goods in European harbors as well as supporting
Napoleon’s diplomacy. One immediate consequence was war with
Sweden, since the Swedish king remained loyal to the anti-French
cause, and the conquest of Finland. Russia’s larger foreign policy
in these years, however, was a return to imperial conquest in the
south, and war with the Turks brought the annexation of Bessara-
bia in 1812. The earlier annexation of Georgia (1803) gave Russia
a firm foot on the south side of the Caucasus range, putting her in
immediate rivalry with Iran as well as Turkey.
Alexander’s alliance with France was unstable from the start. The
tsar paid lip service to the boycott of English goods, but American
ships began to flock to St. Petersburg carrying the very English
colonial wares that Napoleon was trying to keep out. The French
emperor complained mightily about this violation of the agreement
as well as other issues, trying to browbeat Alexander into obedi-
ence. Alexander, however, was a master at this sort of diplomacy,
and answered French complaints with unfailing charm and vague
 Russia in the Age of Revolution 147

promises of friendship. As the French tone grew increasingly threat-

ening, the tsar reminded the French of the size of his army and the
extent of his country. He reminded Napoleon’s envoys of the Scythi-
ans, the ancient inhabitants of southern Russia who defeated the
mighty Persian Empire by retreating into the steppe. They exhausted
and harassed the Persians until the invaders realized that they were
short of food and had to run for home. The message could not have
been clearer, but Napoleon did not heed it.
Napoleon had good reason to believe that he could conquer Rus-
sia in the spring of 1812. While France itself and Russia were about
equal in population (about 35–40 million each), France drew on the
resources of virtually the whole of Europe: the Netherlands, Ger-
many, and Italy had either been annexed to the French Empire or
turned into client states and thus had to provide recruits for its army.
Prussia was ordered to join him, and Poland provided an enthusi-
astic contingent as well, fresh from fighting in Spain. Even with
the Spanish war unresolved, Napoleon massed some four hundred
thousand men of the French imperial army and more allies on Rus-
sia’s western border in June 1812. Russia could muster about the
same on paper, but about only half that many in reality. France was
also a prosperous country with flourishing military industries, again
enhanced by its empire. Russia, as everyone knew, was an industri-
ally backward land dominated by primitive agriculture. Napoleon
and most observers were confident of French victory, even those
unsympathetic to Napoleonic aggrandizement, like the first Ameri-
can ambassador to Russia, John Quincy Adams.
In reality the odds were not so stacked against Russia. The estab-
lishment of the Ministry of War and a General Staff meant that
Russia’s army had modern organization, logistics, and planning.
The chief of those plans was precisely the Scythian strategy alluded
to by Tsar Alexander. The minister of war Michael Barclay de Tolly
and the principal generals were all aware that this plan was Rus-
sia’s only chance. The most important thing was to avoid a decisive
battle near the border, where the French would have predominant
force. After some hesitation, Alexander stuck to the plan of retreat
and also removed himself from day-to-day command of the army.
As the French moved into the interior, they had to leave more and
more troops behind to guard their communications back to France.
148 A Concise History of Russia

They also learned that Russia, with its low population density and
poor roads, did not provide enough food along the route of the
march to allow the invaders to live off the land. They were con-
fined to a narrow corridor quickly stripped of all resources. None
of this would matter if they could destroy the Russian army, but
the Russians moved east ahead of them. As the Russians withdrew,
Alexander began to feel the political complications of the retreat,
which offended the patriotism of the people and particularly the
gentry. He decided to sacrifice Barclay and appointed Kutuzov as
supreme commander. Kutuzov, the man whose advice at Austerlitz
Alexander had rejected to his cost, was a sixty-seven-year-old vet-
eran of Catherine the Great’s Turkish wars as well as of more recent
successes against the Ottomans in Bessarabia. Kutuzov stayed with
the original plan of retreat, reluctantly giving battle at Borodino
on September 7 (August 26 on the Julian calendar) 1812, only a
hundred miles or so west of Moscow.
The epic battle so memorably described by Tolstoy was also the
bloodiest single day of combat in nineteenth-century Europe. By
now Napoleon could only field some 120–135,000 troops out of the
hordes he had brought with him and Kutuzov was able to put up the
same. The Russians entrenched themselves behind field fortifications
and let the French attack, with such resultant slaughter that some
40–50,000 men fell as casualties on each side – about 100,000
killed and wounded in one day. The French managed to capture
some of the Russian fortifications and then returned to their camp.
Kutuzov, whose main goal was to keep his army able to fight,
decided to withdraw entirely and marched his men east toward
Moscow. Napoleon, as usual, portrayed the battle as a great French
victory, though in fact it ended his chances of success. He had too
few troops left to control Russia if the Russians continued to resist.
Kutuzov had no intention of surrender, and neither did the pop-
ulation. The Muscovites began to leave the city in the tens of
thousands. Napoleon waited in vain on the Sparrow Hills (where
Moscow University stands today) for a Russian delegation to offer
him the surrender of the city. He entered a ghost town, with no resis-
tance but also no people to greet him or supply his army. Kutuzov
in the meanwhile had marched his army through the city and turned
 Russia in the Age of Revolution 149

southeast along the main road. Then, contrary to everyone’s expec-

tations, he crossed the Moscow River and moved west. He made
his camp southwest of Moscow, sitting on Napoleon’s lines of com-
munication and blocking the way to the rich agricultural provinces
to the south and the Russian center of arms manufacturing at Tula.
The conqueror of Europe was trapped like a rat.
From that point on Napoleon had lost the initiative and could
only stave off the inevitable. Fires started and Moscow burned to
the ground while the French troops looted the empty palaces of
the nobility. Henri Beyle, to be later known to world literature
as Stendhal, stole books from the library of the Golitsyn mansion.
The French emperor waited several weeks, hoping Alexander would
surrender and trying to collect food from the countryside around
Moscow. There was no surrender. Cossacks patrolled the coun-
tryside and the peasants massacred French soldiers sent to forage.
Finally he did the only thing left to him, retreat. He tried to go
farther south, realizing that the direct road to the west had been
stripped of all provisions and nothing could come from France.
Kutuzov stood in his way, blocking the road south, and Napoleon
was canny enough to realize that he could not risk a major battle.
Instead he turned directly west, with winter coming on, hoping to
get away fast enough before his troops starved to death. He failed.
The Russian army and bands of enraged local peasants followed
the French all the way, picking off stragglers and further complicat-
ing the already catastrophic supply system. The winter came early
and hard, and eventually the emperor of the French abandoned his
army to its fate and escaped to Paris to try to start over. Only a
few thousand men of his great army managed to get to the Polish
border.
The defeat of Napoleon in Russia transformed European politics
in a few months. His unwilling allies began to desert, Prussia first
of all and then Austria, joining Russia and Britain against France.
The Russian army moved west into Poland and Prussia, providing
the largest allied contingent at the giant battle of Leipzig (October
1813) and the subsequent campaign in France. By 1814 Napoleon’s
empire had come to an end. The hopeless attempt at its restoration
the next year only ended in disaster at Waterloo.
150 A Concise History of Russia

Alexander, along with Britain, insisted that the restored French

state have a constitution with some sort of legislature, rather than a
return to absolute monarchy, and the two allies prevailed. Relations
with Britain were not so smooth in other areas, as the Congress of
Vienna showed. There were long battles about post-war boundaries
for Prussia and Poland, primarily the result of British and Austrian
fears that Russia was now too powerful. In the end, Russia’s ally
Prussia retained large parts of Poland and received important new
territories in the Rhineland. Alexander’s attitude to Poland was
complicated: he wanted some sort of Polish political unit with the
name Poland (no “Duchy of Warsaw”), but he wanted it under
Russian influence. The result was the Kingdom of Poland, with
the Russian tsar as its king – it was now part of the Russian
Empire but with a constitution and its own government, similar to
Finland.
The Polish settlement suggested that Alexander would continue
along his previous liberal path. He soon emancipated the Estonian
and Latvian serfs in the Baltic provinces, albeit without land. In
1818 he even toyed with granting Russia a constitution, consider-
ing a text written by his old friend Novosil’tsev. At the same time his
private views were becoming increasingly conservative. The expla-
nation for his new found conservatism lay not only in disillusion-
ment with liberalism or the rightward drift of European politics but
also in his religious views. Alexander fell more and more under the
influence of Baroness Julie von Krüdener, a Baltic German aristo-
crat who had evolved a mystical pietism all her own. Krüdener had
believed Napoleon to be the Antichrist and Alexander the savior
of the world, and she told him so. Alexander spent more and more
time reading mystical tracts and talking to Krüdener and other seers.
His mystical interests had a decidedly Protestant strain to them, and
the tsar even sponsored the translation and circulation of the Bible,
relying largely on the English Bible Society to set up a network in
Russia. He merged the ministries of education, the Orthodox synod,
and the administration of non-Orthodox denominations into a sin-
gle ministry under Prince Alexander Golitsyn, thus concentrating
wide power over religion and culture in the hands of an imperial
favorite. Golitsyn required Russian universities to teach explicitly
conservative doctrines, to expunge ideas of natural law from the
 Russia in the Age of Revolution 151

curriculum, and to substitute the notion that law was the expres-
sion of divine will. Similarly the scientists were to teach only ideas in
accord with the Bible and revelation. The professors could do little
to oppose Golitsyn, but fortunately his policies also antagonized the
Orthodox Church. To the church the religion that was to be taught
was a mixture of Protestant evangelicalism and mysticism, not cor-
rect Orthodoxy. It was the church and secular conservatives who
eventually managed to discredit Golitsyn by 1824, but not before
his and Alexander’s notions put an indelible stamp on the Russian
culture of those years.
Even more powerful than Golitsyn was General A. A. Arakcheev,
originally a favorite of Alexander’s father Tsar Paul. Alexander
had recalled him from exile in 1803 to head Russia’s artillery, and
in 1809–10 he was Minister of War. Politically very conservative,
Arakcheev was an extremely competent military administrator, but
with a narrow education and a powerful streak of arrogance and
cruelty. In 1814 Alexander made him the head of his personal chan-
cellery, which meant that all the ministers, generals, and courtiers
had to approach the tsar through Arakcheev. He was also largely
responsible for hare-brained schemes like the military-agricultural
settlements. The idea was to turn some of the villages of state peas-
ants into military units with the aim of reducing costs and encourag-
ing discipline and better agricultural practices among the peasantry.
Instead the result was discontent and rebellion among the peasants
that resulted in a series of revolts, which Arakcheev suppressed
with savage cruelty. There were other measures. In 1817 Alexander
turned the Gendarmes, originally a military police force designed
to deal only with soldiers, into a militarized police force charged
with the preservation of internal order, the first such police force
in Russian history. The Special Department of the Ministry of the
Interior also began to look for internal dissent.
Abroad Alexander’s initial liberalism in France quickly faded
as he and the Austrian chancellor Metternich became the prime
movers behind the Holy Alliance. The Holy Alliance included Prus-
sia and France as well as some lesser states in an agreement with
Russia and Austria to fight the hydra of revolution wherever it
appeared, such as the revolutions in Spain and southern Italy in
1822–23. French and Austrian troops suppressed these attempts at
152 A Concise History of Russia

constitutional order, but for Russia the greatest challenge came

when the Greeks rose in revolt against their Ottoman masters
in 1821. Catherine and even Paul had encouraged Greek revolts
against the Turks earlier on in expectation of Russian territorial
gains in the Balkans, and now the occasion presented itself to satisfy
Russian aims in the area. Alexander hesitated, even though many
of the Greek leaders were politically quite conservative. Metternich
finally convinced him that the Turks were the legitimate rulers of
the Balkans, and that the Greeks deserved no more support than
the Spanish rebels who fought against their king. The Greeks were
left to fight on alone, in defiance of obvious Russian interests in
weakening the Turks and supporting an Orthodox people.
The conservative turn in Alexander’s thinking came in the wake
of the 1812 victory over Napoleon, but in other sectors of Russian
society the same events had the opposite effect. Among the officers
of the Russian army – young noblemen with European education –
the great victory brought an enormous pride in their country and
its people, and gave them tremendous confidence in themselves.
As the army moved west in 1813–14, many of them saw Western
Europe for the first time, and with an almost universal knowledge of
French and German were able to observe and investigate unfamiliar
phenomena in detail. They dined in Parisian cafes, read newspa-
pers, attended lectures, and met their counterparts in French and
German salons. They came prepared, for their education had famil-
iarized them with the basis of European thought – Kant and Mon-
tesquieu, Goethe and Rousseau. They read the latest works of the
French liberal leaders Germaine de Stael and Benjamin Constant,
the conservatives Chateaubriand and de Maistre, and they learned
about English experiments in popular education. Some followed the
debates of the English parliament in the French press, and others
looked at more exotic systems by studying the constitutions of the
United States and the state of Pennsylvania.
After the heady years of victory and fuller acquaintance with
Western European life and thought, the return home was a cold bath
for many. They knew that serfdom had been a matter of debate and
condemnation since the mid-eighteenth century and that Napoleon
had abolished it in Poland and the Prussian reformers in their own
land. Russia was now for the first time the only European country to
 Russia in the Age of Revolution 153

have such an institution. Furthermore, their own tsar, as everyone

knew, had insisted on a constitution for the French, and within his
own empire for Poland and Finland. What about Russia?
From about 1816–17 groups of young officers began to form
more or less secret literary and debating societies with the aim of
continuing the intense dialogue and reading of the war years. The
first was the Union of Salvation, with only some thirty members,
utilizing rituals imitated from the Freemasons to keep their actions
deeply secret. There were already serious political discussions at
this stage, and soon there were even more. In 1818 they founded a
larger secret society, the Union of Welfare, which even had a literary
society associated with it, the Green Lamp. Reading poetry, writing
theater reviews, and drinking parties were as much part of the move-
ment among these young officers as politics, but by 1821–22 they
began to move toward more concrete plans of action and to write
constitutions for the future. By 1825 there were two centers of this
activity. In St. Petersburg, where most of the guards regiments were
stationed, several hundred officers formed the Northern Society,
with the aim of overthrowing the monarchy and proclaiming a con-
stitutional state. The majority, led by Nikita Murav’ev, a captain in
the Guards General Staff, wanted a constitutional monarchy and a
legislature elected on a property-based franchise. More radical was
the poet and ex-guards officer Kondratii Ryleev, an official in the
Russian-American company that administered Alaska, who moved
toward republicanism. Farther south, a similar radicalism inspired
Pavel Pestel’, colonel of the Viatka Infantry regiment, and other
officers of the army stationed in the Ukraine close to the Ottoman
frontier. Pestel’ compiled an elaborate constitution for a democratic
republic along Jacobin lines. Tactically there were many disagree-
ments as well: should the army be the basis of a revolt? How much
should they tell the troops? Was it enough to just remove the tsar,
or did they need to kill him? And was that right? The disagreements
were never resolved because they seemed too distant. The conspir-
ators were still actively recruiting and expected Alexander to live a
long time.
The new police forces and the various repressive policies failed to
detect the presence of the conspiracy until it was much too late. In
the summer of 1825 the all-powerful Arakcheev was immobilized by
154 A Concise History of Russia

personal disaster: his longtime housekeeper and mistress, a monster

of sadism, was murdered by his serfs. The general was plunged into
despair, increased by the discovery that she had been embezzling
large sums of money and had convinced him that her son by one
of her lovers was Arakcheev’s. In the southern army an officer of
English origin named Sherwood sent in a secret report naming many
of the conspirators, but it was too late.
On November 19, 1825, the tsar suddenly died at the age of
only forty-seven. Alexander had been on tour of the Crimea and
died at Taganrog, far from the capital or any other large city and
word did not reach St. Petersburg until December. The first con-
sequence was confusion. By the succession law of 1797, the heir
to the childless Alexander should have been his younger brother
Konstantin, the tsar’s viceroy in Warsaw. Unknown to virtually
everyone, Konstantin had abdicated the throne in 1822 by agree-
ment with Alexander and left papers to that effect with the Council
of State. Thus the heir would be the next brother Nicholas, but
Alexander had never bothered to tell him about it. Thus the news
came as a shock to Nicholas, who insisted on hearing formally from
Konstantin himself. While couriers raced back and forth between
St. Petersburg and Warsaw, Nicholas ordered the troops quartered
in the city to swear the oath of allegiance to Konstantin and refused
to take the throne. Finally a definitive answer came from Warsaw,
and Nicholas ordered a new oath for December 14.
The conspirators knew most of this, as they included in their ranks
officers with frequent duty in the Winter Palace. They decided to
forestall Nicholas and bring out the troops in revolt in the morning
before the administration of the oath. The rebels assembled on the
Senate Square, only a block from the Winter Palace, and demanded
that the throne go to Konstantin, a tactic designed to give time for a
seizure of power. Nicholas refused to budge now that he knew that
he was legally the tsar, and he called in loyal troops. For most of the
short December day the two bodies of soldiers faced one another
in the falling snow, and several attempts to resolve the issue failed.
Finally, as sunset approached in the afternoon, Nicholas gave the
order to fire, and the artillery dispersed the rebels. The first attempt
at revolution in Russian history was over. Nicholas now had to
decide what to do with the rebels, and how to rule the country.
 9
The Pinnacle of Autocracy

The first acts of the new reign were the capture, investigation, and
trials of the Decembrists, as they were known immediately and for
ever after. Several hundred officers and men of the rebel regiments,
as well as a few civilians, were immediately arrested. Tsar Nicholas
appointed a court of numerous officials and high officers, the most
distinguished being Michael Speranskii, who had returned from
exile and was now again in favor. The investigation was long and
detailed, conducted in secret, and eventually ended in the execution
of five of the rebels, including Pestel’ and the poet Ryleev, for the
crime of plotting against the life of the tsar. Thirty-one others were
sentenced to death as well for the same crime, but Nicholas decided
to ignore their obvious guilt and commuted the sentences to labor
and exile in Siberia. All together one hundred twenty-one of the
rebels made the long journey east. Another four hundred fifty were
either released without punishment or demoted and transferred to
line regiments in the Caucasus.
In Russian history the punishment of the Decembrists became a
classic example of official cruelty, but the most striking aspect of
their treatment was its lenience. The number of death sentences was
about the same as in the reprisals for the Italian constitutionalist
revolts of 1820–21 and far less than for similar actions in Spain.
Nicholas chose to hold back, perhaps because he still held a very
old-fashioned conception of the tsar as the stern father of his peo-
ple. In any case the Decembrists in Siberia had various fates. Eight
of the most “guilty” actually worked in an open-pit silver mine for
155
156 A Concise History of Russia

several months, while others had lighter tasks. The labor sentences
were lightened by the 1830s. A number of the Decembrists’ wives
were allowed to join them, and as the years passed the labor sen-
tences were entirely commuted to simple prison and eventually exile
(outside of prison). Many of the former rebels were given positions
in the local administration. In Siberian towns the Decembrists and
their wives provided the first glimpse of European culture, for they
set up schools and orphanages, put on amateur theatricals, and
became the centers of local society. What they were not allowed
to do is publish anything or even to return to European Russia. A
blanket of silence descended around them, to remain until the death
of Nicholas thirty years later.
The new tsar could now turn to ruling the country, which he
did with an iron hand. Nicholas was nearly twenty years younger
than Alexander, for he was born in 1796. Thus he entirely missed
the reign of his grandmother Catherine, and his formative years
were those of the defeat of Napoleon. His upbringing was nar-
rowly military and he was not educated as a future ruler. Personally
he was convinced that only autocracy could prevent the spread of
revolution, liberalism, and constitutional government, all of these
essentially the same in the minds of European and Russian conser-
vatives. He relied on the ministries to provide his government with a
trained staff to execute the laws, but increasingly he centralized deci-
sion making and in particular directed any new initiatives from his
personal chancellery using men, mostly with military backgrounds,
who were personally close to the tsar himself.
One of his first acts was to add a “Third Section” to his per-
sonal chancellery, one that was to keep track of potential political
opponents through the Corps of Gendarmes and their network of
agents. The new organ removed political police from the Ministry of
Internal Affairs and subordinated it directly to the tsar through its
head, General Alexander Benckendorf. The Third Section reflected
in its actions the conceptions of the tsar, for in addition to look-
ing for “secret societies” of revolutionaries it was to track insults
to the tsar and imperial family, counterfeiters, and religious sects,
especially the Old Believers. It was also supposed to collect news
of peasant discontent and rebellion, a new note from a government
hitherto only concerned about liberal ideas among the nobility.
 The Pinnacle of Autocracy 157

The Gendarmes who were its main agents were also to look out for
corruption among government officials, especially in the provinces.
In the mind of Nicholas, paternalism and the repression of revo-
lution were two sides of the same coin. Though the actual agents
of the Third Section were few and it continued to rely heavily on
denunciations, it was large enough to become a major factor in the
life of Russia’s small political and cultural elite.
Nicholas was not in theory opposed to all reform, and he set up
a series of committees to consider the needs of the country and even
to wrestle with the issue of serfdom. None of the reform programs
came to anything, for the tsar believed serfdom to be an evil, but
also that any attempt to change the system would lead to a massive
revolt like that led by Pugachev in the previous century. Perhaps the
only important positive measure of the reign was the codification
of Russian law, a massive task entrusted to the capable hands of
Michael Speranskii. In 1835 his committee published a code of law
derived from carefully collected Russian precedent. Speranskii and
his staff also compiled codes of local law from Finland, the Baltic
provinces, and the formerly Polish provinces in the western part
of the empire. Speranskii’s code remained the basis of Russian law
until 1917. Nicholas was himself enthusiastic about the project, as
it fitted his image of himself as the stern yet just monarch, careful
of the law as well as of his own authority.
The utter stagnation of government was not matched by stag-
nation in Russian society, slow as it was to develop. The colo-
nization of the southern steppe continued, and Odessa emerged
as a major port, exporting the growing surplus of Russian grain
to Europe. In the interior of Russia all was not stagnant either,
for within and around the serf system industrial capitalism made
its first appearance. In the villages of Ivanovo and Voznesenskoe,
Sheremetev estates northeast of Moscow, textile factories pow-
ered by steam engines were built starting from the 1790s. The
entrepreneurs who bought and imported English steam engines,
however, were themselves serfs who only gradually bought them-
selves out in the course of the early nineteenth century. The workers
were also mostly Sheremetev serfs, though they worked for the fac-
tory owners and only paid the count, their owner, a yearly rent.
Peasant entrepreneurs, some of them serfs, and townsmen began to
158 A Concise History of Russia

Figure 9. A village council from John Augustus Atkinson, A Picturesque

View of the Manners, Customs, and Amusements of the Russians, London,
1803–04.

start small enterprises in and around St. Petersburg, Moscow, and

other towns and villages of the Russian interior. In St. Petersburg
many of the businessmen were foreign or non-Russian citizens of the
empire – Germans, Swedes, Finns, Englishmen. In Moscow many
of the richest textile manufacturers came from Old Belief groups,
and thus for religious reasons were treated with some suspicion by
the authorities. By the standards of Western Europe all this activity
was small, labor was expensive, and industry was usually techni-
cally backward, but it was a beginning. The overall prosperity of
the Russian Empire also benefited from the beginnings of industri-
alization in Russian Poland, the Baltic provinces and Finland.
The attitude of the tsar and his government toward industri-
alization was highly ambiguous. On the one hand he supported
it, if modestly, establishing the first commercial high schools and
maintaining a protective tariff. Nicholas played a major role in the
 The Pinnacle of Autocracy 159

construction of Russia’s first railroad, the line from the capital to the
Tsarskoe Selo (1837) and then in a much more important project,
the line from St. Petersburg to Moscow that opened in 1851. Russia
acquired its first engineering school in 1828 with the St. Petersburg
Technological Institute, but the builder of the Moscow-Petersburg
railroad was the American engineer, G. W. Whistler, the father of
the famous painter. Russia simply did not have the trained special-
ists for the project. Nicholas supported the railroad, but at the same
time he did not want Russia to acquire a large industrial base, as
he saw that as the seedbed of revolution as well as fundamentally
unnecessary. The most basic issue was, of course, serfdom, for as
long as that lasted Russia was saddled with increasingly backward
agriculture, a highly restricted labor market, and capital tied up in
serfs and noble estates. Russia could not hope to move forward
until that system was removed, but that act would entail fundamen-
tal change in society, the legal system and the state. Nicholas would
not have that.

As Russian society slowly grew in complexity with some hallmarks

of modernity and began to move away from state tutelage, the
government began to sense the need for a newer conception of
itself. Autocracy alone was not enough, as it implied only obedi-
ence by the public, including the upper classes, and society outside
the peasantry was by now too sophisticated for simple obedience.
In the early years Nicholas relied on the traditions of cosmopolitan
monarchism inherited from his brother and the Holy Alliance. The
main government spokesman in the press (and a major informer for
the Third Section) was Faddei Bulgarin, journalist and author of
moralizing novels of Russian life. Bulgarin, however, was actually
the Pole Tadeusz Bułharyn, who had even fought against Russia in
1812. His support of Russia over his native country was the result of
firmly anti-revolutionary views and loyalty to the idea of monarchy:
Russia’s greatness lay in its adherence to these ideas. Another note
entered the chorus of conservative ideas with count S. S. Uvarov.
Uvarov was also cosmopolitan in education, more comfortable in
French than in Russian, and Nicholas appointed him Minister of
Education. In 1832 he sent around a rescript to the ministry’s insti-
tutions informing them that their task was to encourage “autocracy,
160 A Concise History of Russia

Orthodoxy, and nationality,” and thus was born the doctrine of offi-
cial nationality, as it came to be called. Autocracy was not new, and
Alexander and others had believed religion was the natural prop to
the throne, but Uvarov specified Orthodoxy and added nationality
to the mix. For the time this notion remained mainly the ideology of
his ministry; for Nicholas, whose ministers and entourage included
generals Benckendorff and Dubelt in the police, Karl von Nesselrode
as foreign minister, and whose court included numerous Baltic Ger-
mans, Finns, and even conservative Polish aristocrats, could hardly
advocate a purely Russian state. Russian nationality was still more a
vague idea than a strict ethnic principle. The result was a contradic-
tory mix of ideas, a mix that remained until the death of Nicholas
and to a large extent until the end of the old regime in 1917. The mix
was perfectly incarnated in the architecture of Konstantin Toon, the
builder of the Kremlin’s Grand Palace and the Church of Christ the
Savior – the two great projects of the later reign of Nicholas. To
provide the tsar with a modern Moscow residence Toon, consulting
the tsar at every step, produced an essentially classical building that,
seen from a distance, was no different from dozens of St. Petersburg
palaces. At the same time decorative details like the window frames
and décor were adapted from the older Russian architecture still
visible in the Kremlin. The Church of Christ the Savior was much
more Russian looking, but Toon took the style of the much smaller
twelfth-century churches and simply blew it up to colossal size and
placed it on a high platform with classical (or at least non-Russian)
decorative elements such as massive lions.
Not just the architecture of church buildings but the church itself
became an integral part of the autocratic regime. Nicholas put a
final end both to the mild enlightenment of the eighteenth-century
church and the fascination with Biblical evangelicalism of Alexan-
der’s time. In 1836 he appointed to the post of ober-procurator the
Most Holy Synod Count N. A. Protasov, a general of hussars. Pro-
tasov’s task was to make the church more “Orthodox,” to restore
its doctrinal purity and eliminate practices and intellectual trends
from the West. He continued to manage the affairs of the church
until 1855, and in the process he succeeded in making the church
into a consciously conservative and obedient instrument of autoc-
racy. In his time the church also absorbed a large dose of nationalist
 The Pinnacle of Autocracy 161

ideology, a combination that endured to the end of the old regime.

Protasov’s church was not the whole of Orthodoxy. Paradoxically
the secularization of monastic lands in the eighteenth century led to
a revival of monasticism, the “elders” (startsy), becoming the most
charismatic figures of Russian Orthodoxy in the nineteenth century.
The elders were monks whose asceticism included a large element
of spiritual service to the surrounding society. In the 1820s the most
famous was Saint Seraphim of Sarov, and at mid-century Makarii
and Amvrosii of the Optina Monastery in southern Russia. Famous
writers and intellectuals as well as ordinary laymen of all classes
came to visit the monks and seek their guidance, a practice that
formed a new element alongside the more traditional pilgrimages to
the shrines with the relics of the saints. In spite of all these efforts,
however, some twenty-five percent of the Russian peasantry fol-
lowed the various versions of Old Belief rather than the Orthodox
Church.
Uvarov’s ideological experiments and the commitment to autoc-
racy that lay behind them probably reflected the sentiments of most
of the gentry, but they did not have universal success, even in the
government and the imperial family. Mildly liberal circles existed
even at the pinnacle of Petersburg society. The salon of the tsar’s
sister-in-law Elena Pavlovna (1806–1873) was one such place. Born
Princess Frederike Charlotte Marie of Württemberg, she came to
Russia in 1824 to marry the younger brother of the tsar, Mikhail
Pavlovich (1798–1849). Grand Duke Mikhail was mainly inter-
ested in his military duties, and Elena became one of St. Peters-
burg’s most important figures. Her drawing room in the Michael
Palace, still carefully preserved in the building that became the Rus-
sian Museum, was an important artistic salon, especially for music
and art. In the 1840s the emphasis was artistic, but the Thursdays
with the Grand Dutchess also saw discussion of issues that never
appeared in the press and were frowned upon in other aristocratic
houses.
In Russian society at large the absence of political discussion in
the press or any public forum did not imply that everything was
calm below the surface. By this time a whole generation of young
men, mostly of gentry origin, had finished a university or one of
the elite schools like the Tsarskoe Selo Lycée. This education was
162 A Concise History of Russia

supposed to fit them for state service, and indeed most of them with
such an education chose that path, if only as a livelihood rather than
an avocation. If public political discussion did not exist, however,
literature and philosophy flourished. To some extent they served as
an outlet for otherwise frustrated reflection on Russian life, but the
absorbing interest in art and thought was also a response to cultural
trends in Western Europe, especially Germany.
Starting in the late 1820s more and more young Russians fell
under the influence of the metaphysical idealism of Friedrich Schell-
ing, whose popularity in Germany was then at its peak. Schelling’s
appeal was the result of his extensive writing on religion, art, and
the philosophy of nature and his desire to find a single unifying
spirit in them all. For the esthetically inclined Russians of this
moment, Schelling, for all his murky abstraction, seemed a real
guide to understanding the world of culture and thought. By the
1830s Schelling’s thought seemed so restricted to that sphere that
some of the students at Moscow University turned to the more
all-embracing and more rigorous world of G. F. W. Hegel. Their
leader was Nikolai Stankevich (1813–1840). From 1831 until his
departure for Europe in a vain search for a cure for his tuberculosis,
Stankevich included in his circle nearly everyone who would make
a difference in Russian thought for the next generation.
Stankevich’s patience, wide reading, and gentleness attracted
widely disparate personalities, at that time all united by a fascina-
tion with German philosophy and literature. The future anarchist
Michael Bakunin (1814–1876), the critic Vissarion Belinskii, and
the future socialist Alexander Herzen (1812–1870) were all part of
the circle. They would all in different ways form the Westernizer
camp, which saw Russia’s destiny as a belated variant of European
socio-political development. Also part of the circle were the future
Slavophile Konstantin Aksakov and the conservative publicist
M. N. Katkov. For the moment their common effort was to master
Kant, Fichte, Schelling, and their idol Hegel, writing long letters to
one another describing their understanding of their reading, turgid
abstractions in Hegelian jargon. Yet out of the Stankevich circle
came the major trends in Russian thought, ideas with echoes that
have outlived the moment of their creation.
 The Pinnacle of Autocracy 163

For Belinskii the problem Hegel posed was that he saw the his-
tory of the world as the development of the idea of freedom, but
also identified its outcome with the existing order of Europe in his
time. Thus everything in the world had a place, leading to ultimate
self-knowledge of the Idea. Belinskii at first concluded, as did many
of his friends, that Russian conditions were therefore justified, they
were part of the development of humanity. This was a very uncom-
fortable conclusion, and further reflection on Hegel’s dialectic took
them in another direction: Hegel was right about Europe, it was the
ideal toward which humanity headed, but Russia needed to catch
up. Thus Hegelian idealism provided an intellectual foundation for
thinking Russia needed to imitate the West, and that imitation could
take two forms. Either Russia needed to imitate the existing Western
societies, which seemed to be moving toward industrial capitalism
and constitutional states, or Russia needed to follow the new trend
that had emerged in the West, socialism.
For Belinskii, Herzen, and Bakunin the choice of liberalism or
socialism was not one that they yet had to make. Either was consid-
ered utopian by Russian standards, and it seemed more important to
analyze the condition of Russia and form a theory for future action.
Belinskii chose to analyze Russia on the basis of its literature, and
became Russia’s most famous literary critic in the 1840s. This choice
fitted well with Hegelianism, for Hegel had seen art and literature as
another manifestation of the development of the Idea, whose politi-
cal incarnation was the idea of freedom. Literary criticism also gave
Belinskii, as a provincial doctor’s son and the most plebeian of the
group, a modest means of livelihood. Herzen was a more complex
story, as the illegitimate son of a Russian nobleman, part of the
gentry and yet permanently an outsider. Arrested in 1834, he spent
several years in exile, and back in Moscow he devoted himself to
reading Hegel and writing novels. In 1847 he left Russia for Western
Europe, wanting to see the society he had been so long praising. He
never returned to Russia, constructing his own version of socialism
in exile. Bakunin followed a similar trajectory. The son of wealthy
nobles, he went directly from the Stankevich circle to the West in
1840, where he joined the left Hegelians. Bakunin moved quickly
from an inchoate radicalism to anarchism, coining his famous
164 A Concise History of Russia

slogan, “the passion for destruction is also a creative passion.”

By 1848 he had acquired a name in European radical circles.
Other members of the Stankevich circle interpreted Hegel in a
liberal light; V. P. Botkin and M. N. Katkov remained typical liberals
in their views, opponents of serfdom and autocracy and advocates of
a constitutional monarchy. Konstantin Aksakov was another story,
for his reading of Hegel and the Germans ultimately led him to a
complete rejection of it as irrelevant to Russia. In his mind, Russia
was fundamentally different from the West, with a unique Slavic
national culture. Thus Slavophilism was born.
The Slavophiles rejected the premise that Russia ought to fol-
low Western models, for they believed that Russian civilization was
fundamentally distinct from that of Europe. Europe was mired in
egoism, whose results were evident in political strife and the impov-
erishment of the people in consequence of industrial capitalism.
Religion offered the West no escape, for Protestantism only rein-
forced individualism and the Catholic Church strove mainly for
political power and influence. Russia, with its traditions of the peas-
ant community and the (supposed) harmony of noble and peasant,
tsar and subject, had largely escaped from the evils that plagued the
West. Peter’s westernization of Russia threatened to draw Russia
into the morass, but a return to Russian values would reverse the
process. Orthodoxy would continue to provide the spiritual cement,
as it maintained a Christian community but refused to strive with
the state for secular power. This heady mix of Orthodoxy and
nationalism produced a vivid ideology but in practice was less sig-
nificant, if only because it remained something of a sect. Most of the
intelligentsia and the upper classes, however patriotic and some-
times even religious, remained to a greater or lesser degree West-
ernizers. Slavophilism was also much less conservative in practice
than in theory. For all their romantic visions of the autocratic tsars
of the age before Peter, the Slavophiles actually wanted autocracy
tempered by a consultative legislature, as did the more moderate
Westernizers. It was a different culture more than a different poli-
tics that inspired the Slavophiles.
By the 1840s these cultural impulses, Official Nationality and
Slavophilism, Westernizing liberalism and radicalism had crystal-
lized into distinct ideologies with their more or less numerous
 The Pinnacle of Autocracy 165

followers. Most of them were centered in Moscow, while St. Peters-

burg remained rather quiet politically in the wake of the Decem-
brist defeat. Around the middle of the decade, however, new voices
appeared, also small in number but which revealed some of the
outlines of the future. These voices were heard in the St. Petersburg
living room of a minor government official, Mikhail Butashevich-
Petrashevskii.
Petrashevskii and his followers represented a different social type
and a different ideology from the Decembrists or the Stankevich cir-
cle. None of them came from the aristocracy, and some were very
recently noblemen. Petrashevskii himself was the son of a military
doctor born into a family of Ukrainian priests. Only his father’s mil-
itary rank conferred nobility on Petrashevskii, and this background
was virtually identical to that of his most famous listener, Russia’s
great writer Fyodor Dostoevskii. Yet the Petrashevskii group did
not include marginal outsiders. Most of the members had attended
the Lycée in Tsarskoe Selo, the same institution that had earlier
produced many Decembrists, Pushkin and his aristocratic friends,
and a large number of aristocrats and dignitaries of the empire.
In the late 1840s they were young men serving at the beginning
level in government offices, but rather than climbing the career lad-
der they were spending their time reading economic and political
tracts under Petrashevskii’s leadership. Very soon they turned to the
works of the French utopian Charles Fourier, and declared them-
selves socialists. Fourier was not a revolutionary, as he believed
that the foundation of utopian colonies without private property
and based on joint labor would quickly spread to found a new
social order. As many American followers proved, this idea was an
illusion, but in 1845 that conclusion was still in the future. Petra-
shevskii’s group was convinced it would work but they realized that
in Russian conditions they could not operate, and they needed first
to secure legal order and political freedom. Debates and divisions
over tactics soon surfaced, with some of the group favoring a con-
centration on propaganda while others looked to organize a revolt.
The European revolutions of 1848 provided a stimulus to the idea
of revolt, but also to government surveillance. The Third Section
planted three spies in the group and in April 1849, they were all
arrested.
166 A Concise History of Russia

The government’s treatment of the Petrashevskii group differed

sharply from the general legality with which it had treated the
Decembrists twenty-four years earlier. After months of interroga-
tion, during which the accused were not informed of the charges
against them until very late, they were placed before a military court
though there were only a few officers among them. The court found
them guilty of plotting against the life of the tsar, of organizing a
secret society, and of planning a revolt. Only the last charge was
substantiated in the evidence, and only for some of the accused. The
point of the first charge, plotting to kill the tsar, was that it alone in
Russian law carried the death penalty. Thus forty of the defendants
were sentenced to death, including Petrashevskii and Dostoevskii.
They were then taken to the place of execution, and the first three
were tied to stakes before a firing squad. At that point, an officer
appeared with the announcement that the death sentences had all
been reduced to hard labor in Siberia, and the prisoners were taken
on the spot to the road east. This gratuitous piece of cruelty had
been part of the traditions of the monarchy – the clemency of the
tsar instead of death – but by 1849 this was out of place with the
culture of the times.
Thus Russia reached the middle of the century with autocracy
and serfdom intact, but there was ever-growing ferment under the
surface, both in society at large and among the ruling elite. Change
was inevitable, but Nicholas was immoveable. The downfall of his
system came from the area he considered his greatest success, foreign
policy.

Russia’s foreign policy was intimately bound up with its imperial

structure and its overall imperial aims. Along the Western boundary,
Russia was a status quo power; its only aim was to maintain control
over what it already held. In Finland and the Baltic provinces, this
aim was easily satisfied. Though Nicholas never called the Finnish
diet, the rest of the autonomous Finnish government remained in
place and built up the country, the new capital in Helsinki with its
modern university and other institutions. The Baltic provinces were
quiet as well, with a newly free peasantry and a combination of
imperial central and local noble government. The problem in the
west was Poland, for the 1815 Constitution provided for a diet, a
 The Pinnacle of Autocracy 167

Polish army, and a local government only generally subject to Rus-

sian control. Increasing conflict between Warsaw and St. Petersburg
and the impact of the July Revolution of 1830 in France led to an
uprising in November 1830 and a full-scale war. The Russian army
crushed the Polish revolt and Nicholas abolished the constitution,
retaining only the Polish legal system under Russian administra-
tors. Nicholas warned the Poles that they must give up the idea of
separate statehood. Eighteen years later the revolution in Germany
and Hungary brought the tsar back to the fray, for the Habsburgs,
defeated by the Hungarian rebels, called on him to rescue them.
Nicholas marched his army into Hungary, the first Russian mili-
tary expedition in Europe since 1814, and the Hungarians had to
surrender. Nicholas would pay dearly for this act of monarchical
solidarity.
In the south, Russia confronted a situation infinitely more compli-
cated if ultimately less dangerous. In Alexander’s reign Russia had
taken control of Georgia and then conquered Azerbaidzhan from
Iran. An Iranian attempt at revenge in 1826 led to a short war that
brought Russia a more defensible border that included the khanate
of Erevan, an Iranian vassal state on part of the territory of medieval
Armenia. After the end of the war in 1828 Russian policy varied in
each of these areas. The most obvious partner was the numerous
Georgian nobility, and the Russians set out to include them in the
empire’s elite. To do this, the new rulers first had to reorganize the
Georgian nobility along more “European” lines, abolishing the var-
ious types of dependency and vassalage within the nobility, making
all nobles equal. New schools appeared, with curricula the same
as Russian gymnasia, and the higher Georgian aristocracy entered
the elite schools in St. Petersburg. The viceroys of the Caucasus
even set up operas and introduced other European entertainments
and forms of sociability to Europeanize the “oriental” Georgians.
Russian rule affected the Armenians of Georgia as well. The small
Armenian nobility of Georgia acquired the same status as Russian
and Georgian nobles, and Russian administrators freed the largely
Armenian townspeople from serfdom. In the khanate of Erevan, as
in the Azeri khanates, most land belonged to the khans and now
came under the Russian state. Thus the peasantry continued on their
lands, paying taxes to the tsar rather than the khans, while much of
168 A Concise History of Russia

Muslim elite left for Iran. The khanate of Erevan was unique in all
the lands once under the Armenian kings, for on its territory was
the great monastery at Echmiadzin and the residence of the Kato-
likos (head) of the Armenian Church. The Russian administration
granted the Armenian Church, in spite of its dogmatic disagree-
ments with Orthodoxy, the right to maintain an extensive system
of schools under its own supervision, a privilege highly unusual
in the Russian empire. Even more important, the khanate in 1828
was only about twenty percent Armenian: most of the population
were Kurdish or Turkic nomads. Under Russian rule Armenians
from Ottoman and Iranian territories migrated to the Erevan area,
so that they formed a majority by the end of the century. In other
words, in Transcaucasia the Russian Empire once again relied on
the local nobility where it could find one, and in its absence on the
Armenian Church and the local notables of the Azeri towns.
Transcaucasia was fairly quiet once Russia established control.
The lands on the north slopes of the Caucasus range, however,
were another story. The North Caucasus was the domain of a series
of semi-nomadic mountain peoples, the most important of whom
were the Circassians and the many tribes of Dagestan. Starting
in 1817 the Russian army began to build new lines of forts and
move south toward the high mountains, encountering continuous
resistance from the Circassians. Around 1830 the center of warfare
shifted east to Dagestan, to the Murids, the “disciples” of a purified
Islam. In 1834 the Avar warrior Shamil became their leader, taking
the war against the Russians into Chechnia and the northern parts of
Dagestan while conflict with the Circassians still continued farther
west. By the outbreak of the Crimean War in 1853 the Russian
army had pushed Shamil into his stronghold in the high mountains
of Dagestan, but had subdued neither him nor the Circassians. This
was not a war of great engagements and Russia never had more than
60,000 troops in the entire area before 1856. It was a guerilla war of
raids and counter-raids, of kidnapping and the siege of small remote
forts and villages. In many ways its importance came not from local
events but from its proximity to the main front of Russian foreign
policy, the Ottoman Empire.
In the eighteenth and early nineteenth century the Ottoman
Empire had been the main direction of Russian expansion. By the
 The Pinnacle of Autocracy 169

time of the Greek revolt of 1821, however, Russian policy faced

a number of dilemmas. The new Russian boundaries in the West
created the need to defend a vast expanse that had few roads and no
natural defenses along the frontier. Russia had an army of 800,000
men – the largest army in Europe – but most of it was deployed
on the western border and could not be easily moved south in case
of war. Further territory in the Balkans would be very far away
from Russia’s home bases and even more difficult to control and
defend. Prudence dictated a stationary policy and the maintenance
of existing boundaries in the south. At the same time, the Christian
subjects of the Turks were becoming increasingly restive, and all of
them were Orthodox, potential allies in any imaginable conflict. Yet
they were also influenced by the political events in Western Europe
and the Greek rebels imagined their future under some type of con-
stitutional monarchy, anathema to both Alexander and Nicholas.
Russia could also not afford to let the Ottoman Empire collapse,
for it was not the only power interested in the area. France had long
possessed major commercial interests in the eastern Mediterranean
and in 1830 began the conquest of Algeria. Even more serious was
British rivalry, for Britain, completing the conquest of India, had
become the first world superpower and considered itself privileged
to dictate the shape of the world wherever it chose. The Anglo-
Russian rivalry began to turn into a long-standing conflict, an early
“cold war” that lasted until 1907. A collapse of the Ottomans
could lead to British or French control of the Balkans, so Nicholas
preferred to maintain a weak neighbor under Russian influence,
rather like Catherine’s policy toward Poland before 1788.
In this situation Russia tried to work with its potential rivals.
Britain agreed to help the Greeks and an Anglo-Russian naval force
sank the Turkish fleet at Navarino (1827). Turkey then declared
war on Russia, and in 1828–29 the Russian army moved into the
Balkans, going nearly to Constantinople. The resultant treaty forced
Turkey to recognize Greek independence and autonomy for Serbia
and the Rumanian principalities. Russian influence in Turkey now
seemed predominant, a situation that was not to the liking of either
France or Britain. For the time being the rise of Mohammed Ali in
Ottoman Egypt and his establishment of a de facto independent state
were more important as they threatened the collapse of the whole
170 A Concise History of Russia

empire. Thus Russia supported Britain against France in 1840 to

uphold the Ottoman Sultan against his subject in Egypt. For one last
time Russian and British interests in the Ottoman Empire coincided.
A new element entered the scene with the 1848 revolutions in
Europe, for Louis Napoleon was elected president of the new French
republic. He soon proclaimed himself emperor as Napoleon III, and
set out to restore the grandeur of France as it had been under the rule
of his great uncle. He also needed the support of Catholic conserva-
tives in France who were loyal to the Bourbons and suspicious of the
Bonapartes. Looking for areas to affirm French power, Napoleon
III elevated an obscure dispute over the control of the holy places
in Palestine between Catholics and Orthodox into a major inter-
national issue. Nicholas was contemptuous of Napoleon III and
slow to recognize the seriousness of British interests in the Ottoman
Empire. Thus he presented the Turks with an ultimatum early in
1853 that led to war.
The Crimean War was actually rather inglorious for most of the
participants. Though the Russian Black Sea fleet destroyed the Turk-
ish navy at Sinop right at the start, it was no match for the British
and French navies. The Russian army did well against the Turks
in Asia Minor, but in the Crimea it was pushed back and forced to
defend the main base at Sevastopol. The Russian Black Sea fleet had
to be sunk to close the harbor to enemy ships. Russia had massive
forces in theory but could not get them to the Crimea quickly and
could not release enough of them in any case with long frontiers to
defend. Obsolete weapons further complicated their task.
In spite of these obstacles, the Russian army and navy managed
to hold Sevastopol for 349 days under intense bombardment. The
Anglo-French forces were able to beat off Russian attempts to
relieve the siege albeit with numerous catastrophes of which the
charge of the Light Brigade was only the most famous. Sanitation
and medical care were appalling on both sides, relieved only by
the English hospitals reorganized by Florence Nightingale and the
surgical work of the great Russian surgeon Nikolai Pirogov. As the
slaughter continued at Sevastopol, the British navy tried to penetrate
Russian defenses in the Baltic, but, frustrated by the powerful Rus-
sian fortresses at Sveaborg and Kronstadt, all it could do was burn
 The Pinnacle of Autocracy 171

Finnish coastal towns and capture the unfinished fort at Bomar-

sund in the Aland Islands. Other British ships attacked Russian
monasteries in the White Sea and even tried to take Petropavlovsk
in Kamchatka. A squad of Cossacks beat them off.
During the war Austria’s open support of Russia’s enemies sur-
prised Nicholas in view of his actions in 1849 and contributed to
Russia’s diplomatic isolation. Normally friendly Prussia took an
ambiguous position. Then in February, 1855, Nicholas I died. In
September 1855, Sevastopol fell after the French army took the
Malakhov kurgan, the heights overlooking the city, and in Novem-
ber the key Turkish fort of Kars in Asia Minor fell to the Russians.
These events and the death of Nicholas set the stage for a peace
conference in Paris, which ended the war.
As a military defeat, the outcome was hardly catastrophic for
the Russians. Russia agreed to give up its claim of a legal right
to protection of the Orthodox subjects of the Sultan, to give up its
Black Sea fleet (in any case at the bottom of Sevastopol harbor), and
to surrender a small strip of land on the Danube delta to Rumania.
Only the second was a major concession, and naturally Russia made
it its eventual aim to acquire the right to rebuild the fleet. For
the time being there were more pressing issues, for the real defeat
was in the revelation that the system of Nicholas I had failed to
preserve Russia’s position as supreme land power in Europe that
seemed guaranteed in 1815. The huge army could not move, it was
too expensive for the treasury and its cost meant that it could not
be modernized. Serfdom prevented the army from going over to
a reserve system, as no one wanted serfs with military training.
Nicholas’ army, his navy, and the state that maintained them had
failed. This was the signal for reform, the most basic upheaval in
Russian life between the time of Peter the Great and 1917.
 10
Culture and Autocracy

One of the ironies of the reign of Nicholas I is that his unrelent-

ing autocracy presided over the first great age of Russian culture.
Nicholas realized to some extent the growing importance of Rus-
sian culture and the extremely high level it achieved in a short time,
but he was more concerned to direct it in the proper conservative
channels than to celebrate it. He abrogated the more tolerant cen-
sorship system of Alexander I in favor of one with the emphasis
on combating subversion in religion and politics while retaining the
paternalistic aspects of the older laws. The new structure remained
under the Ministry of Education, but included a greater role for the
bureaucracy and the more ominous Third Section. Its head, Alexan-
der von Benckendorff, exercised erratic and arbitrary authority over
publications while clumsily trying to encourage the appearance of
pro-government material. Even with writers and artists well dis-
posed toward the state, this policy was largely a failure, for Russian
society was beginning to grow away from court and state tutelage,
a process too fundamental for the actions of the tsar to stop. Some
of the changes were even the result of state policy, particularly
the support of the universities and the gymnasia, which produced
a much larger and educated public, eager for the products of the
new Russian culture. Another factor was the growth of commercial
capitalism, which gradually brought into being a market for books
and journals, concentrated in Petersburg and Moscow but slowly
spreading to the provinces as well.

172
 Culture and Autocracy 173

The cultural explosion took place in a number of areas. Painting

and the visual arts remained largely bound to the Academy of Fine
Arts in St. Petersburg and thus indirectly to the court and its network
of patronage. The Academy continued to favor large historical, clas-
sical, and Biblical canvases over the increasingly popular landscape
and genre painting. It continued to supply paintings for official
building projects like St. Isaac’s Cathedral in St. Petersburg, or the
Church of Christ the Savior in Moscow. Nevertheless the Academy
also offered for its students and graduates some possibility of travel
and long residence in Italy, and many painters and sculptors took
advantage of the opportunity. Karl Briullov, the best of the academy
painters, returned from Italy and obtained many contracts for the
decoration of churches and palaces as well as acquiring court and
aristocratic patrons. Alexander Ivanov, in contrast stayed in Italy
to avoid the halls of the Academy and fell under the influence of
German romantic painting in its religious guise (the “Nazarenes”).
The main result of his Italian years was an enormous painting,
“Christ Appearing to the People,” which showed Nazarene influ-
ence but rejected the pseudo-medievalism of the Germans to depict
the people whom Christ saved rather than a hieratic portrait of the
Savior. Ivanov’s innovations seem minor today, but in the world of
Nicholas I he had a great impact.
Music, especially opera and ballet, remained to a large extent
within the court sphere. Catherine had built an opera theater in
1783 outside the palace to provide public access to the perfor-
mances, and it quickly became the center of operatic and social life.
The court did not let go of the opera, however, for the Ministry
of the Court acquired control over all theaters in 1802. Thus the
repertory of the Petersburg theaters was the result of the taste of
the Ministry’s officials and even of the tsar himself. Originally
Alexander I had set up four opera companies – Italian, French,
German, and Russian – according to the language of the libretto and
the singers, more than the nationality of the composer. The Italian
company soon faded out, leaving the French company dominant
until 1811, when it was closed in the patriotic atmosphere leading
up to the war with Napoleon. The German and Russian companies
continued, performing Italian operas as well as German with
174 A Concise History of Russia

translated librettos. The Russian opera company could present only

a few original works and relied largely on the European repertory.
Instrumental music flourished outside of state sponsorship, as
much of Russian musical culture in these years was the product
of aristocratic amateurs and private societies. The court banker
Alexander Rall helped found the St. Petersburg Philharmonic Soci-
ety in 1801 and the aristocrat V. V. Engelhardt’s concert hall on
Nevskii Prospect provided much needed performance space for a
generation. In the salon of the Russian-Polish Counts Mikhail and
Matvei Wielhorski, Russian and foreign musicians met, played, and
made the personal contacts that took Russian music forward. Count
Matvei (1794–1866) was a superb cellist who earned praise from
Hector Berlioz, and his brother Mikhail (1788–1856) was not only
a gifted performer but a composer as well. Both brothers had stud-
ied with Luigi Cherubini in Paris in their youth, returned to Russia
and eventually received high positions at the tsar’s court. The Wiel-
horski house stood on the same square as the palace of Grand Duke
Michael, where his wife Elena Pavlovna held her own musical and
political salon. The Philharmonic Society and the salons brought
most of European music to Russia – Mozart and Beethoven being
particular favorites of the Wielhorskis. Count Mikhail even per-
formed Beethoven’s first seven symphonies at his wife’s country
estate with an orchestra composed of their own and their neigh-
bors’ serfs. Later on it was Count Matvei who introduced the young
Anton Rubinstein to Elena Pavlovna, a meeting that was to bear
fruit in later years.
With no professional conservatory yet in existence in Russia,
musicians relied on private teachers and trips to Europe for their
training. Out of this semi-amateur musical world came Russia’s first
major composer, Mikhail Glinka (1804–1857). After some training
in Italy, Glinka wrote a patriotic and very monarchist opera, A Life
for the Tsar, first performed in 1836. The story was the suggestion
of the poet Zhukovskii, who also found a librettist in Baron G. F.
Rosen, a Baltic German turned Russian writer who also tutored
the heir to the throne, the future Alexander II. The Wielhorskis
and other aristocratic patrons of the arts provided rehearsal space.
There was some quibbling from the director of the imperial the-
aters, but the support of Zhukovskii and the Counts Wielhorski,
 Culture and Autocracy 175

given their positions at the court, meant that any objections were
ultimately irrelevant. The opera’s premiere enjoyed an authentic
success. Glinka’s success did not, however, inaugurate a new age for
Russian opera, for in 1843 Nicholas I was entranced and delighted
by a traveling Italian company. He immediately hired them as a
permanent troupe and gave them the facilities of the Russian opera
company, which moved to Moscow. The result was two decades of
brilliant performances of Bellini, Rossini, Donizetti, and their lesser
contemporaries in St. Petersburg while Russian opera languished.
If music and theater remained tied to the court, Russian litera-
ture began to emancipate itself with the spectacular brilliance of the
first wave of Russian writers, Alexander Pushkin, Nikolai Gogol,
Mikhail Lermontov, and the critic Vissarion Belinskii as well as
numerous lesser but still highly skilled writers and critics. Eman-
cipation from the court coincided with the emergence of Russian
literature as a mature and original literature, the first contribution
of Russia to the culture of the world. The emergence of Russian
literature also brought to the fore the old issue of Russia and the
West in a new form. This issue had lain dormant in the eighteenth
century, when Russia’s cultural products were heavily imitative of
Western models in form and content. Now a vibrant and origi-
nal Russian literature, even as it followed Western trends and used
them, had created a peculiarly Russian culture, one that was part
of Western literature but not identical with it. The old question of
Russia and the West now had a major cultural component.
Such a spectacular debut could not have been easily predicted
in 1820, so closely had Russian literature continued to follow its
European models. It was competent, occasionally inspired, but ulti-
mately modest in achievement. In the early years of the nineteenth
century the leading figures were Nikolai Karamzin, who had turned
his attention to Russian history after 1803, and Vasilii Zhukovskii.
Zhukovskii had a marvelous way with language, and his poetry
remains to this day part of the heritage of Russian verse, but his
best works were translations of the German and English poetry
popular in the Romantic era – Goethe and Gottfried Bürger, Sir
Walter Scott and Thomas Campbell. Through Zhukovskii Euro-
pean Romanticism came to Russia. To be sure, Karamzin and
Zhukovskii were creating an audience for Russian literature that
176 A Concise History of Russia

began to spread beyond the court and the capital cities, but it was
an uphill battle. The Russian nobility, especially after the found-
ing of the universities and gymnasia under Alexander, was much
better educated than before, but it also knew French even better
than before and often better than Russian. The main reading matter
of many gentry families was French novels, and the latest fash-
ionable novel in Paris was widely read in St. Petersburg in a few
weeks. The numbers of the educated public were still small, and
thus Karamzin’s and Zhukovskii’s journals, with their selection of
new Russian poetry and prose among articles on history or occa-
sionally politics, were thin small-format volumes with a circulation
that rarely went much beyond a thousand copies. In this situation
writers needed the patronage of court and state to survive. Much
verse circulated in aristocratic drawing rooms, in the notebooks of
young men and women, and only in manuscript, even when it had
no political content. Zhukovskii came to play a key role. Already the
most prominent poet of the age, he took up a position at the court
teaching Russian to Nicholas I’s Prussian wife Alexandra and then
in 1819 became the principal tutor to Nicholas’s son Alexander,
the future Tsar Alexander II. For the next two decades Zhukovskii
continued to live in the Winter Palace and served as the main patron
for Russian literature and art.
Zhukovskii spotted Pushkin’s talents as early as 1815, when the
young poet was still a pupil at the Tsarskoe Selo Lycée. On leav-
ing the Lycée in 1817, Pushkin took a very junior position in the
Ministry of Foreign Affairs. Though he came from an ancient noble
family (his ancestors had served in the boyar duma of the Moscow
princes in the fourteenth century), his fortune was limited and the
tradition of government service meant that he, like other writers
of his generation, started out as an official. He also spent much
of his time carousing in the demi-monde of St. Petersburg with
his old Lycée comrades, and participating in a number of literary
societies (including Green Lamp and Arzamas). All of these groups
included many future Decembrists, though none of them thought
he was the type to be recruited for their revolutionary activities. To
be sure Pushkin was sympathetic to many of the political goals of
his friends, and occasionally wrote poems expressing these views,
which circulated in manuscript. These came to the attention of the
Special Section of the Ministry of the Interior early in 1820, and
 Culture and Autocracy 177

Pushkin was sent into exile to the south, first to Kishinev and then
to Odessa. A few weeks later his first major poem appeared in print,
a fairy tale called “Ruslan and Liudmila”.
In the next decade, one of the most remarkable in the history
of Russian culture, Pushkin published poem and after poem: “The
Prisoner of the Caucasus” from the events of the Caucasian Wars,
“The Fountain of Bakhchisarai” with its Crimean background,
“The Gypsies,” “Poltava” from Ukrainian history in the time of
Peter the Great, and others. From his reading of Shakespeare he
was moved to write a verse drama, “Boris Godunov,” a tragedy
of ambition and power that served as the basis for Modest Mus-
sorgskii’s later opera. Pushkin’s masterpiece was the novel in verse
Evgenii Onegin. On the surface the story of a bored young noble-
man’s flirtation with Tatiana, a country girl brought up on French
novels, it provided a portrait of Russian gentry society. Onegin
emerges as a man with no purpose in life, neither a career nor an
absorbing occupation, well educated in European culture but con-
tributing nothing to the Russia around him. In contrast Tatiana,
for all her girlish naivité, is the deeper and stronger character, the
prototype of many of the women in Russian literature. The book
had phenomenal success and later Tchaikovsky was to turn it into
his own greatest opera. The echoes of European Romanticism were
apparent in almost all these works, but Pushkin was no imitator,
alongside the echoes from his reading was a powerful melody all
his own.
Pushkin’s astonishing creativity was not alone. The decade saw
an explosion of Russian poetry and a gradual transformation of
the audience. Normal commercial publication was still barely prof-
itable, but innovative booksellers found a new genre, the almanach.
Small format volumes with fancy bindings and paper, they were
designed as New Year’s presents, especially for young ladies. They
normally included only Russian authors with few translations, all
of them new. Poets competed to be published in them, and they
were guaranteed an audience, for part of the appeal of the format
was that they could be easily carried in a lady’s purse. In aristocratic
drawing rooms the French novel now had a competitor.
In 1824 Pushkin received permission to return to his estate near
Pskov, south of St. Petersburg, but not to the capitals. The Decem-
brist revolt complicated his attempts to restore his position, and the
178 A Concise History of Russia

newly founded Third Section sent agents to observe him. They were
particularly concerned to discover if he talked to the peasantry, and
about what. Their findings were meager: the worst they could dis-
cover was that he wore a straw hat and a Russian traditional shirt
with a pink sash around it. The point was that his dress could be
construed as an attempt to mix with the people to stir up revolu-
tion, but his neighbors reported that he never talked about politics
or even went out much. Finally Pushkin, with encouragement from
Zhukovskii, appealed directly to tsar Nicholas, who granted him an
interview in Moscow in 1826. After a long conversation, Nicholas
agreed to end the exile, to allow Pushkin back to St. Petersburg, and
to help him with his problems with the censorship. Henceforth his
censor would be the tsar himself.
Pushkin returned to the capital still closely observed by the
authorities, but also with the court title of kammerjunker and a
direct relationship to the tsar and to the head of the Third Section,
Benckendorf himself. Pushkin chafed at Benckendorf’s philistinism,
but he admired Nicholas and remained loyal to the monarchy, if crit-
ical of its officials and many of its policies. He received an official
appointment as historian and wrote a history of the Pugachev rebel-
lion as well as a novella on the same subject, The Captain’s Daugh-
ter. Pushkin even borrowed money through the Third Section, and
eventually received permission to found a journal, The Contem-
porary. This was in part a commercial venture, for the economic
circumstances of literature were rapidly changing. In 1834 the Pol-
ish conservative turned Russian writer Osip Senkovskii founded the
Library for Reading, which quickly outsold any other Russian jour-
nal with its thick issues that contained a mixture of light fiction,
serious literature, non-fiction, and much chitchat from the editor
himself. Pushkin was hoping to move into this market while offer-
ing more sophisticated material for the reader when fate intervened.
Pushkin had married a woman of great beauty, limited intelli-
gence and depth, and great social ambitions. Her life centered on
the houses of the great aristocracy, the court and its entertainments,
its balls and intimate gatherings, which she attended as lady-in-
waiting to the empress. There she met Georges-Charles D’Anthès,
a young Alsatian-French nobleman serving in the Russian guards, a
monarchist refugee from the French revolution of 1830. Adopted as
 Culture and Autocracy 179

a son by the Dutch ambassador Baron van Heeckeren, he revolved

in the highest society and was utterly unscrupulous. He began a flir-
tation with Natalia Pushkina (how serious it was remains unclear to
this day), and in November 1836, Pushkin received an anonymous
letter that asserted the flirtation to be a real affair. He challenged
D’Anthès to a duel, but Zhukovskii and others managed to patch up
the quarrel. It erupted again a few months later and on January 27,
1837, it ended in a duel. In the snow on the outskirts of St. Peters-
burg the two opponents faced each other and D’Anthès fired first.
Fatally wounded and bleeding profusely, Pushkin raised himself on
his elbow and fired, but only inflicted a slight wound. His second
brought him home where Zhukovskii got the best doctors in the
city, those who treated the tsar, but they could do nothing. Pushkin
sent a message to Nicholas, asking him for forgiveness (dueling
was a crime) and Nicholas granted it, but advised him to take the
last rites like a Christian, and promised to take care of his family.
Count Mikhail Wielhorski, the poet Prince Peter Viazemskii, and
Zhukovskii visited and stayed with him until he died. D’Anthes was
expelled from Russia, and went on to a long career in his native
France. Nicholas paid Pushkin’s debts and took care of his family
and Natalia soon remarried.
Pushkin’s death was a huge event in the history of Russian culture,
soon mythologized into martyrdom at the hands of an unfeeling
aristocracy and court, but his death was the result of his deep roots
in precisely that milieu. Though most of the later Russian writers
were still noblemen, none were as much part of the court circle as
was Pushkin. The closest to Pushkin’s social position was the poet
Mikhail Lermontov, also a nobleman but without distinguished
ancestors like Pushkin’s. His political views were not really radical,
but his poetic reaction to Pushkin’s death earned him a transfer
to the Caucasus, the scene of his greatest work, A Hero of Our
Time. An interconnected series of stories, the book’s hero Pechorin
is a sort of Onegin, this time serving in the army in the Caucasus
but again placed between European education and the limits of
Russian reality. On Lermontov’s return to St. Petersburg in 1838
he, too, frequented aristocratic salons if not the court, and as if
repeating Pushkin’s fate, got into a duel over a woman with the son
of the French ambassador. The duel ended in reconciliation, but
180 A Concise History of Russia

Lermontov was sent back to the Caucasus. There he met his end in
yet another duel in July 1841.
Pushkin and Lermontov were typical of the writers of their age
though far more talented. Both noblemen, with many friends and
relatives in the court, the government, and the army, they lived as did
the men of their social rank. They were present at the great social
events of the capital and spent much of their time playing cards,
drinking, hunting, and occasionally visiting their country estates.
The next generation of writers, though also noblemen, lacked the
connections at court and experienced St. Petersburg less as the home
of the court than as a great modern city.
The first of this new generation to emerge was Nikolai Gogol’.
Gogol’ was the son of a provincial Ukrainian landowner, and on his
father’s side even the noble ancestry was rather recent. He attended
the lycée in nearby Nezhin, an institution of the highest educa-
tional quality but lacking the connections with the court and the
high aristocracy of Pushkin’s school in Tsarskoe Selo. On grad-
uation the young Gogol’ found a position in St. Petersburg at a
school for the daughters of military officers. His livelihood came
from the school and soon from his writings after his first great
success, a series of comic stories from Ukrainian life, Evenings on
a Farm near Dikan’ka. Gogol’ eventually met Pushkin, who pub-
lished some of his stories, and Zhukovskii, who appreciated his
talent but never played the role of patron with Gogol’ that he had
in other cases. Gogol’ was something of a loner, and at first he did
not need Zhukovskii’s patronage. There was already enough variety
of outlets for his work and they paid enough to keep him going.
Nevertheless, the Russian market was still too narrow to provide
more than a modest living and Gogol’s poor health left him vulner-
able. The solution found by Zhukovskii and others of his friends
after 1840 was a series of direct grants from the tsar himself, one of
the last examples of court patronage of literature. Nicholas I liked
most of the work done by Gogol’, and the grants came regularly
until the writer’s death.
Gogol’ brought new themes into Russian literature. His stories of
St. Petersburg, often fantastic and grotesque, introduced an urban
theme into Russian literature that was previously absent. The cap-
ital was growing, both because of the expansion of the central
 Culture and Autocracy 181

bureaucracy and because of the city’s role as a port and an indus-

trial center. The St. Petersburg that Gogol’ knew was the city of
the impoverished clerk and the lonely wanderer in a vast and cold
mass of huge buildings, not the city of glittering balls and brilliant
salons. The heroes of these stories were such little people as the
clerk in “The Overcoat,” but St. Petersburg also inspired the fan-
tastic strain in his writing, with stories such as “The Nose,” in which
the nose of a minor bureaucrat leaves his face and roams around
the city in a carriage wearing an official uniform.
Gogol’ remained all his life the product of the Ukrainian
provinces, deeply religious, nationalistic, and conservative in his
political views. He took the conservative ideal for Russia seriously
and realized that the reality was different. His first play, “The
Inspector General” of 1836, was a scathing satire of provincial
life and official corruption. Poorly performed at first, it was not a
success until much later, though it showed the direction in which he
was heading. Nicholas I liked it, as he saw himself struggling with
the corruption and incompetence of the Russian bureaucracy, and
found an echo of that effort in the play. His greatest work, the novel
Dead Souls (1842), was a picaresque account of the adventures of
a swindler traveling through provincial Russia. Again Gogol’ saw
Russia’s shortcomings from the point of view of a conservative
ideal of autocracy and Orthodoxy, but it was a sign of the times
that reaction to the novel divided very much along ideological lines.
The pro-government conservatives Bulgarin and Senkovskii hated
it. More independent conservatives, the Slavophiles, and the West-
ernizer Vissarion Belinskii loved it, but for different reasons. The
Slavophiles saw it as an apotheosis of Russia and its mystical future,
while Belinskii praised it for its unvarnished portrayal of Russia’s
present.
The debate over Dead Souls was a harbinger of the future: litera-
ture was fast becoming a battleground of political and cultural ideol-
ogy. It was changing in other respects, for Zhukovskii left for Europe
in 1842 in search of better health and never returned to Russia. He
had no replacement at the court, and Russian literature no longer
had a patron with the ear of the tsar himself. By the 1840s the “fat
journals” pioneered by Senkovskii and Pushkin fought lively and
vituperative battles over Gogol’, Lermontov, Goethe, and Georges
182 A Concise History of Russia

Sand. The most powerful of the younger writers was Fyodor Dos-
toevskii, whose early works took up the thread of Gogol’ in his
Petersburg stories, with his own tales of impoverished seamstresses
and other little people of the great metropolis. The commanding
figure of the decade in criticism was the critic Vissarion Belinskii,
the main spokesman of the Westernizers.
Belinskii came to be seen in Russia as the archetypical “commit-
ted” critic who judged works of art by largely utilitarian standards
and by their significance for the reformation of Russian society. This
judgment placed him in the straightjacket of the conceptions of a
later generation, for Belinskii’s view of art was essentially historical,
a view derived from his Hegelian youth. Belinskii got from Hegel
the idea that art was one of the many manifestations of the Idea
in history, alongside philosophy or the development of the state.
Art was, in his words, “thinking in images,” and thus was the equi-
valent of political or social thought in another form. Since the devel-
opment of the Idea in society was the progress of freedom, art in
Russia should reflect the movement of the country toward that ideal.
Art that did not was condemned to ultimate insignificance and was
considered bad art to boot. This theoretical framework gave him
a basis for his total rejection of older Russian culture, his qualified
approval of the eighteenth century, and his enthusiastic approval
of Pushkin, Lermontov and particularly Gogol’. In Gogol’ he saw a
relentless critic of the existing order of Russian society, the satirist
of nobility and state alike. His appreciation of Gogol’ was only
partly correct, for Gogol’s satire came from a conservative position
with a religious basis, the idea that Russia was not yet living up to
its potential to create a society profoundly different from the West.
Here Belinskii parted company with Gogol’ entirely, for the critic
was a firm Westernizer. To him Russian society was only acceptable
insofar as it approached the standard of an idealized West, a West
that itself needed to be transformed by the French utopian socialism
that became Belinskii’s credo.
The discussion of literature was to a large extent a discussion of
political and social issues that could not otherwise be aired in print.
Eventually they broke out into the open, or partly so. Gogol’s pub-
lication of his conservative manifesto, Selections from Correspon-
dence with Friends, in 1847 created huge controversies, muffled by
 Culture and Autocracy 183

censorship, for he seemed to be not just supporting the existing state

and church but losing faith in literature itself. Belinskii’s response,
the letter to Gogol’ in 1847, became a classic example of liberal
and radical thought in Russia for the next two generations. “The
public . . . looks upon Russian writers as its only leaders, defend-
ers, and saviors from the darkness of autocracy, Orthodoxy, and
nationality.” In Belinskii’s mind, “Russia sees her salvation not in
mysticism . . . but in the successes of civilization, enlightenment, and
humanity.” The Russia of his day needed to start with the abolition
of serfdom and corporal punishment and the establishment of legal
order. Belinskii’s life was perhaps as important as his views, for he
was the first important example of the Russian intelligentsia, the
educated stratum of society that took Russian culture out of the
hands of the nobility. Himself the grandson of a priest and the son
of a military doctor, he was only technically a noble because of
his father’s promotion in the army. He survived, and survived very
poorly on his income from his articles and editiorial work in the
journals where he published, most importantly The Contemporary,
originally Pushkin’s journal and a publication that would have a
remarkable future.
Belinskii’s literary tastes and views pointed to the future in other
ways. One of his early friendships was with Ivan Turgenev, again
a writer of noble origins and some wealth. Turgenev had come to
Moscow from his provincial estate and made acquaintance with the
Stankevich circle that included Herzen and Bakunin, whom Tur-
genev came to know better when he studied in Berlin. On his return
to Russia in 1841 Turgenev became close friends with Belinskii,
a friendship that lasted until the critic’s death in 1848. Turgenev
shared Belinskii’s support of Western culture and his critical view
of Russia, if not the critic’s radicalism. The great event of Turgenev’s
youth was his meeting with the Spanish opera singer Pauline Garcia-
Viardot in 1843, who came to St. Petersburg as one of the stars of
the Italian company that was to have a major effect on Russian
opera. The passion seems to have been mainly on Turgenev’s side,
but it unlocked his creative powers. In his middle thirties he found
his voice, first in his play “A Month in the Country,” and then in his
series of stories of rural life, A Hunter’s Sketches (1847–1852). The
Sketches, with their portraits of eccentric and domineering nobles
184 A Concise History of Russia

and their very human (but unsentimentalized) serfs, caused a sensa-

tion. Turgenev’s were the not the first attempts to describe the life
of the peasantry, but they were both the most effective by far and
under their mild surface they conveyed the poverty and humiliation
in which the great mass of the Russian people, the peasants, lived.
The son of a despotic and sadistic mother who mistreated her serfs
as well as her children, Turgenev knew what it meant to live under
arbitrary power. The publication of such work in the darkest period
of the reign of Nicholas was a major act of civil courage, but ironi-
cally it was not the Sketches that earned him his first brush with the
authorities.
In 1852, just as the publication of the Hunter’s Sketches was
proceeding, Gogol’ died. Turgenev had been acquainted with Gogol’
but was not a close friend. As a fellow writer, however, he admired
him intensely, and was so moved by his death that he quickly wrote
a short essay about Gogol’ and his significance for Russia and its
literature. In St. Petersburg the publisher was afraid it would not
pass censorship for there were many conservative officials who did
not share the tsar’s approval of Gogol’. Turgenev sent the essay to
Moscow, where it was approved and appeared in print. Turgenev
was then arrested for violating the censorship rules, a charge that
was legally dubious, but convincingly presented to Nicholas by the
Third Section. The punishment was a month in prison followed
by exile to his estate, time that he used to write another novella.
The incident only confirmed Turgenev’s oppositional attitude to the
autocracy.

Turgenev was extremely sensitive to the trends of Russian society

and thought and his stories of peasant life prefigured by only a few
years the great debate over serfdom that erupted after the Crimean
War. He was also aware of another trend in Russian culture, the
turn away from philosophy, German or otherwise, toward a fas-
cination with the natural sciences, a trend that would also come
to the surface only after Crimea. This fascination did not grow in
sterile soil, for the universities founded under Alexander I were fully
equipped with faculties of the natural sciences. Until the middle of
the nineteenth century they competently taught the achievements
of European science adding nothing of importance to that body
 Culture and Autocracy 185

of learning, with one enormous exception: mathematics. In 1829–

30, the same years as the publication of Pushkin’s Evgenii Onegin,
Nikolai Lobachevskii inaugurated a revolution in geometry in a
series of articles in the official journal of the University of Kazan’,
where he taught and eventually became rector. Lobachevskii’s idea
was very simple: all geometry since the time of Euclid had included
the assumption that two parallel lines do not meet. Suppose you
reverse the assumption: what sort of geometry would you construct?
This Lobachevskii proceeded to do, a discovery so bizarre that it
earned him no recognition in his lifetime. Europeans with similar
ideas, Christian Gauss and the young Hungarian Janos Bolyai, had
never developed them, for Gauss thought them too odd to publish.
He did not want to risk his own reputation and discouraged Bolyai
from taking steps to make his suggestions better known. It was left
to Lobachevskii, in the obscurity of provincial Russia, to work out
the notion. Unknown to almost everyone, Russia had its first major
scientific discovery, but Russian science would not come into its
own until the 1860s, and it would be Turgenev who would bring
science and its implications to the public for the first time. The new
fascination with the natural sciences also brought a new current of
thought into Russian radical politics.
 11
The Era of the Great Reforms

Russia’s defeat in the Crimean War caused a tremendous political

shock in the country. It was not the scale of the defeat but its rev-
elation of the weakness of a political system that prized its unique
conservatism on the European scene and its supposed military might
above all. It was the autocracy that was defeated, all the more so
because the long siege of Sevastopol demonstrated to many Russians
that the army still had the spirit to fight, a spirit hampered by the
backwardness of society and government. Russia’s backwardness
was not only the result of the slow evolution of economy and soci-
ety under the tutelage of Tsar Nicholas. The greatest problem was
that the world was changing very quickly in the middle years of the
nineteenth century, and the most rapid changes were taking place
in Great Britain, Russia’s primary imperial rival. Railroads were
transforming the landscape in all of Western Europe and the United
States, building on and stimulating the rapid modernization of iron
and steel production, thereby raising output to new heights. Besides
railroads, all sorts of machines came into existence – improved
steam engines, telegraph equipment, and huge metal-hulled ships.
Britain and other powers imported increasing amounts of food and
raw materials from colonies and distant countries in the Western
hemisphere, sending out masses of cotton and wool cloth, machin-
ery, and innumerable consumer goods. Society evolved to support
all this growth, with high-speed presses to produce daily newspa-
pers and rapidly expanding educational systems to produce engi-
neers, lawyers, politicians, and an educated public to use the new
186
 The Era of the Great Reforms 187

products. In this new world, Russia was lagging behind. The reform-
ers in the government realized all this and saw that Russia needed
the new production techniques and a new economy simply to sur-
vive as a major power. They also realized that technology alone
was not enough: Tsar Nicholas had built railroads, but had not suc-
ceeded in transforming the Russian economy. Russia would need a
new legal system, a modernized and expanded educational system,
and even some forms of public discussion of major issues. What
Russia could not stand, the reformers believed, was a new political
system. Most of them admired the emerging constitutional regimes
in Europe, but believed that Russia was far too primitive with its
illiterate peasantry, outmoded agriculture, and thin layer of edu-
cated people. Such a society could not sustain a free, constitutional
government. For the foreseeable future, it would have to remain an
autocracy.

With the death of Tsar Nicholas in February 1855, a new regime

came to power with his son Alexander. Alexander II would preside
over the greatest changes in Russia since the time of Peter the Great –
changes that brought the country into the modern world, hesitantly
and only partially, but nevertheless across the threshold toward
industrial capitalism and the beginnings of a modern urban society.
The new tsar was as often against as for these changes, and had
to be pushed all the way, but nevertheless he did allow himself to
be convinced and to make the decisive moves. Ultimately the tsar
decreed the reforms, but like the reformers he intended to preserve
autocracy intact and keep society, even upper-class society, out of
political decisions. This was a difficult and ultimately impossible
goal, for Russian educated society emerged now for the first time as
a force in the political and social process, even if it was a force of
limited power. Its emergence, even if modest, was a revolution in
Russian politics and a revolution with wide implications.
At first the initiative for reform came from the government. Dur-
ing the Crimean War, however, Herzen and other émigré radicals
had raised their voices, and inside the country even conservatives
among the gentry and intelligentsia began to circulate memoranda
proposing reforms of various kinds. None of this had any effect,
as these groups were too small and had little echo even among the
188 A Concise History of Russia

educated sectors of the social elite. The situation changed with the
Peace of Paris in March 1856, which put an end to the war. The war
had revealed that the unreformed autocracy was no longer capable
of maintaining Russia’s position in the world, and would have to
develop a more modern economy. Serfdom was the main obstacle.
Soon after the signing of the peace, Tsar Alexander spoke to the
assembled gentry of the province of Moscow (that is, to much of
the top aristocracy) in his first major public pronouncement. The
mere fact of such a pronouncement was unusual and the content
even more so. He warned the nobles that the peasant question now
had to be addressed. It was much better, he told them, that it be
resolved from above than from below. In other words, the state had
to reform the countryside or the nobles would face a peasant revolt.
The virtually simultaneous relaxation of censorship meant that
the issues raised in the tsar’s speech as well as other pressing con-
cerns could now be addressed, albeit cautiously. Debate appeared
in unexpected places such as the publications of the Ministry of the
Navy, headed by the tsar’s more liberal brother, Grand Duke Kon-
stantin Nikolaevich. While Alexander’s government, or at least part
of it, was convinced of the need for reform, every step met oppo-
sition from conservatives within the corridors of power and also
from the gentry, who now could express their views publicly and
still had access to the court and the important ministries. The first
committee appointed by the tsar in January 1857, to deal with the
peasant questions was thus secret. The reformers in the government
showed their hand only at the end of the year, when the Ministry of
the Interior sent a memorandum to one of the provincial governors
ordering him to require the local gentry to form committees to pro-
vide suggestions on the emancipation of the serfs, its desirability,
and paths to achieve it. The Ministry published the memorandum
in its official printed register, and now the gentry and the educated
part of the population knew what was afoot.
Not surprisingly most noblemen were against the idea of eman-
cipation, and hoped that if it did come, all the land would remain
in the hands of the gentry. This would be a landless emancipation
like that earlier in the Baltic provinces, and peasants would have to
rent their land from the gentry or go to work as day laborers. The
government reformers did not like this idea, for they feared that it
 The Era of the Great Reforms 189

would produce a vast landless proletariat that would be the source

of endless revolts and upheavals. Instead the committee, blandly
called the “Editorial Committee,” proposed that the peasants be
freed with land, for which they would have to pay the landown-
ers, and furthermore they would have to pass through a period of
temporary obligation to the owners of the estates. The redemption
payments would be spread over sixty years, the state giving the
gentry a lump sum that the peasants were to repay to the treasury.
This plan evoked intense hostility among the gentry, who thought it
would undermine their livelihood and their place in Russian society.
Throughout 1859–60 battles raged in the committee, in government
ministries, and the court itself.
The reformers were a powerful and well-connected group. Much
of the responsibility fell on the Ministry of the Interior, whose vice-
minister was Nikolai Miliutin. Miliutin’s brother Dmitrii, a profes-
sor at the General Staff Academy and adjutant to the Minister of
War, had come to the attention of Grand Dutchess Elena Pavlovna,
and in the 1850s attended her “Thursdays,” the weekly gathering of
her friends and allies. In the new atmosphere, the Grand Dutchess’s
salon added political reform to its agenda, and Nikolai Miliutin, a
well-educated and progressive younger official, joined his brother
in the Grand Dutchess’s good graces. Both Miliutins had strong
reformist views, and Nikolai was appointed to the Editorial Com-
mittee on its inception. In the committee Nikolai Miliutin could
count on the support of its chairman, General Iakov Rostovtsev,
an officer whose career had not been in the field but in the role of
adjutant to Tsar Nicholas and who had been close to Alexander in
his years as heir to the throne. During the Crimean War he rather
unexpectedly became a strong reformer and exploited his access to
the new tsar to the fullest. Grand Duchess Elena also monitored the
progress of reform, and her network of informants at the palace
insured that the reformers knew who was trying to influence the
tsar and in what direction. Dmitrii Miliutin, after several years in
the Caucasus, in 1860 went on to head the Ministry of War. With
Grand Duke Konstantin Nikolaevich in charge of the Navy, both
military ministries as well the Minstry of the Interior were in the
reform camp. The reformers were a tightly interconnected group,
well educated, highly placed, and ready for action.
190 A Concise History of Russia

Figure 10. Alexander II and his dog Milord.

At the beginning of 1860 General Rostovtsev died suddenly, but

the committee continued its work moving on toward a reformist
solution. Then in September the tsar appointed his brother Kon-
stantin to chair the committee, and by that act ensured an outcome
 The Era of the Great Reforms 191

favorable to emancipation. The result was a swift conclusion to

support the original idea of emancipation with land for the peas-
ants on the basis of redemption payments, as the reformers had
proposed two years before. The proposal went to the Council of
State, the highest body of government, which debated the proposal
for several weeks. On February 17, it voted against the proposal.
The majority wanted more land for the gentry and the Council
sent the two opinions on to the tsar, the majority against and the
minority for emancipation with land for the peasants. The fate of
twenty million serfs hung in the balance, for Russia was an autoc-
racy, and the tsar had no obligation to accept the majority of the
Council of State, or the minority for that matter. After two days
of deliberation, Alexander II chose to accept the minority report
and signed the decree of emancipation. In the tsar’s mind, disaster
loomed if he went with the majority: the peasants should not be
made “homeless and harmful to the landowners as well as to the
state.” The government decided to wait until the beginning of Lent
to announce the decree, and it was read in churches everywhere in
the country beginning on March 5/17, 1861. The hope was that
the Lenten atmosphere would encourage a quiet response to the
decree among the people. Whatever the reason, there were only a
few minor disturbances among the peasantry.
The balance of power inside the government was the only thing
that really mattered, but the reformers also looked to societal sup-
port and in some sectors they found it. Early in 1856 the exiled
radical Herzen realized that reform was coming in Russia and he
decided to help it along. His first act was to use his base in Lon-
don to begin publishing a series of essays, Voices from Russia, that
provided background information and uncensored discussion of the
current problems. Herzen understood that his own views were too
extreme for most of his potential audience, so he found contributors
who were liberals rather than radicals, even quite moderate liber-
als. In 1857 he began to publish a monthly newspaper, Kolokol (the
Bell), which did reflect his own views, though in many cases he held
his fire to avoid alienating the readers. Both the essays and Kolokol
were smuggled into Russia and quickly became widely available.
The Third Section acquired copies and circulated them to high offi-
cials and even to the tsar himself. Herzen’s vivid prose and clear
192 A Concise History of Russia

perspective gave him popularity with many readers who did not
share his particular views, his peasant socialism, and his opposition
to autocracy. His was not the only voice heard, for the (at first tem-
porary) relaxation of censorship allowed newspapers and journals
to appear in increasing numbers. This new phenomenon was not
only a function of change in the censorship rules, for technological
innovations in printing now made daily newspapers possible for
the first time in Russia. They were, to a large extent, commercial
enterprises, and many of the editors learned to combine sale-ability
with liberal ideas. Newspapers whose editors were critical of the
authorities from a conservative point of view began to appear as
well. Many topics were beyond the pale, such as the personalities
and views of the tsar himself and the imperial family, but the editors
were able to find ways to discuss current issues and at the same time
present a mass of information on Russian life and on the affairs of
the world. In the conditions of wide debate over the reforms, even
a bare account of village life or a criminal trial could take on rele-
vance to the reform process. Detailed accounts of Western politics,
of English parliaments, French foreign policy, or even American
presidential elections offered Russian readers regular accounts of
political systems different from their own. The reformers inside the
state bureaucracy were not unhappy with these developments, as
the press allowed them to assess the degree of support or lack of
it for their actions, although they had no intention of following
suggestions from anyone outside the government. Much of their
effort went to keeping the gentry and the aristocrats from influenc-
ing opinion or the reform process, as they correctly believed the
nobility, high and low, to be mainly against reform. Thus the gov-
ernment reformers kept the government’s deliberations as secret as
they could.
Until the actual emancipation decree of 1861 the government,
however secretive, enjoyed the guarded support of emerging opin-
ion among the educated classes. After that moment tensions began
to arise between the government and the pro-reform wing of the
educated classes, for many of the liberals felt that the reforms did
not go far enough. At the same time the pro-reform elements of soci-
ety began to divide into moderate and radical wings. Herzen was
highly critical of the inadequacies of the emancipation, and his views
 The Era of the Great Reforms 193

contributed to the formation of a radical camp inside Russia. Most

liberals, the intelligentsia, and the liberal minority of the nobility,
continued to support the government and enthusiastically plunged
into the reform process, the nobles serving on local committees to
implement the reforms. Moreover, the government continued with
additional reforms, the next steps being the reform of the judiciary,
local government, and the army.
Other factors, however, complicated the politics of the reform.
In January 1861, there were a series of disturbances in Warsaw,
the first such manifestations of Polish discontent since the 1830
revolt. Tsar Alexander and the ministers sent Grand Duke Kon-
stantin Nikolaevich to Warsaw as viceroy with the hope that he
could manage a compromise that would introduce some reform
into Russian Poland and defuse discontent. The attempt was a fail-
ure, and a new revolt broke out in 1863. This revolt undermined
Grand Duke Konstantin’s authority in St. Petersburg, and he never
again played a major role. It also created a permanent split between
Herzen and the liberals, for Herzen supported the Polish effort and
the liberals came out for Russian national interest. Kolokol quickly
declined into insignificance. Fortunately for Russia the revolt was
largely a matter of small guerilla groups operating within the coun-
tryside, and in the western Ukrainian provinces the peasants even
joined the government troops against the rebels. By the end of 1864
Russian authorities had restored order in Poland, and in the mean-
time they even managed to decree two important measures for the
rest of the Empire, judicial reform and the establishment of a new
form of local government.
The new decrees established a series of local administrative
boards, the zemstvos, which were to take care of roads, bridges,
public schooling, health, and other matters of local concern. The
innovation was that the members of the boards were to be elected.
Most delegates to the zemstvos were noblemen, but the newly eman-
cipated peasantry was also regularly represented. Liberals correctly
complained that the zemstvos were too closely supervised by the
bureaucracy and lacked many of the powers needed to carry out
even their modest tasks. The provincial governors and the Ministry
of the Interior kept a close watch on the new institutions and had
the power to override their decisions. At the same time the zemstvos
194 A Concise History of Russia

took on an important role in Russian life, both for the practical

problems they addressed and as elected institutions. Whether the
government liked it or not, they became centers of modest politi-
cal activity and provided the local nobility with an outlet for their
energies and the experience of political and administrative activ-
ity. The zemstvos also employed large numbers of experts from
the intelligentsia, teachers, doctors, and statisticians, and this group
also became a force for the politicization of the zemstvos as time
went on. Ultimately the zemstvos became centers for liberal political
organization.
More radical were the judicial reforms. Nicholas I had codified
the laws, but the judicial system remained largely as Catherine II
had left it at the end of the eighteenth century. The judiciary was not
completely separated from administration, the judges lacked inde-
pendence and often legal training as well, and judicial procedure still
depended on written testimony. Proceedings were not public, and
the judges decided cases without a jury. The 1864 decree changed all
that, paradoxically giving Russia one of the most progressive judi-
cial systems in Europe. Trials were henceforth conducted in public
as an adversarial trial with both a public prosecutor and a defense
attorney. In the great majority of criminal cases the decisions on
guilt or innocence were made by a jury. The Ministry of Justice
appointed the judges, but they could not be removed except for
misbehavior. Overnight, Russia acquired a legal system up to Euro-
pean standards and a legal profession. Trials, criminal and civil,
became news and were reported in the newspapers, often at length.
Unfortunately this brilliant judicial system had to enforce laws that
were far from progressive in many areas from family law to com-
mercial matters, but the many areas of ambiguity in the legislation
allowed judges to reshape the law in a more modern direction. A
more basic flaw in the system was the continued existence of laws
allowing the state administration to issue various punishments out-
side the courts. The most notorious was the use of administrative
exile, by which the provincial governors and the Minster of the
Interior could sentence anyone they found problematic to exile (not
prison) for a number of years merely by decree. Liberal publicists
and zemstvo activists increasingly found themselves the target of
this practice.
 The Era of the Great Reforms 195

The other exception to the new system was the formation of a

separate court system for the peasants, the township courts. These
courts were to formalize the older informal village courts, with a
panel of judges elected from among the peasants and a clerk (often
the only literate person in the court) to record its actions. Peasants
were to settle all civil cases and minor crimes in these courts, which
worked not by the law of the state but by the customs of the villages
orally transmitted, or simply on the basis of “conscience.” Their
decisions could not be appealed to state courts. The township courts
often decided cases on the basis of the reputation of the plaintiff and
defendant, and the main punishment was flogging. This system kept
the peasantry separate from the rest of society, conserving the village
community and its values.
In the zemstvos and the new courts some part of the public finally
had a sphere of activity, even if it was not political activity. Even this
modest public sphere could not function easily without the press. In
April 1865, the government finally promulgated permanent censor-
ship laws. The statute itself was an amalgam of two contradictory
principles, both Western in origin. The new laws abolished prior
censorship that had been largely rendered unworkable by high-
speed presses and the new political situation, but retained penalties
for undermining respect for the state, the family, and religion. How
were these to be enforced? The statute provided for settling the main
issues in the new courts, which meant that the state would have to
bring a case to a trial open to the public. The attempts to control crit-
ical journalists by this method were a failure and soon abandoned,
for the courts either found the defendants innocent or if guilty,
imposed largely symbolic punishments. The state had recourse to
other methods, however, for the statute had taken censorship from
the Ministry of Education and placed it under the Ministry of the
Interior, the principal body in charge of preserving public order. The
statute had also borrowed from French legislation a whole series
of administrative measures including fines and warnings to editors
that allowed the authorities to bypass the court system. After the
initial failures in the court, these administrative sanctions tri-
umphed, including eventually the prohibition of specific works of
radical literature. The new censorship rules suppressed much public
debate, but were never intended to eliminate it entirely.
196 A Concise History of Russia

Perhaps the most complicated reform issue after the emancipation

of the serfs was that of the army. Minister of War Dmitrii Miliutin
made his first proposal in 1862, and though it was approved by
the tsar, it took until 1874 to be fully implemented. The core of
the proposal was the replacement of the twenty-five-year service
of the soldiers with a reserve system based on a limited term that
was ultimately determined at six years. The conservatives wanted
to keep the army a caste, in which peasants were made into sol-
diers commanded by nobles, while Miliutin saw such an army as
reactionary and slated to repeat the defeats of Crimea. He saw no
reason why free peasants could not serve and then return to their
villages to resume farming. It was his powerful will, and the tsar’s
determination to maintain an effective army, that kept the military
reform on track through many political vicissitudes.

Vicissitudes there were. Almost immediately with the appearance

of public discussion of reform in 1858–59 the debate went beyond
the parameters of government-sponsored liberal reform and conser-
vative resistance. Both liberals outside the bureaucracy and young
radicals began to present ideas that went far beyond what the min-
isters pondered behind the closed doors of government committees.
Much of the reason for the challenge lay in the transformation of
educated society, the formation of an intelligentsia defined by edu-
cation and profession – often of plebeian origin and unconnected
to the nobility. The core of the intelligentsia were the profession-
als – teachers, doctors, scientists, and engineers – but the term came
to include anyone with some sort of education beyond the basic
level, and of course it included students. Young men and (for the
first time) women, mostly in and around the universities rejected
not only state leadership but were also part of a new culture, for
this was the generation that abandoned the interest in German ide-
alist philosophy that had inspired Herzen and Bakunin as well as
many liberals, and turned instead to the natural sciences. Turgenev’s
1862 novel Fathers and Sons gave the term “nihilists” to this new
generation for their rejection of the pieties of the past. The accusa-
tion was that they believed in nothing (in Latin “nihil”). Ferment
began among the university students who had been granted a great
deal of freedom in the post-Crimean era. In the autumn of 1861 a
 The Era of the Great Reforms 197

number of rather minor disturbances at St. Petersburg University led

the authorities to close the university and begin to look for radical
activity there and at other universities and academies. Small groups
of radicals, no more than a few dozen individuals, also began to
spread revolutionary manifestoes, convincing the government that
vast plots were afoot. In most Russian university cities communes
of students with more or less radical ideas came into existence in
these years, partly for purely economic reasons but also from con-
viction that a simple communal life was the path to the future. The
students knew about Herzen and read widely in Western liberal and
radical literature, but their hero was Nikolai Chernyshevsky, whose
ideas continued to inspire radicals long after he was lost to Siberian
exile.
From the time of his emergence as a leading journalist in 1853,
in the pages of the Contemporary, still one of the leading journals,
Chernyshevsky had become the dominant intellectual and cultural
figure of the radical intelligentsia and remained so for nearly a gener-
ation. The son of a priest and the graduate of a seminary rather than
a secular high school, Chernyshevsky managed to enter St. Peters-
burg University, and ultimately acquired a master’s degree in liter-
ature. In the pages of the Contemporary, however, his writing cov-
ered far more than literature. He wrote on philosophy, economics,
and politics when he could, especially West European politics, on
which it was easier to publish than on Russian politics. He also
devoted a great deal of space to the peasant question, the economic,
administrative, and social issues involved in the emancipation. Con-
trary to the views of liberal economists in the government and in
educated society, Chernyshevsky advocated the preservation of the
Russian peasant community with its communal landownership and
agriculture and village-level decision making. Chernyshevsky, in
this respect close to Herzen, believed that Russia could construct
a kind of agrarian socialism built around the village community
and thus avoid the horrors of industrialization familiar from Vic-
torian England and continental societies. Chernyshevsky was also
a revolutionary, though he never created an actual revolutionary
organization, but he did look forward to the overthrow of the tsarist
regime and sympathized with those who tried to take an active role
in the process.
198 A Concise History of Russia

Chernyshevsky’s most powerful contributions to the emerging

revolutionary movement were his articles in the Contemporary. The
radicals around the journal were convinced that the natural sciences
were the key to all knowledge, that the social sciences were simply a
backward area that would soon catch up to biology and chemistry.
Their view of man was ruthlessly biological: there were no spiritual
entities, and indeed their objection to religion seems to have been
founded more on disbelief in the soul than in God. Chernyshevsky
and his colleagues also held an essentially utilitarian view of art, the
task of which was to transform the consciousness of the readers with
its arguments and its presentation of the images of reality as it actu-
ally was. By 1862 the government had become aware that he was the
most important figure among the radicals, and decided to put an end
to his activity. The Third Section had him arrested on suspicion of
relations with Herzen and of agitating to arouse the people against
the government, but they could find very little against him. Relations
with Herzen could not be proven and Chernyshevsky’s articles were
not in themselves criminal. After some months they found a police
agent among the radicals, already arrested on another charge, who
claimed to have letters from Chernyshevsky’s hand and a manifesto
calling on the peasants to rise. Using these documents as evidence,
the Third Section brought up a new charge, and Chernyshevsky
was convicted of trying to inspire rebellion. The sentence was four-
teen years labor in the mines (a sentence that was later commuted)
and perpetual exile in Siberia. Chernyshevsky was allowed to leave
Siberia only in 1883, six years before his death.
The most complete expression of the values of the new generation
came in Chernyshevsky’s novel, What is to be Done?, written in the
prison of the fortress of St. Peter and Paul after his arrest in 1862.
The novel managed to be published legally through an error of the
censor, even though it presented a case for the complete reorgani-
zation of society and a plan of the future. The idea was to construct
a series of communal production workshops and living arrange-
ments that would liberate the individual from the constraints of
poverty and the traditional family. Chernyshevsky’s novel was as
much a feminist as a socialist tract. The emancipation of women,
even from the upper classes, was a central part of his platform,
 The Era of the Great Reforms 199

for Chernyshevsky saw himself as the advocate of individual liber-

ation to a society of “rational egoism” as much as the advocate of
peasant and worker emancipation. The book became the Bible of
a whole generation and its characters, the devoted revolutionary,
the emancipated husband, the new woman – all these provided the
youth of the time not only with ideals but also specific models of
behavior, which many followed to the letter. Long hair for men
and short for women, contempt for upper class manners and dress
to the point of rudeness and general sloppiness became the fashion
among students and gave the tone to a whole generation. Cherny-
shevsky’s arrest and exile deprived the radicals of a public voice,
and also led to the emergence of a whole underground and émigré
literature that circulated among students and youth throughout the
empire.
The radicals would soon capture the center stage of Russian
life and culture and even provoke a series of “anti-nihilist” nov-
els designed to demonstrate their limitations and errors. The post-
Crimean decade, however, was also the period of formation of Rus-
sian liberalism, which had much greater support than the radicals
among the intelligentsia: the professors, doctors, and teachers who
made up its core. The liberal generation was also deeply affected by
the new scientism of the era, which seemed to find a European model
in Darwin, Herbert Spencer, and French positivism. The first and
primary leader of the liberals, however, remained true to the older
Hegelianism of his youth, albeit in the liberal rather than radical
interpretation. This was Boris Chicherin, a professor of law whose
conception of Russian history neatly fit his political ideas and legal
training. His idea was simply that early Russian history to Peter
the Great, had been the history of the development of statehood.
Autocracy was a primitive survival from the later phases of this
era, necessary in its time but now becoming outdated. Peter’s reign
had signaled the beginning of the development of legality within the
autocratic structure, a development that was reaching its maturity
in his own times with the great reforms. The task of the reform
generation was to move this process forward, so that the further
development of society would raise Russia to the level of civiliza-
tion suitable for a constitution. The constitution was for the future,
200 A Concise History of Russia

the task of the present was to move along the process of reforming
the state, not to blow it up.
Chicherin’s ideas or some variant of them were easy to fit with the
general fascination with progress in nineteenth-century Europe, and
the liberals felt they were part of a worldwide process that sooner
or later would triumph in Russia too. These ideas were the inspira-
tion of the zemstvo activists, as well as the journalists and writers
who gathered around the new newspapers and the more intellectual
“thick journals.” The latter were ideally suited for the age, as the
censorship was much more interested in daily newspapers and pop-
ular literature than the thick journals. Long learned discussions of
local government in England or economic problems of the Russian
countryside were much easier to get through censorship (thus Karl
Marx’s Capital was legally published in Russia). The most popular
of the thick journals was the Messenger of Europe (Vestnik Evropy),
founded in 1866. Every month its subscribers received three or four
hundred pages of high-level journalism and even scholarly articles
on current topics, novels, and verse that included the future clas-
sics of Russian literature and usually a novel translated from some
Western language. The journal was full of useful information, long
articles in which the authors discussed not only the alleged sub-
ject at hand but also many excursions into various types of useful
knowledge – scientific, social, economic, even medical. In the draw-
ing rooms of the provincial gentry and the libraries of gymnasium
teachers throughout the Empire, journals of this sort were a lifeline,
a connecting link with the larger world in Russia and beyond, and
an inspiration for dogged persistence in zemstvo work and other
humble attempts to make a modern society of Russia.
Conservative thought, as well, radically changed after Crimea.
Unlike the liberals – numerous and in general agreement with one
another – the conservatives remained a series of small mutually
hostile groups alongside several idiosyncratic thinkers who lacked
a following. The most important group was still the Slavophiles,
who found a constituency among the bankers and textile million-
aires of Moscow. The millionaires subsidized their journals and
allowed them to keep their ideas before the public even if their cir-
culation never reached the same volume as the liberal publications.
The Slavophiles were generally supportive of the reform process,
 The Era of the Great Reforms 201

but they thought that too much of it was the result of mechani-
cal adoption of Western models. Nationalism was increasingly the
dominant feature of Slavophile ideology. They also feared farther
moves in certain areas, especially any liberal (government or out-
side) measures that might weaken the peasant community, for them
the basis of Russia’s unique harmony in a world of political and
social strife. Their general support of the autocracy and its policy
was by no means uncritical, and earned them considerable official
suspicion and hostility.
A more powerful advocate of conservative ideas was Mikhail
Katkov, who until the Polish revolt was a liberal spokesman. In the
wake of the revolt Katkov and his Moscow News (Moskovskie
Vedomosti), subsidized by the Russian government in spite of
occasional clashes, became the principal public voice of Russian
nationalism and the idea of autocracy. Katkov advocated a sort of
“westernizing” conservatism, one where Russian would acquire an
industrial social order but retain the authoritarian form of govern-
ment of the past, modernized by modern administrative methods.
In many ways Katkov admired Bismarck’s Germany and hoped
that Russia would imitate it, not least in its strident nationalism.
Katkov’s nationalism was nastier than the vague “nationality” prin-
ciple of Uvarov and Nicholas I. Katkov was relentlessly anti-Polish
and anti-Semitic, and for all of his admiration of Germany, he was
relentlessly hostile to the Baltic German aristocracy still so promi-
nent in Russia’s government and army, as well as at court. He also
favored an aggressive foreign policy and came to advocate a strongly
anti-German policy. The government was not always happy with
Katkov (the Baltic German issue was a constant irritant) as it did
not admit the propriety of even friendly criticism, but it could not do
without him. For the conservative gentry and officialdom, Katkov
was an oracle. None of the other conservative voices, even Dosto-
evsky’s, had his following.

The conservatives and the government were most of all afraid of

the revolutionary movement, which they correctly perceived as a
political, social, and cultural threat. Indeed the communes of radi-
cal students inspired by Chernyshevsky’s novel were very far from
the privileged world of the court or the liberal journalists and their
202 A Concise History of Russia

readers. The students operated by strict equality, including that

of men and women. Their communes were broader than the rev-
olutionary movement, including many members with only vague
political views, but they formed an ideal recruiting ground. The
expansion of the universities meant that many of the students were
much more plebeian than their predecessors – the children of priests,
minor officials, and noblemen whose incomes, to say the least, did
not match their status. After 1859 women gradually entered univer-
sities, and their presence, entirely in accord with radical ideology,
led to a major role for women in the revolutionary movement and
gave it a distinctive style.
The young revolutionaries operated entirely underground. The
reform of Russian society had not led to the appearance of legal
public politics, for the state retained all power in its hands and
political parties were not permitted. Not only liberals and radi-
cals, but even conservatives were prevented from forming any sort
of political associations, even in support of the state. Among the
principal victims of the censorship was the Slavophile leader Ivan
Aksakov, who supported the autocracy and was highly conserva-
tive and openly anti-Semitic. Aksakov nevertheless believed that he
should have the right to criticize the autocracy in the press. The gov-
ernment saw things differently, and Aksakov’s publications eventu-
ally came to an end. The liberals enjoyed broad support among the
intelligentsia, especially its core of professionals, and controlled a
number of key newspapers and periodicals, but they had no orga-
nization. The closest to a liberal (or conservative) forum was the
zemstvo, whose meetings sometimes took on a political air, but the
police and administration made sure that these attempts came to
nothing. The only political actors outside the government were the
revolutionaries.
In the early years, the 1860s, the main radical groups were small,
only a few dozen members at the most, and were short-lived. They
were also conspiratorial and dominated by a few charismatic lead-
ers, some of them young men of very questionable character and
motives, the most famous being Sergei Nechaev. Nechaev convinced
his followers that he represented a revolutionary “central commit-
tee” under whose orders he worked. In fact it existed only in his
imagination. In late 1869 he told his small group that one of their
 The Era of the Great Reforms 203

number was an informer for the police and that they should murder
him, which they did. The result was that the police, while investigat-
ing the murder, uncovered the organization. Nechaev fled abroad,
leaving his followers to their fate – exile in Siberia. Even the anar-
chist Bakunin, who at first thought that Nechaev represented some
sort of new wave in Russia, finally realized that he was mentally
unbalanced and morally depraved.
The few small groups like Nechaev’s were doomed to failure, but
events also kept the incipient radical movement from taking off in
the first decade of its existence. The occasion was the attempt to
assassinate the tsar on April 4, 1866. The would-be assassin was
one Dmitrii Karakozov, a minor nobleman from the Volga region
who had been involved in various radical groups, mostly composed
of students, for several years. His comrades, who were more serious
personalities than the like of Nechaev, actually opposed the idea and
tried hard to dissuade him. They failed, and Karakozov shot at Tsar
Alexander as he was leaving the Summer Garden but he missed. He
was immediately captured and the tsar spoke to him, asking him
if he was a Pole. Karakozov replied that he was pure Russian, and
the police now knew that they were dealing with terrorism, a new
phenomenon in the Russian revolutionary movement. Karakozov
believed that killing the tsar would inspire a popular revolt, or at
worst weaken the government and thus force further reform. The
opposite happened, for it produced a government shakeup and the
appointment of several less liberal ministers and the reactionary
count Petr Shuvalov to head the Third Section. The pace of reform
notably slowed.
By 1870 enough experience had accumulated among the radicals
to suggest that the conspiratorial methods were unsavory and inef-
fective. The issue in any case was to spread radical ideas among the
people, primarily among the peasantry. The result was the forma-
tion of new organizations whose members decided that the young
radicals should “go to the people.” Thus in 1874 thousands of
young men and women began to learn practical skills and move
to rural areas to try to fit into peasant society. Concrete political
goals were placed far in the future, and the radicals concentrated on
spreading their ideas. The effort lasted for several years, and was a
complete failure. The peasants were at best unreceptive, suspicious
204 A Concise History of Russia

of outsiders, especially from higher social levels (no matter how

plebeian the students were, they were still not peasants). Many of
them turned the radicals (or “populists”) over to the police.
By the summer of 1876 it was clear that going to the people had
failed and the remains of the group in St. Petersburg created a for-
mal organization called Zemlia i Volia (“Land and Freedom”). The
authorities noticed the actions of the new group and arrested many
of them, holding mass public trials in 1877 that featured the veterans
of “going to the people” as well as newer detainees. The trials were
a disaster for the government as prisoner after prisoner presented
impassioned and well-reasoned explanations for the misery of Rus-
sia’s people and their plans for the future. The government struggled
against the movement with inadequate forces and antiquated meth-
ods, but it could not break its spirit. The conditions and practices
of the Russian prisons were primitive and caused much suffering,
something widely known in society as well as in revolutionary cir-
cles, and it gave the rebels a halo of martyrdom. Then in early 1878
one of the prisoners in St. Petersburg was ordered to be flogged by
general Trepov, the governor-general. A few weeks later a young
woman walked into his office during the period reserved for peti-
tioners, and in revenge shot him several times with a revolver. The
general survived his wounds, but the young woman, Vera Zasulich,
became the object of yet another public trial. The jury failed to
convict her, and she escaped abroad. From then on the govern-
ment avoided the civilian court system and tried revolutionaries in
military field courts.
Zasulich’s act inaugurated three-and-a-half years of a fantastic
duel between the revolutionaries and the police. Most of the pop-
ulists were now convinced that the social revolution could not occur
without the destruction of the Russian autocracy. Unless Russia
became a federal and democratic republic, the radicals would never
have the freedom of action to preach social renewal. Therefore they
shifted their effort from preaching radical social ideas to propa-
ganda for political revolution, and most important, for a program
of terror against the state. They did not target random populations:
the objects of terror were only the officials of the state, and among
those, mainly the ones responsible for political control and repres-
sion, that is policemen, governors of provinces, the Minister of the
 The Era of the Great Reforms 205

Interior, and the tsar himself. The terror campaign produced a split
in the movement, with the majority in favor of terror forming a new
organization, Narodnaia Volia (“People’s Will”) and the minority,
which wanted to stick to the old policy of agitation and propaganda,
keeping the old name, Land and Freedom. Most of the latter soon
emigrated.
The People’s Will then began a coordinated campaign of ter-
ror that came increasingly to focus on the tsar himself. Alexander
responded slowly to the campaign, believing that his fate was in
God’s hands and in any case the traditions of the court made strict
security very difficult. As before, the tsar frequently rode about St.
Petersburg with only a squad of Cossacks and resisted any greater
measures for his protection. His attention was focused on govern-
ment and his private life, for the death of the empress in 1880
allowed him to finally marry his longtime mistress, Princess Eka-
terina Dolgorukaia, which legitimized their children. The attempts
on his life continued and after several failures terror came even to
the Winter Palace. Stepan Khalturin, one of the few revolutionaries
actually of peasant origin, managed to disguise himself as a carpen-
ter and get access to the palace, where he exploded a bomb early
in 1880, killing many soldiers of the guards but missing the tsar. A
small band of revolutionaries had caused a crisis in the state, too
old-fashioned even after the reforms to operate effectively against
the terrorists and too autocratic to command or even solicit univer-
sal support. This time, however, the government responded imme-
diately. Alexander replaced the Third Section with a Department
of Police under the Ministry of the Interior and established a
Supreme Executive Commission under general Count Michael
Loris-Melikov. Loris-Melikov, an Armenian who knew numerous
European and Caucasian languages, had an excellent military record
from the Caucasian wars, the Russo-Turkish War, and a recently
successful administrative career. His plan was to fight the revolu-
tionaries both by repression and a return to the reform process
that had been stalled for nearly a decade. Thus liberal journalists
dubbed his program “the dictatorship of the heart.” Soon Loris-
Melikov moved up to head the Ministry of the Interior, and began
to circulate plans for greater reform. By February 1881, he had con-
structed a plan for a consultative legislature based on the zemstvos
206 A Concise History of Russia

to be called together to provide support for the state and to show

society that the government was truly committed to reform. Perhaps
Russia would change, but fate determined otherwise.
Narodnaia Volia had paid no attention to Loris-Melikov and
the rumors of reform. In any case the prospect of reform did not
cheer them, for it might help the government survive and further
economic reform might damage the peasant commune. Narodnaia
Volia’s Executive Committee under Alexander Zheliabov and Sofia
Perovskaia put all its resources into killing the tsar, and on March 1,
1881, they succeeded. As Alexander was returning to the Winter
Palace along the Catherine Canal in Petersburg, one of the revolu-
tionaries threw a bomb at his carriage. Several of his guards and
a fourteen-year-old boy were killed, many were wounded, and the
tsar got out of the carriage to see what had happened. A second ter-
rorist in the crowd threw another bomb at him, fatally wounding
the tsar and killing himself. Alexander was carried to the Winter
Palace with his legs blown off and soon died. The last words of
the tsar who had freed the peasants, and, however haltingly, trans-
formed Russia were, “it is cold, it is cold . . . take me to the Palace . . .
to die.”

Now his son Alexander came to the throne as Alexander III, and
after some initial discussion, any talk of reform or legislatures came
to an end and Loris-Melikov lost his position. The assassins were
publicly hanged. The educated classes were appalled that the revo-
lutionaries had killed the tsar, while many of the peasants believed
that it was a conspiracy of the nobles acting in revenge for the
emancipation of the serfs. Another effect of the assassination was
the first great wave of pogroms against the Jews in the Ukrainian
provinces of southern Russia. It was a fitting beginning to more than
a decade of conservative politics and attempts at counter-reform.
Yet counter-reform ultimately achieved little. It was a tribute to the
strength of the original reforms and their anchoring in law that most
of them could not be undone. The zemstvos, for example, were con-
tinually harassed by the minions of the Ministry of the Interior, but
they continued to exist and work. The new institutions had become
part of the fabric of Russian society, whose increasing progress kept
 The Era of the Great Reforms 207

them alive. In spite of the use of censorship and forms of repression

like administrative exile for liberals and radicals alike, the press
flourished and expanded, providing a forum for the discussion of
as much of the government’s policies as it could get away with.
Alexander III’s autocracy could retard the development of Russian
society, but could not stop it.
 12
From Serfdom to Nascent Capitalism

The city of St. Petersburg exemplified the transformation of Russia

in the decades after the emancipation of the serfs. As the nineteenth
century progressed, it changed from an administrative capital of
government buildings and aristocratic residences with a seaport into
a major industrial center served by railroads as well as the ever-
expanding port and the older canal system.
Though built as a seaport on the Baltic, the shape of the older St.
Petersburg was created by the Winter Palace and the ring of military
and government buildings around it. Most of these were classical
in style, and three or four-stories high at most. Peter had wanted
to concentrate the actual government on the north side of the Neva
River, on Vasil’ev Island, but the site was too remote in the absence
of permanent bridges, and in any case the government needed to be
near the center of power, the tsar. Thus the Winter Palace, on the
south side of the river and near the western end of Nevskii Prospekt,
the main street, quickly became the center of the city. The General
Staff of the army and the Ministry of Foreign Affairs were right
across the Palace Square, the Ministry of Finance nearby, as well as
the Senate, the Council of State, and other major offices. Only the
expanded Ministry of the Interior came to occupy new buildings
on the Fontanka River farther to the south. Trade and commerce,
until mid-century, were concentrated along Nevskii Prospekt and
on Vasil’ev Island, the latter home to the city’s large German and
foreign merchant population.

208
 From Serfdom to Nascent Capitalism 209

The transformation of the city began to speed up after the

Crimean War, as railroad building and new industries began to
change the landscape. In these years St. Petersburg’s port was a
great asset, for much of the equipment and raw materials for the
new industries came from abroad. The great industrial boom of
the 1890s changed all that, as Russia began to rely more on inter-
nal resources. Metallurgy and machine building became the city’s
biggest industries. Located primarily on the outskirts, the huge fac-
tories with smoking chimneys replaced the suburban villas, forests,
and villages of former times. The port turned into a giant ship-
building yard. Factories with newer technology, such as the electric
industries, were built in the center of the town, so that the city
never acquired the radical social segregation characteristic of West-
ern cities at the time. The industrial boom also brought a tremen-
dous expansion in banking and finance, centered still on Nevskii
Prospekt and the adjoining streets.
The economic boom changed the city in other ways. The popu-
lation doubled between the 1890s and 1914, from about a million
to around two million. Most of these new residents were workmen,
living in barracks near the main factories, often without their fami-
lies who remained back in their native villages. At the other end of
the social scale, the newly rich bankers and railroad kings bought
or built grand mansions on the river near the center of town. Many
of the great aristocrats were heavily invested in the new industries,
and their increased wealth showed itself in ever more luxurious
residences in and around the city. The boom also brought a new
middle class into being, employees of the new businesses, engineers
and technicians, and the many schoolteachers, doctors, and retailers
who served them. The burgeoning population and its needs brought
a boom in construction, especially along the central streets and on
the northern edge of the city. The new buildings displayed the archi-
tectural fads of the time, neo-Renaissance, neo-Baroque, and often
the Russian versions of art nouveau. The strictly classical St. Peters-
burg was becoming a much more eclectic city, but the classical core
remained. Builders were not allowed to build higher than the Win-
ter Palace, so there were limits to the scope of change. The result
was also a city very much less densely built up than Paris or Berlin,
even if much of it lacked formal public parks.
210 A Concise History of Russia

Daily life changed, especially after 1900. New department stores

sprang up around the city, one off Nevskii Prospekt even built as
an investment by the Imperial Corps of Guards Regiments. Farther
down the street were the new Singer Sewing Machine building and
the Eliseev Delicatessen, with its imported and domestic stocks for
the wealthy gourmet. The city sponsored or built telephone service,
and new sewer and water systems were financed through loans from
foreign banks. In 1907 Westinghouse and Russian investors opened
the city’s first electric tram lines, which quickly came to cover most
of the city. Electric lights lit up the main streets in the center and
more and more gas lights in other parts of town illuminated the
winter dark and fog. New bridges across the Neva contributed to
the charm of the city’s waterfront but also made communication
among its various parts easy for the first time.
The social life of the city was centered on the court. Until the
1890s the court balls and other grand events provided a glittering
backdrop to the dramas of life and politics in the capital. The great
aristocratic houses were not far behind. They too put on magnificent
entertainments, some of them in private theaters in their palaces, like
the one in the Yusupov palace, with professional artists. The great
imperial theaters, especially the Mariinskii, were another venue for
the display of wealth by the old aristocracy and the newly rich as
well. For the intelligentsia and the middle classes, the legitimate
stage, state financed and private, provided the more “advanced”
culture they craved. On the edges of the city where the working
people lived were popular theaters, many of them outdoors in the
summer, which provided cheap entertainment for the masses. A
whole range of restaurants, from the elite establishments off Nevskii
Prospekt to the lowest dives on the edge of town, filled the various
needs of a variegated population. St. Petersburg was very much
the artistic center of Russia. The imperial ballet at the Mariinskii
Theater was the darling of the aristocracy, but the opera and stage
flourished as well. Most of the new trends in Russian painting, from
World of Art to suprematism, came into being in St. Petersburg, and
the major writers from the 1890s onward were almost all based in
the city.
For all its artistic glory, St. Petersburg remained quintessentially
a center of political power. After 1905 the main newspapers of the
 From Serfdom to Nascent Capitalism 211

legal political parties were published in St. Petersburg, reporting

on the government as well as the new Duma. The Duma occupied
the old palace of Catherine’s favorite Potemkin, to the east of the
main center of power. Politics remained the principal concern of
the tsar, and his presence in the city was essential to the functioning
of the state. In actual fact Nicholas II spent relatively little time
in the city itself, preferring a quieter life at nearby Tsarskoe Selo
or Peterhof, or even his Crimean estates. He rarely attended the
theater, restricting his social events to court balls and a few other
crucial ceremonies, a practice that did not win the approval of the
aristocracy. The tsar and his advisors were nervous about public
appearances in the face of the persistent terror campaign waged by
the populist revolutionaries, and Nicholas personally preferred a
simple life with his family. These were understandable decisions,
but they contributed to the drift and instability of power at a time
of rapid social and political change. The state had been central to
Russian development for centuries, and suddenly the ship seemed
to have no pilot.

In no area did the policies of the Russian state have more unin-
tended consequences than in economic and social development. The
reformers of the 1860s, as well as count Sergei Witte a generation
later, tried to encourage industrial capitalism while conserving as
much of the existing social structure as possible. The government
sponsored railroad building throughout the period, both private
and state projects, helping to secure loans from abroad and award-
ing lucrative contracts to Russian businessmen. It constructed the
tariff system to favor railroad building and then later in the cen-
tury moved to a more protectionist system to encourage Russian
industry. The maintenance of the landed gentry and the peasant
community remained a basic goal, however, even at the expense
of industrial development. The maintenance of the peasant com-
munity restricted the movement of peasants out of the village to
join the industrial labor force, but it could not prevent it. The sur-
vival of gentry landholding, under siege from the new economic
forces, was also a government goal. Even Prime Minister Stolypin’s
attempt to loosen up the village community after 1907 was a grad-
ualist program designed to strengthen the gentry, not undermine it.
212 A Concise History of Russia

Ultimately, however, the state could only influence, not direct, the
evolution of Russian society. Factories sprung up, banks and other
financial and commercial institutions grew, even when government
rules hindered them. State-sponsored development programs like
railroad building created whole new towns and new industries that
the increasingly archaic state administration could not direct in the
ways that policy demanded. Modern cities with newspapers and
tram lines, restaurants and amateur cultural institutions created
forms of life unknown in the older Russia but essentially the same
as those in Western Europe and America. Whatever the government
did, Russia was becoming modern, slowly but relentlessly.
The driving force in the changes to Russian society was industri-
alization. At the end of the Crimean War Russia was not without
industry, for the textile industry in Central Russia – in Moscow
and surrounding towns – was flourishing and working with mostly
modern equipment, steam-driven looms, and other machinery. At
the head of that industry were a whole series of native business-
men, mostly of peasant origin and many of them Old Believers in
religion. Some families from the Old Believer communities, includ-
ing the Morozovs, Riabushinskiis, and Guchkovs, built factories in
Moscow and other towns in the surrounding areas. Their faithful
adherence to the inward-looking and occasionally xenophobic vari-
ants of Old Belief did not prevent them from buying English and
German machinery and hiring foreigners to run it and teach their
workmen. The founders of all these great business dynasties had
moved from the peasantry or small-scale trading to owning facto-
ries and even banks by the 1840s, and they set their children – sons
and daughters alike – to master foreign languages and learn about
the modern world, including its new technology. If the Old Believers
were perhaps the richest of the Moscow industrialists and bankers,
Orthodox businessmen flourished as well, such as the Tretyakovs,
who rose from the ranks of provincial shopkeepers to own tex-
tile factories in Moscow, Kostroma, and elsewhere. In Petersburg
the businessmen were more cosmopolitan, for alongside Russians
(mostly Orthodox) were Germans, Englishmen, Swedes like the
Nobel family, and the Jewish banker Baron Horace Ginzburg. Busi-
nessmen in St. Petersburg concentrated less on textiles and more on
metallurgy and new technology as well as finance and a flourishing
 From Serfdom to Nascent Capitalism 213

import-export trade. Other centers quickly emerged in the south,

the Baltic provinces, and Poland. In Poland most of the bankers and
manufacturers were German or Jewish, while in southern Russia
the Jewish Poliakov brothers, railroad kings and eventually bankers,
made deals with Russian and Polish noblemen in the sugar beet busi-
ness. In the south the Welshman John Hughes founded Iuzovka, the
first major metallurgical center in the Don River Basin, the coal
and iron area that came to be known as the Donbass. Today it is
Donetsk in the Ukraine.
In the first years after emancipation, however, the textile industry
was by far the most successful. The Moscow textile manufacturers
were a colorful group, with Old Believers and Orthodox rubbing
shoulders with noblemen-turned entrepreneurs. Many of them ran
their factories with marked paternalism, building cheap housing,
places for entertainment, and schools. Timofei Morozov was one of
these, an Old Believer who ran his business largely on his own and
with an iron hand. His factory was noted for the high quality of its
products, made with English machinery and (until the end of the
century) imported cotton. He also provided medical facilities and
various forms of welfare for his workers, as well as the usual housing
and entertainment. He struggled tirelessly with working class drink-
ing habits, both from religious conviction and the realization that
drunk or hung over workers could not perform high quality work
for him. Morozov remained very much in the old world, for his cul-
tural patronage went to the history and the culture of Russia before
Peter. He also had many connections among the Slavophiles, whose
publications were heavily subsidized by the Moscow businessmen.
None of this did him any good when the market for textiles con-
tracted suddenly early in the 1880s: he responded by cutting wages
and demanding more from his workers. They responded with riot
and destruction in January 1885 – one of the first major strikes
in Russian history. The age of paternalism was passing, though his
son Savva tried to keep it going for another twenty years. Eventually
management of the firm, like so many others, passed to engineers
and the middle level of management, replacing the personal style of
the older businessmen.
Important as the textile industry was, it relied on imported equip-
ment and did not solve the overall problem of Russian economic
214 A Concise History of Russia

development. The results of the Crimean War made it abundantly

clear to the government that something had to be done. As the state
moved toward emancipation of the peasantry, it simultaneously
moved to encourage a massive program of railroad building. Rail-
roads were the crucial infrastructure of the nineteenth century, pro-
viding the freight services essential to industrialization. In a country
with Russia’s vast distances and natural resources spread over thou-
sands of miles, they were even more necessary. Without railroads
Russia could not enter the modern age. The center of the efforts to
build railroads was the Ministry of Finance, especially in the tenure
of Mikhail Reutern (1862–1877), a Baltic German nobleman who
had worked under Grand Duke Konstantin Nikolaevich. Reutern
had a difficult problem, for the Crimean War had left the treasury
depleted, and the emancipation settlement demanded even more
expenditures. Though a principled supporter of private industry, he
realized that Russia lacked capital. Reutern and most of the progres-
sives in the government were convinced that railroads were vital,
and that they could be built by private initiative, given an adequate
supply of capital. Reutern’s predecessors had turned to the French
Credit Mobilier bank, which formed a large company to build Rus-
sian railroads. This attempt proved an expensive failure, and only
after 1866 did the real boom begin, this time with Russian financing
at the center of the operations. The Russian treasury continued to
provide guarantees and sometimes direct subsidies often kept secret
from the public, but most of the initiative and capital was private.
The private investors not surprisingly came from the ranks of
businessmen with good government contacts and often from the
ranks of government officials. Some, like P. G. von Derviz and
K. F. von Meck, were Russian-German officials who left government
service to build railroads. Others had gotten their starts in farming
the state vodka monopoly. The vodka monopoly had produced huge
fortunes, and provided much of the private capital for investment,
as well as the crucial government contacts.
The great “railroad king” of the era, Samuel Poliakov, had started
out working in the vodka monopoly around his native town of
Orsha in the Jewish Pale of Settlement. He came into contact
through that activity with Count I. M. Tolstoi, briefly the Min-
ister of the Post and the Telegraph. Poliakov quickly abandoned
 From Serfdom to Nascent Capitalism 215

the vodka business to become a construction contractor, working

on a variety of railroad projects with the patronage of Tolstoi. By
the 1870s he was famous throughout Russia for the speed and effi-
ciency (if not always the quality) of his work, landing lucrative
contracts with the army during the Russo-Turkish War. The Jewish
Poliakov had plenty of Christian rivals as well as business partners,
and the partners were Moscow textile manufacturers and bankers
and a variety of aristocratic grandees. Railroad building necessarily
involved collaboration between business and government, and thus
every railroad builder had his patrons and paid agents throughout
the administration. As in other countries engaged in rapid railroad
construction (France and the United States, for example) the age’s
greatest technical marvel was also the most powerful engine of cor-
ruption. To complicate matters, foreign capital remained crucial,
and the treasury stepped in with guarantees to reassure the French,
German, and Belgian investors. Though the state guaranteed and
regulated virtually all of the rail companies, until the 1890s most
Russian railroads remained in private hands.
Railroads required great amounts of iron, steel, and coal, and
Russia had plenty of iron ore and coal, but few facilities to process
them. The Urals iron industry was old-fashioned – technically back-
ward – and just too small to supply Russian needs. The government
thus adopted a tariff policy that allowed the importation of rails,
rolling stock, and industrial materials like scrap metal at low tar-
iffs. It encouraged Russian metal working plants, like the Putilov
factory in St. Petersburg, to produce rails and other equipment with
imported scrap metal and pig iron. By the 1890s Russia was moving
toward an industrial society.
Engineering was an important part of that development. Russia,
however, lacked modern engineering schools. The only institution
of that sort was the Mining Institute that dated from the time of
Catherine the Great. Such schools stood under the jurisdiction of
the Ministry of Finance, the principal state agency behind economic
development from the Crimean War onward, and it quickly moved
to encourage engineering education. The St. Petersburg Techno-
logical Institute, founded in 1828 as a trade school and named
for tsar Nicholas I, reorganized itself in the 1860s under rector
Ilya Tchaikovskii (the composer’s father) into a thoroughly modern
216 A Concise History of Russia

engineering school. It was joined by similar schools in Riga (1862)

and Khar’kov (1885). Older trade schools in Moscow were reor-
ganized on the St. Petersburg model. The end of the century saw
another new wave of foundations. The Warsaw and Kiev Polytech-
nical Institutes came in 1898, followed by another school in Siberian
Tomsk in 1900. In St. Petersburg the Technological Institute had
concentrated on mechanical and chemical engineering and did not
address many emerging engineering specialties that had come to
play increasing roles in the industrial age. The young Abram Ioffe,
the future builder of Soviet physics, found its physics department
small and antiquated. In 1899 the minister of finance Sergei Witte
and the now world famous chemist Dmitrii Mendeleev organized
yet another new institution, the St. Petersburg Polytechnic Institute.
Here the students could specialize in electronics, shipbuilding, met-
allurgy, physics, or even economics. Ioffe, after more training in
Germany, moved to the new institute, a move fraught with major
significance in later years. Russia was beginning to train more and
more engineers alongside the foreigners heretofore so prominent in
building Russia’s railroads, bridges, and factories.

Russian agriculture did not keep pace with industrialization. The

Emancipation Statute burdened the peasantry with redemption pay-
ments, but also conserved the village structure that had existed
under serfdom. The now free peasants did not own their land, which
remained the property of the community. To leave the village, the
peasant had to have the permission of that community, which in
practice meant the village elders. The village was responsible for the
redemption payments and taxes, not the individual peasant. Better-
off peasants could and did own or rent land outside the village
allotments, but the great mass of the peasantry survived on the vil-
lage land alone, still occasionally redistributed as families grew or
died out.
Russian peasant farms were much less productive than European
and even less than American. Chemical fertilizer was unknown,
natural fertilizer was inadequate, and machinery was a rarity con-
fined to gentry estates. The peasantry was too poor and too bur-
dened with the redemption payments and rent to accumulate the
resources that would be necessary to modernize their farms, and
 From Serfdom to Nascent Capitalism 217

Figure 11. Russian Peasant Girls around 1900.

the nobility, except for the great aristocracy, also was unable to
move beyond the traditional routine. Only in a few favored areas,
like the Ukraine and the south, did the presence of commercial
crops like sugar beets and nearby export ports for grain allow more
modern agriculture to develop. There machinery appeared on a few
great estates together with more modern methods of crop rotation.
In most of Russia the village community encouraged the mainte-
nance of routine agriculture, and most of the crops stayed in the
village to feed the peasants. Still the growing towns and railroad
network provided a much greater market than existed before. In
central and northern Russia the peasants turned to dairy farming
and more profitable grains like oats to supply the new and grow-
ing markets. The Transsiberian Railroad turned the Siberian peas-
antry toward massive exports of butter and other dairy products to
218 A Concise History of Russia

European Russia, and by 1914 the Siberian peasantry was so pros-

perous that American companies had opened dozens of stores in
the region to sell agricultural machinery, something unimaginable
west of the Urals. Market gardening spread around the big cities,
and even remote regions eventually were pulled into the seem-
ingly unlimited export market for grain. In these areas a thin
layer of better-off peasants emerged with better ties to the mar-
ket and slightly more modern practices, and were quickly dubbed
kulaks (kulak meaning “fist”) by their neighbors. The black earth
regions of southern Russia, however, potentially the country’s rich-
est land, remained the domain of impoverished peasants working
with ancient methods, consuming their own grain, and gazing long-
ingly at the massive gentry estates that surrounded them.
Not surprisingly Russian villages, even the more prosperous ones,
lived at a standard unknown for decades in Europe. Peasant houses
were still small, usually one-room buildings without a chimney –
the smoke went out a hole in the roof or the window – and the
livestock shared the space in winter. Several generations shared
the same house. Dirt, crowding, and simple ignorance were the
basis of medieval levels of hygiene. Not surprisingly typhus, tuber-
culosis, dysentery, and in some areas even malaria flourished. In
areas where many male peasants worked in the cities syphilis was
endemic. Smallpox could not be eradicated because the number
of trained vaccinators was tiny, and many peasants hid in the
forest from the vaccinators, convinced that the vaccination was the
mark of Antichrist. In the middle years of the nineteenth century
child mortality was at forty percent, though it declined noticeably
by 1914. Though homespun cloth increasingly gave way to indus-
trially produced fabrics, clothing remained homemade and most
peasants still wore the traditional shoes made of birch bark. Alco-
holism and heavy drinking were the norm: on Sundays in many
villages the township courts did not meet because the male popu-
lation was too drunk for serious deliberations. Husbands routinely
beat their wives. The traditional values, centering on religion and
folk wisdom were unchallenged, and religion still meant only the
Sunday liturgy, which was rarely supplemented by a brief homily
from the priest. Little could change with the great majority of peas-
ants being illiterate. Only around 1900 did the slow growth of rural
 From Serfdom to Nascent Capitalism 219

education begin to have an effect, as the younger generation in the

villages came to be literate in larger numbers. Small rural libraries
came into existence, and soon acquired a noticeable readership. The
zemstvos put scarce resources into health care as well as education,
and by 1914 vaccination was beginning to make a modest dent in
the high levels of disease and mortality.
The greatest change to peasant society was the enormous increase
in migration out of the villages, both permanent and temporary. The
factories of St. Petersburg and the Moscow region drew more and
more workers, both men and women (many textile workers were
women). The rapid expansion of the railroad and of the cities, large
and small, meant a huge demand for construction workers and other
seasonal laborers, and many areas of rural Russia by 1900 were vir-
tual “women’s kingdoms” for much of the year, as the men went
north for the factories and construction and south to work on the
great estates. Though grain production per capita rose slowly after
1861, it was not enough to prevent periodic famines, like the catas-
trophic events of 1891. Official encouragement of grain exports
did not help. The peasantry remained poor and convinced that its
poverty was the result of the unequal distribution of land. Though
noble landholding fell slowly but relentlessly after emancipation, by
1913 roughly half of the land still remained in the hands of a few tens
of thousands of noble families. The other half was the property –
burdened by redemption payments – of some 120 million peasants.

the last decades

The 1890s witnessed an economic boom that went far to trans-
form Russian industry, if not the whole of Russia. For the first
time heavy industry began to catch up to textiles and other light
industries. The Donbass came into its own as a major coal and
steel area, while St. Petersburg acquired more and more plants that
serviced a modern economy. This was the great age of metal tech-
nology, not just in Russia but throughout the world, and the St.
Petersburg metal working plants were able to produce most of the
innumerable metal parts that made up railroad engines and bicycles,
samovars, and wood stoves. Newer technologies were mainly rep-
resented by branches of European or American companies, like the
220 A Concise History of Russia

German Siemens-Halske electric plant that produced electric motors

for the Russian market. The Nobel petroleum interests, producing
kerosene from Baku oil, and the Nobel diesel engine factory in St.
Petersburg, were other examples. In the traditional industries and
banking, Russian entrepreneurs predominated, though the colorful
pioneers of the 1860s were dying off and their replacements were
more impersonal syndicates and trusts. Some of their sons contin-
ued in business, others became art patrons, and yet others gambled
away their inheritance in Monte Carlo.
The boom of the 1890s was the product of the business cycle
not government policy, but the Ministry of Finance under count
Witte certainly helped it along. Witte was a commanding figure
in the government, more far-sighted than his colleagues and ener-
getic to a fault. He inherited a new protectionist tariff from his
predecessor, and enforced it rigorously to the satisfaction of Rus-
sian businessmen. In 1897 he put Russia on the gold standard, a
move that enormously strengthened its international economic posi-
tion. At the same time Witte was not an advocate of unlimited free
enterprise: in his tenure in office the government took over most
of the private railroads, and indeed his greatest accomplishment
was the state’s construction of the Transsiberian railroad, already
begun in 1891. Witte’s contribution was to propose a comprehen-
sive plan for the line, taking into account the whole region and the
problems of supply and construction, with the result that the tsar
quickly approved his plan. By 1905 it was largely complete, though
with single track only on certain segments and one flaw that almost
proved fatal: Witte ran the line through Manchuria rather than
inside the Russian border and in doing so helped provoke Japan to
attack in 1904.
In 1900 Russia experienced its first major recession after the
industrial boom. Primarily a stock market crash and financial crisis,
it affected the metal and coal complex more than any other, and
the response of the industry (with government support) was to form
syndicates and trusts to regulate production. The French investors
who figured heavily in this sector of the Russian economy supported
this syndication of the industry as well. Light industries, textiles,
food and drink, and other consumer-oriented businesses were much
less affected by the recession and continued to grow. The 1905
 From Serfdom to Nascent Capitalism 221

Figure 12. The Ilya Muromets, designed by Igor Sikorsky for the Russian
air force in 1914, the first successful four-engine aircraft.

revolution naturally disrupted production as well as politics, but

when the government reestablished its authority in 1907, economic
prosperity returned, for the recession came to an end.
The last years before the outbreak of the First World War saw a
return to prosperity, and the further modernization of Russian city
life. Cities, including the small ones, now housed about fifteen per-
cent of the population. Telephones, motorcars, electric trams, mass
media, advertising, and even the beginnings of the cinema turned
Russian cities into modern centers. Not just St. Petersburg, but also
Moscow, Warsaw, Odessa, and Kiev became largely modern cities.
Large apartment blocks arose in place of the older courtyard houses
filled with trees that still predominated in smaller centers and the
more traditional parts of Moscow. Luxurious and not so luxuri-
ous stores opened, with the latest fashions from Paris or Vienna.
Restaurants, cafés, and hotels became major social centers, replac-
ing the aristocratic clubs of the past. Automobiles appeared on the
streets, and by 1914 there was intense public interest in air flight.
Modern social organizations, like the Boy Scouts, took root in the
major cities. St. Petersburg, Odessa, parts of Moscow, and some
of the industrial cities differed only in degree from their European
counterparts.
It was the Russian village, still largely unmodernized, if not
unchanging, that made Russia backward by European, if not Asian,
standards. After 1907 Prime Minister Stolypin pushed his famous
222 A Concise History of Russia

plan to create independent farmers, on the model of European

peasants, outside the village communities, and some peasants took
advantage of the opportunity. Most of them, however, greeted the
scheme with relentless hostility, and the numbers that did opt for
independent farms were too small to have any substantial effect
by the time that war broke out. A more promising change in rural
life was the migration of the peasantry to Siberia and the Kazakh
steppe of Central Asia. Here the peasants became more independent
farmers on their own, without conflict with pre-existing village com-
munities, though the native Kazakhs were not happy with the loss
of some of their prime grazing lands. In Siberia the native popu-
lation was much smaller and such conflicts were few, so that on
the eve of the war, Siberia seemed to be coming into its own for
the first time, not just as a place of mines and convict labor but as
a land of rural settlement, growing industry, and booming towns.
The Urals as well was growing rapidly, just beginning to overcome
the legacy of the outdated local iron industry of the past. None
of these regional shifts, however, were yet extensive enough to
change the overall pattern of Russian society: a sea of backward
agriculture dotted with larger or smaller islands of modern industry
and society.

The large-scale economic changes of the decades between 1861 and

1914 had all sorts of unexpected or at least unplanned effects. The
government stuck to the older system of classification by social
estate – gentry, merchants, townspeople, and peasants – but social
change rendered it increasingly irrelevant. Millions of peasants actu-
ally spent most of their lives as urban workers. Businessmen came
from all sorts of backgrounds, not just urban families but noble and
peasant families. The intelligentsia had representatives of virtually
every social group, if townspeople and nobles (often only techni-
cally nobles) predominated. Economic development rearranged the
ethnic pattern of the empire. St. Petersburg added a Jewish commu-
nity to its many other ethnic groups, some 35,000 people (officially)
in 1910, the largest community outside the Pale. Masses of peas-
ants and townspeople poured into the new industrial cities in the
Donbass – Russians, Ukrainians, Poles, Jews, and many others –
producing a multi-ethnic but Russian-speaking area. The Baku oil
 From Serfdom to Nascent Capitalism 223

fields brought thousands of Armenians and Georgians to the largest

city in the Azeri provinces.
The lives of women changed, if not to the same degree at all levels
of society. For noblewomen, already with property rights greater
than those typical of bourgeois Europe, life went on as before.
Noblewomen either supported an aristocratic life and the govern-
ment or military career of their husbands and fathers by an endless
round of parties and social occasions, or they managed the estates
for absent spouses. Many noblewomen, however, like their male
counterparts, took advantage of the new educational opportunities
that emerged in the reform era. For the men those opportunities
were more places in universities or new sorts of institutions, like the
engineering schools. For women the change was much more radical,
because starting in 1858, the government began to radically expand
the network of secondary schools for girls as part of the general
expansion of education. By the 1880s there were already 50,000
girls in the new schools, and they continued to expand into the twen-
tieth century. Even more radical was the appearance of university
education for women. Earlier universities were closed to women,
but in 1858–1863 there were experiments with opening them. Con-
servative fears, prompted in part by the nascent revolutionary move-
ment’s advocacy of women’s liberation, led the government to shut
the doors. Into the gap stepped the liberal intelligentsia, which
started private university courses for young women in 1869. The
lecturers were normally university professors who took on the extra
duties, often for free, as part of a general commitment to the liber-
alization of society. The emancipation of women was a major cause
to liberals as well as radicals, as both saw the patriarchal family as
a mirror of the political autocracy that ruled the country. Finally in
1876 the government authorized “women’s courses” that offered a
university training but no degree, other than in certain professions
such as teaching and midwifery, deemed suitable for women. Ever
inconsistent, the government left open one loophole: foreign degrees
were recognized in the Russian Empire, so a woman who received
a degree in one of the few foreign institutions (mainly in Switzer-
land) that admitted women obtained a degree recognized officially
in Russia. Ironically, the Russian women at Swiss universities found
that there were no Swiss women in the universities, only Russians,
224 A Concise History of Russia

Poles, and some young women from Serbia and other Balkan
countries.
The new educational opportunities attracted women from well
beyond the nobility. The daughters of the intelligentsia, the clergy,
and the middle classes joined them in the women’s courses. The
transformation of Russian urban society created new professions
that women entered and even dominated. In addition to medical
work and teaching at various levels in both town and country, office
work on the soon-to-be ubiquitous typewriter created a whole new
stratum of employed young women from the middle classes. The
telephones of the time required manual connections and switch-
boards, and women found work here. These trends were particu-
larly marked after about 1900 in the larger cities, and this meant
that for the first time Russian women of the middle classes were
working outside the home.
In the working classes, the proportion of women in the factories
grew from about twenty percent in the 1880s to thirty percent on
the eve of the war. Most of them worked in textile or other light
industries. The rapid growth of the cities meant a huge demand
for domestic labor in the form of cooks and maids, most of them
inevitably women. Some of these women were already born in the
cities, but like the men, most of them were migrants from the vil-
lages. In the villages the traditional family patterns persisted, and in
areas where out-migration was not important, the lives of peasant
women changed little over the course of time. In the cities women
workers were more likely to be illiterate than men, were paid less
than male counterparts, and endured the unwanted attentions of
male supervisors and foremen. In the end, however, working class
women had their revenge: it was the women in the bread lines
in March 1917, who began the revolution that brought down the
monarchy. Once their men joined, the Romanov dynasty came to
an end.

Ultimately the most important social result of the increasing indus-

trialization of Russia was the appearance of the factory working
class. At the time of the emancipation there were a bit less than a
million miners and factory workers, but by 1913 their number had
grown to a bit over 3 million, with perhaps another half a million
 From Serfdom to Nascent Capitalism 225

railroad and other transport workers. These 4 million formed the

core of the working class, alongside many more seasonal work-
ers in construction and agriculture and some 1.5 million domestic
servants. In a country of some 180 million people these were a
small minority, but they were strategically placed. They worked in
industries that used increasingly modern equipment, and the elite
of the working class, the skilled metal workers, performed tasks of
considerable technical complexity, cutting precision parts follow-
ing blueprints supplied by the engineers. For such skilled workers,
some education was necessary, and for all the workers, a men-
tal break with the village routine and adjustment to city life was
essential.
City life was in itself a whole new world for young migrants from
the countryside. Most of them male and living without families for
years, they slept in barracks put up by the factory owners. The
barracks were notorious, but the managers put them up precisely
because they actually kept workers at the factory, since the fast pace
of urbanization meant a permanent shortage of housing. Married
workers and some single men who found places outside the barracks
ended up renting “corners,” parts of basements partitioned off by
clotheslines. Sanitation was minimal, and the crowding in the poorer
areas of St. Petersburg made it the tuberculosis capital of Europe.
A city nevertheless afforded more than a village. Cheap theaters
and musical halls provided entertainment, and in the summer were
often outside. For those who wanted to better themselves, there were
small popular libraries and reading rooms, and popular literature
boomed – the first tabloid newspapers and cheap adventure stories
appeared on the streets. Workers were increasingly literate. In 1897,
60 percent of male workers were literate, and 35 percent of women
workers were literate, but in St. Petersburg the figures were 74
percent and 40 percent, respectively.1 At the same time, the absence
of mass education for workers beyond the most elementary meant

1 In Russia as a whole, in the same year, only 29 percent of men and 13 percent
of women were literate. In France, Germany, and northern Europe by the 1890s
literacy was nearly universal for both men and women. The Russian figures were
matched only in southern Italy, and even Spain was slightly ahead. By 1914
Russian literacy rates reached about 40 percent of the whole population, with
great differences between women and men.
226 A Concise History of Russia

that many had little formal education but sharp intelligence and a
thirst for knowledge.
While the work took them out of the village routine, it soon
established another routine of its own. Ten and twelve hour days
were normal, with only Sunday and a few hours on Saturday off.
Pay was low, but the low skill level of most workers meant that
Russian labor was expensive to the employer in spite of the low
wages. Conditions were probably not radically worse than in the
West, but labor unions and strikes were forbidden, so even the
most elementary improvements were hard to come by. The 1885
strike at the Morozov textile works near Moscow brought new
factory legislation, requiring managers to at least pay the workers
on time. On the whole there was little government supervision of
the workplace, and ironically the major result of the government’s
efforts was the Factory Inspectorate. It had little power to enforce
proper conditions, but its voluminous reports and statistics left a
treasure for historians.
Those historians would not have been much interested in the
Factory Inspectorate’s records had the Russian working class not
become the recruiting ground and principal base of the revolution-
ary movement. The populists of the 1870s had already attempted
to recruit workers, but their great hope was the peasantry, not
the workers. The emergence of Marxism in the 1880s under the
leadership of Georgii Plekhanov changed the focus. For Russia
Marxism was an exotic import, a German ideology with entirely
West European roots. In exile in the West, Plekhanov observed the
growing strength of Marxist socialism in Germany and was deeply
impressed. Armed with a new worldview, Plekhanov rejected the
entire heritage of Chernyshevsky and populist ideology. The pop-
ulists had believed that industrial capitalism in Russia was an artifi-
cial growth, the result of the economic policy of the autocracy. Once
the autocracy was overthrown, they thought capitalism would dis-
appear and the peasants would build socialism out of peasant com-
munities and artisanal collectives. As a Marxist, Plekhanov believed
that the growth of capitalism in Russia was inevitable. It might not
grow swiftly, but it was growing and creating a working class –
the proletariat, who, in Karl Marx’s words was, “the class called to
liberate humanity” and the class that would bring socialism. For the
 From Serfdom to Nascent Capitalism 227

time being, however, Plekhanov and his tiny band of exiles remained
in Switzerland translating Marx into Russian and smuggling pam-
phlets across the Russian border.
It was the industrial boom of the 1890s that gave the Marxists
their chance, and from then on their influence and strength grew
from year to year. Small Marxist groups appeared in the larger
cities, led by young men and women from the intelligentsia like
Vladimir Lenin and Iulii Martov, distributing leaflets and organizing
reading groups to spread the new ideas. By 1898 they were able to
form a party, the Russian Social Democratic Workers’ Party. Along-
side the Marxists the populist strain in the Russian revolutionary
movement revived, producing a series of small groups committed
to a peasant revolution but in practice recruiting among workers.
They combined the older belief in the socialist potential of the vil-
lage community with the Marxist notion that the workers would
organize socialism in the industrial cities. Much of their activity
went into terrorism (which the Marxists rejected), but ultimately
the populists were able to form a party in 1901–02, the Party of the
Socialists-Revolutionaries to rival the Marxist Social Democrats.
Thus the industrialization of Russia had brought forth new social
classes, the businessmen who owned and ran the factories and the
workers who toiled within them. It created new forms of urban life
and new opportunities for women. Ultimately it also created the
social forces that would blow Russian society apart.
 13
The Golden Age of Russian Culture

The development of Russian society in the reform era profoundly

affected Russian culture, both by changing the institutional envi-
ronment of culture and by calling forth new intellectual and artistic
impulses. For almost all spheres of thought and creation, the period
was the first great age of Russian culture, and the first one to bring
that culture an audience beyond its boundaries. By the 1880s Russia
had become part of the world, not just as a major political power
but as a major contributor to the arts and even to science.

science in the age of reform

Science had not flourished in the years of Nicholas I. While the uni-
versities did provide high-level instruction, the professors were often
foreigners and facilities were small and inadequate. Lobachevskii’s
new geometry was the work of an isolated provincial professor
whose calculations needed only his own genius and a pencil and
paper. After the Crimean War, the government realized that the
scientific level of the country needed to be raised, and the Ministry
of Education provided for the expansion of science departments
in the universities as part of a general upgrading of higher educa-
tion. Equally or more important were the initiatives of the Ministry
of Finance, especially its reorganization of the Technological Insti-
tute in St. Petersburg. A modern engineering school was crucial
to the industrialization program, but the reformed curriculum had
one unexpected result of worldwide significance. The young Dmitrii
228
 The Golden Age of Russian Culture 229

Mendeleev set out to provide a new, up-to-date chemistry course,

and in the process found the existing textbooks unsatisfactory. He
started to create his own, and in the process of looking for a way
to explain the relationships among the various elements in nature,
realized that they fit a certain pattern. The idea of a regularity
was not absolutely new, but Mendeleev went further: he saw that
there were gaps in the pattern and in 1869 he predicted that new
elements would be found to exist that filled in these gaps. Soon
scientists abroad found his prediction to be correct, and Mendeleev
became Russia’s foremost scientist. His fame endured on the walls
of science classrooms ever after in the form of charts of the periodic
table of the elements that came from Mendeleev’s discovery.
The very process of educational reform and the new role of
the natural sciences in Russia had sparked a major discovery.
Mendeleev went on to work extensively to promote not just chem-
istry but scientific education and Russian economic development,
working closely with the government on these tasks. Another case
of the intersection of social changes and science was the work of
Vasilii Dokuchaev, the creator of modern soil science. Dokuchaev’s
insight was simply that soil could not be treated as just the top
layer of rock mixed with decaying organic matter but as a distinct
stratum of its own. Trained in geology and mineralogy, he came
to this conclusion while working to survey the black earth districts
of southern Russia for the Free Economic Society, a project explic-
itly designed to help Russian agriculture. The Ministry of Finance
also helped sponsor other scientific and technological societies, in
an effort to spark more public interest and channel it into directions
that would contribute to industrialization.
In these years Russian science came into its own, not only because
of the fame of Mendeleev but because dozens of lesser lights
acquired solid if modest places in many new and old specialized
fields of chemistry, physics, and biology. The other reason for the
advances in science was its immense popularity with the intelli-
gentsia of the reform era. For educated people the natural sciences
seemed to be a model of rationality and progressive thought. They
debated whether the experiments on the nervous system of frogs
conducted by the physiologist Ivan Sechenov proved that the soul
existed or not, a topic which Sechenov thought went way beyond
230 A Concise History of Russia

the possible consequences of his modest work. Darwin was tremen-

dously popular in Russia, though “social Darwinism” never caught
on. Part of the popularity of Darwin came from the lack of inter-
est on the part of the church in debating the details of biology
or the biblical account of creation. Concerned about the spread
of “materialism,” the church nevertheless avoided direct polemics
with scientists. In Russia, Darwin’s works were approved by the
Ministry of Education as soon as they appeared, even before Rus-
sian translations were available. The atmosphere of the time as well
as government policy combined to rapidly raise the level of scientific
activity in the country.

If government policy was crucial to the emergence of world-class

natural sciences in Russia, its relationship to the arts was more com-
plicated. For the writers, the relaxation of censorship was crucial,
but an equally great change came from the end of court patronage
and the rise of a market for books and journals. The painters also
benefited from the new social environment, as the new millionaire
businessmen became crucial patrons for the artists. Music was more
complicated still, since the main opera and ballet theaters fell under
the Ministry of the Court, while philharmonic societies and the con-
servatories worked with a combination of state and private funding
and control.
The social and institutional environment of the arts was only
one side of the story of Russia’s Golden Age. Central to the period
was also the attempt to grapple with Russia’s history, its current
politics and problems, and its place in the world of culture and ideas.
Liberal intellectuals and later Soviet historians regularly portrayed
almost all of the cultural figures of the era as either “democratic” or
“critical,” but this description fits only some of them. Tchaikovsky
was an admirer of the autocracy, as was Dostoyevsky, and both of
them had only amused contempt for liberal democracy. Perhaps the
only internationally famous figure to fully fit the liberal model was
Turgenev, but it is perhaps futile to explore the views of most of
the great artists, as many of them were too idiosyncratic to classify.
Tolstoy is perhaps the most striking example, and not only in his
later Christian anarchist phase. What they all did was to create
works that were permanent parts of Russian culture, and in the
 The Golden Age of Russian Culture 231

case of the writers and composers, of the whole of Western culture

of the modern age.

music

The musicians had the weakest base to work from and yet produced
in only a few decades an enormous amount of new music, much of
it part of the international repertory to this day. Before the Crimean
War Glinka had been virtually the only important composer, an
amateur from the nobility who made his name with the help of
the Wielhorski salon and Grand Duchess Elena Pavlovna. She was
also to play a crucial role in taking Russia into the world of profes-
sional music education, for she was the patron of Anton Rubinstein.
Rubinstein was the son of a Jewish businessman from the Ukraine
who converted to Christianity and moved to Moscow in the 1830s.
There his children’s music teacher quickly noted Anton’s immense
talent at the piano and took the boy and his parents to Berlin, where
he soon found fame as a child prodigy and acquired a solid musical
education and the favor of Mendelson and Liszt. On the father’s
death young Anton had few resources and returned to St. Peters-
burg. There the Wielhorskis introduced him to Elena Pavlovna, and
he became her personal pianist, an invented position designed to
provide him with an income. By the late 1850s Rubinstein, now
world famous, persuaded his patroness that Russia needed a real
music school, and in 1861 the St. Petersburg Conservatory opened
its doors, across the street from the Mariinskii Theater, where it
still stands. Elena Pavlovna’s support ensured state financing to the
new institution. From the very beginning Rubinstein ruled it with
an iron hand, demanding deep study and long hours, and during
his tenure as director the Conservatory produced many prominent
musicians. The most important would be Peter Tchaikovsky, one
of Rubinstein’s first students. Four years later, a similar conser-
vatory came into existence in Moscow under the directorship of
Anton’s younger brother Nikolai, also a talented pianist and com-
poser, though not in his brother’s league. While Anton was in Berlin,
Nikolai had stayed behind in Moscow, forming lifelong friendships
with his neighbors, the future leaders of the Moscow industrial-
ists, the Tretyakov brothers, and Nikolai Alekseev. The Moscow
232 A Concise History of Russia

conservatory had no significant state financing and the businessmen

had to periodically help it through crises, a new source of patronage
for Russian art. The Moscow Conservatory was on a sound enough
footing to hire Tchaikovsky as one of its professors (1867–1877)
during the years of his maturation as a composer.
The Rubinstein brothers and Tchaikovsky constituted one of two
musical circles active in Russia from the 1860s to the 1880s. The
other major group, also centered in St. Petersburg, consisted of
the five composers of the Balakirev circle: Milii Balakirev, Cesar
Cui, Modest Mussorgsky, Nikolai Rimskii-Korsakov, and Alexan-
der Borodin. These were a curious group – Balakirev was a gentle-
man amateur like Glinka, while Cui and Mussorgsky were military
officers. Mussorgsky soon abandoned the army for music (but had
to take positions in the civilian bureaucracy to support himself),
while Cui continued in the army as a fortress engineer, rising to
the rank of general before his death. Borodin was the illegitimate
son of a Georgian prince and by profession a chemist, teaching
at the Medical Academy and achieving some small discoveries in
chemistry. Rimskii-Korsakov was a former naval officer and had
even participated in the visit of the Russian fleet to New York in
1864, Tsar Alexander’s gesture of support for the Union cause in
the American Civil War.
None of the circle had formal musical training, and not surpris-
ingly their relationship with Rubinstein and the Conservatory was
hostile. The hostility was stoked by their foremost defender among
the music critics of the time, Vladimir Stasov (1824–1906). Stasov
was a librarian at the St. Petersburg Public Library, but quickly
acquired a name for himself as a writer both on music and the
visual arts. The son of a well-known architect, he had traveled in
Europe and was extremely erudite in the music and painting of the
time. In both cases his esthetic was simple. He hated any remnant of
classicism, and thus condemned all painting since 1500 and most of
the music of the eighteenth century. He despised Italian opera, even
Verdi, for its adherence to the conventions of aria, duet, and chorus,
as well as for the insubstantiality of the plots. Another mark against
it was its immense popularity with the aristocratic public in Russia,
from the 1830s onward – in Stasov’s view a mark of the elite’s igno-
rance and love for showmanship. He was for free forms, forms that
 The Golden Age of Russian Culture 233

would adequately express the true nature of human beings, their

inner world and their place in society, and thus he believed that
art had to be realistic and national. In music that meant a certain
preference for program music, and his European heroes were
Berlioz, Liszt, Chopin, and Schumann. He advanced his views with
wit, rudeness, savage personal attacks, and name-calling when he
could, but his intelligence could not be denied. His great enemies
in music were Wagner, the European classic tradition that he iden-
tified with the heritage of Mendelson, Anton Rubinstein, and the
Conservatory. The Conservatory was his particular bugbear, for he
thought that it would conserve traditional classic form in music and
establish the dominance of German music in Russia – not “true”
German music like that of Beethoven or Schumann, but a German-
based cosmopolitanism.
Fortunately the Balakirev circle, soon to be christened the “mighty
handful” or “mighty five,” originally a derisive epithet, was not as
combative or as rigid as Stasov. They had their own views, devel-
oped under the leadership of Balakirev, the group’s main mentor at
first, and later in the writings of Cui and the other composers. They
were not as exclusively enamored of Russian themes as was Stasov:
Balakirev and Mussorgsky from the first wrote program music and
songs to non-Russian themes. Cui in particular made a very odd
“nationalist.” The son of a Polish noblewoman and a French officer
who stayed in Russia after 1812, he was born in Wilno and what
training he had in music came from the Polish composer Stanisław
Moniuszko. Among all of them, however, the atmosphere of the
1860s, as much as Stasov’s hectoring, encouraged an interest in
Russian folk music and operas and instrumental music on Russian
themes.
The Russian themes they chose reflected in a general way the
concerns of the 1860s. The use of folk music went along with the
intense interest in the peasantry that was the hallmark of the eman-
cipation era. In Russian history they turned to the pivotal moments
and the eternal questions of the role of the tsars, their aims, and
their effect on Russia. Even in opera, where the portrayal of figures
from the Romanov dynasty was prohibited, they presented the Rus-
sian past in all its complexity. Rimskii-Korsakov’s first successful
opera, “The Maid of Pskov” (1873), addressed the paradoxes of the
234 A Concise History of Russia

reign of Ivan the Terrible, while the greatest achievement of any of

the five, Mussorgsky’s “Boris Godunov” of 1868–1874, followed
Pushkin’s play to portray a tsar whose ambition and greed for power
destroyed him and his country in the process. He took the events of
the Musketeer revolt of 1682 to portray the end of the old Russia
and the dawning of the new in his second opera “Khovanshchina.”
These were not political tracts, and Mussorgsky was no radical, but
they did offer a reflection on the painful issues of the time, earning
them later fame as “critical.” Mussorgsky’s innovations in harmony
and other areas would also bring him great fame in the twentieth
century, but in his lifetime the operas were only limited successes,
and he died of alcoholism before he could finish “Khovanshchina.”
Of the rest of the five the most successful was undoubtedly
Rimskii-Korsakov, who eventually joined the Conservatory and
taught himself counterpoint and orchestration, becoming one of
its most distinguished professors. His series of operas based on sto-
ries from Russian history and folklore became a mainstay of the
Russian operatic repertory. Borodin’s opera “Prince Igor” and his
music on Central Asian themes won him a permanent place in world
repertory, and his symphonies and other music continue to be pop-
ular in Russia. Balakirev, a contentious if charismatic personality,
went through a religious crisis in the 1870s and stopped writing,
only to take up music again in the 1880s. His religious and con-
servative views earned him the patronage of Alexander III’s court,
and Balakirev received a position as director of the Imperial Chapel
choir.
Cui, in contrast, wrote a great deal, including many articles on
Russian music in French, but his extensive musical work has not
retained an audience. As the move of Rimskii-Korsakov to the
Conservatory shows, the five gradually moderated their hostility
to the “cosmopolitans” over the decades, and musical life gradually
became less contentious. Nikolai Rubinstein helped in this process,
and even Stasov had to pull in his horns a bit, though he remained
hostile to Tchaikovsky to the end.
The Balakirev circle made a great deal of noise as well as music in
Russian musical life, but Tchaikovsky overshadowed them in pop-
ularity, especially outside of Russia. He whole-heartedly adopted
Rubinstein’s point of view that Russian composers needed to be
 The Golden Age of Russian Culture 235

Figure 13. Peter Tchaikovsky

as a young man.

trained properly and that meant in the Western manner, and he

utterly lacked the hostility of Stasov and his followers to the for-
mal conventions of Western music. Indeed Tchaikovsky’s idol was
Mozart, and he believed that much of his inspiration for a musi-
cal career came from an early acquaintance with Mozart’s “Don
Giovanni.” Tchaikovsky’s father was a well-educated official and
mining engineer of noble origin but without estates or independent
means to leave to his son. After the Conservatory, Tchaikovsky was
unwilling to take non-musical employment, and thus his appoint-
ment to the Moscow Conservatory was crucial to his survival. There
in the relatively relaxed atmosphere of Moscow he produced his first
major works, the second, third, and fourth symphonies and the first
and most famous piano concerto. He also began the work on the
ballet “Swan Lake” and the opera “Evgenii Onegin,” both of which
brought him enduring fame.
236 A Concise History of Russia

Tchaikovsky moved to St. Petersburg in 1877, abandoning his

position at the Moscow Conservatory. He then was in contact with
the center of the Russian opera and ballet world, and the results
were soon seen. He added “Sleeping Beauty” and “Nutcracker”
to his ballets, and “Mazeppa” and the “Queen of Spades” to his
list of operas, as well as a violin concerto and two more sym-
phonies, the fifth and the sixth (“Pathetique”) before his death in
1893.
Tchaikovsky’s operas were not in the Italian tradition so despised
by Stasov and others. He himself called “Evgenii Onegin” “lyric
scenes” rather than an opera as it was a series of scenes strung
together by the story, something Stasov should have liked but char-
acteristically found reason to fault anyway. His operas used libretti
based on Russian literature rather than folklore, and thus were
“national” as well, but again in ways quite different from what
Stasov advocated. They had none of the reflections on Russian his-
tory that prompted Mussorgsky and Rimskii-Korsakov to write,
and by the late 1870s Tchaikovsky was politically quite conserva-
tive. In his correspondence he made fun of the idea of government
without a strong tsar.
In some respects Tchaikovsky’s ballets were even more important,
for they were not only great pieces of music, but the first native com-
positions of importance for the St. Petersburg ballet under Marius
Petipa (1818–1910). Petipa came to Russia in 1847 as a dancer and
by 1862 had become the principal choreographer at the Imperial
Theater, the Mariinskii. Himself a product of the French ballet of
the first half of the nineteenth century, he was the creator of ballet
in Russia as we know it. From Petipa come not only a whole series
of ballets now still in repertory but many of the now standard Rus-
sian practices, including the strong male roles that were unusual in
the mid-nineteenth century. The ballet, even more than the opera,
retained its ties to the court and had a predominantly aristocratic
audience: a number of the ballerinas were also mistresses of the
Grand Dukes and great aristocrats. As the ballet was directly sub-
ordinate to the Ministry of the Court, it was provided with lavish
subsidies for the productions and support for Petipa until nearly the
end of his life. As George Balanchine later put it, “St. Petersburg
was now the ballet capital of the world.”
 The Golden Age of Russian Culture 237

Russian music came to maturity in a relatively short period of

time, the result of both state and private patronage. The continua-
tion of the state theater system was a great boon to ballet, less so to
opera, but by the 1890s operas could be staged by private compa-
nies subsidized by the Moscow industrialists. Rubinstein founded
the Imperial Russian Music Society with court patronage to provide
symphony concerts as early as the 1860s. Stasov and the Balakirev
circle were particularly concerned to bring music to a larger pub-
lic, founding a Free (not for payment) Music School and giving
many semi-amateur concerts of choral music. At first the audiences
were sparse, but by the 1890s St. Petersburg and Moscow boasted
a number of concert series and private theaters and orchestras with
growing and enthusiastic audiences. In the provinces small, mostly
private music schools sprang up, creating music far from the capi-
tals and producing many great musicians. The institutional basis of
Russian music reflected the changing society of the time, combining
as it did state subsidy and control, private patronage from the new
class of industrialists, and intelligentsia activism. On this basis the
composers and musicians were able to create and perform some of
the world’s greatest music.

the visual arts

For Russia’s painters the most important event was the resignation
of thirteen students from the Academy of Art in 1863. The students,
led by the most talented of the group, Ivan Kramskoi, objected to
the traditional conditions of the annual Gold Medal competition at
the Academy. For these competitions the students were assigned a
historical, mythological, or biblical subject for their painting, and
the specific theme that year was “Odin in the Hall of Valhalla.”
The winner received not just a medal but also a trip to Europe and
the right to sell the painting from the Academy but Kramskoi and
his colleagues would not accept the assigned subject. Instead they
chose to resign from the Academy, thus forfeiting their chances to
win, and formed a “Free Association of Artists.”
The Academy rebels were not alone in wanting to reject the aca-
demic models. Both the artistic conventions and the subject matter
seemed to most younger artists to be old-fashioned and foreign,
238 A Concise History of Russia

having nothing to do with the Russian reality changing so swiftly

around them in the 1860s. Insofar as any of them had European
models, they were Courbet and some of the German realist painters,
but mostly the Russian painting that emerged in the decade had
native roots in the genre painting of the 1850s and to some extent
in Alexander Ivanov. The new painting was to be realist, and it was
to depict the life of the Russian people in its fullest extent. Not sur-
prisingly, the self-appointed spokesman of the new trend was once
again Vladimir Stasov.
The association of the Academy rebels soon fell apart from inter-
nal squabbles, but in 1870 Kramskoi came up with the idea of
the “Itinerant Association of Russian Artists,” designed to put on
exhibits of their work not just in the capitals but in a variety of
Russian cities. The idea was an immediate success, and many artists
joined. The new association came to encompass virtually all Russian
artists other than the privileged academicians. It found a new public
beyond the St. Petersburg elites, bringing the work of its members
to provincial audiences, to the intelligentsia and also to the emerg-
ing middle class. The exhibitions also brought the artists in contact
with wealthy businessmen, the most important being the Moscow
textile millionaires. Pavel Tretyakov had been collecting since 1856
and made his private collection available to the public from early
on. He thus was able to support the artists by buying their work
and also making it better known. In 1881 he opened the collection
to the general public. Petersburg had no equivalent, though Tsar
Alexander III did purchase many paintings, including the work of
the Itinerants. Supposedly it was one of Repin’s religious paintings
which Alexander bought at the Itinerant exhibition in 1889 that
gave him the idea for establishing a museum of Russian art in St.
Petersburg. It opened only in 1895, after Alexander’s death, in the
Michael palace, the old residence of Grand Duchess Elena Pavlovna.
The Itinerants chose as their subject matter Russian landscape,
genre scenes of life in the countryside, and portraits of the writers
and artists of the day, as well as of the businessmen who served
as their patrons. The most important was Ilya Repin, who made a
sensation in 1873 with a simple depiction of workmen hauling a
barge on the Volga. Though Repin’s sympathies were with the Itin-
erants, he was an Academy student and made use of its stipend to
 The Golden Age of Russian Culture 239

spend several years in Paris. Though he intensely admired the French

painters of the time including Manet, and improved his technical
skills, he remained true to the ideals of his Russian mentors and
colleagues. His most famous paintings were the work of the 1880s,
monumental canvasses depicting a religious procession in Kursk
province, the return of a political prisoner to his family, and other
subjects that implied mild criticism of the existing order. Repin also
tried historical subjects, the most powerful being his painting of
Ivan the Terrible in the moment after killing his son. Repin saw this
work not as an unambiguous condemnation of despotism but as a
tragedy of crime and repentance, though many among the public
took it in a more political sense.
Repin was only the best known of many painters of the time.
Vasilii Vereshchagin’s horrifying pictures of the wars in Turkestan
and the Balkans were a sensation for their realistic depictions of the
aftermath of battle. The Siberian Vasilii Surikov’s huge historical
paintings, showing Peter the Great’s execution of the musketeers,
the imprisonment of the Old Believer martyr Morozova, and the
conquest of Siberia, formed Russia’s visual conception of its past
for decades. The landscape painters, Ivan Shishkin with his forests
and Isaak Levitan with his many elegiac rivers and fields with their
churches conveyed the vastness and humble beauty of the Russian
countryside. Most of these painters were pupils or friends of Repin,
for St. Petersburg’s artistic life changed rapidly. The Academy was
less of a threat as salons and studios appeared, as did new patrons.
Tsar Alexander III was deeply impressed by Repin, bought more
and more of the Itinerant paintings, and eventually the Russian
Museum in St. Petersburg provided the city with its first museum
devoted exclusively to Russian art. The rebels had found a supporter
where they least expected it.
Russian painting never acquired the fame abroad of Russian lit-
erature or music. Some of the painters (Vereshchagin, for example)
had a brief vogue in Europe at the time, but were largely forgotten
in the twentieth century. Russian art of the nineteenth century was
too far in its esthetic from the dominant French school to have any
impact. Indeed Russian painters other than Repin and a few others
did not travel in the West and knew little of French art. Their work
did not even resemble the European realist art that was dominant
240 A Concise History of Russia

outside of France, though they were aware of the Germans to some

extent. Impressionism left the Russian painters cold until the very
end of the century. What the painters of the period – the Itinerants
and others – did produce was a portrait of Russia, its people, its his-
tory, and its land, that still resonates with virtually every educated
Russian.

literature

The glory of Russian culture in the decades after the Crimean War
was in its literature, which not only was central to Russian soci-
ety and culture but for the first time breached the barrier of lan-
guage to enter into the common culture of the West. Within a
few years, Ivan Turgenev, Fyodor Dostoevsky, and Leo Tolstoy all
acquired enormous fame and popularity in Russia. The vehicle of
this new popularity was the press, particularly the half dozen or so
“thick journals” that published almost all of the new work. The
public for Russian literature, as opposed to Western Europe, was
not concentrated in the big cities. Even Petersburg was not yet a
huge metropolis like Paris or London, and much of its population
was barely literate. No large educated middle class yet existed to
provide readers for the new novels, whose place in Russia was
taken by the gentry and the intelligentsia. They were spread all over
the country as landowners on their estates, provincial doctors and
gymnasium teachers, and minor officials throughout the empire.
There were often no bookstores in the provinces, and the monthly
arrival by post of the “thick journal” was the main focus of cultural
life.
Ivan Turgenev had already made a name for himself with the
Sportsman’s Sketches and several novels when he achieved real
notoriety with Fathers and Sons in 1862. In his later novels Tur-
genev’s heroes and his very strong heroines, mostly from the gentry,
spent their time trying to puzzle out the meaning of the changes in
Russia and the world and their role in them. Turgenev presented
various possibilities, and in the process satisfied no political camp,
but earned for himself a large and appreciative public. His nearly
full-time residence abroad kept him aloof from much of the details
 The Golden Age of Russian Culture 241

of ever-changing Russian life, but it also made him a link to Euro-

pean literature. His friendship with the leading lights of French
literature, Emile Zola, the Goncourt brothers, and others, eased the
way for translations and thus earned Russian literature a place in
wider European culture for the first time.
Fyodor Mikhailovich Dostoevsky had made his literary debut,
like Turgenev, in the 1840s. His involvement in the Petrashevskii
circle had brought him four years in prison in Siberia, followed by
another five years in the army in remote fortresses bordering the
Kazakh steppe. In prison Dostoevsky’s view of the world began to
change, for he abandoned utopian socialism as too far away from
the people and began to turn to Orthodoxy, in his mind the “peo-
ple’s” religion. In the army he was able to at least read and write,
and finally returned to European Russia in 1859 with a bundle
of manuscripts in his trunk. One of them was his Notes from the
House of the Dead (1860–61), which brought him instant fame. Its
harrowing account of prison life was in harmony with the public
mood of the emancipation era, and many readers seemed to have
missed the note of redemption by faith in the work. Unlike most of
the Russian writers of his time, Dostoevsky did not come from the
hereditary gentry. His father was a doctor who had acquired noble
rank through service but little means of subexistence. Dostoevsky
had to live by his pen, and that was not easy. In 1861–1865 he
tried his hand at journalism, together with his brother putting out
two journals that sold only moderately and quickly collapsed. In the
journals he espoused a variant of Slavophilism, calling for the return
to the soil and traditions of the Russian people. In his mind, this
return meant Orthodoxy and respect for the tsar. A trip to West-
ern Europe broadened his experience, but also confirmed in him an
increasingly negative view of modern society as individualistic, irre-
ligious, and mainly devoted to greed. The trip also introduced him
to the casino, and added an addiction to gambling to his medical
problems (epilepsy) and his chronic indebtedness.
Dostoevsky had already made a contribution to the literary debate
of the time in his 1864 Notes from the Underground, a savage attack
on the utopianism of Chernyshevsky’s What is to be Done?, but this
was not a work calculated to win popular acclaim, indeed its fame
242 A Concise History of Russia

came only in the twentieth century. The collapse of his journals

impelled him to furious work just to survive, and the results were
spectacular in the literary sense, if not the financial. His first major
success was Crime and Punishment, published in Katkov’s conser-
vative “thick journal” Russian Messenger in 1866. Eventually it
would win him worldwide fame, but right from the start it was his
greatest Russian success. The story of the student Raskol’nikov who
murdered an elderly woman pawnbroker because he needed money
and felt that he was above normal moral rules caught the imagina-
tion of his contemporaries, and has never ceased to fascinate. Over
the next decade and a half he would produce more great novels as
well as a host of shorter works. In them he showed himself a master
of human psychology, though he disliked the term: he thought he
was simply portraying the human soul as it was.
Crime and Punishment brought him enduring fame, but it did
not solve his monetary problems. The Russian book market was
developed enough to circulate new novels widely, but not enough
to provide a living even for a now famous author. The second of
the great novels, The Idiot, was an attempt to portray a positive
character in Prince Myshkin, the main character, but it is perhaps
for the mysterious Nastasia Fillipovna that it is best remembered.
Soon after came Demons (1871–72), among other things an attack
on the liberals and radicals of his time, whom he portrayed as
ineffective dreamers playing with fire in the elder Verkhovenskii or
amoral and power-hungry fanatics in the younger Verkhovenskii, a
combined portrait of the revolutionary Nechaev and Dostoevsky’s
erstwhile leader Petrashevskii.
Demons cemented his reputation as a conservative spokesman
and once again in financial straits, Dostoevsky turned back to jour-
nalism, but this time in different circumstances. In 1872 Dostoevsky
began to visit the political salon of Prince V. P. Meshcherskii, the
close friend of the heir to the throne, Alexander Alexandrovich. The
heir was the center of the conservative opposition to his father’s
reforms, reinforced in his views by the conservative lawyer Kon-
stantin Pobedonostev, who had served as one of his tutors. All
of them espoused a monarch-centered statist conservatism, nation-
alist and Orthodox, but lacking the specific Slavophile doctrines
about the village community and the spiritual unity of the nation.
 The Golden Age of Russian Culture 243

Meshcherskii had just founded a newspaper called The Citizen and

convinced Dostoevsky to become the editor. As an encouragement,
Alexander Alexandrovich also paid Dostoevsky’s debts, a fact not
known until the 1990s. Part of Dostoevsky’s contribution was the
regular feature, The Diary of a Writer, which contained some of
his most famous as well as his most notorious contributions. In the
Diary and its later continuations he used the opportunity it pro-
vided to criticize the new reformed Russia. The new court system
in particular aroused his wrath, as the idea of trial by jury seemed
to him pernicious. In any case, he saw crime in a religious light,
as an issue of sin and repentance, and mocked legal formulas and
trial procedure. His journalism was intensely nationalistic, glory-
ing in Russia’s military achievements in the Russo-Turkish war and
indeed in warfare itself. The Poles, Ukrainians, and Jews came in
for his wrath, the latter in his mind the incarnation of the grasping,
individualistic spirit of modern society. None of these ideological
positions and national prejudices endeared Dostoevsky to the intel-
ligentsia outside its small conservative contingent.
The last of Dostoevsky’s novels, The Brothers Karamazov, again
brought him success, with its family intrigue and philosophical
ruminations, and finally established his position among Russian
writers. His last important public appearance took place in 1880,
as a speaker for the celebrations surrounding the erection of a statue
of Pushkin in Moscow. Here he surprised his audience by praising
Pushkin not as just a Russian writer, but one who embraced all
of humanity. The speech went a long way to repairing his reputa-
tion with the intelligentsia, but did him little good with his con-
servative friends like Pobedonostsev. Pobedonostsev was by now
the head of the Holy Synod, and as guardian of Orthodoxy he had
begun to think Dostoevsky’s view of Christ much too vague and not
sufficiently in accord with church teaching. Dostoevsky’s Christ had
indeed come to resemble his Pushkin, a figure for humanity, not just
for Russia. This was to be Dostoevsky’s ultimate fate as well.
The religious theme that was central to Dostoevsky’s work and
thought also came to preoccupy the other of Russia’s greatest writ-
ers, Tolstoy. Count Lev Nikolaevich Tolstoy was born in 1828 into
a family of well-off landowners with lands in the rich provinces
south of Moscow. Tolstoy was born in Iasnaia Poliana, the primary
244 A Concise History of Russia

family estate, and it remained his principal home until his death.
The family was not part of the great aristocracy that frequented
the court and Petersburg salons, but was certainly of ancient date
and with a distinguished record of service in the army and the civil
service of the Russian empire. He grew up on the family estate
under the guidance of various tutors and then spent some time as
a student in the University of Kazan,’ all described in unforget-
table detail in his autobiographical trilogy, Childhood, Boyhood,
Youth. At the university he also participated in the normal life of
the young nobleman, drinking, playing cards, and pursuing women
far removed from polite society. He never took a degree at the uni-
versity and so, restless at home, he took off for the Caucasus where
he enlisted as a volunteer in an artillery unit. The outbreak of the
Crimean War brought him a commission, and he saw serious fight-
ing, not least at the siege of Sevastopol. His stories of that siege were
published while it was still continuing and brought him instant fame
as a writer. At war’s end he spent several years in Petersburg and
Moscow, quarrelling with nearly all the important and unimportant
literary figures of the time. Fundamentally he was not in sympathy
with their ideas, neither with the progressivism and fascination with
science and progress of the liberals nor the subservience to autoc-
racy of the conservatives. The Slavophiles seemed to him nice people
but hopelessly doctrinaire. Personally he remained a nobleman and
country gentleman (not a courtier) and found most of the literati
crude or self-serving or both.
In these years he made his first trip to Western Europe. Europe as
a whole left him with much the same critical view as that of Dosto-
evsky, that Europe’s vaunted progress was just materialism, greed,
and spiritual emptiness. The difference was that Tolstoy lacked
Dostoevsky’s chauvinism, and had no great respect for Russian
autocracy or Orthodoxy. He did not see any “Russian” answers to
Europe’s dilemmas. His next project was a school for the peasant
children on his estate, which he determined to run on lines derived
from Rousseau’s pedagogical theories. That meant no compulsion,
no punishments, work projects, and a determined attempt to engage
the pupils in the subject matter. The school was eventually success-
ful, though perhaps more due to Tolstoy’s charisma than to the
efficacy of his theories. Tolstoy founded a magazine to propagate
 The Golden Age of Russian Culture 245

his views, in the process annoying most of the educational establish-

ment. The school gave him considerable notoriety, and also inspired
a second trip to Europe to meet famous pedagogues and inspect
schools. He found European schools, especially the famous Prus-
sian schools, to be depressing, regimented, and heavily dependent
on memorization, all of which merely substantiated his prejudices.
Returning from abroad early in 1861, just after the emancipation
of the serfs, he found himself with a new occupation: Intermediary
of the Peace for one of the districts of his home province of Tula.
These were the men the assembled gentry were supposed to elect to
deal with disputes between peasants and landlords over the imple-
mentation of the emancipation. The Tula gentry rejected Tolstoy as
too sympathetic to the peasants, but the provincial governor, a gen-
eral, overruled them and appointed Tolstoy. He served for nearly a
year, most of the time in battles with his fellow intermediaries. The
rumors of his unusual views caused him even more trouble, for the
spreading revolutionary movement in the spring of 1862 led to a
police raid on the estate. The police were looking for underground
printing presses and revolutionary manifestoes, and found nothing
of the sort. Tolstoy wrote to the tsar to complain of the insult to his
honor and reputation, and received assurances from the ministers
that there would be no consequences. Neither his neighbors in the
gentry nor the government knew quite what to make of him.
The same year he married Sofya Bers, the daughter of one of his
neighbors, and for the next twenty years devoted himself to his fam-
ily, his school, his duties as Intermediary of the Peace, and to writing.
The fruit of those years would be War and Peace, which appeared in
1865–1869, like many of Dostoevsky’s works, in Katkov’s Russian
Messenger.
Tolstoy’s immense epic was devoted to Russia’s wars with
Napoleon, and mainly to the French invasion of 1812. Though
certainly patriotic in a general sense, Tolstoy was no nationalist. He
hated Napoleon, not the French, and his view of Russia was far from
rosy. He portrayed the tsar, the court, and the government as inept
and removed from the realities of life and warfare. The many Ger-
mans in Russian service came in for contemptuous treatment, and
only his hero Kutuzov stands above the crowd of cold and formalis-
tic commanders. Though the book concluded with long reflections
246 A Concise History of Russia

Figure 14. Lev Tolstoy Plowing a Field, drawing by Ilya Repin. Tretyakov
Museum.

on the meaning of history (Tolstoy was particularly incensed by

notions that “great men” determine the course of history), the book
is not really about the events of 1812, it is about man and his fate,
as Tolstoy understood it.
For Tolstoy the real issues of life were not political, they were
moral. Pierre Bezukhov and his spiritual pilgrimage in particu-
lar incarnated the desire to act in a moral manner and to find
what meaning might be hidden behind the rush of everyday life
and the mindless acceptance of inherited values and institutions.
Prince Andrei Bolkonskii is his opposite, the rational analyst of
warfare, events, and human beings. Ultimately it is Pierre who finds
happiness, first learning from the peasant Platon Karataev and his
humility and faith in God, and then in family life with Natasha
Rostova. Much of Tolstoy was in Pierre, not only his experiments
with schemes to benefit the peasants on his estate but also in his
spiritual search.
 The Golden Age of Russian Culture 247

After the success of War and Peace Tolstoy turned again to ped-
agogy and several schemes for new novels. The outcome was Anna
Karenina in 1875–1877. This was the story of the aristocratic Anna,
her lover Vronskii and her bureaucrat husband, contrasted with
Levin and his wife Kitty, again a portrait of Tolstoy, a happy family
life contrasted with Anna’s disastrous affair. While he was writ-
ing the book, however, Tolstoy went through the final and deepest
spiritual crisis of his life.
Tolstoy’s was a religious crisis. Haunted by death and the problem
of the meaning of life, he turned to philosophy and religion, but
could not make out which religion he should follow. He first turned
to Orthodoxy, the religion in which he had been brought up, mainly
on the grounds that it was the religion of the peasantry and he
wanted to remain close to them and their wisdom. Orthodoxy,
however, did not satisfy him. The liturgy left him cold, and he
disliked the enthusiastic support of the church for the state and
all its doings – warfare, oppression, and capital punishment – all
already unacceptable in his mind.
Finally in 1879–80 he began to read the Bible intensively, par-
ticularly the Gospels, and came to the conclusion that the core of
the teaching of Christ was non-resistance to evil. (“I say unto you,
That ye resist not evil; but whosoever shall smite thee on thy right
cheek, turn to him the other also.” Matt. 5:39) In Tolstoy’s mind,
everything flowed from that principle. It meant that the state, in
fighting crime or foreign enemies, was basically un-Christian, and
that the only proper stance was radical pacifism and a sort of Chris-
tian anarchism. He developed these ideas in a series of long tracts,
the Confession that recounted his inner development toward these
views as well as accounts of what he saw as true Christianity. Need-
less to say, none of these works could be published in Russia though
they circulated widely underground and attracted to him a small but
devoted following.
Tolstoy did not abandon literature, in 1899 he published his last
major novel, Resurrection, about a prostitute wrongly convicted
of a murder and her spiritual rebirth (this book was banned in
Russia) and he wrote Khadji Murat, a novella of the Caucasian
Wars. Shorter works like The Kreutzer Sonata and The Death of
248 A Concise History of Russia

Ivan Ilich as well as innumerable articles on public issues gradually

made him the most famous person in the country, and the most
famous Russian in the world.
Tolstoy’s views and his stubborn defense of them created prob-
lems with the church and the state and with his family as well.
His wife thought that he was neglecting their welfare, though by
the 1890s the changing book market in Russia meant that he, like
other authors, began to realize more substantial returns on his many
works. The Revolution of 1905 was a hard time for him as well,
since he was opposed to the autocracy but did not believe in the
violence used against it, much less the violence of the state against
strikers, revolutionaries, and peasant rebels. Finally in 1910, at the
age of eighty-two, he decided to leave everything and lead the life of
a religious recluse. His trip on an unheated third class carriage in
winter proved too much for him. He died in the house of the rail-
road stationmaster in a small town only a few hundred miles south
of Iasnaia Poliana.
By the time of Tolstoy’s death Russian literature and culture had
passed into new phases, with which he had little sympathy. He
was the last survivor of the greatest age of Russian literature, and
perhaps of Russian culture in general. The arts as well as the sciences
had put Russia on the map of world culture. For the first time the
vast Russian empire was known for something other than size and
military power.
 14
Russia as an Empire

The Russian Empire’s foreign wars over the centuries laid the foun-
dation for its expansion to include the whole of northern Eurasia. Of
course by British standards, the results were not impressive. Most
of the Russian Empire lay in Siberia, the largest part of which was
seemingly impenetrable forest and tundra. Russia’s newest acqui-
sitions in Central Asia were small in population and were poor –
no equivalent to India or even Burma. The resultant state included
extensive areas on its borders with non-Russian populations, effec-
tively two empires, a traditional land empire in Europe and an
attempted imitation of the British example in Central Asia. In both
west and south internal and foreign politics were inextricably inter-
twined.
Nicholas I had understood that Russia’s empire had very limited
possibilities for expansion. After 1828 its main effort went into
subduing the Caucasian mountain peoples already within Russia
rather than the conquest of new territory. In Central Asia the army
also concentrated on strengthening the existing frontier and control
of the Kazakhs of the steppe while making no serious attempt at
expansion. Even in the Balkans, Nicholas had pursued a status
quo policy, preferring to maintain Russian influence in a unitary
Ottoman state rather than run the risks of partition schemes. Even
this modest policy had been too much for Britain and France, but it
reflected the tsar’s strategic prudence as well as his tactical blunders.
The new situation after Crimea brought different possibilities.

249
250 A Concise History of Russia

The treaty of Paris not only ended the Crimean War but put an
end to hopes of Russian influence on the Ottomans, leaving Russia
with only the local nationalist movements in Serbia and Bulgaria
as potential allies. Bands of insurgents with plans for democratic
republics, the Balkan nationalists were unlikely allies for the Rus-
sian empire, and the international and military position of Russia,
weakened by defeat and saddled with debts and an enormous deficit,
rendered Russia’s European policy essentially passive. The need for
stability on the European border also arose from the feeling that the
Russian Empire’s boundary in the west was very difficult to defend,
running an enormous length through territories poorly served by
communications. The answer would be railroads, but they took a
long time to build. Threatening noises from Britain and France dur-
ing the Polish revolt in 1863–64 caused nightmares in St. Petersburg,
but they came to nothing, in large part because of the firm Russian
alliance with Prussia, now under its new chancellor, Otto von Bis-
marck. The Prussian alliance meant that the western boundary was
largely secure, especially as Bismarck defeated Russia’s rivals, Aus-
tria and then Napoleon III, establishing in the process a powerful
new state in the unified imperial Germany, for the time being Rus-
sia’s friend.
Preoccupation in Europe with Germany and Italy and the pacific
policies of Russia’s foreign minister, Prince Gorchakov, secured
peace in the 1860s. Russia could gradually reform itself and also
begin to rebuild its army on more modern lines, but crisis in the
Balkans soon created a new dilemma. The Serbian and Bulgar-
ian revolutionaries had repeatedly attempted insurgencies inside
Ottoman territories, calling on the Slavic and Orthodox peoples
to rise against their Turkish masters. The response was increas-
ingly savage reprisals, until in 1875 the Serbs of Bosnia revolted
again and were able to hold their own for several months before
the Ottomans crushed the revolt, in the process perpetrating the
largest genocide in modern European history up to World War I.
The next year the Bulgarians rose as well, and Turkish irregular
units exterminated entire villages, causing even English public opin-
ion to waver in its support of the Turks. Here was a chance for
Russia to reassert itself and secure influence in the Balkans, and in
1877 Russia proposed to the Turks an autonomous status for the
 Russia as an Empire 251

rebel areas. The Ottomans refused, and Russia declared war. The
war that ensued was bloody but relatively short. The Turks had
first-class fortresses, were well supplied with European weapons,
and fought with their usual courage and determination. The Rus-
sian army, though larger, was still in the process of reformation
and hampered by old-fashioned and unimaginative generals. After
a series of bloody assaults on the Turkish forts, the Russians finally
pushed their way over the mountains and arrived near Istanbul
in 1878. They then made a treaty with the Turks that established
Bulgaria as the main Slavic state in the Balkans, one that would
presumably become a Russian client. This alarmed Britain and Aus-
tria, and the result was the treaty of Berlin, which created a much
smaller Bulgaria with a German monarch. Austria was allowed to
take Bosnia as a protectorate. This was Bismarck’s work, and it was
a qualified defeat for Russia after all the sacrifices and heroism of
the war.
The Russian Empire had become a conglomerate of two very
different sorts of empire, each posing its own problems for
St. Petersburg. At the same time as the failure in the Balkans, a new
empire arose in Central Asia, where Russian generals overwhelmed
the local khanates of Kokand, Bukhara, and Khiva. The first was
entirely annexed to the empire, while the latter, much reduced in
territory, became Russian protectorates. By the 1880s all of Cen-
tral Asia was directly or indirectly under Russian rule. In explicit
imitation of British India, Russia set out to build a modern colonial
empire.
On the western border, the issues were mainly those of nation-
ality, not colonialism. The Poles posed the chief national issue
throughout the nineteenth century and, after mid-century, it was
the Jews. For quite different reasons, neither Poles nor Jews fit well
into the imperial structure. The Poles were seen in the government as
a hostile element, and for many government officials the Jews were
not able to assimilate and exploited the local peasantry. The Polish
revolts and the pogroms directed against Jews added an element of
violence absent in relations with the other European minorities of
the empire. Finland, in contrast, was quiet and largely loyal to the
tsar until the 1890s. Both Poland and Finland were important to a
large extent for military reasons, as they both formed part of the
252 A Concise History of Russia

crucial western frontier. The economies of both western borderlands

contributed to the overall prosperity of the empire, but Russians
had few investments there in either land or industry. In popula-
tion together the Poles and Finns were less than ten percent of the
total population of the empire. The largest non-Russian group in
the European part of the empire was actually the Ukrainians (about
seventeen percent), whose ambiguous ethnicity and national con-
sciousness kept them on the margins of Russian politics until 1905.
The integration of the western borderlands of the Russian Empire
had depended since the eighteenth century on the inclusion of
local elites in the imperial power structure. The ruling circles of
nineteenth-century St. Petersburg were very far from uniformly Rus-
sian. Prominent Germans included Nicholas’ minister of finances
Georg Kankrin, his foreign minister Karl von Nesselrode and the
head of the Third Section, Alexander von Benckendorf. Among the
Ukrainians in the imperial elite were minister of internal affairs Vik-
tor Kochubei and the victorious field marshal Ivan Paskevich, the
viceroy of Warsaw after 1830. Finlanders were important in the
army and navy, and two of them (Arvid Adlolf Etholén and Johan
Hampus Furuhjelm) were governors of Alaska in its Russian period.
The diplomatic core had several princes Lieven, Baron Nicolai, and
a host of others, as did the court and the army. Only the Polish
nobility, loyal to its traditions of Polish statehood, held back from
Russian service, aside from a few prominent exceptions.
The reliance on noble supporters of the Romanov dynasty, so
successful earlier on, had one shortcoming. In the course of the
century the development of commercial and then industrial capi-
talism, however slow by European standards, changed the society
of the empire. In the western borderlands the result was the declin-
ing economic fortunes of the nobility, the principal support of the
empire. Businessmen, on the other hand, in Finland, Poland, and
other western areas benefited considerably from the imperial market
and were willing to cooperate (within limits), but the aristocratic
conservatism of the court and most of the ruling elite made an
arrangement with newer social groups difficult or impossible. The
Russian empire could not fully abandon its alliance with the local
nobilities, nor could they survive without the tsars, and they all
went down to destruction together in 1917.
 Russia as an Empire 253

poles in the russian empire

The outcome of the Congress of Vienna meant that the historically

Polish lands incorporated into the Russian Empire fell into two areas
with quite different character and status, central Poland (Congress
Poland) and Poland’s former eastern territories. In both parts the
Polish nobility did not cooperate in large numbers with the Russian
Empire, and instead provided the social basis for nationalist revolt.
The central Polish lands around Warsaw formed the Kingdom of
Poland, an autonomous unit within Russia, with the tsar as king
of Poland. Its population was overwhelmingly Polish, and until the
1830 revolt, the Kingdom of Poland had its own government, legis-
lature, and army under the general aegis of the tsar and his viceroy
in Warsaw. After the revolt was crushed, the Russian viceroy field
marshal Paskevich ruled the area directly, with the assistance of
appointed officials. Polish émigrés in France and Britain formed
a series of revolutionary societies aimed at overthrowing Russian
rule, but none of them had any success until after the Crimean War.
The eastern territories of the old Poland, today’s Lithuania, Belarus,
and the western Ukraine, were quite different in their fate. There the
Poles were primarily the nobility, owning serfs of different national-
ities whose relationships to the Polish cause ranged from somewhat
friendly in Lithuania to quite hostile in the Ukraine. As the towns-
people were largely Jewish and thus not part of the Polish nation
in the eyes of the revolutionaries, the potential base of the Polish
cause in these areas was thin indeed. To make matters worse, these
areas were never autonomous within the empire, though the Rus-
sian authorities continued to apply Polish law in civil and criminal
matters until the 1830s.
To make things even more complicated, the Kingdom of Poland,
where serfdom had been abolished by Napoleon, developed more
rapidly than the Russian interior. Textile industries came into being
in Warsaw, Lodz, and other cities, mostly the work of Jewish, Ger-
man, and other immigrant entrepreneurs but attracting Polish and
Jewish workers and gradually building more modern cities in place
of the old centers with their noble palaces and impoverished arti-
sans. Warsaw became the center of unrest in the area. The Russian
authorities’ reactions to the new revolt of 1863–64 was to further
254 A Concise History of Russia

reduce the limited autonomy of Poland, the policy that came to

be known as “Russification.” Even the official name was changed
from Kingdom of Poland to “Vistula Provinces” and the school
system was henceforth required to teach in Russian. The Russian
government enacted reforms of landholding more favorable to the
peasantry, seen as a potential counterweight to the nobles. The Pol-
ish response to the defeat was a generation that avoided politics and
turned toward smaller deeds, the building of civil society through
education, even if in Russian, and taking advantage of the booming
economy. The irony was that much of the prosperity of Poland’s
economy was the result of the huge market provided by the Rus-
sian Empire, where Polish goods, uncompetitive in Western Europe,
found ready customers. The revival of Polish politics in the 1890s
brought new groups into the underground, the National Democrats,
a middle-class nationalist group and the various socialist parties, all
of whom would play a major role in 1905.

the baltic provinces

In some ways the Baltic provinces, Estonia, Livonia, and Kurland
(modern-day Estonia and Latvia) were more profoundly affected by
the evolution of state and society in the Russian Empire than other
non-Russian European areas.1 Alexander I had abolished serfdom
in the Baltic provinces in 1816–1819. The landless emancipation
left the Estonian and Latvian peasants still the sharecroppers or
tenants of the German nobility, and frequently still obligated to per-
form labor services, but the emancipation did begin the process of
modernization. The role of the Baltic provinces as ports of entry to
the Russian Empire made Riga a major commercial and eventually
industrial center by the end of the nineteenth century. At the same
time the restoration of Baltic noble privileges under Paul I meant
that the provincial assemblies of nobles – all of them Germans – and
the restoration of traditional forms of city government meant that

1 In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries the term “Baltic Provinces” did not
include Lithuania, which was part of the former Polish political and cultural
sphere. Latvia, Estonia, and Lithuania came to be called the “Baltic states” and
seen as a group only after independence in 1918.
 Russia as an Empire 255

effective control of the area remained in the hands of the nobility

and the German city patriciate. The noble assemblies were freely
elected, and worked directly with the tsar, often bypassing the Rus-
sian governors, the only representatives of the central government
in the area. These were free institutions of a type that did not exist
in the rest of the empire (except Finland), but their existence per-
petuated the rule of an ethnically distinct nobility over the rural
population.
The persistence of the autonomous noble institutions and the
freedom of the peasants meant that the effects of the reforms of
the 1860s were different in the Baltic provinces from the rest of the
empire. For the peasants the great issue was not their legal status but
access to land ownership, granted only in the 1860s. The press flour-
ished and was much less restricted than in the rest of the empire as
a result of the local legal system. Latvian and Estonian journals and
newspapers appeared beside the older German press, providing a
forum for political debate as well as cultural and national polemics.
There had always been minorities of Latvian and Estonian artisans
and small traders in the towns, and the economic development of
the area led to a rapid flow of population from the countryside into
the city, so that by the end of the nineteenth century the Germans
were a minority in the cities. At the same time the spread of edu-
cation, as elsewhere in the empire, gave rise to an educated class
among the Baltic peoples, and voluntary cultural societies carried
national ideas to the Latvians and Estonians. For these emergent
nationalities the Germans, not the Russian tsar or the Russian peo-
ple, were still the enemy. Indeed Russian Slavophiles thought that
the imperial government should encourage the Latvians and Estoni-
ans against the Germans, but the conservative pro-nobility policies
of St. Petersburg, as well as the excellent court connections of the
Baltic nobles, prevented the full emergence of such a tactic by the
Russian authorities.
All of these changes led to conflict between St. Petersburg and
the Baltic nobility, but the local noble assemblies continued to exist
and function, and in the countryside the German nobility was still
completely dominant. Most of them continued to serve in the Rus-
sian army and administration and particularly the aristocratic elite
remained loyal to the Empire. The existence of the new united
256 A Concise History of Russia

Germany after 1870 provided an attraction for some, but on the

whole the reliance on the nobility in the area was a largely success-
ful policy in the Baltic provinces. The situation began to change only
after 1900, when social changes and national movements brought
the Latvian and Estonian majorities onto the front stage of society
and politics. And they were not nobles.

finland

Like the Baltic provinces, Finland retained autonomous institutions

until the end of the empire, but these institutions and Finnish society
were otherwise quite different from the Baltic provinces. Finland, in
the words of Alexander I, had been “raised to the rank of nations”
by the Russian annexation of 1809. No longer was it merely the
eastern extension of Sweden with an exotic language spoken by
peasants, but it was a country of its own under the Russian tsar.
Alexander had also granted Finland the continuation of the laws and
Lutheran religion from the Swedish time, a separate government in
Helsinki, and a legislature modeled on the old Swedish diet. Unlike
the situation in the Baltic provinces, Finnish peasants had never
been serfs but were free tenants and freeholders, and the Finnish diet
continued the Swedish practice of including peasant representatives.
Thus the Russian tsars at first could rely in Finland on the loyalty
of the Swedish-speaking nobility for they found that the nobility
lacked both the antagonism to Russian rule of the Polish nobles
and the caste egotism of the Baltic Germans. Indeed for much of
the century the Russian tsars looked favorably on Finnish economic
development, state building, and emerging national consciousness.
The generally peaceful relationship was not wholly untroubled, for
Nicholas I never called the Finnish diet to meet. The local gov-
ernment in Helsinki remained in power, carrying out numerous
educational and economic projects with the support of the Russian
governors-general and the Finnish State Secretariat in St. Peters-
burg (usually headed by a Finn). The establishment of a university
in Helsinki not only raised the cultural level of the country but also
provided a center for an emerging national culture in both Swedish
and Finnish that affirmed national dignity while maintaining loy-
alty to the empire. Perhaps the most important result was Elias
 Russia as an Empire 257

Lönnrot’s compilation of Finnish folkore, the Kalevala, most of it

collected among the Finnish-speaking peasantry of northern Russia
rather than in Finland itself. Finnish rapidly became a literary lan-
guage alongside Swedish, though the latter remained the primary
language of administration until the end of the Russian Empire. As
the 1809 agreement added the Finnish territories taken by Peter the
Great to the rest of Finland, the border ran almost to St. Peters-
burg itself. Thus only a few hours from his capital, the Russian tsar
became a constitutional monarch. Finnish law remained separate
from that of the rest of the empire, with the result that Russian rev-
olutionaries could hide in Finland without legal obstacles to their
activities.
The Crimean War brought some destruction to Finland, as the
British navy shelled and burned a number of coastal towns, though
no bombardment could knock out the great fort of Sveaborg in the
Helsinki harbor. Finland repeatedly demonstrated its loyalty, and
was rewarded in the reform era that followed. As in the rest of the
empire, the end of the Crimean War meant a radical relaxation of
censorship and a new economic policy oriented toward capitalist
development. Economic development and reform brought newspa-
pers and public opinion to Finland as well, and political group-
ings began to form. The decisive change came in 1863 when Tsar
Alexander called the Finnish diet into session, an elected legislature
that represented “estates” (nobility, townspeople, clergy, and peas-
ants), not the country as a whole since the franchise was sharply
restricted. The peasants were overwhelmingly Finnish speakers, and
the tsar recognized their needs the same year, mandating that peti-
tions and other documents to the administration could be presented
in Finnish as well as Swedish (Russian was not contemplated). The
Finnish peasant deputies, all firm supporters of the Finnish lan-
guage, were the tsar’s main allies in Finland, against the mostly
Swedish-speaking liberals among the urban and noble deputies.
Inclusion in the Russian Empire created a new economic situ-
ation for Finland, as St. Petersburg was an enormous market for
labor and goods. In the early nineteenth century more Finns lived
in St. Petersburg than in any Finnish city, and the Finnish country-
side provided an increasingly large proportion of the capital’s food
supply. The more rapid development of the Russian interior after
258 A Concise History of Russia

the emancipation and the construction of railroads only speeded the

integration of Finland into the empire’s economy, as textile mills and
metalworking plants provided products for the seemingly unlimited
Russian market. Thus businessmen as well as nobles had an inter-
est in preserving a stable autonomy within the empire. This success
story only came to an end with the attempt at “Russification” by
governor-general N. I. Bobrikov in 1896–1902. Bobrikov decided
that Finland needed to be further integrated into the empire, a goal
shared by Tsar Nicholas II. Bobrikov’s actual measures were rather
limited (use of Russian by high officials, a threat to draft Finns to
the Russian army) and most of them remained on paper, but they
were enough to create a crisis without actually advancing Russian
rule in the country. The result was the emergence of radical nation-
alist groups and dissension among the nobility and business classes.
Finland retained almost all its autonomous rights up to 1917, but
Nicholas II and Bobrikov had succeeded in alienating large sections
of the population, including the elites.

jews
The Jews constituted a substantial population – accounting for
approximately five million in the Russian empire, about four per-
cent of the whole. At first the social and legal structure of the Jewish
community was inherited from Poland and only in the 1860s did
the Russian state began to mark out a distinctive Jewish policy in
keeping with the principles of the reform era.
Russia had no Jews among its population from the end of Kievan
times until the First Partition of Poland in 1772. In the eighteenth
century some Jewish merchants and artisans settled in the Ukraine
and in Riga, but this was technically illegal and the groups were
small. When Russia acquired its first substantial Jewish community,
the reaction of the Russian government was to preserve the status
quo. The kahal organization of the Jewish community remained
as it had been in Polish times, with the chief rabbis of each town
collecting the taxes for the state and administering justice. Further,
the Jews were restricted to the former Polish provinces (the “Pale of
Settlement”), so that they could not move into the Russian interior,
though the Pale did come to include the Black Sea coast provinces
 Russia as an Empire 259

with the new city of Odessa. Nicholas I’s attitude toward the Jews
was essentially hostile, but his only measures of consequence were
to draft them into the army (at a higher rate than Christians!) and
to formally abolish the kahals in 1844. Virtually all Jews remained
inside the Pale until the 1850s.
The reforming governments of the 1860s took a different direc-
tion, one of selective integration. (Assimilation or “Russification”
was not contemplated.) The idea was that the Jews needed to
become more useful to the state and to Russian society, and there-
fore were to be encouraged through education to form elites that
could both render that service and provide modern leadership for
the Jewish community. To that end the Russian government listened
to the petitions of the Jewish commercial and banking elite, and in
1859 permitted individuals of that elite to take up residence outside
the Pale. In 1865 similar permission was granted to the wealthiest
artisans. The result was the formation of an important Jewish com-
mercial and intellectual elite in St. Petersburg, whose leaders were
the Ginzburg banking dynasty. The Ginzburgs’ ties to the govern-
ment and court ensured them a voice on Jewish affairs until the
1880s.
The other side of the reform policy was the opening of Russian
universities to Jews beginning in the 1850s. Crucial to the fate of
Jewish students was the November 1861 decree permitting all Jew-
ish university graduates the same rights to private occupations and
residence granted to Christians upon completion of the university
degree. Though state service, however, remained closed to them,
these measures speeded the transformation of Jewish society, espe-
cially since they more or less coincided with the first wave of the
Haskalah, the Jewish enlightenment that rejected the traditional
Jewish religious world for the adoption of European education and
norms. By 1886 some fourteen percent of all university students in
the empire were Jews, and some ten percent of gymnasium students.
The assassination of Alexander II proved to be a disaster for the
Jews of the Russian Empire. In wake of his death a wave of pogroms
swept the southwestern provinces (mainly the Ukraine) and contin-
ued on and off for two years. The mob blamed the Jews for the
tsar’s death, looted their houses, and assaulted and raped thousands
of people, though only two died in the violence. Alexander III’s
260 A Concise History of Russia

government blamed Jewish exploitation of the peasantry for the

riots and began to rescind some of the existing legislation. The
most important measure was the introduction in 1887 of quotas
in the universities, to be only three percent for Jews in St. Peters-
burg and Moscow, five to ten percent elsewhere. Outside the two
capitals, however, the quotas were not strictly enforced. Petitions
for exceptions presented to the Minister of Education and other
means led to the actual growth in percentage of Jewish students
to twenty-seven percent (Kharkov University) and twenty-four per-
cent (Odessa). Thousands of Jews also went abroad for education,
especially to universities in Germany and Austria. There they con-
fronted a paradox. Though legally equal in all respects to native
students, Russian Jews confronted a student culture that was, by
the end of the century, nationalistic and militantly anti-semitic. In
Russian universities, where the students mostly supported the lib-
eral opposition to the state or even the revolutionaries, the student
culture was largely favorable to the Jews.
Thus the government had gone back on the spirit of selective
integration, but most of the legal structure remained and the mod-
ernization of Jewish society continued, if slowly. The lack of more
general progress inspired various responses, one being massive emi-
gration to Western Europe and the United States, but this option
also was not universally available or desired. Another response was
the appearance of a Jewish press that was liberal in its politics
and oriented toward the reform of the empire. Baron Ginzburg
and the St. Petersburg Jewish elite lobbied unceasingly, but with
less and less success after 1881. More radical options, especially
among students and young people generally were the various rev-
olutionary movements. Many Jews joined the Russian populists,
including the terrorist groups, and later the Marxists who preached
international solidarity. Others formed specifically Jewish social-
ist groups, the Jewish Workers’ League (the Bund), and finally the
growing Zionist movement encouraged Jews to opt out entirely
and move to Palestine. As the Russian government after the 1880s
tried more and more to present itself as “Russian,” anti-Semitism
became more or less an official policy. Pogroms like the Kishinev
pogrom of 1903, in which nearly fifty Jews died, further poi-
soned the atmosphere. In response, Russian liberal and radical
 Russia as an Empire 261

groups underlined their opposition to legal and social discrim-

ination against the Jews, and Jewish parties grew more radical
as well.
In spite of the restrictions, the evolution of Russian society meant
that more and more Jews entered the business classes, the profes-
sions, the intelligentsia, and more of them found ways, legal or
otherwise, to evade their confinement to the Pale. By 1897 six per-
cent of Jews lived officially outside the Pale – many unofficially.
Jewish communities emerged in St. Petersburg and Moscow, and
even in towns on the Volga far from the legally permitted areas.
Jews were entering Russian society, and the emergence of mass pol-
itics in 1905 would bring them to center stage in many ways, some
of them highly explosive.

ukrainians
Though the largest non-Russian group in the empire, the Ukrainians
played little role in imperial affairs until 1905, except as a potential
opposition to the Polish national movement and its claims. Their
minor role was the result of the ambiguities of Ukrainian national
consciousness, only slowly and incompletely changing among some
parts of the local intelligentsia from a Russian regional identity into
a national Ukrainian one.
Before the Crimean War the Ukrainian territories were Ukrainian
only in the nationality of the peasantry, with the exception of the
Left Bank, the former Hetmanate, and the Kharkov province. In
these latter regions the local nobility was descended from Khmel-
nyts’kyi’s officers and maintained local traditions of history and a
modest regionalist literature in Russian and occasionally Ukrainian.
In the 1830s and 1840s, Ukrainian cultural activities of that local
nobility were looked upon with favor from St. Petersburg as a
counterweight to Polish political movements and a regional exam-
ple of Russian uniqueness. The dominant figure in Ukrainian cul-
ture, however, came from a wholly different milieu. He was Taras
Shevchenko, a serf whose talents at drawing led him to an education
at the St. Petersburg Academy of Arts and liberation from serfdom.
A lottery organized by Russian noblemen, with the prize being a
portrait of the poet Vasilii Zhukovskii, raised enough money to
262 A Concise History of Russia

buy him out of serfdom. His first volumes of poetry attracted more
attention than his art, and back in Kiev he soon joined the histo-
rian Nikolai Kostomarov and other local intelligentsia who were
dreaming of Slavic federalism. These dreams came to the attention
of the authorities on the eve of 1848, and earned the poet a decade
of exile on the shores of the Caspian Sea.
After Crimea the changes in Russian society and government
policy had a sharp effect on the tiny Ukrainian intelligentsia. They
began to publish a journal in St. Petersburg and involved themselves
in the many activities of Russian radicals and liberals, including try-
ing to educate the peasantry. Shevchenko returned from exile and
resumed his central place in Ukrainian culture. The cultural efforts
of the nascent Ukrainian intelligentsia came to a sharp stop in 1864
and 1867, when most publishing in Ukrainian became forbidden
out of fear that Polish nationalists would penetrate the Ukrainian
movement. In the Ukrainian cities small groups of intellectuals with
a Ukrainian cultural orientation emerged, but they had little impact
as yet. The cities remained firmly Russian speaking up to 1917
and after. Most university students in Kiev or Kharkov, Ukrainian
or otherwise, ignored the Ukrainian movement and joined Russian
radical groups or entered careers in the Russian administration or
other institutions. The zemstvos, the elected local councils, were
introduced into the Left Bank provinces, but their occasional for-
ays into politics were oriented to the empire as a whole, not to
specifically Ukrainian problems. Disagreements among the various
layers of Russian bureaucracy over the language issue meant that
some Ukrainian language books did appear, and local history and
traditions were cultivated in the Russian language. Ironically the
chief venue for Ukrainian history was the Archeographical Society
in Kiev, which subsisted on funds from the Russian imperial mil-
itary governors-general of the southwestern provinces. The main
area of concern to the Russian empire was the Ukrainian move-
ment across the border in Austrian Galicia, where electoral politics
made possible a variety of Ukrainian parties, most of them not
friendly to the Russian tsars. In the Russian Empire, however, the
Ukrainian movement would not spread beyond the small Ukrainian
intelligentsia to a larger population until the eve of the 1905
Revolution.
 Russia as an Empire 263

the asiatic empire

If the European side of the empire was largely the result of territorial
and strategic ambitions, the Asiatic Empire combined those same
goals with a largely chimerical desire to imitate the economic success
of the European colonial empires. Within that general framework,
the Asiatic possessions of Russia fell into two areas, the Caucasus
acquired by 1828 and Central Asia, where Russian conquest began
in earnest only in the 1860s. To make matters more complex, the
Crimean and Volga Tatars and the Bashkirs, conquered earlier and
largely surrounded by Russian settlers, played a role both in Russian
imperial rule and in the formation of native nationalism in Central
Asia and elsewhere. Altogether the various Asian parts of the empire
constituted about twenty-five percent of its population.
In the Caucasus Russia began to move beyond the sixteenth cen-
tury boundary only at the end of the eighteenth century, annexing
(rather theoretically) the North Caucasus and then Transcaucasia.
Formal control was largely complete by 1828. South of the moun-
tains the Russians established an administration based on Russian
officials and the cooperation of the local Georgian and Armenian
nobility. These Christian elites were integrated into the imperial
nobility rather like the Baltic Germans or the Finns, and many of
them played major roles in the Russian state and especially in the
army up until 1917. The Azeris and other Muslims were a different
story, though the Russian government was to a large extent able to
coopt the Muslim clergy and other local elites after the end of the
Caucasian wars.
The conquest of the Caucasus had been carried out to secure the
eastern flank against the Ottomans. Commercial motives played
some role in the planning, for trade with and through Iran was
assumed to be a viable path to enormous profits. That idea proved to
be an illusion, since Russia lacked the commercial infrastructure to
make use of what was available, but that result did not become clear
until the 1830s. In any case, the strategic value of the Caucasus and
Transcaucasia as a southern frontier against Turkey was immense,
and the Russians were not going to leave just because trade with Iran
did not prove to be a bonanza. The mountain peoples of the north
slopes of the Caucasus were not impressed by Russian strategic
264 A Concise History of Russia

interests and liked even less the gradual penetration of Russian

settlers in the adjacent lowlands. The result was war.
The Caucasian Wars of the nineteenth century fell into two fronts
and two phases. One front was in the western end of the mountain
range and its foothills, and the principal opponents were the Cir-
cassians, while the other front was far to the east, in Dagestan and
parts of Chechnia. The wars began with the Russian attempt to
build a solid line of forts to control the area in 1817, which met
furious resistance both in east and west. Dagestan emerged as the
main center of resistance in 1830, with Islam as its banner. The
leaders were part of the Naqshbandi sufi order, which acted as the
leadership group for the rebellion. The mountaineers proclaimed
Shamil their imam in 1834 and for the next twenty-five years he
led the struggle in Dagestan and Chechnia from his stronghold in
the southern Dagestani mountains where he was born. This was
a war of small units, night raids, guerilla tactics, and occasional
massacres, which irritated the Russians but did not defeat them.
The Russian army’s attempts to send expeditions into the moun-
tains to defeat the insurgents were equally fruitless until the 1840s.
Then they realized that the solution to their problem was not more
troops or battles but the construction of roads in the mountains and
particularly the cutting of pathways and cleared areas in the dense
Caucasian forests. It was the axe more than the gun that gave the
Russians an advantage in the Caucasian wars – new “American”
axes wielded by thousands of Russian soldiers. Finally, with the
end of the Crimean War, Prince Alexander Bariatinskii, the viceroy
of the Caucasus, decided to put an end to it and introduced large
Russian forces. Shamil had to surrender in 1859, the effective end of
resistance. On the northwest slopes of the Caucasus the war with the
Circassians continued intermittently until the 1860s, when the Rus-
sian government began to encourage them to migrate to Ottoman
domains, leaving large areas on the western slopes of the Cauca-
sus for Russian settlers. From then until 1917 the north Caucasus
was largely quiet. Even the Sufis turned to purely religious concerns
and rejected holy war, and in 1914 Russia fielded an entire cavalry
division consisting of Dagestanis, Chechens, and other Caucasian
mountaineers with Russian and Georgian officers and commanded
by a Grand Duke. There were ten Muslim generals and 186 Muslim
 Russia as an Empire 265

colonels in the Russian army in 1914, mostly Caucasians, though

Muslims did not join the imperial elite in St. Petersburg. Most of the
North Caucasus remained under military rule, with Russian (and
often Georgian or Armenian) officers appointed to supervise the
local communities where the village elders remained in power.
On the southern side of the mountains society evolved in response
to Russian rule and the social changes that it brought. The great
reforms brought an end to serfdom in Georgia, creating a crisis for
much of the Georgian nobility. At the same time the slow spread of
education led to the formation of a Georgian intelligentsia, liberal
in politics and determined to preserve and continue the national
culture. A few of the younger generation were already attracted
to Russian populism, and in the 1890s the first Georgian Marx-
ist groups appeared in Tiblisi and Baku. Similarly the Armenians
formed a local business class and intelligentsia, both with centers
in Tiblisi and Baku rather than Erevan, still a sleepy provincial
town. For Russian Armenians the great issues were the condition
of the Armenians across the border in the Ottoman territories and
increasing Russian pressure on the Armenian Church. The increas-
ing nationalist radicalism of the Armenian intelligentsia led to the
formation of the Armenian Revolutionary Federation (Dashnakt-
sutiun) party in Tbilisi in 1890, a nationalist party with a mildly
socialist program. Though its main opponent was the Ottomans, the
Dashnaks quickly attracted the enmity of the Russian authorities.
In spite of slow economic growth, development in Trancaucasia
remained on the level of peasant agriculture, artisan production and
trade with one major exception: Baku. The great irony of Russian
Transcaucasia was that it did eventually provide a great economic
benefit to the empire in the form of the Baku oil fields. Local pro-
ducers, mostly Armenians, already exploited the oil in a small way
for lighting and other purposes, but by mid century more modern
drilling technology appeared, some in local or Russian hands, but
the Russian branch of the Swedish Nobel family became the main
producer, selling kerosene as fuel for lamps all over Russia. The
American Rockefellers joined them, but Nobel remained dominant
until the revolution. The result was to produce a modern, Euro-
pean type city on the shores of the Caspian, populated mainly by
Georgians, Armenians, Russians, and Azeris. Until 1905, the Azeris
266 A Concise History of Russia

themselves showed little interest in secular politics or new ideas,

but beneath the surface they too were influenced by the changes
emanating from Baku.

central asia
Russia had started to move south into Kazakhstan in the eighteenth
century, but until the Crimean War its main activity was the build-
ing of border stations and trying to maintain influence among the
various tribal rulers of Kazakhstan. Attempts to make a more per-
manent penetration were failures. Only in 1853 did the Russians
manage to seize the small fort of Ak Mechet on the Syr Darya near
the Aral Sea, on the south side of the Kazakh steppe. Nothing fur-
ther happened until 1860. The driving force behind the expansion
of Russia into Central Asia was the army and Ministry of War,
operating partly out of the need to control the frontier in Kaza-
khstan and partly out of fear of British expansion into and beyond
Afghanistan. The immediate context was the decision to maintain
a fortress line south of the Kazakh steppe, on the northern borders
of Central Asia proper. This meant seizure of the forts built by the
khans of Kokand to control the southern Kazakhs, and put Russia
into conflict with both Kokand and Bukhara. In 1860–1864 the
Russians took control of the Kokand forts on the southern fringe
of the Kazakh steppe, and then moved south to the Central Asia
cities. Acting on his own initiative but with the general approval
of the Ministry of War, General Mikhail Cherniaev took Tashkent
in 1865, giving Russia a stronghold in the rich and well-watered
Ferghana valley, Kokand’s base. The largely Uzbek Central Asian
khanates of Khiva, Bukhara and Kokand were old-fashioned and
weak even by the standards of the Near East in the nineteenth cen-
tury and soon fell to Russian arms. The khanates’ attempts to fend
off the Russians only led to more defeats for them and in 1876 the
whole of Kokand fell under Russian rule. Bukhara and Khiva were
reduced to Russian protectorates on the model of the native states
of British India, and in 1881 general Mikhail Skobelev eliminated
the last resistance among the Turkmens. The Russian Empire now
stretched to the borders of Iran and Afghanistan. The conquest was
achieved at a low cost to Russia, only a few hundred soldiers died
 Russia as an Empire 267

over the years of fighting. The soldiers of the Khanates were not
used to European warfare and though numerous and brave, could
not stand up to disciplined troops. Thus the largest problems for
the Russians were logistic: learning to transport men and equipment
over arid steppes and actual deserts, coping with intense heat in the
summer and cold in unsheltered steppe in the winter. Fortunately,
for all the British concern about Russian expansion, Central Asia
was just too far away for the authorities in Delhi and London to
try to counter the Russian moves. Iran and Afghanistan separated
the Russian possessions from the British and the Ottomans as well.
That is not to say that Britain was not concerned by Russian policy,
obsessed as it was by the specter of losing India. The result was the
continuation of the long “cold war” between the two empires – a
situation that caused immense problems for Prince Gorchakov at
the Russian foreign ministry, for his focus was stability in Europe.
Thus the army often acted without informing him of its moves until
it was too late for him to object.
The Russian colonial administrators, with general Konstantin von
Kaufman at their head, were determined to avoid the mistakes of
the Caucasus, which they saw as a narrowly military approach to
empire. Instead they were going to imitate the master imperialists,
their English rivals, and build a modern empire. Central Asia was to
be slowly modernized by building European infrastructure, giving
modern education to the natives, and encouraging or directly setting
up investments that would benefit the empire. The great idea was the
development of cotton growing, already a major crop, to supply the
Russian textile industry. This project enjoyed modest success, but
only by the early twentieth century. All these plans brought a small
measure of modern society to Central Asia, one of the poorest and
most backward parts of the Muslim world. Those modern elements,
however, had other effects, for they called into being a small local
intelligentsia with some modern ideas.
The development of the local intelligentsia was a response not
just to Russian rule and its consequences but also to developments
among other Muslim peoples of the Russian Empire and beyond.
One current was pan-Turkism, the idea that all Turkic speaking peo-
ple were really one nation, propounded by the Crimean Tatar aris-
tocrat Ismail Bey Gasprinskii. Gasprinskii advocated a modernized
268 A Concise History of Russia

Figure 15. Nomadic Kirghiz (Kazakhs) around 1900.

state and modernized Islam, but his views on the unity of the Turkic
peoples raised the suspicion in St. Petersburg that he was essentially
furthering Ottoman foreign policy aims against Russia. Another
trend, influential also in Central Asia was jadidism, from the Arabic
work jadid (“new”). Jadidism began in the late nineteenth century
among the Muslims of British India, who believed that a modern-
ized Islam would be closer to the original inspiration of Mohammed,
stripped of the accretions of centuries in between. Like Gasprinskii,
the jadidists wanted a modern education system that went beyond
rote memorization of the Koran in Arabic and the study of classic
Islamic texts. They also wanted many of the features of modern
society, which they did not see as contradictory to the Islamic spirit,
if not to the Islamic practice of their time. These ideas soon spread
among the Volga Tatars, living as they did among Russians who had
 Russia as an Empire 269

already achieved a more modern society than that of the Tatars. The
Volga Tatar merchants had been for centuries the intermediaries in
trade between Bukhara, Khiva, and Russia, and now many came to
settle in Central Asia under the aegis of the Russian Empire. They
found an audience among the local intelligentsia, which began to
try to put their ideas into practice. In the Central Asian cities the
only result was the creation of a few small cultural circles, but it
was the beginning of modern nation building.
For the Russian Empire, Central Asia, once conquered, was not
a serious problem until nearly the end of the empire. Aside from a
small Islamic revolt in 1898 in Andijan, the interior of Central Asia
was quiet. In the Kazakh steppe matters were more complicated.
Russian cities appeared on the northern fringes of the steppe and in
them a small Kazakh intelligentsia emerged, dependent on Russian
institutions and loyal to the empire. At the same time the economic
integration of the Kazakhs into the emerging Russian industrial
economy brought demand for cattle and other products that dis-
rupted the traditional nomadic society. Even worse, large numbers
of Russian peasants settled among them with the encouragement of
the state. Before 1905, however, open conflict was largely absent.

the manchurian gamble

Russia’s last attempt at empire on the Western model was its expan-
sion into Manchuria. Witte’s Transsiberian Railroad went right
through Chinese territory to Vladivostok, and Russia carved out
a sphere of influence like those of the other Western powers in
China. The railroad was under Russian control, and the Ministry
of Finance had its own police force to guard it. The Russian fort at
Port Arthur provided a base for the Russian navy and also anchored
the Russian military presence in Manchuria. The center of Russian
administration and business, however, was Harbin, a modern city
built from scratch by the Russians, with a Russian administration
and a progressive urban order unknown in the rest of the empire.
Most restrictions on Jews, for example, did not apply in Harbin.
Witte was building a modern Russia on Chinese soil. All these plans
came to an end, however, with the Russo-Japanese war. The final
peace gave the Russian naval base at Port Arthur to Japan, and
270 A Concise History of Russia

Japan proceeded on the path of development and control that led to

its further expansion in China. Russia retained control of the rail-
road, but never achieved dominance in northern China. Manchuria
was too far away from the Russian heartland, and too close to
Japan.

The Russian Empire, conglomerate as it was, functioned success-

fully only as long as it could remain a coalition of nobilities united
by loyalty to the Romanov dynasty and rewarded appropriately for
faithful service. Clearly this model of the empire mainly applied to
the European areas and the Christian Caucasus, but there it did
work until the strains of modernization undermined the domina-
tion of the nobility. The Russian state also tried to increase admin-
istrative uniformity and centralization, the policy known as Rus-
sificiation, but its efforts were half-hearted. There were too many
obstacles, lack of financial resources, the influence of local elites,
and the general backwardness of the country. The state could not
abolish the variety of legal status and local administration in favor
of a single unified state that might strive to assimilate all minori-
ties to Russian language and culture, and indeed almost no one
in the government had any such aim. Outside government policy,
there were, of course, other more modern forces of integration – the
power of the huge Russian market, the modernization of Russian
culture, modern transportation and media, as in other countries,
but they were all weaker than in Western Europe. The result was an
unstable equilibrium in an empire too modern to remain an empire
of nobilities around the tsar but too backward to fully unleash the
social forces that integrated minorities in Western Europe. The Rus-
sians could not hope to imitate the ruthless and highly successful
Germanization schemes in the German parts of Poland, for those
depended on the combination of state resources, enthusiastic public
support from a populace mobilized around nationalism, and the
economic pull of German society. Russia had little of this, and its
policies, especially in Poland, antagonized the people without being
effective. Such integration of non-Russian minorities that did occur,
and it was not small, came about simply by the ordinary motion of
social change, not from state policy.
 Russia as an Empire 271

As time progressed, traditional loyalties eroded. Nationalist

movements among the minorities emerged during the 1890s, but
did not yet set the tone among non-Russian peoples. Few, save the
Poles and the more radical of the Finns, actually anticipated or
sought independence: their aim was greater autonomy within Rus-
sia. Many of the minorities were more concerned about one another
than about Russians or the imperial state. The Baltic peoples saw
their main antagonists in the Germans, the Finns fought over the
Swedish-Finnish language issue, the nationalist movements of the
Poles and Ukrainians feared each other and the Jews. Politicized
Jews increasingly turned to Jewish socialist movements (the Bund)
or to Zionism. At the same time, the great cities, especially St. Peters-
burg, Moscow, and the Donbass mining and manufacturing towns,
were powerful integrating forces, attracting thousands of migrants
from among the Baltic peoples, Finns, Poles, and Jews. The main
concern of the state remained the politics of the Russian core, the
maturing liberal opposition and the revolutionary socialists. The
autocracy saw them, not local nationalists, as their main threat,
and it was right.
 15
Autocracy in Decline

The quarter of a century from the assassination of Alexander II until

the 1905 Revolution was one of political stagnation. The response
of the new government to the assassination was to stop the process
of reform, to publicly affirm the necessity of autocracy, and to for-
mulate plans for counter-reforms. The latter came to little, but the
government took advantage of every possibility to block criticism,
political discussion, and organization among the public. Though it
returned to sponsoring economic development in the 1890s under
Minister of Finance Sergei Witte, it refused to recognize the impli-
cations of the further modernization of society that resulted in part
from its own measures. The increasing isolation of the government
and its own internal lack of coordination led to the botched attempt
at modern imperialism in Manchuria, an attempt resulting in a failed
war with Japan that nearly brought down the monarchy.

Alexander III had become the heir to the throne in 1865 on the
death of his older brother. Alexander was already twenty at the
time and the product of a rather narrow military education unlike
that provided for his brother. In 1866 he married Princess Dag-
mar of Denmark (Mariia Fedorovna after her conversion to Ortho-
doxy), leading to a stable marriage with a woman of intelligence
and extremely conservative views. The young heir was no intellec-
tual, but he did come in contact with Slavophile ideas at court
and through his tutor in jurisprudence, Konstantin Pobedonos-
tev. Through the guards and other aristocrats he became friends
272
 Autocracy in Decline 273

with the conservative publicist (and the most prominent gay in the
St. Petersburg aristocracy), Prince V. M. Meshcherskii. These were
highly principled radical conservatives, with nothing but contempt
for freedom of speech, democracy, and representative government,
all of which they saw as shams and likely to lead to revolution.
In their view what was needed was the unity of society and the
monarch, which they saw as the essence of autocracy. By the 1870s
they formed a powerful opposition to the more liberal ministers
around Alexander II, powerful largely because of their association
with the heir. As part of his attempt at balanced government, Tsar
Alexander II appointed Pobedonostsev head of the Synod, a position
he held for the next twenty-four years. After Alexander III came to
the throne, Pobedonostsev used his position at the Synod to retain
constant access to the tsar, offering him advice on all sorts of sub-
jects well beyond the ecclesiastical issues under his purview. In the
eyes of liberal society and many government officials, he had far
too much power and influence, all of it in a conservative direction.
“Prince of Darkness” was one of his milder nicknames.
In reality Alexander listened to Pobedonostsev and Meshcherskii,
but in his decisions usually went along with the ministers, conserva-
tive to be sure but unwilling to tear down the structure so carefully
built up by the previous reign. Those structures still left many areas
where the ministers and local administrators could act on their own
discretion – in relations with the zemstvos, cases of administrative
exile of liberals and socialists, and others. Here the tsar and his
officials almost always chose the harsher and more authoritarian
line. The 1881 “Temporary Regulations” were directed against
the revolutionaries and allowed provincial governors to declare
states of “reinforced security,” which allowed them to imprison
subversives without trial, transfer security cases to military courts,
and shut down universities and businesses. The regulations lasted
until 1917. At the same time, few “counter-reforms” were actu-
ally enacted. University autonomy was further restricted, and the
tsar issued a decree establishing noblemen as appointed “land cap-
tains” to monitor law enforcement in the villages. The decree did, as
intended, reinforce the power of the gentry in the countryside, and
other regulations tinkering with local administration strengthened
the bureaucracy against the zemstvo, but none of these measures
274 A Concise History of Russia

was a major change. In the cities the government eventually raised

the property qualification for elections to the city Dumas and pro-
hibited Jews from sitting in the Dumas but left the basic structure
intact. The reactionary character of the reign of Alexander III lay
in the absence of response to ongoing social and economic change
rather than any concerted attempt to return to a previous era.
Part of the new reign was also increasingly shrill official national-
ism, including official anti-semitism. Again this was more a change
in tone than substance, for little in the way of new measures or
policies appeared, but a more rigorous enforcement of discrimina-
tory legislation against Jews, such as the restrictions on settlement
beyond the confines of the Pale did appear. In 1887 the government
introduced the formal quota for Jews at universities in addition
to the new laws on city government. There were other occasional
forays into Russification. The latter was often more declaratory
than real, for the Russian empire lacked the resources to form a
firm policy in this area. Proposals to substitute Russian-language
for German-language schools in the Baltic provinces, a particular
campaign of Russian nationalists at the time, failed because the
Ministry of Education pointed out that it lacked the resources for
either teachers or school buildings. Thus the schools in the Baltic
provinces remained in local, that is to say German, hands. The con-
tinued prominence of German and other non-Russian aristocrats at
the court, in the army, and diplomatic corps also put a very sharp
limit to the amount of “Russianness” the government could claim
or try to enforce.
It was in foreign and economic policy that the years of Alexan-
der III brought the most changes. In the years after Crimea Prince
Gorchakov had kept the country firmly in the traditional camp of
friendship with Prussia, at the same time trying to ease the tension
with Britain and France. In the latter he was only partially suc-
cessful, and the ambiguous position of Bismarck’s Germany at the
end of the Russo-Turkish war in 1878 undermined the old alliance
of Berlin and St. Petersburg. As Germany grew closer to Austria
in the course of the 1880s, the relationship fell under even greater
strain, for both Russia and Austria had designs on the Balkans.
The competition between Russia and the two German powers led
to the end of Russian influence in Bulgaria in 1886. The resultant
 Autocracy in Decline 275

cooling in Russo-German relations left Russia effectively isolated

in Europe. The new Germany, however, had been built on victory
in the Franco-Prussian War and the annexation of Alsace-Lorraine,
and thus had in France an implacable enemy. Both Russia and
France quickly recognized a common interest, and in 1893 the great
republic and the autocracy of the east signed a treaty that made them
allies against Germany. The political constellation that had lasted
on the European continent since 1815 came to an end, and the first
seed was sown that would lead to war in 1914. To this day the
Alexander III Bridge in the center of Paris serves as a reminder of
that fatal alliance.
The alliance was not yet, however, a trigger of war, for none
of the potential enemies wanted it as yet. The dynastic ties between
Berlin and St. Petersburg remained, and allowed both sides to retain
the illusion that things might eventually work out. The respective
armies, however, thought differently, for the Russian army had
begun to rethink its western defenses starting in the 1870s, when
Germany and Russia were still allies, and the German army also
moved quickly to plan for a two-front war. For the time being, how-
ever, the attention of governments and societies was more focused
on the Far East. Here two quite separate issues came together, Sergei
Witte’s economic plans and the rise of Japan.
Sergei Witte was perhaps the last really dynamic and thoughtful
statesman in the Russian Empire, a man with great plans and abil-
ities as well as a giant ego, who never easily worked with others
on an equal basis. Contemptuous of the other ministers of state –
in large part justifiably – he formulated his plans with his staff
and worked directly with the tsar. How he came to this position
is a story in itself. Witte always claimed that his ancestors were
Dutch and came to Russia through the Baltic provinces. In fact his
grandfather was simply a middle-class Baltic German (perhaps with
Dutch ancestry) who served as a tutor in Russian noble families.
The young Witte finished Odessa University in natural science, not
administrative law like most future officials. He also seems to have
participated in a shadowy right-wing society called the “Union of
St. Michael the Archangel,” but then went to work for the South
Western Railway, a private railroad running between Odessa and
Kiev. This gave him a sense of the workings of capitalist enterprise
276 A Concise History of Russia

that few high Russian officials could duplicate. Alexander III first
appointed him to the government’s railroad department and his rise
was swift: by 1892 he was Minster of Finance at the age of forty-
three, a notable achievement in an increasingly elderly government.
Like earlier favorites of the tsar, his power rested entirely on the
trust of the monarch, for Witte was too arrogant, too uncouth,
and too unused to the subtleties of Petersburg politics to find allies
among the ministers. He regarded most of them as timid incompe-
tents, but failed to realize that without them he had only the tsar
on whom to rely. With Alexander III on the throne, this attitude
seemed sensible.
Witte’s great project was the Transsiberian Railroad, begun
already in 1891. This enormous line of track, stretching across the
whole of northern Asia, was to become in many ways his monu-
ment. Against many skeptics he pushed the project through, first
with the support of Alexander III and then with that of his son
Nicholas II. Witte’s plans were not merely to improve communica-
tions with the farthest point of the empire. A radical change was
needed to be sure, for the only ways to get from European Russia to
the Pacific were to go by horse and riverboat over several months, or
to take a steamer from Odessa through the Suez Canal around India
and China. Witte intended to develop Siberia, both for its natural
resources and its potential as a settlement area to relieve the peas-
ants’ hunger for land. At the same time he was aware that the Euro-
pean powers were carving up China into spheres of influence and
he did not want Russia to miss acquiring its share. Thus the last leg
of the new railroad’s route was to run from Lake Baikal through
Manchuria to Vladivostok, leaving a line inside Russian territory
for later. The aim was to take Manchuria as Russia’s share of China
and a space for a new, more modern style of colonialism. Witte’s
aim had been “peaceful penetration” of China for economic rea-
sons, but the Russian military wanted a naval base, and in 1896
managed to lease Port Arthur, on the south coast of Manchuria,
from China. Russia seemed to have a firm position in the Far East.
The only problem with this brilliant plan was Japan. Exactly
in the 1890s Japan was making its own first steps toward empire
in Asia, with its defeat of China and increasing informal power in
Korea. The presence of a Russian railroad, Harbin, and a naval base
 Autocracy in Decline 277

Figure 16. Count Sergei Witte, probably in New Hampshire for the Ports-
mouth Treaty in 1905.

at Port Arthur was a serious irritant to the Japanese and a direct

consequence of Witte’s policies. For the time being, however, peace
remained, and Russia, Japan, and the European powers worked
together to suppress the Boxer Rebellion in China (1900).

In 1894 Alexander III died. Though his policies kept Russia from
moving forward in almost all areas but industrialization and empire
building, he was at least a firm leader capable of making difficult
decisions, as Witte recognized. His son, Nicholas II, was a man
of very different character. He utterly lacked his father’s ability to
278 A Concise History of Russia

Figure 17. Tsar Nicholas II on the imperial yacht Shtandart.

take charge and make use of his ministers. Alexander had gone
along with them on most occasions but had also been willing to
accept a minority view and support it. Nicholas often simply agreed
with whoever spoke to him last, and then changed his mind again.
He shared his father’s views of the worthlessness of legislatures,
freedom of speech, and human rights and tended to see the hidden
hand of the Jews in liberalism and socialism. Had he not been the
tsar, he would have made an ideal conservative country gentleman,
for he was also gracious, kind, and a good family man. His wife
Alexandra, the German princess Alix of Hesse-Darmstadt, encour-
aged all these characteristics, as she was equally conservative and
equally devoted to her family.
 Autocracy in Decline 279

Unfortunately Alexandra’s devotion to her family and her limited

horizons were not helpful in dealing with the hemophilia that her
son, the heir to the throne Alexei, had from birth. Her response was
to turn to a series of faith healers, each one more influential than the
last. To top it off, the fully justified fear of terrorists increased the
isolation of Nicholas and his family, in turn making it even harder
for them to understand what was happening around them. The
endless round of trips to the Crimea and elsewhere, the occasional
court entertainments and family excursions on the imperial yacht
did not leave much space for contact with the people. The only
public appearances were carefully staged, often as part of religious
ceremonies, which gave both tsar and people an utterly false sense
of the country’s needs and public opinion.
At first, however, everything went well. Nicholas was a great
enthusiast for the Far East and its development and supported
Witte to the hilt. He even supported the Minister’s controversial
placing of Russia on the gold standard in 1897, a measure designed
to encourage investment and industrialization but a decision that
was not necessarily good for the agrarian interests that the nobility
defended. After 1900 the tsar’s support for Witte began to erode.
The appointment of Viacheslav Plehve, a career official and pow-
erful personality, to head the Ministry of the Interior gave Witte a
strong rival, and by the middle of 1903 Nicholas had removed the
Minister of Finance from office. Plehve’s only solution to Russia’s
problems was more repression, both of revolutionaries and middle
and upper class liberals.
All of these opposition groups rapidly grew and consolidated in
the 1890s. The first to organize were the Marxists, who rejected
terror in favor of organizing workers to strike and fight employ-
ers and the state in collective action. The Marxists who managed
to meet and adopt a general program in 1898 were then immedi-
ately arrested and the various Marxist groups did not come together
again until 1903. When they met in London that year a new figure
came to the fore, a graduate of the law faculty of St. Petersburg
University with experience in the underground and exile. This
was Vladimir Il’ich Ul’ianov, whose revolutionary pseudonym was
Lenin. The son of a high school science teacher and inspector of
public schools in Simbirsk on the Volga, Lenin had gone from
280 A Concise History of Russia

Siberian exile to Western Europe to edit a socialist journal, Iskra

(Spark), through which he and Marxism acquired a following
among the students and few workers who were the seedbed of
the revolutionary movement. At the congress in London the party
was refounded with a more elaborate program and structure, and
the first disagreements broke out. The aim of the Marxists was to
overthrow the tsar and establish a democratic republic (a “bour-
geois revolution”). That is to say, they believed that until this task
was completed, they should not try for the dictatorship of the pro-
letariat and the introduction of socialism. The enemy for now was
the tsar. Thus they would be operating under the autocracy, con-
tinuously at war with the police, and Lenin believed that the party
should be primarily an underground movement of professional rev-
olutionaries. His opponents, with their most accomplished leader
Iulii Martov, thought that Lenin was exaggerating the need to con-
centrate on the underground struggle and wanted a looser party.
In the vote on the question Lenin won by a narrow majority, and
his followers thus acquired the name Bolsheviks (bol’she mean-
ing “more”) and Martov’s followers Mensheviks (men’she meaning
“less”). This dispute did not yet engage the few worker activists, and
remained the province of the party’s intelligentsia. For that is what
the leaders were in these early years. Martov’s father was a pros-
perous Jewish businessman and journalist in the Russian-language
Jewish press, and he himself attended the gymnasia in St. Petersburg
and had a year at the university before he was arrested for revolu-
tionary activity. Trotsky came from a family of Jewish farmers, the
descendents of settlers in New Russia from the time of Alexander I.
The graduate of an elite Lutheran high school in Odessa, Leon Trot-
sky, like Lenin and Martov, was typical of the early revolutionary
leaders.
The Marxists were not the only political group to form. In 1901
the revolutionary groups who looked back to the old populist tra-
dition of the 1870s came together to form the Party of Socialists-
Revolutionaries. They continued to believe that capitalism was an
artificial transplant on peasant Russia, and in theory would con-
centrate their efforts on the villages. In practice they found the
peasants hard to organize, and most of their followers were in the
urban factories. The SRs, as they were called, also absorbed some
 Autocracy in Decline 281

Marxist ideas to produce an eclectic ideology no less appealing for

its lack of consistency. They also continued to believe that terror
against government officials was a useful tool, and alongside the SR
party agitators in the factories the Fighting Organization waged a
relentless war against the government with a series of spectacular
assassinations. The police naturally concentrated most of its atten-
tion on this group, and from 1903 to 1908 the head of the Fighting
Organization was a police agent named Evno Azef.
The last to form an organization, not surprisingly, were the liber-
als. Their appearance on the political scene was part of the larger fer-
ment in middle and upper class Russia that grew rapidly toward the
end of the century. Since the 1860s innumerable professional groups
and societies had come into existence, organizations of chemists and
engineers, doctors and agronomists. The businessmen were partic-
ularly active in forming lobby groups to pressure for favorable eco-
nomic policies, protective tariffs, and a more modern (and friendly
to business) legal framework for their activity. The business groups
were not merely groups of manufacturers or bankers dealing pri-
vately with the government, they met in conventions, using the great
Nizhnii Novgorod fair and the many exhibitions as fora for pub-
lic discussion of their needs. The newspapers reported extensively
on these meetings, which addressed Russia’s many needs but stu-
diously avoided constitutional issues. Many of these organizations
were initially supported or even created by the Ministry of Finance
as a measure to encourage progress, and the members were mostly
intensely loyal in their politics. In the course of time, however, busi-
ness and other organizations broadened the discussion of social and
economic issues, expressing the frustration of these levels of society
with a government that they increasingly perceived as too conser-
vative and too slow to respond to the needs of a changing society.
Some of the liberal leaders in the intelligentsia and the gentry
began to think that time had come to organize in a more political
fashion. For decades they had hoped that the zemstvos would evolve
into a system of representation of the public or that new, more lib-
eral measures would come from the government that would replace
arbitrariness with basic rights and consultation of the people in
some form. None of this transpired, but the zemstvos did provide a
forum in which many liberal noblemen and others learned to deal
282 A Concise History of Russia

with the innumerable local issues that gave them experience with
public life and with the government’s unwillingness to share power
to any large extent. By 1901 they had given up, for the government
refused to budge, and a small group of liberal activists formed an
underground group, the Union of Liberation. Opposed to terror
and revolutionary methods, they decided that only an illegal group
could get beyond specific issues and conduct the needed discussion
and supplement publications smuggled in from abroad.
By 1904 networks of activists of varying persuasions covered
the Russian interior’s major cities, and on the western and southern
fringes nationalist and socialist groups among the Poles, Jews, Geor-
gians, Armenians, and others added another dimension of instabil-
ity. Then on January 27 (February 9), 1904, the Japanese navy
attacked the Russian base at Port Arthur and sank most of the Rus-
sian squadron. Russia was now at war with Japan on the other
side of the globe from St. Petersburg. The only line of commu-
nication was the Transsiberian Railroad, much of it still a single
track and not all of it completed. The Russian army, far from its
bases and lumbered with elderly generals, suffered a series of further
defeats through the year. In July an SR terrorist assassinated Plehve,
and Nicholas appointed the more tolerant Prince Petr Sviatopolk-
Mirskii in his place. The appointment came unexpectedly and in
large part was owed to the efforts of Nicholas’s mother, the dowa-
ger Empress Maria. At the same time as Sviatopolk-Mirskii seemed
to move toward some mildly liberal measures, another crisis was
brewing in St. Petersburg.
The police in the capitals had long been frustrated by the success
of the Social Democrats and the SRs among the workers of the city.
In spite of continuous arrests they seemed to be making modest
progress and alarmed the authorities by their dogged persistence
and the readiness of workers to listen to them. Then the head of
the political police for Moscow, Sergei Zubatov, had the idea of
building a labor union controlled by the police. It would provide
some modest social services to the workers to alleviate their con-
ditions while inculcating in them loyalty to the Orthodox Church
and the tsar. In St. Petersburg the leader of the union was father
Georgii Gapon, who quickly came to enjoy the enthusiastic support
of the workers and pose a serious threat to the revolutionaries. Thus
 Autocracy in Decline 283

when a spontaneous strike broke out at the huge Putilov machine

works on the southern fringe of the city, Gapon was in a dilemma.
The policy of the police unions was to oppose strikes (seen simply
as violations of public order in Russian law), but if he chose that
path he knew he would lose the support of the workers to the rad-
icals. He chose to go along with the strike but conceived the idea
that the workers should present their grievances to the tsar himself.
Gapon assumed that the tsar would listen and do something, which
would appease the workers and settle the strike. As the workers
approached the Winter Palace in the snow on January 9/22, 1905,
the response of the government, nervous about the unrest in the
city, was to line up soldiers in front of the palace and order them to
open fire on the unarmed crowd. Over a hundred were killed and
many more wounded.
Within a few days workers all over the country, from Poland to
Siberia, went out on strike by the hundreds of thousands. These were
spontaneous movements with no unions, no strike pay, and virtually
no leadership. The police union was immediately discredited, and
the revolutionary parties were swamped, as they had only a few
thousand activists in the whole country.

The Revolution of 1905 that ensued was an extraordinarily com-

plex event. The urban strike movement was enormous, especially
considering the lack of experience at such actions on the part of
almost all workers, and the inadequacy of organizational structures.
In the villages for the first time peasant unrest became widespread
enough to provoke massive campaigns of military repression, even if
SRs and others still found it extremely difficult to actually organize
the peasants. Most of the non-Russian areas experienced the same
upheavals as the interior of the country, with nationalist or socialist
forces predominant in different areas at different times. The liberal
middle classes generally supported all these upheavals, if only pas-
sively, and solidly blamed the government for the bloodshed. The
government found itself extremely isolated, though Tsar Nicholas
tried to hold on to the fantasy of the loyal peasantry corrupted by
the intelligentsia and the Jews.
To complicate everything, the war with Japan continued and
went from bad to worse. In the spring the Japanese inflicted a major
284 A Concise History of Russia

defeat on the Russian army at Mukden. To replace the lost Far

Eastern squadron, the navy sent the Baltic Fleet on an epic voy-
age around Africa and Southern Asia to the theater of operations.
There it encountered the Japanese navy at Tsushima in May 1905,
and was almost entirely destroyed. At this point, Nicholas and his
government realized that they had no option but to make peace, and
with Theodore Roosevelt as intermediary, the peace was signed at
Portsmouth, New Hampshire, on August 23 (September 2), 1905.
Russia lost the base at Port Arthur and the southern half of Sakhalin
Island, but kept its Manchurian railroad and its buildings in
Harbin.
These events took place against a background of rapidly growing
unrest. In the spring nearly a million workers struck for greater or
lesser times in St. Petersburg alone. Some of these were political
strikes, but most were about wages and particularly about conde-
scending and rude treatment at the hands of the factory administra-
tions. Peasant seizure of land and attacks on the houses of the nobil-
ity reached a peak over the summer and spread throughout central
Russia, the Ukraine, Poland, the Baltic provinces, and Caucasus.
In Georgia whole areas were out of control of the government, and
bandits flourished alongside peasant rebels. Starting in Baku, Arme-
nians and Azeris attacked one another, killing thousands. In the
Baltics the ethnic antagonism of German landlords and Latvian and
Estonian peasants added extra viciousness to the violence, and Rus-
sian Cossacks were put in the position of defending Baltic German
nobles. The high point of the summer of 1905 was the mutiny of
the sailors on the battleship Potemkin, later immortalized in Sergei
Eisenstein’s film. The sailors demanded better conditions and an
end to autocracy, supporting strikers in Odessa before they sailed
off to internment in Rumania. This and other military mutinies,
continuing into 1906, kept the government at bay.
In August Nicholas, under pressure from his government and his
mother, issued a manifesto conceding a representative legislature,
but with very limited powers. The manifesto had no effect, and in the
autumn the strike movement in the cities resumed with even greater
force. In October the strikes turned into a general strike, now a
political strike directed against autocracy with calls for a democratic
republic. In the absence of other organizations, the St. Petersburg
 Autocracy in Decline 285

workers began to form councils (in Russian, soviets) at the fac-

tory level and then came together to form a city soviet. The Social
Democrats were dubious about the soviets at first, but the Men-
sheviks realized their potential. The most vigorous leader in the St.
Petersburg soviet of workers’ deputies was Leon Trotsky, a vivid
and powerful orator and one of the main leaders of the Menshe-
viks. Lenin and his followers quickly jumped on the bandwagon.
Finally on October 17/30 the tsar conceded that Russia would have
to have a representative legislature, to be called the Duma, and some
sort of constitution. The general strike came to an end, but Lenin
and the Bolsheviks wanted to keep pushing the revolution farther.
The result was an insurrection in the factory districts in the west of
Moscow in December 1905, suppressed with considerable force by
the army and police.
The October Manifesto changed Russian politics completely, per-
haps more so than Nicholas had intended. Witte now came back to
power in the new office of Prime Minister. Liberal and conservative
groups began to form parties, and some of the revolutionaries came
at least partially out of the underground. The new parties founded
newspapers and enrolled members, preparing for the elections. The
beginnings of mass politics brought more sinister forces as well in
the form of the Union of the Russian People and many lesser groups
of the same type. These were the “Black Hundreds,” devoted to
autocracy and Orthodoxy and proclaiming the Jews the source of all
of Russia’s problems. Intensely nationalistic, they opposed equality
for all the national minorities, but singled out the Jews for bloody
pogroms which they believed would put an end to revolution, in
their mind the work of the Poles and the intelligentsia, but most of
all the Jews. Two Jewish deputies to the Duma fell victim to their
terror as well as hundreds in the pogroms. At least four hundred
Jews died in the Odessa pogrom alone. While ineffective at com-
bating revolution, the Black Hundreds added another element of
violence and chaos to Russian politics.
The government had promised Russia a constitution, and Witte
and the ministers produced one that the tsar would agree to. This
was Russia’s first constitution, the Fundamental Laws, written by
Witte and other government officials and proclaimed on the open-
ing day of the new Duma – April 27, 1906. In the new structure,
286 A Concise History of Russia

the Duma was to pass laws, and if the Council of State agreed, they
were sent to the tsar for his approval, without which they were not
valid. The Council of State became an upper house, appointed by
the tsar mainly from the great dignitaries of the state but with some
representatives of the nobility, businessmen, and the universities.
Rather inconsistently the document proclaimed the tsar an auto-
crat, but he now had to make laws through the Duma. His power
remained predominant, for the Fundamental Laws reserved to the
tsar foreign policy, the power to make war and peace, command
of the army, and all administrative appointments. For the first time
the tsar had something like a cabinet with a prime minister (Witte
at first), but the ministers were all responsible to the tsar, not to the
Duma.
This was a highly conservative constitution, though not as odd
in the Europe of 1906 as it later seemed. The concentration of mil-
itary and foreign policy power in the hands of the monarch was
also a feature of the German and Austrian constitutions, and even
in Sweden the ministers were still responsible to the king, not the
parliament. What made the Russian system more distinctive was the
failure of the cabinet to emerge as a united force (results depended
on personalities) and the complex system of electoral franchise for
the Duma. The Duma was elected not simply from regions or with
property qualifications for voting, but by a complex of regional dis-
tricts, indirect voting, and the curial system. For each social group
(peasants, townspeople, workers, nobles) there was a curia, and the
voters cast their ballots within a curia. Still believing in the loyalty
of the peasantry and its social conservatism, the elections to the first
Duma that took place in winter 1905–06 were based on a distri-
bution of seats that favored the peasantry. Nicholas was convinced
that only the upper and middle classes opposed autocracy, but the
peasants were on his side.
The outcome of the elections presented the government with a
Duma that was impossible to work with. Boycotts by the revolu-
tionary parties meant that the liberals, the Kadets (Constitutional
Democrats, officially the Party of Popular Freedom), were the largest
party in the Duma, while the peasants, only slowly moving into par-
ties, were the largest group. For the Kadets, the government’s con-
cessions to constitutionalism were far too small, and the peasant
 Autocracy in Decline 287

deputies surprised everyone by voting for any measure that would

give them land. Many did express loyalty to the tsar, but they also
wanted the land, something Nicholas and Witte had not bargained
on. Nicholas dissolved the Duma in July, hoping new elections
would prove more favorable. Witte resigned, and his replacement
was Petr Stolypin, a former provincial governor with a reputation
for crushing rebellion but also for an interest in reform. The first
sign of the latter was the law he sponsored in the fall of 1906 allow-
ing peasants to leave the village community and set up independent
farms.
The strike movement and the rural disturbances gradually died
down in the course of late 1906. Stolypin sent out punitive battal-
ions into the countryside to repress peasant rebels, with executions
carried out on the spot. The elections to the second Duma, however,
did not produce the results that Stolypin and the government hoped
for. If anything, the new Duma was even more radical than the first.
The peasant deputies were now organized into the “Labor Group”
that demanded all land for the peasantry. Finally on June 3, 1907,
Stolypin dissolved the Duma, and there was virtually no reaction
from the public. The revolution had spent its force.
The 1905 Revolution had been a bloody affair, with some fifteen
thousand killed, most of them peasants executed or simply killed
during government reprisals in the countryside. Several thousand
revolutionaries were also executed, and many workers perished in
conflicts over strikes or in the various insurrections. Some landown-
ers in the countryside suffered as well, and much property was
destroyed. In late 1905 an “All-Russian Peasant Union” had come
into existence, which enrolled several hundred thousand members
and demanded the surrender of all the land to the peasantry. The
Union tried to avoid violent tactics, but its members grew increas-
ingly radical into 1906 and allied with the Labor Group in the
Duma. The Peasant Union too was suppressed. The most impor-
tant outcome was the radical change in Russian politics. The virtual
disappearance of censorship and the elections to the Duma and its
debates took politics from the halls of the court and the offices of the
bureaucracy into the public, even into the streets for the duration of
the revolution. Whole social classes began to think differently: the
nobility stopped flirting with liberalism and quickly united behind
288 A Concise History of Russia

slogans of autocracy, nationalism, and preservation of the social

order. The urban middle and working classes lost their passivity
and began to participate in political action and to support some of
the more radical parties. The businessmen formed small parties of
their own and lobby groups, the peasantry heard the speeches of the
Peasant Union activists and the SRs, and learned to vote for its
interests in the land issue. The various national minorities now
had active political parties: in Georgia the Mensheviks combined
socialism with nationalism to become the far and away strongest
force. In Latvia the Social Democrats allied with the Bolsheviks and
dominated the labor movement. In Poland all the political parties
came out into the open, and the National Democrats competed
with some success against socialist groups for the allegiance of the
workers. Among the Muslim peoples of the empire, the progressive
intelligentsia put up candidates for the Duma and won, going on to
form a Muslim Duma group that united Tatars, Bashkirs, Crimeans,
Azeris, and North Caucasus mountaineers to press for equal status.
Like many of the autonomist groups, they allied with the Russian
Kadets and participated actively in Duma debates.
However much power the tsar and his ministers retained – and
it was considerable – they now had to contend with a wholly new
political situation, and few of them, Nicholas least of all, were
prepared for it.

The next seven years after the dissolution of the second Duma were
Russia’s only peacetime experiment in constitutional government
with an open press and active public organizations. The fate of the
country depended on the ability of Stolypin and others to deal with
this new reality. Stolypin’s repression of the revolution met with
apparent success: hundreds of activists were executed, especially
from the SR terrorist group, and all radical parties lost members in
droves to prison, exile, disillusionment, and simple exhaustion. The
dissolution of the Duma in 1907 went along with a new, even more
indirect and undemocratic electoral system. Some fifty percent of the
seats in the new Duma went to the nobility, while the representation
of peasants was radically cut, as were the number of seats assigned
to the national minority areas in the south and west. The new
Duma was overwhelmingly noble, Russian, and very conservative.
 Autocracy in Decline 289

Most nobles and many businessmen supported the Octobrist party

(so-called in their support of the tsar’s October Manifesto), but
there was also an extreme right, mostly noblemen, that included
leaders of the Black Hundreds. Stolpyin seemed to have a perfect
situation in which to carry out his modest reforms, maintain the
power of tsar and government, and move toward a more Russian
nationalistic policy in the empire. In fact he accomplished little
beyond his agrarian program, which proved to be of limited effect.
The result of the endless bargaining of Prime Minister and Duma
was only to drive a wedge between him and the upper classes. His
reforms were too radical for the nobles and yet not strong enough
to placate society and the liberals in the Duma. The climax was
his 1911 plan to introduce the zemstvo into the western provinces,
areas where nobles were predominantly Polish. In order to stack the
zemstvo boards against the Poles, Stolypin proposed to increase the
number of peasant deputies, Ukrainians and Belorussians whom
Stolypin saw as more loyal to the tsar than Polish nobles. At the
same time, the zemstvo would relieve the administrative burden on
the state and hopefully placate the liberals. In the event, the scheme
was too clever to succeed. He managed to get it through the Duma
only to have it fail in the Council of State. Stolypin resigned in
protest, knowing that Nicholas thought him indispensable. The
tsar begged him to return, but Stolypin would not agree unless
Nicholas removed some of the extreme conservatives from the gov-
ernment, prorogued the Duma, and enacted the western zemstvo
bill by his emergency powers. The tsar agreed, but the incident
confirmed his growing suspicion that Stolypin’s plans were too far
reaching, and he was too powerful and not trustworthy. Before
their disagreements reached a crisis, an SR terrorist assassinated
Stolypin in September at a performance in the Kiev opera house.
With Stolypin gone, the tsar turned to lesser figures to run the gov-
ernment. He particularly disliked the institution of a prime minister,
and appointed to the office men who would not dominate the cabi-
net. The result was drift. None of the problems facing Russian soci-
ety were addressed, and the government was increasingly isolated.
In educated society the perception grew, even among conservatives,
that the tsar and government did not understand the country and
lived in a world of their own. No major issues were addressed, and
290 A Concise History of Russia

government measures achieved neither reform nor successful repres-

sion. Attempts to use nationalism and anti-semitism to garner popu-
lar support backfired. In 1911 the investigation of a murder in Kiev
led to accusations of ritual murder against Mendel Beiliss, a Jewish
supervisor in a brick factory. The Ministry of Justice in Petersburg
and the police “organized” a trial and pamphlets appeared about
ritual murder and other supposed crimes of the Jews. Russia, how-
ever, now had a relatively free press and the liberal dailies mounted
a furious counter campaign. Passions were so inflamed among the
intelligentsia that the performance of a play based on the works of
Dostoyevsky was shut down in St. Petersburg, on the grounds that
the great writer’s anti-semitic nationalism gave support to the pros-
ecution. The trial took place in the fall of 1913 in a regular criminal
court in Kiev. The jury remained unconvinced by the prosecution’s
evidence and acquitted Beiliss. The result was a major humiliation
for the government.
To top it all off, the presence of Grigorii Rasputin at the court
added an element of the grotesque to an already bad atmosphere.
Rasputin was a wandering monk from Siberia who was introduced
into the court at the end of 1905. Empress Alexandra had always
been interested in faith healing and hoped that he could help her
son, the heir Aleksei. She soon came to believe that Rasputin alone
could stop the bleeding. Rasputin thus had unlimited access to the
imperial family, in spite of his heterodox religious views and stories
(largely true) of drinking bouts and womanizing. The security police
set up a whole detachment to watch the monk with the purpose
of stopping the rumors as they discredited the tsar and his wife.
Rasputin was a real concern to the monarchists and conservatives
in the government and Duma and they managed to bring the issue to
the floor of the assembly, in the process enraging the tsar. He never
realized that they were trying to save the prestige of the throne and
instead interpreted their acts as disloyalty. Rasputin, rumors aside,
had no political effect that can be traced, but his presence and the
real and exaggerated stories further undermined the monarchy.
If the liberals and conservatives in the Duma, for all their frustra-
tions, found in the new order a vast arena for political activity, the
revolutionary parties were demoralized, losing thousands of mem-
bers, especially from the intelligentsia. The leadership went into
 Autocracy in Decline 291

exile in the West, spending their time trying to keep the move-
ment alive. The movements fissured: Trotsky abandoned the main
Menshevik movement and founded his own newspaper in Vienna,
commenting from cafés on world politics. The Bolsheviks were par-
ticularly contentious, torn by philosophical disputes as well as party
tactics and organization. Lenin wrote an entire book denouncing
the attempt of some Bolshevik intellectuals to integrate the episte-
mology of the German physicist Ernst Mach into Marxism. Only
around 1912 did the various factions coalesce into organized par-
ties and reestablish a network in Russia. For the Bolshevik party the
moment came that year at a conference in Prague that finally con-
solidated the Bolshevik structure and program, reaffirming Lenin’s
belief in the need for an underground party. The Prague confer-
ence also marked the beginnings of a generational shift among the
Bolsheviks, for the intelligentsia leadership of Lenin’s youth grad-
ually gave way to a younger group that was more plebeian (if not
exactly proletarian). They usually lacked university education but
were experienced in the ways of the underground and used to mak-
ing contact with the workers in continuous struggle with the police.
One of these was a Georgian Bolshevik, Soso Djugashvili, known as
Koba – a shoemaker’s son from the Caucasus. As he made his mark
on the movement throughout Russia, he took a new revolutionary
pseudonym, Stalin. As Joseph Stalin he would be known to history.

During the time that Stolypin was struggling to control the Duma,
the formation of political blocs in Europe continued. Nicholas and
the Kaiser repeatedly tried for a rapprochement, but the attempts
came to nothing. In 1907 Russia and Britain signed a treaty dividing
up spheres of influence in Iran, thus eliminating a major object of
their imperial rivalry. The result was not exactly an alliance, but
it did put an end to the decades old “Cold War,” and in the pres-
ence of an Anglo-French agreement, meant that Russia, with Britain
and France, now faced Germany and Austria-Hungary. There were
plenty of areas of conflict, the most important being the Balkans.
Russia had allied with Serbia, which stood right in the path of
any Austrian or German expansion in that area, and both had
great ambitions focused on the Ottoman Empire. Germany hoped
to make the Turks semi-allies and semi-dependents in their larger
292 A Concise History of Russia

rivalry with Great Britain. In 1909 Austria, with German backing,

humiliated Russia by annexing Bosnia-Herzegovina, since 1878 an
Austrian protectorate. A series of local wars in the Balkans added
to the growing tension. Then in June 1914, the heir to the Aus-
trian throne, Archduke Franz Ferdinand, made a tour of the new
Bosnian province. As his motorcade proceeded along the narrow
street by the river at Sarajevo, a young Serb nationalist, Gavrilo
Princip, stepped out from the crowd with a revolver and shot him
dead. For Russia as for the rest of Europe, it was a fatal shot.
 16
War and Revolution

The Russian revolution of 1917 was one of the many consequences

of the First World War. The war placed strains on the Russian state
and society that neither could withstand. The result was six years
of war and upheaval that created the Soviet Union.

war
Russia’s participation in the First World War was not an accident.
After the Russo-Japanese War Russia’s foreign policy turned west.
In 1907 Russia concluded the treaty with its long time rival, Great
Britain, to establish a condominium over Iran. The Russians took
control of the northern part of the country down to Teheran, and
the British the south. This compromise put an end to Anglo-Russian
imperial competition in Asia, and meant that Russia was now effec-
tively allied with Britain as well as France. The only imaginable
enemies were Germany and Austria. The agreement over Persia
set the stage for 1914, but it was imperial rivalries in the Balkans
that provided the spark for the explosion. There, Russia faced a
resurgent Ottoman Empire allied with Germany and Austria and
Bulgaria tagging along. At this point Russia’s only ally was tiny Ser-
bia, which stood right in the way of Austro-German expansion in
the south. A series of Balkan crises in these years repeatedly showed
Russia’s weakness in the area: it had no formal allies other than
Serbia and none of the informal power that came from business ties
established by the Germans and Austrians as well as the French and
293
294 A Concise History of Russia

British. When Gavrilo Princip assassinated the Austrian archduke in

Sarajevo in 1914, Vienna issued an ultimatum to Serbia and Russia
had to back up Serbian resistance. Russia’s basic credibility was at
stake, and the result was war. It had not sought the war, but had
drifted into the crisis as it was doing in so many other areas.
If the government of the Russian Empire after the death of
Stolypin merely drifted on the current of events, neither Russian
society nor the revolutionary movement demonstrated such passiv-
ity. The years just before the First World War were years of dynamic
economic growth for the islands of modern industry in the sea of
rural backwardness. Industrial development meant growth in the
size and to some extent in the sophistication of the working class,
and the revolutionary parties were poised to make use of it. In some
places the workers turned to strikes again. In 1912 on the Lena
River in Siberia, several hundred workers perished when soldiers
and police suppressed a strike at the English-owned gold fields.
About this time the revolutionary parties had recovered from defeat
in 1905–1907. Bolsheviks, Mensheviks, and SRs were all reasonably
well organized, and the labor movement recovered. In the spring of
1914 a wave of strikes swept St. Petersburg, one where the Bolshe-
viks for the first time seemed to be in the lead, not the Mensheviks
or SRs. The rest of the country was relatively quiet, however, and
the news of war hit Russia like a thunderbolt. Russia had actually
devoted much effort to rebuilding its army and navy since the war
with Japan, and one of the many factors encouraging the German
General Staff and the Kaiser to push for immediate war was the fear
that Russia would be much harder to defeat in only a few years.
That being said, both planning and equipment were still deficient.
At the insistence of the tsar huge sums had gone to rebuilding the
Baltic Fleet, which in the event was far too small to challenge the
German navy and never left port. Russia’s armaments industry was
still inadequate to supply a modern army and its transport network,
adequate for peacetime, was too small for rapid mobilization and
supply of the army on the western frontier. To make matters worse,
the rapid advance of the German army through Belgium and France
created a crisis at the front. Under heavy French pressure the Rus-
sians dealt with the crisis by sending an unprepared army into East
 War and Revolution 295

Prussia, an expedition that ended in defeat at Tannenberg in August

1914. Thus, Russia began the war with a defeat.
At home the war produced an orgy of patriotism at first.
To universal acclaim the government changed the German name
St. Petersburg to Petrograd, a Russian translation, more or less, of
the same. Liberals and reactionaries in the Duma united on a war
platform and the intelligentsia, like their counterparts farther west,
poured out a flood of anti-enemy propaganda and nationalist rav-
ings. The workers as well were swept up in the fever and the strike
movement in the capital evaporated. The police came down hard on
the revolutionary parties, particularly on the Bolsheviks, and within
days their leaders inside Russia disappeared into prison and Siberian
exile. Stalin was among them. The Bolsheviks were the particular
object of the government’s wrath because of their position on the
war, a position that transformed an obscure Marxist group into a
world movement that fundamentally reordered the twentieth cen-
tury. For it was out of Lenin’s reaction to the war, not as a response
to the later Russian Revolution, that Communism was born.
Before 1914 the European Socialist parties had repeatedly pledged
at their international meetings to oppose all wars among the Euro-
pean states as inimical to the interests of the working class. These
were large powerful parties with mass membership, control of major
labor unions, and elaborate social and cultural services, utterly
unlike Lenin’s little band of underground fighters. As the decla-
rations of war came thundering out of the governments in July and
August 1914, the expectation was that the socialists would likely
oppose the war, and even go on strike, as they had threatened ear-
lier, in order to stop it. Nothing of the kind happened. Instead,
almost to a man the socialist leaders came out for the war, and
joined the chorus of patriotism and hate in their respective coun-
tries. The few that dissented felt bound by party discipline to keep
silent and follow the leadership. Among the Russians, the elderly
founder of Russian Marxism, Plekhanov, came out in support of the
war, and the Mensheviks adopted a compromise position, not call-
ing for Russian victory but not opposing the war. Alone among the
European Socialists, Lenin’s Bolsheviks and a handful of dissident
Mensheviks like Trotsky opposed the war from the first day.
296 A Concise History of Russia

Lenin was no pacifist, and his program on the war was not just
to oppose it. He proclaimed that the defeat of the Russian Empire
would be the best outcome for Russia and called for all socialists, in
Russia and elsewhere, to turn the international war into a civil war.
In other words, he was calling for armed insurrection in wartime.
This position seemed to him the only correct Marxist attitude, but
why did so few of the European Socialists agree? They had, he
thought, betrayed the working class they were supposed to lead,
but why? In despair at the future, Lenin turned to Marxist theory to
try to understand what had happened. He reread Aristotle’s Meta-
physics (in Greek; he was a product of the Russian gymnasium) and
Hegel’s Science of Logic to try to recapture the original sense of
dialectics as Hegel and Marx understood it. He also made a long
study of recent economic developments. His aim was to understand
the support for the war by the European Socialists. His conclu-
sion was that the answer lay in imperialism, in the superwealth
generated by the European empires in Africa and Asia, fuelled by
the ever-growing concentration of capital. Empire was the real aim
of the warring powers, concealed under a deceptive jargon about
freedom or national honor. Wealth from empire also produced a
labor aristocracy, happy with the status quo and thus unwilling to
cause trouble in wartime. In the short term, it would benefit from
imperialism. Both conclusions would have enormous effects after
the Russian Revolution, but for the moment the reading did little
more than keep Lenin busy while the world slipped deeper into the
bloody swamp of war.
As the casualties piled up in the millions, opposition to the war
began to surface among the socialists in Western Europe. The first
to break ranks were the left wing of the German Social-Democrats,
Rosa Luxemburg, Karl Liebknecht, and their followers, who voted
against the war credits in the Reichstag in December 1914. Soon
the anti-war socialists held small meetings in Switzerland to call for
an end to the war and discuss tactics, and even here Lenin, with
his uncompromising call for revolution, was in the minority. The
Russian Bolsheviks for the first time came to the attention of the
world, as a tiny band of revolutionaries who stuck to their position
even though it seemed to doom them to isolation and defeat. Their
position began to attract support among Western socialists, and
 War and Revolution 297

out of these small groups meeting in Switzerland came a world

movement with decisive consequences for Russia as well as for
China, Vietnam, and other countries as well.
The consequences of these obscure meetings lay in the distant
future. Back in Russia, the situation gradually deteriorated and
offered no comfort to either the tsar and his government or the
Bolsheviks. At the start of the war Nicholas suspended the Duma,
hoping to rule alone. The initial defeat in East Prussia was followed
in spring, 1915, by a general Russian retreat from Poland, and this
retreat finally led to a government crisis. The Duma was recalled
over the summer, and the Kadets and moderate conservatives man-
aged to put together a “Progressive Bloc” that offered to cooperate
in the war effort with the government. Ultimately the government
did have to call on the zemstvos and various committees of busi-
nessmen to resolve the crises in supply, but only reluctantly and too
late. New agencies appeared to regulate the economy for the war,
as in Germany and other warring powers, but Russia lacked the
infrastructure to make them work. The government regulated grain
prices to supply the army and cities with cheap food, but the result
was that the peasants began to cut back on their sowing, and food
production began to fall, worsening the situation.
In late 1915 Nicholas himself took over command of the army,
moving from Petrograd to the Stavka, the army headquarters near
Mogilev. His move did the army no good and only further disorga-
nized government in the capital, for he remained the sole authority
and now it was even harder to get his attention. His repeated con-
sultation with Empress Alexandra and Rasputin probably did not
have much impact on policy but served to further alienate the pub-
lic. The Russian army had mixed successes, for it could do little
against the Germans but scored a major victory against Austria in
1916 (the “Brusilov Offensive” led by General Aleksei Brusilov)
and against the Turks. Erzerum in eastern Anatolia fell to General
Nikolai Yudenich the same year. These successes could not change
the general stagnation in the war nor stop the bloodshed. Russia’s
casualties mounted toward some two million dead, two-and-a-half
million wounded, and five million prisoners of war. In the Duma
the Kadet leader Pavel Miliukov spoke of treason in high places
(a reference to the Empress Alexandra, among others) and then in
298 A Concise History of Russia

December 1916, a group of young aristocrats fearful of the fate of

the monarchy assassinated Rasputin. Inviting him to dinner, they
first fed him heavily poisoned food and wine, and then when that
had no effect on his massive frame, they shot him and put him
under the ice of the St. Petersburg canals. Rasputin was gone, and
the monarchy soon followed.
In many respects the fall of the Romanov dynasty was almost an
anticlimax. In late February 1917, the worsening food situation in
St. Petersburg led to long lines at bakeries and other food stores
in working class parts of the city. On International Women’s Day
(February 23/March 8; a socialist holiday) many women workers,
exhausted by standing in the food lines on top of long work days,
went out on strike. In a few hours the men in the factories heard the
news and they went out on strike as well, soon shutting down the
entire city. Students and the middle classes joined them. The gov-
ernment called out troops, who fired on the demonstrators, killing
several dozen. The next day, however, the very same soldiers who
had fired refused to fight and mutinied, taking other regiments with
them, even the Cossacks. The ministers and the Duma sent increas-
ingly desperate telegrams to the tsar, and Nicholas hurried back
from the Stavka. Before he got to the capital he was met by repre-
sentatives of the government who convinced him to abdicate. This
he did, on March 2/15, and the monarchy abruptly came to an end.

revolution
Even before the tsar’s abdication two new governments were form-
ing in Petrograd. As the tsar’s government collapsed, the Duma
leaders formed a Provisional Government led by Prince Georgii
Lvov, the head of the Union of Zemstvos, a liberal country gentle-
man with a law degree and a record of service in the local councils
and the Duma. His foreign minister was the leader of the Kadet
party, the historian Pavel Miliukov. The only more or less rad-
ical voice was that of Aleksandr Kerenskii, a lawyer known for
defense work in political trials and a member of the Duma’s “Labor
Group,” agrarian socialists close to the right wing of the SRs. His
father had been the principal of the high school in Simbirsk when
Lenin was one of the pupils. These men were the flower of liberal
 War and Revolution 299

Russia, broadly conceived, but as a group had no idea how to lead

the masses and spent much of their time worrying about the reac-
tions of Russia’s wartime allies, Britain, France, and soon the United
States. Their preferred solution to all problems facing Russia was to
call a Constituent Assembly to write a constitution for a democratic
republic that would address the peasants’ desire for the land and
the grievances of the workers. In the meantime they would pursue
the war, hopefully to an allied victory over Germany.
The other “government” was the Petrograd Soviet. On Menshe-
vik urging, the workers at nearly every factory in the city elected
delegates to the city Soviet, which numbered nearly a thousand
members. Its first act was “Order no. 1” that specified that the
army was to be run by elected soviets of the soldiers, the officers
having command only during operations. As the revolutionary par-
ties came out into the open for the first time in Russian history,
the Mensheviks and SRs, not the Bolsheviks, quickly asserted domi-
nance in the Soviet in Petrograd and most other towns. The Menshe-
vik tactic was to refuse support to the Provisional Government and
simultaneously push it toward a more radical direction, a hopeless
compromise position. Right at the start, the war had to be faced as
an issue. While the Russian Mensheviks differed from most Euro-
pean socialists by arguing that the war should be ended without
victory for either side, they had no workable plan to stop it, nor did
they advocate an immediate socialist revolution. Their position did
reflect real popular hostility to the war, and in May Miliukov and
others had to leave the Provisional Government, for they wanted to
push the war to a victorious end and the Soviet would not have that.
Lvov organized a new government with several moderate socialists,
including Kerenskii who was in charge of the army and navy, and
started a new offensive at the front. Soviets were also formed in
Moscow and other cities, in the army, and even in some parts of
the countryside. They represented workers, soldiers, and peasants
only, not the middle or upper classes. Reelected every few weeks,
the local soviets reflected the popular mood very closely.
In all these deliberations during the first months of the revolution
the Bolsheviks remained a minority in the soviets. Lenin heard of
the fall of the tsar in Switzerland and managed to return to Russia
through Germany, having convinced the German government that
300 A Concise History of Russia

he was more of a threat to Russia’s war effort than to their own.

He traveled in a train whose doors were sealed until he reached
neutral Sweden, reaching Petrograd via Finland on April 3/16, 1917,
to the tumultuous welcome of his followers. He found that the
Bolshevik leaders, including Stalin, had returned from exile and
were beginning to organize themselves. They all lacked, however, a
clear idea of what their platform ought to be. Lenin’s was absolutely
clear, as expressed in the “April Theses.” The fall of the tsar, he
wrote, meant that the bourgeois revolution, the one the party had
aimed for in 1905, had ended. In the country there was now dual
power, the soviets alongside the Provisional Government. The aim
should now be the seizure of power by the proletariat with the
aim of transforming Russia into a socialist society. The instrument
of that seizure was to be the soviets, primarily the workers’ and
soldiers’ soviets. The immediate aim of the Bolsheviks was thus to
secure a majority in the Petrograd and other soviets.
The story of the next few months is the story of the fulfillment of
that goal. It was the situation of Russia that made it possible, for
the whole country entered a major crisis. The collapse of the old
government left little effective authority in its place, and much of
that was cowed by the revolutionary crowd. In the villages the peas-
ants simply took the land during the summer. In many places there
was violence, but often they simply ignored the noble landowner
and began to plow up his fields for their own. Sometimes they came
to the mansions of the aristocrats and politely told them to leave.
However it occurred, the peasant seizure of the land was a cata-
clysmic change in Russian society, in a few months putting an end
to a social order that had lasted for centuries. Most nobles were no
longer the masters of the land but impoverished refugees in the big
cities. In the cities the workers used their new freedom to demand
an eight-hour day, higher wages, and to form factory committees
that tried to take control of the work place.
The left parties all came out into the open and tried to become
mass organizations. The time of the revolutionary underground was
over. At first the most successful were the SRs, with their traditions
of direct action and appeal to the peasantry. For the first time they
actually managed to organize significant numbers of peasants into
their party, and their working class following was very large. They
 War and Revolution 301

had one deep problem, however – the war. Even before 1917 some
of the SRs had come out against the war, with a position very close
to Lenin’s, but remained part of the larger party. As the crisis deep-
ened over the summer of 1917, the split widened. The Mensheviks,
always hoping to build a mass party in freer conditions, benefited
enormously from the new freedom. When the soviets held their first
congress of delegates from all of Russia in June, the SR’s and Men-
sheviks had nearly three hundred deputies each, and the Bolsheviks
only a little more than a hundred. Moderation seemed to triumph,
but the mood changed very fast.
The Bolsheviks for the first time were becoming a mass party, too.
In place of the few thousand professional revolutionaries the party
grew rapidly to over two hundred thousand, with the largest con-
centration in the large cities and in Petrograd in particular. These
new members were overwhelmingly young factory workers, most
under twenty-five. As more and more revolutionaries returned from
abroad, the Bolsheviks also began to attract dissidents from the
Mensheviks, the most important being Trotsky, whose opposition
to the war brought him to join Lenin for the first time. Trotsky was
a powerful orator, and his speeches were a major weapon in win-
ning the masses to Bolshevism. The new members transformed the
Bolshevik party, especially at the level of the rank and file, whose
radicalism came to the fore in early July. The Petrograd Bolsheviks
staged an armed demonstration that seemed to be turning into a bid
for power. The Provisional Government, with support from the city
soviet, was able to put it down and arrest many Bolshevik leaders.
Lenin went into hiding in Finland and Trotsky landed in jail. In
reaction to the events Kerenskii replaced Prince Lvov as prime min-
ister. For a few weeks the revolutionary wave seemed to subside, but
that was not to be. The war ground on, discontent in the army mul-
tiplied into a gradual collapse of discipline and Kerenskii replaced
Brusilov with general Lavr Kornilov as commander in chief, hop-
ing that Kornilov could restore order in the army. The task was
beyond his powers. The transport net of the country, already weak-
ened by the war, began to collapse, as did many essential industries
and services. In the cities the soviets organized Red Guards, who
contributed as much to disorder as to order. Revolutionary orga-
nizations and groups “expropriated” buildings for their own use,
302 A Concise History of Russia

the most famous example being the Petrograd Soviet’s seizure of

the buildings of the Smolnyi Institute in Petrograd, the aristocratic
girls’ school founded by Empress Elizabeth. Thus it came to serve
as the Bolshevik headquarters. For the middle and upper classes, it
was the beginning of anarchy; for the workers, it was the dawn of a
new world, chaotic, but their own. Endless discussion and meetings
further disrupted factory work but also built a constituency for ever
more radical demands. Life in Petrograd was feverish, and in the
provinces only a bit calmer. Moscow and all towns and settlements
with any industry boiled with meetings, speeches, and demonstra-
tions. On the fringes of the country nationalist movements appeared
with demands for autonomy. In Kiev groups of nationalist intellec-
tuals and party activists proclaimed themselves the Ukrainian Rada
(council) alongside the Provisional Government and the local sovi-
ets. Other groups formed in the Baltics and the Caucasus, though
none of them advocated actual independence as yet.
The July days had put a crimp in the Bolshevik organization and
its rise to dominance among the workers. Then at the end of August
general Kornilov advanced on the capital with the Mountaineer
Cavalry Corps consisting of the Muslim peoples of the North Cau-
casus – Chechens and Circassians – to restore discipline and order
in the country. In the face of this challenge Kerenskii had to turn
to the Petrograd Soviet, which armed the workers. The Bolsheviks
had grown in strength since the July Days. They were now crucial
for the defeat of Kornilov, and their leaders emerged from jail into
the open again. The inability of Kerenskii to defend the revolution
on his own was the last blow to his power, and from the time of the
defeat of Kornilov on September 1/14, the Provisional Government
essentially drifted. The locus of action had shifted to the soviets.
During and right after the Kornilov episode the Bolsheviks finally
secured a majority in the Petrograd and Moscow soviets. As the
weeks advanced and the economic and military crisis continued to
worsen, another Congress of Soviets met, again with delegates from
all over the country. Here the divisions in the SR party were to play
a decisive role, for the Bolsheviks had clearly won the majority of
the city workers, but in the villages they had no organization at all.
The left wing of the SR party, increasingly radicalized by the revolu-
tion and demanding an immediate end to the war, was prepared to
 War and Revolution 303

join the Bolsheviks. On October 10/23, Lenin returned from hiding

in Finland and assembled the Bolshevik leaders. With the support
of Trotsky and Stalin, he overcame the pessimists in the leader-
ship, Zinoviev and Kamenev, and the Bolshevik Central Committee
voted to seize power. With the votes of the Left SRs the Bolsheviks
captured the leadership of the Congress of Soviets, and on October
25/November 7, 1917, the Red Guards moved on the Winter Palace
to eject the Provisional Government. Only a few hundred defenders
were left in the palace, officer cadets and the “Women’s Batallion
of Death,” a unit formed of mostly middle-class women to fight in
the war. On a signal from the naval cruiser Aurora, anchored in the
Neva River, several thousand Red Guards in a fast walk through
the autumn chill took the palace with minimal firing and casual-
ties. Attempts at looting the wine cellar and the many treasures of
the palace were quickly suppressed, and the ministers of the Provi-
sional Government were escorted to prison in the St. Peter and Paul
Fortress. Kerenskii escaped south in a US embassy car in a fruitless
attempt to rally support at the front.
Relying on their majority in the Congress of Soviets, the Bol-
sheviks and the Left SRs now took power, proclaiming Russia
a Soviet and Socialist Republic. The Mensheviks and Right SRs
walked out of the Congress in protest as Trotsky consigned them to
the “garbage heap of history.” The first actions of the Reds were to
organize the new government. The Congress of Soviets elected a gov-
ernment of People’s Commissars with Lenin at the head and Trotsky
as People’s Commissar of Foreign Affairs. The other positions went
to prominent Bolsheviks and Left SRs, the most significant among
the former being Joseph Stalin as Commissar of Nationalities. Trot-
sky went to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs at the Choristers’ Bridge
near the Winter Palace, turned off the lights, and told everyone to
go home. For the next few months, he ran foreign policy from a
small office in the Smolny Institute.
The new Soviet government came into power with great sup-
port from the workers and intense opposition from the old upper
classes, the middle classes, and the intelligentsia. These divisions
were reflected in the Constituent Assembly that convened on Jan-
uary 5/18, 1918. Called by the Provisional Government, the Assem-
bly elections had proceeded through the autumn, before and after
304 A Concise History of Russia

the Bolshevik seizure of power. In the cities the Bolsheviks routed the
moderate socialists (SRs and Mensheviks) leaving the increasingly
more conservative and nationalistic Kadets as the second urban
party. In the countryside, however, the SRs emerged with the most
votes, though most candidates had not declared whether they sup-
ported the left or right, muddying the result. The Assembly met
for some thirteen hours, after which the Bolshevik guard of Red
sailors from the navy simply told the deputies to leave and go home.
They obeyed. A few days later another Congress of Soviet Deputies
proclaimed the new state, the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist
Republic, with ringing declarations of the rights of the workers,
peasants, and national minorities.

civil war and soviet power

By this time civil war had already begun, as groups of military offi-
cers in southern Russia came together to organize resistance to the
new government and discontent grew among the Don Cossacks.
The Cossack leader Kaledin formed a Cossack government of sorts
on the Don, and the Reds quickly moved against him. Through the
Civil War the Cossacks were to be the foundation of resistance to
Soviet power. Living on the southern and eastern fringes of Rus-
sia, they were no longer the rebels of the eighteenth century. They
combined peasant farming with service in the army, and secure in
possession of their land, they had been the tsar’s most loyal servants
since the 1790s. The largest and most prosperous of the Cossack
hosts was on the Don, and there was the fiercest resistance to the
new order. At the same time the nationalist intellectuals in the Kiev
Rada declared themselves to be the supreme power in the Ukraine. A
Cossack-Ukrainian front seemed to be forming against the Reds in
the south. A motley collection of red guards and sailors were enough
to defeat both the Don Cossacks and the Rada by January 1918.
At the same time chaos spread through the country, along with
episodes of resistance elsewhere. At the end of December 1917,
to meet these threats, Soviet authorities also formed the Cheka,
the Extraordinary Commission for the Struggle with Banditism and
Counterrevolution, an organization that combined security police
 War and Revolution 305

functions with a sort of political army. Its first head was a Polish
Communist, Felix Dzerzhinskii, incorruptible and ruthless.
The quick defeat of opposition to the Bolsheviks did not mean
that order returned. The war had ruined the Russian economy.
Inflation was out of control and the transport networks and the dis-
tribution of food were breaking down. Heat and light disappeared
in Petrograd and other big cities, and workers began to return to
their native villages, if they could. In the former capital of the Rus-
sian Empire the lights went out in the great palaces, the nobility fled
to the south to warmth and food, along with much of the intelli-
gentsia and the middle classes. As the army disintegrated, millions
of soldiers clogged the trains going home, taking with them rifles
and hand grenades. Criminal gangs terrorized many cities. The first
measures of the Bolsheviks only increased the disintegration, for the
new government set out to build a new socialist state in the midst of
chaos. The workers frequently interpreted socialism to mean that
they should physically eject the factory owners and managers and
elect committees of workers to run the plants. These committees
had no way to procure supplies or distribute the goods, and in
the general social chaos labor discipline collapsed. It was a vicious
circle. The Bolsheviks went along with this for several months, as
part of the need to dissolve the old order, but by spring of 1918,
the collapsing economy and the needs of civil war caused them to
reverse themselves and begin to appoint single managers, former
workers or party activists, to run the factories. In theory these Red
managers were accountable to the newly established Supreme Eco-
nomic Council and the various People’s Commissariats (Industry,
Trade, Agriculture, Labor, Food Supplies). Here was the embryo of
the later Soviet state.
For the moment the Bolshevik priority was simple survival. The
first order of business in November 1917 was the war, and immedi-
ately after the Bolshevik revolution the new government proclaimed
a truce with Germany and its allies and opened negotiations. Trot-
sky went to Brest-Litovsk on the Polish border, now under German
occupation, to try to make peace. The German demands were exor-
bitant, and Trotsky dithered, proclaiming that the right policy was
“neither war nor peace.” The Germans responded with a massive
306 A Concise History of Russia

offensive, occupying all of the Ukraine, Belorussia, and the Baltic

provinces. Local nationalists proclaimed their independence of Red
Petrograd, but the Kaiser’s armies paid them no attention. The
Germans set up a puppet regime in Kiev with the Russian general
Pavel Skoropadskii, a former adjutant of the tsar who had suddenly
discovered his Ukrainian roots, as their instrument. Red Guards
were too amateurish a force, and the Bolsheviks now formed a real
army, the Workers’ and Peasants’ Red Army, in response, but the
new army could not stop the Germans. The government moved
to Moscow, farther from the German lines. Even so some of the
Communist leaders, Nikolai Bukharin especially, and the Left SRs
wanted to continue to fight a “revolutionary war.” Lenin realized
that this was madness, and convinced the leadership to sign on to
the German conditions. Peace came in March, with the loss of all
the western territories to Germany and Austria, but it was peace
and the Kaiser recognized the red republic. The Left SRs resigned in
protest, leaving the Bolsheviks entirely in charge of the new state.
The fiasco at Brest-Litovsk encouraged opposition to the Reds
in the south. The southern Cossack areas rose in revolt again, this
time allied with the Volunteer Army of General Mikhail Alekseev
formed from officers of the old army. On the Don the new Red
Army managed to suppress the Whites, who fled south to the Kuban
River area, but other troubles soon arose. Serious fighting began
in May 1918, in a wholly different part of the country, after the
actions of the Czechoslovak Corps. The Czechoslovak Corps had
been formed under the tsar from prisoners of war, former Austro-
Hungarian soldiers of Czech and Slovak nationality, to assist the
Allies against Austria and Germany. After the Soviet peace with
Germany, they wanted to continue to fight and the new government
allowed them to exit the country through Siberia to Japan and the
United States so as to be able to continue the war in France. A series
of clashes with local Soviet authorities led them to seize control of
the rail lines from European Russia all the way to the Pacific
Ocean. In Samara in June, guarded by the Czechs, some SR deputies
of the dispersed Constituent Assembly formed a government that
attempted to continue the practices of parliamentary democracy. It
also managed to get together a “People’s Army” that moved toward
Moscow against the Reds.
 War and Revolution 307

Figure 18. Trotsky, Lenin, and Lev Kamenev 1918–1920.

For Lenin and the Bolsheviks, this was a real crisis, aggravated by
the revolt of their recent allies, the Left SRs. Enraged by the peace
with Germany and out of power the Left SRs attempted a revolt
in Moscow, assassinating the German ambassador in the process.
Similar revolts took place in other Russian towns, all quickly sup-
pressed but indicative of serious opposition to the new government.
The main threat, however, was the Czechoslovak Corps and its
Russian allies moving from the east, and the ramshackle Red Army,
formed of poorly trained militias with inexperienced officers, fell
back in retreat. This was the moment that Trotsky first showed his
mettle as a military commander, as well as his ruthlessness in impos-
ing order and discipline. He made full use of officers from the old
army of the tsar, holding their families hostage to guarantee their
loyalty. In addition the political commissars assigned to each mili-
tary unit were to maintain and inspire its reliability. He had officers
who failed, commissars, and simple soldiers shot in the hundreds.
With this new organization, the Red Army recaptured the Volga
308 A Concise History of Russia

towns and pushed the rapidly disintegrating People’s Army back to

the Urals.
These crises sealed the fate of the former Tsar Nicholas and his
family. Their presence in Siberian Tobolsk, where the Provisional
Government had sent them, was too close to the emerging centers
of resistance, and so the Reds brought them to Ekaterinburg in the
Urals. In July 1918, as the Whites approached, the Soviets ordered
the imperial family executed, the final end of the Romanov dynasty
that had ruled Russia for three centuries. The house where they lived
and where they were killed remained unnoticed for decades until
1977, when an overzealous Communist party boss, Boris Yeltsin,
had it razed to the ground. Back in Moscow, Lenin himself was the
target of an assassin’s bullet at the end of August. The response of
the Cheka was to declare Red Terror, arresting thousands from the
middle and upper classes. Some were executed immediately, others
kept as hostages against future attempts.
By the autumn of 1918, the new Red Army had retaken most of
the Volga and the Urals, and the People’s Army melted away. Far-
ther east in Siberian Omsk another White army had come into being,
Siberian Cossacks and units formed by ex-imperial officers deter-
mined to fight the Reds. In November, Admiral Alexander Kolchak
seized power as Supreme Ruler of Russia, and dissolved the rem-
nants of the SR leadership from the Constituent Assembly. Kolchak
also shot many of the SRs as well as any other Bolshevik or left-
wing activists whom he could find. Kolchak was a military dictator,
and there were to be no more games with democracy. In addition
there was a new element coming into play, for the First World War
ended on November 11, and allied commissioners, British, French,
American, and Japanese, arrived in Omsk. The allies, too, were for
dictatorship, and quickly moved to support Kolchak as the leader
of the opposition to Bolshevism.
If Kolchak was the titular supreme leader, his was not the only
White army in the field. After the Reds had retaken the Don early
in 1918, the Volunteer Army had moved south through the winter
to establish themselves on the Kuban. The death of Alekseev and
his replacement Kornilov (of the 1917 putsch attempt) in rapid
succession led to the emergence of General Anton Denikin as the
supreme commander of the Volunteer Army in the south. While
 War and Revolution 309

Trotsky was preoccupied on the Volga, Denikin had held on, and
on the Don the Cossacks rose again later in 1918. With covert
German support, they tried to move north and east. As yet they
were too weak to break the Red resistance, though they did cut off
much of the crucial grain producing areas, and if they crossed the
Volga, they had a distant chance of linking with Kolchak. On the
Volga at Tsaritsyn, the Cossacks and the Whites confronted Joseph
Stalin, sent originally just to organize grain deliveries, but Stalin
quickly moved to take control of the military apparatus and shore up
resistance. His ally among the soldiers was Kliment Voroshilov, who
had fled east with a ragtag workers’ militia from the Donbass ahead
of the advancing Germans. Stalin and Voroshilov were also unhappy
with Trotsky’s policy of extensive use of professional officers from
the tsar’s army, but Lenin supported Trotsky on this issue and they
had to back down. Red units commanded by professional officers
were decisive in holding the line, but at Tsaritsyn the Commissar
of Nationalities had his first taste of warfare. The Cossacks did not
cross the river, and Kolchak was thousands of miles to the east,
unable to join them.
Behind all these front lines the Reds proceeded to build utopia.
While Marxism provided a detailed analysis of capitalism and the
projected path to proletarian revolution, it provided almost nothing
beyond generalities about socialism. The worsening crisis in food
supplies caused by increasing chaos and the German seizure of the
Ukraine had led to the proclamation of the “food dictatorship”
in May 1918. Under the People’s Commissariat of Food Supplies
armed detachments went out into the countryside to seize “surplus”
grain at fixed, pre-revolutionary prices or simply to confiscate it. The
idea was to get at grain allegedly held back by kulaks and traders
with the help of the poor peasants organized in committees, but in
fact the distinctions among the peasants were hard to make, and the
measures affected all of rural society. Continued hyperinflation and
the disappearance of money worsened the ongoing economic col-
lapse, and the Reds instituted rationing and a system of cooperatives
to distribute food and consumer goods.
Early in 1919 the Soviet authorities formalized the system of
obligatory grain deliveries, to be accompanied by a centralized
allocation of consumer goods to the peasants. Some sixty thousand
310 A Concise History of Russia

men were now mobilized into a “food army” to extract grain from
the countryside. The peasants responded by reducing the size of their
crops, further plunging the cities into crisis. These new measures, in
part the product of ideology and in part the necessity of war, lasted
throughout the civil war. The Bolsheviks had always been hostile
to markets, and the collapse of transport and general chaos broke
down normal market ties. This situation gave them an opportunity
to institute utopian schemes of distribution through the central allo-
cation of goods. Virtually all factories and all trade were national-
ized. Small retail shops disappeared, while the Soviet municipalities
tried to set up large city-owned bread factories instead of small
neighborhood bakeries, worsening the food situation. This was the
system that came to be known as “War Communism.” Reality soon
intervened, for local Soviet authorities regularly violated the rules,
and the impossibility of full central control led the major factories
and even the Red Army to set up their own procurement systems for
food, including substantial numbers of farms operated by the facto-
ries and the army. The only remaining markets were the flea markets
and the black market, both of which made simple survival easier for
much of the urban population. The new central economic institu-
tions were incapable of implementing their schemes, for they were
not grand bureaucratic structures, but rather small offices staffed
by former revolutionary activists with no relevant experience,
assisted by a few engineers or economists and the more qualified
workers.
The emerging Soviet state was also a party-state, for the Bolshe-
vik party expanded in size, to over three hundred thousand in early
1919. These men and women were the cadre for the new state. The
remaining Mensheviks and SRs were pushed out of political life by
the end of 1918 and the new institutions required loyal officials to
run them. The party itself became more centralized, especially with
the establishment of the Politburo (Political Bureau) over the Cen-
tral Committee in 1919. The new Politburo included only Lenin,
Kamenev, Trotsky, Stalin, and Nikolai Krestinskii as full members;
Zinoviev, Bukharin, and Mikhail Kalinin were included as candi-
dates. Here was the core of the Bolshevik leadership. Zinoviev was
the son of Jewish dairy farmers in the Ukraine and had been close
to Lenin during his years of European exile. After the government
 War and Revolution 311

moved to Moscow in 1918, Zinoviev headed the Petrograd party

organization, effectively running the city until 1926, at the same
time leading the new Communist International. Lev Kamenev was
the son of a Jewish railroad worker, but had acquired some univer-
sity education and was married to Trotsky’s sister. After 1917, he
functioned as Lenin’s deputy and ran the Moscow party organiza-
tion. Bukharin, the best educated of the Bolsheviks after Lenin, was
something of a Marxist theorist and had spent time both in Western
Europe and briefly in the United States. He was a bit younger than
the others, and personally popular in the party. Like Lenin he was
also actually Russian, as were Krestinskii and Kalinin, both minor
figures. Krestinskii served as Commissar of Finance, while Kalinin,
the only worker in the group and even born into a peasant family,
headed the Central Executive Committee of the Soviets – in other
words, he was the technical head of government. All of them shared,
with Stalin, solid credentials of unwavering Bolshevism. Trotsky, in
contrast, was a flamboyant ex-Menshevik who fit poorly into the
group.
The crucial person in the whole party and government was Lenin.
Until 1917 he had spent his life as a revolutionary organizer and
journalist, turning out masses of articles explaining his position and
denouncing his opponents. He was also more intellectual than the
others, as his writings on philosophy and the economics of imperi-
alism demonstrated. In such matters only Bukharin came close to
him. As an orator he was clear and capable of moving an audience,
but not on the level of Trotsky or Zinoviev. On taking power in
1917, he proved to have political and administrative skills far in
excess of most of his comrades, as well as a powerful will and the
ability to make decisions. He rapidly absorbed himself in the details
of government, including the myriad economic problems that arose
when the Bolsheviks nationalized the economy. He tried and largely
succeeded in imposing a spirit of teamwork on the party leadership,
getting contentious and often arrogant comrades to work together.
When he argued his position in person, he could convince his oppo-
nents without belittling them (although his published polemics were
another matter). Even if all of the other leaders disagreed with him
on occasion, he remained the unchallenged leader of the party and
hence of the state.
312 A Concise History of Russia

This highly effective leadership controlled a very imperfect state

apparatus, but it had, besides the party, other instruments of power.
The Red Army was five million strong by the end of the Civil War
but “labor armies” made up much of its theoretical strength and
it took on many economic functions, providing horses for plowing
and restoring railroad service. The Cheka provided internal security,
eliminated active and potential opponents, and tried to suppress
the growing number of criminal bands in the cities. There were
some twenty-five thousand people in the Cheka by the end of the
Civil War, but it also controlled over a hundred thousand internal
security troops, infantry, and cavalry. The party, the army, and the
Cheka made possible the Red victory, but they could not stop the
deepening economic crisis and accompanying anarchy. The near
collapse of rail transport meant that the northern cities could be
supplied only with great difficulty. Petrograd suffered in particular,
losing some three quarters of its population by 1920. With the
move of the government to Moscow the Reds evacuated a number
of key factories with their workers and equipment, and hundreds
of thousands of workers came to work in Moscow, joined the party
apparatus, the Cheka, or the Red Army. Many simply went home
to their native villages in search of food, heat, and work. As order
collapsed, disease began to spread. Typhus, influenza, and other
diseases were epidemic.
The spring of 1919 brought new life to the White movements.
The end of the war in Europe in November 1918 meant the with-
drawal of German troops from the western territories. In the Baltic
provinces and the Ukraine, local nationalists declared independence
from the Bolsheviks, but the Red Army quickly returned power to
the Soviets. The Reds drove out the nationalist Ukrainian Directory
in Kiev. At the approach of the Red forces, the Directory’s peas-
ant army simply melted away. Under their military leader Semyon
Petliura the Ukrainian nationalists moved west, carrying out a fero-
cious massacre of the Jews in Proskurov on the way. Kolchak held
Siberia and the Urals and Denikin moved north through the spring,
taking the Donbass, most of the Ukraine and southern Russia.
Denikin was able to advance as far as Orel, raiding far behind
the Red lines with substantial groups of cavalry. The mobility of
the Civil War put a premium on cavalry, and the Cossacks and the
 War and Revolution 313

cavalry officers of the old army were a formidable challenge. The

Reds answered with Semen Budennyi’s First Cavalry Army, formed
in the middle of the battles against Denikin, at first a ragtag band of
poorly disciplined men whipped into shape by Budennyi’s charisma.
In July mass mobilization by the Reds allowed them to send sub-
stantial armies against Denikin and stopped him. Behind his lines in
the southern Ukraine a new army appeared seemingly out of noth-
ing, the anarchist army of Nestor Makhno, an ex-sergeant of the
Russian Imperial Army and an instinctive guerilla leader. Makhno
shredded Denikin’s communications, and with the Reds driving him
from the north, he had to retreat.
Denikin was an accomplished general but this was a political war.
The White governments were military dictatorships with civilian
ministers recruited from former liberals to give them some mini-
mal credibility. Their social policy was bound to antagonize the
masses, as they opposed not only the Reds but also anything the
workers saw as conquests of the revolution. In the cities, only
the middle and upper classes supported them. Massacres of Jews
were frequent. In the countryside their policy inevitably supported
the noble landowners against the peasants and could not exploit
rural antagonism to Bolshevik measures. To make matters worse,
the White governments financed their operations by printing money
and the peasants were reluctant to sell grain for worthless currency.
Like the Reds, the Whites turned to confiscation of grain. As in the
Red-held areas, the peasants reduced their farming to subsistence,
creating food shortages in the richest agricultural areas in the coun-
try, western Siberia and the south. As resistance to them grew, the
Whites could only answer with repression, and the cities that the
Whites occupied saw mass executions. Behind the White lines in
Siberia and the Ukraine the peasants formed armed bands to con-
front the Whites. Not only Makhno but also hundreds of peasant
bands bent only on preserving their own territory kept the Whites
from effective control of the countryside.
Even foreign intervention could not save the Whites. With the end
of the First World War the Allies had free access to Russia through
the Black Sea and elsewhere, but the exhaustion of war meant that
they could offer little in the way of actual troops. Japan sent some
sixty thousand to Siberia as part of a scheme to take control of
314 A Concise History of Russia

Russian territory (thereby antagonizing the United States), but the

other powers sent fewer troops. A brief intervention in Odessa
and other southern cities in 1919 ended after only a few months,
although Britain, France, and the United States continued to send
weapons. They were not of much use, for transportation bottle-
necks (especially in Siberia) held up the supplies in the ports and
massive corruption meant that arms and ammunition often ended
up in the hands of the Reds. To make matters worse, the officers
who formed the core of the White movement were intensely patri-
otic and many were offended by the need to rely on foreign armies.
The intervention weakened morale as much as it strengthened it.
In the fall of 1919 the Reds pushed Kolchak’s forces back
into Siberia, the first victories of the later Soviet marshal M. N.
Tukhachevskii, an aristocratic guards officer turned revolutionary
enthusiast. The Red Army finally defeated Kolchak, capturing and
executing him in Siberian Irkutsk. There was another try at a White
victory: General Iudenich, the victor of Erzerum in 1916, led an
expedition from Estonia toward Petrograd. Zinoviev thought the
city defenseless, and Lenin agreed with him. Trotsky and Stalin
vehemently objected, and convinced Lenin to let them defend the
city. They raced north to Petrograd, Trotsky personally jumping
on a horse to rally the troops. In October of 1919, Iudenich began
the retreat back to Estonia. In the south, Denikin gave up com-
mand early in 1920 and went into exile. The remains of the White
Army retreated to the Crimea and set up a new army and govern-
ment under Baron Peter Wrangel. At that point the new Polish state
invaded the Ukraine. The aim of the Poles was to conquer the lands
held by Poland before the partitions of the eighteenth century, and to
do so they allied with Petliura, who thus further discredited himself
with the Ukrainian peasantry for whom the Poles were only noble
landlords, and as such, their enemies. The Red Army redeployed
west to meet the new threat, mobilizing some half a million soldiers.
Lenin was convinced that the Reds should go all the way to Warsaw,
an attempt to help the spread of revolution in Europe as well as to
defeat the Poles. Trotsky was skeptical. The Red Army, led before
Warsaw by the brilliant but erratic Tukhachevskii, moved too far to
the west in an attempt to encircle the city. A huge gap opened in the
Red lines, but the Red troops farther south under Budennyi, with
 War and Revolution 315

Stalin as political commander, delayed moving north to help close

the gap. The Poles, with French advice and weapons, swept north
in a maneuver of brilliant simplicity to encircle Tukhachevskii’s
troops. The Reds retreated far to the east, their major defeat in
the Civil War, and made peace with Poland. The treaty estab-
lished a boundary that gave Poland large parts of western Belorus-
sia and the Ukraine, but not the main cities, Kiev, Odessa, and
Minsk.
At the critical moment of the Polish war Baron Wrangel had
moved into the Red rear from Crimea. Now his was the only hostile
force left in the field against the Bolsheviks. At the end of 1920 the
Red Army stormed across the isthmus into Crimea with the help
of Makhno’s irregulars, and the White cause was finished. The last
refugees, soldiers and civilians evacuated the southern cities under
the guns of the British navy, in a chaotic scene that marked the final
end of the old Russia.

The revolution and civil war was largely a Russian event but it
had profound effects for the various nationalities that made up the
periphery of the Russian Empire. In Poland nationalism trumped
class and socialism, and the transition to an independent govern-
ment was (internally) fairly smooth. In Finland a vicious civil war
in 1918 between the local Social Democrats and the Whites led to
a White victory after the Kaiser sent an expeditionary force to aid
Baron Gustav Mannerheim, a former Imperial Russian general. In
the Baltic provinces the collapse of the German occupation led to
civil war as well, for Riga especially had a large and very radical
working class. Britain, however, saw the Baltic as its sphere of influ-
ence and landed Freikorps soldiers, German right-wing nationalist
paramilitaries, in 1919 to push out the Reds. The British then set
up a nationalist government in their place, evicting the Freikorps as
well. The Baltic Reds went into exile in Soviet Russia, providing in
particular a major component in the Cheka and Red Army. In the
Ukraine the task of the Reds was made easier by the fact that all
of the cities were Russian-speaking. The largest urban minority was
Jewish, not Ukrainian, and the local nationalist movement was a
small layer of intellectuals trying to lead the peasantry. Their armies
were totally disorganized, and in addition they were reluctant to be
316 A Concise History of Russia

clear on the land question, the crucial issue to the peasants. The
Reds easily swept them away.
In the Caucasus the Reds were also victorious. The Brest-Litovsk
treaty had led to the German-Turkish occupation of the Caucasus,
and the end of the war meant their withdrawal. The Reds tried to
make a revolution in their wake, but local nationalist parties took
power with British help. As Britain was busily occupying the nearby
Middle East, it had few resources to spare, and the local govern-
ments were left to their own devices. In 1920 the Red Army came
south under the command of Stalin’s fellow Georgian and close
friend Sergo Ordzhonikidze and took Baku. The small Azeri army
was largely led by Turkish officers, by now supporters of Kemal
Ataturk’s resistance to the western powers in Anatolia, and greeted
the Reds as allies. Furthermore, Baku itself was a city in its major-
ity not Azeri but Russian, Georgian, and Armenian, a population
drawn by oil to what was largely a European city. The Reds had
plenty of allies. The Reds moved on quickly to eject the Armenian
nationalists, and a few months later it was the turn of the Georgian
Mensheviks. A new Soviet republic, the Transcaucasian Federation,
came into existence, combining all of the area under one govern-
ment. In Central Asia resistance to the Reds ended by 1922, and
the Japanese were eventually persuaded to withdraw from eastern
Siberia, so that everywhere but in the West the old boundaries were
reestablished.
The new, Soviet, Russia that came into being was devastated by
years of war and revolution, with its economy in pieces. Perhaps
a million men had died on the many fronts of the Civil War and
(estimates vary) five or six million civilians – the greatest number of
these from typhus and other epidemic diseases, followed by hunger.
Executions and massive reprisals by all sides made up the rest of the
death toll. Some million or two Russians, including much of the old
upper classes and the intelligentsia, left the country, never to return.
Transport and production were at a standstill. For the time being,
the Soviets continued the policy of War Communism and mobilized
the Labor Armies under Trotsky to rebuild the damage. This was
not a viable policy and resistance to the new order grew through-
out the country. Lenin realized that some sort of compromise was
 War and Revolution 317

needed, an economic policy that provided enough room for the pop-
ulation, particularly the peasantry, to work without state direction.
This compromise would be named the New Economic Policy and
it inaugurated a whole new era in the history of Soviet Russia and
the other Soviet states under the rule of the Communist Party.
 17
Compromise and Preparation

The end of the Civil War presented the Soviet leadership with a
whole series of new issues, some immediate and some more long
term. If the White armies were defeated, internal discontent was
growing rapidly, fueled by the catastrophic economic situation
and resentment of the party dictatorship. In 1920 in the Tambov
province in central Russia a major revolt of the peasantry broke
out, largely unpolitical but no less fervent. It required major army
forces under Tukhachevskii to suppress it. As the army moved into
Tambov province, the sailors of Kronstadt rose in revolt. The revolt
at the naval base in the harbor of Petrograd was much more visi-
ble and more political. The sailors had been crucial supporters of
the Bolsheviks in 1917, and now they were calling for Soviets to
be elected without Communists, a direct challenge to the emerg-
ing Soviet system. At the end of March, 1921, Trotsky sent troops
across the ice to retake the fort with much loss of life, the whole
event illustrating the fragility of Soviet power. The revolts and the
obvious failure of War Communism led to a sharp turn in economic
policy. As the fighting raged in Kronstadt, Lenin and the party abol-
ished the system of compulsory grain deliveries, substituting a tax
in kind and permitting the peasantry to trade freely in the products
left after the payment of the new tax. This step was the founda-
tion of the New Economic Policy, known as NEP. A return to a
money economy soon followed, and with it came permission from
the state, even encouragement, for private individuals to trade and
set up businesses to supply a population starved of the most basic
318
 Compromise and Preparation 319

consumer goods. Socialism was no longer on the immediate agenda.

Industrial recovery would eventually provide a basis for further
development, and at an indefinite point in the future peasant agri-
culture would be drawn somehow into the socialist system (a process
called “collectivization”).
The next immediate issue was the famine that appeared in 1922,
the result of years of devastation, neglect of equipment and infras-
tructure, the absence of peasants from the fields while fighting in the
various armies during the Civil War, the Soviet grain requisitions
that discouraged farming, and general death and destruction. The
Soviets took up the offer of the American Relief Administration
under Herbert Hoover, fresh from relief operations in Belgium, to
provide food to stricken areas in the south and the Volga region.
Relief and the return of peace could contain the famine, but longer-
term issues remained. The outcome of the revolution and civil war
was that the peasantry finally controlled virtually all arable land in
Russia. With the urban economy devastated, however, they at first
had little incentive to sell their grain to the cities. Yet NEP depended
precisely on the peasant sale of grain for consumer goods, and even-
tually it worked. The peasants now had cloth, industrially manufac-
tured consumer goods, and some farm equipment to buy in return
for their grain. At this point, the party did little to advance any
sort of socialist agriculture. It abandoned the experiments with the
“communes” of the Civil War era, and settled for modest coopera-
tives among the peasants while trying to build a basic party network
among them, especially from younger peasants who had served in
the Red Army.
The result was a certain return to normalcy on the part of urban
society, but that was very much a matter of the surface of things. In
reality, all had changed. The old state, upper classes, and much of
the intelligentsia were gone, dead, marginalized, or abroad. In their
place was the new party-state, the core of which was the Communist
Party. In the old palaces of the nobility the Party set up museums and
kindergartens, party offices and schools, and Cheka headquarters
and administrative offices. Interspersed among drab new institu-
tions were the more garish shops and restaurants of the Nepmen
(as the new businessmen were called) with their hints of luxury and
hedonism. Bright lights reappeared and private restaurants featured
320 A Concise History of Russia

jazz bands and European cabaret acts. Advertisements for privately

manufactured rubber boots and champagne hung alongside ban-
ners calling for world revolution. Prostitutes and smugglers rubbed
shoulders with German Comintern agents and Latvian Cheka offi-
cers. Workers were enrolled in instant higher education projects
(the “Workers’ Faculties”) and peasants came to the cities looking
for unskilled work as before.
The Soviet Union of the 1920s was a colorful place, but there
was more than an easier daily life in the cities. The economy revived
from the catastrophic situation of 1920; indeed it revived much
faster than the party leadership expected. Instead of decades of
rebuilding, production in almost all areas had rebounded by 1926
to pre-war levels, in some areas exceeding them. Of course this
was merely a revival, and in the years since 1914 the world had
not stood still. Especially in the United States and Germany, new
technologies were changing the landscape, and the Soviet Union
had merely rebuilt the pre-war world. Automobiles, new chemical
industries, aircraft, and radio technology were all new and growing
rapidly in the West. The USSR would have to move very fast just to
catch up. Unfortunately one crucial area lagged behind: agriculture.
The problem was not total production, for the country produced
almost exactly the same amount of grain – the crucial commodity –
as in 1914, but now much less came to market. On average the
peasants marketed only a bit more than half of the amount of grain
marketed before the war. Explanations for this phenomenon vary,
but it seems that it was the result of land seizures in the summer of
1917. Large estates, which had been market-oriented, disappeared,
and the distribution of land among the peasants was radically equal-
ized. Well-off peasants (the kulaks) did remain in the villages, but
most land went to middling producers who consumed more of their
harvest than before the war. Soviet pricing policies increased the
problem, as the peasants thought the state purchase prices were
too low. Here was the dilemma: if the country was to continue to
industrialize, and to keep up with the West, it would need vast new
industries and new cities, and their workers would need food. How
to get it? Agriculture would have to become more productive, but
how and how fast? Thus the rather technical questions of balanc-
ing industrial growth rates and modernizing agriculture became the
 Compromise and Preparation 321

object of increasingly acrimonious debate and vicious internal strug-

gles inside the leadership of the Communist Party. The outcome of
these debates and struggle was the supreme power of Joseph Stalin.
The Civil War had further centralized an already centralized party
and also imbued it with a civil war mentality. All disagreements
became necessarily matters of life and death – all opponents were
covert enemies of the entire revolutionary idea. Lenin and Trotsky
defended and practiced terror against the Whites and other enemies.
The remaining moderate socialist parties, the Mensheviks and Left
SRs as well as the anarchists were suppressed. Not surprisingly,
the end of the Civil War had no effect on the Bolshevik mentality,
and the demands for ideological unity, if anything, became sharper.
Personality clashes and differences in strategy, however, militated
against unity. Lenin, in his last writings, was critical of all of the
major figures – Stalin, Trotsky, Bukharin, and others – but offered
no clear choice among the leadership. The first major dispute broke
out in 1923, as Lenin’s health deteriorated after several strokes.
Trotsky and a number of his allies from the Civil War began to
criticize the “bureaucratic tendencies” in the party. Then in January
1924, Lenin died. The mantle of leadership was not passed on to any
one man: Stalin, Zinoviev, and Kamenev were the dominant figures.
In 1922 the Party Congress had appointed Stalin General Secretary
of the party, a position he held until his death. It gave him control or
at least knowledge of all appointments in the party to any positions
of significance. Bukharin, as editor of Pravda, the party newspaper,
was their most important ally. Trotsky still possessed great power
and prestige but the others did not trust him. As the Commissar
of War for many years, he seemed the most likely to become the
Bonaparte of the Russian Revolution. If not as well educated as
Bukharin, he was sophisticated, cosmopolitan, and arrogant – too
aloof to form powerful allies. Trotsky’s Menshevik past continued
to haunt him. He also seriously underestimated Stalin, thinking him
a provincial boor who was only good at bureaucratic maneuvers.
Stalin, as a Georgian with a heavy accent, was in some ways even
more of an outsider than Trotsky, but he had to his credit long
years of faithful service to the party and an unflinching loyalty to
Bolshevism. He had not spent long years abroad before 1917, and
in that sense was more part of the Russian scene and more familiar
322 A Concise History of Russia

to the party rank and file than the other leaders. Unlike Trotsky, he
did not read French novels when bored at party meetings.
These biographical details would be only curiosities of the time if
they did not come into play when real and basic issues arose in the
party leadership over the future of the country. The most important
of these was the controversy over “socialism in one country,” both
for its own sake and for the implications it had for decisions in so
many areas.
The struggle began in the last years of Lenin’s life, the first major
one being Trotsky’s 1923 opposition platform. Trotsky’s main point
was that the party was becoming less democratic and more bureau-
cratic through the practice of appointing its officials through Stalin’s
secretariat rather than by election. His letter to the party leadership
on this issue sparked an intense discussion that eventually came out
into the open just on the eve of Lenin’s death on January 21, 1924.
His opponents were Stalin, Zinoviev, and Kamenev on this issue,
the three forming a triumvirate that ruled the party and the country
after Lenin’s death. Trotsky’s opposition for the moment produced
some concessions, but the triumvirate remained in control. In any
case the dispute was not as radical as it might seem, as Trotsky was a
principled supporter of a centralized and authoritarian party. All he
wanted was a little room for maneuver. More basic disagreements
quickly emerged. Trotsky believed that the revolution could not
survive, and socialism could not be built in the Soviet Union unless
there were revolutions in the advanced countries of the West. Only
fraternal socialist aid could overcome Russia’s backwardness. In the
meantime, the USSR needed to pursue a policy of super-accelerated
industrialization. The economist Evgenii Preobrazhenskii supported
Trotsky on the issue of party structure, but also propounded a more
detailed economic platform. His idea was simply to strip resources
from the countryside by confiscations and other methods reminis-
cent of War Communism and use them for extremely rapid indus-
trialization. The dilemma, as Preobrazhenskii saw it, was that the
existence of private, small-scale peasant farming would lead to the
strengthening of capitalism within the Soviet Union. He shared with
Trotsky the idea that the Soviet Union could never survive as a
socialist society encircled by capitalism: revolution in the advanced
countries was essential to the building of socialism in the USSR, but
 Compromise and Preparation 323

in the short run extreme measures were necessary to ensure that

the country would still be around when the revolution came in the
West. This was the platform of the Left Opposition, as it came to
be known.
This perspective met furious rejection from Bukharin, whose posi-
tion as editor of Pravda meant that his views would receive wide
circulation. Bukharin’s platform was a strident defense of NEP.
He ridiculed the super-industrialization schemes of the opposition
and explained that the crucial issue was the recovery of agricul-
ture and the gradual enrichment of the peasants. As long as the
party controlled the state and industry remained in state hands,
there was nothing to fear from the peasants and the country would
move rapidly toward a socialist industrial society. Stalin allied with
Bukharin and himself began to formulate the notion of “socialism
in one country,” the idea that the USSR alone could totally trans-
form its society, including its agriculture, before the ultimate tri-
umph of socialism in the West. For Stalin did not reject the prospect
of world revolution, as he was convinced that the capitalist pow-
ers would eventually unleash a new world war and that revolution
would come out of it if not earlier. Where he differed from Trotsky
was in the belief that the Soviet Union could manage to build a
socialist society on its own while waiting for revolution abroad.
The effect of the struggle was first to marginalize Trotsky, who
lost his position as head of the War Commissariat and other offices
in 1925. In that same year Zinoviev and Kamenev switched their
allegiance, coming out in opposition to Stalin and Bukharin. For
Zinoviev and Kamenev the main issue before had been fear of
Trotsky: now they feared Stalin more. The now united opposi-
tion failed to win much support in the party and in 1926 Stalin
had Zinoviev removed from his position as head of the party in
Leningrad (Petrograd had acquired another new name on Lenin’s
death). Thus the opposition had no longer any substantial base in
the organization of the party. Stalin and Bukharin triumphed at
the end of 1927. The NEP policy triumphed, it seemed, if with
an increased push toward industrialization. Trotsky, Zinoviev, and
Kamenev were expelled from the party along with their followers.
Zinoviev and Kamenev soon recanted their errors and were read-
mitted, but Trotsky went first into exile in Alma-ata, and then was
324 A Concise History of Russia

expelled from the country in 1929. Stalin had utterly defeated the
opposition, and it seemed that NEP might continue.
Stalin’s victory went along with increasing prohibitions on dis-
sent in the party and particularly on the formation of factions and
oppositional platforms. Before the principle of absolute ideologi-
cal unity could triumph, one last major dispute shook up the party
leadership. Starting early in 1928, Stalin and his supporters changed
their plans entirely. The cause was a drop in grain procured by the
state agencies to feed the cities at the end of 1927. Stalin believed
that the peasantry, mainly the kulaks, were simply holding grain
back in the hopes of better prices or even to harm the Soviet state.
His response was to organize an expedition of party officials led
by himself into the Urals and Siberia early in 1928 to seize the
grain. His expedition returned with freight cars loaded with grain,
and he proclaimed it a success. Stalin and his allies now moved
toward a policy of rapid industrialization and the collectivization
of agriculture, effectively the end of NEP. The new policy provoked
opposition from Bukharin as well as from Mikhail Tomskii, the
head of the trade unions, and Aleksei Rykov, the Soviet Prime Min-
ister. Basically their platform was simply that NEP was working
out well, in spite of occasional problems, and that there was no
need to force the pace, either in industry or the countryside. The
Right Opposition was less of a defined group than the Left and had
much more support in the party than the small group of Trotsky-
ists and followers of Zinoviev and Kamenev. Nevertheless, Stalin
fought it to extinction, expelling the Rights from the leadership and
from the party by the end of 1929. Their many followers, especially
in the party organization in Moscow, followed them into defeat.
Stalin now had complete control over the central leadership of the
party.

NEP, for all the concessions to the peasantry, implied a centralized,

state-owned, and managed industry, and that implied a new kind of
state. The Soviet state did not just regulate industry, it also directly
managed it at every level. The overall structure was a refined form of
the one established in 1918, the Supreme Economic Council placed
at the center over a series of units for each branch of industry, one for
iron and steel, another for coal, yet another for machine-building,
 Compromise and Preparation 325

grouped along regional lines. These units made the decisions that
in capitalist economies are made by businessmen, and the decisions
were subject to a single overall plan. That plan was the work of the
State Planning Committee, or Gosplan. For most of the time from its
foundation in 1921 to 1930 Gosplan worked under the leadership
of Gleb Krzhizhanovskii. An exception to the norm among Bol-
shevik leaders, he was both a trained electrical engineer (from the
St. Petersburg Technological Institute) and an Old Bolshevik. The
original Gosplan was primarily an advisory office for the Supreme
Economic Council, but it soon worked out an electrification plan
for the whole country. By 1925 it was compiling “control figures,”
a sort of crude general economic plan, and by the late twenties it
moved to writing the first five-year plan adopted in 1929.
The state’s management apparatus for the economy, however,
did not match these ambitious goals. In the 1920s most of the state
officials were not Communist Party members. Even in the Supreme
Economic Council and Gosplan, most were economists or engineers
who neither belonged to the party nor were particularly sympathetic
to its goals. Many had been active as Mensheviks, SRs, or even
liberals before 1917, but they did have the technical skills the Bol-
sheviks needed. Lenin had always maintained that they would grow
to accept the new order, but it was far from clear that this was the
case. The party’s instrument in all these offices was a small number
of People’s Commissars and chairmen of committees appointed by
the party from its own leadership ranks – men with political rather
than technical experience. The same was true at the factory level:
the director was usually a party official, but the engineers and cler-
ical workers were not. Thus the party gave orders to the economic
managers and factories, but did not have full control. Even so, the
party’s Politburo and Central Committee spent long hours on
the technicalities of economic administration, the timber industry
or the acreage sown of sugar beets as well as arcane issues of mon-
etary circulation and foreign trade. Some of these issues also had
a political side and were involved in the factional battles of Trot-
sky, Stalin, and the “Rightists,” so that economic decisions were
frequently decided on political grounds. Indeed Stalin and the other
leaders thought that politics should go ahead of “narrowly” eco-
nomic concerns.
326 A Concise History of Russia

The other side of the new state was its federal structure based on
a hierarchy of national units. Soviet federalism was about ethnicity,
not just territory, and it grew out of the experiences of 1917–1920.
The Bolshevik party had always maintained that the Russian Empire
was a “prison of peoples” that combined the worst of European
colonialism with the old military despotism of the tsars. Therefore
they advanced the slogan of self-determination for the non-Russian
peoples (including full independent statehood if desired) well before
the First World War. During the revolution most of the national
groups of the empire formed nationalist parties, if they did not
have them before (as in Finland and Poland), parties that advocated
some sort of national autonomy. Before most of them had time to
formulate a clear platform and build a base, the Bolsheviks had
seized power in Petrograd. With most cities speaking Russian and
following the Reds, more or less, the nationalists had as their con-
stituency only the local intelligentsia and, potentially, the peasantry.
As most of the periphery was occupied by the Whites or interven-
tionist troops until 1920, the Reds dealt only with the Ukraine
and Belorussia in the west and the Muslim peoples of the Volga,
the North Caucasus, and Central Asia. In each case the situation
differed.
Belorussia was a largely artificial creation mandated by the party
authorities in 1919–20 to counter Polish designs on the area. Most
of the population was indifferent to the issue and the local Commu-
nists were flatly opposed to a local ethnic republic. Lenin (and Stalin,
as Commissar of Nationalities) overruled them. The Ukraine was
quite different. Here the nationalist movement was quite well estab-
lished among the minority of the intelligentsia that considered itself
Ukrainian and was initially able to mobilize wide support among
the peasantry. They faced, however an insurmountable obstacle in
the cities, largely Russian and Jewish in population. The work-
ing class was absolutely uninterested in the Ukrainian cause and
most intellectuals were Russian or identified with Russia (meaning
the White cause). Jews followed one or another of the Russian or
Jewish parties (Zionists, the Bund), not the Ukrainians. Neverthe-
less the Bolsheviks in Moscow realized that they had to provide
some sort of Ukrainian framework if only to neutralize the nation-
alists and thus they forced local Communists to form a Ukrainian
 Compromise and Preparation 327

Communist Party and proclaim (in 1919) a Ukrainian Soviet Repub-

lic. Both the Belorussian and the Ukrainian republics were de jure
independent of Moscow, but their Communist Parties were not.
They were explicitly subject to the orders of the Central Committee
in Moscow.
The Muslim peoples were a wholly different issue. In the North
Caucasus nationalism was very weak and the predominant iden-
tity was Islamic and very local. Some groups had allied with the
Cossacks against the Reds and supported the White armies, but the
hostility of the latter toward any sort of local autonomy made allies
for the Reds, especially in Daghestan, and this led to a multi-sided
struggle of extraordinary complexity. The outcome was decided by
the victories of the Red Army, and in 1920 the Soviet government
began to set up a series of local autonomous republics in the moun-
tains. Each of the local peoples acquired its political unit (some of
the smallest combined).
The other main Muslim groups with whom the Reds had to deal
were the Tatars and Bashkirs of the Volga and Urals. These were
substantial minorities, several million each, living in relatively pros-
perous areas and largely surrounded by Russians and in mainly Rus-
sian cities. Under the Provisional Government the Muslim Duma
deputies and other political figures had formed local parties in favor
of national culture and autonomy but supported the Provisional
Government. In the course of the Civil War the nationalist groups
had started out on the side of the Whites but some of them switched
to the Reds, unable to stomach Admiral Kolchak’s nationalist ori-
entation. In March 1919 the Bolsheviks set up a Bashkir Soviet
republic as an autonomous unit within Russia and a year later a
Tatar republic. Central Asia had provided yet another challenge,
as fighting lasted until 1922, but the establishment of Soviet rule
did bring a single Turkestan Soviet republic within Soviet Russia in
1918. Here nationality was an especially problematic issue that was
not addressed until 1924.
In one way the most important of the Muslim peoples in 1920
was in the Caucasus. These were the Azeris, for the simple reason
that their largest city, Baku, was also the principal center of oil
production in the previous Russian Empire. The rapid conquest of
the area led to the formation of a united Transcaucasian Federal
328 A Concise History of Russia

Soviet Republic in 1921. The idea came at the insistence of Stalin

and Ordzhonikidze over the objections of other Georgian Com-
munists, for Stalin did not want to encourage the aspirations of
the larger nationalities. The brief years of independence had seen
Georgian Mensheviks refuse to grant national rights to Abkhazia
and Southern Ossetia as well as repeated Azeri-Armenian clashes.
The solution was a federation that gave some sort of autonomy to
all of the many ethnic groups of Transcaucasia, and in that way
provided an obstacle, it seemed, to nationalism among the larger
groups.
By 1922 Moscow was the center of several Soviet republics, tech-
nically independent but ruled by Communist Parties subordinate
to the Russian Central Committee. Stalin decided to change this
clumsy arrangement. His plan was to simply incorporate the other
republics into Russia as autonomous units rather like Bashkiria
but with somewhat more autonomy. His plan met opposition from
Lenin, who believed that the greatest danger to party rule was Rus-
sian chauvinism. He did not want to provoke nationalist resistance
on the periphery, and of course Russian nationalism had been the
ideology of the Whites. Lenin’s objections led to a new scheme, in
which all the Soviet republics, including Russia, formed the Union
of Soviet Socialist Republics. In this scheme the larger non-Russian
units entered the union on an equal legal status with Russia. In the
1920s only some functions were formally centralized in Moscow.
There was no Commissariat of Agriculture or Education for the
whole union, only in the republics. At the same time the Communist
Party was centralized in the Politburo and Central Committee and
gave orders to all the republican party organizations. In addition,
the management of most of the industrial economy from Moscow
was a powerful centralizing element.
The new union now had to face a series of unresolved issues
throughout the country. The basic presumption of the Soviet lead-
ership was that nationality was a matter of language. Though both
Lenin and Stalin added common history and culture to this defi-
nition, in practice it meant language was the deciding factor. This
criterion that worked fairly well in the European part of the country
did not fit other areas so well. It committed the Soviets to forming
autonomous units wherever there were language differences, and
 Compromise and Preparation 329

thus they began to set up autonomous units among small Siberian

peoples without any political or national consciousness in the
modern sense. Even among peoples of European Russia there were
problems. The small Volga people who spoke a Finno-ugric lan-
guage that Russian scholars called Mordovian had a common lan-
guage but no common word for both of the two Mordovian sub-
groups. The Soviet authorities simply declared them all Mordovians
and introduced the Russian word for their nationality into their lan-
guage. In the Ukraine large cities with few Ukrainian speakers such
as Odessa soon had no newspapers in Russian, only in Ukrainian.
Multi-national cities like Baku were a particular problem.
The language issues in the western parts of the country paled
compared to the situation in Central Asia. The Kazakh population
of the northern steppes was a relatively coherent group and received
the status of an autonomous republic within Russia in 1924 (and
a union republic in 1936). Farther south, the population of the
Syr-Darya and Amu-Darya river basins presented tremendous dif-
ficulties. Identity in these areas did not fall along linguistic lines.
Most of the people thought of themselves first as Muslims, and then
only as parts of one or another group. The urban and much of the
settled village population fell under the category of Sarts, whether
they spoke a Turkic or Iranian language. “Uzbek” usually meant
Turkic-speaking nomads around and among the settled areas. The
great cities, Bukhara, Khiva, and Samarkand had been the centers
of Uzbek dynasties but their traditional culture was both Turkic
and Persian. The area more or less compactly settled by Iranian
speakers had no large urban center. The most prosperous agricul-
tural area, the Ferghana valley, was also one of the most ethinically
diverse. While the Turkmens, Kazakhs, and Kirgiz formed rela-
tively coherent units, they were also divided along tribal lines. The
Soviets took all of this as merely backwardness and feudalism and
proceeded to create republics along linguistic lines, though in the
Ferghana Valley this meant leaving large minorities on all sides of
the new borders. The outcome was five republics: Kazakhstan, Kir-
gizia, Turkmenia, Uzbekistan (the most populous) and Tadjikistan
(the Iranian-speaking area).
In the 1920s the conditions of NEP meant that there were few
grand plans to transform the new republics. Starting in 1924–25
330 A Concise History of Russia

the party pursued a policy of “nativization” of the party and state

apparatus outside the Russian republic. The main thrust was the
promotion of non-Russian cadre at all levels, though the key posi-
tions were usually exempt from this policy, being reserved by
Moscow for its most trusted workers. These party leaders were
not necessarily Russians, however: Georgians, Armenians, Latvians
(especially in the political police), and Jews were prominent in the
leadership of the non-Russian republics, far from their presumed
home territories. Both culture and the peasantry were to a large
extent left to the republics during the 1920s, not surprisingly as in
Bolshevik ideology the peasants were the reserve of nationalism and
the intelligentsia were the carriers of the local national cultures. In
the NEP years, both were to be conciliated and indeed local cultures
could not be advanced or created without the native intelligentsia.
The cultural autonomy of the new republics went along with a
largely centralized political and economic system. While the repub-
lican Communist parties managed their own day-to-day affairs, the
guidelines and top personnel were firmly in the hands of the lead-
ership in Moscow. Economic management was split between the
Supreme Economic Council of the USSR in Moscow and analogous
offices in the republics. The most important centers of production,
such the Donbass and the huge metal industry of the Ukrainian
republic, were under the authority of the center. This situation led
to complaints from all the republican governments, including even
the Russian republic.

The Soviet Union came into existence at the end of years of war
and during upheaval around the world. Lenin and the Bolsheviks
believed that their revolution was only the first of a series that would
soon come, and not even the most important. The whole Bolshevik
leadership believed that a revolution was imminent in Germany, and
the overthrow of the Kaiser in 1918 seemed to be the beginning, the
German version of Russia’s February Revolution. For the next few
years it seemed that the German October was just around the corner.
The brief establishment of a Hungarian Communist government in
1919 and upheavals around the rest of Europe seemed to confirm
the prognosis, but the anticipated revolution never came. In 1923
the German Communists made a last failed attempt, and Lenin
 Compromise and Preparation 331

and the Soviet leadership recognized that the revolutionary wave

had ebbed.
The Soviet Union was now isolated in a world of hostile capi-
talist powers. It needed to survive, and its leaders, including Stalin,
also believed that the world revolution would come sooner or later.
This was the basic contradiction of Soviet foreign policy, and it
remained until the final end of the Soviet state. The revolutionary
side of Soviet relations with the world in the 1920s was the province
of the Communist International (the Comintern). Founded in 1919
as the Communist answer to the Socialist International of moder-
ate (and mostly formerly pro-war) socialists, it aimed to organize
and promote revolution throughout the world. It boasted an inter-
national leadership and staff, but its headquarters in Moscow was
firmly under Soviet control, in the person of Grigorii Zinoviev until
1925. It brought together under its leadership all the many groups
of socialists who had opposed the First World War and then had
gone on to espouse revolution in its aftermath, forming Communist
Parties in nearly every country in the world. These were fractious
parties, most of them with tactics far more militant than Moscow
approved, but the Soviet leadership soon brought them into line.
The Soviet government also realized that it needed to break out of
its isolation. Early in 1921 Britain had made a trade agreement, the
first breach in the economic blockade imposed by Western powers
in 1918. Then in 1922 the Soviets made an agreement with Weimar
Germany, an agreement that included recognition, mutual trade,
and a secret military protocol that allowed German military officers
to train on Soviet territory and other forms of military coopera-
tion. Weimar Germany, as the main victim of the peace settlement
of Versailles, wanted maneuver room, and Lenin accommodated
them. For the next decade relations with Germany warmed and
then cooled, but the military agreement remained intact and trade
expanded. In contrast, relations with Britain took a sharp down-
ward turn, in large part the result of Soviet and Comintern policies
in the East.
The policies of the Soviet leadership in Asia formed a historic turn-
ing point, both in Russian history and in world history, generally.
Their impact has far outlasted the particular goals of Lenin and the
Comintern in 1919–20. Lenin’s conception of imperialism implied
332 A Concise History of Russia

that the European colonial empires provided crucial resources for

the dominance of capitalism in the world and over the European
working classes in particular. The oppressed people of the colonies
were therefore crucial allies of the proletariat in the battle for social-
ism. The first meetings of the Comintern proclaimed this principle
loud and clear, and its agents and supporters around the world
spread the news. In Paris a young Vietnamese working at painting
pseudo-asian pottery in a French factory read that the Comintern
wanted to support the colonized peoples, and he decided to join
the Communists. His name was Ho Chi Minh. At the time, how-
ever, it was the events in China that took most of the attention of
the Comintern’s Asian sections and the Soviet government. In 1911
nationalists led by Sun Yat-sen had overthrown the Ching dynasty
and established a republic, but the struggle raged to make the repub-
lic work and to expel, or at least radically weaken, the treaty regime
that held China in bondage to the Western powers and Japan. The
Comintern and the infant Chinese Communist Party supported the
Nationalists, only to have Chiang-kai Shek turn on them and virtu-
ally exterminate the Communists in 1927. The Chinese Communists
would recover, but for the time being Soviet policy in China was
one of the major reasons Britain broke off diplomatic relations with
the USSR in 1927, provoking a war scare in Moscow that lasted
for several months. The small groups of Communists in the vari-
ous Asian colonies continued to exist, largely ignored by all but the
colonial administrations, but their actions would eventually have
enormous consequences that the modest growth of Communism in
Europe could not match.
In spite of the failure in China the Soviet leadership was convinced
that the setbacks were only temporary. Stalin, as well as his oppo-
nents in the party, was convinced that a new war was inevitable
sooner or later – a war between the western powers, for the “con-
tradictions”, in Marxist terminology, between Britain, France, and
Germany were too serious to be resolved in any other way. War
would lead to another social crisis like that after World War I. In
1928 the Comintern made a sharp turn to the left, proclaiming that
a new era of instability and revolution was coming soon, a notion
that the depression beginning in 1929 seemed to confirm. Stalin was
 Compromise and Preparation 333

entirely behind the new Comintern line, especially as it urged the

Communists to focus their attack on Social Democrats in the hopes
of weaning the working class away from moderate leaders. At the
same time he did not want to provoke a war with the great powers,
and the policy of the Soviet state was much more conciliatory than
the Comintern’s proclamations. Stalin needed peace on his frontiers,
as he was about to launch a giant upheaval.
 18
Revolutions in Russian Culture

Unlike Russia’s state and society, its culture did not experience such
a sharp break in 1917. The period from about 1890 to the middle of
the 1920s was full of artistic revolutions, happening simultaneously
and in entirely different directions. These revolutions shared many
characteristics with artistic movements in the rest of the world, but
paradoxically the Russian culture of the Silver Age, as it is known
(by comparison to the Golden Age in the nineteenth century) has
never acquired an audience outside of Russia comparable to that
which the writers and musicians of the earlier period secured. Per-
haps one of the main reasons is that most of the truly talented writers
of the Silver Age were poets, masters of that most untranslatable
of art forms. The natural scientists, in contrast, began to acquire
an international audience, in large part because of the efforts of
the Soviet regime to encourage and use the sciences to build a new
society.

literature, music, and art

The writers and artists who came to maturity in the 1890s were
a mixed lot: symbolists and realists in literature, the “World of
Art” group in the visual arts. In about 1910 new waves, or often
wavelets, came on to the scene. A whole series of new movements
in poetry, futurism, acmeism, and other groups contended for the
attention of readers and critics, while the Ballets Russes introduced
both new forms of dance and the radical (it seemed) new music of
334
 Revolutions in Russian Culture 335

Igor Stravinskii. The speed of innovation only increased. Working

in Germany, Wassily Kandinsky produced entirely abstract work
by 1911, and in St. Petersburg Kazimir Malevich painted his “Black
Square” in 1915. The revolution and civil war split Russian culture
in two, with many of the great names of the time staying abroad
or emigrating, and others remaining behind with varying degrees
of sympathy for the Bolsheviks. The émigrés largely continued their
earlier styles, while in Soviet Russia the situation was more complex.
Some saw the new order as of the same essence as their artistic
revolution, while others espoused even more radical notions and
still others tried to combine modernism with socialist content. By
the end of the twenties, with the aging of the émigrés and the new
Soviet order in art, a new phase began.
The generation of the 1890s confronted not just new ideas but
also new conditions of work. The Russian publishing industry had
expanded enormously since the Emancipation, and by 1900, promi-
nent writers could actually live and even prosper on the earnings
from their writing alone. Maxim Gorky was the first to be able
to do so and in a spectacular fashion. As recounted in his autobi-
ography, he came from a family of minor traders and earned his
living by casual labor until he started writing. Virtually a tramp, he
followed the course of the Volga working on the boats and taking
factory jobs for short periods. By 1905 he was the best-paid author
in Russia with a worldwide reputation and he spent his time mostly
in Capri or Paris. Gorky was also typical of the artistic currents
of the time, a fact muffled by later Soviet attempts to cast him as
the father of “socialist realism.” Gorky’s prose was “realist” only
by comparison to that of his contemporaries, for it also reflected
his worldview, a kind of anarchistic rebelliousness and admiration
for strong individuals. European critics immediately branded him a
follower of Nietzsche, which was incorrect (Gorky read Nietzsche
for the first time long after he formed his ideas and style) but it was
an understandable mistake. His other great fascination was with
religion, though not with official Orthodoxy but with what he saw
as the semi-pagan and mystical religion of the people. It was the
latter fascination that drew him to the Bolsheviks, for he saw in
Marxism a kind of religion of the future that could lead the people
to salvation.
336 A Concise History of Russia

Equally famous in the 1890s were the plays of Anton Chekhov.

Chekhov’s great fame was preceded by over a decade of writing
short stories for newspapers, and in some ways he was aestheti-
cally closer to the generation of Tolstoy and Turgenev. In his the-
atrical practice, however, he was in the Russian vanguard, for the
most famous stage for his plays was the Moscow Art Theater. The
Moscow Art Theater was the first major Russian dramatic theater
that was not an Imperial Theater, for the court had abandoned its
monopoly in 1882. The Moscow Art Theater was strictly a private
enterprise operation with the sponsorship of local businessmen such
as Savva Morozov, the heir to the family textile fortune. It was also
the first major laboratory for the work of Konstantin Stanislavsky,
who reformulated theatrical performance in Russia and much of
the world in the first half of the twentieth century. Stanislavsky’s
demand that the actor live his role from the inside was a new depar-
ture over the (as he saw it) declamatory styles of the nineteenth
century.
If Gorky, Chekhov, and Stanislavsky remained influential or at
least revered for decades afterward, they were not entirely typical
of an era dominated by Symbolism and other new trends. Dmitrii
Merezhkovskii was the most prominent of the symbolists, beginning
his career with a series of critical articles attacking the utilitarianism
of the liberal and radical artistic theories of the previous generation.
His call was for a sort of pure art, but in fact his own works were
suffused with the philosophical and religious ideas of his generation.
His subject matter was far from that of the earlier Russian classics –
his first great success being a trilogy of novels set in ancient Rome
(Julian the Apostate), the Renaissance, with Leonardo Da Vinci
as its hero, and the Russia of Peter the Great. The idea was the
eternal struggle of paganism and Christianity, with Peter as a sort
of neo-pagan in the tradition of the emperor Julian and Da Vinci.
Now largely forgotten, Merezhkovskii was a dominant figure for a
generation. A more vital legacy was in the poetry of the younger
symbolists, especially Alexander Blok.
Music and art also changed rapidly at the end of the century.
For the St. Petersburg musicians the appearance of a patron, the
timber merchant Mitrofan Beliaev, opened new possibilities in the
1880s. Beliaev not only sponsored concerts, but he also ran a
 Revolutions in Russian Culture 337

Friday evening salon that featured regular performances of new

music, and even more important, he founded a music publishing
firm in Leipzig to publish Russian music and paid generous hono-
raria. The core of Beliaev’s circle comprised the survivors of the Five,
though Balakirev rarely attended the salon. The Beliaev circle was
also broader in its tastes than the original Five: to their admiration
of Berlioz and Liszt they added Wagner, and grew more friendly
to Tchaikovsky. Rimskii-Korsakov was the strongest artistic influ-
ence, though Stasov continued to command deep respect. As time
passed, a younger generation such as Alexander Skriabin and Sergei
Rakhmaninov benefitted from the circle’s attention. The end of the
monopoly of the Imperial theaters also allowed the formation of
a private opera company in Moscow sponsored by the millionaire
businessman Savva Mamontov, whose company attracted Russia’s
greatest singer, Fyodor Shaliapin. Mamontov also was the patron
for a whole series of innovative painters, especially Valentin Serov.
For Serov the light in his paintings was as important as the sub-
ject, as in the case of the Impressionists in France. This sort of art
was a sharp break with the Itinerants and their fascination with the
Russian landscape and the Russian people and its dilemmas.
In St. Petersburg the Russian artistic scene was transformed under
the leadership of Sergei Diagilev, the main force behind a new maga-
zine devoted to the visual arts named Mir Iskusstva (World of Art).
The journal gave its name to a whole movement, a revolution in
subject matter if not in technique. Though World of Art painters
had a definite look that differed from the older painters of the Itiner-
ant school, their greatest innovation was the turn from peasant life,
landscape, and portraits of the intelligentsia toward more decorative
depictions of interiors, retrospective pictures of eighteenth-century
France or Russia, and portraits that stressed appearance and style
as much or more than the sitter’s inner life. The World of Art was
also notable in that its impulses came to a large part from European
painting, but there was no direct European prototype. Impression-
ism, Art Nouveau/Jugendstil, and other European trends played a
role. The World of Art group also valued European styles from the
past, the Renaissance and the eighteenth century, which the Itiner-
ants despised. The same was the case with Russian art: Diagilev was
perhaps the first to discover the value of eighteenth-century Russian
338 A Concise History of Russia

portraiture. He organized regular exhibits of contemporary Euro-

pean art, starting with that of Finland and Scandinavia, to educate
the Russian public. The goal was to promote painting that was
not concerned with social issues and only rarely sought to affirm
Russian nationality. Yet the artists like the writers of these years
were not yet in pursuit of pure art. Almost all of them were looking
for some reality behind the world of appearances, and found it in
mysticism, theosophy, encounters with mediums, or occasionally
even Orthodox Christianity. They also revealed a great deal of cul-
tural pessimism, and a profound sense of ending. The World of Art
painter Alexander Benois published a history of Russian art in 1898
that ended with the statement that art was now coming to an end,
and would either cease to exist among humanity or be replaced by
an art that served a religious idea.
Into this artistic ferment came the Revolution of 1905. The artis-
tic world reacted variously to the events, but most of the artists
were not sympathetic to the tsarist regime. In 1905 the issues were
not only the general ones of political representation of the people
and the social state of the workers and peasants, because the artists
also chafed under the various hindrances and monopolies imposed
by the state. Writers were doing well economically, but still had to
deal with state censorship. Tolstoy’s last major novel Resurrection
could not be published in Russia and was passed around by stu-
dents in mimeographed copies. The great theaters were under the
Ministry of the Court, and their capacities and repertoire were far
behind the expectations of the audience in the big cities. In St. Peters-
burg the only state-financed orchestra, the ancestor of the later Pet-
rograd/Leningrad/St. Petersburg Philharmonic Orchestra was still
technically the private orchestra of the tsar, and was founded only
in 1882. The imperial patronage of music and the arts that made
much of Russian artistic life possible in earlier decades was no longer
necessary and felt as a burden.
Thus the establishment of the state Duma in 1906 and the accom-
panying relaxation of censorship found great approval among writ-
ers and artists, who quickly moved to exploit the opportunities.
Whole new subject matter appeared in literature: the first novels to
make sexuality an explicit theme and books with all sorts of het-
erodox religious conceptions that the Orthodox Church could no
 Revolutions in Russian Culture 339

longer keep out. Alongside the more traditional locations of cul-

tural activity, St. Petersburg and Moscow quickly developed a café
and cabaret culture that attracted the leading lights of literature
and art alongside the general public. A bohemian style of life was
increasingly fashionable, including various experiments in sexuality
and dress. Some writers acquired signature appearances, dandified
clothing and hairstyles, or a studied artistic look. Sergei Diagilev
had pioneered all this with his elegant suits and a lock of hair died
silver to make him look more distinguished.
Private patronage became easier and more abundant as Russian
businessmen prospered. After 1909 Sergei Kussevitskii was the con-
ductor of a private orchestra in Moscow, the first in Russia to be
successful. (After emigration in 1920 he became the long-time con-
ductor of the Boston Symphony Orchestra and the founder of the
Tanglewood Festival.) The most famous example of a private dance
company was Diagilev’s Ballets Russes, which made its debut in
Paris in 1909 as well. In the following year the company presented
the premiere of Igor Stravinskii’s ballet, the Firebird and in 1913
his even more revolutionary Rite of Spring. The latter caused an
uproar with its dissonances and apparent celebration of pagan sex-
uality and vigor, brilliantly interpreted by the lead dancer Vatslav
Nijinskii. Stravinskii was the vanguard of Russian music, but not
the whole of it. Of the older generation, Rimskii-Korsakov was
active until his death in 1910 and among the younger musicians
Sergei Rakhmaninov and Sergei Prokofiev took different paths to
fame, Rakhmaninov with his rich neo-romanticism and Prokofiev
already heading toward the irony and precision of neo-classicism.
Not only Diagilev but also many of the musicians began to gravitate
to Paris and Berlin, for the St. Petersburg theaters and orchestras
with the necessary resources were usually too conservative for the
new music and performance styles.
The painters also moved very rapidly. Kandinsky in Munich had
a limited impact on his Russian colleagues, but in Russia paint-
ing evolved very quickly. Especially in Moscow a group of young
painters in several informal groups (“Jack of Diamonds” and “Don-
key’s Tail”) under the influence of Cubism and Russian folk art
began to move sharply away from realist technique. One of the most
talented among them, Kazimir Malevich began to turn toward full
340 A Concise History of Russia

abstractionism, painting his famous “Black Square” and other fully

non-representational works. Malevich evolved the notion of Supre-
matism, in which the artist should work with geometric forms, in
their turn the key to hidden reality behind the appearance of the
world. Few of his associates followed him all this way, but it was
this world that produced such painters as Marc Chagall.
For writers the years after 1905 were equally frenetic with change.
The most important of the new prose writers, Andrey Belyi, pub-
lished his phantasmagoria of St. Petersburg in the revolution, the
novel Petersburg, in 1913. Belyi was emblematic of the period
in other ways, as he was an adept of the “anthroposophy” of
Rudolf Steiner, at whose center in Switzerland he spent much of his
time. The poets were even more active and contentious, with new
groups, each with a manifesto, forming every year. The Acmeists in
St. Petersburg met in the Stray Dog café and proclaimed Apollonian
clarity against the “Dionysian” symbolists. Mostly very young, their
most striking work came long afterward, as in the case of their great-
est writer, the poet Anna Akhmatova. The futurists appeared a bit
later with their manifesto, appropriately titled “A Slap in the Face
of Public Taste.” The futurists were as apocalyptic as the Symbolist
generation in their evaluation of the world, but saw the approaching
upheavals in a more positive light. They were fascinated with tech-
nology and saw the end of the older forms of art as liberating. The
principal writer of the futurists was the poet Vladimir Mayakovskii,
who was not only an artistic revolutionary but also a revolutionary
in real life. Earlier on he had worked in the Bolshevik party and
later he was to become the most famous poetic spokesman for the
Reds after 1917.
Mayakovskii’s attraction to Marxism was as unusual among the
writers and artists as it was among the intelligentsia as a whole. The
intelligentsia, however, outside the artistic avant-guard in Peters-
burg and Moscow, remained committed to the older ideals of the
nineteenth century, liberalism in politics, occasional populist social-
ism, and its artistic canons as well. They preferred Turgenev to
Merezhkovskii or Belyi, and only some of the poets managed to
break out of the rarified atmosphere of the St. Petersburg cafés
to reach the provincial reader. When the war came, most of the writ-
ers followed the general reaction of the country and the intelligentsia
 Revolutions in Russian Culture 341

and supported the war effort. The revolution was another matter.
By 1917 most realized that the war effort had largely failed, and they
were happy with the fall of the tsar but were not heavily engaged in
politics or at first even distracted by it. While Mayakovskii enthu-
siastically worked for the Bolsheviks, the composer Prokofiev was
more typical: 1917 was one of his most productive years as he com-
posed major works having nothing to do with the cataclysm around
him. Most of the artists and writers, like the rest of the intelligentsia,
greeted the Bolshevik revolution with hostility, but it was the out-
break of the Civil War and the economic collapse of Petrograd that
forced them to make decisions.
To the writers and artists, whatever their reaction to the Bolshe-
viks, the Russian Revolution was not so much the seizure of power
by Lenin and his comrades as a fundamental and total upheaval, a
descent into chaos and anarchy. It seemed to them that Russia had
returned to the Time of Troubles, that all the veneer of civilization
that the country had acquired since Peter the Great had been blown
apart by a massive upsurge of popular anger and violence. For many
it was the reign of Antichrist.
A small number of the writers, however, were sympathetic to
the revolution, if not to the specific Bolshevik platform. Alexan-
der Blok’s most famous poem, “The Twelve” (1918), depicts the
anarchy and violence of Petrograd in the dark of the winter, but
the twelve working-class Red Guards marching through the half-
deserted streets are following a leader who is Jesus Christ. In con-
trast Vladimir Mayakovskii was entirely in the Bolshevik camp,
and spent the years of the Civil War writing not only poetry but
also agitational verse and drawing pictures for political posters. He
changed his elegant futurist suits for a proletarian look in dress and
a shaved head. In his poetry he tried to make the masses the heroes,
most famously in “150,000,000” that began
150,000,000 is the name of the creator of this poem.
Its rhythms – bullets,
Its rhymes – fires from building to building.
150,000,000 speak with my lips . . . [trans. E. J. Brown]
Some of the painters and artists worked for the Reds as well,
making huge modernist decorations for the May Day parades and
342 A Concise History of Russia

other Bolshevik rituals. Most writers and artists, however, waited

on the sidelines or hoped for White victory. Many moved south to
the White-occupied territories. As the Reds drove the White armies
out of the country, large parts of the intelligentsia followed them,
producing a Russian culture in exile in Berlin and Paris.
For the musicians, dancers, and some of the painters, the move
to Western Europe or America was the start of another career.
Rakhmaninov made so much money from concerts that he was able
to support other Russian émigrés, contributing to Igor Sikorsky’s
aircraft company in Connecticut. Prokofiev, the great singer Fyodor
Shaliapin, and the dancers of the Ballet Russes worked through-
out the world. Though the Ballets Russes fell apart after Diagilev’s
death in 1929, it left a legacy to the world of ballet in its many
active dancers and in the work of George Balanchine in America.
For the writers, however, the emigration was largely a disaster.
Dependent on a Russian audience, they were cut off from Russia
where their works could not be published and ceased to circulate
legally after the early twenties. Russian émigrés did set up publish-
ing companies, journals, and newspapers in Paris and elsewhere,
but their readership was necessarily small, limited to the Russian
and Russian-speaking exile communities in the West. Nevertheless,
some were able to create remarkable works, especially in the early
years. The poet Marina Tsetaeva wrote through the revolution, and
when she came to Paris in 1921 continued to publish her verse in
large quantity until about 1925. Even the older writers were able to
produce a great deal at first, but the lack of audience soon began to
tell. Western publishers were not interested in translations of any
other than a select few, and even Ivan Bunin’s 1933 Nobel Prize
could not awaken much interest in the latest émigré literature.
In the emigration new intellectual currents arose, like Eurasian-
ism, the idea that Russia was not really European, but part of a sep-
arate “Eurasian” civilization exemplified by the Mongol Empire.
Other small groups elaborated new philosophies of religion, or
drifted toward fascism. Some made their peace with the Soviets
and returned home, such as the writer (Count) Alexei Tolstoy, a
distant relative of Lev Tolstoy. Prokofiev returned in 1935. Maxim
Gorky, who had maintained his distance from both the Soviets and
emigration after 1920, returned in 1932 to become a major figure
 Revolutions in Russian Culture 343

in the Soviet literary world. Others were not so lucky: Tsvetaeva,

after returning, committed suicide in 1941.

culture and nep

In the years of NEP the fate of the émigré writers and artists abroad
seemed to be increasingly irrelevant, as the cultural world of the
new USSR burgeoned with new artistic trends and new names. In
the early years the Bolsheviks had no definite position on the arts.
During the Civil War some of the radicals in the party formed
the Proletarian Cultural-Educational Organizations, known as Pro-
letkult, which combined schools to teach workers to write poetry
and paint with radical esthetic notions. Lenin and Trotsky were
skeptical of Proletkult, believing its claims to represent the correct
proletarian line in art to be spurious. The Bolshevik leadership was
also generally skeptical of much modernist art: Lenin reproached
the Commissar of Education Anatolii Lunacharskii for printing so
many copies of the works of Mayakovskii. Whatever their content,
the verses failed to impress Lenin with their quality and he thought
the money better spent elsewhere.
The Civil War had a catastrophic effect on music and the theater,
for the simple reason that there was no money to keep the theaters
going at any but the most minimal level. The Imperial Ballet School
closed, and the ballet and opera theaters closed for various periods
until the early 1920s. Orchestras suffered similar fates. With NEP
and the revival of the Soviet economy, the Soviet government grad-
ually reestablished the old theaters and orchestras under different
names, and at the same time the NEP economy and the absence of a
defined party line on the arts meant that many smaller ballet compa-
nies and theaters of various types came into existence. Instrumental
music did better, for the conservatories continued to function with
many of the old staff, and produced a whole generation of new
composers. By the end of the 1920s Dmitrii Shostakovich already
had a name, both for his “serious” compositions and for film music.
Perhaps the most innovative theater was established under the lead-
ership of Vsevolod Meyerhold in Moscow in 1922. Meyerhold had
begun under Stanislavskii in the Moscow Art Theater, but by 1917
had rejected the master’s ideas to develop his own theory and style of
344 A Concise History of Russia

acting which he called “biomechanical.” The idea was that the actor
should not strive for naturalism but use his body and his voice for
the most expressive possible performance, making his point by an
“unnatural” style that would strike the audience more powerfully.
Meyerhold in turn had a powerful effect on another art form that
was just coming into its own at the time, the cinema. Sergei Eisen-
stein was just starting on his career as a director in the 1920s with
his historical masterpieces such as Battleship Potemkin. The actors
in the film reflected Meyerhold’s theories, while the overall struc-
ture was the product of Eisenstein’s technique of montage, using
a series of discontinuous images to hammer home his esthetic and
political points. This was a radical break with the normal technique
of Hollywood and other films of the time, which stuck to visual
continuity to tell the story. Eisenstein’s innovations seem to have
bothered no one among the Soviet authorities, for whom film was
in some ways the perfect art form: it spoke to the masses, was based
on the latest technology, was easy to reproduce, and was cheaper
and more portable than the stage. It was also much more adaptable
for political messages, as Eisenstein and other directors proved. As
Lenin had said, in a comment endlessly repeated, “of all the arts,
cinema is the most important to us.” The Soviet authorities funded
movies through their cultural offices, but resources were inadequate
to produce films in large numbers. The great majority of the movies
shown in the NEP era were actually imported Hollywood films.
With the end of the Civil War, publishing also revived, and in the
NEP years a number of private publishers supplemented the prod-
ucts of the state publishers. The rich artistic world of the past could
not be recreated. The NEP cafés lacked the elegance and panache
of their pre-revolutionary prototypes, and the state publishers did
not pay very well. The young Shostakovich survived by playing the
piano in movie theaters to accompany silent films. The economy of
artistic life was only one issue, as artists had to deal with the ambi-
guities of Soviet policy toward the intelligentsia, a policy based on
an attitude of suspicion combined with an awareness of its value.
The party also had very little to say about art. Certainly openly
anti-Soviet works could not be published and the émigré writers
gradually disappeared from the bookstores. Yet the party did not
even publish a statement on literature until 1925, and that one
 Revolutions in Russian Culture 345

contained little in the way of positive recommendations. The gist

was that the party should help and promote “proletarian” writers
as well as writers from the peasantry, but should also show toler-
ance of the “fellow travelers” (originally Trotsky’s phrase), writers
from the intelligentsia to a greater or lesser degree sympathetic or at
least neutral toward the new order. Party critics should not expect
the “fellow travelers” to have and express a complete Bolshevik
world-view. In a sense, the party’s position on the writers was simi-
lar to its position on engineers or government officials from the old
intelligentsia. Until the end of the decade, the party relied on their
skills and seemed to be willing to let them gradually move toward
a friendlier attitude to the party and its aims.
The result of all these different elements was a great deal of var-
ied writing, much of it innovative in language, style, and narrative
technique. Even the “proletarian” writers wrote in a language that
was full of slang, local dialects, and obscenities, a language that was
later edited out of reprints of their work after the 1930s. While some
of the proletarians wrote stories of Civil War sacrifice and heroism,
pulling few punches to describe the horrors of the war, others tried
to write about the working class in their factories, accounts of the
rebuilding of Soviet industry and the new forms of life emerging
around them. There were not very many of the actual proletarian
writers, however, and most literature of the time presented a wide
variety of daily life – often the semi-criminal margins of Soviet urban
life, the complexities of the personal and private life of the intelli-
gentsia and party officials. While many of the writers also spent
much time in acrimonious debate among the various groupings,
others managed to produce work of more enduring significance. In
1921 Boris Pasternak published a collection of poetry, “My Sister
Life,” which instantly established him as a leading poet. In 1926
Isaak Babel’s Red Cavalry with its brutal honesty placed it at the
head of all descriptions of the Civil War. The stories of NEP-era
marginal characters culminated in 1928 with Ilf and Petrov’s Twelve
Chairs, whose con man hero Ostap Bender passed into Soviet
and Russian folklore. Other writers found it impossible to pub-
lish: Anna Akhmatova was not published from 1925 to 1940, and
Mikhail Bulgakov began to have difficulties from the mid-twenties.
Though his Civil War–era play “Day of the Turbins” was scarcely a
346 A Concise History of Russia

flattering portrait of the White cause, it was also not crudely hostile,
and the play was repeatedly banned and then allowed again until it
finally disappeared from the repertory to return only in the 1960s.
His other works were simply forbidden entirely. Some writers were
allowed to emigrate, such as Yuri Zamiatin whose novel of an anti-
utopian society We would come to influence Aldous Huxley and
George Orwell.
In literature and art, the 1920s were in many ways a continu-
ation of the Silver Age under new conditions. Many of the most
important voices of the twenties, Mayakovskii or Pasternak, Mey-
erhold or Prokofiev, were already accomplished artists by 1917, and
the younger generation that came to maturity after 1920 was pro-
foundly influenced by the culture of the pre-revolutionary decades.
Even some of the young “proletarian” writers with their new themes
wrote with Belyi or Blok in the back of their heads. The numerous
literary or artistic platforms and groups maintained some of the
organizational forms of artistic life of the Silver Age until the end
of the NEP era.

the natural sciences

For the natural sciences, in contrast, the revolution marked a more
fundamental break, not so much intellectually but institutionally.
The years before the revolution had been a period of change for
Russian science. Perhaps the most important innovation had been
the foundation of the new engineering schools under the Ministry of
Finance. These technical schools not only produced sorely needed
engineers but also were less conservative in their curricula than the
universities under the Ministry of Education. Thus they were open
to rapidly changing and growing disciplines like physics, while the
universities tended to keep chemistry at the center of scientific edu-
cation. The technical institutes were more open to society. They
maintained ties with business, and were less restrictive about their
admissions. Thus Jewish students like Abram Ioffe finished the
St. Petersburg Technological Institute, studied in Germany, and
received his first position in physics at the new St. Petersburg Poly-
technic Institute, which was Witte’s creation. His years there from
1906 to the Revolution were to be the incubation period of the
 Revolutions in Russian Culture 347

later Soviet physics, for Ioffe quickly revealed his talent for organi-
zation and intellectual leadership. Yet the conditions of science as a
whole left much to be desired. Physics had suffered a major blow in
1911 when much of the science faculty of Moscow University and
the Kiev Polytechnic Institute resigned over Minister of Education
Kasso’s illegal repression of student meetings (a meeting in honor
of Tolstoy’s death was at issue). There were few other institutions
where the scientists could move, though some managed to find a
home in the Academy of Sciences in St. Petersburg. Among the
successful few among the protestors was the geochemist Vladimir
Vernadskii, one of the founders of the science of ecology, who man-
aged to find a place in the Academy.
For the scientists, laboratory equipment and space was a cru-
cial issue, and unfortunately most government offices did not see it
as a priority. Pre-revolutionary Russian scientific laboratories and
research stations were mostly small divisions within ministries or
government offices like the Division of Agriculture within the Min-
istry of Finance or the small research laboratories of the Ministry of
War, devoted to such problems as the production of optical sights
for artillery. Most science took place in university departments, and
there were scarcely any privately financed laboratories. Science was
already dependent on government support throughout the world,
but Russia was still too poor and backward to provide facilities
similar to those of Germany or France. There were exceptions, like
the physiologist Ivan Pavlov’s laboratory at the Imperial Institute of
Experimental Physiology in St. Petersburg which had state funding
and aristocratic donors and patrons, primarily Prince A. P. Olden-
burgskii, a relative of the tsar and a general. It produced medicines
while Pavlov conducted experiments on conditioned reflexes. Most
scientists lacked such facilities, and all these problems came to a
head during the First World War, in which Russia’s technological
backwardness played a crucial role in its defeats. The scientific com-
munity was patriotic if not monarchist and in 1915 the Academy of
Sciences founded a Commission for the Study of Natural Productive
Forces, that was designed to survey the Russian Empire for natural
resources that would be useful in war and industry. The result was
a massive accumulation of data that came to be used by an entirely
new regime after 1917.
348 A Concise History of Russia

The new Bolshevik government inaugurated a revolution in Rus-

sian science. For the Bolsheviks, the natural sciences were central to
their utopian project. Their own ideology, Marxism, was in their
minds a science, not just a political viewpoint. To them it was an
objectively true account of the character and laws of development
of human society. They believed that knowledge of the natural
sciences would help convince people of the truth of Marxism, as
it would impart knowledge of scientific methodology. There were
other more practical benefits. The spread of scientific knowledge
would combat religion, a high Bolshevik priority in the early years.
Most important, however, they believed that science held the key
to technology, and that the new Soviet Union needed technology to
become a modern state and society.
Right from the beginning, the Bolshevik regime treated science
and scientists very differently from other sectors of the old intelli-
gentsia. The Soviets preferred large-scale, state-financed institutions
mostly detached from university teaching, and the scientists were
mostly in favor of the same structure, frustrated by the conservatism
and limited resources of the pre-1917 Ministry of Education. Thus
as early as 1918, as the Civil War was beginning, the Soviet govern-
ment set up what became the Leningrad Physico-Technical Institute
under Abram Ioffe. As the Civil War ended, Ioffe’s institute was
given a series of buildings and money to build new laboratories at
a time when the state had almost no resources and famine swept
the interior of Russia. Similarly, the Section of Applied Botany and
Selection, a small laboratory of the old Agriculture Department,
became the All-Union Institute of Plant-Breeding under the botanist
and geneticist Nikolai Vavilov.
These were highly sophisticated institutions, and the Soviet gov-
ernment did not spare expense. Vavilov’s institute moved into the
former mansion of the tsarist Minister of State Properties off St.
Isaak’s Square in the center of Leningrad, with greenhouses and
research facilities in Tsarskoe Selo (renamed Detskoe Selo in the
1920s and later Pushkin) in confiscated properties from the old
regime. Even more important, Vavilov was sent abroad to Europe
and to the United States to acquire scientific literature, equipment,
and seeds for research. In the United States he traveled widely, met
Luther Burbank, and spoke at American universities – all of this at
 Revolutions in Russian Culture 349

Soviet government expense. Ioffe and the physicists fared as well

or better. Ioffe made a similar journey to Europe in 1920–21, and
the students at the physics institute were not only allowed but even
officially encouraged to spend years abroad working at Cambridge,
England, with Ernest Rutherford or in Germany with the leading
physicists of the time. In the rapidly changing world of physics in the
early twentieth century, these contacts were crucial and established
international reputations for many Soviet physicists. They published
their works in the German Annalen der Physik, until 1933 the lead-
ing outlet for physics research in the world. Vladimir Vernadskii,
in spite of his participation in the Kadet party before the Revolu-
tion, spent several years working in Paris in the 1920s with the full
approval of the Soviet authorities. The Soviet government created
a system that supplied scientists with better housing and favored
access to consumer goods even in the 1920s, when the NEP market
could have supplied many of their needs and wants. Pavlov, who
was openly anti-Soviet, was appointed the head of the new Institute
of Physiology of the Academy of Sciences in 1925.
Standing over and financing the scientific institutes in the 1920s
were a variety of government offices. Some institutes were supported
by the Russian republic Commissariat of Education, but the phys-
ical sciences increasingly came under the industrial commissariats
or the Supreme Economic Council. Biology was mainly the purview
of the Commissariats of Health or the Russian Commissariat of
Agriculture. The idea was to unite theory and practice, an idea
central to Marxism but also popular with many scientists on the
eve of the Revolution who thought that Russia needed their exper-
tise to overcome its backwardness. Thus the Leningrad Physical-
Technical Institute had contracts with many industrial agencies,
including a long-lasting and ultimately unsuccessful study of insu-
lation for long-distance power cables. Successful or not, these con-
tracts provided supplementary financing and demonstrated to the
party leadership the usefulness of scientific research. The party
authorities were perfectly aware that the scientists were not Bolshe-
viks. Many of them did believe that they should help the new state
to modernize the country, whatever its leadership, but they were
not Marxists. For the time being, this divergence of aims was not a
problem.
350 A Concise History of Russia

The end of NEP meant, however, a radical upheaval in society

launched by Stalin and the party leadership and a radical upheaval
in art, literature, the humanistic disciplines, and the natural sciences.
No area was spared this “cultural revolution,” as it was called at
the time, an upheaval in culture that matched that in the villages
and the factories of the Soviet Union. This cultural revolution itself
was short-lived but it was the beginning of a fundamental transfor-
mation of Soviet culture.
 19
Building Utopia

Starting in 1929, the Soviet leadership began to transform the soci-

ety of the USSR, to build an industrialized modern state, but not
a capitalist state. The new society was to realize the old dream of
socialism, a place without private property where the state ran and
managed production of goods and services for the benefit of every-
one. This was the idea. The reality that emerged after more than
a decade of upheaval served as the framework of the Soviet Union
until its demise two generations later.
The basic outlines were in place at the end of 1927 with the first
five-year plan and the course toward collectivization of agriculture.
The plan was to last from the beginning of 1928 to the end of
1932, and called for a twenty percent annual increase in industrial
production, a rate of growth that was unheard of at the time. Such
a growth rate implied a huge increase in urban population, and
that required much more food than the country produced with its
backward peasant agriculture. To complicate matters, grain exports
were the Soviet Union’s main source of hard currency to buy the new
industrial equipment abroad that was essential for rapid industrial-
ization. The solution was to be the collectivization of agriculture,
which would increase per acre yield and free millions of hands to
work in the new industry. The original plan for the pace of collec-
tivization was moderate, with about a fifth of peasant households
to be collectivized by the end of 1932.
The first thing that went wrong was the crisis in grain procure-
ments early in 1928. The response of Stalin and the leadership was to
351
352 A Concise History of Russia

return to grain requisitioning such as they had practiced in the Civil

War. In 1929 the food supply situation was so serious that local
authorities began to introduce rationing, soon established through-
out the country. The crisis also stimulated Stalin and his supporters
toward faster industrialization, for they felt that it showed that the
kulak was getting stronger and could eventually make socialism
impossible. The solution was to change the first five-year plan in
1929, with vastly increased production targets for state industries
and huge construction schemes. These were the decisions that led to
the opposition of Bukharin and the “rights,” so that the plan was
also political. To fulfill the targets and discredit the “rights,” Stalin
also had to make the speeded up plans work at whatever cost. The
result of the speedups was that the plan ceased to work: managers
in the targeted areas took supplies and workers wherever they could
get them at whatever cost, wrecking the balances in the plan. The
quality of production suffered as the physical output target con-
sumed all attention. As food supplies decreased, the factories began
to find their own sources, making semi-legal deals with farms to
supply the factory dining rooms, which quickly became the main
sources of food for their workers.
The plan called not just for more production but also for a total
modernization of the key industrial sectors. The Soviet engineers
and planners wanted to follow American industrial models such as
Henry Ford’s River Rouge auto plant, which relied on a moving
production line rather than on many highly skilled workmen as
was the case in Europe. To the Soviets, with millions of unskilled
workers, this seemed to be the solution and the great Soviet tractor
(and tank) factories were set up on these lines. The tractor factories
were crucial to the collectivization plan, but for them as for every-
thing else the country needed far more iron and steel for machines.
Throughout the world this was the great age of metal and machines,
and if the USSR was to have them, it would have to build huge new
complexes. A giant dam on the Dniepr River was built to provide
electricity for Ukrainian industry. In the Urals a great industrial
base began to grow with whole new cities like Magnitogorsk built
from scratch in order to mine iron ore. These were what were called
“shock construction” sites, and resources were pulled from every-
where to supply them. The party mobilized youth to work there – the
 Building Utopia 353

youth lived in tents and mud huts – as a grand campaign to continue

the work of the revolution. The press plastered their achievements
all over the country, and the most successful “shock workers” saw
their pictures in Pravda and on billboards.
The first five-year plan was to be the great turning point in the
building of socialism, the decisive break with the past, and Stalin
and his allies saw it as a class war. The organs of the state and party
under the Georgian Bolshevik Sergo Ordzhonikidze turned their
fire first on industrial management, enlisting former Trotskyists to
ferret out alleged bureaucratism. Workers and local party commit-
tees were encouraged to inform on their bosses, accusing them of
incompetence, or even worse, “wrecking.” Anyone responsible for
a factory where production flagged or accidents were frequent could
be accused of consciously trying to stop the building of socialism by
sabotage. Local activists and the GPU (Main Political Administra-
tion, successor to the Cheka) also went after Communist managers
with enthusiasm, but anyone from the old order was a particular
target. During these years the GPU staged show trials of “enemies,”
engineers and managers from the pre-revolutionary elites, Menshe-
vik economists, agrarian experts who had supported the SRs or
liberals before 1917, and other “former people.” The attack on
the old intelligentsia went far beyond the economic sphere: histori-
ans and literary scholars, even some natural scientists were arrested
and tried. In the non-Russian republics the authorities went after the
local intelligentsia as well, accusing them of links with foreign states
and various separatist schemes. Most of the managers and engineers
were accused of “wrecking”; that is, intentionally causing accidents
and slowing down production, usually on the orders of émigré orga-
nizations and foreign intelligence agencies. By 1930 these methods
had discredited much of the existing administrative units, and Stalin
placed Ordzhonikidze in charge of the Supreme Economic Council,
where he brought his staff, many former Trotskyists among them,
to manage the speedup of the plan.
The ever-increasing plan targets and the chaos that resulted from
collectivization meant that millions of people were displaced, roam-
ing the country from one construction site to another. Housing
became an acute problem, especially in Moscow and other big or
new cities. Most of the urban population came to live in communal
354 A Concise History of Russia

apartments, usually older apartments cut up into several rooms

with a common kitchen and bathrooms. Whole families lived in
one room or two small rooms. In many places workers lived in
barracks or “temporary” housing. Initially the plan had called for
rapid expansion of at least basic consumer goods, but the increas-
ing targets for heavy industry gutted the production of textiles and
other basic commodities. To make things worse, the series of war
scares in the late 1920s encouraged massive investment in the mil-
itary industry until 1934, and this investment reached levels not
seen again until the eve of World War II. The standard of living of
the population began to fall precipitously. In a few places strikes
even broke out over the shortages of food supplies. The managers
in the crucial industries could not maintain their workforces with-
out radical measures, and they went beyond supplying food in the
factory cafeterias to building apartment houses and schools, tram
lines, and clinics for their workers. A whole new type of hierarchy
appeared in Soviet society, which put not just the party elite but also
entire factories and industries above the rest. Workers in priority
industries like the auto and tractor factories or the defense complex
managed to get through these years with at least the basic needs
of life supplied, while at textile factories or other light industries,
many of them with predominantly female work forces, the workers
had too little food even to work a full day.
City life meant intense privation, even for the youthful enthusiasts
at shock construction sites. These hardships were nothing compared
to the disasters of collectivization. At the beginning the party was
not even clear what the new collective farm was to look like: was
it to be some sort of association of peasant households for com-
mon planting and harvesting, or was it to be a total commune with
farmers living in communal housing and eating together, as well as
farming all the land together? And how fast was it to proceed, and
how? In any case, it was in the autumn of 1929 when Stalin decided
to go for as much collectivization as he could get. To prepare the
ground the leadership decided on the “liquidation of the kulaks as a
class” and the GPU set out to round up and deport the kulaks. Sev-
eral thousand were executed, but nearly two million were deported
to the north, the Urals and Siberia, where they were put in “special
settlements” to cut timber or sometimes to work in the mines or on
 Building Utopia 355

construction. They arrived in remote areas where they had to build

their own houses, often in the dead of winter without any facili-
ties, medical care, or established food supplies. Thousands escaped
and thousands died, until in 1931 the GPU took over the special
settlements, the first large group to come under the auspices of the
GULAG. For the time being, the special settlers vastly outnumbered
the prisoners in actual concentration camps.
With the kulaks out of the way, collectivization went on at top
speed. Under intense pressure from rural party officials as well as
emissaries sent from the cities, the peasants were convinced to aban-
don their strips of land and combine them, in theory at least, into
one huge farm to be worked together. To make matters worse, the
authorities in some areas tried to push the peasants not just into
collective farms but even into communes, the super-collectivized
units with communal living and eating arrangements. By early 1930,
almost half of the peasants had agreed to join a collective, but they
also slaughtered their livestock, not wanting to waste them in the
new order. There was as yet no equipment to work the farms beyond
the old plows and horses, whose numbers were rapidly decreasing.
Opposition was rife, with thousands of “incidents,” ranging from
real rebellions to minor objections blown up into anti-Soviet demon-
strations by the GPU. Early in 1930 Stalin realized that he had to
pull back. The economic results of forcing the peasants into col-
lective farms were becoming serious, and he published an article in
Pravda under the title, “Dizzy with Success.” Local party members
were getting too enthusiastic, he wrote, and were pursuing target
numbers for their own sake, not paying enough attention to local
circumstances and the mood of the peasantry. After the article, the
number of collective farms fell rapidly and the communes were
abandoned, but the process did not stop, it only paused and then
resumed at a slower pace. In the meantime, disaster struck.
As collectivization continued, with all the disruptions that it
caused, the weather played a cruel trick. In 1931 and 1932 bad
weather struck – cold in some areas and drought in others – in the
Ukraine and southern Russia, the main grain producing areas. By
the summer of 1932 this meant famine that spanned a wide belt
running from the Polish border into Siberia. The authorities reacted
slowly, keeping up their collections of grains at the amount fixed in
356 A Concise History of Russia

better years. Only toward the end of the year did they begin to ease
off, but it was already too late, and famine had spread taking with it
some five to seven million peasants throughout the southern regions
of the USSR, about half of these in the Ukraine. The casualties of the
famine, not the kulaks, turned out to be the principal victims of col-
lectivization. The drought hit the peasants when the numbers of
livestock had fallen, on average, by half and they had no reserves of
grain; all of this was the result of the chaos of collectivization and
the relentless collection of grain for the cities. The famine disturbed
the authorities, but they did very little about it. Stalin did not take
any extraordinary methods against the famine, which crushed oppo-
sition to collectivization. Not until better weather in 1933 produced
a better harvest did the famine come to an end.
By the middle of the 1930s the basic outlines of the Soviet col-
lective farm, the kolhoz, were in place, for the notion of setting up
communes had been abandoned. The Russian village had always
been a community, with houses clustered in the village surrounded
by the fields. What was new was that the fields were now under the
control of the kolhoz (actual property rights were still vested in the
state). The kolhoz had a chairman and a governing board that set
the farming tasks, which the peasants carried out together, plowing
and sowing, harvesting and taking care of the livestock. For their
work on the farm the peasants received payment, not in money but
in the form of part of the harvest calculated by a system known as
“labor-days.” The bulk of the harvest went to the state at a fixed
price, one that favored the state and the cities over the kolhoz.
The kolhoz rarely owned its own machinery. As the new tractor
factories came on line, the tractors went to a new institution, the
Machine-Tractor Station, some eight thousand of them by the end
of the decade. These were state operations, and they rented out the
tractors and other machinery with the drivers and workers, provid-
ing the essential equipment for the kolhoz as well as assuring state
control over the collective farms. If the machinery put the state into
farming directly, the market did not disappear entirely in the coun-
tryside. Unlike the cities, where all retail trade was in state hands
by the early 1930s, the peasantry was explicitly granted the right to
farm small private plots alongside their houses. They used them pri-
marily for vegetables and smaller livestock and took the produce to
 Building Utopia 357

the peasant markets that reappeared in all Soviet cities. Though the
private plots were only about four percent of the kolhoz land, they
produced forty percent of vegetables and potatoes and over sixty-six
percent of the meat coming from the collective farms. Their prod-
ucts were sold at prices much above those fixed in the stories and
factory cafeterias, but at least they were available.
From 1933 to about 1936 the tension and upheaval in Soviet
society lessened considerably. The rightists in the party had capitu-
lated and publicly recanted their errors as had the Trotskyists, and
Bukharin became the editor of Izvestiia. In 1932 the government
abolished the Supreme Economic Council, replacing it with a series
of People’s Commissariats for different branches of industry. The
most important was the People’s Commissariat of Heavy Indus-
try, headed by Ordzhonikidze. It seemed that a more rational style
of economic management had triumphed, for Ordzhonikidze took
with him to the new organization many of the former Left Opposi-
tionists and even many “bourgeois specialists” like those whom he
had harassed in 1926–1929. New methods of increasing productiv-
ity in the work force emerged. In 1935 the Donbass miner Aleksei
Stakhanov managed to produce fourteen times his norm of coal and
was proclaimed a national hero. Other workers tried to imitate the
simple reorganization of work methods that he used to achieve the
goal, and were rewarded as Stakhanovites. Work gangs and shops
within factories announced “socialist competition” contests to over
fulfill the plan, earning brief fame as well as more concrete bene-
fits. In themselves these campaigns, heavily sponsored by the party,
achieved little, but labor productivity managed to grow anyway.
The extreme shortages of food and consumer goods began to abate
and in 1935 the rationing of food and other consumer goods ended.
Nevertheless, many basic commodities would be periodically or per-
manently in deficit. Elaborate systems of informal supply among the
population formed to deal with these shortages, ranging from crude
black market operations (strictly illegal and widely punished) to
relatively harmless exchanges of goods among families and friends.
The population was learning to cope. Unemployment had disap-
peared, to be replaced with a permanent labor shortage, though
real wages were well below those of the late 1920s for the great
majority of workers.
358 A Concise History of Russia

In these somewhat brighter years, the seeds of destruction were

already sown. On December 1, 1934, an assassin killed the leader
of the party in Leningrad, Sergei Kirov. The authorities proclaimed
the murder to be the work of unrepentant Trotskyists, though the
most likely theory is that it was the result of Kirov’s romantic entan-
glements. In public the uproar died down quickly, but in the ensu-
ing months the NKVD (in place of the GPU from 1934) began to
search for enemy agents, particularly among the former opposi-
tionists working in Soviet institutions. By 1936 they were ready to
bring Zinoviev and Kamenev together with other old Bolsheviks,
mostly former oppositionists, to trial. The charges were the murder
of Kirov, a conspiracy to kill Stalin, and treasonous arrangements
with fascist agents. The defendants all “confessed” in a carefully
staged public trial and were mostly sentenced to death. In January
of 1937, another trial followed, and this time the main defendants
were Karl Radek, a journalist and Comintern official, and Georgii
Piatakov. Both were former Trotskyists, and Piatakov had in recent
years been the right-hand man of Ordzhonikidze in the People’s
Commissariat of Heavy Industry. Ordzhonikidze seems to have
been the only one in the leadership to resist the coming terror –
at least as it applied to the institutions he headed at the time. On
February 17, after a long conversation with Stalin, Ordzhnokidze
committed suicide. His death was announced as the result of sudden
illness, and he received a grandiose state funeral.
In late February 1937, the Central Committee of the Party met
in plenary session, its agenda being to discuss the new constitution
about to be promulgated for the country. The new constitution
replaced the formal institutions formed in the Civil War with ones
that looked more like those of a normal state, though it had no
impact on the actual relations of power, dominated as they were
by the party. A rather dull meeting seemed to be in prospect. Early
in the proceedings Molotov and other confidants of Stalin arose
to add to the deliberations the need to “unmask the Trotskyist
agents of fascism” whom they asserted to be hiding in large numbers
in the party and state apparatus. By the end of the meeting the
unmasking of traitors had become the main task proclaimed by
the Central Committee. In the ensuing months the NKVD, under its
new head Nikolai Ezhov, began to arrest tens of thousands of people
 Building Utopia 359

as enemies of the people. In May the NKVD ordered the arrest of

nearly the whole of the high command of the Red Army. Marshal
Tukhachevsky and seven others, almost all Red Army heroes of the
Civil War, were accused of treason and confessions were extracted
by torture. They were tried in secret, and quickly executed. Some
forty thousand officers perished or went to prison in the wake of
the Tukhachevsky trial. At the ranks of brigade commander and
above nearly ninety percent were executed, altogether some eight
hundred men. The terror was not confined to such elite groups, for
other and larger classes of victims accompanied them to the camps
and the firing squads. In July the Politburo issued order 00447 (the
00 signified top secret) providing each regional unit of the NKVD
with a quota for arrests and executions. The total for the country
in this order alone was to be seventy-two thousand. The victims
were to be, in principle, all known former kulaks, White officers,
Mensheviks or SRs, and a multitude of lesser and vaguer categories.
Each office of the NKVD began frantically to search through its
card files for anyone ever arrested or under suspicion in any of
the relevant categories. Regional NKVD units wrote to Moscow
begging to be allowed to over fulfill the plan for executions and
arrests. Their requests were granted, and similar orders followed.
These orders at least targeted (mostly) real potential enemies of the
Soviet order.
Stalin also struck at the party apparatus with the NKVD, again by
torture extracting confessions from party members that they were
wreckers and Japanese or German spies. To enforce the terror, Stalin
sent trusted deputies, Kaganovich, Georgii Malenkov, and others,
to republican and provincial capitals to “unmask” the enemies in
the party hierarchy and order their arrest. Ezhov presented Stalin
with long lists of enemies and wreckers, some forty-four thousand
in all, and Stalin personally checked off the names, presenting them
to Molotov and others in his inner circle for confirmation. Molo-
tov and Stalin even added comments in the margins of the list:
“Give the dog a dog’s death,” or “Hit them and hit them.” Most of
the members of the central party leadership, including the Central
Committee of the Party, People’s Commissars, and other high gov-
ernment officials perished. The same occurred at the republican
level, and even reached down to provincial and city party and
360 A Concise History of Russia

government circles. Thus most of the party apparatus perished.

The names of the dead and imprisoned simply disappeared from
public documents, and they were erased along with Trotsky from
the history books.
The last of the show trials took place in March 1938, and fea-
tured the former rightists, Bukharin, Rykov, and others, as well as
Ezhov’s predecessor as head of the NKVD, Genrikh Yagoda. The
usual confessions and violent denunciations from the prosecutor,
Andrei Vyshinskii (himself an ex-Menshevik), were the highlights.
This lurid spectacle was the last of the show trials, and though
it and its predecessors attracted world attention, it served mainly
as a background to the real killing. In the course of 1937–38, the
NKVD executed some three quarters of a million people, including
the bulk of the military and political elite, all former oppositionists
from within the party, but the majority of the victims, however,
were people in all walks of life who fit into the prescribed cate-
gories of enemies such as former nobles or Mensheviks. To top all
this off, the NKVD also decided to deport the entire population
of the so-called “western national minorities”: the Poles, Latvians,
Germans, Finns, and others who lived near the western boundary
of the USSR. Hundreds of thousands perished in transit. When the
NKVD ran out of people in the assigned categories, they rounded
up common criminals, executed them, and listed them as political.
In the two years, the total who were executed or died of priva-
tions in transit came out to a million people. Finally, the blood
came to an end. Through 1938 Stalin gave increasingly frequent
signals that “excesses” had been committed, putting the blame on
the NKVD, and Ezhov himself was soon executed. By 1939, the
wave had passed. A semblance of peace descended on a terrorized
society.
After the end of the terror, the subject passed entirely from Soviet
public discourse. Stalin soon ordered the composition and exten-
sive publication of the Short Course of the History of Commu-
nist Party and ordered all members of the party to study it thor-
oughly. It became a compendium of the official line, and offered
a wholly falsified history of Bolshevism and the 1917 revolution,
with Trotsky and other leaders omitted except to vilify them for
 Building Utopia 361

their opposition in the 1920s and their alleged later roles as spies
and traitors. Its centerpiece was a simplified sketch of Marxism
authored by Stalin himself though not publicly acknowledged as
such. The book offered no explanation of the events of 1937–38
other than to describe the results of the show trials. The actual ter-
ror never received any public explanation then or later in Stalin’s
lifetime. Though the specific charges at the show trials and in secret
arrests normally had been manufactured, Stalin, Molotov, and the
others around them seem to have seriously thought that they were
fighting and destroying real and dangerous enemies. Such, at least,
is the language of their surviving private correspondence with one
another. Their public statements in 1937 asserted that the success-
ful building of socialism only “sharpened the class struggle,” which
seems to have meant that Stalin’s policies, especially collectiviza-
tion, produced more and more doubters, whom Stalin and his circle
interpreted as conscious enemies suborned by foreign intelligence
services. In addition they feared that such internal enemies might try
to strike when the inevitable war in Europe broke out and involved
the Soviet Union. The mentality of Soviet leaders, and particularly
the NKVD, encouraged such conclusions. NKVD officials during
collectivization regularly interpreted objections by the peasants to
minor aspects of the new order as conscious political opposition
to the Soviet system. In their minds and in Stalin’s, if someone
disagreed with some details of the plan targets for the aluminum
industry, that person must be a secret opponent of the regime, and
as the Short Course taught, all enemies of socialism are ultimately
in league with one another.
Not everyone who was arrested was shot, and as a result, the pop-
ulation of the prison camps boomed. In the 1920s the prison camps
had been relatively small and organized around the main camp on
the Solovki Islands in the White Sea. In those years just over one
hundred thousand people languished in Solovki and various other
prisons, in cold, insect-infested cells, required to work cutting peat
or felling trees. In 1929 Stalin and the security police decided to
turn the prison system into a network of labor camps on the Solovki
model, and common criminals were placed in the same camps. The
great expansion came with the collectivization of agriculture, for
362 A Concise History of Russia

those kulaks considered especially dangerous were sent to camps

rather than to the special settlements. By 1934, when the GULAG,
or the Chief Administration of Camps, under the OGPU/NKVD
came into being, there were half a million prisoners. By 1939 a
million-and-a-half prisoners lived in camps and “labor colonies,”
which had a somewhat less strict regime. Though plenty of people
died in Soviet camps, they were not death camps, but labor camps,
and the GULAG took the labor component quite seriously. At first
they even advertised their “successes,” such as the building of the
White Sea Canal in 1931–32, touted as an example of labor success-
fully re-educating class enemies. From 1937, however, the camps
were in principle secret. The system was a complex hierarchy, rang-
ing from “special settlements,” where the prisoners lived in fairly
normal housing or minimally livable barracks, to horrific mining
settlements like Vorkuta or the Kolyma gold fields on the east coast
of Siberia, reachable only by ship. Most prisoners were assigned
labor in forests, cutting trees for the timber industry with primitive
tools, or were assigned to mine, or work in construction. Death
was the result of disease, accidents, and general privation, for the
GULAG needed labor to meet its own plans. Most deaths occurred
during the shipment out to the camps in 1937–38 when hundreds
of thousands were shipped east and north in unheated boxcars to
places where facilities for the prisoners were almost non-existent.
In the Stalin years, failure to meet the plan could be fatal, so the
camp commandants engaged in a complex juggling game to keep the
prisoners well-enough fed and housed to be able to work while not
expending too much on them. With the special settlements, some
four million people lived “under the jurisdiction of the NKVD”
by 1941. Of these most were not political prisoners in the usual
sense. In the camps and colonies, only about twenty percent had
been convicted of “counter-revolutionary actions” or other politi-
cal offenses, and the rest were a mixture of common criminals and
those who fell afoul of increasingly strict laws on labor discipline,
hooliganism, or “theft of state property,” a particularly murky area
given the realities of Soviet life. Many were imprisoned for passport
violations after the introduction of internal passports in 1932. Even
the “political” prisoners included many classified as political only in
the super-politicized categories of Stalin and the NKVD. The camp
 Building Utopia 363

system under Stalin was primarily a system of convict labor into

which political prisoners were added.

At the end of the 1930s the Soviet Union was even more a land of
paradox than before. State centralization had continued to increase.
The defeat of the Right Opposition had put Stalin’s allies in all the
key positions of state: Molotov became the chair of the Coun-
cil of People’s Commissars, the head of state and government.
Along with Molotov and Stalin the inner circle now consisted
of Lazar Kaganovich, Sergo Ordzhonikidze, Kliment Voroshilov,
Anastas Mikoyan, and, until his death Valerian Kuibyshev. While
Ordzhonikidze and Kuibyshev oversaw industry, Kaganovich took
care of transport and Mikoyan of the crucial area of food supplies
and trade. Voroshilov was in charge of the armed forces. All of
them had other duties as well, and they regularly met to discuss
even minute issues of economic management as well as political
questions. Around this inner group until 1937–38 was a large num-
ber of managers and party officials who had mostly come out of
the Civil War and come into power under Stalin. This was the
core Soviet elite at the time, and most of them did not survive the
terror of 1937–38. The result of the terror was to further concen-
trate power in the inner circle and even more so on Stalin himself,
but to also bring new men into the leadership. Foremost among
them was Lavrentii Beriia, another Georgian who replaced Ezhov
as head of the security police. Others of the younger men were
Andrei Zhdanov, Georgii Malenkov, and Nikita Khrushchev, all of
whom would play major roles in the coming war and post-war years.
Zhdanov was the son of a school inspector and worked his way up
through provincial party leadership to take over Leningrad’s party
after the assassination of Kirov. Malenkov, also from the Urals, and
with a pre-revolutionary gymnasium education, made his career in
the central party apparatus in Moscow. Khrushchev, by contrast,
was actually a worker in the Donbass who rose through the party
ranks when Kaganovich was running the Ukrainian party in the
1920s, and then moved on to Moscow. All three had served in the
Civil War. Along with these new men came a shift in the structure of
power at the center, with all of the leaders taking more direct roles
in managing the state, not merely supervising it from the Politburo.
364 A Concise History of Russia

Figure 19. The funeral of the writer Maxim Gorky in 1936. From right to
left: Genrikh Iagoda, chief of the political police, Stalin,Viacheslav Molo-
tov, Bulgarian Communist and Comintern leader Georgii Dimitrov, (in
white) Andrei Zhdanov, Lazar Kaganovich.

The centralization of power was formalized in May 1941 when

Stalin replaced Molotov as Chairman of the Council of People’s
Commissars. Stalin now formally and actually headed both party
and state.
Alongside the centralization of power in the Politburo and then
with Stalin alone a whole cult of the leader appeared, managed
from the center. It was already normal in the early 1920s to display
portraits of Lenin, Trotsky, and the current leadership at major cel-
ebrations like November 7 and May 1. By the end of the 1920s
Stalin was the central figure in these displays and by the end of
the 1930s almost the only figure. Statues of Stalin sprouted in
addition to the ubiquitous statues of Lenin, and cities and insti-
tutions were named in his honor. At party meetings it was the
ritual to stand when his name was mentioned and acclaim him.
 Building Utopia 365

Stalin was not a dynamic public speaker, in part because of his

pronounced Georgian accent, and he never seems to have desired
the unceasing public display and admiration that Hitler and Mus-
solini craved and staged over and over. He rarely appeared in pub-
lic and his actual personality remained private, but the standard
epithets – “great leader of peoples”– were obligatory. His writings
were the required textbooks of Marxism and his image and his name
were everywhere and became basic components of Soviet political
culture.

The centralization of power also affected the complex federal struc-

ture of the USSR. Starting in 1929–30 all-union Commissariats of
Agriculture, Education, and Culture and other organs had been cre-
ated that stood over the analogous republican agencies. The policies
and structures of the NEP era had meant a sort of de facto alliance
of the party with intellectuals in the non-Russian republics to build
and in some cases create local cultures. This arrangement in many
ways paralleled the role of the pre-revolutionary Russian engineers
and economists in Soviet industry, and it met the same fate begin-
ning in 1929–30. Show trials of local nationalists signaled the end
of collaboration, as did the appearance of an all-union Commis-
sariat of Culture and Education. In 1932–33 the party carried out
a campaign against Ukrainian nationalism, including show trials
of Ukrainian intellectuals accused of nationalism and ties with for-
eign powers. The Ukrainian party leaders who preferred the older
policy committed suicide and others were arrested or demoted. Sim-
ilar campaigns took place in other republics, all of them part of the
“cultural revolution” of 1929–1932.
Even more important for the fate of the Soviet republics was
the tremendous growth in centralization of the economy. Republi-
can plans for economic development were swamped by new central
authorities’ grandiose schemes for regional development based on
economic, not ethnic, criteria. In the northern autonomous republics
of Russia, no local authority could compete with the sheer economic
power of the GULAG, even when the political arm of the NKVD
was not involved. Ukrainian and Siberian economic development
followed the dictates of the all-union industrial Commissariats,
Gosplan, and other agencies. The result in many areas was massive
366 A Concise History of Russia

economic development but also ultimate erosion of the authority of

local party committees and republican governments. The republican
authorities (including the Russian republic) were largely left with
agricultural issues, by their nature requiring more local control. The
hierarchy that emerged from industrialization was not based on the
federal state structure, but on the economic structure. The hierar-
chy was not ethnic or political: a district or a republic with many
factories under a high priority commissariat such as heavy indus-
try or defense was favored both with investment and consumer
goods. A district with light industry was not. This system favored
the Ukrainian Donbass and neglected central Russian towns where
the predominant industries were textile factories.
In some respects the central authorities continued to pay atten-
tion to local issues. For all the centralization, the formal federal
structure remained. The 1936, “Stalin” constitution perpetuated
the federal structure of the USSR, by now including twelve union
republics and many autonomous republics under them. The end of
the “indigenization” policy in the party came with the assault on
local nationalism, but Stalin did not replace the local minorities in
the party leadership with Russians. Local nationality party mem-
bers came to be the majority in almost all union and autonomous
republics, including the leadership groups, though Stalin contin-
ued to bring in occasional trusted outsiders at the top, like Nikita
Khrushchev in the Ukraine in the wake of the 1937–38 terror. The
Soviet Union’s central leadership was multi-national. Stalin himself
was Georgian as was Orzdzhonikidze and the post-1938 head of
the NKVD, Lavrentii Beriia. Molotov and Voroshilov were both
Russian, while Kaganovich and the foreign minister in the 1930s,
Maxim Litvinov, were Jewish. Mikoyan was Armenian. The cam-
paign against local nationalism did not imply cultural Russifica-
tion. Stalin and the leadership were perfectly happy for the non-
Russians to speak and write native languages, as long as Moscow
retained political control and Moscow ran most of the economy. In
Russian-speaking Ukrainian cities the newspapers were still mostly
in Ukrainian until 1939. After about 1932 the Soviet authorities
began to heavily promote the celebration of non-Russian writers
and artists in the central press, organizing meetings with Stalin and
other leaders in Moscow to great press coverage. Pre-revolutionary
 Building Utopia 367

Russian culture received a similar positive re-evaluation, culminat-

ing in the Pushkin anniversary celebrations of 1937. In the same
years in the Ukraine new statues of the poet Taras Shevchenko
appeared, to great organized festivity, and similar figures were glo-
rified or occasionally invented in the other republics. This was not
merely a cultural campaign, for it formed one of the foundations
of “friendship of peoples,” the Soviet attempt to bond the various
nations of the Soviet Union by downplaying conflicts of the past
and emphasizing the supposedly harmonious present and future. In
a predominantly centralized economy and state, the promotion of
local culture alongside Russian provided a way to build a multina-
tional society that would move toward a unified socialist state.
Soviet policy was not uniform in all the non-Russian republics
in these years. In the Muslim areas Soviet leadership moved very
cautiously against Islam. In Central Asia the main issue in the 1920s
had been the abolition of the veil for Muslim women, an issue
on which the small local intelligentsia was in general agreement.
Most of the southern Islamic areas were also not yet the object
of massive industrialization drives, though collectivization, when it
came, was normally as harsh as in Russia and the Ukraine. The
one great disaster in Central Asia was in Kazakhstan. Kazakhstan
was still to a large extent nomadic in 1930 and collectivization
implied “sedentarization,” that is, nomadic herders were to settle
down and raise their stock in one area. This policy set off internal
struggles inside the clans that combined with intense party pressure
and produced a massive crisis. The nomadic Kazakhs responded by
slaughtering their animals or fleeing across the border to other Soviet
republics and even to China. Over a million became refugees and
over a million, some twenty percent of the Kazakh population, died
of hunger or disease. In the succeeding years, the Kazakh authorities
managed to resettle most of the refugees in Kazakhstan, and stock-
raising slowly recovered, but the demographic catastrophe’s effects
lasted for decades.

Another series of paradoxes grew from the outcome of the transfor-

mation of Soviet society. Though terrorized by the events of 1937–
38, the population at the end of the 1930s was much better edu-
cated, more urban, and in most ways more “modern” than in 1928.
368 A Concise History of Russia

Some thirty-one percent of the population lived in urban areas,

double the pre-1917 figure, and almost all of the population had
at least basic literacy. Ties with older traditions disappeared. The
Orthodox Church and other religions were essentially smashed by
the anti-religious campaigns: only a few hundred churches remained
open in the entire country, and the great majority of the clergy were
dead or in camps. The traditional rhythm of the Russian year, with
Shrovetide, Lent, and Easter simply evaporated without churches
to support it, and the Communist festivals, November 7 and May
1 replaced them, with a secular New Year celebration in between.
The huge expansion in urban population meant that millions left
the world of the peasantry. People who had never seen a complex
machine before now ran tram lines and built airplanes. Basic con-
sumer goods were scarce, but movies, popular music, and the radio
provided mass entertainment of a more or less modern sort. Mass
education, especially in technical subjects, was a priority and tens of
thousands of students received the basics of modern science, while
surviving crowded, unheated dormitories and wretched and erratic
food. This sort of speeded-up education allowed Stalin to fill the
positions left empty by the arrests of the great terror with people
from peasant and working class backgrounds but who were more
or less able to do their jobs.
The five-year plans were a qualified success. The Soviet leadership
regularly used deceptive statistical methods to make the results look
better, but the actual results in industry were impressive enough
by 1940. The USSR was now the world’s third industrial power,
after the United States and Germany. The new industrial plants had
modern equipment, and many of them were located in the Urals
and Siberia, places of yet untapped wealth that were also far from
the increasingly threatened frontier. Small villages had turned into
cities, and entirely new industrial areas came into being. Some of the
promises of socialism were beginning to be realized. The People’s
Commissariat of Health doubled the number of doctors and medi-
cal personnel between 1932 and 1940, and vaccination and hygiene
programs markedly decreased the death rates from disease. At the
same time, years of famine, deprivations, and crowded and unsan-
itary housing provided immense obstacles to the new and mostly
female medical personnel. The Communists had always promoted
 Building Utopia 369

the equality of women, and by the 1930s the work force was almost
half female. Some women began to appear even as tractor drivers
on the collective farms and workers in heavy industry. Some pro-
fessions, such as medicine, were rapidly becoming primarily the do-
main of women. The successes of women pilots and workers were
the subject of huge propaganda campaigns in the media. The large
gap in education between women and men virtually closed, at least
in the cities. As in all cases, the reality of daily life provided major
obstacles: in light industry, where most workers were women, there
was never enough daycare for children. Though women were paid
the same as men for the same work, the predominantly female light
industries were lower in priority and hence the wages were lower
and fewer, and worse consumer goods were available through the
workplace. The burden of family continued to fall on women even
when daycare centers and kindergartens appeared. It was women
who bore the brunt of standing in lines for scarce commodities and
forming informal networks to obtain them.
In the late 1930s consumer goods continued to trickle back into
the stores and the lives of women as well as men eased. The weak
point of the Soviet economy was and remained in agriculture. The
collective farms were just barely able to supply the burgeoning cities
with grain, but pre-1940 meat production never reached the levels
found in the late 1920s. Meat and milk came overwhelmingly not
from the kolhoz but from the private plots the state had allowed the
peasants to retain after collectivization. The population continued
to rely heavily on the peasant market, more expensive than state
stores, and on workplace distribution centers for anything beyond
the most basic foodstuffs. Nevertheless, the country was able to
vastly increase military production again at the end of the 1930s,
in the face of the danger of war, without completely wrecking the
plan and the supply of consumer goods. This was not nearly the
promised utopia, but it did provide the basis of the Soviet version
of a modern society. It was just barely enough.
For Stalin’s new industrial giant of a country was about to face
a threat greater than any kulaks or imaginary Japanese spies. By
1938 the heart of Europe was under the power of Adolf Hitler,
who had made it clear in Mein Kampf that Germany must conquer
“living space” to survive, and that Germany’s living space was to
370 A Concise History of Russia

be found in the Soviet Union. In 1931, Stalin had told a conference

of industrial managers that Russia “was fifty to a hundred years
behind the advanced countries. Either we catch up in ten years or
they crush us.” Perhaps his evaluation of the state of the Soviet
economy had been too pessimistic at the time, but his prediction of
the time they had at their disposal was right on the mark. They had
exactly ten years.
 20
War

From the very beginning the Soviet leadership expected an invasion

sooner or later. This conviction grew from the actual situation of
the Soviet Union since the revolution, the experience of intervention
and hostility of almost all other states, and also from their analysis
of the world. For they expected not just an attack on their own
country but a war among the western powers as well, and thought
it likely that the war in the West would come first. Their analysis of
the world came from Lenin’s view of the most recent stage of cap-
italism, which he understood to be the period of imperialism. He
believed that the First World War was the result of the increasing
concentration of capital in the hands of a small number of massive
semi-monopolistic corporations and banks, which in turn led to a
speeded up competition for markets and resources. The result was
the division of the world among great empires, and the desire of the
late-comers in that process, Germany in particular, to re-divide the
world. Thus, even without the existence of the USSR, another war
was inevitable. Stalin and the Soviet elite accepted this conception
of the world without any doubts, and their own historic experience
in the First World War, as well as their observation of the various
rivalries in the world after 1918, only strengthened their convic-
tion. At the same time they realized that the differences (“contra-
dictions”) among the capitalist powers might be temporarily shelved
in an anti-Communist alliance or that one or more of the western
powers might be strong enough to attack them on its own. Until
1933 the principle threat seemed to come from the British Empire,
371
372 A Concise History of Russia

the apparently hegemonic power of the time. The Red Army con-
structed its war plans on the assumption that an attack would come
from Poland and Rumania with British (and perhaps French) back-
ing or even participation. The de facto military arrangements with
Weimar Germany were designed in part to obstruct such an even-
tuality. When Adolf Hitler came to power in Germany in January
of 1933, the Soviets confronted an entirely new situation.
At first the Soviets were not excessively concerned. Since 1928 the
Comintern had predicted a new crisis of capitalism, and the Depres-
sion seemed to bear out that prediction. The Soviet leadership, like
many other observers, was not convinced that the Nazis were really
much different from other reactionary German groups that had sup-
ported restoration of the Kaiser and suppression of the left parties.
Anti-Semitism, the parades, and the uniforms, all seemed to be just
trappings to deceive the naı̈ve, not symptoms of a more serious and
sinister purpose. Though Hitler eliminated the German Communist
Party (and the Socialists) in a matter of months, the Soviets were still
convinced that Hitler’s support was limited and his regime unstable.
The 1934 purge of the Storm Troopers seemed to confirm this pic-
ture, and Soviet propaganda as well as internal discussion stressed
the alleged unpopularity of Hitler’s economic and other programs
with the German working class. At the same time, the Soviets noted
the rearmament of Germany and its increasingly aggressive tone
in international affairs. Late in 1934 the Soviet Union joined the
League of Nations, a step both symbolic and practical, especially as
Hitler had taken Germany out of the League the year before. Soviet
Commissar of Foreign Affairs Maxim Litvinov used the League as
one of his principle stages on which to proclaim the need for the
Western powers to make an agreement with the USSR to oppose
Hitler.
Talk of opposing Hitler from the Soviets was not merely a ges-
ture, for the Soviet Union now possessed a new army, much more
powerful than the old-fashioned Red Army of the 1920s. Two fac-
tors were crucial in the transformation of the army. One was the
pre-1933 cooperation with the army of the Weimar republic, which
provided the Red Army with a complete picture of the most recent
developments in military technology and organization. The turn of
Western armies toward motorized units, tanks, and aircraft was
 War 373

perfectly clear, yet in 1928 the Red Army still relied on cavalry
and infantry armed with rifles and machine guns. Even artillery
was inadequate. The second factor was the first five-year plan. The
five-year plan originally called for quite considerable increases in
military production, but the highly charged atmosphere of world
politics (the Japanese seizure of Manchuria in 1931) impelled Stalin
to raise the targets for military production even higher. In the next
year, the Soviet Union produced four thousand tanks, an immense
number by the standards of the time, and they reflected sophisti-
cated designs, both foreign and Soviet. The same enormous effort
was put into aircraft production, particularly of heavy bombers.
These modern weapons reflected the military doctrine of the Soviet
army staff, particularly that of Tukhachevskii, who believed that
modern wars would be decided by fast mechanized and armored
units as well as long-range aerial bombing. By 1935 the USSR had
one of the most advanced armies in the world. Its only limitation
was size, for budgetary constraints kept the standing army relatively
small.
With this new army in the background, Stalin and the Soviet lead-
ers still had to confront an increasingly dangerous world situation.
The most important consequences of the new situation created by
Hitler and his allies were the new policies enunciated at Geneva by
Litvinov and also a sharp turn in the strategy of the Comintern. At
the Seventh Comintern Conference in 1935 the Bulgarian Commu-
nist leader Georgii Dimitrov announced the new policy: the Popular
Front. The new policy abandoned the attacks on the Socialists as
agents of the ruling class and the orientation toward revolution,
putting in its place the demand for Communists to make an alliance
with the Socialists and indeed any group opposed to fascism for the
purpose of preventing the extension of fascist power. At the same
time the Soviet state began to try to form alliances with Western
powers, signing mutual aid pacts with France and Czechoslovakia in
May of 1935. Soviet relations with Britain, however, remained poor,
and Hitler was on the march: in 1936 he remilitarized the Rhineland
to thundering silence from London and Paris. A few months later
the Civil War broke out in Spain with General Francisco Franco’s
revolt against the Republic, now governed by a popular front elected
by the people. Soviet reaction was initially cautious, as they feared
374 A Concise History of Russia

that overt aid to the Republic would provoke intervention by the

Western powers on the side of the monarchist-fascist rebels. Hitler
and Mussolini soon solved that problem, for their supplies of troops
and munitions gave the Soviets an opening. Stalin also sent tanks,
aircraft, and many officers to Spain through the dangerous waters of
the Mediterranean. In Spain, Stalin and the Comintern followed the
popular front strategy, the Spanish Communists being instructed
that they were not to make revolution but to continue to ally with
the Socialists and Liberals to support the Republic. The Spanish
situation revealed the limits of that strategy, for Stalin also wanted
the Communists to control things as much as possible and insisted
on eliminating the Trotskyists and Anarchists, powerful especially
in Barcelona. In the long run, neither the Popular Front strategy
nor Soviet aid and interference made much difference. The Spanish
Republic succumbed to brute force and was extinguished by the end
of 1938.
The defeat of the Republic only increased the danger for the USSR.
The lack of enthusiasm on the part of Western powers for the Span-
ish Republic only revealed – in Stalin’s mind – the increasing chances
of his nightmare scenario, a four-power pact that included Britain,
France, Germany, and Italy, which would be directed against the
Soviet Union. And Hitler continued to move. In 1936–37 Germany,
Japan, and Italy signed the “Anti-Comintern Pact,” forming the
alliance that came to known as the Axis. In 1938, Hitler annexed
Austria, again causing no reaction from Britain and France, and
soon began to make demands on Czechoslovakia, the only power
in Eastern Europe with a substantial and modern armed force. For
the Soviets as well as Europe as a whole, this was a crisis.
Soviet actions were stymied by two factors. One was the gener-
ally pro-German policy of Poland, which controlled the corridors
through which any Soviet aid to Czechoslovakia had to pass. The
other factor was the suspicion on the part of the Western powers,
especially Britain – both of the Soviet Union in general and the
capacities of the Red Army in particular. The Soviet mutual assis-
tance pacts with France and Czechoslovakia hinged on cooperation,
which was not forthcoming from Paris. In the days leading up to the
final crisis at Munich, the Soviets did actually begin to mobilize the
Red Army in secret, but all was in vain. Chamberlain surrendered
 War 375

the Czechs to Hitler in what from the Soviet point of view was a
four-power pact. Such a pact, in their view, must be directed against
the Soviet Union.
In this situation the Soviet leadership, convinced that war was
coming, moved to its other possible strategy, making a deal with
Hitler. Off and on since 1933 the Soviets had put out feelers to
Berlin, but nothing had come of them. Early in 1939 discussions
with the Nazis suddenly became serious, and the attitudes in Lon-
don and Paris propelled them forward. Though Chamberlain began
to realize that Hitler was a threat, he was not willing to discuss a
serious agreement with Stalin. In the summer of 1939 a British mis-
sion to Moscow explored the possibilities of cooperation, but when
Commissar of Defense Voroshilov asked for specifics on military
cooperation, the British could reply only that they had no instruc-
tions. The result was the German-Soviet pact of August 23, 1939,
signed in Moscow by Ribbentrop and Molotov, now Litvinov’s
replacement as Commissar of Foreign Affairs.
The pact unleashed Hitler to attack Poland, which brought decla-
rations of war against Germany from Britain and France. The Ger-
man invasion of Poland was so successful and so quick that Stalin
was caught off-guard. He was also preoccupied with the Japanese
probing attack on Mongolia at the end of August, thrown back at
Khalkhin Gol by some hundred thousand Soviet troops. Though
the pact implied a partition of Poland, it had not included any
delimitation of frontiers. The Red Army hurriedly marched into the
eastern territories of the Polish state inhabited mainly by Belorus-
sians and Ukrainians, annexing the new territories to the respective
Soviet republics. The Communists quickly established Soviet insti-
tutions and deported the Poles in the area. Most went to camps or as
“special settlers” to Siberia and Kazakhstan, but the army officers,
police, and other officials were executed in the camp at Katyn forest
and elsewhere early in 1940.
The pact also put the Baltic states into the Soviet sphere of influ-
ence. Stalin moved quickly to assert control over the area, in the
process awarding the city of Vilnius to Lithuania, a city then almost
entirely Polish and Jewish in population. By 1940, control was suffi-
cient that the three states were incorporated into the USSR as Soviet
republics, after “popular assemblies” went through the ceremony of
376 A Concise History of Russia

“requesting” incorporation. Stalin thought his western border was

now secure except for one area: Finland.
The Finnish-Soviet border was the result of the international-
ization of an internal border of the Russian empire. When Russia
annexed Finland in 1809, the Karelian isthmus to the west of St.
Petersburg had been part of the Russian Empire for a hundred years,
but in a concession to the Finns, was reunited with the rest of Fin-
land. By 1918, at the time of Finnish independence, this meant that
the border was only a short tram ride away from the center of Pet-
rograd. The border had been a problem for Soviet military planners
ever since, and Stalin decide to fix it. He proposed to the Finnish
government a deal, giving the USSR control of strategic islands near
the coast and moving the border some kilometers west in return for
territory in the far north. The Finns decided that this was a ploy
to take control of the country and refused. Thus began the Winter
War, in which the small but well-trained and enthusiastic Finnish
army held off the Soviets for several months, eliciting support from
Britain and other Western powers that allowed them to draw public
attention from the “phony war” along Germany’s western bound-
ary. After many setbacks and heavy casualties, the Soviets finally got
their army together and defeated the Finns, leaving an impression of
incompetence that only encouraged their future enemies in Berlin.
In the wake of the war, Stalin replaced the Commissar of Defense,
his old Civil War crony Voroshilov, with S. T. Timoshenko, a pro-
fessional military officer who quickly proceeded to reform the army
and speed up its re-equipment.
Thus by 1940 the Soviet western frontier had moved hundreds
of miles west, and Stalin and Timoshenko had bought some time to
put the armed forces in order. This was a huge task, one that had
many complications. In 1935 the Soviets had realized that they had
the ability and need to finally turn the Red Army into a mass army
with a peacetime strength of one-and-a-half million men; in 1939,
Stalin ordered an increase in the size of the army to three million.
The expansion followed in short order, but the inevitable result was
that the soldiers, and particularly the officers, were poorly trained
and inexperienced. Hundreds of thousands of soldiers and junior
officers were only a step away from the villages. For many soldiers,
their rifle was the first really modern piece of equipment that they
 War 377

had ever seen. The army purge of 1937–38 only made things worse,
especially at the level of high command. Here lay the explanation of
the army’s poor performance in the Winter War. Furthermore, the
army’s equipment was no longer up-to-date. After the great push in
the early 1930s, Soviet military production had stagnated and new
designs were not forthcoming. Thus the appearance of the German
Messerschmidt fighter over Spain in 1937 was a great shock to the
Red Air Force, for their best planes were no match for it. German
tank technology was moving quickly as well, and all this came at
just the moment when the Soviet design bureaus and the armed
forces were paralyzed by the purges. Starting in 1938, new designs
came into being, but they had to be tested and then put into mass
production. Thus by the summer of 1941, the USSR had the first
of its modern weapons, the Ilushin-2 ground attack fighter, the T-
34 and KV tanks, and the Katiusha rocket artillery. The tanks and
rockets were way ahead of the German equivalents, but there were
not nearly enough of them or of any modern aircraft.
As the Soviet factories furiously put the new weapons into pro-
duction and the army struggled with the problems created by rapid
expansion and new borders, Hitler was planning his assault. In
1940 he had overrun France and the Balkans. He had failed in the
Battle of Britain to bring the English to their knees, but the British
Empire, dangerously overstretched by the need to defend the Far
East and the Mediterranean as well as the home islands, seemed to
the Führer doomed. He would turn his attention to Russia.
All through the winter Wehrmacht units moved east into Ruma-
nia, Finland, and what had been Poland. Hitler’s tactical intelligence
was excellent, for he knew exactly where the Soviet units were sta-
tioned, their strength, and their defensive positions. What he did not
know, or even care about, was the economic and military poten-
tial of the USSR. To Hitler, the Soviet state was simply a Jewish-
Mongol horde that would fly apart at the first blows. His generals,
who thought in terms of the Russia of 1914, were only slightly
less contemptuous of the enemy. Stalin was perfectly aware of the
German moves, for his spy network was just as good as Hitler’s.
His interpretation of the German moves, however, was completely
wrong. Stalin never fully grasped the radicalism of the Nazi regime,
still seeing it in the light of older German rightist movements, or
378 A Concise History of Russia

perhaps as a German version of Mussolini’s fascism. He also was

convinced that Hitler would not invade the Soviet Union until he
had defeated Britain, for Stalin could not imagine that Hitler would
be stupid enough to repeat the Kaiser’s mistake and fight a war
on two fronts at the same time. Thus Stalin interpreted the troop
movements as a bluff: he expected that Hitler would hold off for a
year or two, and in the meantime perhaps try to bluff the Soviets
into delivering much needed raw materials to the Reich. His worst
fear was that Soviet troops along the border might provoke Hitler
too soon; hence he ordered them to ignore German overflights and
other suspicious actions. Soviet military intelligence believed differ-
ently, but when their reports reached their top commanders, they
were shelved as not consistent with the policy and analysis that
emanated from the Kremlin. Nevertheless, in April 1941, Stalin
ordered nearly a million additional men mobilized under the cover
of large-scale maneuvers and he moved more troops west. The Red
Army now had a theoretical strength of some five million men. Only
in the last days before the war were orders issued to put some of
the troops into a state of greater readiness: the night before the
invasion Timoshenko ordered the air force to disperse the planes
on the air strips so that they would not make an easy target. Only
the Odessa military district obeyed the orders, for even in Stalin’s
Russia, commands from the center did not necessarily get through
in time or call forth instant obedience.
On Sunday, June 22, 1941, at first light – 3:30 in the morn-
ing – Hitler launched the invasion of the Soviet Union, Operation
Barbarossa, named after the medieval German warrior emperor.
Some three million German soldiers crossed the border, together
with nearly a million allies, Finns, Rumanians, Slovaks, Hungari-
ans, Italians, and small volunteer and collaborationist units from
nearly every country in Europe, including neutral ones like Sweden
(SS Nordland). Hitler’s army was fresh from victory all over the con-
tinent, from Norway to Greece, backed by an economic machine
greater than that of the USSR (if not by much) and the resources
of occupied Europe. Facing them were the five million men in the
Soviet armed forces, but almost half of them were either deployed
far in the rear or were still only in the process of formation and
training. In addition to being caught in the middle of mobilization
 War 379

and learning to use new equipment, the Soviet forces were placed
too close to the border and were easy targets for the Luftwaffe and
the German armor. The placement was a relic of the long-standing
offensive orientation of the Soviet army, which assumed that soon
after an attack the Soviet forces would move to make a series of
deep incursions into enemy territory to spoil the attack as the Red
Army moved to full mobilization. To make things worse, the Sovi-
ets erred in predicting the main direction of the German attack.
Until 1940 all Soviet war plans had assumed that the German army
would attack directly east through Belorussia toward Moscow, as
indeed turned out to be the case. In 1940, however, Timoshenko, the
new chief of staff general Georgii Zhukov, and Stalin had decided
that Hitler would more likely strike south into the Ukraine. Along
the central axis there were only farms and large forests, while the
Ukraine was still the most important industrial area of the USSR
and a major agricultural region to boot. Surely Hitler would go for
needed resources. Thousands of troops were moved south into the
Ukraine.
Instead the main blow came directly forward the east. German
armor repeated its tactics from France and slashed through Soviet
defenses along the main roads and rail lines, pushing deep into the
country. Lithuania and much of western Belorussia fell in days.
The Luftwaffe destroyed most of the Soviet air force on the ground
in the first few days, leaving the army with no air cover and no
ability to move without German knowledge. With the weight of the
German advance directed toward the center, the Soviet front was
overrun within weeks and nearly a million and a half Soviet soldiers
found themselves in captivity. Almost none of them survived, for the
Germans, as part of their racial policies, chose not to feed them and
simply let them die. To the north and south, the Germans advanced
almost as swiftly, and by the end of the summer they were at Kiev
and the gates of Leningrad.
Conditions on the Soviet side of the front were chaotic as poorly
designed communications collapsed under the onslaught, command
posts were destroyed, and large bodies of Soviet troops desperately
tried to retreat east. The Soviet commander in Belorussia was out
of communication with his men as well as with Moscow for days.
The orders from Moscow at first followed the old and now utterly
380 A Concise History of Russia

irrelevant scheme of counterattack against the invaders. Local com-

manders were lucky if they never got the orders and just followed
their instincts. Some units fought to the end, others until food and
ammunition ran out. The next orders from Moscow were to hold on
long after the situation was hopeless, and commanders who led
their troops out of entrapment found themselves under suspicion or
worse for retreating without orders. In July Stalin ordered the trial
and execution of a number of the generals whose armies had been
destroyed in the first weeks of the war.
Fortunately Stalin and army leadership did more than look for
scapegoats. On the second day of the war Stalin set up a State
Defense Committee headed by himself, soon replacing Timoshenko
with himself also as People’s Commissar of Defense, and addition-
ally he became the head of the High Command and formal supreme
commander of the armed forces. Zhukov remained as chief of staff.
Stalin thus took personal responsibility for the whole conduct of the
war. He learned to work with Zhukov and the other generals, but
his was the final decision in all matters. Sometimes his orders led to
more defeats, but ultimately they led to victory. He had, more than
ever, supreme power. The mobilization of the army continued, and
became even more essential with the loss of millions of men over
the first summer of war. As the situation at the front deteriorated,
the government began to evacuate industry from the Ukraine and
Leningrad and other areas threatened by the advancing Nazis. In
the short run this meant a fall in military production just as the
Wehrmacht was capturing and destroying masses of Soviet equip-
ment. Ultimately it was a crucial and a heroic effort, for tens of
thousands of men and machines and their families had to move
thousands of miles east to the Urals and Siberia, and then build
factory buildings to house the equipment, build housing for them-
selves, and start production on vital goods as quickly as possible.
Not just factories were evacuated: the kolhoz and state farms were
ordered to move their cattle and other larger animals to the east as
well. Huge herds of thousands of cattle moved through the cities,
prodded along by women from the villages heading toward the east.
In September the Germans began the final advance toward
Moscow, sure of victory. Hitler even considered that he could soon
send troops to help Mussolini in the Mediterranean. As the Nazis
 War 381

advanced, Soviet armies to the west of Moscow were ordered to hold

on and hundreds of thousands were encircled and perished, but their
deaths bought time. Time was of the essence, for the Germans had
no conception of Soviet resources. Their pre-invasion intelligence
had underestimated the size of the Red Army at the moment of the
attack by nearly a third, by one hundred divisions. Even in the first
weeks German commanders in the field were surprised to find that
new Soviet units suddenly appeared where they thought that resis-
tance had been smashed. Yet as the autumn advanced, German vic-
tory seemed assured: in October the foreign embassies and most of
the Soviet government evacuated east to Kuibyshev (Samara) on the
Volga. Only the announcement that Stalin was still in Moscow and
did not intend to leave staved off panic in the capital. On November
7, he appeared on the Lenin Mauseoleum on Red Square as in previ-
ous years to review the parade in honor of the October Revolution,
a major Soviet ritual. This time the soldiers marched past in the
snow straight to the front. German reconnaissance units began to
appear on the outskirts of the city, around and inside the ring high-
ways that encircle it today. The government formed volunteer units
of students, older office and factory workers, and sent them to the
front to fill the gaps torn by the attackers. Yet the situation was bet-
ter than it appeared. As the Germans plowed on toward Moscow,
the Soviets had formed a substantial strategic reserve, part of which
now moved west of the city to meet the Nazis. Now for the first time
the Germans were halted, for the apparently seamless advance to
the east had in fact cost the Wehrmacht dearly. German casualties
were greater than the German losses for all campaigns of the war
until the invasion of the USSR. German armor had lost thousands of
tanks to enemy fire, and many were inoperable from the wear and
tear of Russian conditions or out of ammunition. German engines
and automatic weapons froze in the cold. Unlike the Russians they
had not thought how to keep them working at night temperatures of
forty below freezing. Even the Luftwaffe, which had ruled the skies
in the first months, was taking rapidly mounting losses as newly
built Soviet aircraft with newly trained pilots filled the gaps left by
the massive losses of the summer. In early December, the Red Army
counterattacked, pushing the Germans away from Moscow and far
to the west, inflicting (and taking) massive casualties. By the end
382 A Concise History of Russia

of January 1942, the Nazis had lost nearly a million men and four
thousand tanks, half of them in the final battle for Moscow. The
Soviets had stopped the Wehrmacht, the first time any army had
done so since 1939.
While the Red Army’s losses were horrific, the German losses
were ultimately crippling. Germany lacked the population of the
Soviet Union, and its superbly functioning industry had not been
used to prepare supplies for a war on this scale. The German army at
Moscow lacked winter clothes not just because Hitler had assumed
a rapid victory but also because he had not counted on the massive
expenditure of supplies and the need to fully mobilize to counter
Soviet industry. He had no idea that the Soviets could produce far
more tanks and aircraft than Germany from a smaller industrial
base. By early 1942 the evacuated Soviet industries had come back
into production and began to turn out equipment in numbers Ger-
many could not match. This equipment was also superior to the
German, especially the tanks, the rocket artillery and many of the
aircraft. Now the Soviets had to learn how to use it properly, but
they had already inflicted a major strategic defeat from which Ger-
many did not have the resources to recover. Germany could no
longer defeat the Soviet Union, although Hitler had no intention of
stopping.

The German invasion was not only a military conflict but also a
political conflict as well. Stalin saw the war in political terms, as
he did everything else, and as in the case of the conduct of war, it
took him some time to understand what he was dealing with. He
made no statement at first, ordering Molotov to make the formal
announcement of war on June 22, several hours after the invasion.
Stalin’s first speech came on July 3 and reflected his determination
to fight, for he ordered a scorched earth policy in the path of the
German invaders and called on Soviet citizens to form partisan units.
The old illusions still remained, for he asserted that the Nazis were
coming to restore tsarism and the rule of the landed gentry. Though
he also stated that the Germans wanted to destroy the culture and
statehood of the Soviet peoples, his description of the Nazi aims
missed the essential truth. The Wehrmacht and its European allies
were paving the way for the extermination of the great majority of
 War 383

the Russian and other Slavic peoples and the colonization of the
territory by Germans, the famous “Lebensraum” that Hitler had
wanted from the beginning. Yet Stalin concluded with a ringing
declaration that the German people, enslaved by the Nazi leaders,
would be an ally. Nothing could have been further from the truth.
The extermination began in the first days. The orders to the Ger-
man troops had been that all “representatives of the Soviet way of
life” were to be eliminated, and that no food was to be given to
soldiers or civilians out of any misguided sense of humanity. These
orders applied to Russians, Ukrainians, and other Soviet citizens
and were behind the destruction of Soviet prisoners of war. The
extermination of the Jews also followed the first German victories,
for Einsatzgruppen began to round up Jews in occupied territory,
the first large-scale massacre taking place in Kaunas on June 25,
1941, with the enthusiastic participation of the local Lithuanian
population. Ultimately two million of the five million European
Jews who perished in the holocaust were Soviet citizens. Contrary
to Stalin’s expectations, Hitler did not restore the pre-soviet order,
keeping the collective farms since they made it easy for the Germans
to extract grain and meat from the population. The remaining facto-
ries went to German businessmen, though sabotage by the workers
meant that few really went back into production. Any remaining
Russians, elite or otherwise, were to become the slaves of the Reich
and were to be prepared for that role. Most schools closed and the
Germans frequently hanged the teachers as “representatives of the
Soviet way of life.”
The thousands of soldiers who had been surrounded by the Ger-
mans but escaped captivity formed a new menace to the invaders.
In the huge forests of Belorussia, the northern parts of the Ukraine,
and western Russia they took refuge, collected food and weapons,
and formed partisan units. The partisans began to attract local peas-
ants as well, and to attack German communications and transport.
By the fall of 1941, the disruption to the rail network was con-
siderable, seriously reducing the output of the already desperately
overstretched German supply routes. By the end of the next year
there were nearly a half million partisans under arms, and they
controlled substantial areas where the Nazis could not move. The
Soviet command established a central partisan staff to supply them
384 A Concise History of Russia

Figure 20. The Ilyushin 2m3 (Shturmovik). Designed as a ground attack

aircraft, the two-seater bomber was the Soviet Union’s most effective
warplane.

by air, sending over old and slow but sturdy and hard to detect
biplanes that could land on a dime in forest clearings. Hitler’s army
reacted to the partisan attacks with vicious brutality, exterminat-
ing village after village – men, women, and children – where they
suspected contact with partisan units. Collaborationist units from
all over Europe and the western territories of the USSR were often
more savage than the Germans in dealing with the population of
the partisan areas.
Still in Soviet hands but gripped by the vice of the German and
Finnish armies was Leningrad. The Germans and their allies had
reached the outskirts of the city in September, and from then on the
only road was over Lake Ladoga. Around the city were substantial
numbers of Soviet troops, but the Germans lacked the resources
to take it by assault, so they hoped instead to starve it out. Hitler
planned to have it destroyed when he won, as a place of no use to
the new Reich. Without effective means of replacement and further
reduced by German bombing, food supplies dropped rapidly and
 War 385

starvation began. By mid-winter ten to twenty thousand people

were dying every month. Heat and electricity virtually disappeared,
all with continuing German shelling and bombing to make things
worse. Only workers in the few remaining factories – almost all
now devoted to weapons and other war production – had anything
close to adequate rations. Fortunately the lake froze, and some
supplies could come in over the “Ice Road.” The authorities had to
improvise, opening stations in food stores that served only hot water
or tea substitutes just to keep people a bit warmer. During the next
summer the improvised transportation across the lake improved,
but by the time the Red Army raised the siege in January, 1944,
some eight hundred thousand people had starved to death.
In Leningrad many of the factories had been evacuated before the
Germans came, and more were evacuated in 1942. They were part
of the massive move of Soviet industry to the east, and the popu-
lation went as well, in the tens of millions all across the country.
The Soviets evacuated ordinary people and groups of children as
well as officials. Indeed officials were often required to stay behind
to form resistance groups, and those who tried to get out ahead
of the Germans, as in the Moscow panic of October 1941, found
themselves stopped by the NKVD and even the local populace.
Virtually everything and everyone in the country was part of the
war effort, a degree of mobilization unknown even in Germany.
Women not only staffed the hospitals and took care of orphan chil-
dren, but they also fought in the army. Anti-aircraft regiments were
mostly female, pitting young women just out of high school against
the Luftwaffe. In the army, radio operators were women as were
other auxiliary positions, and women also made up a fighter reg-
iment and two bomber regiments, including a night bomber unit.
Altogether over half a million women served in the armed forces.
The intelligentsia went to war as well, not only scientists and engi-
neers. The Soviets evacuated the universities, research institutes, and
theaters. Artists and writers who had lived in fear through the 1930s
found themselves on transport planes coming out of Leningrad with
fighter escorts. Moved east to Siberia and Central Asia, they con-
tinued to work, producing major works like Eisenstein’s epic movie
Ivan the Terrible, filmed in Kakazhstan, or Shostakovich’s Seventh
(“Leningrad”) Symphony, finished at Kuibyshev on the Volga. Their
386 A Concise History of Russia

work contributed immensely to the morale of the population, not

only by their content but also by the simple fact that something
normal was still taking place. In the rear food was spartan if gen-
erally unfailing, and housing often meant several families crammed
into a school classroom. Workers who had come east with their
factories lived in tents in the Siberian winter while they built build-
ings and barracks in which to live, sometimes starting work in new
buildings before the roofs were built. Yet most who remembered
the war remembered it as a time of privation and sorrow mixed
with enthusiasm and the warmth of solidarity. Stalin had greatly
overestimated the extent of discontent among the population, and
while his agents read mail and listened in on telephone conversa-
tions in search of German sympathizers, most people just went to
work to help the army, whatever their views of the ultimate value
of the Soviet system.

The victory at Moscow encouraged Stalin and the generals to try

to exploit their success, and early in 1942 they mounted a series of
attacks from Khar’kov in the south to well north of Moscow. All
of these offensives were costly failures. The Germans were pushed
back here and there, but with heavy Soviet losses. Again several
large units were surrounded and ground to pieces. When the spring
ended and the mud season with it, Hitler decided not to move
against Moscow again, as Zhukov and Stalin expected, but to go
south. His aim was the Caucasus with the oil supplies in Grozny and
Baku. The Third Reich was short of oil, and this seemed the way
to solve the problem. The Nazis smashed through Soviet defenses,
getting all the way to the line of the Caucasus Mountains, but also
directly east toward the Volga. To protect his flank and cut off the
Russians from Baku, he needed to cut the rail lines at Stalingrad
and cross the river itself. Stalingrad was the old Tsaritsyn, where
Stalin had first encountered warfare in 1918 and was now the site
of an immense tractor factory that was also producing tanks, but
its main importance was its location.
By the end of August the Germans were on the edge of the city,
sending wave after wave of armor and mechanized infantry against
the defenders dug into the ruins of the city. It seemed that the war
hung in the balance. Yet the German advance had brought many
 War 387

problems with it. The rail lines back to Germany were now so
long that transport was jammed up almost to the German border.
Hitler no longer had enough German troops to secure his flanks,
so the sides of the German wedge pointed at the city were held by
Italian and Rumanian troops. Most important, the defenders just
kept fighting. By the end of the year the Russian salients were down
to just a few acres, their artillery support coming from batteries on
the eastern side of the river. In one place sergeant Iakov Pavlov held
out for months with just a few dozen men in the basement of a
shattered apartment block. The fighting went from house to house,
and many Soviet soldiers decided that the most effective weapons
were sharpened trenching shovels and grenades. The Nazis could
not cross the river.
Around the burning wreckage of the city the Red Army was
preparing its trap. Huge armored forces moved up to the north
and south, facing the hapless Italians and Rumanians across the
frozen steppe. Then on November 19 they attacked with massive
artillery and air support and in four days came together to encircle
the six hundred thousand German soldiers in Stalingrad. German
attempts to supply the trapped army were futile, and in Febru-
ary the Wehrmacht’s Sixth Army surrendered. Berlin radio played
Siegfried’s Funeral March from Wagner’s opera over and over again.
Nearly a half a million men had died at Stalingrad on each side, but
Soviet victory was now assured.

The German invasion had immense consequences for Soviet for-

eign policy and for the position of the USSR in the world. The day
after the invasion the Soviet leadership was surprised to learn not
only that Great Britain wanted an alliance but also that Winston
Churchill had spoken on the radio to explain the new alliance. “No
one has been a more consistent opponent of Communism than I
have for the last twenty-five years, and I will unsay no word that I
have spoken about it. But all this fades away before the spectacle
that is now unfolding . . . I see the Russian soldiers standing on the
threshold of their native land, guarding the fields which their fathers
have tilled from time immemorial . . . I see advancing upon all this
in hideous onslaught the Nazi war machine . . . ” Churchill’s con-
clusion was that “Any man or state who fights on against Nazidom
388 A Concise History of Russia

will have our aid.” Until the rise of Hitler the Soviets had always
assumed Britain to be their main enemy, and the rapprochement
with France and Czechoslovakia in 1935 never extended to the
British Empire. The day of the invasion many Russians, including
some in the leadership, assumed that Hitler must have made a secret
treaty ending the war with Britain, so Churchill’s announcement
came as a great relief. In August, Franklin D. Roosevelt declared
that the Lend-Lease program designed to help England and any
other power fighting Hitler would be extended to the Soviet Union,
and after Pearl Harbor the United States joined the USSR and Britain
to fight Germany and Italy as well as Japan. The Soviet Union and
Japan, however, did not declare war on each other: both were far
too preoccupied elsewhere to risk another front in Eastern Siberia
or Manchuria.
Lend-Lease provided significant support to the Soviet war effort,
both in equipment and food supplies. The Studebaker trucks went
to make up the shortfall in Soviet truck production, crucial to the
support of mechanized warfare, and many of them served as launch-
ing platforms for the Katyusha rockets. The American Airocobra
fighter covered gaps in Soviet aircraft supply in 1942, and Spam
filled out the meager wartime diet for millions of Russians. If the
scale of American efforts was not decisive, the contribution was
real as was the morale effect. The Allied convoys around the North
Cape of Norway through winter seas infested with U-Boats and
under continuous bombardment from German aircraft were a dif-
ficult and dangerous operation, giving the Russians concrete proof
that they were not alone against Hitler.
For Stalin and the generals, however, the real issue was not
Lend-Lease but the possibility of a second front. After much dis-
cussion Roosevelt and Churchill decided to make their first move
in the Mediterranean, in North Africa, and then in the 1943 land-
ings in Italy. These moves led to the overthrow of Mussolini and
knocked Italy out of the war, though fighting continued against
the Germans. Stalin was deeply disappointed that the moves came
in the south rather than in France and were limited in scale; he
complained bitterly, but to no effect. He never realized the extent
of the US commitment in the Pacific theater. Finally he met with
Churchill and Roosevelt in Teheran at the end of 1943, where the
 War 389

three allies agreed that they would demand unconditional surren-

der from Germany, that the USSR would declare war on Japan as
soon as Germany was defeated, and that the second front would
consist of an allied invasion of northern France in the early sum-
mer of 1944. Stalin promised to coordinate a major offensive with
the Anglo-American landing. Issues also arose at Teheran about the
future of Europe, as Britain and America recognized by now that
the Red Army would be the one to liberate Eastern Europe from the
Nazis and reach Germany first. In October 1944, Churchill came to
Moscow and proposed to Stalin a “percentage agreement” on the
Balkans: Britain was to have predominant influence (ninety percent)
in Greece, while the Soviet Union was to have the same in Rumania.
Bulgaria was to be seventy-five percent under Soviet influence, while
the two powers would have equal shares in Yugoslavia and Hun-
gary. Stalin agreed, but Eastern Europe was a major issue again at
the Yalta conference in February 1945. There the three powers gen-
erally agreed on the joint occupation of Germany (for an undefined
period), the destruction of the legacy of Nazism, and reparations to
the Soviet Union. Stalin agreed to Roosevelt’s proposal to set up the
United Nations. Some greater agreement was achieved on the status
of Eastern Europe, such as the future Polish-Soviet boundary, and
an agreement that the future Polish government would represent
both Stalin’s Polish allies and the conservatives. Stalin promised
elections after the war. Most of the other issues involving Eastern
Europe were not settled. Roosevelt and Churchill did not want sim-
ply to cede control of Eastern Europe to the Soviet Union, but with
the Red Army in possession of most of the territory and accounting
for three quarters of the Wehrmacht’s losses, there was little that
they could do.
The fate of Eastern Europe and Germany were not just issues
of Soviet foreign policy. Since 1939 the Comintern had experience
dizzying shifts in policy. The pact with Germany implied that fas-
cism was no longer the main enemy: the war was a new “imperialist
war” and the Communists were to oppose both Hitler and the
Allies equally. The German invasion of the Soviet Union prompted
yet another abrupt change in revolutionary strategy, a return to a
variant of the Popular Front idea of 1935–1939. Stalin dissolved
the Comintern in 1943, but most Communist parties of the world
390 A Concise History of Russia

remained oriented toward Moscow. The Communists were ordered

once again to make a coalition with anyone who opposed the Nazis,
from conservative and aristocratic army officers like the French
Gaullists to the Social Democrats. In most of occupied Europe resis-
tance movements acquired this make-up, and even in France many
aristocratic Russian émigrés joined the resistance, fighting and dying
alongside working-class French Communists. As the Soviet army
passed its western borders and came into the lands allied with Hitler
or occupied by his troops, decisions had to be made. What sort of
government should the Soviets put in place? Many local Commu-
nists believed that the time had come to seize power, to make up for
the defeats of the interwar era. The Soviet tactic, however, was dif-
ferent. The new slogan was “people’s democracy,” meant to indicate
a continuation of the wartime coalition. Land reform and limited
nationalization of industry were to be central features of the new
order, not “dictatorship of the proletariat,” and the Communists
were to rule together with Socialists and even anti-fascist liberals
and conservatives.

At the moment of the German surrender at Stalingrad, all these

issues were barely on the horizon. The task was to begin to drive
the Nazis out of the country, and the Red Army moved to the west,
pushing the Germans back to their starting points from the previous
summer. In the spring of 1943, as the snow melted and the mud
dried, Hitler tried for the last time to reverse the tide of defeat.
The Wehrmacht planned a massive counter attack into the Soviet
salient around Kursk, in the middle of the steppe, ideal ground for
armored warfare. It was the German armor, the giant Ferdinand
assault guns and the new Tiger tanks that were to carry the weight
of the attack. The Red Army, however, fully reequipped and with
new skill and confidence, planned its countermeasures without flaw.
Though Stalin at first wanted a swift counter-offensive, Zhukov
and the generals persuaded him to stay in defense until the Nazis
were worn down. The German armor confronted massive fire from
artillery, rockets and anti-tank guns as well as the Soviet air force.
In a matter of days the offensive stalled and then the Soviet armor
pushed the Germans back. The Red Army went on through the rest
of the year to take back the eastern parts of the Ukraine, Kiev itself
 War 391

in November, as well as most of Russia proper. Soviet troops lifted

the siege of Leningrad in January 1944. In the next months the
Red Army surrounded and destroyed some fifty thousand German
troops in one battle at Korsun, southwest of Kiev, pounding them
to pieces in the snow with artillery and air strikes.
Hitler had now lost the war. All that he could do was feed more
men and equipment into the meat grinder in the hope of staving
off the inevitable defeat. By the early summer of 1944 the Soviets
were ready to launch a huge offensive through Belorussia; the offen-
sive was timed to coincide with the landings at Normandy. In this
one operation the Red Army encircled the whole of the German
army group Center, hundreds of thousands of German soldiers,
and moved into Poland. There they faced an unpleasant surprise.
Without informing the Soviet command, the Polish Home Army,
the main underground resistance group, staged an uprising against
the Germans in Warsaw. The Soviet army was at the end of its
operational line, on the other bank of the Vistula, with little capac-
ity to help the Poles quickly. Molotov wanted to push on, not to
help the Poles but just to exploit the victory. Zhukov was against
any new offensive, for the army was exhausted and needed to rest
and reequip. In any case, Stalin decided that it was not necessary;
he was not going to help his opponents in the Polish Home Army
and the Poles were left to fight on alone. In the same summer the
Soviets moved south into Rumania, and the pro-German govern-
ments in Rumania and Bulgaria collapsed. In Yugoslavia the Red
Army linked up with Tito’s partisans and went north toward Hun-
gary. In Budapest the Germans put up furious resistance, but the
Soviets were able to crush the resistance and move on to Vienna.
Hitler’s coalition continued to collapse. In Finland, Baron Manner-
heim, the commander in chief of the army, became the president of
the country and immediately took Finland out of the war, signing
an armistice in September.
The Red Army was now pounding at the gates of Hitler’s Ger-
many. The Nazi command placed the bulk of their army in Poland
and Eastern Germany facing the Soviets, even with the Americans
and British moving rapidly to the German western border. The last
year of the war brought incredible slaughter, as the now desperate
Wehrmacht faced a well-equipped and huge Red Army. The Soviet
392 A Concise History of Russia

command had learned how to fight and now had the equipment
to do it, and Stalin had learned to work with his generals. The
Russians fought their way through Poland, in the process liberating
those prisoners of Auschwitz and other Nazi death camps who were
still alive. Soviet soldiers, many of whom had spent time in Soviet
labor camps, had a glimpse of something even more sinister in the
gas chambers and crematoria. As they moved into Germany, they
found a country in ruins but still showing the signs of pre-war pros-
perity. As one Soviet soldier said to a Western journalist, “if they
had all this, why did they attack us?” As the Soviets approached
Berlin, Hitler threw everything he had into battle. Northeast of the
Nazi capital stood SS Charlemagne, the French SS brigade, and high
school boys were mobilized to fight Soviet tanks with hand-held
anti-tank weapons. None such desperate measures nor the persis-
tence of the German army could stand up to the huge barrages by
152-millimeter self-propelled guns, rockets, and masses of heavy
Stalin tanks. Even with such overwhelming force, the encirclement
of Hitler’s capital and the final assault through the flaming ruins of
the city cost the Red Army hundreds of thousands of men. By early
May of 1945, they had fought their way into the city and raised the
Soviet flag over the Reichstag. The Red Army had pounded a stake
into the heart of the Third Reich.
 21
Growth, Consolidation,
and Stagnation

The Soviet Union emerged from the war victorious but with tremen-
dous population losses and economic damage. The number of dead
was at least twenty million, twenty-seven million by some estimates,
including three million prisoners of war, some seven million soldiers
killed in battle, two million Soviet Jews, and at least fifteen million
Russian, Ukrainian, and Belorussian civilians. All areas occupied
by the Germans were devastated, including the USSR’s richest agri-
cultural land and the whole Ukrainian industrial complex, which
had supplied the country with almost half of its products on the
eve of the war. Housing stock and city services were smashed, and
even in unoccupied areas the strain of the war showed everywhere.
To make things worse, a bad harvest in 1946 led to famine condi-
tions in much of the country. Soviet reparations from Germany and
Eastern European countries helped somewhat, but the scale of loss
and destruction was so great that even such measures provided only
small recompense for the losses.
At the same time, the victory brought with it a new order in the
Kremlin. Soon after the war, Stalin ordered the People’s Commis-
sariats to be called Ministries, for he announced (in private) that
such names had been appropriate to a revolutionary state, but that
the Soviet Union had now consolidated itself enough to operate
with more permanent institutions. For the first time Stalin and his
inner circle began to delegate power to a series of state committees,
usually headed by the principal ministers who managed the main
areas of the economy. In principle, Stalin was no longer going to
393
394 A Concise History of Russia

monitor all the details of government and economic activity, and

some new faces joined the pre-war leadership. Beria and Zhdanov
(until his death in 1948) continued on in Stalin’s inner circle, while
Molotov, Mikoyan, Kaganovich, and Voroshilov remained from
the pre-war years but were less powerful, especially Voroshilov,
disgraced by his military failures. New faces in the top leadership
were Malenkov (vice-chairman of the Council of Minsters under
Stalin’s chairmanship), Nikolai Bulganin (minister of defense and
a longtime economic manager), and Khrushchev, until 1949 head
of the Ukrainian party organization and then of the Moscow city
party. To a large extent the system did work in a more regular
fashion for the last eight years of Stalin’s life, but at the same time
he did not refrain from scolding and bullying his closest collabora-
tors and from directing a series of political “cases” with murderous
results. The cult of Stalin reached its apogee in the post-war years.
Besides the ubiquitous portraits and statues an official adulatory
biography appeared on his seventieth birthday. The press produced
endless accolades to the “great leader of peoples,” the great Marx-
ist, and the genius military commander Stalin. As much as he may
have realized that the USSR needed a more normal mode of govern-
ment, Stalin could not let go of the reins of power, and continued to
behave like a revolutionary commissar of the civil war era, jumping
into the middle of the fray with a firing squad ready.
The main task before the Soviet leadership was first of all recon-
struction of the war damage, and then the continuation of “socialist
construction,” including the progressive technical modernization of
industry.
In some ways reconstruction was the easy part, for it meant the
rebuilding of previously existing plants and infrastructure, and it
was largely completed by 1950. The expansion and modernization
of industry was more complicated. It is the case that the growth
rates of the post-war era were some of the highest (actual) growth
rates in Soviet history. In those years many of the pre-war invest-
ments began to pay off, with huge growth in the Urals-Western
Siberian metallurgical and mining areas. To a large extent the cru-
cial Soviet industries came up to world standards, and an enormous
nuclear industry came into being, at this time largely for military
purposes but with planning for power generation and other civilian
 Growth, Consolidation, and Stagnation 395

uses in the future. What did not happen was proportionate invest-
ment in consumer goods or agriculture, the latter still hampered
by the leadership’s fascination with agronomic fantasies such as the
“grass-field” system of crop rotation. Reconstruction brought hous-
ing only to the pre-war level, with most people living (at best) in
communal apartments. A rare improvement of the post-war years
was in medicine, for the number of doctors grew again by seventy-
five percent, and the 1946 famine did not lead to massive epidemics,
as had occurred in 1932–33.
Stalin’s insistence on centralized discipline and his assumption
that all disagreement masked political subversion created a series of
incidents among the leadership that terrified even Stalin’s allies. The
first sign was Marshal Zhukov’s demotion in 1946 to commander
of a local military district. This and later incidents fell in a period of
intense ideological campaigning that affected more than just cultural
life. The party issued reproofs to composers, poets, and biologists,
but it also launched campaigns to celebrate Russian culture and its
importance (as well as selected aspects of the non-Russian cultures)
as part of a closing-off of Western influence wherever possible.
After the creation of the state of Israel in 1948, the Soviet authori-
ties suddenly launched a campaign against “cosmopolitanism” that
was in fact directed against the many Jews prominent in Soviet cul-
ture as well as the state and party apparatus. The campaign soon
died down, but not without casualties. The wartime Jewish Anti-
Fascist Committee was dissolved and its leading members – Yiddish
poets, Jewish scientists, and party officials – were arrested and shot.
On Stalin’s orders the security forces killed the famous actor and
director of the Moscow Yiddish theater, Solomon Mikhoels, in a
faked auto accident in Minsk. It is in these years that travel and
correspondence abroad became essentially impossible for almost all
Soviet citizens. The irony of these campaigns and repressive mea-
sures was that the war had for the first time given the Soviet Union
legitimacy in the eyes of millions of its people, but rather than rely-
ing on that new found legitimacy, the party simply tightened the
screws.
Potentially even more serious was the Leningrad affair of 1949.
Arising from an arcane dispute over a trade fair held in Leningrad,
it soon turned into the dismissal of several thousand party members
396 A Concise History of Russia

in the city and the secret trial of nine local party leaders, charged
with treasonable offenses. Six were executed and three sent to
camps, their real crimes apparently being the creation (in Stalin’s
mind) of a sort of local fiefdom that did not consult the central
leadership. Another victim was Nikolai Voznesenskii, who had
headed Soviet planning since 1938. Peripherally involved in the
Leningrad affair, his actual crime seems to have been conceal-
ing information from Stalin about the 1949 plan, something the
aging dictator would not leave unpunished. Voznesenskii also per-
ished. In 1952 Stalin called a Congress of the Party, the first since
1939, where Georgii Malenkov presented the main report on Soviet
achievements, including a wildly inaccurate account of the supposed
progress of agriculture. This sort of public spectacle gave an appear-
ance of unity in the party leadership, but in reality Stalin’s behavior
was beginning to worry his comrades. In 1951 the Ministry of State
Security forces arrested more than a dozen Georgian party officials,
charging them with nationalism and spying for the West (the “Min-
grelian affair”), resulting in the exile of over ten thousand people
from Georgia. Late in 1952 a new “conspiracy” surfaced, in which
a supposed plot of Kremlin doctors, most of whom were Jewish,
planned to murder Stalin. The horizon was darkening.
In the background of these lurid and sinister events, the party
leadership was beginning to realize that some changes were needed.
Malenkov and other leaders knew perfectly well that agriculture was
not prospering. The collective farms managed to produce enough to
feed the people at a sufficient but low level. Every harvest was still
a gamble, and meat and dairy products came overwhelmingly from
the collective farmers’ private plots. Another area of crisis was the
GULAG. By 1950 the special settlements had two and a half million
people, most of them from various national minorities deported for
unreliability: Germans, North Caucasian peoples, Crimean Tatars,
as well as some remaining kulaks. The camp system had about the
same number, in this case heavily Russian, including political pris-
oners from the 1930s, Nazi collaborators real and mythical, and
a great majority of people convicted of non-political crimes and
common murderers and thieves. For the GULAG administration the
problem was that prison labor was no longer economically effective.
Though prisoners made up some ten percent of the work force in
 Growth, Consolidation, and Stagnation 397

logging and construction and were used in projects where ordinary

labor seemed too expensive, the costs of the GULAG were too great.
The expenditures on administration and hundreds of thousands of
guards were just too high, and to make matters worse, the prison
labor system rested on unskilled labor. Even in logging, mechaniza-
tion was beginning to penetrate Soviet industry, and prison laborers
lacked the skills and motivation to use the new equipment. By 1952
the GULAG officials and Beria himself were considering some sort
of changes in the system.
Then Stalin died at his dacha on March 5, 1953. The response
of Stalin’s inner circle was to declare collective leadership, with
Khrushchev (now made first secretary of the party) and Malenkov
(now made chair of the Council of Ministers) as the main figures.
The immediate problem they faced was Beria. Since 1946 Beria had
not headed the security police, the Ministry of State Security or the
Ministry of Internal Affairs, but he did have Stalin’s ear. He was also
head of the Special Committee within the defense network that ran
the increasingly important nuclear industry, at that time still almost
entirely working for military production. In the new division of
power after Stalin’s death Beria obtained the united Ministry of
Internal Affairs and State Security. Once again, as in 1938, he was
in charge of all police functions. The first political crisis of the new
regime came at the end of June, when Malenkov raised the issue of
Beria at the Presidium of the party (the new name for the Politburo).
The meeting on June 26 was actually a conspiracy, for Beria was
not told that his fate was on the agenda. Right in the meeting
Marshal Zhukov and a group of officers arrested him. A week later
Malenkov and Khrushchev explained their actions to the Central
Committee, claiming that Beria was trying to control the party
through the security police and was aiming for absolute power.
He was an intriguer who had poisoned Stalin’s mind against the
other leaders and ultimately was an agent of Western imperialism.
He was presenting himself as a reformer to create a political base
in the party. After a closed trial, Beria was executed in a military
bunker by the Moscow River.
The removal of Beria solved only one problem. Even before his
arrest the new leadership knew that some changes had to take
place. Agriculture was in poor shape, the camp system was in crisis,
398 A Concise History of Russia

and ferment in eastern Germany was creating a problem in East-

ern Europe. Khrushchev sponsored a series of agricultural reforms,
higher purchase prices for kolhoz products and lower taxes on
the peasants’ private plots. After Stalin’s death Khrushchev had
acquired the position of first secretary of the Communist Party,
but Malenkov was the prime minister and Molotov still a powerful
minister of foreign affairs. Both sat on the Presidium of the party
and all of its members, with Khrushchev leading the chorus, pro-
claimed that the party and country now had collective leadership. To
carry out his plans, however, Khrushchev needed to eliminate poten-
tial rivals. First he managed to convince his colleagues to demote
Malenkov from the position of prime minister to minister of electri-
fication and replace him with Bulganin. He then moved to sideline
Molotov, though the latter remained foreign minister. By the time
of the 1955 Geneva Conference it was clear that Khrushchev was
the most powerful, not Bulganin or Molotov.
While these maneuvers in the Kremlin were bringing Khrushchev
to the top, the leader was carrying on in secret a complete revision
of the Stalin era policies of repression. The news of Stalin’s death
and the first reforms provoked revolts in the GULAG in 1953 and
1954 that were put down by the military, but the process of release
began, from the camps and labor colonies as well as from the spe-
cial settlements. Almost a million were released by the beginning
of 1955. Equally important were the various investigations that the
authorities launched under the aegis of the USSR Supreme Court
to examine the more egregious cases of execution and imprison-
ment back to the 1930s. Their findings were overwhelmingly that
in the cases of these victims they found “an absence of the com-
ponents of a crime” (otsutstvie sostava prestupleniia), leading to
their release and the posthumous rehabilitation of the dead. Reha-
bilitation was not merely symbolic, for it meant that the families
of those who perished were no longer enemies of the state, and
if they had languished in the camps, they were released. All over
the Soviet Union hundreds of thousands of people found them-
selves with a ticket home and papers allowing them to live normal
lives, returning to families some had not seen for fifteen or more
years, and whose families did not even know if they were alive.
For the time being, the release and rehabilitation of the prisoners
 Growth, Consolidation, and Stagnation 399

and the dead took place in silence. Nothing appeared in the news-
papers.
At the end of 1955 Khrushchev convinced his colleagues, even
those who had been Stalin’s closest associates like Molotov and
Kaganovich, to establish a party commission to look into Stalin’s
“violations of socialist legality,” particularly the extermination of
most of the party elite in 1937–38. The head of the commission was
P. N. Pospelov, a former editor of Pravda and to all appearances
a fervent Stalinist. His commission’s report became the basis of
Khrushchev’s famous “secret speech” at the Twentieth Congress of
the Communist Party in February 1956. Khrushchev’s speech, with
additions from himself and editorial work by another party ideol-
ogist, M. M. Suslov, came at the end of the Congress. As everyone
was packing to go home, the announcement came to the Soviet and
foreign Communists that there would an additional session. There,
Khrushchev read his speech for four hours (with a short break) to
a stunned and silent audience. In it he blamed all the crimes of the
1930s and after on Stalin personally, with some room for Beria.
He focused primarily on the destruction of the Central Committee
in 1937–38, seventy percent of whose members had perished, and
on Stalin’s conduct of the war. Neither of his accounts was fully
honest, for in blaming Stalin for the terror he omitted the role of
Molotov and other leaders, including himself, to say nothing of the
thousands of enthusiastic denouncers of wreckers and spies from
among the population. Khrushchev’s account of Stalin’s role in the
war was simply wrong, giving rise to numerous legends that came
to be refuted only after 1991. He said almost nothing about collec-
tivization, which ultimately involved more people and more deaths
than the terror. The point, however, was to shift the blame onto
Stalin for all the crimes of the past and to underscore the impor-
tance of the collective leadership of the party, to avoid “the cult
of personality” that surrounded Stalin in his lifetime. To prevent a
recurrence of such horrors, the need was for collective leadership
and the preservation of “socialist legality.”
The leadership had debated how much to publicize the speech,
and the result was a compromise. It was not published in the Soviet
Union (it appeared only in 1989) but was circulated among party
organizations where it was read in its entirety to party members,
400 A Concise History of Russia

some seven million people, and the whole of the Komsomol, more
than eighteen million. As it was also circulated to foreign Commu-
nists, the speech got to the West through Poland and was quickly
printed in many translations. Khrushchev’s lurid depictions of tor-
ture and execution (taken directly from Pospelov’s report) were a
tremendous shock to foreign leftists, especially in the West, but
elsewhere reaction was mixed. In China Mao Tse-tung never really
approved of it, and Stalin’s works remained canonical in the Chi-
nese party. In the Soviet Union itself the report produced pro-Stalin
riots by thousands of students in Tbilisi and Gori in Stalin’s native
Georgia, and it caused outbursts of violent criticism of the regime
among Moscow intellectuals. Mostly, however, the population was
more concerned with meat prices and accepted the new policies,
even if many harbored more positive views of the Soviet past than
those now propagated by Khrushchev.
The main effects of the secret speech were in Eastern Europe,
leading to riots in Poland and the Hungarian revolution in the
fall of 1956. Khrushchev survived these threats with his power
intact, and moved on with more reform projects. In the late 1950s
the release of prisoners and special settlers grew to a flood. The
deported nationalities from the North Caucasus returned home,
their autonomous republics restored. (Crimean Tatars, Volga Ger-
mans, and some other groups, however, did not return, though
their personal legal statuses were restored.) By 1960 the GULAG
had come to an end. More change was in the works. Soviet industry
was doing much better than agriculture, but the pressure to build
a fully modern society, now in competition with the United States,
mandated greater progress in both manufacturing and agriculture.
Khrushchev publicly called on Soviet agriculture to surpass US pro-
duction in meat and milk products. For industry the solution he
adopted early in 1957 was to decentralize the economy, creating
“Councils of the National Economy” on the regional level instead
of the central industrial ministries that had managed the economy
since the 1930s.
Before this plan could be implemented, a new crisis arose, this
time in the central leadership of the party. Molotov, Malenkov,
and Kaganovich had been discontented with Khrushchev for some
time. Molotov was unhappy with the partial reconciliation with
 Growth, Consolidation, and Stagnation 401

Tito, the increasing talk of peaceful coexistence with the West, and
with the increased priority given to agriculture and consumer goods.
His allies shared these doubts, and also opposed the growing per-
sonal power of Khrushchev. Behind these particular concerns was
the looming issue of de-Stalinization: how far would Khrushchev
go? The lesson of Hungary was that the process could get out of
hand, and even without that, as the main survivors of Stalin’s old
guard they were themselves acutely vulnerable. In the early months
of 1957 they lobbied the members of the Presidium, gaining seven
votes – themselves, the aging Voroshilov, Bulganin, and two impor-
tant economic managers – out of eleven for ousting Khrushchev
from power. The plotters then told Khrushchev that they needed to
meet to discuss a joint appearance in Leningrad for its anniversary,
but when he arrived on June 18, he learned that they wanted to
replace him as the leader of the party. Furious debate raged and
Mikoyan, alone of the Stalin old guard in support of Khrushchev,
left the room briefly and went to Leonid Brezhnev and Elena Furt-
seva (the only woman ever to play a role in Soviet leadership), both
candidate members of the Presidium. He told them to contact the
Minister of Defense and a candidate member of the Presidium, Mar-
shal Zhukov, who was absent because the plotters had sent him off
on maneuvers. Brezhnev raced to the telephone and summoned the
Marshal, who arrived in the Kremlin while the debate still raged.
Molotov had his seven votes, but all but one of the candidate mem-
bers stuck by Khrushchev. Mikoyan and others had also contacted
the Central Committee members resident in and near Moscow, and
by the party statute the ultimate arbiter of such decisions was the
Central Committee (CC). Molotov and the others at first refused
to meet with the CC members, but soon realized that they had no
choice, especially with Zhukov unwavering in opposition to their
plans. He had been the man who had arrested Beria and had the
loyalty of the armed forces. The full Central Committee convened
on June 22, 1957, the sixteenth anniversary of Hitler’s invasion.
These events had taken place in secret, and only a very few were
aware that something was up. For a week the CC, some two hun-
dred strong, lambasted Molotov and his allies, accusing them of
mistaken policies, splitting the party, trying to seize power, ignoring
the Central Committee, and bringing up the behavior of Molotov
402 A Concise History of Russia

and Kaganovich in the great terror. The party elite did not want a
return to the fear and despotism of the Stalin era. One of the most
outspoken was Brezhnev, a provincial party leader from the Ukraine
who had only recently entered the ranks of the party’s central elite.
Finally Khrushchev and his supporters denounced the three main
plotters as an “anti-party group” and expelled them from the Pre-
sidium, replacing them with Brezhnev and Furtseva. In Stalin’s time
the plotters could have expected only death: instead they received
minor appointments, Molotov going as ambassador to Mongolia.
He and his allies had grossly underestimated the new party elite that
had come into power since the 1930s – people with a great deal of
experience in wartime and economic management and who were
appalled at the prospect of a return to the Stalin era. These younger
people were Khrushchev’s base in the party, and they would remain
in power until the 1980s.
Molotov had criticized Khrushchev for trying to create a new
“cult of personality” and run everything himself, but the Central
Committee had taken that charge as mere demagoguery. They were
to be proved to a large extent wrong in the coming years. Only a
few months later Khrushchev arranged the demotion of Marshal
Zhukov, accusing him of ignoring party control of the armed forces
and despotic behavior. These charges had some truth to them, but
his removal from the Ministry of Defense and the Presidium meant
that Khrushchev now had no rivals at the top. He was not a dictator
like Stalin, but he alone was at the pinnacle of power in the USSR.
Khrushchev used his power to conduct a foreign policy that
increasingly involved bluffing his way through crises, alternating
cautious diplomacy with wild risks, the most famous being the
Cuban missile crisis of 1962. He also faced the increasing disinte-
gration of the Soviet bloc, as Albania and Rumania gradually turned
into independent Stalinist states, and most important, China moved
inexorably away from the USSR toward the Cultural Revolution.
Mao and his allies in the Communist movement saw Khrushchev
as the embodiment of “revisionism,” of a turn away from the true
revolutionary path. Khrushchev’s colleagues in the Kremlin most
certainly did not share Mao’s views, though they did think that
Khrushchev had frequently exacerbated the conflict by his clumsy
personal style. All of these events undermined his standing with the
 Growth, Consolidation, and Stagnation 403

party elite, but equally problematic were the economic policies he

pursued.
The problem here was not Khrushchev’s goals. The party elite
clearly agreed that the country needed a radical improvement in
agriculture. In the late 1950s the urban population still lived largely
on black bread, sausage when it was available, and whatever could
be afforded from the peasant market. Consumer goods were far
more available than earlier but hard to actually obtain. Hence
Khrushchev’s desire to put more resources into agriculture, con-
sumer goods, and even housing, was extremely popular not just
with the people but with the party leaders. They realized that they
could not maintain stability if living standards did not improve
radically.
The biggest problem was agriculture. One of his first acts was
to abolish the machine–tractor stations set up in the 1930s and
transfer their machinery to the kolhozes, a move that meant much
greater autonomy for the farms. More was to come. On his 1959
trip to the United States he caused a considerable stir by his visits to
American farms in Iowa and his meetings with American farmers.
From this experience he seems to have been confirmed in his belief
in large-scale, higher-technology farming, for American agriculture
was already turning from family farms toward agribusiness. He
realized that the USSR was way behind in the production and use
of chemical fertilizer. The Stalinist industrialization model had con-
sciously favored metallurgy and coal over chemicals and oil, as they
were more suited to the then level of economic development as well
as more important for defense production. This decision meant that
increases in agricultural production, which did occur after the mid-
1930s, came from mechanization, hybridization of plants, and more
systematic crop rotation, rather than from the use of fertilizer or pes-
ticides. None of these methods did more than keep pace with rapidly
increasing urbanization, and to make matters worse Stalin and his
agricultural bosses had accepted various crank schemes in agron-
omy like the notorious “grass-field” system. This was the notion,
accepted by the authorities from the late 1930s, that food grains
should be rotated with grasses rather than clover or other plants
that aid nitrogen fixation. The system became a major bugbear
for Khrushchev, who demanded that Soviet agriculture follow the
404 A Concise History of Russia

rotation patterns accepted in American and other agricultural sys-

tems, and in 1963 he got his way.
Unfortunately Khrushchev’s programs combined solid planning
with dubious schemes like the virgin lands project. Khrushchev, who
considered himself something of an agricultural expert because of
his years in the Ukraine, was aware that there was a great deal of
uncultivated land in Western Siberia and Kazakhstan. To him the
solution was obvious: the Soviet Union’s low yield in grain could
be solved by sending thousands of settlers to these areas to put
the steppe under the plow. The result was a 1930s-style mobiliza-
tion, with the Komsomol in the lead, sending young people out to
live in tents while they sowed grain and built houses. The over-
all size of the Soviet harvest did increase rapidly as a result, but
the program also took resources from modernizing the collective
farms and it turned out that much of the land was indeed fertile
but too arid for continuous cultivation. Environmental degradation
was the inevitable result, with falling output. The Kazakh leader-
ship had warned Khrushchev that there was not much suitable new
land, but he simply replaced these naysayers with his cronies from
Kiev and Moscow.
Besides the virgin lands, his other agricultural obsession was
corn. Khrushchev knew even before he went to America that corn
was a major component of animal feed throughout the world,
and he decided that the Soviet Union should produce corn. Most
agronomists thought that it was not a suitable crop outside of some
small areas in the far south of the country, but Khrushchev would
not agree, even trying to force the authorities in the Baltic republics
to grow corn in place of the more traditional crops. Much time and
money was expended trying to find a hybrid that would grow well
under various conditions, but the project just turned into another
centrally sponsored campaign with no major results. Khrushchev,
however, would not give up.
Khrushchev’s record in industry was mixed. The 1950s were
a period of very high growth rates, even after the end of post-
war reconstruction. Soviet achievements in technology, such as
the building of a nuclear industry and rockets that could go into
space were visible symbols of a modern state. Most of the nuclear
development was still secret, but the Sputnik launch in 1957 was
 Growth, Consolidation, and Stagnation 405

a worldwide event. Even more spectacular was Iurii Gagarin’s flight

into space in 1961, followed by a whole series of space flights. Until
the American moon landing in 1969, the Soviets seemed to be way
ahead in the space race. Along with these very real achievements
there were persistent problems. The new decentralized management
system was no better than the old one, and in many areas it sim-
ply added a new layer of bureaucracy. More promising was the
decision, which Khrushchev enthusiastically supported if he did not
originate, of turning massive resources toward the chemical indus-
try and the production of oil and natural gas. The two were related,
as much of the raw material for the chemical industry would be
petroleum byproducts. The Soviet Union would have plastic. For
Khrushchev, the chemical industry was also to be a panacea for
agriculture, as he did realize that corn and the virgin lands were not
enough.
Unfortunately none of these plans addressed immediate problems.
The decisions made in 1959–1960 did lay the basis for subsequent
massive developments that shifted the energy base from coal to oil
and gas by the 1970s and created a huge chemical industry, but
there was little to show for it in the short run. Perhaps his most
successful program for the average person was the first attempts
at mass housing, the five story (with no elevator) small apartment
houses that mushroomed around Moscow and other large cities.
These were no longer communal apartments and although they
were small they had the usual modern conveniences.
Khrushchev kept tinkering with agriculture and proclaiming
grand goals. In 1961 he held another party congress in which he
announced that the Soviet Union was going to “build communism,”
Marx’s second stage beyond socialism in which the state would
wither away among a universal abundance of all possible goods
and services. For a population that was still struggling with deficit
goods, long lines at stores, and high prices at the peasant market,
this program tasted of megalomania. In the next year the authorities
even faced a riot in the southern town of Novocherkassk – a riot
entirely with economic causes that was harshly repressed.
Coming on top of the Cuban missile crisis, the economic prob-
lems were increasingly disturbing. To top it off, Khrushchev did
seem to be constructing a “cult of personality.” Movies appeared
406 A Concise History of Russia

chronicling his trips abroad in loving detail with titles like Our
Nikita Sergeevich. With his son-in-law Aleksei Adzhubei control-
ling Izvestiia, one of the two main newspapers, his doings were
spread all over the country. He appeared at various meetings with
writers and artists, lecturing them about politics and art, the most
famous being his performance at an exhibit of mildly modernist
art in 1962, where he told the artists that their work looked like
a donkey’s tail had painted it. The party leadership did not neces-
sarily disagree, but disliked his practice of dealing with these issues
off the cuff and without consultation. It was too much like Stalin’s
incursions into economics and linguistics. Khrushchev also antago-
nized large numbers of people by a new campaign against religion.
After Stalin’s recognition of the Orthodox Church and most other
religions at the end of the war, the churches gradually began to
acquire a modest position in Soviet society. Khrushchev decided to
change that, and embarked on another massive wave of persecution.
Fortunately it lacked the murderous results of the 1930s, but it did
result in the closing of many churches, arrests, and the virtual pro-
scription of religion from Soviet life. The party elite was certainly
not in favor of religion, but like Stalin, they no longer thought it
was a major issue and preferred simply to control it. Khrushchev’s
campaign was unnecessary and was the result of his personal quirks
imposed on the country.
Ironically the straw that broke the camel’s back for Brezhnev and
the other party leaders came from the intersection of agriculture
and science, for a long time one of the chief sore points of the Soviet
system. Khrushchev, for all his anti-Stalinism, remained a convinced
supporter of Trofim Lysenko and his officially sponsored 1949 con-
demnation of modern genetics. Lysenko had his own fiefdom in
the network of agricultural research institutes, but the Academy of
Sciences kept most of his cronies out. Early in 1964 Khrushchev
tried to get a number of these cronies elected to the Academy of Sci-
ences, but the physicists, led by Andrei Sakharov and Igor Tamm,
mobilized so much opposition that the prospects were voted down.
Khrushchev was furious, though his own scientist daughter tried to
persuade him that Lysenko’s work was simply wrong. At a full meet-
ing of the Central Committee in July, after a long rambling speech
about agriculture, Khrushchev suddenly announced that part of the
 Growth, Consolidation, and Stagnation 407

problem was with the scientists, with Sakharov’s and the Academy’s
meddling in politics, as he saw it, to reject the Lysenkoites. Then he
announced that they should just abolish the Academy as a relic of
the nineteenth century.
Brezhnev and his colleagues decided that the time had come.
The Academy issue was only one of many, but it was just too
much. As they were struggling to modernize Soviet society, here
was their leader trying to wreck the principal source of innovation,
their only hope of catching up to the West. In October 1964, the
Central Committee met again, presenting a whole list of charges
against Khruschev, including the Academy affair. He did recognize
his “rudeness” about Sakharov and the Academy and his obses-
sion with corn, but he continued to defend this behavior in the
Cuban missile crisis (“the risk was inevitable”) and in the various
Berlin crises. The Committee voted him out, placing Brezhnev in
the position of head of the party and Aleksei Kosygin, an economic
manager, in the position of Prime Minister.
The new regime largely continued Khrushchev’s policies without
his erratic style. The regional Economic Councils were quickly abol-
ished, and the more exotic agricultural campaigns ceased. There was
no return to Stalinist methods of rule. Stalin remained unmention-
able in most contexts, though some of the World War II generals did
describe aspects of his wartime leadership in memoirs, mostly rather
negatively. In history textbooks and public statements the achieve-
ments of the Stalin era were attributed to “the party and people,”
and accounts of his crimes remained as they stood in 1964. Further
revelations ceased. The new policy produced some disquiet in the
intelligentsia, but for most of the population Stalin was no longer
an issue. If anything, popular estimation of the former “great leader
of peoples” was more positive than the official line. In two impor-
tant respects the Brezhnev era actually brought further liberaliza-
tion. The campaign against religion came to an end, establishing a
modus vivendi with the Soviet Union’s various religions that lasted
until the 1980s: religion was discouraged, but not prohibited, and
the artistic heritage of Orthodoxy in icon-painting and architecture
became the object of extensive study for the first time. In science
the new regime totally abandoned Lysenko and restored genetics to
Soviet biology. The last remnant of Stalinist science disappeared.
408 A Concise History of Russia

The first decade or so of the Brezhnev era was a period of

enormous economic growth. Plans laid under Khrushchev came
to fruition, as vast new fields of natural gas went into production.
In only twenty years gas production increased tenfold, with about
half coming from Siberia and a quarter from Turkmenistan and
Uzbekistan. Whole new cities sprang up, like Navoi in Uzbekistan,
named in typical Soviet fashion for a medieval Central Asian poet.
New oil fields opened up, mainly in Western Siberia, and produc-
tion nearly doubled by the 1980s. The Soviet Union launched a
huge program in nuclear power, starting with the Beloiarsk station
in the Urals. Beloiarsk followed a largely experimental reactor built
near Moscow in the 1950s. It employed a slow-neutron reactor, a
design not later used in the Soviet Union, and it produced its first
electricity in 1964. Eventually the Soviet Union built nearly fifty
nuclear power plants with pressurized water or graphite moderated
designs, the latter being the version that failed at Chernobyl. By the
1980s nuclear reactors produced around a quarter of the country’s
electricity.
The huge growth in the energy sector signaled a shift from coal to
petroleum-based energy sources and nuclear power. It also changed
the distribution of energy among the republics, for coal had been
mined mainly in the Ukraine until World War II, then increasingly
in the Russian republic and Kazakhstan, although the Ukraine still
produced almost half of Soviet coal. Oil, by contrast was ninety
percent the product of the Russian republic and gas was nearly
eighty percent. To some extent nuclear power reset the balance,
for the policy was to build nuclear power stations where other
resources were absent or in decline. Thus the Chernobyl graphite
moderated reactor began to produce electricity in 1977, and the
Ukraine came to depend on nuclear power for half its electricity,
in contrast to only twenty percent for the USSR as a whole. The
southern Ukrainian city of Zaporozhe received the largest nuclear
power facility in Europe, whose reactors came on line starting in
1985, fortunately with the safer pressurized light water reactors.
The other effect of the massive increase in the energy base was that
the Soviet Union began to export oil and gas to Eastern Europe and
the world in general. Trade with the West as well as Asia began
to increase rapidly in the 1950s, but oil and gas exports were in
 Growth, Consolidation, and Stagnation 409

a whole different league. In Eastern Europe, the new exports sped

up the transition inaugurated under Khrushchev from one in which
Soviet satellites subsidized the USSR with low resource prices to
the reverse. In the 1960s Soviet gas and oil went to “fraternal”
socialist countries at considerably below market price. The export
of oil to the West compensated for these subsidies by bringing in
large amounts of hard currency that allowed the Soviets to make
much needed purchases of technology and grain abroad.
As elsewhere, the nuclear industry was also tied into military pro-
duction, which allowed the Soviet Union to reach rough parity with
the United States in the late 1960s, for the first time. The founda-
tion of this parity was the development of nuclear submarines and of
Intercontinental Ballistic Missiles (ICBMs), which now could actu-
ally strike the United States from the USSR in the event of war.
Long-range bombers were no longer necessary. The result was an
increasingly expensive arms race that absorbed huge amounts of
capital and trained personnel, which the USSR could not afford
as easily as its American rival. The arms race was only part of the
social and ecological cost of the final decades of Soviet industrializa-
tion. Rivers and forests were polluted with nuclear waste, leading to
serious health problems in the affected areas. The oil and gas fields
disturbed the fragile sub-arctic ecology, and hydropower meant the
flooding of large areas, removing the inhabitants and causing all
sorts of changes in the environment, many of them totally unan-
ticipated. This was not merely the story of arrogant party officials
pushing scientists and engineers to construct shoddy plants in pris-
tine nature: the scientists were convinced that their designs were
perfectly safe and the ecological effects were minor. Indeed it was
the physicists who most consistently pushed for more nuclear power
plants, convincing party officials who worried about the massive
costs.
The early Brezhnev years also saw a radical transformation of
Soviet agriculture, at least of its technology. The same collective
farms that had operated for decades without enough fertilizer and
pesticides were using three to five times as much as American farms
by the late 1970s. In 1966 the authorities abolished the labor-day
system, and collective farmers received their share of the proceeds
in money. Agricultural production expanded rapidly, freeing up
410 A Concise History of Russia

millions of peasants for industrial work. The migration to the cities

in the last thirty years of Soviet power was so great that large
areas, especially in central and northern Russia, began to empty out,
leaving thousands of abandoned villages dotting the landscape. For
the first time in Russian history, the city population outnumbered
the country residents, rising to more than two thirds of the total
in the USSR by 1990.
These massive increases in production, the creation of a nuclear
industry and a more or less modern chemical industry, also brought
a wave of consumer goods for the first time in Soviet history. Food
stores began to display some variety, both of Soviet products and
canned goods imported from Bulgaria and elsewhere. Dairy prod-
ucts appeared in modest variety. To make up the needs in grain
and fodder, the Soviet Union imported grain from Canada and the
United States regularly. The result was a massive improvement, but
not universal prosperity. Supplies were irregular, and one or another
food item was in deficit every year. Carrots disappeared in one area
for several months, and returned while beets disappeared from the
stores. Workplace distribution continued, if on a lesser scale, to sup-
ply hard-to-find items like chickens. Consumer electronics became
nearly universal in cities and television even appeared in the villages.
At the same time actually buying a television set was a major oper-
ation. Telephones came mostly from Poland in exchange for cheap
Soviet gas and were notoriously unreliable. The housing crisis eased
as thick rings of pre-fabricated high-rise housing surrounded Soviet
cities. Finally, most urban residents left the communal apartments
for new apartments with their own kitchens and bathrooms. Unfor-
tunately, the other necessary facilities, such as schools and stores,
often failed to appear in the new neighborhoods for decades. Pro-
duction boomed, but distribution remained in a state of permanent
disorder. With all the problems, however, the first decade or so of
the Brezhnev years was in many ways the high point of the Soviet
Union. Not only had it achieved superpower status but the popula-
tion also finally acquired the basic elements of a modern standard of
living. There were two problems with that standard of living. One
was the post-war boom in Europe and America that created a whole
new world standard of living, and news about that seeped across the
border. The USSR was chasing a moving target. The other problem
was that the rise in Soviet living standards stalled after the middle
 Growth, Consolidation, and Stagnation 411

of the 1970s. More housing appeared, but virtually all consumer

goods gradually entered a permanent state of deficit, which meant
that they were available but increasingly difficult to actually find.
The struggle of daily life was the background to the malaise that
settled over Soviet society.
This malaise was not explicitly political, outside of small dissi-
dent groups in the intelligentsia. The first dissidents had appeared in
the 1960s, when it was finally clear that openly opposing the Soviet
system would lead to harassment and even prison in some cases, but
not death or long incarceration. The KGB under Yurii Andropov
changed its mode of operation. It no longer looked for organized
opposition groups tied to émigrés in the West and instead tried to
police society with a combination of persuasion and selective force.
For most people who fell afoul of the system, the KGB brought them
in for a “conversation” and reminded them of the possible conse-
quences of persistent action, and then left it at that. A very small
minority of intellectuals continued to protest and went to prison
or to psychiatric hospitals. The dissidents mostly came from highly
privileged positions in Soviet society. Intellectuals continued to have
apartments, privileged access to goods, and a select few maintained
opportunities for foreign travel. Writers lived in dachas in the Pere-
delkino and other writers’ colonies, while ordinary citizens struggled
with long lines and mass-construction housing. Scientists, especially
those in strategic areas like physics, lived in similar places, and also
had contact with power on the basis of their utility to the mili-
tary and the civilian nuclear industry. Not surprisingly some began
to chafe at this privileged but ultimately powerless role. In 1968
Andrei Sakharov moved from criticism of nuclear weapons testing
and Lysenko’s biology to criticizing the whole system and formu-
lating notions of convergence that would produce a society more
like the West than the Soviet Union. Alexander Solzhenitsyn moved
from fictional and non-fiction accounts of the Stalinist GULAG to
a Russian nationalist position that criticized equally Western and
Soviet society in favor of an authoritarian religious state based only
on the Slavic peoples of the USSR. The phenomenon closest to
widespread dissent was the emigration of almost a million Soviet
Jews, some forty percent of the Jewish population, between 1970
and 1990. The first wave consisted of more or less committed Zion-
ists who moved to Israel, but the by the 1980s that stream had dried
412 A Concise History of Russia

to a trickle, and most Jewish emigrants had moved to the United

States and Germany in search of better economic conditions.
The dissidents attracted enormous attention in the West during
the Cold War, and their ideas and writings were well known in the
Soviet intelligentsia. Some other intellectuals supported them but the
dissidents had no popular following. Nevertheless the authorities
saw them as a threat to their utopian conception of a unified society,
exiling Solzhenitsyn to the West in 1974 and Sakharov eventually to
Gorkii (Nizhnii Novgorod), east of Moscow. Needless to say their
works were published only underground or in the West, and they
were never mentioned in public. More serious was the general sense
that the country was somehow on the wrong track, a feeling that
crystallized with the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in 1980. The
most common reaction to the invasion was neither patriotism nor
indignation, but the sense that the leadership had made a serious
mistake. For most people the Soviet Union remained a legitimate
state, but one that was most definitely in the hands of incompetent
and short-sighted leaders.
In 1982 Leonid Brezhnev died. The generation that he repre-
sented, the young party leaders promoted in the late 1930s, was
now a group of elderly men who simply could not understand why
things had not come out as they had expected or even how bad the
situation remained for the mass of the people. The world had also
changed outside the USSR and they failed to grasp the challenge
created by mass prosperity not only in the United States but also
in post-war Europe and Japan. On Brezhnev’s death the Central
Committee put in his place Yurii Andropov, the head of the KGB
since 1967. Nearly seventy and in poor health, Andropov never had
time to formulate a new policy, but he did bring to Moscow Alexan-
der Iakovlev, Mikhail Gorbachev, and other future reformers. On
Andropov’s death in 1984, the CC appointed the seventy-two year
old Konstantin Chernenko to succeed him. Chernenko had been
Brezhnev’s director of personnel for decades and the appointment
allegedly came against Andropov’s wishes. If Andropov really did
prefer Gorbachev, his wishes were fulfilled in 1985 when Cher-
nenko died in turn, and Gorbachev became the General Secretary
of the Communist Party. He was to preside over its demise.
 22
Soviet Culture

With the end of NEP and well before the war, the Soviet Union
entered a new period of its history, with profound cultural impli-
cations. The first phase of that new period, from about 1928 to
1932, saw major upheavals in every area of culture, science, art,
literature, and the humanistic disciplines. It was a “cultural revo-
lution” in the phrase of the time, though one neither so deep or
thorough as the much later Chinese events that borrowed the name.
For the people involved, it was certainly traumatic, for it was not
merely a new ideological campaign. In those years the party author-
ities carried out a systematic attack on the leaders of virtually every
field of culture, accusing them of failure to live up to the demands
of “socialist construction” and of harboring old-regime views and
hostility to the new order. These attacks came in the press and in
meetings held in various institutions and workplaces, where mostly
young and enthusiastic Communists were encouraged to attack their
elders and teachers in the name of the revolution. In addition, the
OGPU carried out systematic arrests of leading intellectuals – histo-
rians, engineers, writers, and some scientists. Most were accused of
participation in various, presumably mythical, underground organi-
zations aimed at undermining or overthrowing Soviet power. Com-
pared to later times, the treatment was relatively mild: some were
executed, more went to prison camps, but many were simply exiled
to provincial towns to teach or work in local institutions. Some
professions suffered more than others: the scientists were less com-
monly victims, but even for them there were consequences. At the
413
414 A Concise History of Russia

same time as the old authorities were removed, all sorts of radical
super-Marxist notions achieved brief fame and dominance, along
with the ideas of various cranks who presented themselves as new
proletarian voices.
For the writers this period meant the virtual monopoly of the
Proletarians connected with the Russian Association of Proletar-
ian Writers (RAPP in Russian) and their leader, the critic Leopold
Averbakh. The Proletarians assailed nearly all of the major writers
of the 1920s as counter-revolutionary, particularly those from the
pre-revolutionary intelligentsia and the “fellow travelers.” Many
major writers, including Evgenii Zamiatin and Mikhail Bulgakov,
were the objects of furious attacks. Zamiatin was allowed to leave
the country, but Bulgakov was not and for a while had almost no
possibility to work. Other writers like the poets Akhmatova and
Pasternak, escaped attacks because they published little or nothing
during those years. The Proletarians were almost as savage with
Communist writers who did not toe Averbakh’s line. What the Pro-
letarians wanted was a literature that engaged itself in the struggle
for the building of socialism, and in this sense some of their produc-
tions were quite critical of bureaucratism and passivity in the party
and the state. Their ideal novel featured heroic workers overcom-
ing tremendous obstacles to construct a new town or collectivize a
village, changing themselves in the process. In reality, these stories
were rarely successful, and the only readable works to come out of
the movement were about the Civil War and were mostly written
before 1929. The best by far was Mikhail Sholokhov’s Quiet Don,
and the RAPP leaders were uncomfortable with this volume.
Music as well had its proletarian radicals, who attacked the young
Shostakovich and virtually every other composer, whatever the aes-
thetic. For the Russian Association of Proletarian Music, the only
“proletarian” musical culture had to be “mass songs,” performed
by semi-amateur choruses, preferably made up of workers. The pro-
letarian musicians relied on the network of factory clubs and other
amateur organizations to spread their work and doctrines, but most
of their songs found little favor with the workers, who preferred a
more traditional repertory. The Proletarians were allowed briefly to
rule the conservatories, but in 1932 the party ended their monopoly
as it did for the proletarian writers.
 Soviet Culture 415

Even in the sciences meetings took place in research institutes,

meetings that would have ominous consequences later on. In Niko-
lai Vavilov’s botanical institute radical graduate students criticized
his leadership, political views, and scientific work. In the sciences
these attacks were not yet primarily ideological, the chief charge
being that the scientists were “cut off from life” and paid insufficient
attention to the implications of their work for technology and thus
“socialist construction.” It was at this time that Trofim Lysenko, a
Ukrainian plant breeder, first came to the attention of the public and
the authorities with his theories about breeding strains of wheat that
were resistant to cold. Lacking the proper scientific training needed
to develop his occasional practical insights, Lysenko was more of a
crank at first, but he quickly learned to drape his claims in references
to his plebeian origins and assertions that his was “proletarian” biol-
ogy. The party authorities listened to him because his discoveries,
real and imagined, seemed to promise much greater harvests very
quickly, something the Soviet Union desperately needed.
After several years of chaos in many fields, the campaign came to
a swift end in 1932. The exiled scientists and historians returned to
their jobs, some returned from the camps, and generalized public
attacks on the intelligentsia gradually ended. Thus began a new
phase, one in which the party leadership, which increasingly meant
Stalin alone, constructed the framework for what they considered a
Soviet culture. In literature the Proletarians had alienated the party
leaders, and in 1932 all literary groups were banned, a move mainly
directed at Averbakh and his Proletarians. The pressure on non-
party writers like Bulgakov and Pasternak eased. Bulgakov went
to work for the Moscow Art Theater, writing original plays and
adaptations that provided him with a livelihood even though they
were often banned. He continued working on his masterpiece The
Master and Margarita in private. Pasternak published prose and
poetry in those years, becoming one of the country’s best-known
poets, in spite of being out of step with Soviet ideology. In the new
situation Stalin set up a single Writers’ Union, which met for the
first time in a Congress of Soviet Writers in 1934. It was to include
writers of all types, non-party member writers and Communists
in one group, again a move in large part directed at taming the
Proletarians. The Writers’ Union was the prototype for a series of
416 A Concise History of Russia

unions of creative intellectuals, for composers, painters, architects,

and others, that dominated the daily life of Soviet literary and artistic
culture until the end, in many ways parallel to the structure for the
natural and social sciences and the humanities found at the Academy
of Sciences. The Writers’ Union had two functions. One was to
provide ideological and artistic direction to the writers. At the head
of the union was a committee whose membership was chosen by
the Central Committee cultural apparatus and cleared with Stalin
himself. These were the men who were to declare the party line in
art and enforce it. The other function was to take care of the needs
of writers in daily life. The Writers’ Union controlled apartments
and dachas in the countryside, had a privileged distribution center
for scarce consumer goods, and the best restaurant in Moscow. Its
headquarters was a nineteenth century Moscow palace supposedly
the prototype of the Rostov house in Tolstoy’s War and Peace.
Similar unions of artists and composers were formed and took on
similar functions.
The party now intended to give literature and art firm direc-
tion. Stalin told the writers that they were the “engineers of human
souls,” but he did not give them the blueprint. That was to come
from the method of “socialist realism,” and at the first Writers’
Congress in 1934 A. A. Zhdanov and Maksim Gorkii, assisted by
the former oppositionists Bukharin and Radek, tried to define what
that was. The idea was to “reflect reality in its revolutionary devel-
opment.” The implication was that the writer needed to show the
great changes in Soviet life, but avoid concentrating on mistakes or
shortcomings, and indicate how society was moving forward. The
result was to demand a kind of official optimism that was very hard
to provide in practice, as it would lead to flattened characters and
unconvincing conflicts. The other side of socialist realism was that
it was to become the art of the people and as such had to be accessi-
ble. This issue peaked in 1936, not over literature, but as a result of
the staging of Dmitrii Shostakovich’s opera, Lady Macbeth of the
Mtsensk District. The composer thought that he had made a good
Soviet opera, based on a story by Nikolai Leskov that showed the
dark, oppressive world of pre-revolutionary Russia. Instead he met
savage criticism for his adoption of modernist musical language
similar to that found in Western music of the time. In the minds
 Soviet Culture 417

of his critics, the opera was cacophonic and incomprehensible. It

was “formalist,” a term that immediately became one of the most
serious charges an artist could face. The writers as well understood
the implications of the attack on Shostakovich, and realized that
their styles would have to change. Many of them, even the most
loyal supporters of the revolution, had employed style and narra-
tive techniques that were innovative and modern in the 1920s, but
now they were supposed to construct a novel much as Turgenev
had done in the nineteenth century.
Besides mandating the correct direction in the arts, the party
leadership in the later 1930s moved to expand and subsidize artis-
tic institutions, and indeed the intelligentsia as a whole. The great
theaters, the Bolshoi in Moscow and the Mariinskii (Kirov) in
Leningrad, no longer scraped by on small budgets. The opera and
ballet became central parts of Soviet culture, and although they were
concentrated in the two main cities, they were not restricted to those
places. Older cities such as Kiev and Tbilisi, now serving as repub-
lican capitals, also found their theaters with more solid budgets.
In provincial cities and new republican capitals large theaters for
musical performances and concerts sprang up. The great companies
were encouraged to do provincial tours. Budgets for dramatic the-
aters also increased, as did the number of theaters in provincial and
republican capitals. The theaters and orchestras supported a great
many actors and musicians and in a style that became increasingly
removed from that of the Soviet population. The Writers’ Union
actually spent most of its effort in the 1930s not on ideological
issues but on securing control of superior housing in the cities and
the dacha districts, and even building them when it could. Paster-
nak was able to acquire a two-story house in Peredelkino – a dacha
village for writers near Moscow – to use as his home for the rest of
his life. Writers had access to the Union’s closed food and consumer
goods distribution service. By the war, Shostakovich had a multi-
room apartment, servants, and a car with driver. Thus the artistic
elite came to match the scientists in standards of living, remaining
only slightly less well off than the party elite itself.
Perhaps the central art form of the 1930s was film. During NEP,
the necessary resources were simply unavailable for mass produc-
tion and circulation of movies, and Hollywood productions filled
418 A Concise History of Russia

the theaters. The cultural revolution tried to change this situation,

but the works of that era were as shallow and short-lived as they
were in other art forms and they came under heavy criticism, to
boot. In the course of the 1930s the Soviet film industry changed
radically. The state devoted increasing sums to the production of
film stock and studio facilities, and bought expensive equipment
abroad, including the entire technology for sound films acquired
from the United States. Unlike all the other arts, cinema was a state
industry under the state film committee, which answered directly
to the central government, not a branch industrial unit. In keep-
ing with its central status, it also received personal attention from
Stalin himself. Most of the new films were shown in the Krem-
lin in the presence of the heads of the film industry, who received
extensive comments from the leader. Stalin’s views of cinema were
surprisingly sophisticated: he found most of the early films on revo-
lutionary or other political subjects boring, and told the filmmakers
that the country needed more comedies. That was a tall order, since
the scriptwriters and directors were mostly afraid to satirize Soviet
institutions, even mildly, though Stalin told them directly that they
should do so. Ultimately the result was a series of authentically pop-
ular musical comedies, many of them starring Liubov’ Orlova, who
became the leader’s favorite actress.
The expanded institutional base in film and theater came with
much greater ideological demands on the arts. All forms of art were
to be accessible as well as politically correct. The 1936 attack on for-
malism led to particular kinds of productions. In the ballet the many
small experimental studios of the 1920s closed, and in their place
came the large ballet companies that presented a basically classical
choreography but with new sorts of ballets. There were attempts
at “revolutionary” content, but very quickly Soviet dance moved
toward story ballets, which were often based on literary classics
and performed with undistinguished music – Boris Asaf’ev’s Foun-
tain of Bakhchisarai (based on Pushkin) became the most popular
of all. Shostakovich turned to more accessible musical styles, and
Sergei Prokofiev, back in the Soviet Union since 1935, did the same.
His music for Romeo and Juliet gave the repertory at least one bal-
let that fit the required esthetic but provided great music, as did
his film music for Eisenstein’s two masterpieces, Alexander Nevsky
 Soviet Culture 419

and Ivan the Terrible. No one escaped criticism: Eisenstein had two
movies banned in the 1930s and returned to favor only in 1938
with Alexander Nevsky.
In this situation the scientists were – most of them, at least –
in a better position. Their institutes also received improved fund-
ing, which was even more generous than for the arts. The new
situation came at a price, for starting in the early 1930s the scien-
tific institutes were required to come up with five-year plans like
those in the economy. In part, this move was to increase their use-
fulness to industry, but for that aim the ultimate means was the
creation of a large network of specialized institutes for different
branches of technology, while basic research remained in the hands
of the older institutes. Gradually all basic research was centralized
under the Academy of Sciences during the cultural revolution, was
brought under party control, and then subordinated directly to the
central government, bypassing the various People’s Commissari-
ats. The Academy also had to leave its Leningrad headquarters for
Moscow, which now acquired a new battery of scientific institutes
to rival those of Leningrad. Thus in 1934 the Soviet government
took advantage of the visit of the physicist Piotr Kapitsa from Eng-
land to force him to remain in the country, and then set up the
Moscow Institute of Problems of Physics under his leadership. The
Soviet Union now had two world-class research institutes in physics.
The scientists were also less often than writers and artists the object
of ideological campaigns after the end of the cultural revolution.
Abram Ioffe was the object of heavy criticism in 1935, but the
charges were only that his Leningrad Physical-Technical Institute
did not do enough to provide industry with new technology. The
decade was in many ways the great age of Soviet physics. Some six
Nobel prizes eventually went to Soviet physicists and chemists, all of
them for discoveries made in the Leningrad and Moscow institutes
during the 1930s. Biology was a different story. Throughout the
decade Lysenko maintained a continuous assault on his opponents,
spearheaded by his ideological spokesman, Isaak Prezent. The cam-
paign culminated with Lysenko’s promotion to the leadership of
the Agricultural Academy, but the party did not proclaim his doc-
trines to be the sole truth, and classical genetics survived, if under
something of a cloud, until 1948.
420 A Concise History of Russia

The terror of 1937–38 hit the arts hard but not evenly. Musi-
cians and composers seem to have suffered relatively little. Among
the critics connected with the party, like Leopold Averbakh and his
Proletarians, almost all perished. Surprisingly the writers from that
group did much better, though many of them, even Sholokhov, lived
those years in daily fear. Stalin did not carry out a mass purge of
writers, but he and his agents did arrest and imprison many of them.
For whatever reason, many of the most famous victims were arrested
at the very end of the terror, Osip Mandelstam in 1938, followed by
Isaac Babel, and later Meyerhold. Mandelstam died in prison, while
Babel and Meyerhold were shot. At the same time, Pasternak spent
the years of the terror working on translations from Shakespeare
in his Peredelkino dacha, and Bulgakov continued at the Moscow
Art Theater, dying of kidney failure in 1940. The sciences endured
similar trials. On the whole the physicists escaped lightly: the few
party members among them perished, and a few non-party scientists
were arrested, Lev Landau among them. He spent months in prison
only to be released without explanation. Kapitsa had interceded for
him and Kapitsa’s institute survived intact. Biology was a different
story. A denunciation from Lysenko’s spokesman Prezent led to the
arrest of Nikolai Vavilov, the Soviet Union’s greatest biologist. He
died in prison, as did several other important geneticists. The eve
of the war was a dark time, both in the USSR and Europe. Stalin
had decided by 1938 that the Soviet Union needed a fundamental
ideological schooling, the beginning of a new and even more intru-
sive policy in culture. The basis of the new ideological campaign
was to be the Short Course of the History the Communist Party,
with its chapter on Marxism from the pen of Stalin himself. Yet the
approaching war overshadowed even ideological efforts. The Soviet
film industry’s annual plans stressed the “defense theme” and epics
from the history of the revolution and Civil War. Movies on “social-
ist construction” and “friendship of peoples” were few in number
and did not have big budgets.
When the war actually came, it created an entirely new situation,
and Stalin had to quickly adjust. The preservation of cultural insti-
tutions was a priority. As the Germans advanced, orders came to
evacuate cultural institutions as well as factories. Science research
institutes, ballet companies, and writers were evacuated to the east.
 Soviet Culture 421

Eisenstein went to Alma-ata, and Shostakovich went to Kuibyshev

on the Volga. The purpose was both to conserve the personnel of
Soviet culture and to preserve some sense of normalcy during the
war. Intellectuals joined the war effort with famous results such
as the Leningrad symphony of Shostakovich, first performed in the
besieged city. The physicists lobbied Stalin on behalf of an atomic
bomb, as well as devoting their energies to more conventional
weapons in factories and research institutes. For many engineers
their war work took place as prisoners in NKVD laboratories, the
most famous prisoners being the aircraft designer Andrei Tupolev
and the later rocket designer Sergei Korolev. The war also cre-
ated ideological problems for the party leadership. To mobilize as
many people as possible meant including sectors of the population
whom the official ideology had not reached or had even repelled.
The answer was nationalism. After Stalin’s early pronouncements
about the virtues of the German working class ceased, the official
line began to stress Russian heroes and Russian accomplishments.
Historians dusted off manuscripts on Peter the Great or Kutuzov,
hitherto unpublishable. Eisenstein made one of his classic films on
the life of tsar Ivan the Terrible, a film designed to glorify the tsar’s
conquests and portray him as fighting for the unity of the land. Even
Marxism had to be rethought: in 1943 the leading party journals
declared that formerly there had been far too much emphasis on
Hegel as the background to Marxism and he needed to be deem-
phasized. The result was an inaccurate history of the thought of
Marx, but it made Marxism seem less German. For much of the
intelligentsia, the new line on culture meant more breathing space,
and many of them hoped that it would continue after the war. They
were to be disappointed. Even as the fighting raged there were inci-
dents: Mikhail Zoshchenko, a popular satirical writer, found his
introspective autobiographical novel Before Sunrise banned after
the first chapters were published in a leading literary magazine.
The return to orthodoxy came swiftly after the war, and the years
from the victory until Stalin’s death were the darkest and dreariest in
the history of Soviet culture. The first signal was the attack mounted
in 1946 by Andrei Zhdanov, one of Stalin’s closest collaborators,
on Zoshchenko and the poet Anna Akhmatova. Stalin himself reg-
ularly read the literary journals, and the judgments were ultimately
422 A Concise History of Russia

his. Zoshchenko’s work was trite and lacking in ideas, Zhdanov

said, and the novella written during the war was “disgusting” and
had no relationship to the conflict with Hitler. Akhmatova’s poetry
was pessimistic, oriented toward the past, and was a relic of a deca-
dent aristocratic salon culture. Soviet literature was supposed to
educate the reader and make the reader a fully conscious member
of a socialist society who did not dwell on problems and shortcom-
ings or on the details of individual psychology. It was also not to
imitate Western literature, and indeed Stalin did not want too much
Western literature translated: “Why do this?” he asked at one of
the dressings-down for the writers. “It gives the impression that
we Soviet people are second class, and the foreigners are the only
first class people.” The result was a long series of dull chronicles
of Soviet life, fantastic in their sanitized depiction of everyday life.
Even Stalin realized that they were dull, but continued to blame the
writers for their lack of talent and mastery of their art.
In 1948 it was the turn of the composers Prokofiev and
Shostakovich, attacked for supposedly dissonant music that was
too far removed from folk music and inaccessible to the masses.
In many ways a repeat of the 1936 attack on formalism, this new
campaign had behind it both the rivals of the serious composers
among the writers of popular songs and the party authorities. In the
same year Lysenko was able to crown his long fight for power in
biology by his appearance at a “discussion” on genetics, where he
declared genetics to be a reactionary and “idealist” science and his
own ideas progressive and “materialist.” Stalin took a direct hand
in this affair as well. Lysenko sent him his speech for criticism, and
the General Secretary read it carefully. Lysenko originally wanted to
contrast his own “proletarian” biology to the “bourgeois” biology
of the geneticists and make a general pronouncement that scientific
thought reflected class interests. Stalin crossed out that passage,
writing in the margins, “Ha ha! What about mathematics?” He
required Lysenko to drop the class terminology and substitute “pro-
gressive” and “reactionary.” The result, however, was to destroy
genetics for nearly twenty years and do enormous harm to Soviet
biology. There were plans to hold a similar “discussion” to provide
an ideological framework for physics, but for whatever reason, it
never materialized.
 Soviet Culture 423

In the last years of Stalin’s life the official Soviet ideology was a
strange mixture of dogmatic Marxism and nationalism. There were
campaigns to prove Russian priorities in science, the most famous
being the claim that the Russian engineer Alexander Popov had
invented the radio in 1900 (Popov was in fact one of several pio-
neers in this area.) Pre-revolutionary Russian writers, composers,
and artists became the object of mini-cults, with endless statues,
films, and publications made in their honor. The promotion of Rus-
sian culture was largely aimed at the West, to show Russia to be
equal to Western culture, if not superior. At the same time the
party leadership continued the promotion of culture heroes from
the other Soviet nationalities. The Politburo ordered celebrations of
the work of medieval Muslim poets claimed as ancestors of Soviet
nationalities, Alisher Navoi in Uzbekistan and Nizami of Gandzha
in Azerbaidzhan. Russian poets were paid to translate their works
and they were the objects of fulsome official praise in the cen-
tral press. In these years, Shevchenko or the medieval Georgian
poet Shota Rustaveli loomed larger than Shakespeare or Goethe.
In every Soviet republic the authorities assigned composers, usually
Russians or Caucasians, to help local talent produce “national”
ballets and operas to provide repertory and prestige for the newly
opened theaters. At the same time as the activity on the periphery, in
Moscow and Leningrad the ballet struggled with the restrictions of
Soviet esthetics. The sheer genius of the dancers like Galina Ulanova
kept it alive. The anti-cosmopolitan campaign directed against Jews
in 1948 only further poisoned the cultural atmosphere since so
many musicians, writers, and artists were Jewish. The main Yiddish
writers were imprisoned or shot. The intelligentsia remembered the
1930s and the various ideological campaigns seemed to be leading
to another mass terror. That never materialized, and the number of
actual arrests among the intelligentsia in those years was small, but
for Shostakovich or Akhmatova, the fear in those years was real.
The death of Stalin changed the whole atmosphere. Within a few
months prisoners began to return from the camps, and the intel-
ligentsia sensed the possibilities. Ilya Ehrenburg, mainly known as
a war correspondent and author of mildly modernist novels of the
1920s set in Western Europe, quickly produced a short novel called
The Thaw, which gave its name to the whole period. The villain
424 A Concise History of Russia

of the story is a factory director, a classic Stalinist boss. Attacked

at first, the story set the tone for a whole series of writings that
tried to deal with the past, if within definite limits. Khrushchev’s
secret speech gave another great impulse to this sort of literature,
as well as relaxing the demands for orthodoxy in music and art.
By the early 1960s a number of works had appeared describing the
camp system that had just come to an end, the most famous being
One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich by Alexander Solzhenit-
syn. The novella appeared in the literary journal Novyi Mir, which
gained huge popularity for its publication of many works in sym-
pathy with the program of destalinization. Some writers, especially
young poets like Evgenii Yevtushenko, acquired enormous popular-
ity at this time, even reading his poetry in sports stadiums that filled
to capacity. Shostakovich used Yevtushenko’s poem “Babii Yar,”
about the wartime massacre of Jews in Kiev by the Nazis, in his
Thirteenth Symphony. The ending of the post-war cultural policies
and the rehabilitation of imprisoned and executed writers meant
a sudden boom in the republication of the literature of the 1920s
with its frequently modernist styles. Soviet publishers began to put
out a wave of translations of Western authors: William Faulkner,
John Updike, and many European writers. Soviet opera and bal-
let moved away from the Stalinist canon toward styles that were
less narrative and more innovative, a compromise style that still
required elaborate sets and more “acting” than was then popular
in the West, then at the height of fascination with abstractionism
in all the arts. The Khrushchev era was not all liberalism, however.
The renewed campaign against religion affected many areas of cul-
ture indirectly, making impossible the republication of nineteenth
century classics like certain works of Dostoyevsky or the expression
of religious themes. The great event of the decade was the scandal
around the award of the 1958 Nobel Prize to Pasternak for his novel
Doctor Zhivago, a clearly anti-Soviet account of the revolution
and Civil War. A huge propaganda success for the West, the book
was prohibited in the USSR and Pasternak became the object of
press attacks and official condemnation. This was not Stalin’s time,
however, and Pasternak continued to live quietly in his dacha in
Peredelkino.
Perhaps the most striking relic of the Stalin era in Khrushchev’s
time was his refusal to accept modern genetics. Lysenko remained
 Soviet Culture 425

king in biology, primarily because of Khrushchev’s support of him.

At the same time science expanded enormously during these years.
By the 1960s only the United States outranked the USSR in the
number of publications in the natural sciences, and by the 1980s
the Soviet Union had the largest number of natural scientists per
capita in the world. The sciences had whole complexes at their dis-
posal, like Akademgorodok (“Academy Town”) near Novosibirsk
in Western Siberia. Started in 1958 at the inspiration of Academy
scientists, this entirely new town came to have some fifty thou-
sand scientists and their families, with new and comfortable (by
Soviet standards) housing and privileged access to a whole range of
consumer goods. For the party leadership, science was not only
the basis of a “scientific” worldview but also the key to economic
growth, the path to victory in the rivalry with the capitalist world.
The ability to concentrate resources on crucial areas had brought
spectacular successes in rocketry and the nuclear industry, both
military and civilian, and the idea was to broaden the base so as to
ensure a more thorough modernization of industry and agriculture.
With the removal of Khrushchev the new leadership quickly
moved to end the anti-religious campaign and allowed the churches
to continue a modest and heavily supervised existence that lasted
until the 1980s. Lysenko finally lost his monopoly of power in biol-
ogy, his work was repudiated and genetics reappeared as a recog-
nized discipline. Until the end of the Soviet Union the relationship of
the authorities to the science community was polite and collabora-
tive, though not without tensions under the surface. For the writers,
however, the new regime was less positive. The young poet Joseph
Brodsky had been sent into northern exile for “parasitism” in the
last months of Khrushchev’s leadership, and in 1972 the KGB threw
him out of the country for publishing his work abroad. Brezhnev
never repudiated the condemnation of Stalin, but he put an end
to the toleration and encouragement of writing, historical or liter-
ary, that exposed the repressions of that era. Thus Solzhenitsyn’s
work could no longer be published, and appeared only in the West,
leading to his expulsion from the Soviet Union. Cultural policy was
essentially frozen in time, for the works of many writers repressed
under Stalin continued to appear, but Bulgakov’s unpublished writ-
ings or Doctor Zhivago could not. Large numbers of translations
of Western literature appeared in translation, but major writers like
426 A Concise History of Russia

Marcel Proust (published in the Soviet Union in the 1930s) or James

Joyce could not. Soviet writers began to write in a mildly modernist
vein, and avoided the classic subjects of socialist realism. Some,
Vasilii Belov and others, began to turn in different directions, influ-
enced by Solzhenitsyn. They wrote romanticized accounts of village
life with a strong nationalist undertone, the idea being that the peas-
antry had once had true Russian values, patriarchal and religious,
which the Soviet order had destroyed. They were highly critical of
the kolhoz, and their historical stories described a harmonic village
destroyed by urban outsiders, often Jewish, in the 1930s. The criti-
cal edge and the nationalist tone gave them wide popularity among
the intelligentsia in the later Brezhnev years. The village writers and
their ideology shaded off into the dissident movement, which was
heavily nationalistic in its outlook, though a minority of dissidents
shared the more westernizing approach of Andrei Sakharov. Both
tendencies were actually well known among the elite intelligentsia
from underground manuscripts, but more than the dissidents it was
some of the “bards,” the singers like Bulat Okudzhava and Vladimir
Vysotskii, who performed their songs on the guitar and who most
accurately reflected the mood among educated people. Vysotskii
rarely gave public concerts, for no state agency could permit that,
but his songs performed in small gatherings or Moscow apartments
quickly spread all over the country in tape recordings and amateur
performances, again behind closed doors. Not quite political enough
to be overtly anti-Soviet, the songs and their lyrics reflected a kind
of introspective alienation characteristic of the time. Above-ground
recordings of Okudzhava’s songs appeared in the Soviet Union only
in the later 1970s, and one recording of Vysotskii’s surfaced only
shortly after his death in 1980.
Soviet filmmakers followed similar trends. The breakthrough
of Christianity and Russian nationalism in film was Andrei
Tarkovsky’s Andrei Rublev of 1966. Rarely shown in the Soviet
Union, the film depicted the fifteenth century icon painter Rublev
as a man who survives the disasters of his time by faith and art.
Tarkovsky later moved on to more psychologically introspective
themes, usually with religious overtones, in his later works such
as Stalker (1979), more or less science fiction. Though the film
was seen in the Soviet Union, its showings were extremely limited.
 Soviet Culture 427

Tarkovsky had had enough and moved to the West, dying in Paris
in 1986. Other film directors also divided their time between his-
torical epics (Siberiade, also made in 1979 by director Andrei Kon-
chalovsky) and mildly modernist films from the private life of the
Soviet intelligentsia.
One of the most striking features of Soviet life from the 1960s
onward was the emergence of popular culture. The beginnings lay
in the Stalin era, and to a limited extent were there even before the
revolution. In those years, however, the audience of popular cul-
ture was mainly the thin middle layer of urban society, with some
extensions into the working classes. The main examples were the
musical stages (estrada in Russian), which featured Soviet jazz bands
and comedy routines, and film. The boundaries with the culture of
the intelligentsia were fluid: Prokofiev and Shostakovich wrote film
music, and major writers produced scripts as well. Some writers
produced science fiction and detective stories, though both were
under a cloud after the middle 1930s. The more liberal atmosphere
of the Khrushchev era brought about a revival of popular fiction,
especially science fiction, and jazz came back onto the radio and into
musical theaters. What really changed Soviet popular culture, how-
ever, were television and the availability of Western popular music,
not just jazz but eventually some forms of rock and roll. Television
took popular music out of the theaters and into everyone’s apart-
ment. While Soviet television put on some culture programs, it was
the popular entertainment that made a mass audience, like Iulian
Semenov’s World War II spy story, Seventeen Minutes of Spring, the
hit miniseries of 1973 that so impressed the young Vladimir Putin.
Popular music had a complex history. As elsewhere, the jazz
audience was increasingly elite after the 1960s, and American rock
took its place. Soviet youth heard rock music on foreign radio sta-
tions, but also massive amounts of tape recordings began to circu-
late, many homemade, as tape recorders and players became widely
available. The Brezhnev regime did not prohibit rock music. It tried
to restrict what it saw as the more erotic and wild versions, but
much rock music circulated openly, and the state began to spon-
sor rock bands and popular singers with eclectic styles. Some of
them, like Alla Pugacheva, became wildly popular. Parallel to these
more official versions of popular music were underground bands
428 A Concise History of Russia

like Aquarium in Leningrad that also relied for a long time on taped
recordings but by 1980 had acquired some state recognition. All
late Soviet popular music was derived from Western models, even
if modified with a local twist, and it also imitated Western music in
creating a series of rapidly changing generational subcultures. Each
new moment, from jazz to the disco craze of the late 1970s, had
its own audience that often did not extend to listeners even a few
years younger. Soviet popular culture, at least the musical variants,
now had very little to do with “Soviet reality.” It also had little to
do with the culture of the intelligentsia, official, critical, or dissident
culture, though it did share in the sense of alienation of much of
the intelligentsia. It also shared a social background as many of the
popular musicians, even rockers, came from privileged backgrounds
in the intelligentsia or even the party elite.
By the 1980s most of the great writers and artists of the early
Soviet days were gone: Pasternak died in 1960, Shostakovich in
1975, and Sholokhov in 1984. Almost all of the first wave of film
directors and actors of the 1920s were gone. The newer generation
of writers and artists was not in the league of their predecessors, no
more than their counterparts in the West were in the league of Proust
or Joyce. Soviet writers and artists had the additional burden of an
ossified but obligatory cultural policy, one that no longer attracted
the new generations among the intelligentsia. Even if the dissidents
seemed to many educated people shrill and unconvincing, their own
views of the Soviet system were scarcely enthusiastic. The official
cultural line and its products became more and more a fantasy
world that ignored what the public actually read or watched. For
the intelligentsia, Gorbachev’s Perestroika was an earthquake – a
welcome earthquake, as they were sure that political freedom and a
market economy would produce a great flowering of culture. They
were sure that the time for the intelligentsia had finally come. They
would find out otherwise.
 23
The Cold War

The Cold War lasted for the whole of the last forty-six years of
Soviet history. It was an epic contest, ranging over the whole world,
from Berlin and Peking to the most distant parts of Africa and Latin
America. For much of the time the Soviet Union seemed to have
a good chance of “winning” in some form, and indeed the more
hysterical of its opponents were convinced that it was immensely
powerful. In reality, the Soviet Union came from behind in the
struggle and was never close to defeating its new enemy, the United
States. For most of the time, it struggled just to keep up and survive
with its newfound power more or less intact.
At the end of the Second World War the two new powers seemed
relatively evenly matched, for both were industrial powers and sim-
ilar in population, the United States at 151 million and the Soviet
Union at 182 million. The population figures were an illusion, how-
ever, for the Soviet figure was the result of concealment of war
losses and may have been as low as 167 million. Soviet industry,
however, had been only third in 1940 behind the United States and
Germany and much of it was now in ruins. The devastation of the
country was unparalleled, even in Germany, and the United States
had suffered no war damage at all, outside of Pearl Harbor and the
Aleutian Islands. The war had restored American prosperity after
the Depression and was a huge boost to American technology and
industry, as the rapid success of the atomic project demonstrated.
At the time Stalin was convinced that after the war the “contradic-
tions” between the United States and other Western powers would
429
430 A Concise History of Russia

grow, especially as he anticipated a rapid recovery and rearma-

ment of Germany and Japan. Eventually there could be another
war among the Western powers. Some in the Soviet hierarchy ques-
tioned this view, pointing out that England, for all its differences
with the United States, was fundamentally dependent on American
money and power, and so would be Germany and Japan. Stalin
simply suppressed such dissent.
In spite of his optimistic assessment of the world, Stalin took no
chances. During the war he had paid little attention to the construc-
tion of an atomic bomb at first, in spite of repeated warnings from
Soviet scientists, who were concerned both about Germany and the
United States. Soviet intelligence had actually acquired some very
valuable information early in the war from Britain, but it sat in
Beria’s files unused. As always, he was afraid it might be just clever
disinformation. Soviet physicists wrote to Stalin lobbying for action,
for they realized that the Americans were working on a bomb (all
publications by the relevant physicists in the United States had dis-
appeared from science journals) and were fearful that the Germans
might make a bomb first. Finally in 1943 Stalin decided to establish
a research unit to build a reactor and put Igor Kurchatov in charge,
one of the talented physicists to come out of Ioffe’s Leningrad
Physical-Technical Institute. Starting in a small building in the south
of Moscow, Kurchatov and his group were able to make the reac-
tor, but only with the news of Hiroshima did Stalin put the bomb
project into full gear, establishing a laboratory south of Moscow
called Arzamas-16 in the buildings of the famous nineteenth-century
Sarov monastery. Beria was in charge of the bomb project, as well as
the whole nuclear industry that was extracting and processing ura-
nium in the USSR, eastern Germany, and Czechoslovakia. There
remained the problem of the exact design of the bomb, and this
time intelligence from Klaus Fuchs at Los Alamos and the mere fact
of American success helped Soviet scientists to gain at least a year
in time. In 1949 they exploded their first atomic bomb in secret.
The US government learned of it only from analyzing atmospheric
fallout.
The construction of the bomb was an immense technological
feat for a relatively backward country, one that came at equally
immense cost in capital investments. The mere existence of the bomb
 The Cold War 431

did not solve all Soviet military problems. No Soviet bomber then
existing could fly from the Soviet Union to strike the United States,
and bombers were the only delivery vehicles then available. To
make things worse, the Soviets did not have aircraft engines big
enough to power a large bomber. The United States maintained a
network of bases in Western Europe and Turkey from which aircraft
could strike virtually any important target in the USSR, but the only
reply or preventive action would have to target those bases, not the
United States itself. The Soviet air force had been primarily a ground
support weapon, having abandoned strategic bombing before the
war to build smaller bombers to support the infantry. Thus Stalin
had to order the construction of long-range bombers and a massive
air defense network to defend the main Soviet target cities, all at
colossal expense. By the time of his death the foundations of these
forces were in place.
Military power was all very well, but Stalin and his circle real-
ized that their greatest advantage was in the political sphere, in the
prestige of the Soviet victory over Hitler and of the Communist
movement in the world generally. Spreading Communist rule and
the socialist system, they assumed, would also spread Soviet power.
The first arena in which they saw possibilities was quite naturally in
Eastern Europe, which had been liberated from the Nazis and was
now under Soviet occupation.
The Soviets hosted many exiled Communists in Moscow dur-
ing the war, and came into contact with the underground as they
advanced into Eastern Europe. The strategy that Stalin developed
and required the local Communists to follow was the establishment
of a regime of “people’s democracy.” The Communist party was
to make a coalition in each country with other leftist and agrarian
groups rather than seize power in its own name. New constitutions
were to be worked out with new elected governments (a change
from pre-war dictatorships) and in the one previously democratic
country, Czechoslovakia, the old constitution was restored. Stalin,
however, was by no means relinquishing the opportunity for control
provided by the victory in the war. In all of the liberated countries
the Communists were to be a major partner in the government,
and if they could not do that honestly, then by manipulation of
the elections. The local Communists everywhere took charge of the
432 A Concise History of Russia

ministries of the interior that controlled the various police forces,

and those ministries were effectively controlled by the Soviet security
forces. Further, the local Communists consulted the Soviet author-
ities, either the Soviet ambassador or Moscow directly on virtually
every issue of importance.
This situation was not stable in the long run. It had the same
problems that the Popular Front did in the Spanish Civil War, the
incompatibility of the Communist parties with their coalition “part-
ners” in methods and aims. The disastrous economic situation of
most East European countries added more instability, and the war
had left a residue of violence and hatred that further complicated
matters. Even the Soviet ambassadors were shocked at the amount
of anti-Semitism in post-war Czechoslovakia and other countries,
and were nervous at its exploitation by local Communists. As they
came to realize, nationalism was just under the surface even in the
Communist parties, for all East European countries had a modern
history where nationalist movements predominated, not liberalism
or socialism, and the war had only exacerbated the situation. The
non-Communist coalition parties were determined not to surrender
complete control to the Communists, something they found increas-
ingly difficult. Finally, the Soviets were not popular everywhere,
even if they had defeated Hitler. If the Yugoslavs and the popula-
tions of Czechoslovakia and Bulgaria greeted the Red Army as liber-
ators, Hungary and Rumania were a different matter. The national-
ist dictatorships had been popular until Hitler began to lose the war,
and both were stridently anti-Soviet and anti-Russian. In Poland the
Communists were a minority in a mass resistance movement that
was also anti-Communist and anti-Russian, and the Warsaw upris-
ing remained a bone of contention. Germany was especially difficult,
as support for Hitler had been nearly universal and the victorious
Red Army had behaved as conquerors toward Germans civilians,
not as liberators, looting houses and raping women.
The turning points came late in 1947, when Stalin created the
Communist Information Bureau as a smaller successor to the Com-
intern, signaling his intention to maintain formal control over his
comrades. In February 1948, a government crisis in Czechoslo-
vakia led the Communists under Klement Gottwald to form “action
committees” and with some Soviet prompting, to seize power. The
 The Cold War 433

constitutional president Edvard Beneš soon resigned and the Com-

munists were now in complete control. By various devices the Com-
munists took power in all the other East European countries. The
new governments then moved way beyond the original slogans
of “people’s democracies” (though officially the term remained)
toward full nationalization and collectivization of agriculture. The
new Communist governments also deployed the full arsenal of ter-
ror against their opponents, executions and imprisonment for hun-
dreds of thousands. Show trials of allegedly dissident Communist
leaders, like that of Rudolf Slansky in Czechoslovakia, imitated ear-
lier Soviet show trials. With opposition cowed, the East European
states began huge construction projects on the Soviet model, rely-
ing on very real enthusiasm for socialism, especially among youth,
but nowhere did they approach a level of support large enough to
maintain themselves without the threat of force and Soviet backing.
The one exception to many of these rules was Yugoslavia, which
provided Stalin with a challenge from within the Communist move-
ment that he never succeeded in crushing. Unlike his neighbors, Josip
Broz Tito had come to power with considerable mass support, the
fruit of his years leading the partisans against German and Italian
occupation. In the postwar years Tito was more Stalinist than Stalin,
and also had tactical disagreements over post-war Balkan structures
and over the Greek Civil War, where Stalin ended his support of
the Communists and thus enraged Tito. Finally in 1948 Stalin con-
demned Tito’s “deviations” and tried to isolate Yugoslavia, without
much success given tacit Western support. Later Tito came up with
the idea that his socialist industries would be “self-managed” to
differentiate them from Soviet practice, but fundamentally the issue
was simply that Tito was not dependent on the Soviets for survival
and did not see any reason to follow orders.
The other area in which Stalin was at least partially stymied was
Germany. The four-power occupation gave the Soviets control over
the eastern part of the new Germany and the eastern part of Berlin.
As in Eastern Europe, the Soviets set up a people’s democracy in
the eastern zone with the Communists at the center. Otherwise
the situation was somewhat different from East Europe. Germany
was an industrialized country with much of that industry in the
Soviet zone. The German Communists before Hitler had been a
434 A Concise History of Russia

major political force and the tiny anti-Nazi resistance in Germany

was heavily Communist. At the same time almost all of the Com-
munists’ pre-1933 supporters had enthusiastically embraced Hitler.
The new German Communist leader Walter Ulbricht and his com-
rades were generals without an army. Furthermore, Stalin wanted
to solve the German problem as a whole, not just set up a rump
Communist state, so that all the decisions about the eastern zone
were in effect temporary measures. He seems to have hoped for
a united neutral Germany with major Soviet influence. Part of his
reasoning was that such a policy would be a successful propaganda
ploy, but he also seems to have believed that a neutral Germany
would necessarily differ in its interests from the United States and
Britain and even come into conflict with them. Molotov would stick
to this policy well after Stalin’s death. It was not until western Ger-
many began to coalesce, starting in 1947 with the Marshall Plan,
then the establishment of a common west zone currency, the failure
of the Berlin blockade (1948–49), and finally the foundation of the
Federal Republic in the West that Stalin accepted the inevitable.
He allowed Ulbricht to form the German Democratic Republic in
1949, though even then it remained somewhat provisional into the
1950s.
Thus Europe was divided by 1949. Stalin had already abandoned
the Greek Communists just as the West abandoned its allies in
Eastern Europe, for both sides realized that Soviet and Western
power were unshakeable in their respective spheres of influence.
Stalin discouraged any adventures by Italian or other Communist
hotheads in Western Europe, telling them instead that their goal
was to maintain their structures intact and fight for peace against
the possibility of a Western attack on the Soviet Union. As it turned
out, events were unfolding in Asia that would come to put European
affairs in the shadow.
Stalin had not paid much attention to Mao Tse-tung and the
Chinese Communist party for years. After the Communist defeat
in 1927 the party had spent years forming a guerilla base around
Yenan, remote from the centers of the country. The Japanese inva-
sion had led to a sort of Popular Front with Chiang Kai-shek’s
nationalists and in the course of the war the Communists grew
immensely in numbers and strength. With the defeat of Japan,
 The Cold War 435

Chiang’s troops moved into northern China and Manchuria, where

the Communists had strong bases in the countryside. Initially Stalin
assumed that the Communists would not be able to match Chiang’s
professional army and were too weak politically to matter, but by
1947 Mao had proved his ability to hold off the apparently superior
forces of the enemy. The Soviets upgraded their support, and Stalin
began to send the Chinese telegram after telegram with advice on
how to organize power as well as answers to questions of Marx-
ist ideology. By the summer of 1948, the Communists were clearly
winning, but even Mao thought victory might come in only three
to five years. Even he did not expect the decisive Communist victo-
ries ending with the rout of Chiang’s troops at the giant battle of
Huaihai at the end of the year. The battle smashed the corrupt and
incompetent Nationalist regime and the People’s Liberation Army
entered Peking in January 1949, sweeping on into southern China.
Mao proclaimed the People’s Republic of China on October 1. The
Communist world had more than doubled in size.
One of the first international consequences of Mao’s victory was
in Indochina. Since 1940 the Vietnamese Communists under Ho
Chi Minh had been battling first the Japanese occupation and then
France, which was trying to rebuild its colonial empire. The Viet-
namese Communists followed a variant of the people’s democracy
strategy, stressing opposition to colonial rule and land reform rather
than an immediate transition to socialism. Ho’s bases were in the
north, and with the Chinese Communist victory he turned to link up
with China, a ready source of supplies. The French fought on, but
in 1954 made a fatal error in establishing a base in the mountainous
northwest of the country to cut off Ho’s links with Laos. The Com-
munist army, no longer just a guerilla force and now equipped with
heavy guns, surrounded the French and forced the garrison to capit-
ulate after a siege of several months. The Geneva settlement divided
the country at the seventeenth parallel, and the Democratic Repub-
lic of Vietnam now held the north. Vietnam would come to play
a crucial role in the Cold War, but the most important immediate
consequence of the Chinese Communist victory was in Korea.
In Korea events had moved very much as in China and Viet-
nam. Soviet troops had briefly occupied the north, giving a boost to
the Communists under Kim Il Sung. Kim too followed the line of
436 A Concise History of Russia

people’s democracy rather than proletarian dictatorship but found

himself stopped in the south, occupied by American troops. In 1948
American-sponsored elections led to the formation of the Republic
of Korea under the despotic Syngman Rhee. From 1949 Kim began
to press Stalin to allow him to invade the south, where Communist
guerillas were active and victory seemed within grasp. Stalin was ini-
tially very skeptical, but in 1949 changed his mind, in part because
of the Chinese revolution and in part as a response to the formation
of NATO in that year. Mao had similar doubts, but both approved
the plan. The Soviet Union provided North Korea with massive
military aid and in June 1950, Kim’s troops invaded South Korea,
quickly defeating both American and South Korean troops. Soviet
confidence in victory was such that they continued to boycott the
UN Security Council over American policy toward Taiwan, allow-
ing the United States to fight an American war under the UN flag.
Stalin monitored the war’s progress in detail, sending regular advice
and instructions until the American landing at Inchon in Septem-
ber 1950, which turned the tide against the Communists. It seemed
that Kim would go down to defeat, for Stalin had no intention of
sending in Soviet troops. A request for Chinese troops met with
refusal, to the surprise of both Stalin and Kim, and Stalin ordered
the Korean leader to prepare for guerilla warfare and evacuate to
the Soviet Union. Then the Chinese changed their minds, apparently
in response to General Douglas MacArthur’s bellicose talk of “roll-
back” and its implied threat to China. Chinese “volunteers” poured
across the border, pushing the Americans and their allies back to
the thirty-eighth parallel, more or less the starting point. By 1951
the war was at a stalemate, to be resolved only by the truce con-
cluded a few months after Stalin’s death. Kim had failed to conquer
the south, but the Chinese and North Korean armies, barely out
of their own revolutions and with only backward economies (and
some Soviet aid) had held off the United States for three years.
At the time of Stalin’s death in 1953 the Soviet Union had a great
deal to show on the international stage for the years since the Sec-
ond World War. There was now a “socialist camp” that included
China and the northern parts of Korea and Vietnam as well as most
of Eastern Europe. The Soviet Union did have an atomic bomb
and was about to acquire a hydrogen bomb. These successes were
 The Cold War 437

also the reasons that galvanized Western opposition, in the process

negating Stalin’s belief in the inevitability of conflict among West-
ern powers. The United States was now completely committed to
prevent any more Communist successes, and it possessed resources
that the Soviet Union could not match. Furthermore, Eastern Europe
was a mixed blessing. None of the new regimes except (ironically)
Yugoslavia had enough popular support to stay in power with-
out Soviet backing, and the German problem remained unresolved.
The German Democratic Republic had not been able to produce
a stable economy and the open border with the West meant that
thousands of people, mostly highly trained professionals, left every
year. The emerging Cold War prevented the final resolution of the
many problems created by the post war four-power occupation, the
most explosive being the status of Berlin.
Behind the back and forth of Cold War diplomacy, with its peri-
odic crises, loomed the larger issue of Soviet military power. The
mere possession of an atomic bomb did not render the country
invulnerable, much less equal to the United States. By 1953 the
Soviets had gone a long way toward fending off the potential threat
of US strategic bombers, but the world was not standing still. The
United States realized that the next stage would be the construction
of missiles and as such was working on them. Soviet scientists and
military planners had come to the same conclusions, and thus missile
construction proceeded, if slowly. The launching of the world’s first
satellite, Sputnik, in 1957 created the impression that the Soviets
might be way ahead in missile design and construction, and set off a
frantic search by the CIA for information about Soviet capabilities.
In reality, the rocket that launched Sputnik was highly successful but
useless for military purposes. It required a huge launching pad and
several days’ preparation time, besides being too expensive to manu-
facture in large numbers. The Soviets would not have even twenty or
thirty ICBMs until the early 1960s, and rough parity with the United
States did not come until after the fall of Khrushchev. The United
States did not know this until relatively late, however. The no-
torious U-2 flight of 1960 was an attempt to find out just what the
Soviets had, but it was, of course a failure though it did demon-
strate the abilities of Soviet air defense. It was not until 1961, after
the United States deployed its first spy satellites that the American
438 A Concise History of Russia

government was able to determine just how weak the Soviet mis-
sile program was. Thus, for most of the 1950s Khrushchev could
continue to bluff his way through a series of crises.
The absence of the ability to strike the continental United Stares
during those years did not remove the problem created by nuclear
weapons. The Soviets most certainly could destroy Western Europe
in any nuclear exchange, and Washington could not be sure that
some sort of weapons could reach farther. Fortunately in both the
Soviet Union and the United States, political leaders, generals, and
scientists were becoming increasingly concerned that the weapons
were too destructive to be easily or even usefully deployed. Stalin
had resisted this conclusion, but once he was gone, even his inner
circle began to have doubts. When Eisenhower remarked in a speech
at the end of 1953 that atomic weapons could end civilization, even
Malenkov echoed the idea, though Khrushchev initially rejected it.
Nevertheless they also began to move toward the idea of interna-
tional cooperation in developing peaceful uses for atomic energy.
For the scientists, led by Kurchatov, the 1955 Soviet hydrogen bomb
test was a turning point. Still the scientific head of the Soviet nuclear
project, Kurchatov began to speak in favor of peaceful coexistence
and warning of the dangers of nuclear war. He and the other physi-
cists also pushed for more contact with Western colleagues, and
Soviet and Western physicists began to meet fairly regularly. This
was important for science, and in addition the involvement of so
many scientists east and west in weapons programs meant that an
informal channel existed on nuclear issues. Even before the hydro-
gen bomb test, Khrushchev had Marshal Zhukov mention the pos-
sibility of peaceful coexistence in his May Day speech of 1955,
in spite of Molotov’s objections. Thus by the Geneva conference
of 1955 the limitation of nuclear weapons became a major part
of Soviet diplomacy, a concern shared by Eisenhower and most
other Western leaders. Khrushchev’s further proclamation at the
Twentieth Congress in 1956 that war was not inevitable and peace-
ful coexistence between capitalism and socialism was possible had
many dimensions, but one of them was to justify the need and
possibility for talks on weapons limitations and disarmament. The
continuous crises of the Cold War played out against powerful
counter-currents in both the United States and the USSR, pushing
 The Cold War 439

both sides toward some sort of agreement on nuclear weapons. For-

tunately these countercurrents were at least to some extent present
in the minds of most of the political leaders on both sides. Ulti-
mately they would lead to the 1963 Nuclear Test Ban treaty, which
eliminated atmospheric and undersea testing of nuclear weapons.
The treaty did nothing to stop the arms race, but it did sharply
curtail the damage to the environment and public health caused by
the testing of nuclear weapons.
With the knowledge that their nuclear arsenal was inferior to
that of the United States and that American military doctrine in the
1950s included the first use of atomic weapons, Khrushchev was in a
difficult position. The issues that mattered to him the most, at least
at first, were the European issues that centered on Germany. For
the Soviets there were three basic problems. First were the economic
problems in East Germany and the resultant series of political crises,
starting with the June 17, 1953, disorders in East Berlin that were
put down by force. Second was the status of West Berlin, a thorn
in the side of both the Soviets and the GDR, even if also a major
inconvenience to NATO. Finally there was the problem of West
Germany. After Stalin’s death the Soviet leadership realized that the
Federal Republic was not going to turn against the United States,
and indeed early in 1955 it joined NATO and began to build an
army. The Soviet response was to establish the Warsaw Pact with
its East European allies and put an end to any ideas of a neutral
Germany. Though Molotov stuck to older policy, he had no support
in the Politburo and from this moment on the Soviet leadership was
committed to the division of Germany and full support of the GDR.
The particular fear of Germany was largely a relic of World War
II and the inability of Khrushchev and many others of his genera-
tion to realize how much Europe, including Germany, had changed
after 1945. West Germany’s chancellor of those years, Konrad Ade-
nauer, while violently anti-communist, was also not interested in
provoking conflicts and wanted much better trade relations with
the Soviet Union than his American allies would permit. The imme-
diate irritation for the Soviets was West Berlin, mainly because it
created a threat to the GDR, where most of the Soviet Union’s
troops facing NATO were stationed. To make matters worse, no
final resolution of the outstanding issues of the occupation or any
440 A Concise History of Russia

other matter concerning Germany was possible without including

Berlin, an issue on which Soviet and American views were com-
pletely incompatible. A solution of sorts came in 1961, as East
Germany’s Walter Ulbricht urgently requested Khrushchev for help
in yet another economic crisis that led to a big increase in emi-
gration from the east. Ulbricht suggested that somehow they close
the border and Khrushchev responded with the idea of building a
wall around West Berlin. The result was the Berlin Wall, put up
in the early hours of August 13, 1961. Khrushchev was careful to
make it clear that the access of the soldiers of the Western powers
would not be affected, thus eliminating the incentive for Kennedy
to respond with anything other than condemnation and more aid.
Though it was a huge blow to the prestige of the socialist bloc, the
wall defused the Berlin problem for the next decade.
European affairs had been at the center of Soviet attention for
most of the time since 1945, but as the years passed China and what
became known as the Third World came to take a larger place. The
Third World meant the vast majority of the globe that in 1945 was
still part of one or another European empire or (in the Western hemi-
sphere) dominated by the United States. It was here that the Soviet
Union was gradually able to challenge the West with increasing
success until the 1970s. From the outset the Soviet leadership had
assumed that sooner or later they would find allies in the colonial
world, and their own policies in Central Asia were, in their minds,
an anti-colonial revolution. The first Comintern Congress in 1919
had proclaimed the alliance of Communists and anti-imperialist
nationalists, but the policy had little impact outside of China, and
there it seemed a failure after 1927. The Second World War changed
all that, and not only in China but also with its neighbors. In most
other colonized countries the Communists were not strong, but vir-
tually everywhere nationalist movements grew much more powerful
than they had been before the war, which so weakened Britain and
France that neither could put up much resistance. In 1948 the cen-
terpiece of the British Empire, India, became independent, and by
the 1950s it was clear that Britain would have to give up its empire
sooner or later. France fought on in Indochina until 1954 and then
in Algeria, but there too it went down to defeat. A whole host of
new states came into being. Stalin had been skeptical of these new
states, but his successors were not so wary.
 The Cold War 441

The first Third World country that came into the good graces of
the Soviet Union was Nasser’s Egypt in 1955. After some debate
among the leadership Khrushchev agreed to supply Nasser with
tanks and planes, marking the USSR’s first major entrance into the
Middle East. When Nasser nationalized the Suez Canal, Khrushchev
supported him during the ensuing crisis, though he had little real
leverage over the area. In any case, the week that the Suez crisis
peaked, the Soviet leadership was absorbed with a far more serious
issue in Eastern Europe. The beginnings of de-Stalinization in the
USSR had a prompt echo in Poland, where riots led to the installa-
tion of Wladyslaw Gomulka as party leader. Gomulka had been a
victim of Stalinist purges in Poland and now steered the country on a
course that was loyal to Moscow but differed in its social and other
policies: most notably, Polish farmers received land on the breakup
of the collectives and remained owners until the fall of communism.
More serious was the challenge in Hungary. Here the local Stal-
inists tried to hang on, provoking the collapse of the regime, and
the emergence of a new leader in Imre Nagy. Nagy announced that
Hungary would have multi-party elections and leave the Warsaw
Pact. The Soviet leaders, including Khrushchev, hesitated. They had
moved troops near Budapest, but only after days of indecision did
they finally move in and suppress the revolt, installing Janos Kadar
as the new party leader. Nagy was taken to Rumania and executed.
After 1956, relations with all the socialist brothers became
increasingly complicated. Kadar retained collective farms but per-
mitted and even encouraged small businesses. Both Poland and
Hungary (after initial repression) permitted oppositional opinion
to express itself in ways that were generally modest but not seen
in the USSR or other Communist ruled countries. Other East Euro-
pean countries began to exert much more independence, though
not necessarily accompanied by more liberal policies. Albania’s
Enver Hoxha had opposed de-Stalinization from the first, and grad-
ually built a Stalinist mini-state featuring crank economic schemes.
Rumania became increasingly critical of Khrushchev and Soviet
leadership generally, but also moved in a much more authoritar-
ian direction than the USSR, and accompanied this course with
super-industrialization schemes that impoverished the country by
the 1980s. None of these changes in East Europe, however, were as
significant as the growing break with China. Mao Tse-tung was not
442 A Concise History of Russia

happy with Khrushchev’s secret speech, claiming later that Stalin

was seventy percent good and only thirty percent bad. With some
ambiguity, Mao backed the Soviets in Hungary, but relations dete-
riorated in subsequent years. Mao’s Great Leap Forward (1958–
1961) reflected the growing radicalization of Chinese policy, estab-
lishing gigantic communes in the place of Soviet-style collective
farms and promoting back yard blast furnaces to make steel. Mao
was also increasingly unhappy with Khrushchev’s attempts at peace-
ful coexistence with the United States, in his mind a fundamental
impossibility. Khrushchev, as elsewhere, exacerbated the tension
with his clumsy diplomacy, but totally different visions of social-
ism were at the heart of the dispute. The Soviet Union had spent a
great deal of money in aid to China, especially after 1953, and sent
many advisers on technical matters. Then in July 1960, Khrushchev
ordered them all home. The final split came with the Cuban mis-
sile crisis in 1962, for Mao saw the resolution of the crisis as a
surrender to the United States. Open polemics in the Chinese press
calling Soviet policies “revisionist” made the split obvious for all to
see, and continued until the beginning of the Cultural Revolution in
China (1967). Now the Chinese leadership was claiming capitalist
restoration in the USSR, and entered into a mad world all of its
own. Border clashes only made things worse, but China was too
absorbed in its own upheaval to make problems for the Russians.
Nevertheless, the only major ally of the USSR in the Cold War was
now gone, right at the time when Moscow had finally achieved
strategic parity with the United States.
The rivalry with America moved more and more to the center of
Cold War politics. Khrushchev continued to make attempts at pro-
moting understanding, symbolized by his trip to the United States
in 1959. The Soviet leader saw more than farms, for he toured the
country extensively, meeting with Hollywood stars (though he was
prevented from seeing Disneyland) and speaking with Eisenhower
and other American officials. In spite of the ongoing Berlin prob-
lem, there seemed to be some progress, and more meetings were
scheduled in Europe. Then in 1960 the Soviet air defense tracked a
U-2 spy plane over Sverdlovsk and shot it down, ending any hope of
talks on arms control or easing of tensions for the time being. The
construction of the Berlin Wall the next year did not help either,
but Khrushchev had much riskier plans in mind.
 The Cold War 443

The Cuban revolution of 1959 had found a lukewarm reception in

Moscow. Fidel Castro was not a member of the Cuban Communist
Party, which had in fact opposed his movement until the last minute.
Castro’s orientation was nevertheless both against American domi-
nance and toward socialism. The many US moves against Cuba, the
1961 Bay of Pigs invasion, covert operations, and threatening talk
in the US Congress, convinced the Soviets that they should support
him. Khrushchev thought that he could solve two problems at once
by placing Soviet missiles in Cuba. One was that he had only a half
dozen ICBMs, and the rest of his missiles were not yet big enough to
reach the United States from the Soviet Union, leaving his country
at a serious disadvantage. The other aim was to provide Castro with
a serious defense against a possible invasion. Khrushchev made the
decision largely on his own, with little consultation with the Soviet
elite. Once the United States detected the missiles by U-2 overflights,
Kennedy decided that they had to be removed. The outcome was
inevitable, given that the USSR lacked a nuclear arsenal with the
size and range of US equipment. Khrushchev had to withdraw, and
to make matters worse the one US concession (removing US mis-
siles from Turkey) remained secret. The humiliation was complete,
and the internal repercussions were the beginning of Khrushchev’s
ultimate fall.
With the arrival of Leonid Brezhnev as Soviet leader, the bluff and
risk-taking came to an end, and the USSR concentrated on building
up its military so that the Cuban debacle could never be repeated. Its
foreign relations with the United States remained central, but as the
Americans were increasingly preoccupied with Vietnam, Brezhnev
had a bit of breathing room. He certainly needed it, for the descent
of China into the Cultural Revolution was followed in 1968 by
crisis in Czechoslovakia. In many ways the “Prague Spring” was a
repeat of Hungary with the same outcome: Soviet troops restored
the rule of the Communist party in a spirit in accord with Soviet
conceptions of socialism. Ultimately it was not Eastern Europe but
Vietnam that became the main focus of the Cold War for a decade.
The Soviet leadership had never seen Vietnam as an important
front of the Cold War, and regarded the United States as too pow-
erful in Southeast Asia to challenge. To make things worse, the Viet-
namese Communists generally supported China after 1956, in part
because the policy of peaceful coexistence undermined their desires
444 A Concise History of Russia

for a war in the south to reunify their country. Khrushchev largely

ignored them. He scarcely had the time to react to the Tonkin Gulf
incident of 1964, for he was soon out of office, but Brezhnev quickly
decided to respond to American escalation of the war by sending
large quantities of Soviet aid, including anti-aircraft missiles capa-
ble of hitting American bombers, even B-52s, over North Vietnam.
Unlike Khrushchev’s quixotic pursuit of Third World nationalist
leaders like Nasser or Patrice Lumumba to almost universal fail-
ure, the support of North Vietnam led to the biggest defeat for the
United States in the Cold War. By 1975, the last Americans had fled
from the roof of the US embassy and the Vietnamese Communists
ruled in the whole country, even if one devastated by war with a
million and a half dead.
The victory of the Vietnamese Communists and the continued
alliance with Cuba were certainly successes, even if neither coun-
try was large enough to make much difference in the geopolitical
balance. In Europe the Soviet position seemed stable. The increas-
ing economic problems in Poland were balanced by the restora-
tion of normal relations with West Germany, the result of Willy
Brandt’s Ostpolitik in the early 1970s. This rapprochement defused
the European Cold War’s most serious conflict – the German prob-
lem. Brandt’s new turn was possible because Communism was no
longer an issue in Western Europe. The post-war economic boom
combined with a solid welfare system produced a generation of sat-
isfied consumers, so far from the desperate masses of the first half
of the twentieth century. The West European Communist parties
ceased to grow, and the smaller ones faded into obscurity and the
larger ones, such as the Italian Communist Party, grew increasingly
critical of the Soviets, if more so of China.
Though no one knew it then, the Vietnamese victory was the last
Communist success. No Communist revolution materialized from
Che Guevara’s attempts in Latin America, and the mildly reformist
Salvador Allende was overthrown in a coup most contemporaries
believed to have been masterminded by the CIA. In Africa, the
radical regime of Colonel Mengistu of Ethiopa (1974–1991) was a
Soviet ally, but its land reform hardly made it a socialist country in
the Soviet sense, and in any case was too poor and small to make
much of a difference. Africa, like most of the Third World, evolved
 The Cold War 445

in various ways, some countries becoming relatively prosperous

capitalist economies, others moving toward even more desperate
poverty, but none of them toward socialism as Moscow understood
it. The rhetoric of people’s liberation that came from the Soviets
rang increasingly hollow.
The first American response to its defeat in Vietnam was to move
toward some sort of accommodation, the policy that was known
as détente. The Nixon administration, knowing that the Soviets
had rough parity in nuclear weapons and weakened by the war in
Vietnam, decided to respond to Soviet overtures on arms limitations,
the result being the 1972 Strategic Arms Limitation Treaty (SALT)
limiting strategic weapons. The next stage was the 1975 Helsinki
accord that recognized the post-World War II boundaries for the
first time and also included generalities about mutual consultations
and human rights, the latter soon to become a bone of contention.
Discussions continued through the decade, ending finally with SALT
II in 1979, limiting the number of delivery vehicles for nuclear
weapons.
While limiting the hitherto frenetic pace of construction of nuclear
arsenals and thus reducing the risks of annihilation, these moves did
not end the Cold War, nor were they intended to. In many ways
the more important move was the rapprochement with China that
Nixon and Henry Kissinger inaugurated in 1971. With Nixon’s visit
to China the next year the Soviet Union found itself facing both
China and the United States as rivals. China, of course, was still in
the throes of the Cultural Revolution, with all its murderous effects
and political and economic chaos. The US-Chinese arrangement
coincided with the rise of the Gang of Four, who ruled China with
terror until Mao’s death in 1976. Only then was Deng Xiaoping able
to restore some sort of normalcy, so that China was able to provide
the United States with important support. During these years the
United States and China traded intelligence on the Soviet Union. In
public, the United States denounced the exile of Soviet dissidents
and restrictions on Jewish emigration in the USSR while remaining
silent about the thousands of people who perished in China during
the last phases of the Cultural Revolution. The Soviets lambasted
US imperialism while allying with Third World countries whose
socialism or even nationalism was strictly nominal. Once the United
446 A Concise History of Russia

States had played its “China card,” the US-Soviet contest gradually
ceased to be a struggle for socialism or democratic capitalism and
turned into yet another superpower rivalry.
The aging leadership around Brezhnev did not perceive these
deeper shifts in society and politics in the world. It still lived in
the world of revolutionary struggles and the building of social-
ism, even if their tactical orientation meant that revolutions abroad
were rarely a priority. Their last move in that struggle was to be
fatal, the involvement in Afganistan. The USSR had always had
relations with its Afghan neighbor and occasionally provided aid
and considered various schemes of meddling in Afghan politics,
but the country was too poor, too traditional, and too marginal to
the great power conflicts, especially after the end of British India.
Then in 1973 a military coup overthrew the monarchy, and five
years later it, in turn, fell to another group of army officers with
more or less Marxist views. The new rulers passed various mea-
sures to destroy “feudalism,” the many traditional customs which
they viewed as oppressive, provoking massive discontent. The Soviet
leadership took the Afghan government seriously, as Communists
moving toward a society on the Soviet model, and the challenge
to the regime as another US-sponsored revolt. The latter belief was
correct, as the CIA had started to aid the rebels by mid-1979, in
part in the hope that the Soviets would be forced to intervene. To
make matters worse, the Soviets feared that the Afghan leaders at
the moment might go over to the United States or China. Thus on
December 27, 1979, Soviet troops seized Kabul, placed a more loyal
government in charge, and the invasion began. The United States
provided aid for the rebels through Pakistan, thus laying a founda-
tion for the rise of Islamic extremism. This fighting led to massive
destruction and casualties in Afghanistan, and the death of some
fourteen thousand Soviet soldiers. For the next six years, until the
rise of Mikhail Gorbachev, the Afghan war was the main issue of
the Cold War as well as being an enormous drain on the resources
and morale of the USSR. It also speeded up the collapse of the Soviet
order.
 EPILOGUE
The End of the USSR

The collapse of the Soviet Union and the reappearance of Russia

were momentous events, but events that are difficult to describe in
any depth. The main outlines are clear, as much of its fall took
place in public under intense scrutiny by the Soviet population,
Russian and foreign journalists, and the governments of the world.
Yet many of the crucial decisions took place behind closed doors
and are too recent to be the object of study by historians. Many of
the major events of the time have already fallen from memory, and
others have been probably exaggerated in popular accounts as well
as in the few academic attempts at analysis. Real sources scarcely
exist, and sensational memoirs and fragments of information do
not make good history. To complicate matters, perceptions of the
events outside Russia and among the Russian and most former
Soviet populations differ profoundly. All that is possible is a sketch
of the events and of some of the more obvious social, political, and
economic trends of a quarter of a century of upheaval, with some
attention to the understanding of these events and trends by the
Russians who lived through them.

Mikhail Gorbachev became the General Secretary of the Communist

Party in March of 1985, just a few hours after the death of Cher-
nenko. He brought with him a new team – among others, Aleksandr
Iakovlev as an adviser and Boris Yeltsin, whom he put in charge of
the Moscow party organization. Gorbachev belonged to a new gen-
eration: born in 1931, he graduated from Moscow University in law
447
448 Epilogue

in 1955. The last Soviet leader with a university education had been
Lenin. After university Gorbachev soon became the party boss of
his native Stavropol’, an agricultural district in the plains north of
the Caucasus. In 1979 he entered the Politburo. Iakovlev was older,
born in 1923, and had risen through the party propaganda network
in the 1950s. He spent 1958 at Columbia University in New York
on an exchange, and was ambassador to Canada from 1973 to
1983. These two men would lead the attempt to reform the Soviet
order. Their nemesis was another party boss from the provinces,
Boris Yeltsin. Yeltsin, born the same year as Gorbachev, graduated
from the Technical University in Sverdlovsk, also in 1955, and went
on to become the party boss of the Sverdlovsk region, one of the
USSR’s key industrial regions. He remained at that post from 1976
until Gorbachev brought him to Moscow.
The first year or so after the appearance of Gorbachev brought
little change on the surface. Indeed the most spectacular event of his
first year in office was the explosion of the nuclear reactor at Cher-
nobyl in April 1986. The country that had sent the first man into
space could not maintain the safety of its reactors. Gorbachev called
for a radical improvement in the economy at the 1986 party con-
ference, but got nowhere. Andrei Sakharov was allowed to return
to Moscow late in the year, but most of the policy discussion still
remained behind the closed doors of party meetings. In 1987 Gor-
bachev began to call for “restructuring” (perestroika in Russian),
publishing a whole book to promote his vision. He soon added to
this glasnost’, which meant something like “openness” or perhaps
even “transparency.” The idea was simply that major issues should
be part of public debate, not just discussion behind closed doors
within the party elite. At the same time a whole series of mea-
sures began to open the economic structure to non-governmental
enterprise. The first important example was the law that permit-
ted “cooperatives” to function, which were, in fact, small private
businesses such as restaurants. Largely unnoticed at the time, the
leadership also took steps to speed up the economy by making
use of the Komsomol, the Communist League of Youth. Founded
in the Civil War as a means of mobilizing the young behind the
party’s goals, it had become an essentially bureaucratic organiza-
tion, a lifeless adjunct to the party. Now it was encouraged to set
 Epilogue 449

up “Youth Scientific-Technical Groups,” which were allowed to

engage in tax-free entrepreneurial activities, mainly with electronics
and automobiles. In these groups the later oligarchs took their first
steps.
Just as important as these changes in attitude and policy was
the Soviet withdrawal from Afghanistan. Gorbachev seems to have
decided on this move almost immediately, but he did not announce
the withdrawal until 1988. Within a year, the Soviets were out of
Afghanistan, which then fell into civil war. The ensuing years of Per-
estroika were politically exciting, as new publications sprang up in
Moscow and Leningrad and many other parts of the country. Issues
from the Stalin era and other dark parts of Soviet history were the
objects of intense discussion. Former dissidents like Sakharov for
a moment were national heroes. Not all of this ferment was the
result of newly found freedom: the first article to appear critical of
Lenin was written on command from the authorities, and historians
who questioned its nationalistic conclusions were told it was not for
discussion. In parts of the country, such as the Ukraine or Central
Asia, the press continued in the Soviet mode. Nevertheless in most
of the central press, in film, in literature, at the theater, and at
the dinner tables of ordinary people, intense arguments raged and
no one any longer took account of what the authorities thought
or did. The excitement of political debate, the first such debate in
seventy years, went along with a rapidly deteriorating economy.
Gorbachev’s first economic reforms removed many of the mecha-
nisms of the Soviet economy but put nothing in their place. A real
market did not yet exist. The supply of consumer goods, already
very poor in the early 1980s, fell catastrophically. The state also
began to lose control of the periphery. In 1988 Armenia began to
make claims to Nagorno-Karabakh, an Armenian enclave in neigh-
boring Azerbaidzhan. Moscow was unable to resolve the dispute,
and Armenia began to reject the authority of the Soviet state.
The pace of change quickened. Behind the scenes, the Komsomol
entrepreneurs had accumulated vast sums, and were soon joined by
Soviet banks and industrial ministries, which converted themselves
into “firms” oriented toward the growing market. In 1989 the Min-
istry of Natural Gas Industry became Gazprom, and it was only
one of many such organizations. Essentially, a kind of privatization
450 Epilogue

was taking place behind closed doors. Other changes were public.
Everywhere in the country Gorbachev’s policy was to replace the
hierarchy of party offices with “Soviet,” that is to say, government,
offices. In many cases the local party boss simply moved across the
street to head the local government, but the change meant that the
party suddenly was becoming irrelevant. Inside the party opposi-
tion to Perestroika was growing. Then Gorbachev announced that
the old Supreme Soviet, the nominal legislature of the USSR, would
be replaced with a “Congress of People’s Deputies.” Elections to
the new Congress would be real and open: there was to be more
than one candidate for each seat. The result was a more or less
free election, the first since 1917, but the results were mixed. Gor-
bachev wanted the new Congress as a vehicle to move ahead the
process of economic liberalization as well as “democratization,”
newly included in the agenda of reform. Unfortunately the com-
position of the new Congress meant a stalemate. Moscow and
Leningrad predictably elected strongly reformist deputies, most of
them from the intelligentsia, as did many Russian provincial cities
and districts. The Ukraine, however, still firmly under party boss
Leonid Kravchuk, and the Central Asian republics elected conser-
vative deputies opposed to reform. The Baltic republics, swept by
a wave of nationalism, were more interested in separation than
reform, and the Transcaucasian republics were focused on their
mutual quarrels. The elections also brought Boris Yeltsin into the
public eye. In 1987 he had fallen afoul of Gorbachev, who had
then removed him from his Moscow post. Now as a deputy to the
Congress, he used the platform to criticize the pace and scope of
reform. He also began to affirm the need for the Russian republic
to look after its own rights and needs, and not defer to the central,
or Soviet, authorities. The year 1989 also saw the collapse of Com-
munist power everywhere in Eastern Europe, climaxed by the fall
of the Berlin Wall in November. Even anti-Soviet Communists in
Rumania were overthrown. Gorbachev accepted all this, apparently
hoping it would lead to better relations with the West.
The next year Gorbachev formally became the head of state of
the USSR, completing the transfer of formal power from party to
state institutions. It did not help him. In the ensuing months grow-
ing nationalism in the Baltic republics and Georgia created a whole
 Epilogue 451

new series of problems. In Georgia the colorful dissident writer

Zviad Gamsakhurdia was elected president in 1990, leading to an
immediate conflict with Abkhazia and South Ossetia. The Georgian
government tried to impose Georgian language on the two minori-
ties, banned local parties, and then shortly after abolished their
local autonomy. Soviet troops had to come and separate the con-
tending parties. Thus all three Transcaucasian republics were now
in turmoil. Gorbachev was losing control over the country. Nation-
alist ferment in Lithuania led to a violent confrontation with Soviet
troops and many deaths in January 1991. In June, Yeltsin won
election to the leadership of the Russian republic by a big major-
ity, in large part because there was no real opposition in the field
against him.
By 1991 the economy seemed to be reaching a nadir, and the
authority of the state was at an all-time low. Yet public politics
still revolved around the battle of reform versus retention of the
Soviet system. The public advocates of reform were mostly from
the intelligentsia, and were increasingly impatient with Gorbachev,
whom they saw as too slow and inclined to compromise. Advocates
of the old system seemed to come mainly from the ranks of the party
elite, increasingly under threat from Gorbachev’s reforms, economic
as well as political. In the background and unnoticed by all, new
groups were forming and waiting in the wings, political clans and a
few new entrepreneurs working largely within the Soviet structure,
but using it to form de facto businesses. The Communists intent on
preserving the system then unwittingly provided the opportunity to
destroy it.
In August of 1991, while Gorbachev was taking a brief vacation
in the Crimea, the vice-president, the Ministers of Internal Affairs
and of Defense, and several other high officials decided to declare an
emergency and take power to reverse the entire process of reform.
They brought several regiments of troops into the city, but found
little support. Most local governments either rejected their appeals
or like the Ukrainian leadership, sat on the fence. The people of
Moscow were clearly against them, and Yeltsin as head of the Rus-
sian republic government led the opposition, famously standing on
a tank to rally the people. The coup leaders kept Gorbachev iso-
lated in the Crimea in his dacha, hoping to hang on, but it was
452 Epilogue

no use. After a few days of almost bloodless confrontation, they

surrendered.
The outcome was the collapse of the Soviet Union. Gorbachev
returned to Moscow, but the country was in chaos. As he strug-
gled to hold on, Yeltsin met with the leaders of Belorussia and the
Ukraine in a hunting lodge in the Belovezha forest in Belorussia.
The three of them abolished the Soviet Union. Other republics were
not asked: the Baltics and Georgia had already declared indepen-
dence, but the Central Asian republic leadership groups were aghast
at the prospect. The public was not asked either: early in 1991 there
had been referenda on the status of the union, and most people,
including in the Ukraine, had voted for more autonomy but to also
preserve the union. This, of course, had been the desire of the local
leadership in Kiev and elsewhere. Now Yeltsin was in power and
the leaders had changed their minds. After seventy-four years of
existence, the Soviet Union came to an end.
The first result, visible already in the weeks after the coup, was
a transformation of the economy unlike anything earlier discussed
in public by the main reformist groups. One part of this policy
of privatization was already largely complete: the transformation
of state production units and banks into private firms. Many or
most of these had an effective monopoly over one or another area
of the economy, and they constituted the cream of the financial
system and the “real” economy. The other part of the policy was
“voucher privatization.” In theory everyone would get vouchers for
property in the new system, but the vouchers were largely worthless.
Some people papered their bathroom walls with them. In fact the
state simply turned over its remaining resources to freshly baked
“businessmen” at fire sale prices. Real private businesses existed
only at the level of small businesses, which were heavily taxed and
consequently conducted business to a large extent outside the law.
The central role of the state and connections of the new owners
with important figures in the government did not mean that the
transformation of power into property was an orderly process. Rival
clans of businessmen intrigued with powerful political clans for
favor. Gangsters became a regular feature of Russian business, and
fought one another other with armed bands. Every week expensive
cars turned up in Moscow parks with the cars and their occupants
 Epilogue 453

riddled with machine gun bullets. Chechen and other Caucasian

gangs controlled the peasant markets and other lucrative sources of
profit.
While a new elite of oligarchs came into being, the standard of
living of the population collapsed. Hyperinflation wiped out the
savings of ordinary people. Doctors, teachers, coal miners, and fac-
tory workers were not paid for months or even years at a time.
Many people lived on a barter economy, and the formerly bet-
ter off grew potatoes in the yards of their dachas. An overvalued
ruble meant that Russia suddenly became a dumping ground for the
world’s goods. Cheap vodka poured into the country from Belgium
and Germany with labels picturing Rasputin, and the American
Snickers candy bar became so ubiquitous that economists used its
price as a benchmark of inflation. The infrastructure, already frail
from years of neglect, began to collapse. Culture disappeared. The
great theaters and orchestras lived on the proceeds of foreign tours.
Few films were made, and movie theaters showed American “action
films.” Scientists moved abroad or tried to find foreign grants. The
intelligentsia, for the first time since the middle nineteenth century,
ceased to play a major role in Russian life. Emigration boomed, not
only Jewish emigration but also the departure of other ethnic and
religious minorities and many ordinary Russians. Only Moscow and
a few other areas maintained a limited prosperity, fuelled by the new
businesses and the rapidly expanding state bureaucracy. While the
Yeltsin years seemed to the West an era of “democratization” and
the transition to a market economy, they seemed to most Russians
a dark night of anarchy, poverty, and total unpredictability.
The ongoing collapse of the economy was paralleled by a collapse
of state power. National republics like Tatarstan began to assert
“sovereign” rights, though no one knew exactly what that meant.
In purely Russian regions provincial governors, mostly from the old
Communist apparatus, got themselves elected and challenged the
central powers. Yeltsin responded in many cases by driving them
out of office and appointing governors himself, but local legislatures
were harder to control. Yeltsin’s largest political problem, however,
was the Russian parliament, the Supreme Soviet of the Congress of
People’s Deputies, in Moscow. The new president was never able
to translate his own electoral victories into a secure majority in
454 Epilogue

the Supreme Soviet, mainly because he was never able to create a

political party to serve his aims. The result was a series of dead-
locks, and increasing opposition to Yeltsin. Popular despair over
the consequences of economic reform created a political vacuum
and gave the Supreme Soviet a chance to try to block further pri-
vatization measures. Yeltsin’s vice-president, Alexander Rutskoi,
elected with him in 1991, joined his opponents as did the speaker
of the Supreme Soviet, Ruslan Khasbulatov, a Chechen by birth.
When Yeltsin ordered the Supreme Soviet dissolved, contrary to the
constitution, the Supreme Soviet impeached Yeltsin and proclaimed
Rutskoi president. In response demonstrators supporting Rutskoi
and Khasbulatov barricaded the parliament building, the “Russian
White House,” seized the mayor’s office and then the television
tower on October 3, 1993. The next day Yeltsin brought in tanks
that shelled the Russian White House, a moment shown live on
television throughout the world. Yeltsin inaccurately portrayed his
opponents and their leaders – both his former allies – as attempting
to restore Communism, a fantasy noticed by a few Western journal-
ists. Most Russians thought the conflict an unprincipled struggle for
power and the levers of privatization. US President Clinton spoke
in favor of Yeltsin’s actions and accepting his description of the
events, sending Russian opinion of America into a decline from
which it never recovered. Yeltsin rewrote the constitution to give
more power to the president, and renamed Russia’s legislature the
Duma to recall tsarist times.
Even worse was to come. In the North Caucasus, Chechen pres-
ident Dzhokhar Dudaev proved completely intractable to Yeltsin’s
attempts to make a deal. As Chechnya was a major center of oil pro-
duction, much was at stake. In October 1994, Yeltsin sent troops
to take Grozny, the Chechen capital. The result was an ignomin-
ious failure, and government bombing killed thousands of civilians,
many of them Russians living within the city. Fighting continued
until 1996, when the Russian air force managed to track down
Dudaev and kill him with a missile strike. Grozny was in ruins.
The Yeltsin years were also the time of the emergence of some
dozen oligarchs, many of them from the Komsomol networks
of 1987–88, who came to head huge personal business empires,
 Epilogue 455

usually centered on banks and controlling vast production units and

all the important electronic and print media. All of them had close
connections with the government, but acted largely on their own
and in ruthless competition with one another. For the mass of the
population, the standard of living continued to fall. The mortality
rate skyrocketed, much of it the result of massive vodka consump-
tion – the product of despair and cheap imported liquor. The birth
rate fell well below the rate needed to reproduce the population. In
spite of all this, Yeltsin managed to achieve his re-election in 1996.
Crucial to his victory was the work of Anatolii Chubais, the head
of the privatization program, who was well connected with Russian
oligarchs and foreign sources of support. Another crucial factor
was the absence of any other candidate than Gennadii Ziuganov,
the head of the Russian Communist party. Ziuganov preached a
strange mixture of Soviet ideology, Russian nationalism, and sheer
eccentricity, and found support among the elderly and provincial
workers, as well as masses of protest votes. Yeltsin entered his sec-
ond term, sick from heart attacks and heavy drinking, which he
displayed in public on several occasions. Western governments and
companies moved into the former Soviet republics in Transcaucasia
and Central Asia in search of new oil and gas supplies. Although
there was a respite in Chechnya, Russia was at its nadir.
The turning point came as a consequence of the Asian financial
crisis of 1997–98. This crisis had repercussions in Russia, and in
August 1998, the State Bank let the ruble fall sharply. The results
were immediate: Russian goods began to replace imports in Rus-
sian stores in a matter of weeks. The rickety financial structure that
was the centerpiece of the oligarchic business empires collapsed.
Russian industry began to revive. The few remaining financial oli-
garchs of the 1990s now were joined by an increasing number of
new oligarchs, whose fortunes rested on industry and the extrac-
tion of resources. Rising revenues from the sale of oil and nat-
ural gas, mainly to the European Union, made Russian finances
healthy again. The war in Chechnya revived in 1999, but this time
to Russia’s favor. After a series of bombings of apartment houses in
Moscow and other Russian cities that were attributed to Chechen
militants, the Russian army moved in on Chechnya, this time slowly
456 Epilogue

but deliberately. By the spring they had retaken Grozny and most of
the area, and established a new government led by Ahmad Kadyrov,
a Muslim cleric and erstwhile supporter of Dudaev.
Yeltsin, evidently exhausted by the years of upheaval, heavy
drinking, and bad health suddenly resigned and appointed his prime
minister, Vladimir Putin, as his successor on the last day of 1999.
No one knew why Yeltsin chose Putin, nor even if Yeltsin’s was
the deciding voice. Putin had served twenty-five years in the KGB,
five of them in East Germany, but then joined the political team
of St. Petersburg’s reformist mayor Anatolii Sobchak. In 1996 he
went to Moscow, at some point attracting Yeltsin’s attention. Much
younger, ascetic by contrast to Yeltsin, and a colorful personality,
he attracted world attention and very quickly acquired popularity
among the overwhelming majority of Russians. He remained presi-
dent through two elections until 2008.
Putin very quickly put together a new order. He inherited a con-
stitutionally strong presidency from Yeltsin’s 1993 rewrite of the
constitution, but more important, his team managed to create a
pro-government political party that supported the president in the
Duma. He regularized the practice of appointing provincial gover-
nors, and appointed military officers and some of his former com-
rades from KGB to important offices. President Putin was much
more powerful than his predecessor, though most Russians still saw
the state as the instrument not of the president, but of the now
ever more numerous oligarchs. The Chechen war gradually died
down, though terrorist acts continued sporadically, like the assas-
sination of Ahmad Kadyrov and the seizure of school children in
Beslan, both in 2004. If foreign journalists saw all these changes
as creeping dictatorship, the Russian population felt that order was
coming back. A new prosperity was as important as order and rel-
ative stability. Moscow and other large cities went into an orgy of
home improvements, as a new middle class emerged and began to
replace aging Soviet appliances with Siemens and Bosch washing
machines and dishwashers. Huge traffic jams appeared every day
as millions bought cars for the first time: ancient used Volkswagens
and gleaming new Japanese SUVs. Hundreds of thousands began to
take vacations abroad to Europe and the Middle East in search of
the sun. The Turkish coast at Antalya was packed with Russians all
 Epilogue 457

year around. The birth rate inched up, nearing the replacement rate
for the first time in decades. Culture revived, with massive expen-
ditures on projects like the reconstruction of the Bolshoi Theater
in Moscow. Publishing boomed, spurred by the new mass market
in detective stories and romance novels, many of them translated
or imitated from Western models. Serious journalists and scribblers
turned out endless biographies and “exposés” of current politics
as well as pseudo-historical accounts of Russian history. Historians
continued to publish ever more massive series of documents from
Soviet history, concentrating on the Stalin era but eventually reach-
ing into the 1950s. After a few years it was fairly clear that the
new prosperity was not just the result of oil revenues from sales to
the European Union: the internal market had begun to grow and
increasing trade with China began to revive old Soviet-era factories.
Prosperity began to spread outside Moscow and the oil-producing
areas to St. Petersburg and provincial cities. Small business increas-
ingly became a normal part of the economy as the Putin government
removed the punitive taxes of the Yeltsin era. Verbally, Russia began
to challenge American hegemony in the world. Though still isolated
from most world economic organizations, and with only a de facto
ally in China, Russia reentered world politics after a decade of
absence.

The end of the Soviet Union left the new Russia with many dilem-
mas. One of them was very basic: What is Russia? And what is
to be the political ideal to cement the state? In the Yeltsin years
the government struggled with this issue largely by itself, for soci-
ety was essentially flattened, desperate merely to survive. In theory,
the ideology of the new regime was democracy, but for most Rus-
sians that simply meant the public pronouncements of the people in
power. When the Russian air force bombed Grozny in 1994, one of
the older Russian residents told Western reporters, “I survived the
Nazis, now I have survived the democrats.” A variety of intellectu-
als and political groupings tried to come up with new ideologies to
replace Marxism, most attempts being a Russian nationalism simi-
lar to that propagated by Ziuganov and Vladimir Zhirinovsky. The
Yeltsin government realized that “democracy” meant to ordinary
Russians nothing more than kleptocracy and anarchy and tried to
458 Epilogue

fill the vacuum, often to comic effects. The television stations,

then entirely in the hands of pro-government oligarchs, ran end-
less programs about the Romanov dynasty and often imaginary
pre-1917 traditions. Yeltsin not only renamed the parliament the
Duma, in recognition of the 1906–1917 institution, he also restored
the double-headed eagle as the state symbol of Russia, a dynastic
emblem of autocracy, not democracy. The government decided that
Russia needed a “state ideology” and appointed a committee headed
by a nationalist mathematician to come up with one. After a year
the committee dissolved itself because it could not come up with
anything reasonable.
The Putin presidency inherited a state that had little legitimacy
with the population. The Soviet Union after the war had been legit-
imate to most people; that is, they may have thought all the poli-
cies were wrong but it was still their state. The new Russia was
nobody’s state, even if most people approved of Putin. Many Rus-
sians believed that the new elite was even further from the popu-
lation than the Communists had been. Ordinary people said of the
new elite, “they don’t ask us” about what they were doing. As the
years passed, the population began to look back more positively on
the Soviet era, and the Putin government responded by memorial-
izing Soviet heroes from the war or the space race, and suggesting
that history textbooks should be less negative about that part of the
Russian past. Increasing segments of the population were better off
after 2000, but in what country did they live? What was Russia? The
boundaries that collapsed in 1991 were not created by the Soviets,
but the Russian Empire centuries before. These were not abstract
questions. Millions of people had personal ties with the Ukraine,
Georgia, Armenia, Kazakhstan, and even more remote areas. They
still lived in terms of the former Soviet space, not just Russia. Nar-
row Russian nationalism turned out to be a failure with no wide
echo in the population, young or old. The new Russia moreover
did not reflect the social values of substantial parts of the popu-
lation. At least the new state did not become an ethno-state, like
most other ex-Soviet republics. At Putin’s 2000 inauguration the
Russian Orthodox clergy were seated in the audience alongside the
rabbis and imams, an arrangement that in a strange way retained
the traditions both of the Russian Empire and the Soviet Union.
 Epilogue 459

If the Caucasus remained a problem, official terminology included

all citizens of Russia as “rossiane” (roughly, people of Russia), not
just “russkie” (Russians in an ethnic sense), a terminology impossi-
ble to translate but highly significant for its attempt at inclusiveness.

In the Perestroika era, a popular joke was that the Soviet Union
was the only country in the world with an unpredictable past – a
comment on Soviet historical ideology and the speed and superfi-
ciality of its replacement. Indeed Russia had been a land of thinly
populated northern forests for the first eight or nine centuries of
its existence, but it turned into one of the world’s most populous
countries and is still the world’s largest in area. It was the world’s
fifth industrial power in 1914 while still overwhelmingly rural. Then
it embarked, or the Bolsheviks embarked it, on a utopian scheme
to realize a new socialist order of society, one without classes or
exploitation. At the same time they sought to become a fully indus-
trialized modern state. In the latter goal it largely succeeded, if at
colossal cost. For a short time, the Soviet Union was a superpower,
or was almost one. For most of the twentieth century Russia was
even a major player in world science and in literature, even if these
never reached the heights achieved in the era of the tsars. The fate
of the socialist dream is more a matter of irony than tragedy: the
ruling party that was to create the new order, after seventy years
of effort, effectively decided that wealth was better than power,
that inequality was better than equality and it privatized itself. The
result was a hybrid society, with private businesses that are not
quite private and government institutions not quite governmental.
The smaller and less powerful but (for many) richer state that suc-
ceeded the Soviet Union appeared on the scene mimicking the old
Russia, with an ambiguous place in the world and in the eyes of its
people. Whether or not it can realize the potential created by the
previous millennium of Russian (and Soviet) history remains to be
seen.
 FURTHER READING

Russian history has never been blessed with an abundance of acces-

sible works on its history and culture in English. Much of the exist-
ing literature is now seriously out of date and is not being replaced
quickly. Hence the following is by no means an exhaustive list;
rather it attempts to provide the general reader with accessible lit-
erature where possible though it occasionally includes academic
studies. Reference works such as the Cambridge History of Russia,
3 vols. (2006) provide full bibliography.

rus and early russia

For the earliest centuries of Russian history, to the time of Peter the
Great, the situation is particularly bad. The best overall introduc-
tion to the earlier centuries is Janet Martin, Medieval Russia 980–
1584 (1995). John Fennell’s History of the Russian Church to 1448
(1995) covers the medieval period. Translations of the devotional
and other literature of medieval Russia are Serge Zenkovsky, ed.,
and trans., Medieval Russia’s Epics, Chronicles, and Tales (1974)
and Michael Klimenko, ed., Vita of St. Sergii of Radonezh (1980).
Medieval Novgorod has never inspired the works in English that it
deserves, especially after the decades of archeological excavation.
An introduction is Henrik Birnbaum, Lord Novgorod the Great
(1981). For the Mongol invasion and rule the foundation is Charles
Halperin, Russia and the Golden Horde (1985).

461
462 Further Reading

For the politics of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries see J.

L. I. Fennell, Ivan the Great of Moscow (1963), Andrei Pavlov and
Maureen Perrie, Ivan the Terrible (2003), the old but still useful
S. P. Platonov, The Time of Troubles (1970), Philip Longworth,
Alexis, Tsar of All the Russias (1984), and Lindsey Hughes, Sophia:
Regent of Russia 1657–1704 (1990). Isolde Thyret, Between God
and Tsar: Religious Symbolism and the Royal Women of Muscovite
Russia (2001) provides a new perspective on the ruling dynasty.
The evolution of the church and religion is covered mainly in schol-
arly monographs such as Paul Bushkovitch, Religion and Society
in Russia: the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries (1992) and Paul
Meyendorff, Russia, Ritual and Reform: the Liturgical Reforms of
Nikon in the Seventeenth Century (1991). Ioann Shusherin’s seven-
teenth century account of Patriarch Nikon’s life has been translated
as From Peasant to Patriarch, Kevin Kain and Katia Levintova,
translators (2007) and see Archpriest Avvakum, the Life Written
by Himself, trans. Kenneth Brostrom (1979).

the eighteenth century

The political and cultural history of the era of Peter the Great and
the eighteenth century are well covered. For Peter the best all around
study remains Reinhard Wittram, Peter der Grosse, Czar und Kaiser
(1964). More modern treatments are Lindsey Hughes, Russia in the
Age of Peter the Great (1998) and Paul Bushkovitch, Peter the
Great 1671–1725: the Struggle for Power (2001). A shorter version
exists for both: Hughes’ Peter the Great: a Biography (2002) and
Bushkovitch, Peter the Great (2001). The empresses between Peter
and Catherine have not attracted much attention, but see Evgenii
Anisimov, Empress Elizabeth: Her Reign and Her Russia 1741–
1761, trans. John T. Alexander (1995); and Five Empresses, trans.
Kathleen Carol (2004). Isabel de Madariaga’s Russia in the Age of
Catherine the Great (1981) and John T. Alexander, Catherine the
Great: Life and Legend (1989) are lively accounts of the empress
and her court while Simon Sebag Montefiore’s massive Prince of
Princes: the Life of Potemkin (2000) describes a crucial figure.
The correspondence of Catherine and Potemkin has been translated
as Love and Conquest: Personal Correspondence of Catherine the
 Further Reading 463

Great and Grigory Potemkin, trans. Douglas Smith (2004). For

court politics and other events see David L. Ransel, The Politics of
Catherinian Russia: the Panin Party (1975) and John T. Alexander,
Emperor of the Cossacks; Pugachev and the Frontier Jacquerie of
1773–1775 (1973). Influential attempts to analyze the Russian state
are Marc Raeff, The Well-Ordered Police State: Social and Institu-
tional Change through Law in the Germanies and Russa 1600–
1800 (1983) and John P. LeDonne, Absolutism and Ruling Class:
the Formation of the Russian Political Order 1700–1825 (1991).
Social history is less well represented in English but see Michelle
Marrese, A Woman’s Kingdom: Noblewomen and the Control of
Property in Russia 1700–1861 (2002) and David Ransel, A Rus-
sian Merchant’s Tale: the Life and Adventures of Ivan Alekseevich
Tolchenov, Based on His Diary (2009). Important studies of foreign
policy and empire include Jerzy Lukowski, The Partitions of Poland
1772, 1793, 1795 (1999); Alan W Fisher, The Russian Annexation
of Crimea 1772–1783 (1970); and Michael Khodarkovsky, Where
Two Worlds Meet: The Russian State and the Kalmyk Nomads
1600–1772 (1992).
In the eighteenth century Russia entered the world of European
culture and the Enlightenment. James Cracraft chronicles Peter’s
time in The Petrine Revolution in Russian Architecture (1988), The
Petrine Revolution in Russian Imagery (1997), and The Petrine
Revolution in Russian Culture (2004). The best introductions to
Russian culture from Peter to 1800 are Marina Ritzarev, Eighteenth
Century Russian Music (2006); W Gareth Jones, Nikolay Novikov:
Enlightener of Russia (1984); Denis Fonvizin, Dramatic Works,
trans. Marvin Kantor (1974) and Political and Legal Writings,
trans. Walter Gleason (1985); and Alexander Radishchev, Journey
from St. Petersburg to Moscow, trans. Leo Wiener (1966).
For the time of Paul and Alexander I Roderick E. McGrew, Paul
I of Russia 1754–1801 (1992) attempts to defend Paul’s reputation,
while Janet M. Hartley, Alexander I (1994) is briefer and more bal-
anced. Russia’s wars are well handled in Norman E Saul, Russia
and the Mediterranean 1797–1807 (1970) and Dominic Lieven’s
magisterial Russia against Napoleon: the Battle for Europe 1807
to 1814 (2009). For the internal politics of the empire in the first
half of the nineteenth century see Marc Raeff, Michael Speransky:
464 Further Reading

Statesman of Imperial Russia 1772–1839 (2d ed., 1969); W. Bruce

Lincoln, Nicholas I: Emperor and Autocrat of All the Russias
(1989). On the Decembrist revolt a now rather old introduction
is Anatole G. Mazour, First Russian Revolution, 1825: the Decem-
brist Movement: its Origins, Development, and Significance (1967),
while more modern treatments of the main figures include Patrick
O’Meara, K F Ryleev: a Political Biography of the Decembrist Poet
(1984); Glynn Barratt, Rebel on the Bridge: a Life of the Decembrist
Baron Andrey Rozen 1800–1884 (1975); and Christine Sutherland,
Princess of Siberia: the Story of Maria Volkonsky and the Decem-
brist Exiles (1984). The debates inside the Russian intelligentsia
from 1825 to the Crimean War are reflected in Andrzej Walicki,
The Slavophile Controversy: the History of a Conservative Utopia
in Nineteenth Century Russian Thought, trans. Hilda Andrews-
Rusiecka (1975) and E. H. Carr, The Romantic Exiles (1933). The
best portrait of the era is Alexander Herzen’s autobiography, My
Past and Thoughts, trans. Constance Garnett, 4 vols. (1968). The
evolution of thought in government circles is the theme of Cynthia
Whittaker, The Origins of Modern Russian Education: an Intellec-
tual Biography of Count Sergei Uvarov 1786–1855 (1984) and W
Bruce Lincoln, In the Vanguard of Reform: Russia’s Enlightened
Bureaucrats 1825–1861 (1986).

from the great reforms to 1917

For the reform era W. Bruce Lincoln, The Great Reforms: Autoc-
racy, Bureaucracy and the Politics of Change in Imperial Russia
(1990) provides an introduction. Unfortunately there is no full
biography of Alexander II or any other major figure of the gov-
ernment during his reign. The revolutionary movement during the
same period has attracted more attention. Nikolai Chernyshevsky’s
What is To Be Done?, trans. Michael R. Katz (1989) influenced a
whole generation, for which see Irina Paperno, Chernyshevsky and
the Age of Realism: A Study in the Semiotics of Behavior (1988).
Another important influence was Herzen, whose writings in transla-
tion are Alexander Herzen, From the Other Shore and The Russian
People and Socialism, trans. Moura Budberg and Richard Woll-
heim (1979). A brilliant portrait of the age is Ivan Turgenev’s novel
 Further Reading 465

Fathers and Sons. The fullest account of the movement is Franco

Venturi, Roots of Revolution: A History of the Populist and Social-
ist Movements in Nineteenth Century Russia, trans. Francis Haskell
(1960).
Sidney Harcave, Count Sergei Witte and the Twilight of Imperial
Russia : a Biography (2004); Terrence Emmons, The Formation of
Political Parties and the First National Elections in Russia (1983);
Abraham Ascher, The Revolution of 1905, 2 vols. (1998–1992);
and the same author’s P A Stolypin, The Search for Stability in
Late Imperial Russia (2001) cover the politics of the last generation
before 1917. Sergei U. Witte’s Memoirs of Count Witte, trans. Sid-
ney Harcave (1990) provide a vivid if scarcely objective picture of
the government.
Russia’s First World War is a neglected subject. For the back-
ground see D. C. B. Lieven, Russia and the Origins of the First
World War (1983) and for war itself Norman Stone, The Eastern
Front 1914–1917 (1975) is still the only overview. See also Peter
Gatrell, Russia’s First World War: a Social and Economic History
(2005). Allan K. Wildman, The End of the Russian Imperial Army,
2 vols. (1980–1987) provides a transition to the revolution. The rev-
olution itself was fully portrayed in William Henry Chamberlin, The
Russian Revolution, 2 vols. (1987, originally 1935). The best brief
account is Steven Anthony Smith, The Russian Revolution: a Very
Short Introduction (2002). John Reed’s Ten Days that Shook the
World (originally 1919) is the classic picture of October by a sympa-
thetic American. For the February Revolution Tsuyoshi Hasegawa,
The February Revolution: Petrograd 1917 (1981) is unsurpassed,
and on October there is Alexander Rabinowitch, The Bolsheviks
Come to Power: Petrograd 1917 (1976). For the Civil War see
Evan Mawdsley, The Russian Civil War (1987) and Jonathan D.
Smele, The Civil War in Siberia: the Anti-Bolshevik Government of
Admiral Kolchak 1918–1920 (1996).

economic, social, and religious history

Work on the economic history of Russia is mostly old and not
numerous. An exception is Peter Gatrell, The Tsarist Economy
1850–1917 (1986). The largest group in Russian society, the
466 Further Reading

peasantry has not found many students in the English speaking

world, but to be recommended are David Moon, The Russian Peas-
antry 1600–1930: the World the Peasants Made (1999); Steven L.
Hoch, Serfdom and Social Control in Russia: Petrovskoe, a Village
in Tambov (1986); and Christine Worobec, Peasant Russia: Fam-
ily and Community in the Post-Emancipation Period (1991). The
merchants becoming modern businessmen have found their histo-
rians in Alfred Rieber, Merchants and Entrepreneurs in Imperial
Russia (1982) and T. C. Owen, Capitalism and Politics in Russia:
a Social History of the Moscow Merchants 1855–1905 (1981). The
working class and its early strike and political activity was once
a subject of great interest. Reginal Zelnik, Labor and Society in
Tsarist Russia: the Factory Workers of St. Petersburg 1855–1870
(1971) and Walter Sablinsky, The Road to Bloody Sunday: Father
Gapon and the St. Petersburg Massacre of 1905 (1976) were pio-
neers. Women, the family and sexuality are the subject of Barbara
Engel, Between the Fields and City: Women, Work and the Fam-
ily in Russia 1861–1914 (1994), the same author’s Mothers and
Daughters: Women of the Intelligentsia in Nineteenth Century Rus-
sia (1983); Richard Stites, The Women’s Liberation Movement in
Russia: Feminism, Nihilism, and Bolshevism 1860–1930 (1978);
and Laura Engelstein, The Keys to Happiness: Sex and the Search
for Modernity in Fin-de-siècle Russia (1992). There is no overview
of the history of religion in modern Russia for any period, but useful
monographs include Vera Shevzov, Russian Orthodoxy on the Eve
of the Revolution (2004); Nadieszda Kizenko, A Prodigal Saint:
Father John of Kronstadt and the Russian People (2000); and for
the theologically inclined Paul Valliere, Modern Russian Theology:
Bukharev, Soloviev, Bulgakov – Orthodox Theology in a New Key
(2000).

foreign policy and empire

The study of Russia as an empire has flourished in recent years.

Older studies looked at Russia as a conglomerate of national minori-
ties: Andreas Kappeler, The Russian Empire: a Multiethnic History,
trans. Alfred Clayton (2001); Ronald Suny, The Making of the
Georgian Nation (2d ed. 1994); Mikhailo Hrushevskyi, History of
 Further Reading 467

Ukraine (1941); M. B. Olcott, The Kazakhs (2d ed., 1995); and

Edward C. Thaden, ed., Russification in the Baltic Provinces and
Finland (1981). On the Jews in Russia Hans Rogger, Jewish Policies
and Right-Wing Politics in Imperial Russia (1986) and Benjamin
Nathans, Beyond the Pale: the Jewish Encounter with Late Impe-
rial Russia (2002) offer some new perspectives. More recent work
takes the perspective of empire: Robert Crews, For Prophet and
Tsar: Islam and Empire in Russia and Central Asia (2006); Daniel
R. Brower, Turkestan and the Fate of the Russian Empire (2003);
Mark Bassin, Imperial Visions: Nationalist Imagination and Geo-
graphical Expansion in the Russian Far East 1840–1865 (1999);
and David Wolff, To the Harbin Station: the Liberal Alternative
in Russian Manchuria 1898–1914 (1999). Some historians com-
bine foreign policy with the imperial perspective, such as David
Schimmelpenninck, Toward the Rising Sun: Russian Ideologies of
Empire and the Path to War with Japan (2001). The crux of Rus-
sian foreign policy in the nineteenth century was its involvement in
the Balkans with the Ottoman Empire and the Slavs. See Barbara
Jelavich, Russia’s Balkan Entanglements 1806–1914 (1991); and
David Goldfrank, The Origins of the Crimean War (1994).

the soviet era

For the Soviet era, the most accessible are probably the recent
biographies of Soviet leaders. Robert Service’s trilogy Lenin (2000),
Stalin (2004), and Trotsky (2009) make a good beginning. William
Taubman’s Khrushchev: the Man and his Era (2003) covers his
subject’s early years in the Stalin era as well as his years of power.
Ronald Suny’s The Soviet Experiment: Russia, the USSR, and the
Successor States (2d ed., 2011) is more comprehensive and provides
extensive bibliography.
The 1920’s and 1930’s are the subject of many recent mono-
graphs. Some of the more useful are Jeremy Smith, The Bolsheviks
and the National Question 1917–1923 (1999); Lewis Siegelbaum,
Soviet State and Society between Revolutions 1918–1929 (1992);
Moshe Lewin, Russian Peasants and Soviet Power: a Study of Col-
lectivization (1968); Sheila Fitzpatrick, Everyday Stalinism: Ordi-
nary Life in Extraordinary Times – Soviet Russia in the 1930’s
468 Further Reading

(1999) and her Stalin’s Peasants: Resistance and Survival in the

Russian Village after Collectivization (1996); and Wendy Gold-
man, Women, the State, and Revolution: Soviet Family Policy
and Socialt Life 1917–1936 (1993); Terry Martin, The Affirma-
tive Action Empire: Nations and Nationalism in the Soviet Union
1923–1939 (2001); Oleg V. Khlevniuk, Master of the House: Stalin
and His Inner Circle, trans. Nora Seligman Fvorov (2009).

documentary collections
The Soviet Union was not just another dictatorship. It also was an
attempt to remake the whole of society, and even the best historians
often have difficulty conveying a sense of what life was about in
those years. Since 1991 Russian historians have produced a vast
and continuing flood of documents from that era, many of which
have been translated into English. A dip into the volumes of the Yale
University Press series, Annals of Communism, will reward the gen-
eral reader. The most useful are: J. Arch Getty and Oleg Naumov,
eds., The Road to Terror: Stalin and the Self-Destruction of the
Bolsheviks 1932–1939 (1999); History of the Gulag: from Collec-
tivization to the Great Terror, Oleg V. Khlevniuk et al. ed., trans.
Vadim A. Staklo (2004); The Stalin-Kaganovich Correspondence
1931–1936, ed., R.W. Davies et al., trans. Steven Shabad (2003);
Stalin’s Letters to Molotov 1925–1936, eds. Lars T. Lih, Oleg V.
Naumov, and Oleg V. Khlevniuk, trans. Catherine A. Fitzpatrick
(1995); War against the Peasantry 1927–1930, ed. Lynne Viola
et al., trans., Steven Shabad (2005).

the war
The Soviet war against Nazi Germany has given rise to a gigantic
and ever-expanding literature, complicated by new understanding
of both sides. The best overall history is that of Evan Mawdsley,
Thunder in the East: the Nazi-Soviet War, 1941–1945 (2005). A
portrait of Moscow in the terrible days of 1941 is Rodric Braith-
waite, Moscow 1941: a City and its People at War (2006). For those
with greater interest in detailed military history the many works of
David Glantz, such as When Titans Clashed: How the Red Army
Stopped Hitler (1995) will be satisfying. For understanding the
 Further Reading 469

German side of the war the turning point was the appropriately
titled work of General Klaus Reinhardt, Moscow – the Turning
Point: the Failure of Hitler’s Strategy in the Winter of 1941–42,
translated by Karl B. Keenan (1992, German original 1972). Rein-
hardt was the first to point out that the casualties and material
losses of the Wehrmacht were so great by the end of 1941 that the
German effort was essentially doomed. Greater background on this
issue is provided by Adam Tooze, The Wages of Destruction: the
Making and Remaking of the Nazi Economy (2006). On German
extermination and exploitation policies see Geoffrey P. Megargee,
War of Annihilation: Combat and Genocide on the Eastern Front,
1941 (2006). The vast literature on the Holocaust also provides
insight into German policies in the occupied territories of the Soviet
Union.

the cold war and the end of the ussr

Stalin’s last years are only now beginning to be studied. Fundamen-
tal is Yoram Gorlitzki and Oleg V. Khlevniuk, The Cold Peace:
Stalin and the Soviet Ruling Circle 1945–1953 (2004). For the Cold
War itself, David Holloway, Stalin and the Bomb: the Soviet Union
and Atomic Energy 1939–56 (1994), makes compelling reading.
Aleksandr Fursenko and Timothy Naftali recount the Soviet side of
the Cold War in Khrushchev’s Cold War (2006), with many rev-
elations, especially for those who lived through it. William Taub-
man’s Khrushchev: the Man and His Era (2003) is fundamental.
For the last years of the Soviet Union and post-Soviet Russia reli-
able studies are hard to find. A fascinating introduction to life in
the provinces, popular culture, and the origins of the post-1991
oligarchy is provided by Sergei I. Zhuk, Rock and Roll in the
Rocket City: the West, Identity and Ideology in Dniepropetrovsk,
1960–1995 (2010). The best all around account remains Steven
Kotkin, Armageddon Averted: the Soviet Collapse 1970–2000 (2d.
ed. 2008). On the origins of the post-Cold War order new perspec-
tives are in Mary Elise Sarotte, 1989: the Struggle to Create Post-
Cold War Europe (2009). Typical Western views of Russian leaders
are provided in Archie Brown, The Gorbachev Factor (1996); Tim-
othy J. Colton, Yeltsin: a Life (2008); and Richard Sakwa, Putin:
Russia’s Choice (2d ed. 2008).
470 Further Reading

culture

An excellent introduction to a major component in Russian cul-

ture is William Brumfield, History of Russian Architecture (1993).
For music, Richard Taruskin’s studies of Mussorgsky and Stravin-
sky are fundamental but daunting for the non-musician. For other
composers see Roland John Wiley, Tchaikovsky (2009); Stephen
Walsh, Stravinsky: a Creative Spring, Russia and France 1882–
1934 (1999); Harlow Robinson, Prokofiev (2002); and Laurel E.
Fay, Shostakovich: a Life (2000). Russian art has only recently
come to the attention of English speaking scholars. Pioneers are
Camilla Gray, The Russian Experiment in Art 1863–1922 (1986)
and Elizabeth Valkenier, Russian Realist Art: the State and Society:
the Peredvizhniki and their Tradition (1989) as well her Ilya Repin
and the World of Russian Art (1990) and Valentin Serov: Portraits
of Russia’s Silver Age (2001). Another source is David Jackson, The
Russian Vision: the Art of Ilya Repin (2006). For the emergence of
modernism see John Bowlt, Moscow and Saint Petersburg 1900–
1920: Art Life and Culture of the Russian Silver Age (2008). On
Sergei Diaghilev and the Ballets Russes see Sjeng Scheijen, Diaghilev:
a Life (2010). The best introduction to Russian literature is to read
it. Otherwise see Joseph Frank, Dostoyevsky (2010), and Ernest J.
Simmons, Leo Tolstoy (1946).
On the culture of the Soviet era a good place to start is Richard
Stites, Revolutionary Dreams: Utopian Vision and Experimental
Life in the Russian Revolution (1989) and Russian Popular Culture:
Entertainment and Society Since 1900 (1992). The best attempt to
understand Socialist Realism is Katerina Clark, The Soviet Novel:
History as Ritual (2000), and for visual arts there is Matthew
Cullerne Bown, Socialist Realist Painting (1998). Film was one
of the USSR’s main cultural efforts. The classic study remains Jay
Leyda, Kino: a History of the Russian and Soviet Film (last edi-
tion 1983). For Eisenstein see David Bordwell, The Cinema of
Eisenstein, 2nd ed. (2005). Much of the drama of the history
of Soviet culture is found in Soviet Culture and Power: a His-
tory in Documents: 1917–1953 (2007) edited by Katerina Clark
and Evgeny Dobrenko with Andrei Atizov and Oleg Naumov.
On Soviet physics see Paul R Josephson, Physics and Politics in
 Further Reading 471

Revolutionary Russia (1991); Alexei B. Kojevnikov, Stalin’s Great

Science: the Times and Adventures of Soviet Physicists (2004); and
for biology and the Lysenko affair David Joravsky, The Lysenko
Affair (1970) and Nils Roll-Hansen, The Lysenko Effect: the Pol-
itics of Science (2005). The connection of science and technology
is treated in Paul R Josephson, Red Atom: Russia’s Nuclear Power
Program from Stalin to Today (2000).
 INDEX

Page numbers in italics refer to illustrations.

Abkhazia, 328, 451 Alexander III, Tsar, 206–7, 234,

Adams, John Quincy, 147 238–39, 242–43, 259–60, 272–77
Adashev, Aleksei, 50, 51 Alexander Nevsky, Saint, Grand Prince
Adenauer, Konrad, 439 of Vladimir and Novgorod, 22, 27,
Adzhubei, Aleksei, 406 31, 95, 418–19
Afghanistan, 266–67 Alexandra, Tsaritsa (wife of Nicholas
Soviet war in, 412, 446, 449 I), 176
Akhmatova, Anna, 340, 345, 414, Alexandra, Tsaritsa (wife of Nicholas
421–23 II), 278–79, 290, 297
Aksakov, Ivan, 202 Alexei, Tsarevich (son of Nicholas II)
Aksakov, Konstantin, 162, 164 279, 290
Alaska, 153, 252 Algirdas, Grand Prince of Lithuania, 28
Albania, 402, 441 Allende, Salvador, 444
Alekseev, Mikhail, 306, 308 All-Russian Peasant Union, 287–88
Alekseev, Nikolai, 231 All-Union Institute of Plant-Breeding,
Aleksei, Saint, Metropolitan of Kiev, 348
29, 31, 35 Amvrosii, elder, 161
Aleksei I, Tsar, 64–74, 108 Anastasiia, Tsaritsa (wife of Ivan the
Aleksei Alekseevich, Tsarevich (son Terrible), 48, 51, 53, 55
of Aleksei I), 71, 73 Andrei Bogoliubsky, Grand Prince of
Aleksei Petrovich, Tsarevich (son Vladimir and Kiev, 12
of Peter the Great), 79, 82, Andropov, Yurii, 411–12
90–92 Anna, Empress, 99–102, 104
Alembert, Jean d’, 125 Anna, Duchess of
Alexander I, Tsar, 130, 141–54, 160, Brunswick-Bevern-Lüneburg, 102
173, 176, 232, 254, 256–57 Anna Petrovna, Duchess of
Alexander II, Tsar, 174, 176, 187–96, Holstein-Gottorp, 113
190, 203, 205–6, 257, 259, Anthès, Georges-Charles d’, 178–79
272–73 Anti-Comintern Pact (1936–37), 374

473
474 Index

Antonii, Saint, 8, 16 Ballets Russes, 334, 339, 342

Apraksin, Fyodor and Petr, 75, 87 Baltic provinces (republics), 1, 83, 85,
Arakcheev, A.A., 151, 153–54 87, 93, 111, 120, 139, 254–56,
Araya, Francesco, 104–5, 126 271, 274, 284, 302, 306, 312, 315,
Argunov, Ivan, 131 375–76
Aristotle, 5, 10, 72, 296 collapse of USSR and, 450–52
Armenia, 167, 449, 458 defined, 254n
Armenian Church, 16, 168, 265 emancipation of serfs in, 150, 166,
Armenian Revolutionary Federation 188, 254
(Dashnaktsutiun), 265 Barclay de Tolly, Michael, 147–48
Armenians, 62, 167–68, 223, 263, 265, Bariatinskii, Prince Alexander, 264
282, 284, 316, 330, 366 Bashkirs, 62, 67, 111, 123–24, 124,
arms race, 409, 429–31, 437–39, 443, 263, 288, 327
445 Batu, Mongol ruler, 20–21
Asaf’ev, Boris, 418 Bayle, Henri, 114
Assembly of the Land, 55, 58, 64 Beccaria, Cesare, 119
Astrakhan’, 37–38, 49, 66 Beiliss, Mendel, 290
Atatürk, Mustafa Kemal, 316 Bekbulatovich, Semen, 52
Atkinson, John Augustus, 124, 144, Belarus (Belorussia), 28, 29, 121, 135,
158 253, 289, 306, 315, 326–27, 379,
Augustus of Saxony, King of Poland, 383, 391, 452
83–84 Beliaev, Mitrofan, 336–37
Austerlitz, Battle of, 146, 148 Belinski, Vissarion, 162–63, 175,
Austria (Austria-Hungary), 77, 81–82, 181–83
91, 104, 113, 114, 118, 137, 171, Belov, Vasilii, 426
250–51, 262, 274, 286 Belyi, Andrey, 340, 346
Napoleonic wars and, 140–41, 146, Benckendorf, Alexander von, 156, 160,
149–52 172, 178, 252
partitions of Poland and, 121, 135 Beneš, Edvard, 433
WW I and, 291–94, 297, 306 Benois, Alexander, 338
WW II and, 374, 391 Beria, Lavrentii, 363, 366, 394, 397,
Averbakh, Leopold, 414–15, 420 399, 401, 430
Avvakum, Archpriest, 68–70 Berlin, 392, 434, 437, 439–40
Azef, Evno, 281 Wall, 440, 442, 450
Azerbaidzhan, 21, 167, 449 Berlin, Treaty of (1878), 251
Azeris, 167, 223, 263, 265–66, 284, Berlioz, Hector, 174, 233, 337
288, 316, 327–28 Bessarabia, 146, 148
Azov, 80–81, 83–84, 102 Bestuzhev-Riumin, Aleksei, 103,
114–15
Babel, Isaak, 345, 420 Bielfeld, Baron J.F. von, 119
Baku, 220, 222–23, 265–66, 284, 316, birch bark letters, 25–26, 25
327–29, 386 Birger, Earl of Sweden, 27
Bakunin, Michael, 162–64, 183, 203 Biron, Ernst-Johann, 101–2
Balakirev, Milii, 232–34, 337 Bismarck, Otto von, 201, 250–51,
Balanchine, George, 236, 342 274
Balkans, 5, 46, 152, 274–75, 291–94, Black Hundreds, 285, 289
377, 389 Blok, Alexander, 336, 341,
Balkan Wars (pre-1914), 121, 133, 346
169, 239, 249–51 Bobrikov, N.I., 258
 Index 475

Bolsheviks, xviii, 280, 285, 288, 291, Caucasian Wars, 177, 263–65
294–97, 299–315, 321, 326, Caucasus, 6, 49, 249, 284, 302, 316,
330–31, 335, 340–45, 348–50, 327–28, 386, 459
360–61. See also Communist Party Central Asia, 20–21, 249, 251, 263,
Bolshoi Theater, 417, 457 266–69, 316, 327, 329, 367, 385,
Bolyai, Janos, 185 450, 452, 455
Boris, Saint, 11, 16, 31 Central Committee of the Communist
Borodin, Alexander, 232, 234 Party, 310, 325, 327–28, 358–60,
Borodino, Battle of, 148 397, 401–2, 406–7, 416
Borovikovskii, Vladimir, 131 Central Executive Committee of the
Bortnyanskii, Dmitrii, 130 Soviets, 311
Bosnia, 250–51, 292 Chagall, Marc, 340
Botkin, V.P., 164 Chamberlain, Neville, 374–75
Brahe, Tycho, 72 Chancellor, Richard, 42
Brandt, Willy, 444 Charles XII, King of Sweden, 84–87
Brest-Litovsk, Treaty of, 305–6, 316 Charter of the Nobility, 132–33, 139
Brezhnev, Leonid, 401–2, 406–10, 412, Charter of the Townspeople, 132–33
425–26, 443–44, 446 Chateaubriand, François-René de, 152
Briullov, Karl, 173 Chechens (Chechnia), 49, 168, 264,
Brodsky, Joseph, 425 302, 453–56
Brusilov, Aleksei, 297, 301 Cheka (later GPU), 304–5, 308, 312,
Budennyi, Semen, 313–14 315, 319–20
Bukhara, 251, 266, 269, 329 Chekhov, Anton, 336
Bukharin, Nikolai, 306, 310–11, 321, Cherkasskii, Prince Mikhail, 76
323–24, 352, 357, 360, 416 Chernenko, Konstantin, 412, 447
Bulgakov, Mikhail, 345–46, 414–15, Cherniaev, Mikhail, 266
420, 425 Chernobyl disaster, 408, 448
Bulganin, Nikolai, 394, 398, 401 Chernyshevsky, Nikolai, 197–99, 201,
Bulgaria, 121, 250–51, 274–75, 293, 226, 241
373, 389, 391, 432 Cherubini, Luigi, 174
Bulgarin, Faddei, 159, 181 Chesme, Battle of, 121
Bunin, Ivan, 342 Chiang Kai-shek, 332, 434–35
Bürger, Gottfried, 175 Chicherin, Boris, 199–200
Byzantine Christianity, 8–10, 13–16, China, 2, 19–20, 61, 82, 270, 276–77,
18, 26 332
Byzantine Empire, 4–9, 35–36 Communist, xviii, 400, 402, 434–36,
440–43, 445–46
Cadet Corps, 104–5, 107, 125–26 Chubais, Anatolii, 455
Campbell, Thomas, 175 Churchill, Winston, xviii, 387–89
Caresano, Aloisio da, 43 Church Slavic, 8, 26, 68, 106
Casimir the Great, King of Poland, Chuvash, 49, 67, 111
28 Circassians, 49, 62, 67, 168, 264, 302
Castro, Fidel, 443 Civil War (1918–20), 304–10, 312–14,
Catherine I, Empress, 80, 88–92, 319, 326–28, 341–44
99 Clinton, Bill, 454
Catherine II, the Great, Empress, 89 Cold War, xvi, xvii, 412, 429–46
113–37, 127, 143, 148, 152, 194 collective farms (kolhoz), 324, 351–57,
Catherine, Duchess of Mecklenberg, 361, 369, 383, 396, 398–99, 403,
102 409–10
476 Index

Commission for the Study of Natural Crusaders, 26–27

Productive Forces, 347 Cuban missile crisis, 402, 407, 443
“communes” of 1930s, 355 Cui, Cesar, 232–34
Communist International (Comintern), Czartoryski, Prince Adam, 143
311, 320, 331–33, 372–74, Czechoslovak Corps, 306–7
389–90, 440 Czechoslovakia, 432–33, 373–75, 388
Communist Party. See also Bolsheviks; Prague Spring of 1968, 443
Central Committee of the
Communist Party; Politburo Dagestan, 168, 264, 327
centralization of, 317, 319–25, 328 Daniil, Prince of Moscow, 22
Gorbachev reforms and, 450 Darwin, Charles, 199, 230
terror of 1936–38, 358–60 Dashkova, Princess Elizabeth, 115,
Communist Party Congresses 116, 129
of 1922, 321 Decembrist revolt, 152–56, 165–66,
of 1952, 396 176–78
of 1956 (Twentieth), 399, 438 Deng Xiaoping, 445
Congress of People’s Deputies, 450, Denikin, Anton, 308–9, 312–14
453–54 Denmark, 4, 39
Congress of Soviets, 302–4 war of 1700 and, 83
Congress of Soviet Writers, 415–16 war of 1762 and, 115
Constant, Benjamin, 152 Depression, 332, 372
Constantine XI, Emperor of Rome, 35 Derviz, P.G. von, 214
Constantinople, 6–9, 35–36, 38, 140 Derzhavin, Gavriil, 129–30
Constituent Assembly, 299, 303–4, de-Stalinization, 401, 424, 441
306, 308 détente, 445
constitutional monarchy, 144–45, 150, Diaghilev, Sergei, 337–39, 342
152–54, 163–64, 187, 199–200, Diderot, Denis, 125
257 Dimitrov, Georgii, 364, 373
Nicholas II and, 285–92 dissidents, Soviet, 411–12, 426, 428,
copper revolt, 66 445, 449
Cossacks, 55–61, 65–68, 74, 86, Dmitrii, Tsarevich (son of Ivan the
110–11, 149 Terrible), 53–54. See also False
Civil War and, 306, 308–9, 312–13, Dmitrii
327 Dmitrii Donskoi, Grand Prince of
revolts of, 56–60, 66–67, 65–66, Moscow and Vladimir, 23, 31
123–25 Dokuchaev, Vasilii, 229
Revolution of 1905 and, 284 Dolgorukii, Prince Iakov, 74, 77, 87
Council of Ministers, 394 Dolgorukii, Prince Vasilii, 87, 91–92,
Council of People’s Commissars, 363, 99
364 Donbass (Don River basin), 213, 219,
Council of State, 138, 144, 191, 208, 222, 271, 312, 330, 357, 363, 366
286, 289 Don Cossacks, 304, 308–9
Councils of the National Economy, 400 Dostoyevsky, Fyodor, 165–66, 182,
Crimea, 6, 21, 34, 37–38, 48, 67, 73, 201, 230, 240–43, 290, 424
77–78, 121–22, 133, 288, 314–15, Dubelt, General, 160
400 Dudaev, Dzhokhar, 454
Crimean War, 168, 170–71, 184, dumas. See also Russian Duma
186–89, 196, 212–14, 244, boyar, 40, 53, 55, 60, 83, 176
249–50, 253, 257, 261–64 city, 274
 Index 477

Dutch East India Company, 42 Faulkner, William, 424

Dzerzhinskii, Felix, 305 feminism, 198–99
Feodosii, Saint, 8, 16–17
Eastern Europe, 389–90, 398, 400, Fichte, Johann G., 162
409, 431–34, 437, 441, 444 Fick, Heinrich, 90
collapse of Communism in, 450 Fighting Organization, 281
Eastern Slavs, 1, 3, 7 Filaret, Patriarch of Russia (Fyodor
East Slavic language, 1, 28 Romanov, father of Michael I), 55,
Editorial Committee, 189 58, 60
Egypt, 140, 169–70, 441 Filipp, Metropolitan of Moscow, 52
Ehrenburg, Ilya, 423–24 Finland, 1, 27, 39, 87
Eisenhower, Dwight, 438, 442 annexation and autonomy of,
Eisenstein, Sergei, 27, 51, 284, 344, 144–46, 150, 153, 158, 166,
385, 418–19, 421 251–52, 256–58, 271, 376
Ekaterina, Tsaritsa (wife of Alexander Civil War and, 315, 376
II), 205 Winter War and, 376
Ekaterina Pavlovna, Grand Duchess WW II and, 376–77, 384, 391
(sister of Alexander I), 145 Finns, 26, 67, 360
elections Fioravanti, Aristotele, of Bologna, 43
of 1906–17 286–89 First Cavalry Army, 313
of 1996, 455 five-year plans, 325, 351–53, 368–69,
Gorbachev reforms and, 450 373
Elena Glinskaia, Grand Princess of Florence, Council of (1439), 35, 36
Moscow (wife of Vasilii III), 47, 48 Fonvizin, Denis, 129
Elena Pavlovna, Grand Duchess, 161, Ford, Henry, 352
174, 189, 231 Fourier, Charles, 165
Elizabeth, Empress, 89, 99, 102–6, France, 4, 102, 118, 250, 274, 275,
113–15, 122, 126, 131, 302 291, 332
Elizabeth I, Queen of England, 50 Crimean War and, 169–70
Elphinstone, John, 121 culture of, 105, 107–8, 125, 152,
Emancipation Statute, 216, 233 176, 199
Engelhardt, V.V., 174 Holy Alliance and, 151–53
English Bible Society, 150 Indochina and, 435, 440
English Muscovy Company, 42 July Revolution of 1830, 167, 178
Erevan, 167–68, 265 Napoleonic, 140–41, 143–50
Estonia, 26–27, 51, 84, 150, 254–56, Revolution of 1789, xviii, 134–40,
284, 314 143
Ethiopia, 444 Russian Revolution and, 299, 308,
Etholén, Arvid Adolf, 252 314
Evdokiia, Tsaritsa (wife of Peter the Seven Years War and, 114–15
Great), 79, 82 WW I and, 293–94, 306
Ezhov, Nikolai, 358–60, 363 WW II and, 372–75, 377, 388–91
Franco, Francisco, 373
Factory Inspectorate, 226 Franco-Prussian War, 275
Falconet, Etienne-Maurice, 89, 131 Franklin, Benjamin, 129
False Dmitrii, first (Grishka Otrep’ev), Franz Ferdinand, Archduke of Austria,
55–58 292, 294
False Dmitrii, second (thief of Tushino), Frederick the Great, King of Prussia,
57 104, 113, 115, 121
478 Index

Free Association of Artists, 237 Weimar, 331–32, 372

Free Economic Society, 125–26, WW I and, 291–96
229 WW II and Nazi, 24, 369–70, 372,
Freemasons, 128, 135, 153 375–92
Free Music School, 237 WW II invasion of USSR, 378–88
French language, 107–8 Germany, Democratic Republic of
Friedland, Battle of, 146 (East), 434, 437, 439–40
Fuchs, Klaus, 430 Germany, Federal Republic (West),
Furtseva, Elena, 401–2 434, 439–40, 444
Furuhjelm, Hampus, 252 Ginzburg, Baron Horace, 212, 260
Fyodor Ivanovich, Tsar, 53–55 Gleb, Saint, 11, 16, 31
Fyodor Alekseevich, Tsar, 72–76 Glinka, Mikhail, 174–75, 231
Godunov, Boris, Tsar, 53–56, 58–59,
Gagarin, Iurii, 405 234
Galich, 12, 14, 33 Godunov, Irina, Tsaritsa, 53, 54
Galicia, 28 Goethe, J.W. von, 152, 175, 181
Galuppi, Baldassare, 126 Gogol, Nikolai, 2, 175, 180–84
Gamsakhurdia, Zviad, 451 Golden Horde, 20–24, 34–35, 37,
Gapon, Georgii, 282–83 48
Garcia-Viardot, Pauline, 183 end of Russian dependency on,
Gasprinskii, Ismail Bey, 267–68 42–43
Gauss, Christian, 185 gold standard, 220, 279
Gazprom, 449 Golitsyn, Prince Alexander, 150–51
Gediminas, Grand Prince of Lithuania, Golitsyn, Prince Boris, 76–78, 99
27–28 Golitsyn, Prince V.V., 75, 76
Gendarmes, 151, 156–57 Golovin, Fyodor, 81–82, 84, 87
Geneva Conference (1955), 398, 438 Gomulka, Wladyslaw, 441
Genghis Khan, 19–20 Gorbachev, Mikhail, 412, 428, 446–52
Georgia, 62, 223, 263, 265, 282, 284, Gorchakov, Prince, 250, 267, 274
288, 291, 316, 328, 330, 366, Gordon, Patrick, 80, 82
396 Gorky, Maxim, 335, 342–43, 364, 416
annexation of, 146, 167 Gosplan (State Planning Committee),
collapse of USSR and, 450–52, 458 325, 365
German Communists, 330–31, 372, Gottwald, Klement, 432
433 GPU (Main Political Administration),
German Crusaders, 26–27 353–55
Germans, Russian society and Great Britain (England), 42, 53, 81,
nobility, in Baltic provinces, 254–56, 107, 134, 152, 186–87, 274,
274, 284 291–93
pre-1917, 72, 80, 208, 212, 252, 274 Central Asia and, 266–67, 291, 293
terror of 1936–38 and, 360 Cold War and, 430, 440
German Social-Democrats, 296 Crimean War and, 170–71, 257
German-Soviet pact (1939), 375, 389 early USSR and, 331–32
Germany, 4, 13, 20, 38, 147, 162, 201, Napoleonic wars and, 140–41,
250, 274–75, 286, 320 145–46, 149–50
post-WW II, 389, 392, 430, 433–34 Ottoman Turks and, 169–70,
Revolution of 1848, 167 249–51
Russian Revolution and, 299–300, Russian Revolution and, 299, 308,
305–7, 309, 312, 316 314–16
socialism and, 226, 330 Seven Years War and, 114–15
 Index 479

WW I and, 293, 294 Ilarion, Metropolitan of Kiev, 12

WW II and, 371–78, 387–88 Ilf, Ilya, 345
Great Horde, 34, 37, 42–43 imperialism, 296, 331–32, 371
Greece, 169, 389, 433–34 India, 92, 114, 169, 251, 266–68,
antiquity, 5, 8 440
revolt of 1821, 152, 169 Indonesia, 42
Greeks, 8, 12, 17, 40, 62, 72–73, 133 Ingrians, 27, 67
Green Lamp society, 153, 176 Ioakim, Patriarch of Moscow, 72
Gregory, Johann, 72 Ioffe, Abram, 216, 346–49, 419, 430
Grimm, Baron Friedrich M., 125 Iona of Riazan, Metropolitan of
Grozny, Battle for, 454, 456–57 Moscow, 36
GULAG (Chief Administration of Iosif, Patriarch of Russia, 69
Camps), 362–63, 365, 396–98, Iran (Persia), 20, 38, 92, 146, 167, 263,
400, 411 266–67, 329
Gustavus III, King of Sweden, 133, 134 British Treaty on (1907), 291, 293
war of 1826–28, 167–68
Hansa League, 13, 24, 27 Iraq, 20
Haskalah, 259 Irina, Tsarevna (aunt of Fyodor
Heeckeren, Baron van, 179 Alekseevich), 74–75
Hegel, G.W.F., xvii, 162–64, 182, 199, Isidoros, Metropolitan of Kiev, 35, 36
296 Islamic revolt (1898), 269
Herzen, Alexander, 162–63, 183, 187, Islam (Muslims), 4–5, 21, 49, 67, 168,
191–93, 197–98 264–65, 267–69
Hitler, Adolf, 369–70, 372–75, 377–79, Elizabeth and, 111
382–84, 386–88, 390, 392, 434 Russian Revolution and, 288, 302
Ho Chi Minh, 332, 435 Soviet federalism and, 326–29, 367
Holy Alliance, 151–52, 159 Israel, 395, 411
Holy League, 77 ancient, Russia as “new,” 45
Holy Roman Empire, 9, 38, 48 Italy, 4, 43–44, 96, 104, 151, 155, 173,
Holy Synod, 92, 107, 150, 160, 243, 175, 250
273 Napoleonic wars and, 140, 147
Homer, 5 post-WW II, 434–44
Hoover, Herbert, 319 WW II and, 374, 388
Hoxha, Enver, 441 Itinerant Association of Russian Artists,
Hughes, John, 213 238–40, 337
Hungary, 1, 20, 38, 167, 330, 389, Iudenich, General Nikolai, 314
391, 432 Iurii Danilovich, Prince of Moscow, 22
Revolution of 1956, 400–401, Iurii (uncle of Vasilii II), 33
441–42 Ivan III, Grand Prince of Moscow,
Huxley, Aldous, 346 36–45
Ivan IV, the Terrible, Grand Prince of
Iagoda, Genrikh, 360, 364 Moscow, 42, 46–53, 84, 234, 239
Iakovlev, Alexander, 412, 448 Ivan V, Tsar (co-ruler with Peter the
Iaroslav “The Wise,” Grand Prince of Great), 73–76
Kiev Rus, 11, 17 Ivan VI, Tsar, 102–3, 122
Iavorskii, Metropolitan Stefan, 83, Ivan Ivanovich (heir of Ivan the
90–91 Terrible), 52
ICBMs, 409, 437, 443 Ivan “Kalita,” The Moneybag, Prince
icons, 18, 26, 31–33, 407 of Vladimir, 22–23
Igor, Prince of Kiev, 3 Ivanov, Alexander, 173, 238
480 Index

Iziaslav I, Prince of Kiev, 17 Kant, Immanuel, 152, 162

Kapitsa, Piotr, 419–20
jadidism, 268 Karakozov, Dmitrii, 203
Jadwiga, “King” of Poland, 28–29 Karamzin, Nikolai, 142, 145, 175–76
Jan III Sobieski, King of Poland, 77 Karl VI, Holy Roman Emperor, 90,
Japan, 275–77, 308, 313–14, 316, 332, 91
430, 434–35 Kasso, Lev, 347
war of 1904–5, 220, 269–70, 272, Katkov, Mikhail N., 162, 164, 201,
283–84 242, 245
WW II and, 374–75, 388–89 Katyn massacre, 375
Jesuits, 68, 72, 82 Kaufman, Konstantin von, 267
Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee, 395 Kaunas massacre, 383
Jewish Pale of Settlement, 214, 258–59, Kaunitz, Count Wenzel Anton, 114
261, 274 Kazakhs, 222, 249, 329, 408
Jewish Workers’ League (Bund), 260 Kazakhstan, 2, 21, 266, 269, 329, 367,
Jews, 121, 212–15, 222, 243, 251, 253, 404, 458
258–61, 269, 271, 274, 278, 280 Kazan’, 34, 37–38, 43, 48, 49, 124
emigration of Soviet, 411–12, 445, Kazan’ University, 142
453 Kennedy, John F., 440
pogroms and, 206, 251, 259–60, Kerenskii, Aleksandr, 298–99, 301–3
285, 290, 312–13 KGB, 411–12, 425, 456
Russian Revolution and, 282, 283, Khalkhin Gol, Battle of, 375
315 Khalturin, Stepan, 205
Soviet, 326, 330, 346, 366, 395–96, Khar’kov, 261–62, 386
423 Khar’kov Technological Institute, 216
WW II and, 375, 377, 383, 393, 424 Khar’kov University, 142, 260, 262
Jochi, 20 Khasbulatov, Ruslan, 454
Jogailo, King of Poland, 28–29 Khazars, 5, 6
Jones, John Paul, 134 Khitrovo, Bodgan, 74
Joseph II, Emperor of Austria, 133, 137 Khiva, 251, 266, 269, 329
Joseph of Volokolamsk, Saint, 45–46 Khmel’nyts’kyi, Bohdan, Hetman of the
Judaism, 5, 7, 16 Ukraine, 65–66, 261
Judaizers, 45 Khovanskii, Prince Ivan, 76
judicial system, 63–64, 132 Khrushchev, Nikita, 363, 366, 394,
reform of 1864, 193–95 397–407, 424–25, 438–44
Justinian, Emperor of Rome, 7, 17 “secret speech” on Stalin, 399, 424,
442
Kadar, Janos, 441 Khwarezm, 20, 21
Kadets (Constitutional Democrats), Kiev, 60, 68, 73, 221, 262, 302, 304,
286–88, 297–98, 304, 349 306, 315, 379, 390–91
Kadyrov, Ahmad, 456 Kiev Academy, 68–69
Kaganovich, Lazar, 359, 363, 364, 366, Kiev Archeographical Society, 262
394, 399–400, 402 Kiev Polytechnical Institute, 216, 347
Kaledin, Alexei, 304 Kiev Rada, 304
Kalinin, Mikhail, 310–11 Kiev Rus (principality), xix, 1–22,
Kamenev, Lev, 303, 307, 310–11, 28–29, 135
321–23, 358 Mongol invasion, 18, 20–23
Kandinsky, Wassily, 335, 339 Kim Il Sung, 435–36
Kankrin, Georg, 252 Kipchaks (Polovtsy), 5–6, 15, 18, 20–21
 Index 481

Kiprian, Metropolitan of Kiev, 35 Latin language, 68–69, 71, 82

Kirghiz, 268, 329 Latvia, 26–27, 150, 254–56, 284, 288,
Kirill of Belozero, Saint, 30, 31 330, 360
Kirov, Sergei, 358, 363 LeFort, Francois, 80, 81, 82
Kishinev pogrom, 260 Leibniz, Gottfried, 107
Kissinger, Henry, 445 Leipzig, Battle of, 149
Knights of Malta, 140 Lend-Lease, 388
Kochubei, Viktor, 252 Lenin, Vladimir Il’ich Ul’ianov, 227,
Kokand khanate, 251, 266 291, 341, 364, 371, 448–49
Kolchak, Alexander, 308–9, 312, 314, “April Theses,” 300
327 background of, 279–80
kolhoz. See collective farms culture and, 341, 343–44
Komsomol (Communist League of Civil War and early Soviet state,
Youth), 400, 404, 448–50, 454 307–12, 307, 314, 321, 321–22,
Konstantin Nikolaevich, Grand Duke 325–26, 328
(brother of Alexander II), 188–91, death of, 321
19, 214 foreign policy and, 330–32
Konstantin Pavlovich, Grand Duke NEP and, 316–19
(brother of Alexander I), 154 Revolution of 1905 and, 285
Korean War, 435–36 Revolution of 1917 and, 299–303
Kornilov, Lavr, 301–2, 308 WW I and, 295–96, 306
Korolev, Sergei, 421 Leningrad. See St. Petersburg
Korsun, Battle of, 391 Leningrad Affair, 395–96
Kosciuszko, Tadeusz, 135, 139 Lermontov, Mikhail, 175, 179–82
Kostomarov, Nikolai, 262 Lesnaia, Battle of, 86
Kosygin, Aleksei, 407 Levitan, Isaak, 239
Kramskoi, Ivan, 237–38 Levitskii, Dmitrii, 131
Kravchuk, Leonid, 450 Liebknecht, Karl, 296
Krestinskii, Nikolai, 310–11 Lithuania, 19, 23, 26–29, 33, 38–39,
Kronstadt, 88, 170 42, 253, 254n, 451
revolt, 318 partition of Poland and, 135
Krüdener, Baroness Julie von, 150 WW II and, 375, 379, 383
Krzhizhanovskii, Gleb, 325 Litvinov, Maxim, 366, 372–73, 375
Kuchuk Kainardzha, Treaty of (1774), Livonia, 93, 254
121 war of 1558–80, 50–54
Kuibyshev, Valerian, 363 Livonian Order, 27–28, 39, 50
kulaks, 218, 354–55, 362 Lobachevskii, Nikolai, 185, 228
Kulikovo, Battle of, 23 Lomonosov, Mikhail, 106–7
Kurbskii, Prince Andrei, 51 Lönnrot, Elias, 256–57
Kurchatov, Igor, 430, 438 Loris-Melikov, Count Michael, 205–6
Kursk, Battle of, 390 Louis XVI, King of France, 135
Kussevitskii, Sergei, 339 Lunacharskii, Anatolii, 343
Kutuzov, Mikhail, 146, 148–49, 245 Lutheran church, 92–93, 256
Luxemburg, Rosa, 296
labor movement, 226, 282–83, 288, Lvov, Prince Georgii, 298–99, 301
294 Lysenko, Trofim, 406, 407, 415,
LaHarpe, Frederic, 143 419–20, 422, 424–25
Land and Freedom, 204
Landau, Lev, 420 MacArthur, Douglas, 436
482 Index

Mach, Ernst, 291 Mensheviks, 280, 285, 288, 291,

Machine-Tractor Stations, 356, 403 294–95, 299, 301, 303–4, 310,
Maistre, Joseph de, 152 321, 325, 353, 358–60
Makarii, elder, 161 Menshikov, Alexander, 82, 84, 87–91,
Makarii, Metropolitan of Moscow, 48, 99, 116
51 Merezhkovskii, Dmitrii, 336, 340
Makhno, Nestor, 313, 315 Meshcherskii, Prince V.P., 242–43,
Maksim the Greek, 46–47 273
Malenkov, Georgii, 359, 363, 394, Metternich, Klemens von, 151–52
396–98, 400, 438 Meyerhold, Vsevolod, 343–44, 346,
Malevich, Kazimir, 335, 339–40 420
Mamai, Emir, 23 Michael, Saint, Prince of Tver, 22, 31
Mamontov, Savva, 337 Michael I, Tsar, 58, 60–61, 64, 65,
Manchuria, 220, 269–70, 272, 276, 68
284 Mikhail Pavlovich, Grand Duke
Mandelstam, Osip, 420 (brother of Nicholas I), 161, 174
Mannerheim, Baron Gustav, 315, Mikhoels, Solomon, 395
391 Mikoyan, Anastas, 363, 366, 394, 401
Mao Tse-tung, 400, 402, 434–35, Miliukov, Pavel, 297–99
441–42, 445 Miliutin, Dmitrii, 189, 196
Marfa (regent and mother of Michael Miliutin, Nikolai, 189
I), 58 Miloslavskii, Ilya, 64, 73–74
Marfa Apraksina, Tsaritsa (wife of Minin, Kuzma, 58
Fyodor III), 75 Mirovich, Vasilii, 103, 122–23
Mariia, Tsaritsa (second wife of Ivan Mniszech, Jerzy, 55
the Terrible), 51 Mniszech, Marina, 55, 57–58
Mariia, Tsaritsa (wife of Aleksei I), 64, Mohammed Ali, Khedive of Egypt,
73 169–70
Mariia Fedorovna, Empress (wife of Molotov, Viacheslav, 358–59, 361,
Alexander III, mother of Nicholas 363–64, 364, 366, 375, 382, 391,
II), 272, 282, 284 394, 398–402, 434, 438–39
Mariia Nagaia, Tsaritsa (fourth wife of monasteries, 8, 10, 29–33, 41, 46,
Ivan the Terrible), 53 161
Marshall Plan, 434 lands secularized, 161
Martov, Iulii, 227, 280 Peter the Great and, 83, 95, 96
Marx, Karl, 200, 226–27, 296 serfs and, 108, 109
Marxism, xvii, 226–27, 260, 265, Monastery of the Caves (Kiev), 8, 12,
279–80, 291, 296, 309, 340–41, 16, 29
348–49, 361, 421 Monastery of the Dormition of the
Matveev, Artamon, 72–77 Mother of God
Maximos, Metropolitan of Kiev, (Kirillo-Belozerskii), 30
23 Monastery of the Miracle of Saint
Mayakovskii, Vladimir, 340–41, 343, Michael the Archangel, 46
346 Monastery of the New Jerusalem,
Mazepa, Ivan, Hetman of Ukraine, 77, 69–70
86, 93 Mongol invasion, 18–20. See also
Meck, K.F. von, 214 Golden Horde
Mehmed the Conqueror, 36, 38 Mongolia, 2, 375
Mendeleev, Dmitrii, 216, 228–29 Moniuszko, Stanislaw, 233
Mengistu Haile Mariam, 444 Mons, Anna, 80, 89
 Index 483

Montesquieu, Charles-Louis de, 114, Nagorno-Karabakh, 449

117, 119, 136, 152 Nagy, Imre, 441
Morozov, Boris, 64, 73 Napoleon Bonaparte, 140–42, 144–49,
Morozov, Savva, 336 152, 173, 245, 253
Morozov, Timofei, 213 Napoleon III, Emperor of France, 170,
Morozova, Feodosia, 239 250
Moscow Art Theater, 336, 343, 415, Narva, siege of, 84–85
420 Nasser, Gamal, 441
Moscow (city), 158–59, 212–14, 216, Natalia Naryshkina, Tsaritsa (wife of
219, 221, 231–32, 237–38, 261, Aleksei I), 74–76, 78–80
271 NATO, 439
culture and, 237, 339 Navoi, Alisher, 423
early building and growth, 41–46, Nechaev, Sergei, 202–3, 242
44, 61–63 Nerchinsk, Treaty of, 82
industrialization, 158–59, 212–14, Nesselrode, Karl von, 160, 252
216, 219, 221, 231–32, 237–38 Nestor, Monk, 16–17
Kremlin, 22, 40–41, 160 Netherlands (Dutch), 42, 53, 81, 96,
Napoleon invades, 148–49 147
Polish occupation of, 57–58 New Economic Policy (NEP), 317–20,
Revolution of 1905 and, 285 323–25, 329–30, 343–46, 349–50,
Revolution of 1917 and, 299, 302 365
riots of 17th century, 64–66 Nicholas I, Tsar, 154–76, 178–81, 184,
Soviet capital moved to, 306, 312 186–87, 201, 215, 228, 249, 252,
Soviet centralization of government 256, 259
in, 328, 330 Nicholas II, Tsar, 211, 258, 276–92,
textile strike of 1885, 213 278, 297–98, 308
WW II Battle for, 380–82, 386 constitutional government of
Moscow Conservatory, 231–32, 1907–14, 288–92
235–36 execution of, 308
Moscow Institute of Problems of Nicolai, Baron, 252
Physics, 419 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 335
Moscow (principality), 22–23, 29–36 Nifont, Bishop of Novgorod, 15
annexes Novgorod and becomes Nightingale, Florence, 170
Russia (1478), 37 nihilists, 196–99
Horde burns (1382), 23 Nijinskii, Vatslav, 339
Isodorios and, 35–36 Nikon, Patriarch, 64, 66, 68–70,
monastic revival in, 29–33 73
Moscow show trials, 358–61 Nil Sorskii, 46
Moscow University, 105–7, 125–26, Nixon, Richard, 445
128–29, 148, 162, 260, 347 Nizami of Gandzha, 423
Moscow Yiddish theater, 395 Nizhnii Novgorod (Gorkii), 58, 109,
Mstislav, Grand Prince of Kiev Rus, 12 281, 412
Mukden, Battle of, 284 NKVD (formerly GPU), 358–63, 365,
Münnich, Count Burkhard, 101–2 366, 385, 421
Murav’ev, Nikita, 153 Nobel family, 212, 220, 265
musketeers, 62, 78 Nogai Horde, 37, 38
revolts of, 60, 75–76, 82, 234, 239 North Caucasus, 168, 263–65, 288,
Mussolini, Benito, 374, 378, 380, 388 302, 327, 400, 454
Mussorgsky, Modest, 56, 177, 232–34, Nöteborg (Schlüsselburg), siege of,
236 85
484 Index

Novgorod, 1–4, 6, 12–13, 19, 21, autocephaly, 45, 54

23–28, 33, 45, 52, 58 Council of 1666–67, 70–72
archeological excavations of, 24–26, Council of Florence and, 35–36
25 Judaizers and, 45
Moscow annexes, 37, 41–42 lands secularized, 117, 126
pagan revolt of 1071, 15 monastic controversy of 16th
Novikov, Nikolai, 128–29, 135, century, 46–47
139 monastic revival of 14th century,
Novosil’tsev, Nikolai, 143, 150 29–32
nuclear industry, 397, 408–10, 425, Nikon reforms of, and Old Believers,
430 64, 68–72
Nuclear Test Ban Treaty, 439 Ottoman Empire and, 169, 171
nuclear weapons, 421, 430–31, Peter the Great and, 83, 90, 92,
436–39, 445 95–96
Nystad, Treaty of (1721), 95–96 Slavophiles and, 164
schism of 1054 and, 9–10, 16
October Manifesto, 285, 289 Orwell, George, 346
Octobrist party, 289 Ostermann, Count Andrei, 101–2
Odessa, 134, 157, 221, 259, 284, Ottoman Empire (Turks), 38, 39, 48,
314–15, 329 73, 77, 263
pogrom of 1905, 285 Alexander I’s war vs., 146, 148,
Odessa University, 260 152
Ogedei, Khan, 20 Anna’s war vs., 102
OGPU, 362, 413 Crimean War and, 170–71
oil and gas industry, 220, 222–23, 265, Greek revolt of 1821 and, 152
316, 327–28, 386, 403, 405, Peter the Great’s war vs., 80–83
408–9, 454, 455 war of 1769–74 and, 118–19,
Okudzhava, Bulat, 426 121–22, 148
Old Believers, 71–72, 111, 123, 156, war of 1787–91 and, 133–34
161, 212–13, 239 war of 1827–29, 168–70
Oldenburgskii, Prince A.P., 347 war of 1877–78, 249–51
Oleg, Grand Prince of Kiev, 3, 6, 15 WW I and, 291–93, 297
Olga, Grand Princess of Kiev, 6
oligarchs, 449, 453–58 paganism, 6, 15, 16, 26, 28
Oprichnina, 52–53 Pahlen, Count Peter von der, 141
Order 00447, 359 Pakistan, 446
Order no. 1, 299 Panin, Count Nikita, 115, 117, 123,
Ordin-Nashchokin, Afanasii, 73 129
Ordzhonikidze, Sergo, 316, 328, 353, Panin, Count N.P. (nephew), 141
357–58, 363, 366 Paris, Peace of (1856), 171, 188, 250
Orenburg, seige of, 123–24 Paskevich, Ivan, 252–53
Orlov, Aleksei, 116, 121 Pasternak, Boris, 345–46, 414–15, 417,
Orlov, Grigorii, 115–16 420, 424–25, 428
Orlova, Liubov’, 418 Paul, Tsar, 114, 123, 128–29, 138–42,
Orthodox Church, xvii, 7–10, 14–17, 145, 151–52, 254–55
21, 28, 60, 65, 107, 111, 118, 130, Pavlov, Ivan, 347, 349
151, 160–61, 230, 241, 243, 247, Pechenegs, 5–7, 12
338–39, 368, 406–7 Pereiaslav Treaty (1654), 66–68
adopted by Vladimir, 7–8 Perestroika, 428, 448–51, 459
 Index 485

Perovskaia, Sofia, 206 revolt of 1768–72, 118, 121

Pestel’, Pavel, 153, 155 revolt of 1787, 133–34
Peter, Saint, Metropolitan of Kiev, 23, revolt of 1830 and, 167
31 revolt of 1863–64, 193, 201, 250,
Peter I, the Great, Emperor, xvii, xxi, 253–54
60, 74–100, 89, 106, 131, 164, Revolution of 1905 and, 284, 288
199, 208, 239, 257, 336 Revolution of 1917 and, 314–15,
culture and state transformed by, 79, 326
82–83, 92–99, 106 serfdom and, 137, 152, 253
death of, 99–100 treaty of 1667, 66, 73
navy and, 80–81 war of 1632 vs., 60
Orthodox church and, 90, 95–96 Warsaw riots of 1861, 193
personality and travels by, 77, WW I and, 297
79–82, 84–85, 88–90 WW II and, 372, 374–75, 377, 389,
regency of Sofia and, 76–78 391–92
son Aleksei attempts to overthrow, Poland, Kingdom of, 150, 253–54
90–92 Poland-Lithuania, 28–29, 38–39, 47,
St. Petersburg built by, 85, 87–88, 90 50–51, 57–58, 65–66
war vs. Sweden and, 82–87 Poliakov, Samuel, 214–15
Peter II, Tsar, 99, 102 Poliane/Rus tribe, 6
Peter III, Tsar, 113–16, 122–23, 138 Polish Home Army, 391
Petipa, Marius, 236 Polish National Democrats, 254, 288
Petliura, Semyon, 312, 314 Politburo (later Presidium), 310, 325,
Petrashevski, Mikhail, 165–66, 328, 359, 364–66, 423, 448
241–42 Polotskii, Simeon, 71–72
Petrov, Yevgeni, 345 Poltava, Battle of, 86
Photios, Metropolitan of Kiev, 35 Poniatowski, Stanislaw, King of
Piatakov, Georgii, 358 Poland, 114, 118, 121, 133–35
Pirogov, Nikolai, 170 Popov, Alexander, 423
Plato, 5 Portsmouth Treaty (1905), 277, 284
Platon Levshin, Metropolitan of Pospelov, P.N., 399, 400
Moscow, 126 Potemkin, Grigorii, 122–24, 130, 133,
Plehve, Viacheslav, 279, 282 134, 211
Plekhanov, Georgii, 226–27, 295 Potemkin mutiny, 284
Pobedonostev, Konstantin, 242–43, Pozharski, Prince Dmitrii, 58
272–73 Prague conference (1912), 291
Poland, 1, 28–29, 50, 73, 77, 117–18, Preobrazhenskii, Evgenii, 322
158, 166, 213, 251–55, 258, 270, Presidium (formerly Politburo),
288 397–98, 401, 402
Anna’s war vs., 102 Prezent, Isaak, 419–20
constitution of 1791, 134–35, 153 Primary Chronicle, 3–4, 8–9, 15, 29
constitution of 1815, 166–67 Princip, Gavrilo, 292, 294
Napoleonic wars and, 147, 149–50 Prokofiev, Sergei, 27, 339, 341–42,
partition of 1772, 121, 258 346, 418, 422, 427
partition of 1791, 134–35 Prokopovich, Bishop Feofan, 90, 92
partition of 1794, 135 Proskurov massacre, 312
Peter the Great and, 83–84 Protasov, Count N.A., 160–61
post-WW II, 389, 400, 432, 441, Protestantism, 69, 72, 118, 150, 151,
444 164
486 Index

provincial administration, 63–64 Rimskii-Korsakov, Nikolai, 232–34,

Alexander II and, 193–94 236, 337, 339
Alexander III and, 273–74 Rokotov, Fyodor, 131
Catherine II and, 126, 131–33 Roman Catholic Church, 7, 9–10,
Paul I and, 139 28–29, 69, 97, 72, 107, 111, 118,
Peter the Great and, 83, 87, 93–94, 164
98 Romanov, Fyodor Nikitich. See Filaret
Provincial Assembly of Nobility, 132 Romanov-Koshkin, Iurii, 48
Provisional Government, 298–303, Roosevelt, Franklin D., 388–89
308, 327 Roosevelt, Theodore, 284
Prussia, 26–27, 113, 118, 121, 133, Rosen, Baron G.F., 174
135, 137, 151, 152, 250, 274 Rostovtsev, Iakov, 189–90
Crimean War and, 171 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 136, 152
Napoleonic Wars and, 146–47, Rubinstein, Anton, 174, 231–33
149–50 Rubinstein, Nikolai, 231–32, 234,
Seven Years War and, 104, 108, 237
114–15 Rublev, Andrei, 32–33, 426
Puffendorf, Samuel, 94–95, 136 Ruffo, Marco, 43
Pugachev, Emelian, 123–25, 130, 157, Rumania, 21, 169, 171, 372, 377, 389,
178 391, 402, 432, 441, 450
Pugacheva, Alla, 427 Rurik, ruler of Novgorod, 3–4
Pushkin, Alexander, 56, 106, 112, 165, Rurikovichi dynasty, 3–4, 6–7, 13
175–82, 185, 234, 243, 367 Rus, origin of, xvi, 3–4. See also Kiev
Pushkina, Natalia, 178–79 Rus
Putin, Vladimir, 427, 456–58 Rus Justice, 11–12
Russia
Radek, Karl, 358, 416 idea of, xviii
Radishchev, Alexander, 135–36, formation of state, with rise of
139 Moscow, 22–25
Rakhmaninov, Sergei, 337, 339, maps of, xx–xxiii
342 post-Soviet (see Russian Federation)
Rall, Alexander, 174 Soviet (see Union of Soviet Socialist
Rasputin, Grigorii, 290, 297–98 Republics)
Rastrelli, Bartolomeo, 104, 131 Russian Academy of Sciences, 94, 105,
Razin, Stenka, 59–60, 66–67 107, 125–26, 135, 347, 349,
Razumovskii, Aleksei, 103, 111 406–7, 416, 419
Razumovskii, Kirill, Hetman of Russian Association of Proletarian
Ukraine, 111 Music, 414
Red Army, 306–8, 310, 312–16, 327, Russian Association of Proletarian
372–82, 385, 387, 389–92 Writers (RAPP), 414
Air Force, 377–79, 384 Russian Constitution
purge of 1937–38, 359, 377 (Fundamental Laws) of 1906,
Red Guards, 301, 303–4, 306 285–86
Red Terror of 1918, 308 of 1993, 456
Repin, Ilya, 238–39 Russian Duma
Reutern, Mikhail, 214 1905–17, 211, 285–88, 290, 295,
Rhee, Syngman, 436 297–98, 327, 338
Rhineland, 140, 150, 373 post-Soviet, 454, 456, 458
Ribbentrop, Joachim von, xvi, Russian Federation (post-Soviet),
375 xvi–xvii, 457–59
 Index 487

Russian language, 19, 35 Savvatii, Saint, 30–31

first dictionary, 129 Schelling, Friedrich, 162
grammar codified, 106 Scott, Sir Walter, 175
Russian Ministry of Education, 142, Scythians, 2, 147
150–51, 159–60, 172, 228, 230, Sechenov, Ivan, 229–30
260, 274 Secret Chancellery, 102
Russian Ministry of Finance, 208, 214, Semenov, Iulian, 427
215, 220, 228, 229, 269, 276, 281 Senkovskii, Osip, 178, 181
Russian Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Seraphim of Sarov, Saint, 161
176, 208, 267, 303 Serbia, 169, 250, 291, 293–94
Russian Ministry of Internal Affairs, serfs and serfdom, 67, 139–40, 145,
156 152–53, 157, 159, 164, 166, 171,
Russian Ministry of Justice, 144 183–84, 253, 261–62
Russian Ministry of the Court, 173, Catherine II and, 117, 120–21,
230, 236, 338 123–26, 136–37
Russian Ministry of the Interior, emancipation of, 188–93, 197
188–89, 193–95, 205–6, 208, 279 emancipation of, in Baltic provinces,
Special Department, 151, 176–77 150, 254
Russian Ministry of the Navy, 188–89 emancipation of, in Georgia, 167
Russian Ministry of War, 147, 151, ended on church lands, 117
189, 196, 266 established, 27, 54–56, 59, 61–62,
Russian Navy, 80–81, 102, 121, 170, 108–12, 120
252, 284, 294 Sergii of Radonezh, Saint, 29–31, 46
Russian Revolution of 1905, 221, 248, Serov, Valentin, 337
272, 283–88, 294, 338 Sevastopol, siege of, 170–71, 186,
Russian Revolution of 1917, xviii, 293, 244
296, 298–304, 335, 341–42, Seven Years War, 104, 114–15, 117
346–47, 360–61 Shaliapin, Fyodor, 337, 342
Russian Senate (Tsarist), 87, 90–91, Shamil, Imam, 168, 264
101–3, 138, 144, 208 Shemiaka, Dmitrii, 33–34
Secret Department of, 136 Sherwood, John, 154
Russification, 258, 270, 274 Shevchenko, Taras, 261–62, 367, 423
Russo-Japanese War (1904–5), 269–70, Shishkin, Ivan, 239
282–84, 293–94 Sholokhov, Mikhail, 414, 420, 428
Russo-Turkish War (1877–78), 215, Shostakovich, Dmitrii, 343–44, 385,
243, 251 414, 416–18, 421–24, 427–28
Rustaveli, Shota, 423 Shuiskii, Prince Vasilii, 57
Rutherford, Ernest, 349 Shulalov, Alexander, 103
Rutskoi, Alexander, 454 Shulalov, Peter, 103
Rykov, Aleksei, 324, 360 Shuvalov, Count Ivan, 104–6
Ryleev, Kondratii, 153, 155 Shuvalov, Count Petr, 203
Siberia, 1, 37–38, 42, 53, 59, 70–71,
Sakharov, Andrei, 406–7, 411–12, 426, 110, 155–56, 216–18, 222, 249
448–49 border of, 61
salt trade, 42, 64, 110 Civil War and, 308, 312–14, 316
Saltykov, Sergei, 114 railroad and, 276–77
Samoilovych, Ivan, Hetman of the USSR and, 329, 365–66, 368, 394,
Ukraine, 77 408
Sand, Georges, 181–82 WW II and, 380, 385, 386
Sarai, 20–22 Sigismund, King of Poland, 57
488 Index

Sikorsky, Igor, 221, 342 Soviet People’s Commissariats, 305,

Silvestr, Priest, 50–51 325, 359
Skobelev, Mikhail, 266 soviets, 285, 299–303
Skoropadskii, Ivan, 93 Spain, 4–5, 45, 147, 151, 155
Skoropadskii, Pavel, 306 Civil War, 373–74, 377
Skriabin, Alexander, 337 special settlements, 354–55, 362, 375,
Slansky, Rudolf, 433 396, 400
Slavophiles, 95, 162, 164, 181, Spencer, Herbert, 199
200–202, 213, 241–42, 244, 255, Speranskii, Michael, 144–45, 155, 157
272 Sputnik, 437
Smolensk, 14, 28, 47, 58, 60, 66 Stael, Germaine de, 152
Smol’nyi Institute, 126, 302–3 Stakhanov, Aleksei, 357
Sobchak, Anatolii, 456 Stalin, Joseph, xvi, 291, 295, 364, 403,
Social Democratic Workers’ Party, 227 407, 415–16, 418, 420–23,
Social Democrats, 282, 285, 288 429–36, 440
“socialism in one country,” 322–23 Civil War and, 309–11, 314–15
socialist realism, 335, 416 centralized power under, 363–66
Socialists-Revolutionaries, Party of collectivization and industrialization
(SRs), 227, 280–83, 288, 294, and, 350–57, 367–69
299–304, 306–8, 310, 321, 325 Comintern and, 331–33
Sofia, Tsarevna (regent, sister of Peter death of, 397–99
the Great and Ivan V), 76–79, 82 Eastern Europe and, 432–34
Solari, Pietro Antonio, 43 federalism and, 326, 328, 366–67
Solomoniia Saburova, Grand Princess Hitler and WW II and, 369–78,
of Moscow (wife of Vasilii III), 47 380–83, 386–92, 399
Solzhenitsyn, Alexander, 411–12, Khrushchev’s secret speech of on,
424–26 399–400
Sophia Paleologue, Grand Princess of post-WW II repression by, 393–97
Moscow (wife of Ivan III), 47 purges and GULAG under, 353,
South Ossetia, 328, 451 358–65, 399–400
South Western Railway, 275 Revolution of 1917 and, 300, 303
Soviet Union. See Union of Soviet struggle for control of Party and,
Socialist Republics 321–26
Soviet Ministry of Defense, 402 Stalingrad, Battle of (1942–43),
Soviet Ministry of Education, 347 386–87, 390
Soviet Ministry of Finance, 346, 347 Stanislavsky, Konstantin, 336, 343
Soviet Ministry of Internal Affairs and Stankevich, Nikolai, 162–65, 183
State Security, 397 Stasov, Vladimir, 232–38, 337
Soviet Ministry of Natural Gas Stefan Bathory, King of Poland, 52
Industry, 449 Steiner, Rudolf, 340
Soviet Ministry of State Security, 396 Stendhal, 149
Soviet People’s Army (1918–20), 306, Stolypin, Peter A., 211, 221–22,
308. See also Red Army 287–89, 291, 294
Soviet People’s Commissariat of Food St. Petersburg (Petrograd, Leningrad),
Supplies, 309 131, 142, 144, 153, 158–59, 161,
Soviet People’s Commissariat of 165, 172–81, 208–13, 219–20,
Health, 368 225–26, 236–40, 252, 257–61,
Soviet People’s Commissariat of Heavy 271, 323, 339, 341
Industry, 357, 358 Anna moves capital to, 102, 104–5
 Index 489

Finnish border and, 257, 376 war of 1787, 133

renamed Petrograd, 295 WW II and, 378
Peter the Great builds, 84–85, 87–90, Swordbearers, 26–27
95, 98
Revolution of 1905–6 and, 282–85 Table of Ranks, 92
Revolution of 1917 and Civil War Tacitus, 114
and, 298, 300–302, 305, 311–12, Tadjikistan, 329
314, 341 Tadzhiks, 63
WW I and, 294, 298 Tambov revolt, 318
WW II and, siege of (1941–44), Tamerlane, 23–24, 34
379–80, 384–86, 391 Tamm, Igor, 406
St. Petersburg Academy of Arts, 105, Tarkovsky, Andre, 426–27
130–31, 173, 237–39, 261 Tatars, 21, 37–39, 42–43, 47, 49,
St. Petersburg Conservatory, 231, 61–63, 67, 77, 111, 123, 263, 288,
233–34 327, 400
St. Petersburg Philharmonic Society, Tatarstan, 1, 453
174, 338 taxes and tariffs, 63, 64, 83, 93, 98,
St. Petersburg Polytechnic Institute, 110, 158, 211, 215, 220
216, 346 Tchaikovsky, Ilya, 215, 235
St. Petersburg Technological Institute, Tchaikovsky, Peter, xvii, 177, 230–32,
159, 215–16, 228–29 234–37, 235, 337
St. Petersburg University, 197 Teheran Conference, 388–89
Strategic Arms Limitation Treaties Temporary Regulations of 1881, 273
(SALT, 1972, 1979), 445 Temriuk, Prince of Circassia, 51
Stravinskii, Igor, 335, 339 terrorism (pre-1917), 203–5, 211, 227,
strikes, 213, 226, 283–85, 294 260, 279, 281
Stroganov, Pavel, 143 Terror of 1936–38, 358–63, 366–68,
Sumarokov, Alexander, 105, 126, 399, 402, 420
128 Teutonic Knights, 26–29, 38
Sun Yat-sen, 332 Theodore, Saint, 18
Supreme Economic Council, 305, Theognostos, Metropolitan of Kiev, 23
324–25, 330, 349, 353, 357 Theophanes the Greek, 26, 32
Supreme Executive Commission, 205 Third Section, 156–57, 159, 165, 172,
Supreme Privy Council, 99, 102 178, 184, 191, 198, 203, 205, 252
Supreme Soviet, 450, 453–54 Thucydides, 5
Surikov, Vasilii, 239 Time of Troubles, 56–58, 60, 84
Suvorov, Alexander, 134–35, 140 Timmerman, Frans, 77
Sviatopolk-Mirskii, Prince Petr, 282 Timoshenko, Marshal Semyon, 376,
Sviatopolk “the Cursed,” Grand Prince 378–80
of Kiev Rus, 16 Tito, Josip Broz, 391, 401, 433
Sviatoslav I, Grand Prince of Kiev Rus, Tokhtamysh, Khan, 23–24
7 Tolstoi, Count I.M., 214–15
Sviatoslav II, Grand Prince of Kiev, 17 Tolstoi, Peter, 91
Sweden, 39, 58, 67, 90, 93, 98, 146, Tolstoy, Alexei, 342
286 Tolstoy, Lev Nikolaevich (Leo), xvii,
early wars vs., 27, 51, 54 106, 148, 230, 240, 243–48, 246,
treaty of 1609 and, 57 338, 416
war of 1700–21, 82–87, 92, 95–96 Tolstoy, Sofya Bers, 245
war of 1741–43, 102–3 Tomskii, Mikhail, 324
490 Index

Tomsk Polytechnical Institute, 216 Ukrainian Rada, 302, 304, 312

Toon, Konstantin, 160 Ulanova, Galina, 423
township courts, 195 Ulbricht, Walter, 434, 440
Transcaucasia, 146, 167–68, 263, Uniates, 65
265–66, 450, 455 Union of Liberation, 282
Transcaucasian Federation, 316, Union of Salvation, 153
327–28 Union of Soviet Socialist Republics
Transsiberian Railroad, 217, 220, 269, (Soviet Union, USSR)
276–77, 282, 284, 306 boundaries of, at end of Civil War,
Trepov, General Fyodor, 204 315–17
Tretyakov, Pavel, 238 collapse of, xv, xviii, 447, 452–53
Trivolis, Michael, 46–47 Constitution of 1936, 366
Trotsky, Leon, 280, 285, 291, 295, creation of, 310–12, 319–20, 324,
301, 303, 305–11, 307, 314, 316, 328–31
318, 321–25, 343, 345, 358–60, federal structure of, 326, 365–67
364 map of, in WW II, xxiv
Tsaritsyn, Battle of (1918), 309. See Union of St. Michael the Archangel,
also Stalingrad, Battle of 275
Tsarskoe Selo (Detskoe Selo, Pushkin), Union of the Russian People, 285
159, 348 Union of Welfare, 153
Tsarskoe Selo Lycée, 161, 165, 176 Union of Zemstvos, 298
Tsvetaeva, Marina, 342–43 United Nations, 389, 436
Tukhachevskii, Marshal M.N., 314–15, United States, 152, 186, 232, 260, 319,
318, 359, 373 320, 348–49
Tupolev, Andrei, 421 Cold War and, 409, 429–30, 437,
Turgenev, Ivan, 112, 183–85, 196, 230, 442–46
240–41, 340, 417 Russian Civil War and, 308, 314
Turkestan, 239, 327 WW I and, 306
Turkey, 316. See also Ottoman Empire WW II and, 388
Turkic people, 2, 5–6, 168, 266, 329 Urals, 1, 53, 70, 110, 111, 123–24,
Turkmenistan, 408 215, 222, 312, 327, 352, 368, 380,
Tver, 22, 33, 42, 67 394
Uvarov, Count S.S., 159–61, 201
U-2 flight, 437, 442 Uzbek, Khan, 21–22
Ukraine, 1, 29, 135, 139, 243, 252–53, Uzbekistan, 329, 408
258, 261–62, 271 Uzbek khanates, 266
Civil War and, 312–16, 326–27
collapse of USSR and, 450, 452, 458 Vasilii I, Grand Prince of Moscow, 33
Cossacks revolt (1648), 65, 66 Vasilii II, Grand Prince of Moscow,
Hetmanate, 67–68, 73–74, 77, 86, 33–34, 36
93, 111 Vasilii III, Grand Prince of Moscow,
Revolution of 1905 and, 284, 289 37, 47–48
USSR and, 326–27, 329, 352, Vasilii IV (Shuiskii), Tsar, 57
365–67, 408 Vasilii Iur’evich “the Squint-eyed,” 33
WW I and, 306, 309 Vavilov, Nikolai, 348–49, 415, 420
WW II and, 379, 380, 383, 390–91, veche (popular assembly), 11, 13
393 Vereshchagin, Vasilii, 239
Ukrainian Church, 29, 68–70, 126 Vernadskii, Vladimir, 347, 349
Ukrainian language, 262, 329 Viazemskii, Prince Peter, 179
 Index 491

Vienna Wladyslaw, Prince of Poland, 57

siege of 1529, 38 Wolff, Georg Christian, 107
siege of 1683, 77 Women’s Battalion of Death,
Vienna, Congress of, 150, 253 303
Vietnam, 20, 435–36, 443–45 World of Art, 210, 334, 337–38
Vikings, 3–4, 12 Wrangel, Baron Peter, 314–15
Vladimir I, Saint, Grand Prince of Kiev Writers’ Union, 415–17
Rus, 7–8, 16, 45
Vladimir II Monomakh, Grand Prince Yalta Conference, 389
of Kiev Rus, 12 yasak (tribute), 49, 67, 111
Vladimir, Principality of, 12, 14, 14, Yedigei, Emir, 47
20–24 Yeltsin, Boris, 308, 447–48, 450–58
Volga Bulgaria, 1, 7, 20–21 Yermak the Cossack, 53
Volga Tatars, 263, 268–69 Yevtushenko, Evgenii, 424
Voltaire, 105, 107–8, 114, 125 Youth Scientific-Technical Groups,
Volunteer Army, 306, 308 449
Volynskii, Artemii, 102–3 Yudenich, Nikolai, 297
Vonifat’ev, Stefan, 68 Yugoslavia, 389, 391, 432–33,
Voroshilov, Kliment, 309, 363, 366, 437
375, 394, 401
Voznesenskii, Nikolai, 396 Zamiatin, Evgenii, 346, 414
Vsevolod, Grand Prince of Kiev, 12, 17 Zarutskii, Ivan, 58
Vyshinskii, Andrei, 360 Zasulich, Vera, 204
Vysotskii, Vladimir, 426 zemstvos, 193–95, 200, 202, 206, 219,
262, 273, 281–82, 289, 297
Wagner, Richard, 233, 337 Zhdanov, Andrei, 363–64, 394, 416,
War Communism, 310, 316–18 421–22
Warsaw Pact, 439 Zheliabov, Alexander, 206
Warsaw Polytechnical Institute, 216 Zhirinovsky, Vladimir, 457
Warsaw uprising (1944), 391 Zhukov, Georgii, 379–80, 386,
Westernizers, 95, 162, 164, 181–83 390–91, 395, 397, 401–2, 438
Whistler, G.W., 159 Zhukovskii, Vasilii, 174–76, 178–81,
White armies, 306, 308–9, 312–15, 261–62
326–28, 342, 346 Zinoviev, Grigorii, 303, 310–11, 314,
Wielhorski, Count Matvei, 174–75 321–23, 331, 358
Wielhorski, Count Mikhail, 174–75, Zionists, 260, 271, 411
179, 231 Ziuganov, Gennadii, 455, 457
Winter Palace, 88, 104–5, 144, 176, Zoe Paleologue, Grand Princess of
208, 283, 303 Moscow (wife of Ivan III), 43
Winter War, 376–77 Zola, Emile, 241
Witte, Count Sergei, 211, 216, 220, Zoshchenko, Mikhail, 421–22
269, 272, 275–77, 277, 279, Zosima, Saint, 30
285–87, 346 Zubatov, Sergei, 282
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