Chapter Eight
At about eleven p.m. on one freezing night in February 1947, the great film director Sergei Eisenstein was summoned peremptorily to join his producer at the Kremlin for a meeting with the general secretary of the Communist Party, Joseph Stalin. Eisenstein had just completed the second part of his movie, Ivan the Terrible, and the rough cut had been shown to senior members of the party for their approval. The reason for the meeting was made clear by Stalin’s first question to the director: “Have you studied history?” When Eisenstein answered “More or less,” Stalin echoed his words sarcastically, “More or less? I am also a little familiar with history . . . Your tsar has come out as being indecisive, he resembles Hamlet. Everybody prompts him as to what is to be done, and he himself does not take any decision . . . By showing Ivan the Terrible in this manner you have committed a deviation and a mistake.”
What followed must have been one of the most terrifying lessons ever given in Russian history. It lasted for more than an hour, with both teacher and student aware that any failure to pay attention would be rewarded by a bullet in the back of the student’s skull. The lesson that Stalin intended Eisenstein to learn was that the goals and methods of Ivan’s rule in the sixteenth century still applied in the twentieth, when the Soviet Union, successor to the Russian Empire, occupied one third of the earth’s surface. “Tsar Ivan was a great and a wise ruler,” Stalin declared firmly, “he looked at things from the national point of view and did not allow foreigners into his country, he barricaded the country from the entry of foreign influence.”
It was in the spring of 1565 that Tsar Ivan IV, the Great or the Terrible, began to impose his nationalist will upon a state that had been the duchy of Muscovy but was in the process of becoming Russia. After eighteen years as tsar, most of its territory was still possessed by the mighty, semi-independent barons known as the boyars. The second part of Eisenstein’s film began with Ivan’s dramatic announcement that he intended to abdicate as tsar and create a separate kingdom or oprichnina, where he would exercise absolute power. The region included most of northern Muscovy, center of the lucrative fur trade that provided much of the tsar’s revenues. The remainder, the zemshchina, was left under the control of the boyars.
Part 1 of Ivan the Terrible had covered the heroic period when the young Ivan, barely twenty years old, launched a series of campaigns against the khans of the Golden Horde, the powerful remnants of Mongol armies to whom Muscovy had paid tribute for generations. Supporting the Russian cavalry, his army’s main attack force, was a new corps of professional musketeers, the strel’tsy, that the tsar himself had created. Using their firepower, a novel weapon to Tatar horsemen, Ivan’s armies drove back the enemy, bringing the province of Astrakhan under Russian control, and giving them a first foothold in the gigantic Volga river basin that lies between Moscow and the Urals. To commemorate his success, Ivan constructed within the walls of the Kremlin, Moscow’s inner citadel, the magnificent cathedral of Saint Basil, with its eye-catching, blue and green gilded onion dome spires.
But the tsar’s greater achievement was less visible, the foundation of a central administration to run Russia’s growing state. Although often haphazard and disjointed, the shape of his reforms was clear: to displace the old, feudal power of the boyars. The jurisdiction of their manorial courts was challenged by a new, tsarist law code, issued in 1550, that created a structure of regional councils, zemskiy, to administer justice and raise taxes. Significantly, they reported directly to Moscow rather than to the provincial boyar governor.
Underpinning this shift in power was a shift in land ownership from feudal to bureaucratic. Service in the tsar’s government was rewarded with land. A thousand estates close to Moscow were, nominally at least, allocated to officials concerned with civil affairs, taxation, justice, and the royal court, while on the expanding borders many more were awarded to those who rendered military service. By regulations brought into force in 1556, for every four hundred acres, military landowners had to supply one cavalryman “on a horse with complete equipment, and for a long march he must have two horses.” Under the tsar’s direct control was the Pomyestny Prikaz, or Estate Office, which was responsible for distributing this land and ensuring that the pomeshchiki, or landholders, provided the service required of them, both civil and military.
The dry administrative detail of Ivan’s reforms muffled the murderous threat this growing structure posed to the boyars. What had begun as a question of government became personal when Ivan IV’s uncertain psychological state was shaken by the death of his first wife, Anastasia Romanovna, in 1560, due to poison, it was whispered, administered by the boyars. The second part of Eisenstein’s film revealed how Ivan launched his attack.
The short-term reason for the tsar’s decision to abdicate in 1565 and take absolute control of the oprichnina was his determination to weed out dissidents suspected of collaborating with Russia’s powerful neighbor to the west, the great commonwealth of Poland-Lithuania. Strategically, however, the goal was to create a core of total unity centered on Ivan himself. But the methods, as described by Heinrich von Staden, a German adventurer who had joined the tsar’s entourage, point also to a tortured mind. The landowners living in the oprichnina “took an oath not to have anything to do with the zemskie people [i.e. those living in the zemshchina] or form any friendships with them. Those in the oprichnina also had to wear black clothes and hats; and in their quivers, where they put their arrows, they carried some kind of brushes or brooms tied on the ends of sticks. The oprichniki were recognized in this way.”
Eisenstein’s depiction of the oprichniki in tall black cowls was another irritation to Stalin, who thought they looked “like the Ku-Klux-Klan.” As part of the history lesson, he emphasized that these black-clad figures, often professional soldiers, strel’tsy, and cavalrymen, were “a progressive army” because they enforced the absolute power that could alone unite Russia. Their brooms symbolized Ivan’s determination to sweep Muscovy clean of its enemies, and the appearance of the oprichniki in a neighborhood was as terrifying to the inhabitants as the nighttime hammering on the door by Stalin’s secret police in the Soviet Union four centuries later.
“A person from the oprichnina could accuse someone from the zemshchina of owing him a sum of money,” von Staden wrote. “And even if the oprichnik had never known nor seen the accused from the zemshchina, the latter had to pay him immediately or he was publicly beaten in the marketplace with knouts or cudgels every day until he paid. No one was spared in this, neither clerics nor laymen. The oprichniki did a number of indescribable things to the zemskie people to get all their money and property.”
The purpose of the terror was not just to cow opponents, but to ensure that land, the source of imperial service, was held only by those loyal to the regime. Consequently, the estates of anyone suspected of collaboration with Poland were confiscated on behalf of the tsar, and transferred to the loyal oprichniki.
But the campaign of terror soon extended to anyone opposed to the tsar’s policies. In 1570 Ivan accused the inhabitants of Veliky Novgorod, the oldest and most cultured city in Muscovy, of maintaining links with Poland. Between three thousand and fifteen thousand citizens were tortured and murdered, many under the tsar’s personal supervision. Soon the oprichniki were running out of control. During Ivan’s periodic, Hamlet-like fits of remorse when he retreated to pray for forgiveness, they took to murdering and terrorizing at random in an orgy of fear and greed.
Seven years after it began, the terror was brought to an abrupt halt. In 1571 the southern Tatars living in the Crimea and along the Black Sea took advantage of the devastation to invade and burn Moscow. Shocked, Ivan turned against the oprichniki, fining and executing them for crimes he had earlier approved. Yet, once he had resumed his authority in 1572 as tsar of all Russia, it became apparent that the terror had succeeded in its purpose and eliminated almost all rivals to his power. His bureaucratic structure was still in place, his reconstituted army inflicted defeat on the Tatars the following year, and only a few boyar families retained any independence. Most significantly, the church, the one remaining institution that could challenge the state, was forbidden in 1580 to acquire more land, leaving Ivan and his successors to claim as their own personal territory every crumb of earth the Russian Empire would acquire between the Baltic and the Pacific over the next 337 years. By uniting all its territory in their possession, the tsars united Russia.
Summing up his history lesson, Stalin pointed out that the founder of the Russian Empire and the founder of the Soviet Union had followed exactly the same policy. “Ivan the Terrible was first,” Stalin pronounced, “Lenin was the second.” To his credit, Eisenstein made only a grudging apology for having failed to appreciate the similarities, but his terrified producer grovelled, promising to change everything if they could be allowed to learn from their mistakes. Seemingly appeased, Stalin allowed the filmmakers to leave soon after midnight.
The one criticism that Stalin made of Ivan IV was his failure to be ruthless enough. After the tsar’s death in 1584, the remaining boyars fought among themselves for supremacy, a period known as “the time of troubles,” leaving Muscovy so vulnerable that in 1612 a Polish army occupied Moscow for twelve months. “He did not completely finish off the five big feudal families,” Stalin complained. “If he had destroyed these five families then there would not have been the Time of Troubles. If Ivan the Terrible executed someone then he repented and prayed for a long time. God disturbed him on these matters . . . It was necessary to be [more] decisive.”
Demonstrating his familiarity with history, Stalin showed no mercy when his own oprichniki, the NKVD secret police, purged his supposed enemies in the 1930s. Where Ivan killed his thousands, Stalin exterminated his millions. As Anna Akhmatova wrote in the opening lines of Requiem,
In those years only the dead smiled,
Glad to be at rest . . .
Among those executed on Stalin’s orders were almost half a million kulaki, rich peasants and smallholders, who mistakenly assumed they had rights to the soil they farmed. A greater knowledge of history would have told them that with ownership of the earth came a claim to power. By definition, an autocratic government had to possess all the land. Stalin’s Communist Party was no more prepared to let ownership pass into the hands of peasants than Ivan the Terrible had been to leave it with the boyars.
Each of the three tsars who have had the accolade “the Great” added to their names—Ivan, Peter, and Catherine—put the distribution of land at the heart of their policy of government. None did so to more dramatic effect than Peter in 1722. As part of his violent campaign to wrench Russia into becoming a Western power, he had already founded a new capital, Saint Petersburg, on the banks of the Baltic, imported Dutch, German, and British merchants and craftsmen to modernize industry and production methods, and put swingeing taxes on Russian smocks and beards in order to force changes in dress and appearance. As a clean-shaven youth with dark wavy hair, Peter himself had resembled a Western romantic hero, but now in his fifties his face was deeply lined and his determination to drag his country into the current of European affairs had grown ruthless. He had executed by the thousands any who resisted him, and flogged to death his own son, Alexis, in rage at his disobedience.
The land autocracy that the Romanov dynasty had inherited from Ivan the Great had not only grown in size as the empire expanded, but changed in nature. In less than a century, estates originally tied to imperial service had come to be treated as family possessions that could be inherited, leased, and exchanged. In 1649, an attempt had been made to reverse the trend. A great compilation of laws known as the Ulozhenie specified that whoever had the privilege of holding pomeshchik land must also pay the taxes and provide the military or civil service associated with it. Yet, by the time Peter the Great took power in 1682, the ineffectiveness of the law could no longer be disguised. It was hardly possible to tell a pomeshchik property from those of the greatest nobility, who enjoyed right of inheritance in return for their hereditary duty of serving the tsar at court. Taxes that should have come to the central treasury were diverted to pomeshchik pockets, and their growing local authority began to endanger the national unity that Ivan’s land monopoly was designed to sustain.
Root and branch, Peter set out to restore the old system of government, locking the whole of Russian society, except for merchants and city dwellers, less than 10 percent of the population, into a new structure that matched government service exactly to the allocation of land. In 1722, he created a “Table of Ranks” placing everyone employed by the government in one of fourteen ranks, from general to junior lieutenant in the army, and from imperial minister to lowly registrar in the civil service. At each level, service merited the award of an estate. More importantly, the privilege of owning serfs, the essential means of making an estate profitable, was restricted to those holding a high rank.
In place of the old Pomyestny Prikaz, or Estate Office, the tsar appointed a College of Heralds, whose chief executive, the Master, had absolute power to supervise the elaborate uniforms that marked each rank of nobility, the progression from white pants to black, from red ribbons to blue, from white epaulettes to gold. Dress was one thing, but the Master also kept the records that showed what estates each nobleman held, and what duties were expected in exchange. Thus as a reward for promotion to vice-admiral, Adam Weid was given an estate of 188 serf households in Finland, which the Master duly clawed back after his death. On his appointment as chief judge, Andrei Matveev received a large property of 132 serf households, but rather close to the Swedish border, and when a treaty alteration placed the land within Sweden, the Master allocated a smaller but safer estate of eighty-two serf households, that reverted to the tsar on Matveev’s death in 1728.
That was how the system was supposed to work, and it demonstrates the profoundly contradictory nature of Peter the Great’s reforms. To make Russia modern, he saddled it with an administrative system akin to those of Ivan the Terrible and Süleyman the Magnificent. His insistence that possession of land should be linked to government service was not just a disastrous attempt to turn back the clock, it flew in the face of human nature by denying the possibility of even family possession of land. In the rest of eighteenth-century Asia, the Ottoman Empire and the great powers of China and Mogul India espoused various forms of peasant ownership that gave some security of tenure to most landowners and guarantees of use to most tillers of the soil. The majority of owners and users could also hope to pass on, albeit at some cost, what they possessed to the next generation. In those places, as in the peasant kingdoms of western Europe, the sense of security was accompanied by agricultural improvements that led to increasing yields in crops and livestock. No similar trend emerged in Russia until Peter’s reforms were pushed aside.
Nevertheless, a land-based autocracy remained the template for the Russian Empire as it spread across Asia with a speed unequaled by any private property society. Ideologically, the conquest of new lands was seen as a spiritual crusade against Muslims and other “enemies of the Holy Cross.” And the tsars’ absolute authority over their new territories was explicit in their official title, “By the grace of God Emperor and Autocrat of All the Russias.” It was this divinely authorized command structure that exploded out of eastern Europe and into Asia.
During the three centuries of Romanov rule, the empire swallowed up an average of almost thirty thousand square miles of new territory every year. From its Muscovite enclave largely covered by conifer forests, it had already broken out in the sixteenth century north to Finland, and eastward across the forest and swampland of the Siberian taiga. This frozen expanse was home to such a cornucopia of fur-bearing animals that by 1650, when the first traders had already reached the Pacific, one third of the imperial revenues came from the sale of sable, black fox, and ermine. As France’s missionaries and coureurs de bois would do in North America, Russians claimed a sparsely populated land but did not settle it. The real imperial thrust of the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries was to the southeast through a warmer country thick with birch, oak, and maple, increasingly broken in the east by the grasslands of the Volga river basin, and suddenly opening out in the south toward the Black Sea into the vast ocean of the steppes.
As early as the 1640s the Russians began to face a colonial challenge Americans would not encounter until the nineteenth century, how to organize the possession of grasslands taken from their indigenous occupants. Just as the American way of converting the prairies into property would leave an indelible imprint on United States society, so the Russian method of imposing their ownership of the steppes profoundly affected the outlook and structure of the Romanov Empire. And at almost the same time in the 1890s, as Frederick Jackson Turner was selecting the frontier experience of the United States in its westward expansion as “the crucible [where] the immigrants were Americanized,” his Russian contemporary, Vasily Klyuchevsky, was insisting that the colonization of Asia was “the fundamental factor” in Russian history.
At first the open country beyond the trees was simply called “the field” or polye, but quite soon people started using the word steppe, which dictionaries defined as an area that was grassy, treeless, and, despite the presence of several million nomadic Cossacks, Bashkirs, and Kalmyks, empty. Thus the Russians, like the Spanish, French, and British in the New World, could see nothing to stop them planting their own society in a land that stretched for more than a thousand miles to the Urals.
The first impression created by the richness of the steppe was of wonder, not unlike the feeling of early settlers in America. “Nothing in nature could be finer,” wrote Nikolai Gogol in Taras Bulba. “The whole surface resembled a golden-green ocean, upon which were sprinkled millions of different flowers. Through the tall, slender stems of the grass peeped light-blue, dark-blue, and lilac star-thistles; the yellow broom thrust up its pyramidal head; the parasol-shaped white flower of the false flax shimmered on high . . . The air was filled with the notes of a thousand different birds. Oh, steppes, how beautiful you are!” The same vision of Eden-like exuberance struck John Perry, a British engineer employed by Peter the Great to construct a canal in the Volga valley. “The tulips, roses, lilies of the valley, pinks, sweet williams, and several other flowers and herbs spring up like a garden,” he declared. “Asparagus, the best I ever eat, grows so thick, that you may in some places mow it down, and the common grass in the meadows is up to the horse’s belly. Liquorish, almonds, and cherries, the fields are cover’d with.” The luxuriant grasses fed herds of wild animals, deer, elk, boar, and a breed of sheep that the gourmandizing Perry insisted “eat tenderer, and was much preferable to common mutton.”
Whereas American settlers immediately saw the prairies as potential property—John Quincy Adams compared their eagerness to acquire western land to “the thirst of a tiger for blood”—the Russians responded to the steppes in military terms. The grasslands were where the Tatar hordes came from, and the empire advanced into them behind lines of defensive fortifications under the command of a military officer.
During the seventeenth century, when Russia was expanding down the Don River toward the Black Sea, one major line running across the steppes was centered on the fortress of Voronezh, built at a strategic point high on wooded bluffs overlooking the river. The land along the line was allocated by the fort’s commander to frontier militia farmers, the ornodvortsy, a motley group including army veterans, Cossacks, a scattering of aristocratic adventurers, and even escaped serfs. They kept a few horses, cattle, and pigs, grew enough wheat and vegetables to feed themselves, and traded iron tools with the native inhabitants for furs, hides, and beeswax. Nominally, they were under the command of the senior officer in Voronezh, and were required to defend the earthworks and fortified posts of the line against Tatar or Cossack attack, and if need be to aid the garrison in Voronezh itself.
The horse-riding Cossacks provided a vital but unreliable element in this first phase of settlement. Clustered in loose alliances along the rivers that fed the Black Sea and the Volga, they were the definitive frontier people, half-nomadic and half-settled, many of them runaway serfs, linked to Russia by their Christianity, but too free to accept its absolute government. They rendered invaluable service as scouts and outriders of the regular military, but, as was made dangerously obvious in 1670, when resentment at Russian demands provoked the Cossacks to rise in a furious rebellion led by Stenka Razin, their loyalty could not be relied upon. Their faces, decorated by the extravagant beards and mustaches that Peter the Great would ban, proclaimed their independence.
The ineffectiveness of the frontier militia in the face of Razin’s failed revolt led to the next stage in the development of the frontier, the introduction of regular troops. Where Voronezh was concerned, this meant the arrival of the Ostrogozhsk regiment numbering about twelve hundred professional soldiers, sent to beef up security. Counting families and servants, almost six thousand new inhabitants had to be settled in the Voronezh area, transforming its nature. It now began to resemble the land-based autocracy of old Russia. Many of the militia farmers found their smallholdings incorporated into larger estates allocated to officers and civilian administrators in return for their service. The tsar personally awarded the regiment’s colonel a large parcel of land a short distance down the Don River, while new farms close to the fort were carved out for the families of the regiment’s regular soldiers.
Then in 1695, Peter the Great arrived in person with fifty thousand troops and five thousand shipwrights and laborers to build a navy to attack the Ottoman Empire. During this third phase of imperial settlement the critical element in Russia’s command society took shape. The tsar awarded most of the fertile black earth in the region to his nobility—one general, Mikhail Tchertkov, acquired almost half a million acres—on condition they settled privately owned serfs on the new land.
Serfdom had come to Russia from Poland, but with one crucial difference. Instead of being the creation of the nobility, it served the interests of a single autocratic ruler. Like other aspects of Russian society, the seeds of serfdom had been sown in the course of Ivan the Terrible’s reign. During the oprichnina, thousands of peasants had fled from the nightmare into the northern forests or south to join Cossack societies living beyond the woodland in the open steppes. Oprichniki who were awarded confiscated estates found them denuded of workers and rendered unproductive. To prevent this from happening, harsh punishments were decreed for peasants who left their estates.
The Romanov tsars went further, forbidding peasant children from moving away or from marrying anyone outside the estate on which they worked, so that pomeshchiki serving as military officers in the field against Tatars and Poles could be sure that their lands would still be worked in their absence. In 1649 all these laws were amalgamated in Chapter XI of the Russian legal code, the Ulozhenie, formally making serfdom a permanent, inheritable condition. From then on, serfs could never legally escape the estate on which they lived, nor could their children, except with the owner’s permission.
By the early eighteenth century, two thirds of the thirteen million inhabitants of Russia were serfs, with over half belonging to the nobility and the remainder to the church and the state, meaning the tsar. Nineteenth-century commentators would compare their status to slavery, but unlike slaves, serfs were at least free to marry, and to live as a family. Indeed, many of the 2.5 million state serfs living on state land enjoyed a range of liberties, including the right to earn an independent living from such skills as carpentry and ironwork. They might have been regarded as free peasants, except that they still fell under the tsar’s direct control. In 1701, for instance, Peter the Great arbitrarily ordered more than a thousand state peasant families to move from northern Russia and settle near Voronezh, while fourteen hundred state carpenters who had been sent to work in Voronezh were instead suddenly dispatched to Saint Petersburg, more than six hundred miles away.
The worst conditions, however, were suffered by serfs tied to private estates who were liable to forced labor for up to six days a week. Any disputes were settled in their owners’ courts, and infringements punished by use of a leather-thonged whip, or knout, wielded by the owner’s overseer. Early in his reign, Peter the Great had found it necessary to criticize landowners for “beating and tormenting [serfs] so that they run away” and had passed a law banning them from selling serfs to new owners singly rather than by families.
So vital was serfdom to Russia’s mainly rural economy that estates were measured not by size, but by the number of “souls” or serfs they supported. It was reckoned that the labor of a hundred souls was needed to let an aristocratic family live comfortably, but most of the lesser nobility on the Table of Ranks possessed fewer than twenty serfs. Out in the provinces, there were even noblemen dressed in woollen smocks and felt boots who were no wealthier than their richest serfs. At the other end of the scale, more than three million of Russia’s serfs belonged to a tiny elite, mostly of the old court nobility, each of whom owned at least one thousand souls.
Even among this group, however, none could compete with the holdings of the richest man in eighteenth century Russia, Count Pyotr Sheremetev, whose inherited property, coupled with the tsar’s awards for service as Marshal of the Nobility, amounted to more than 1.5 million acres with two hundred thousand serf households, comprising more than one million souls. A small army of 340 servants staffed his palace in Saint Petersburg, almost twenty times as many as England’s richest nobleman, the Duke of Devonshire, employed in the ducal mansion of Chatsworth. Serfs not only worked the land, they acted as carpenters, painters, builders, or, in the case of the beautiful Praskovya Kuznetsova, as an opera singer, mistress, and eventually wife of Count Nikolai Sheremetev, Pyotr’s son.
Yet, unnoticed by tsarist rule, the serfs created an institution that came to be seen as the embodiment of the Russian spirit. Although serfs could not own the soil, part of each estate—approximately a quarter in the black earth region, but more than half in the less productive north—had to be set aside for their sustenance. The owner’s steward was responsible for the organization of labor on the manorial land, but the serfs arranged their own lives and the distribution of the land they occupied through the commune, known formally as the obshchina, and more colloquially as the mir.
Each family had its own dwelling and garden, but the number of strips of land that it could farm and their location, together with the quantity of sheep and cattle it could graze on the common pasture, were decided by the mir. And in the interests of fairness, the mir periodically redistributed both land and grazing rights. It specified the amount of tax each person would pay, and because the three-year rotation of crops required one field in three to be left fallow with the other two given over to grazing or cereals, the mir also selected the type of crops to be grown, and the dates for sowing, harvesting, and ploughing, or for turning out the cattle in spring.
Thus, paradoxically, the autocracy of tsarist rule made possible for most Russians the communal life that Winstanley and the democratic Levellers had dreamed of. In the nineteenth century, the institution of the mir, with its apparent equality of ownership, would enter the Russian imagination as the embodiment of a national ideal, a property myth as powerful as the Englishman’s vision of his home as a castle.
In 1790, while Enlightenment believers from Philadelphia to Saint Petersburg were still buzzing with news of the fall of the Bastille and the collapse of feudalism in France, Alexander Radischchev, an earnest, twenty-one-year-old advocate of rationalist politics, published a fictionalized account of serf life entitled A Journey from St Petersburg to Moscow. One of his stops on the journey was at the city of Novgorod, whose inhabitants had been massacred in 1570 by Ivan the Terrible. Radischev made the mistake of associating the serfs’ wretched lives with the land autocracy that Ivan founded. Both institutions, he pointed out, demanded an unquestioning obedience that excluded more rational and progressive policies—“Russians,” Radischev observed in a phrase that became famous, “grow to love their bonds.” It was an acute analysis, but his logical conclusion that tsarist government needed reform could not have been more subversive.
In the margins of her copy of Radischev’s Journey, Catherine the Great scribbled an angry defense of Ivan’s policy, and promptly had the author exiled to Siberia where his health was ruined. Broken by the experience, Radischev later committed suicide. Once an enthusiast for Enlightenment values, Catherine had become converted since taking power in the 1760s to an equally determined belief in the virtues of despotism. Explaining why Radischev was wrong and she was right, the empress wrote vigorously, “[T}he sovereign is absolute, for no authority but the power centered in his single person can act with the vigour proportionate to the extent of such a vast dominion. All other forms of government whatsoever would not only be prejudicial to Russia but would provoke its entire ruin.”
Nevertheless, it was impossible to ignore the problems of despotism. Quite apart from the immorality of reducing most of the population to a near slave-like condition, autocracy had consequences that choked the economy of the Russian empire even as it spread to become the largest territorial unit on earth. With all the resources of the empire available to it, the imperial army possessed a cutting edge that overwhelmed any resistance from Cossacks and nomadic Kalmycks and Uzbekhs who lived beyond the Volga. Even against the fading might of the Ottoman Empire, Russian forces established superiority on land and sea. But the society imposed behind the frontier was dysfunctional.
To foreign observers, the lack of interest that Russian aristocrats showed in their estates was shocking. Instead of improving the soil, they were content to live off the forced labor that came with the land, or to commute it to cash rents, and accepted the discomforts of living in houses built of logs and split greenwood planks. “The nobility is not identified with the soil as in the rest of Europe, nor with the region in which it resides,” a French diplomat complained. “The wooden house, so often burned down, so quickly worm-eaten, so easy to transport or to reconstruct, is a meet emblem of Russian life.” Long after Essex farmers had learned to snuggle into feather beds, an envoy from the Duke of Holstein noted that Russian lords “lie on benches covered with cushions, straw, mats or clothes; in winter they sleep on flat-topped stoves.”
The French-speaking, European-minded ministers and courtiers in Saint Petersburg termed this disconnected state of mind “Asiatic.” According to Nikolai Gogol, the characteristics of the Asiatic temperament were “indifference, naivety and cunning, an intense activity [followed by] the greatest laziness and indulgence.” Those worst afflicted were the great mass of landowners who never attended court, but lived on their estates, supposedly acting as the government’s tax gatherers and law enforcers in the provinces.
In 1859, the lassitude of the minor nobility was fictionalized in Ivan Goncharov’s novel Oblomov, whose protagonist lounges all day on a couch wearing an “oriental dressing-gown” and daydreaming in a state of “Asiatic immobility” of all the deeds he will never undertake. The term “Oblomovism” was immediately adopted into the language, but the state of mind it described had existed for generations. A century earlier, the need to overcome this Asiatic indifference had become a constant theme in the documents generated by Catherine’s growing horde of bureaucrats once they started to report on the state of New Russia.
Increasingly, the lazy aristocrats were bypassed by Catherine’s new centrally organized professional administrators. But the attention of these professionals was soon also attracted to the lack of enterprise shown by the state peasants sent to settle on the frontier. Instead of exploiting the natural fertility of the soil, they seemed content to do no more than the minimum amount of labor needed to keep themselves alive. Like the original militia-farmers, they kept a few animals and grew some wheat, and did nothing to improve homes that were often no more than a one-roomed, chimneyless, earth-floored cottage. The files bulged with reports of settlers “living in dugouts,” of their “extreme immiseration,” and their need for “material and technical assistance.” In 1806, after three thousand peasant settlers had almost starved to death on the rich soils of New Russia, the minister responsible decided the government had to intervene “to put an end to the tragedies and deprivations that so often accompany the peasants’ thoughtless acts.”
Their failings were spectacularly obvious when compared to the energy and drive shown by the colony of twenty-three thousand German Mennonites who migrated to the Volga valley in 1763 at the invitation of Catherine the Great. Like their fellow emigrants to Pennsylvania, the Germans were skilled and successful farmers who grew rye as well as wheat, alternated cereal crops with roots and clover, and employed teams of powerful horses rather than a few plodding oxen to pull their iron-tipped plows through the matted, black earth. Within a generation, they created a mini-Pennyslvania of neat fields, red barns, and white, clapboard houses beside the Volga.
“Why I asked myself would our peasants not want to imitate these settlers?” demanded Judge Pavel Sumarokov after touring the Volga valley in 1803. “Why would they not prefer profit and tranquillity to filth and disorder? Would it not be better for them to live in airy and sunny rooms rather than to suffocate in smoke, breathe foul air, and share their dwellings with cattle?”
The answer went to the heart of Russia’s land-autocracy. So far as it was possible for people who were not high-ranking nobles, the Germans could own the land. They were permitted to inherit the fields they cultivated, and, with local variations decided by each settlement, they could buy and sell the ground they had improved. Only the rough pasture, woods, and waterholes were owned in common. For some critics, their productivity seemed to be simply a matter of culture—“the Germans are like willow twigs,” one Russian commented dismissively, “stick them in any kind of soil and they grow immediately”—but the willingness of free Ukrainian peasants and even some Cossacks to learn German skills, and the reluctance of Russian serfs to imitate them, pointed to a different reason.
The state peasants and privately owned serfs who actually worked the soil were not only denied any incentive, they were required to pay an arbitrarily assessed poll tax from which the nobility were exempt. In his memoir of his service under Peter the Great, John Perry pointed out the consequence: “the common people have but very little heart or desire to any industry farther than necessity drives them. For if at any time by their ingenuity and endeavours they do get money, it cannot rightly be said they can call it their own; But with submission they say, All that they have belongs to God and the Czar: Nor do they dare to appear as if they had any riches, in their apparel, or in their houses, it being counted the best way to seem poor, lest there should be any notice taken of them that they have money; and they are troubled and harrass’d till they must part with it, and always be making bribes and presents to be at rest; of which there are ten thousand instances. So that everywhere as you travel through the villages in Russia, for this reason you will see the general part of the common people idle in the streets.”
Just behind the frontier was where the weakness of the empire’s command system became most obvious. It was easy to order the construction of a fort, the deployment of a regiment, or the movement of peasants so that the empire could spread more widely. The structure of serfdom should have made it equally simple to have the newly conquered areas colonized in “the state’s interest,” as Catherine the Great put it. But a quarter of the families forcibly moved to Belgorod near the Ukraine in the fall of 1647 had left by the end of December that same year, and of the 1,021 families settled in the region of Voronezh itself in 1701 by Peter the Great, only 159 were still there three years later. Where they had gone is not known, but a 1685 petition from a group of nobles awarded estates close to the frontier indicated the escape route chosen by private serfs. The runaways had gone to join the semi-nomadic Cossacks living beyond the frontier, the nobles complained, “and after spending a short time on the Cossack settlements, they return to . . . the villages of their fellows and kinsmen,” where they could then pretend to be free peasants or militia farmers.
In the confusion of frontier conditions, it had always been relatively simple to enter a Cossack camp and enlist in the ranks of a local commander. Those who wanted could later return from beyond the border to claim land on the defensive line as farmers, hiding their previous identities behind a mustache and frontier manners. Blurring the distinctions still further, the predominantly male Russian frontier dwellers frequently married or concubined into native Kalmyck and Bashkir families, dressed in Cossack boots and baggy pants, ate the Tatar specialty, mutton-fat stews, and drank the Bashkir liquor of choice, kumiss or fermented mares’ milk. And most forts also acted as a trading post for fur trappers, horse breeders, and nomadic herders, some of whose Cossack and Bashkiri relatives might be serving in the garrison.
As the frontier moved on, escaped serfs had further to go, but the process could be seen continuing with the foundation in 1734 of the great military outpost of Orenburg eight hundred miles to the east on one of the Volga’s tributaries close to the Urals. Situated in the middle of the grazing territory of the Bashkir nomads, it was intended to control their movements and introduce settlers into the heart of their country.
To those trapped in the serf economy, however, the chance of freedom offered by the frontier was irresistible. During the eighteenth century, the stream of runaways and other illegal migrants grew to levels that caused serious concern to serf owners and the government in Saint Petersburg. Indeed, the scale of unauthorized migration to frontier regions became so large from 1741 to 1797, when the population of the steppes grew by approximately half a million new inhabitants, that the system of governmental direction was evidently close to breaking down. No fewer than forty-seven thousand migrants were estimated to have crossed the border into the province of Orenburg without authorization in just eight years between 1754 and 1762.
In 1773, the pressure of official and unofficial incursions on nomadic land prompted the last great frontier rebellion led by the Don Cossack, Yemelyan Pugachev, against incomers who wanted to take the “rivers, seas, steppes and lands” from their free, bearded occupants. Pugachev’s rebellion ended with the capture of its leader in 1775, but at its height the entire Volga basin had risen up in revolt against tsarist rule. Once the leader was safely executed, Catherine the Great’s government adopted a new policy aimed at making despotism more efficient.
In 1775, the entire empire, from Ukraine throughout the Volga basin right up to the Urals, an area increasingly known as New Russia, was reorganized so that it had the same administrative structure as Old Russia. Voronezh and Orenburg, and a score of other military fortresses, became provincial capitals with governors, administrative councils, and law courts. Teams of civilian mapmakers, tax collectors, and judges were sent out to New Russia. And a blizzard of decrees from the government in Saint Petersburg ordered governors to survey their provinces, identify empty areas, and settle peasants sent by imperial order from overcrowded parts of Russia. In 1776, one such order required two thousand “economic peasants from areas with land shortage” to move south to the Lower Volga, close to the Caspian Sea, an area whose original Cossack inhabitants had themselves just been ordered to settle still further south in the Caucasus.
Meanwhile, controls on serfs, whose runaways were the lifeblood of the Cossacks, became progressively harsher. Private owners imposed ferocious punishments on any they even suspected of plotting an escape, not merely flogging them but forcibly enlisting them in the army, or selling them into exile in the frozen north. Sixty years after Peter the Great had criticized landowners for their inhumane treatment of serfs, Catherine II gave the gentry and nobility freedom to punish them in any fashion short of murder, to exile them to Siberia and to buy and sell them individually as chattel goods. Adding to the sum of serf misery, she arbitrarily transferred more than one million peasants from state lands where they lived in relative liberty to the near slavery of private ownership.
When William Richardson, a visitor from Scotland, arrived in Moscow in the 1770s, he was appalled to discover how completely serfs were at the mercy of their owner’s whims. One eighty-year-old aristocrat, Pyotr Koshkarov, was notorious for surrounding his bed with pretty serf-girls who read him stories, slept on the floor, and were whipped in the morning if they did not satisfy him. Richardson himself cited the example of a Muscovite noblewoman who amused herself by setting her attack dogs on serfs. “The peasants in Russia,” he concluded, “. . . are in a state of abject slavery; and are reckoned the property of the nobles to whom they belong as much as their dogs or horses.”
Catherine the Great’s attempt to reform the serf economy through a professional bureaucracy without ties to the land marked the abandonment of the old policies of her two “Great” predecessors, Ivan and Peter. Many of her provincial governors were still drawn from the ranks of serf owners, and the new administrative class could barely function without their complicity, but a gap had opened between tsarist government and those who controlled the earth’s revenues. Autocratic power would be exercised not through the award and confiscation of estates, but by the promise of higher rank and state contracts, and the threat of prison or Siberian exile. Yet, if landholders were no longer the direct servants of the tsar, it was not immediately clear what they were.
The answer came from an innovation that first arrived almost imperceptibly in 1734. The dumpy, unpredictable empress, Anna, first of three remarkably forceful women rulers, gave an estate to her favorite, Count Petr Saltykov, for his “eternal and hereditary possession,” or vechnoe i potomstvennoe vladenie. That precedent was soon followed by other grants and sales of land under the same provisions. By the time Catherine II succeeded her murdered husband in 1762, land in New Russia was more often sold to the nobility under the vechnoe i potomstvennoe vladenieformula than granted to them. Land that could be inherited legally by its holder no longer belonged to the state. In 1785 Catherine went further. To cement her support among the aristocracy who had once doubted her fitness to govern, she abolished the formal requirement that they should undertake imperial service in return for holding their estates. A form of property rights had been recognized.
Some effects began to occur during her lifetime. One early consequence was the foundation of the State Loans Bank, or Gosudarstvennyi Zaemnyi Bank, barely a year later. So long as ownership of serfs was restricted to nobility, land itself had little value, but the bank did allow aristocrats to mortgage their serfs for up to forty rubles each, creating an instant source of capital. The first signs of a market in aristocratic estates began to develop among the nobility, and the Free Economic Society, once a fringe organization, became an influential source of advice on how to increase yields and profits. Among the topics debated by the society was whether some property rights should be extended to peasants. Naturally the proposition was defeated, but that it should even have been considered was evidence of a new way of thinking.
Nobility with rights of hereditary disposition increasingly invested in their New Russian estates, building plants to process sugar beet for the sweet-toothed west, and growing flax to make canvas for the huge merchant fleets of both Europe and the United States. And the smartest of the aristocracy, ancient families such as the Timoshevs and Manshurovs, sent representatives to buy up cheap land in Orenburg directly from the Bashkirs.
What was recognizably a form of rural capitalism began to take root in Catherine the Great’s Russia. According to the iron law of property, its new owners were bound to seek the political power necessary to protect their interests, but, as the empress had made clear, the absolutist ideals of the tsars had not altered. The conflict would lead, if James Harrington, the seventeenth-century author of Oceana, was correct, to either the new or the old owners of the land being blown up. The remaining history of the Romanovs did indeed resound to muffled and sometimes deafening explosions: in the mordant words of one nineteenth-century Russian, “Every country has its own constitution; ours is absolutism moderated by assassination.”