Much of the Northern War (1700-21) was fought in
Poland-Lithuania, and that Commonwealth during that
period lost more than a quarter of the population
from mortality and emigration.
Saxony’s August II had been confirmed
as King of Poland-Lithuania by 1710.
Although the reforms proposed in the Sejm (parliament)
in 1712 were not passed, August used his army of
25,000 Saxons to subdue the Commonwealth.
His Saxon adversaries agreed to a confederation at
Tarnogród on November 26, 1715.
The Russians offered to mediate the dispute,
and in 1716 their army of 30,000 troops came to Warsaw
and persuaded August II to remove his Saxon army.
The Russians dominated the “mute” Sejm that in February
1717 submitted to the treaty made at Warsaw in 1705
that allowed August II only 1,200 Saxon Guards in Poland.
The Sandomierz Confederation of 1704 and the Tarnogród
Confederation were cancelled,
and the right to form future confederations was renounced.
The King agreed to avoid offensive wars
and not to imprison people arbitrarily.
Hetmans and sejmiks (local Sejms)
could no longer change taxes.
Saxon officials in Poland-Lithuania were limited to six,
and no foreigners were to be appointed.
Protestants’ rights were restricted, and they were not allowed
to restore old churches nor to build new ones;
some churches of Swedish enemies were demolished.
The state was to have a budget for revenues and expenditures.
The army was to be quartered on crown estates.
The Sejm decided that Poland needed an army of only
18,000 men with 6,000 in Lithuania because Russia
promised to keep troops there to protect the Commonwealth.
Russia’s army had 28 times as many men,
Austria’s 17 times as many, and Prussia 11 times.
Regiments had to provide their own supplies
and tended to stay in their own area.
Magnates had private armies,
and bandits plundered some places.
The Sejm also doubled the poll tax on Jews.
During the reign of August II from 1697 to 1706 and under the
Russians from 1709 to 1733 the Sejm had eighteen sessions,
but ten had been adjourned abruptly by the liberum veto.
The years from 1717 to 1733 are considered a dark period
in Poland, and laws were passed that
discriminated against non-Catholics.
In July 1724 at the town of Torun, where Lutherans governed
about the same number of Catholics, a student provoked
a mob to demolish a chapel at a Jesuit college.
The Lutheran mayor, his deputy, and seven rioters
were executed on December 7,
though Lutherans continued to govern the town.
The first Masonic lodge opened at Warsaw in 1728,
and scholarly societies were formed
in Danzig, Elblag, and Warsaw.
Danzig started a literary society in 1720
and one for natural science in 1742.
The Polish Courier newspaper was published from 1729
to 1774. In 1732 the Piarst priest, Stanisław Konarski
(1700-73), with support from Andrzej Załuski began
publishing the Volumina Legum which compiled
all the Polish legislation since the 14th century.
August II confessed that he had a “sinful life”
and died of alcoholism on February 1, 1733.
Stanisław Leszczyński had reigned in Poland-Lithuania
1704-09, and his daughter Maria married
France’s Louis XV on September 5, 1725.
Leszczyński came to Warsaw, and in a nearby field
13,000 electors voted for him on September 12, 1733;
but on October 5 an army of 20,000 Russians gathered outside
Warsaw and compelled one thousand szlachta (nobles)
to elect Saxony’s August III.
On October 10 France declared war, beginning the War
of the Polish Succession, but the French only sent enough
soldiers to take and defend the port of Danzig.
Grain exports from Danzig (Gdansk) were increasing
from 4,800 tons in 1715 to 124,000 tons in 1770.
August III was crowned at Krakow in January 1734
and converted to Catholicism.
On February 22 a growing Russian and Saxon army besieged
Stanisław’s smaller force with about 2,000 French allies
and 130 Swedish volunteers at Danzig,
which surrendered on June 30.
The Confederation of Dzikow led by Adam Tarło fought
for Stanisław Leszczyński and national independence.
They tried to cross the Oder to invade Saxony,
but a Russian and Prussian army defeated them in May 1735,
though the Russians lost 8,000 men.
Stanisław escaped to Königsberg where
he published a manifesto for a confederation.
He asked the French to invade Saxony with 40,000 soldiers.
Count Nicholas Potocki tried to organize guerillas
in the Danzig area, but Russian forces dispersed them.
The French persuaded Stanisław to renounce his claim
to the throne on January 26, 1735,
and they rewarded him with the Duchy of Lorraine.
The Sejm met in 1736 and confirmed August III
as King of Poland-Lithuania.
August III was obese and lazy and spent most of his time
in Saxony drinking and dueling.
During his reign of thirty years he spent a total of 24 months
in Poland as he let the local princes and magnates govern.
The Potocki, Radziwiłł, and other families
were influenced by France, Prussia, and Russia.
Prince August Aleksander Czartoryski had gained power
by marrying in 1731 Zofia Sieniawska,
daughter of Krakow’s Hetman and Castellan.
Protestants were excluded from the Sejm
and from most state offices in 1733 and 1736,
and authorities demolished some Protestant churches.
August III was married to the Austrian Archduchess
Maria Josepha, and in December 1740 he allied with
Empress Maria Theresa; but after the Austrian defeat
at Mollwitz in April 1741 he did not try to stop
Prussians from conquering Austrian Silesia.
He signed a treaty with Austria in 1742,
but he changed sides in 1743
when he was promised a corridor through Silesia.
He had secret agreements with Austria and Russia to help
them in the Second Silesian War, and at the Poland-Lithuanian
Sejm in 1744 he asked for financial and military reforms;
but the Czartoryski party closed
the session with the liberum veto.
In January 1745 Saxony in a treaty at Warsaw allied
with Britain, Austria, and the Dutch Republic.
In the 1740s the Radziwiłłs built up manufacturing in Lithuania.
In 1743 Adam Tarło attacked deputies at a crown tribunal
in Piotrków, but the next year
Kazimierz Poniatowski killed him in a duel.
The tribunal broke up in 1749, and Potockis disrupted
its parliament in 1750 demanding judicial reform.
The historian and lawyer Gottfried Lengnich (1689-1774)
published Public Law of the Polish Realm
at Danzig in 1742-46.
His 9-volume History of Royal Prussia
covered from 1526 to 1733.
In 1747 Józef Andrzej Załuski and Stanisław Konarski
founded the first public library in Europe at Warsaw
that grew from 180,000 volumes to 500,000.
Załuski died in 1774 and left it to the state,
but it would be plundered by the Russian army in 1795.
The poet Elżbieta Drużbacka (1695-1765) lived in a cloister
and wrote about women’s rights, criticizing arranged marriages.
The aristocrats enlarged their estates, and by the 1750s
some 120,000 szlachta owned no land.
Count Heinrich Brühl (1700-63) held the power in Warsaw.
The veto blocked August III’s efforts again in 1746 and 1748.
That year a Russian army marched across Lithuania and Poland
to Germany and back to Russia.
In 1749 Stanisław Leszczyński published in Polish and French
A Free Voice Ensuring Freedom that influenced reforms.
In 1750 the Czartoryski party won the election again.
The priest Benedykt Chmielowski published in 1745-46
and 1754-64 the encyclopedia, The New Athens of the
Academy of All Science, divided into subjects and classes,
for the wise ones to record, for the idiots to learn,
for the politicians to practice, for the melancholics to
entertain with scientific information
that included astrological forecasts.
Konarski spent thirty years writing On the effective conduct
of Debates and published it in four volumes 1761-63.
The first French-German-Polish dictionary
was published in 1763-64.
August III was detained by Prussia’s Friedrich II at Pirna
in August 1756 to keep him from going to the Sejm at Warsaw.
August III declined to participate in the Seven Years’ War.
Russian forces occupied the Commonwealth
from the spring of 1757 to the end of the war.
In the spring of 1759 Russians invaded Great Poland.
August left his wife to govern Saxony and fled to Warsaw.
In 1760 Andrzej Zamoyski (1716-92) freed the serfs
on his estates and urged others to do the same.
In 1762-63 Friedrich II compelled contributions from
northern Poland, and he melted down Polish coins
and substituted worthless imitations.
On February 15 Prussia, Austria, and Saxony
agreed on a peace treaty at Hubertusburg.
Aristocrats were entertained by frequent
balls, opera, and theater.
August III died at Dresden on October 5, 1763.
During his reign there were 13 sessions of the Sejm,
and all but one were ended by the veto.
By the middle of the 18th century 39% of the Jews
lived in villages as innkeepers.
Polish Jews suffered poverty, but Izrael ben Eliezer (1700-60)
in Podolia was called “Baal Shem Tov” and started
the mystical Hasidism movement that
was opposed by the orthodox Rabbinate.
Hasids believed that God is everywhere
and that prayer helps us understand the universe.
Jakub Frank (1726-91) claimed to be the reincarnation of the
prophet Jacob and the messianic Sabbatai Zevi (1626-76),
and he called Poland the “promised land.”
He suggested that loose morals could destroy evil,
and the Rabbinate used the law to curtail the orgies.
After Frank’s arrest in 1757 the Bishop of Lwów organized
a public debate on the Talmud to be judged by Jesuits.
The Frankists held their own against the Rabbinate,
and Frank and his followers became Catholics.
Frank was baptized on September 17 and 18, 1759
with August III as his godfather.
On February 6, 1760 Frank was arrested in Warsaw
and was convicted of heresy and imprisoned
in the Częstochowa monastery for thirteen years.
In 1766 Chancellor Andrzej Zamoyski released his peasants
from labor-rents and was followed by other landowners.
Scibor Marchocki made his estate a peasant cooperative,
and the priest Paweł Brzostowski (1739-1827) started
the Peasant Commonwealth of Pawlow in 1769,
and it became self-governing with a school, hospital, and militia.
Stanisław August Poniatowski (1732-98) was the son
of the noble commander Stanisław Antoni Poniatowski
and Princess Konstancja Czartoryska.
His education included travel to Berlin, Vienna, Dresden,
Holland, and especially England and Paris, and he was
fluent in Polish, Latin, German, Italian, French, and English.
In 1755 he went to St. Petersburg and until 1758 was the
lover of Ekaterina (Catherine) II, who would become
Empress of Russia in July 1762.
King August III died in October 1763.
The Sejm parliament met in May and June, and the
Chancellor Andrzej Zamoyski proposed they exercise
more power and limit the elite aristocrats
by forming a supreme executive council.
They could abolish private armies, codify law, stop appeals
to the Pope, and reform education, paying for it by leasing
crown lands and by increasing taxes and protective tariffs.
On September 7, 1764 the Sejm, surrounded by Russian
soldiers and Czartoryski’s retainers, elected Poniatowski,
and on November 13 he swore to the pacta conventa
to become King Stanisław II August.
The Sejm abolished the veto by making majority vote the rule.
He founded the College of Chivalry to train military officers
and administrators in 1765.
That year he founded the National Theater and the weekly
Monitor that was edited by the playwright
Franciszek Bohomolec and would publish until 1785.
The Russian ambassador Nikolai Repnin challenged the power
of the Czartoryskis, and he got the immoral Gabriel Podoski
appointed the new archbishop and primate of Gniezno.
In 1766 Repnin blocked the reforms.
On November 11 the Russians and the Prussians declared
that Orthodox Christians and Lutherans have the same rights
as Catholics, and they demanded changes in the constitution
and supported the army and tax bills.
In response King Stanisław August published his
Considerations of a Good Citizen
appealing for a defense of the nation’s rights.
About one million people in Poland-Lithuania were dissenting
Christians—half Protestants (Lutherans) and half Orthodox,
but the Sejm adjourned on November 19 without addressing
the petitions by Russian, Prussian, and British diplomats.
In March 1767 the Lutherans formed a confederation
at Torun, and the Orthodox did so at Slutsk;
Russian troops supported both.
Seeing no chance for reform, Chancellor Zamoyski resigned.
Also in March new Russian forces invaded Poland-Lithuania
to form confederations they could control.
The Russians backed the Protestant nobles and the Orthodox,
and in June the ambassador Repnin encouraged the Catholic
leaders to form the Radom Confederation
led by Prince Karol Radziwiłł.
Hetman Branicki and Hetman Rzewuski, Bishop
Kajetan Sołtyk of Kraków,
and other magnates joined this confederation.
Russian troops were occupying the capital
when the Sejm met in October.
The Russian ambassador was watching them.
The bishops of Krakow and Kiev and the Hetman,
who had objected to freeing dissenters, were arrested
at home and taken by Russian troops to Russia.
Then the Sejm confirmed five conservative principles that
included the veto, the nobles’ exclusive right to hold office,
and the landowners’ control over their peasants;
but they repealed the restrictions
against the dissenting Christians.
Ekaterina II swore she would protect these laws
in Poland and left Stanisław II August on the throne.
On February 29, 1768 disillusioned nobles led by
Jan Michal Pac, Kazimierz Pułaski, and the Potocki, Sapieha,
and Krasinski clans formed the Bar Confederation
and began a war against the Russians.
In the Ukraine peasants led by the Zaporozhian Cossack
Maksym Zalizniak revolted against their feudal duties,
and 2,000 men joined them
and besieged Uman which surrendered.
The Haidamak rebels killed about 20,000 nobles,
Jews, Catholics, and Uniate clergy.
They were joined by Cossacks from Kiev, Bratslav,
Podolia, and Volynia palatinates.
The rebels slaughtered nearly 200,000 people
before they were suppressed by similar brutality.
The Polish parliament and sejmiks restricted tavern ownership
by Jews, and magnates ended their leases.
Many taverns and inns were taken over by Christians.
After 1785 Jews began founding clothing and munition factories.
Most Jews declined to be farmers, and some became beggars.
Poland-Lithuania had more Jews than the rest of the world.
King Stanisław II August refused to oppose the confederations,
and France sent them money and urged Turkey to go to war
against Russia which they did in October 1768.
In 1769 Austrians invaded Poland and annexed Spisz,
and in 1770 they took over Nowy Targ and Nowy Sacz.
Magnates Karol Radziwiłł and others, who opposed the King,
supported the Confederation of Bar which while exiled
in Slovakia on October 22, 1770 proclaimed
that Stanisław II August was dethroned.
His men with 4,000 Russian troops led by General Suvorov
defeated 1,300 Confederates at Lanckorona
on May 23, 1771, intervening in a civil war.
A guerilla campaign rose up in southeast Poland,
and on November 3 Confederates abducted the
King Stanisław II from his carriage in Warsaw;
but he persuaded them to let him go,
and he returned to his palace the next day.
A few Confederates held out in the Jasna Gora monastery
at Częstochowa but surrendered on August 18, 1772.
As rebelling magnates fled, about 5,000 szlachta
were captured and sent to Siberia.
Since 1716 German immigrants and Russian peasants
had greatly increased the population of Poland-Lithuania
to 11,420,000 in 1772.
Jesuits were educating 20,000 nobles a year
in 51 colleges and other schools.
Meanwhile Prussia’s Friedrich II had been
negotiating with Ekaterina II since 1771,
and they made an agreement in February 1772.
Then they persuaded Austria’s Empress Maria Theres
on August 5 to join them in partitioning Poland-Lithuania.
Prussians took 580,000 inhabitants and 36,000 square
kilometers in the west from the north portion of
Great Poland (Royal Prussia) except for Danzig and Torun.
Austria got 2,650,000 people and 83,000 kilometers
in the south from Little Poland and Galicia
from western Red Ruthenia.
Russia gained 1,300,000 persons and 92,000 kilometers
in northeast Belarus that included Livonian and White
Ruthenian territory north of the Western Dvina River.
Before the partition the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth
with 282,000 square miles had more territory than France
or Spain, but in this partition they lost 28% of their territory
and 40% of the people.
The Russians and Prussians threatened to take more territory,
and so the Sejm ratified the first treaty of partition
on September 30, 1773 while also agreeing on a trade
treaty with Prussia that allowed them to collect duties
on Polish grain shipped down the Vistula River.
Some estate owners emancipated peasants,
and this drew nearly 200,000 German immigrants
and more than 300,000 Russians.
From 1772 to 1778 a Permanent Council with five
departments that included Treasury, Justice, Foreign Affairs,
War, and the Police governed Poland-Lithuania under the
direction of the Russian ambassador Otto Magnus Stackelberg
by using corrupt Polish nobles to control King Stanisław II
who called Stackelberg a “Roman proconsul.”
The army was increased to 30,000 men while Russian, Austrian,
and Prussian troops occupied two-thirds of the Commonwealth.
The Sejm repealed the law prohibiting the szlachta
from engaging in trade in 1773.
That year Stanisław II appointed a National Education
Commission of enlightened aristocrats with the French
physiocrat Dupont de Nemours as the first secretary.
Jesuits ran more than two-thirds of the schools in
Poland-Lithuania; but when Pope Clement XIV abolished
the Jesuit order in 1773, their funds supported the
educational work that included reforming the universities
of Jagiellon and Wilno (Vilnius), though nearly half
the Jesuit schools were closed.
On November 4, 1775 the Sejm voted 149-114
to abolish the War Department.
In 1776 Stackelberg let King Stanisław II summon a Sejm
as a confederation to suspend the veto by excluding opponents.
The Permanent Council was given control of the army
and let the King appoint military leaders.
He also made Andrzej Zamoyski head a commission
to develop a new legal code which took two years.
The code affirmed the power of the King and put
officials under the Sejm, but landless szlachta
lost their legal immunity and prerogatives.
Some szlachta and clergy objected, and reformers
in the Sejm held back the new code until 1780.
Then clerics and Prussians blocked its passage.
In 1780 the universities of Jagiellon and Wilno
began directing the lower schools.
The population of Warsaw increased from
30,000 people in 1760 to 150,000 in 1792.
The Wilno Gazette was published 1761-92, and the
Warsaw Gazette came out weekly from 1774 to 1791.
The poet Franciszek Zabłocki wrote and produced sixty
comedies based on Italian and French plays
in the 1770s and 1780s.
Others imitated plays by Molière, Voltaire,
Marivaux, and Sheridan.
Ignacy Krasicki (1735-1801) became Prince-Bishop
of Warmia in 1767 and was influenced by the Enlightenment.
He worked for the National Education Commission
for twenty years, and he published the mock epics,
The War of the Mice in 1775 and The War of the Monks
in 1778, and Fables in 1779.
He also produced the first Polish novel, The Adventures
of Mikolaj Doswiadczynski, in 1776 and then
the conversational 3-volume novel, Sir Chamberlain,
in 1778, 1784, and 1803.
Polish operas began in 1778 and spread
to several cities in the 1780s.
In 1774 King Stanisław II commissioned Adam Naruszewicz,
Bishop of Smolensk, to write
The History of the Polish Nation,
and its six volumes were printed in 1780-86.
The King spent much patronizing the arts and architecture.
The French enlightenment had an increasing influence
as the number of schools teaching French
went from 40 in 1740 to 199 in 1777.
The Black Sea Company was organized in 1782 with
Antoni Potocki as president,
and the Polish government subsidized trade there.
The National Education Commission published
Hieronim Stroynowski’s The Science of Natural Law,
Political Law, Political Economy,
and the Law of Nations in 1785.
By 1786 King Stanisław II’s income had increased to
6,143,000 gulden, but the national debt had risen to ten million.
Stanisław Staszic advocated republican government and an
army of 100,000 men in his
Observations on the Life of Jan Zamoyski in 1787.
Dionizy Kniaznin’s play, The Spartan Mother,
was produced before the 1788 elections.
When the Sejm met in 1788, they increased the army.
From 1709 to 1722 Ukrainians supported ten Russian
regiments in their territory, and starting in 1719 they could
only export grain to the west by shipping it to
the Russian ports of Riga and Archangel.
In 1722 the Little Russian Collegium with six Russian officers
was allowed to share power with the Hetman in Ukraine.
Col. Pavlo Polubotok was appointed acting Hetman
and served for two years in conflict with the Collegium.
He reformed the courts and appointed
inspectors to implement them.
After he sent an agent to organize a Ukrainian petition
campaign for self-government, Tsar Petr imprisoned him
and those who had signed the petition in 1724;
but Petr’s death in 1725 prevented their being sent to Siberia.
In 1724 Collegium chairman Veliaminov reported that
they had increased taxes by 600%, and he insisted that
Russians on the Left Bank also pay that tax.
In 1727 Prince Menshikov persuaded the imperial council
to dissolve the Little Russian Collegium, and in October
the 70-year-old Col. Danylo Apostol was elected
Hetman of the left-bank Ukraine.
However, a Russian was to be in charge of all foreign
relations, and a Russian field marshal controlled the military.
Danylo Apostol worked on social, economic,
and judicial reforms.
A survey helped restore lost land by 1731.
He reduced the Russians and foreigners in his
government and brought Kiev into his jurisdiction.
Apostol died in January 1734 and was replaced by three
Russians and three Ukrainians in the Governing Council
of the Hetman’s Office under the Russian president
Prince Shakhovskoi who was secretly instructed
to criticize previous hetmans for the taxes and problems.
Later in 1734 he was replaced by Prince Bariatinsky who
arrested Kiev’s city council and confiscated their charters.
The imperial senate refused to confirm a Ukrainian
as mayor of Kiev twice.
In Russia’s war against Turkey 1735-39 about
35,000 Ukrainians died out of a population of 1,200,000.
A commission worked for sixteen years to codify
Ukrainian law, and the new laws went into effect in 1744.
Kyrylo Rozumovsky was only 22
when he was elected Hetman in 1750.
He organized the judiciary into twenty districts by 1763.
Judges were elected, usually from among the landowners.
In 1763 a council met at Hlukhiv, and they sent delegates
to petition Empress Ekaterina (Catherine) II
asking for more autonomy.
She summoned Rozumovsky,
and he resigned in November 1764.
Although she was German, Ekaterina
worked to “Russify” her empire.
The Hetmanate was dissolved, and she appointed
Petr Rumiantsev governor-general of the Left Bank.
At her Legislative Commission conference in Moscow
the Ukrainian delegates led by Hryhorii Poletyka
asked for their traditional Ukrainian rights.
During the Russian war against the Ottoman Empire 1768-75
Rumiantsev ordered Russian troops to attack the Cossacks’
Zaporizhian Sich, and they destroyed it in 1775.
In 1781 the ten regimental districts of the Left Bank were
replaced by the three provinces of Kiev, Chernihiv,
and Novhorod-Siversk.
Then in 1783 the traditional Cossacks were supplanted
by dragoon regiments which included peasants
and non-Ukrainians.
Also that year Ukrainian peasants lost their right
to leave their landlords, making them serfs.
These changes benefited Ukrainian aristocrats.
In 1785 they gained complete control over the peasants,
and they were exempted from government and military service,
making them equal to Russian nobles.
Hryhorii Skovoroda (1722-94) was the son of a Cossack
and was educated at the Kiev Mohyla Academy
and by traveling in Europe.
He learned Greek, Latin, Hebrew, Polish, German,
and Old Church Slavonic.
From 1751 to 1769 he taught ethics and poetry
at colleges in Pereiaslav and Kharkiv.
His unorthodox ideas and methods of teaching led him to
wander as a philosopher in the Left Bank and Sloboda Ukraine,
and he was called the “Ukrainian Socrates.”
He emphasized self-knowledge and personal independence
with little concern for money or honors.
He criticized the starshyna (military officers)
and clerics for exploiting peasants.
Russia had made a treaty with Prussia in June 1714, and
the Russians came to terms with Hanover in October 1715.
That year a Naval Academy opened in St. Petersburg.
In the spring of 1716 Tsar Petr went to Mecklenburg and
planned to invade Sweden, but delays by the Danish and
British allies caused him to cancel it in September.
Petr visited the Netherlands and bought the collection of
the
Dutch anatomy professor Frederik Ruysch for 30,000 guilders.
He went to the Austrian Netherlands.
At Paris he tried to make an alliance with France
but could only get agreement on neutrality.
Yet that summer Russia made a treaty of friendship
with France and Prussia and withdrew their
troops from Mecklenburg.
A Military Manual had been published in 1716.
In 1718 the 35 government offices were replaced by the
nine colleges of Foreign Affairs, Revenue Collection, Justice,
Expenditure, Financial Control, Commerce, Mining and
Manufacturing, War with Tsar Petr’s friend A. D. Menshikov
as president, and Admiralty under F. M. Apraksin.
The Foreign Affairs College had interpreters who used
Russian, Latin, Polish, High Dutch, Low Dutch, English,
Danish, French, Italian, Spanish, Greek, Turkish,
Chinese, Tatar, Kamuck, and Mongolian.
Tsar Petr summoned his son Alexei to Moscow and removed
him from the succession in February 1718, replacing him
with two-year-old Petr Petrovich.
Confessions were extorted by torture from Alexei who
was condemned to death and after severe whipping
died on June 26, 1718 (OS)
two days before he was to be executed.
Petr Petrovich died in April 1719,
leaving Tsar Petr without a male heir.
In the spring of 1718 Russians began negotiating
with Sweden on the Åland islands.
In May 1719 about 50,000 Russian troops
assembled in St. Petersburg.
Off the Åland islands in July 1720 the Russian navy
defeated a smaller Swedish fleet.
For the next five weeks Apraksin’s warships
ravaged the east coast of Sweden.
Russians and Swedes resumed peace negotiations at Nystad
in Finland in the winter, and they agreed to end the
Great Northern War on August 30, 1721 (OS).
In the treaty Sweden recognized the transfer of Estonia,
Livonia, Ingria, and southeast Finland taken by the Russians
in the war, but most of Finland was returned to Sweden.
Russia agreed to pay Sweden about 1.5 million roubles
(two million silver thaler), and Sweden would be allowed
to buy a fixed amount of grain annually from its
former Baltic provinces duty free.
Russians promised to respect the rights
and privileges of those provinces.
In gratitude Petr pardoned all those in prison
except murderers, and he cancelled all debts
to the government since the war began in 1700.
This treaty was successful enough that the two
nations made a defensive treaty in 1724.
In October 1721 Petr was proclaimed
Emperor of Russia and was called “Petr the Great.”
In February 1716 a decree doubled the tax paid
by Old Ritualists (Believers) who had left
the Russian Orthodox Church in 1666.
Russia had 557 monasteries and convents
with 14,000 monks and 10,000 nuns.
The 151 monasteries around Moscow
owned 242,198 male serfs.
In 1721 Petr decreed the Ecclesiastical Regulation to root
out superstition and ignorance by increasing learning.
In 1722 he ordered a search of ancient monasteries for old
manuscripts which were sent to Moscow, and after his death
they were given to the Academy of Science which was
founded in January 1724 and granted 25,000 roubles a year.
In 1717 Petr had translated The Honourable Mirror of Youth
from German that described the proper
behavior for nobles and peasants.
A monopoly on silk manufacturing was given to Baron Shafirov,
Count Petr Tolstoi, and Count Apraksin.
They invested 81,300 roubles,
and the government contributed 36,700 roubles.
In 1719 a census in Russia counted 7,570,376 male taxpayers
plus 218,551 men in the army and navy who paid no tax.
That year a decree threatened to confiscate the estates
of cruel landlords, but this was difficult to enforce.
In 1720 Russia’s Senate was given rules that included
no shouting during meetings.
Tsar Petr decreed that immigrant officers
were to return to their countries.
To improve local government a college
of Municipal Affairs was established in 1721.
That year the Church Statute created a Church college
called
the Synod under a chief procurator who was a lay person.
Peasants were more than 95% of the people
who paid the poll tax, and half of them
belonged to noble landlords.
Most of the peasants were in the outer provinces of Siberia,
Kazan, Astrakhan, Kiev, Azov, Archangel,
and Nizhny Novgorod.
To implement his ideas Tsar Petr appointed Pavel Iaguzhinsky
to be the first Procurator-General of the Senate in 1722.
In February of that year the Table of Ranks was devised.
Petr placed the military on top with 126 ranks followed
by the
civil service with 94 and the court with 42.
Iaguzhinsky admitted that all officials steal
but on different scales.
Petr tried to control corruption by occasionally
punishing the most egregious thieves.
Already under investigation by 1715 were Prince Menshikov,
Admiral Apraksin, Prince Matthew Gagarin, General Bruce,
two senators, and others.
Gagarin was hanged at St. Petersburg in September 1718.
That year merchants leaving Russia were searched
and had any gold, silver, or copper coins confiscated.
In 1723 the death penalty was enacted for exporting silver.
In 1724 Menshikov was accused of concealing 30,000 serfs
who had escaped from military service or landlords.
Work on a canal from the Neva to the Volkhov
was begun in 1718 and was finished in 1732.
In January 1721 factory and mine owners
were allowed to have factory serfs.
In 1722 Petr decreed that the Tsar could name
his successor and that all peasants could not leave
a landowner’s estate without his permission.
Then in 1724 he decreed that to leave their villages
they had to have a passport.
Also tariffs were imposed on imported goods
between 25% and 75%.
In 1725 the Russian government spent 10.14 million roubles
with 6.54 million of it on the army and navy,
but the revenues mostly from direct taxes were only 8.5 million.
Prince Alexander Bekovich Cherkassky had been born
a Muslim prince, and in 1716 he led an expedition from
Astrakhan with 4,000 soldiers to the Khan of Khiva;
but in the spring of 1717 he agreed to divide his forces,
and they were all slaughtered or sold into slavery.
In 1722 Tsar Petr visited Kazan
and assembled an army of 61,000 men.
He sailed down the west coast of the
Caspian Sea and visited Tarku.
They encountered difficult weather and made it to Astrakhan
at the mouth of the Volga in October.
Petr suffered from illness but sent more expeditions to the
region of the Caspian Sea, and for the ten years thousands
of Russian soldiers died there of disease
until Tsarina Anna recalled them to Persia.
In 1715 Artemy Volynsky was sent to Persia and made
a commercial treaty with the Shah to trade for raw silk.
Petr rewarded him by making him the Governor of Astrakhan.
After Afghans overthrew the Shah and replaced him
with their leader at Isfahan in 1722, in the spring Tsar Petr
sent a force of 22,000 men down the Volga that
defeated Dagastanis and occupied Derwent.
At Astrakhan horses from hay and men by eating rye were
infected by ergotism, causing insanity and many deaths.
The Russians made an agreement with the son of the
previous Shah in September 1723.
Turkey had declared war on Persia in the spring,
but French diplomacy helped mediate a peace
between the two empires in 1724.
Petr had more than twenty ambassadors and consuls
in almost every European nation.
By the end of his reign the Russian army had
about 130,000 men plus 70,000 garrison troops,
a home guard of 6,000, and more than 100,000
in Cossack regiments in the provinces.
Petr sent emissaries to Emperor Kangxi of China,
but he replied that they do not trade.
Also in 1724 Ivan Possochkov published his
Book on Poverty and Wealth advocating mercantilism
and the exploitation of natural resources.
In 1725 about 3% of Russians were merchants.
Just before his death Emperor Petr sent Danish explorer
Vitus Bering to discover whether the continent of Asia
was connected to North America.
By August 1728 Bering was convinced that Asia and America
were separated by the strait that was given his name.
Petr founded the Russian Academy of Sciences
before dying on January 28, 1725.
On May 7, 1724 Emperor Petr had crowned his wife
Ekaterina, and the celebration lasted several days.
She was from a peasant family in Lithuania and was baptized
as a Catholic named Marta Helena Skowrońska in April 1684.
When she married a Swedish dragoon in 1702,
she became a Lutheran.
She may have been the mistress of Field Marshal Sheremetev
before living with Prince Menshikov.
There she met Tsar Petr and became his mistress,
bearing his sons Petr and Pavel who both died in infancy
by 1705, the year she took the name Ekaterina Alexeyevna
and converted to the Orthodox Church.
She married Petr secretly in 1707 and bore him ten more
children; but only Anna and Elizaveta lived past 1725.
Anna married Karl Friedrich of Holstein-Gottorp
in February 1715.
After Petr’s death on January 28, 1725
Ekaterina became Empress of Russia.
While the Senate was debating, Prince Menshikov
paid back salary to the Guards to win them over to her.
In 1726 she formed the Supreme Privy Council led
by Menshikov with Apraksin, Chancellor Golovkin,
Andrei Ostermann, Count Petr Tolstoi, and Prince
Dmitry Mikhailovich Golitsyn helping him govern.
The colleges of Foreign Affairs, the Admiralty
and War became independent of the Senate.
The colleges of State Revenues and Expenditures were
combined into one college and the new college for
Accounting and Tax Collection was put under the Council.
Russia formed an alliance with Austria against
the Ottoman Empire in August 1726.
Ostermann was put in charge of the new
Commission on Commerce in 1727.
That year Sava Vladislavich led a mission to Beijing,
and in August the Kyakhta treaty set the border
between Russia and China.
Empress Ekaterina died in May 1727 and was
succeeded by 11-year-old Petr II Alekseyevich,
grandson of Petr the Great’s first wife Eudoxia.
Menshikov became Generalissimo and Regent,
and he wanted his daughter Maria to marry Petr II.
By then Menshikov had acquired estates in forty districts
with more than 300,000 serfs in about 3,000 villages
and seven towns that he owned.
The Golitsyns and Dolgorukys managed to gain power,
and in September they persuaded Petr II to arrest
Menshikov, deprive him of his titles and positions,
and banish him and his family to Beryozovo in Siberia.
Russia used bribes to pacify
Swedish ambitions to regain territory.
In 1727-28 collection of the poll tax was
transferred from the army to the landlords.
Ekaterina’s daughter Anna died in January 1728.
Petr II abolished the hated Preobrazhensky Office
with torture chambers.
He was planning to wed Ekaterina Dolgorukova,
but he died of smallpox on the wedding day,
January 19, 1730 (OS).
Anna Ivanovna was born on January 28, 1693 (OS),
the daughter of Tsar Ivan V (half-brother of Petr the Great).
She had married Friedrich Wilhelm, Duke of Courland,
but he died in 1711.
The eight Supreme Privy Councilors led by Prince
Dmitri Golitzyn and Vasily Lukich Dolgoruky persuaded her
to agree secretly not to remarry nor designate an heir
and to let the Councilors make all the important decisions
such as use of the military, taxation, promotion, appointments,
rewards, and the royal succession.
These conditions became known in February 1730,
and the Councilors were unable to arrest their opponents
Archbishop (of Novgorod) Feofan Prokopovich, historian
Vasily Tatishchev, and the Moldavian poet Antiokh Kantemir
(1708-44) who preferred autocracy to oligarchy.
They persuaded Anna to tear up the agreement.
Count Reinhold Löwenwolde was one of the delegates
who warned Anna not to accept the conditions.
She appointed his brother, Count Karl Gustav, colonel of the
Semnovsky Guards Regiments, and he named the Scottish
visitor, James Keith, Lt. Col. of the Guards regiment.
Anna and the new men sent the Dolgorukys and the
Golitsyns into exile, and she was crowned
Empress of Russia on April 17, 1730.
A year later the Chancellery for Secret Investigatory Affair
that Ekaterina had closed was revived under Major-General
Andrew Ushakov, who had been in Petr’s Secret Chancellery.
Anna moved to St. Petersburg where she dissolved the
Supreme Privy Council and started a school for cadets
who could become officers without serving in the ranks.
The Cabinet of Her Imperial Majesty advising her included
Prince Aleksai Cherkassky, Chancellor Gavriil Golovkin,
Andrei Ostermann, Senate Procurator-General
Pavel Iaguzhinsky, and Petr Bestuzhev-Riumin.
She let them govern while she enjoyed lavish entertainment
that tripled the court expenditures of Petr the Great.
They spent twice as much on the imperial stables
as the national government did on education.
By 1733 there was a budget deficit that became chronic.
In 1734 total spending was 7,792,785 roubles of which
6,505,154 was for military expenses.
Anna’s court expenses, including 48,000 for the pensions
of her German relatives, were 408,000 roubles.
Anna did not trust the Russian nobles and favored
Germans in her court where German was spoken.
Andrey Ostermann led the Cabinet, and Burkhard
Christoph Münnich commanded the army.
They formed a fourth regiment of Guards
called Izmailovsky staffed by Germans.
The most despised German was her corrupt
High Chamberlain Ernst Johann von Bühren
whom she made Duke of Courland in 1737.
He liked French culture so much that
he changed his name to Biron.
His police terror was castigated as “Bironovshchina.”
Anna and he liked to hunt, and they became lovers.
She showed that she had an open mind by taking male
and female lovers, and she liked to read novels in bed.
Her favoring Germans and other foreigners was not popular.
Criticism of the regime was not tolerated,
and tens of thousands, mostly peasants,
were deported to Siberia.
Kantemir wrote satires and served as ambassador to
London 1731-36 and then at Paris until his death in 1744.
In 1733 Russia and Austria wanted Frederik August to succeed
his father August II in Poland, but Stanisław Leszczyński
was crowned in September.
The Russian army commanded by the Irish general
Peter Lacy and Keith invaded Poland.
While Lacy’s forces besieged Danzig (Gdansk),
other Russian forces persuaded the Polish
and Lithuanian nobles to elect August III.
In 1734 Russia made a commercial treaty that
gave the British access to the Persian silk trade.
Danzig capitulated in June 1734 as
Leszczyński fled to France and later abdicated.
When the French invaded Austria in 1735, Russia sent
an army of 20,000 men to assist the Habsburgs
and fight the French on the Rhine.
After a treaty confirmed August III in the summer 1736,
Russian and Saxon troops withdrew from Poland.
That year the obligatory service of nobles
was limited to 25 years.
Some landlords began enrolling their sons
as early as the age of eight.
A decree required serfs to get their masters’ permission
before leaving for temporary employment.
From 1733 to 1743 Vitus Bering led another expedition
that explored the coasts of the Pacific Ocean, and soon
adventurers were killing otters and seals to sell their skins
until supplies were exhausted by the 1750s.
Russians also struggled with Kazakh tribes
in Central Asia to get furs.
They built the fortress of Orenburg in 1735.
Eastern Siberia was explored,
and Okhotsk became a Pacific port in 1737.
They could not conquer the Bashkirs until 1738.
Orenburg became a Russian province in 1744.
A census that year estimated that the population
of the Russian Empire had increased to 18,250,000.
Meanwhile conflicts with Tatars provoked Russia
into declaring war on the Turks in the spring of 1736.
Lacy led a Russian army toward the Crimea.
They sacked the Tatar capital Bakhchisarai
in June and took Azov.
After heavy losses from fighting and typhus
both sides withdrew by the end of the year.
In 1737 the Russians captured the strategic Turkish fortress
at Ochakov where the Dnieper runs into the Black Sea.
In 1739 Münnich led an army across the Dnieper
and took Khotin and Jassy, and Moldavian nobles
decided to join the Russian Empire.
After their allied Austrians pulled out of the war,
Russia made a treaty at Niš on October 3 and retained
the port of Azov but still had no access to the Black Sea.
Russians had lost 100,000 men
and much money while gaining little.
In a dozen years since the death of Petr in 1725
the peasant population of Russia declined
by about two million.
Many were sent to Siberia, and others fled.
A series of laws had restricted their rights.
In 1730 they lost the right to own land.
A law in 1732 prevented them
from moving without giving notice.
In 1736 nobles were given the right
to punish fugitive serfs in any way.
In 1747 a serf could be sold to the army.
In 1739 Artemy Volynsky, became involved in a
“Project for the Correction of State Affairs,”
and the next summer he was tortured and executed for trying
to make Petr the Great’s daughter Elizaveta the empress.
Anna died childless on October 17, 1740 (OS) and had
named as her successor Tsar Ivan VI, the two-month-old
son of Duke Anton-Ulrich of Brunswick.
Ernst Biron was named Regent,
but after 25 days Münnich had him arrested.
He was condemned to death in April 1741
but was banished to Siberia.
Ostermann then had Münnich condemned and sent to Siberia.
Anna’s niece, Princess Anna Leopoldovia, was Ivan’s mother,
and in November 1740 she became Regent.
In the next year 185 legislative acts were recorded.
She appointed her husband, Prince Anton-Ulrich,
the commander of Russia’s army, and she mollified
General Münnich by making him her prime minister
and Baron Ostermann by appointing him Grand Admiral
to handle foreign affairs.
She hired some Russians but with less rewards.
Sweden had declared war on Russia, and on August 23, 1741
a Russian army of 10,500 men defeated 4,000 Swedes
at Villmanstrand in Finland, capturing a thousand men.
Supported by bribed Imperial Guards and France’s and
Sweden’s ambassadors, Petr I’s 32-year-old daughter
Elizaveta claimed the throne and began
her reign on November 26, 1741.
She was crowned Empress Elizaveta on April 25, 1742.
She declined to pay the French and dismissed their ambassador,
though French would become the language of her court.
She refused to return Baltic conquests to Sweden
and continued the war.
She sent Ostermann and other Germans to Siberia.
Elizaveta liked Russians including peasants and gypsies,
and she took lovers and secretly married a Ukrainian Cossack.
Her top ministers were Chancellor Alexey Bestuzhev-Ryumin
(1744-58) and Petr Shuvalov who headed the Konferents.
His cousin Ivan Shuvalov corresponded
with Voltaire and became her favorite.
Petr’s brother Alexander Shuvalov was
put in charge of the Secret Chancery.
Anna’s German ministers were given
show trials and were banished.
Petr Shuvalov used the economy and industry monopolies
to benefit himself and his supporters.
Elizaveta swore she would not sign a death warrant,
and in 1744 she abolished capital punishment.
Yet efforts were made to revise the criminal code,
and in the 1750s several offenses became capital crimes.
In 1742 Elizaveta had designated as her heir her 14-year-old
nephew Duke Petr of Holstein-Gottorp,
but he became an alcoholic and defied the Church.
In 1742 she expelled all Jews from the Russian Empire,
and she wanted Armenian churches
and Muslim mosques demolished.
From 1740 to 1744 in Kazan province 418
of the 536 mosques were destroyed.
She delighted in others being converted to the Orthodox faith,
and she ordered Old Ritualists persecuted.
Russia agreed to a defensive alliance with Prussia in 1743
but then also allied with the British who were
with France against the Prussians.
Russia and Sweden ended their war with the
treaty signed at Åbo in August 1743.
Sweden ceded the province of Kymmenegard,
and Russia began governing Viborg in 1744.
That year a fire destroyed 4,000 of Elizaveta’s dresses,
but by the time she died she had 15,000 gowns.
She loved theater, opera, banquets, and balls
especially masquerades.
She decreed that men should attend these in female attire,
and women dressed as men,
and this annoyed many people.
When Prussia’s Friedrich II invaded Saxony in 1745,
Bestuzhev mobilized troops in Courland
and persuaded Friedrich to withdraw.
Then in 1746 Russia renewed the alliance with Austria for
25 years and promised to send troops to help the British
against Prussia in exchange for annual subsidies.
Peace came in 1748, and a decree ordered the
Academy of Sciences to translate and print books in Russian.
In 1745 an accurate Atlas of the Russian Empire
had been published.
Vasily Tatishchev (1686-1750) wrote his Russian History
which was published in five volumes after his death.
A P. Bolotov gathered love songs that became popular.
A. P. Sumarokov wrote Russia’s first tragedy, Khorev,
and his tragedy Aritistona also had songs.
He wrote the libretto for the first opera in Russian,
Cephalus and Prokris, that was performed
at St. Petersburg in February 1755.
Mikhail Lomonosov was educated at Moscow, Kiev,
and at the University of Marburg.
He returned to Russia in 1741 and worked as
the adjutant in physics at the Academy of Science
and conducted chemical experiments.
He was also a grammarian, poet, and historian.
Lomonosov helped plan Moscow University in 1755
and published his Russian Grammar.
The University of Moscow published
the Moscow News twice a week.
The Academy of Sciences contributed
the St. Petersburg News.
The historian G. F. Müller edited the Monthly Selections.
In 1759 Sumarokov’s Busy Bee
became Russia’s first literary journal.
Empress Elizaveta ruled Russia from
December 1741 to January 1762.
She attended the Senate fifteen times in the first three years
but only three more times after that.
During her reign the Senate made 80% of the decrees.
Since the time of Petr the number of officials in the central
and local administrations had doubled
by the 1750s to about 12,000.
In 1754 customs duties within the Russian Empire
were abolished, and tripling tariffs on foreign imports
helped Russian industries.
Shuvalov raised the excise tax on salt and alcohol
which impacted the peasants.
By 1760 the budget deficit had become eight million roubles.
Advances in metallurgies enabled Russia to
triple their foundries from 1725 to 1762
with iron production increasing by two and a half times.
In 1750 the Urals surpassed the
British and Swedes in producing iron.
In 1754 the new criminal code defined serfs
as “property of the gentry.”
That year Petr Shuvalov founded the state
Bank of the Nobility in St. Petersburg with a branch
in Moscow so that landlords could borrow at only 6% interest,
and they could pay it back with land and serfs,
resulting in many estates being mortgaged to the government.
He also transferred state enterprises to private investors
in metallurgy, textiles, and alcohol.
Elizaveta suffered her first stroke in June 1756.
That year Sumarokov and the Imperial troupe of
Petersburg established a Russian national theater.
In 1758 only nobles were allowed to own serfs,
and others were required to sell theirs.
In the next two years the opportunity to obtain gentry status
through state service was ended.
In 1755 Russia renewed the alliance with Britain.
The Russians moved closer to Austria, but by the end of 1756
Russia was allied with France as well as Austria.
Russia had the largest army in Europe during the
Seven Years’ War with 162,430 men in field regiments,
74,548 in garrisons, 27,758 in militias, 12,937 with
engineering and artillery, and 44,000 irregulars.
In the summer of 1757 Russia sent an army of 75,000 men
to Eastern Prussia and defeated a smaller Prussian army
at Gross-Jägersdorf on August 30.
Commander Apraksin withdrew the army to Poland.
He was arrested and put on trial;
but he died before the case was resolved.
Empress Elizaveta suffered another stroke.
After she recovered, she arrested Bestuzhev
in February 1758 for not exploiting the victory
and banished him to his estate.
In 1758 the Russian army swept across East Prussia
and Poland to invade Pomerania and Brandenburg.
On August 25 their slightly larger army commanded by
Count William Fermor fought a major battle at Zorndorf
against Prussia led by Friedrich II that killed a total of
more than 30,000 men with greater Russian losses.
Yet neither side gained any advantage.
In 1759 P. S. Saltykov replaced the cautious Fermor,
and after merging with an Austrian army led by
General Laudon they defeated Friedrich’s Prussians
at Kunersdorf east of Frankfurt in August.
In October 1760 Russian and Austrian forces entered Berlin,
but they stayed only four days.
While Prussia and Austria were considering peace,
the Russians on the third siege finally captured
the Kolberg fortress in December 1761.
Empress Elizaveta’s health had been deteriorating,
and she died on Christmas Day in 1762.
Her nephew succeeded as Petr III.
His mother was Petr the Great’s daughter Anna,
but his father was Duke Karl Friedrich of Holstein-Gottorp.
Empress Elizaveta had arranged Petr’s marriage to his
second cousin, Sophia Augusta Frederica,
which had taken place in August 1745.
On January 29 he abolished the Konferents.
In February 1762 Petr III secularized all church properties,
and his Manifesto concerning the Freedom of the Nobility
relieved them of the legal obligation to serve in the military.
He also abolished the secret police, removed restrictions
on grain exports, and decreed religious toleration.
On May 18 Petr formed a council of his
untitled friends from Holstein.
He did not like Russians much,
but he admired Prussia’s Friedrich II.
Petr was criticized for abandoning the Austrian allies
and ending the war against Prussia that Russia was winning.
In June he made Russia an ally of Prussia,
and Russian troops left Berlin to attack Austria.
This enabled the Prussians to regain southern Silesia in October.
Meanwhile Petr was planning a war against Denmark
in order to restore part of Schleswig
for his duchy of Holstein-Gottorp.
Worried Danes threatened to attack Hamburg to get a loan,
and Petr used this as a reason to go to war.
About 40,000 Russian troops were in Pomerania and prepared
to attack the Danes, but Petr’s wife Sophia overthrew him
on June 28 and became Empress Ekaterina II.
Petr III abdicated that day, and he died on July 9, 1762.
Princess Sophie Friederike Auguste von
Anhalt-Zerbst-Dornburg was born
in Stettin on April 21, 1729 (OS).
Her father was a Prussian general,
and her mother was a princess of Holstein-Gottorp.
She had a French governess and tutors.
She was brought up as a Lutheran, but before marrying
Petr of Holstein-Gottorp in August 1745 at St. Petersburg
she learned Russian and joined the Russian Orthodox Church,
taking the name Ekaterina Alekseyevna.
She read books by Voltaire, and after becoming Empress
corresponded with him, Diderot, and d’Alembert.
She also read and was influenced by Plato, Plutarch, Tacitus,
Machiavelli, Corneille, Racine, Molière, Locke, Bayle,
Montesquieu, the Encyclopedists, Périfix’s Life of Henri IV,
and Barre’s History of Germany.
She wrote in her copy of Fénelon’s Télémaque,
Study mankind, learn to use men
without surrendering to them unreservedly.
Search for true merit, be it at the other end
of the world, for usually it is modest and retiring.
Do not allow yourself to become the prey of
flatterers; make them understand that you
care neither for praise nor for obsequiousness.
Have confidence in those who have the courage
to contradict you … and who place
more value on your favor.
Be polite, humane, accessible,
compassionate, and liberal-minded.
Do not let your grandeur prevent you from
condescending with kindness toward the small,
and putting yourself in their place.
See that this kindness, however, does not weaken
your authority nor diminish their respect.1
Ekaterina lived at the Russian court for fifteen years under
Anna and Elizaveta before she became Empress.
Starting with Sergei Saltykov in 1752 Ekaterina had a series
of twelve lovers throughout the rest of her life with the longest
affair being the third with Grigory Orlov from 1761 to 1772.
In 1762 the Russian Empire had about twenty million peasants
including about ten million serfs
out of a population of 23,250,000.
Half the land was owned by about 100,000 nobles with most
of the rest owned by the state or the Orthodox church.
Ekaterina granted favors to nobles and would not listen to
complaints of serfs, whose numbers doubled
to about twenty million by the end of her reign.
Tsar Petr III’s alliance with Prussia and intention to invade
Denmark prompted his wife Ekaterina to take his place.
When Captain Passek was arrested on June 27, 1762,
they feared their plot was discovered.
The next day Count Alexei Orlov arranged for Petr to be
arrested and kept him in his custody,
and that day he was compelled to abdicate.
Ekaterina went to the Winter Palace where
the Synod and Senate had assembled.
She issued a manifesto justifying her action and took an oath.
Then she was received by more than 14,000 troops,
and she sent Admiral Talisin to Kronstadt.
Two days later she ordered Prince Nikita Trubetskoi
to plan her coronation using 50,000 roubles for the ceremony.
Petr III was taken to Ropsha where he was killed on July 6,
probably in a drunken brawl or by strangulation.
The next day Ekaterina announced her coronation in Moscow.
She had paid 226,000 roubles for six months’ salary
for the Petersburg guard, and she sent silver coins worth
600,000 roubles to Moscow to be thrown to people
lining the route of her procession.
She arrived there triumphantly on September 13,
and nine days later she was crowned Ekaterina (Catherine) II.
Ekaterina II on August 8, 1762 had decreed that owners
of factories and mines purchasing serfs for labor
would have to buy the land on which they were bound.
This provoked serfs in the Urals
and by the Volga to go on strike.
She ordered General Vyazemsky to punish the guilty.
He used cannons, had the leaders beaten,
and sentenced them to hard labor.
She also began her reign by withdrawing the troops
mobilized against Denmark.
Although she considered Prussia’s Friedrich II an enemy,
she confirmed the treaty that Petr III had made with him.
Her husband Petr III had ruled Russia for six months
and instituted 220 new laws.
Ekaterina II accepted his secularization of Church property
which included about a million serfs
whom she upgraded to state peasants.
She wanted to abolish serfdom but considered it impractical,
though she did arrange for the state peasants to elect 80
of the 672 representatives.
She showed her protection of the Orthodox Church
by revoking Petr’s decree of toleration.
In February 1764 she gave the College of the Economy
jurisdiction over the monasteries
and church estates with their serfs.
The state increased its dominance by closing down
most of the monasteries so that there remained open
only 161 of 572 monasteries and 67 of 217 convents.
After the ecclesiastical serfs caused disturbances,
she revived religious tolerance.
Since those serfs had become state property,
she began giving them to favorites and politicians.
She bestowed 16,000 serfs on her supporters
on one day in 1762, and during her 44-year reign
she gave more than half of the 800,000 serfs to nobles.
The rents they paid went into the Treasury.
When the Bishop of Rostov protested,
he was excommunicated and imprisoned for life.
The Old Ritualists no longer had to pay twice the regular tax.
In 1764 she ordered the Office for the Affairs of New Converts
closed to moderate the actions of militant Orthodox missionaries.
In 1763 Ekaterina II appointed Ivan Betskoi director of the
Cadet Corps and president of the Academy of Fine Arts in
St. Petersburg, and a year later he helped her write the
General Statute on the Education of Youth of Both Sexes.
In 1764 there were only 26 diocesan schools
with
6,000 students, and this would increase to only 11,329 by 1783.
Next to the Academy of Fine Arts they opened the
Society for Two Hundred Well-Born Young Women.
Ekaterina and Betskoi wrote the book
On the Duties of Man and Citizen.
Citizens were to be taught to understand their duties to God,
oneself, and society and to learn the skills needed in daily life.
Ekaterina also formulated five principles of her administration
as civilizing the nation, maintaining order by enforcing the laws,
instituting good and effective regulations, promoting
a prosperous economy, and making sure
other nations respected the Russian state.
Also in 1763 she founded Russia’s first College of Medicine.
She prohibited the torture of suspects.
After a bad fire in the town of Tver in 1763 Ekaterina
ordered the Commission on Building under Betskoi
to rebuild and to use the plan for other towns.
The plan included two large squares for administrative
buildings and for shops with streets 75 feet wide
to reduce the risk of fire.
Tver was given 100,000 roubles and a loan of 200,000,
and in the next eight years sixteen more burned towns
would be rebuilt on the same model.
She was especially proud that from 1775 to 1785
she created 216 new towns.
From 1762 to 1773 there were forty peasant revolts
in the Russian Empire.
Discussion or writing about politics was banned,
and spies monitored suspected men.
Ekaterina revived the Secret Chancery
calling it the “Secret Expedition,”
and they investigated the causes of disruptions.
In the years 1764-69 serfs killed some thirty landowners
in the Moscow guberniya (province).
Nikita Panin (1718-83) advised Ekaterina
and tutored her son Pavel (Paul).
Panin became jealous of her other lover, Grigory Orlov
(1734-83) and his brothers, and he proposed that
she be Regent until Pavel could rule as Emperor;
but Ekaterina rejected that.
Panin also suggested an administrative cabinet,
and on December 15, 1763 she reformed the Senate
and created six departments with Procurator-General
Alexander Vyazemsky over economics and administration.
She also tried to improve provincial government
by increasing the pay of officials and regulating their duties,
and she revised the Table of Ranks in 1764.
In the fall the last Ukrainian Hetman, Count Kirill Razumovsky,
resigned, and he was made a Field Marshal in the Russian army.
Also in 1764 she confirmed Russia’s alliance with Prussia;
but Panin’s idea to form a northern alliance with Prussia,
Poland, Sweden, and the British had influence
but never really worked.
Ivan VI, who was born in 1740, had been imprisoned
for twenty years, and Ekaterina’s Guards warned him
that if he tried to escape, he would be killed.
On July 5, 1764 Vasily Mirovich and others
in the garrison demanded Ivan’s release.
The jailers quickly killed Ivan,
and Mirovich and his accomplices were executed.
Ekaterina II supported the election of her former lover,
Stanisław II August Poniatowski, as the King of
Poland-Lithuania in September 1764.
That year she instructed her governors to rule rationally,
take a census, map their territories,
and report on their customs, agriculture, and trade.
She doubled the number of provincial civil servants.
She founded the Free Economic Society in 1765
to promote improvements in agriculture and estate
management, but another law allowed nobles
to sentence serfs to unlimited hard labor.
She purchased Diderot’s library for 15,000 livres
and let him be its librarian for 1,000 livres a year.
Voltaire praised her for this and other actions.
By transforming a budget deficit of 7 million roubles into
a surplus of 5.5 million by 1765 she repaid three-quarters
of the national debt she had inherited.
Also in 1765 Russia made a defensive treaty with Denmark
and then in 1766 a commercial agreement with Britain.
While traveling down the Volga River in the spring of 1767,
peasants gave her six hundred petitions, and in August
she decreed that peasants could not submit petitions
against landlords to the Empress.
In July 1767 Ekaterina to improve the laws set up
the Commission for the Composition of a Plan
of a New Code of Laws, and she published
her Instruction for the Commission (Nakaz)
which she had worked on for two years.
The great Russian historian Klyuchevsky called this
her attempt to achieve “personal-constitutional absolutism.”
Yet most of the ideas for government came from
Montesquieu’s Spirit of the Laws,
and those for criminal justice she took from
Beccaria’s Crime and Punishment.
The Nakaz was banned in France, though Voltaire
praised it as the finest document of the era.
She only circulated it to the higher officials in the civil service.
The Commission was dominated by the nobles,
and the serfs were not represented.
After holding many meetings she prorogued
the Commission in December 1768
because of the war with Turkey, and they never met again.
In 1769 she would form a council of advisors
without executive power.
She founded the satirical journal, “A Little Bit of Everything,”
that was edited by state secretary G. V. Kozitsky.
She published articles to explain why the
Legislative Commission had failed.
On October 12, 1768 Ekaterina set an example for
combating smallpox by having herself inoculated.
That month Russians improved trade with China
by revising their treaty at Kyakhta.
In February 1768 a treaty had recognized Russian
protection of Poland with a constitution
that extended rights to non-Catholics.
This provoked the formation of the armed
Confederation of the Bar led by Pułaski
in southern Ukraine near the Turkish border.
The Russian army led by Suvorov backed the royal forces
sent to restore order in the civil war.
During the summer these skirmishes encroached
on Turkish villages by the border.
Russia refused to withdraw from the region or from Poland,
and Turks arrested the Russian ambassador
and declared war in the fall.
The Russian army took Azov and Taganrog by early April 1769,
and later that year another army led by Rumiantsev drove
the Turkish forces across the Danube;
but the Russians could not capture Istanbul.
The Russian Navy led by Alexei Orlov destroyed
the Turks’ fleet at Çeşme Bay in June,
killing more than 8,000 men while their army fought
a larger Ottoman force by the Larga River
and captured 33 Turkish cannons.
On July 21 at Kagul a Russian army of about 40,000 men
overcame a force of about 90,000 Tatars and 75,000 Ottomans
who lost nearly twenty times as many men as the Russians.
To pay for the war Ekaterina borrowed money from
Amsterdam and Genoa, increasing the national debt.
The Russian government printed its first paper money in 1769.
Noble and commercial banks were opened,
and in 1770 they began accepting deposited money
and making loans to merchants.
In 1772 they began providing short-term credit.
Denis Fonvizin, Nikolay Novikov, and Ippolit Bogdanovich
attended Moscow University
and then worked for ethical reforms.
Fonvizin translated Holberg’s Moral Fables in 1761,
and he also wrote the popular comedies,
The Brigadier (1766) and The Minor (1782).
Novikov has been called Russia’s first journalist.
In 1769 Ekaterina II started the journal,
Anything and Everything, to respond to his articles.
They had supported her for ten years but opposed
the Turkish War and by then had become disillusioned with her.
In the next five years Novikov edited the weekly Drone,
a response to Sumarokov’s Busy Bee of 1759,
in which he criticized nobles for scorning merchants
and for exploiting and abusing serfs.
Next Novikov edited the monthly Babbler, followed by
the weekly Painter, and then the weekly Purse.
He described Russian society with help
from Fonvizin and Bogdanovich.
Negotiations had begun in early 1770, but France
was supporting the Turkish war effort.
In 1771 a Russian army commanded by Prince
Vasily Dolgoruky invaded the Crimea.
Soldiers from the war brought the bubonic plague to Moscow
in 1770, and the epidemic spread rapidly in the spring of 1771.
Government offices, shops, and factories were closed.
People wandered in the streets spreading the contagion
as hundreds died each day.
Many believed that an icon on St. Barbara’s Gate would
cure them, but kissing it spread the disease.
So Moscow’s Archbishop Amvrosii removed the icon.
A riot ensued for three days, and a mob looted monasteries.
When they found Amvrosii, they killed him on September 16.
The army dispersed the crowds,
and three hundred people were put on trial.
Officials estimated that 56,672 people,
a quarter of the population, had died of the plague.
Also in 1771 Sumarokov’s tragedy Dimitry the Pretender
showed how a monarch and nobles could suppress a rebellion.
French philosophers were influential in the 1760s and 1770s,
and the Encyclopédie was translated into Russian.
In the first partition of Poland in 1772 Russia took over
36,000 square miles with 1,300,000 inhabitants from
Polish Livonia, Polotsk, Vitebsk, and Mstislavl in Lithuania
(Belarus), and on May 28 Zakhar Chernyshyov
was appointed to govern the territory.
After a few months the war against the Turks was revived
in early 1773, and the Turks accepted a treaty at
Küçük Kaynarca in July 1774 that left the Crimea independent.
Russians restored Wallachia and Moldavia
to the Ottoman Empire, but they were given
the right to protect Christians there.
The Russian Empire had been expanded south to the Black Sea.
Russians gained free navigation in the Black Sea
and through the Bosphorus and the Dardanelles to the
Mediterranean, and the Turks paid them four million roubles.
The Cossack Emelian Pugachev, a landowner
in the Don region, led an insurrection that started
by the Yaik River in September 1773.
He claimed to be Petr III in command of Cossacks,
Kalmyks, and Tatars, and by October he had
three thousand troops besieging Orenburg.
The Archbishop of Kazan excommunicated Pugachev
who promised religious freedom,
and many Old Ritualists joined him.
In early 1774 the rebels took control of territory
between the Volga River and the Ural mountains.
On March 22 a Russian army defeated
the rebels at Fort Tatishchev.
Pugachev moved to the Urals
and gathered several thousand men.
In May they captured several forts,
but they were defeated on the 21st at Troitsk.
Pugachev’s forces captured Osa on June 21.
In July about 25,000 rebels sacked Kazan,
but they could not take the citadel
and were driven off by a Russian force led by Panin’s brother.
Pugachev’s army of 15,000 men was defeated at Arsk Field,
and he fled with only 500 men.
On July 31 he offered serfs the freedom of Cossacks
without taxes and with religious freedom.
In August the rebels lost 10,000 killed
and captured near Tsaritsy,
and on the 25th his diminishing forces were
defeated at the Salnikov metal factory.
On September 14 Cossacks turned in Pugachev,
and General Suvorov sent him in a cage to Moscow
where he was executed on January 10, 1775.
In 1772 Novikov published his Historical Dictionary
of Russian Writers.
He promoted Rosicrucian philosophy and became
a Freemason in 1775, publishing its moral journal,
Morning Light, in 1777.
Novikov also wrote the political biography, History of the
Unjust Imprisonment of the Confidant,
Boiar Artemon Sergeevich Matveev, in 1776.
In 1779 he moved to Moscow and used the university’s press
to publish more books in three years
than they had in their first two dozen years.
Fonvizin’s Life of Count Nikita Ivanovich Panin
was printed in 1784.
In 1787 Bogdanovich wrote the play, Slavs,
about Alexander the Great and his affair
with a Slavic woman whom he held hostage.
Ekaterina II would have Novikov imprisoned in 1792,
and he was not released until after her death in 1796.
Diderot had come to Russia in 1773.
When he left in March 1774,
Ekaterina II gave him 3,000 roubles.
By then Grigory Potemkin had become her favorite lover.
On November 7, 1775 she proclaimed the Institution of
the Administration of the Provinces of the Russian Empire
indicating her intention to expand the empire
and reorganizing it into 42 provincial governments
with about 800,000 people in each with districts
of about 60,000 inhabitants.
She provided 15,000 roubles for a Board of Public Welfare
and a hospital in each province.
Yet the promises to establish a court of equity
and a physician in each district were not all fulfilled.
She increased the amount of money required for guild
registration, decreasing registered merchants from
215,053 in 1772 to 24,562 in 1775.
She also added an elite rank for businessmen
who had more than 50,000 roubles in capital.
Ekaterina II initiated mediation between Prussia and Austria
and sent Prince Nikolai Repnin to preside over the negotiations
in March 1779 that led to the treaty of Teschen ending
the War of the Bavarian Succession on May 13,
and for this she became a protector of the
Holy Roman Empire’s constitution.
Also in March 1779 the Russians and Turks agreed
in the Aynalıkavak palace in Istanbul
not to use military force in the Crimea.
On February 28, 1780 Ekaterina issued her Declaration
of Armed Neutrality that asserted the right of neutral nations
to trade goods but not weapons or military supplies
with citizens of belligerent countries.
She wanted to stop the British from searching their ships
on the high seas and sent squadrons to the North Sea,
the Atlantic, and the Mediterranean.
Sweden, Denmark, the Dutch,
and others joined the neutrality pact.
Panin’s northern alliance had fallen apart,
and in May 1781 he was dismissed.
In April 1782 a new Police Code was enacted
with 174 articles that included moral principles
and detailed regulations.
The Police Board was to be “the mirror of justice
in regard to the mutual obligations
of citizens among themselves.”2
The police were urged to use common sense, goodwill,
humanity, loyalty, honesty, and should not accept any bribes
that “blind the eyes, pervert the mind and heart,
and bridle the tongue.”3
Ekaterina II’s elementary-school primer was published
1781-83 and included the following counsel:
He that does not study in youth will be bored in old age.
Laziness is a poor teacher.
The wise man is never idle.
The good law directs the citizen’s activity to good.
Freedom is the right to do all the law allows.
To err is genuinely human.
There is no shame in admitting one’s mistakes.4
In 1782 she appointed as her advisor,
Teodor Janković-Mirijevski, a disciple of Felbiger
and a former school director in the Austrian province
of Banat, and his primer issued that year was more traditional.
He who fears God and acts with honor
has nothing to fear.
Revere your Lord, and keep His commandments.
Think before you speak.
Do not go where you should not go;
something unpleasant may happen to you.
We must learn to endure little injuries,
when we seek to live a totally peaceful life,
for usually unhappiness is increased by revenge.5
In 1783 she founded a Teachers’ Training School based
on Austrian methods, and she ordered Austrian textbooks
translated with appropriate changes.
She founded a hospital in St. Petersburg for venereal diseases,
and those applying for admission
were not to be asked their names.
A Foundling Home was built in Moscow for orphans
that took in 2,000 infants a year, and smaller homes
were established in St. Petersburg, Tula,
Kaluga, Yaroslav, and Kazan.
In May 1780 Ekaterina secretly met with Emperor Joseph II,
and in 1782 they agreed to partition the Balkans.
After a revolt favoring Russian rule was fomented in the Crimea,
Russian troops were sent. In April 1783 Russia with Austrian
support formally annexed “the Crimean Peninsula,
the Island of Taman, and the Entire Kuban Side
into the Russian State.”
Russia on July 24 provided a protectorate over Georgia
in the treaty of Georgievsk.
On August 1 Suvorov’s army defeated the
Nogay Tatars at the mouth of the Laba River.
In May 1783 a decree had prohibited peasants
from moving permanently.
In 1784 Muslim princes and murzas were made nobles,
but they could not own Christian serfs.
On April 21, 1785 Ekaterina issued her Charter of the Rights,
Freedoms and Privileges of the Noble Russian Gentry
which renewed their advantages, made their assemblies
permanent, ordered a genealogical register in each province,
and defined the proofs of nobility.
In 1786 the State Loan Bank was founded
with eleven million roubles.
On December 5 Ekaterina issued her
Statute for Schools in Russia calling for a school
with two teachers in every district
and one with six teachers in each provincial town.
The schools were free, and attendance was not compulsory.
Count Nikolai Sheremetev owned 210,000 serfs,
and from 1784 to 1788 he financed forty
productions of operas, comedies, and ballets.
In 1787 Ekaterina went on a grand tour of her empire
with Potemkin who according to rumors set up
façades of villages to impress her.
The British and Prussians accused Russia of violating
the Küçük Kaynarca treaty to provoke Turks.
A Russian ambassador presented an ultimatum at Istanbul,
and Russia declared war on September 7.
The Turks attacked the Russians in the fall, and early
in 1788 Austria came to the aid of its Russian ally.
The Russians besieged Ochakov in Ukraine.
In December the Turks failed to break the siege
as they had
20,000 men slain and 4,000 captured
while only 956 Russians were killed.
Swedish and Russian ships fought an even
naval battle off the island of Hogland on July 6.
Conservative Mikhail Shcherbatov (1733-90) published
his History of Russia from the Earliest Times
in seven volumes from 1771 to 1791.
In the late 1780s he wrote On the Corruption of Morals
in Russia, criticizing the corruption of government
and servility, but it was not published until 1797.
Under Ekaterina II the Russian Empire
was expanding in many ways.
Population went from 23,250,000 in 1762 to 28,500,000
in 1782 and to 37,500,000 in 1795.
The number of officials increased from
16,500 in 1763 to 18,000 in 1775.
Exports were worth 12,750,000 roubles in 1762
and 43,250,000 in 1793 while imports rose from
8,250,000 roubles in 1762 to 27,750,000 in 1793.
The government spent 23,500,000 roubles in 1767
and 79 million in 1795 while revenues increased
from 24 million in 1769 to 56 million in 1795.
During her reign the number of factories
increased from 984 to 3,161.
Ekaterina provided no schooling for serfs,
and only 0.2% of the children went to a secondary school.
Russia had only 550 educational institutions
while France had 8,000 elementary schools.
In the second half of the 18th century more than 8,500 books
were published in Russian, nine times
as many as in the first half of the century.
At the age of 60 Ekaterina II suggested
the following epitaph for herself:
In the year 1744 she came to Russia to marry Petr III.
At the age of fourteen she made the threefold resolution
to please her husband, Elizaveta, and the nation.
She neglected nothing in order to accomplish this.
Eighteen years of utter boredom and loneliness
led her to read many books.
When she ascended the throne of Russia, she endeavored
to bring happiness, freedom, and prosperity to her subjects.
She forgave easily and hated no one.
She was considerate, easy-going, of a cheerful disposition,
genuine republican sentiments, and a kind heart.
She had many friends.
Work was a pleasure to her.
She loved sociability and the arts.6
1. Memoirs by Catherine the Great, 365, quoted in Rousseau and Revolution by Will and Ariel Durant, p. 450.
2. Quoted in Catherine the Great: Life and Legend by John T. Alexander, p. 192.
3. Ibid, p. 193.
4. Quoted in Imperial Russian History I 1700-1861 ed. Gary M. Hamburg, p. 122.
5. Ibid.
6. Quoted in Catherine: The Portrait of an Empress by Gina Kaus, tr. June Head, p. 356.