The Urals and the Volga River were areas with a population that included many nationalities other than the Russians. At the time of Peter the Great’s death, the Volga-Urals area had about a million people, half of them Tatars, Chuvash, Bashkirs, among others. In the seventeenth century half or more of the Tatars had served in the Russian army, while the remainder, along with the other Volga peoples, continued to pay the old yasak tax. As serfdom spread, the tax defined their status as non-serfs. From Peter’s time the yasak-payers and the Tatar soldiers were almost all converted to state peasants like the Russian peasants of the north. A continuous flow of Russian peasants and nobles came into the area, avoiding the agricultural Tatar and Chuvash territories but taking much land from the nomadic Bashkirs, leading to predictable revolts in 1705, 1735, and 1755. Altogether Russia was still about ninety percent Russian, the largest minority being the Ukrainians (who made up five percent), with the Volga peoples and the Baltic provinces making up the remaining five percent. The Baltic nobles retained their privileges, as did the Cossack nobility of the Ukrainian Hetmanate. There the office of hetman itself was restored in 1727, abolished again in 1734, and then subsequently restored by Elizabeth. The empress appointed Kirill Razumovskii, the brother of her Ukrainian lover Aleksei, to the post. He would be the last hetman.
If Elizabeth was happy with local autonomy in the Hetmanate and the Baltic provinces, she was not tolerant of religious variation. She had come to power with the support of the bishops of the Orthodox Church, most of them Ukrainians who had absorbed Catholic notions of the need for religious uniformity. Empress Elizabeth initiated a new wave of persecution of the Old Believers, and supported the efforts of the Bishop of Kazan’ and others to convert the Muslims. Hundreds of mosques were destroyed and various forms of enticement and coercion were applied to the Tatars to get them to accept Orthodox Christianity. These attempts were an abject failure, for only a small percentage abjured their faith, and those in large numbers returned to Islam after the death of the empress.
Russia remained an overwhelmingly agrarian society, and few exceptions aside, peasant labor and landowning were the basis of the wealth of the nobility. The growth of the population and the cultivation of virgin land in the south brought enormous prosperity to the nobility. They demonstrated it for all to see not only in mansions in Moscow and St. Petersburg, but also in their new country houses. Traditionally Russian boyars had lived in towns, maintaining only small houses on their estates for their infrequent visits. At the end of the seventeenth century they began to build more magnificent residences around Moscow – whole complexes with churches in the new semi-baroque style of the time – but these were few and near the capital. Only in the middle of the eighteenth century did the newfound prosperity of the nobility lead to the construction of country houses with Baroque and later Classical architecture, far from the cities. These were real country houses with elaborate gardens, natural and artificial ponds, sculpture and pavilions for dining, and entertainment outside. The great aristocrats like the Sheremetevs and Golitsyns had entire theaters built into their house, suitable for drama or ballet. Some of them formed theatrical troupes from their serfs, who were taught to read, play music, and dance or act in performances that replicated European models. One of the Sheremetevs even married one of his serf ballerinas. For the average noble family such luxuries were unattainable, but all over the country noblemen built one or two story wooden houses with at least one room large enough for dances and entertainment. By 1800, obligatory style included a portico with classical columns around the house’s main door. These houses became one of the centers of the life and culture of the nobility in its last century, to be memorialized in countless stories and novels of the great Russian writers from Pushkin onwards: Evgenii Onegin, Fathers and Sons, and War and Peace.
With the noblemen serving in the army and civil service (and legally obliged to do so from 1714 to 1762), much of the management of the estates fell on the women. One of the many paradoxes of Russian society was that noblewomen had much stronger legal rights to property and much more control over it than their counterparts in almost all Western societies of the time. Their control of their dowrer property after marriage was virtually complete in law (if not always in fact), and widows usually retained control of their husbands’ estates. The absence of primogeniture in Russia meant that among the nobility a widow was often the ruler of the family when her sons were long-time adults with important careers. These were the ancestors of the strong women found in the classic novels that were set in the country estates a century later.
Empress Elizabeth, like her predecessor Anna, had to provide for a succession to her throne, as she had no children of her own. She chose her nephew, Karl Peter Ulrich, the Duke of Holstein-Gottorp and the son of her older sister Anna Petrovna, who had married the then Duke in 1725. Elizabeth’s idea was to keep the succession in her family, not in the family of Empress Anna. The Holstein connection also had diplomatic advantages in relation to Sweden and the German states, especially Prussia. Elizabeth brought the boy to Russia in 1742 with a large suite of Holsteiners and he converted to Orthodoxy with the name Peter in honor of his grandfather, Peter the Great. The young Peter was not a particularly promising boy, and Elizabeth decided that he needed a wife. She chose Sophie, the daughter of the Duke of Anhalt-Zerbst – Anhalt-Zerbst being a small German principality in the Prussian orbit. Sophie’s mother was also from the Holstein family, so that Sophie and Peter were cousins and were both related to the then King of Sweden. The family also had the support of Frederick the Great of Prussia, victorious in war with Austria (1740–1748), and whom Elizabeth opposed but wished to placate. In 1744 Sophie came to Russia with her mother and there was instructed in Orthodoxy, eventually taking the name Catherine at conversion. Thus at the age of fifteen the future Catherine the Great took up her position at the Russian court as the wife of the heir to the throne. The young girl was lonely, and her mother’s intrigues only increased their isolation. The one bright spot for the princess was that she got along with the Empress well on a personal level.
At first the marriage was uneventful, a tepid friendship rather than a real marriage, and no heir appeared. As the years passed both Peter and Catherine found other interests, and as Catherine matured she found her husband’s childish behavior and coarseness increasingly irritating. She also began to have political worries, for Peter stuck close to his Holstein entourage and displayed little interest in the country he was to rule. Catherine was already acute enough to realize that this was a dangerous characteristic in a future tsar. Finally Catherine had her first love affair with the young aristocrat Sergei Saltykov, and in 1754 she gave birth to a son whom Empress Elizabeth had baptized Paul. Russia now had an heir, whom Catherine in her later memoirs would make clear was the son of Sergei Saltykov, not her husband Peter. Paul’s presumed parentage was a well-kept secret, even in the gossipy world of the court.
As she recovered from childbirth, Catherine began to read. She had always been more of a reader than was typical in court circles. Her choices had ranged from romances to serious works like Henri Bayle’s Dictionary, a classic of early Enlightenment thought. Now in her momentary isolation she turned to Voltaire, Tacitus, and most important for her later conception of government, Charles-Louis de Montesquieu’s Spirit of the Laws, which was published in 1748. Not all of her reading was so heavy, for she appreciated Voltaire’s wit as much as his ideas, but most of it seems to have been books she thought valuable for the wife of a future emperor of Russia. For whatever she thought of her husband, he seemed certain to inherit the throne.