Russian reality imposed limits to both state-building and cultural progress. Russia was still too poor to support an extensive education system and all local government suffered from chronic lack of funds and staff. Outside of the capitals, large towns, and aristocratic country estates, life remained much as it had before, a round of rural labor punctuated by Orthodox liturgy. Areas of economic progress existed in the Urals and the trading villages and towns of central Russia, but it was still an overwhelmingly agrarian society.
Moreover, it was an agrarian society, half of whose peasant farmers were serfs. This was an issue Catherine and her enlightened friends could neither change nor even confront. She disliked the system and knew it was pernicious, not least to agricultural progress, but was aware that virtually all noblemen, on whom her throne depended, saw it as the basis of their wealth and position in society, as indeed it was. Russia was not alone in the serf system at the end of the century, it persisted in Poland and Prussia, and Joseph II had only just begun to dismantle it in Austria.
Just at the moment when Russia seemed to have achieved a stable and European order, the French Revolution changed all the rules of the game. It would now have to try to respond to a whole series of new challenges, international and domestic, cultural and political. Eventually its very survival would be at stake. It was a new and dangerous era.
8 Russia in the Age of Revolution
On his mother’s death Paul came to the throne, the first undisputed and male inheritance in seventy years. His first act was to rebury Peter III, whom he believed to be his father, in the church of St. Peter and Paul with the other rulers of Russia from Peter onwards. His next act was to replace most of Catherine’s ministers and officials, and send a number of them into exile. Thus began the brief and often bizarre reign of Tsar Paul.
Paul’s reign began just at the moment that the French revolution, having passed through its most radical phase, began to turn outward, and the new tsar had to respond to the apparent danger from his first days on the throne. Far more conservative than his mother, he made it his priority to strengthen the power and authority of the state. He recentralized the government, reestablishing some of the colleges and reviving the Council of State. He also enlarged the Senate, and saw to it that it exercised more effective supervision of law and administration. To this end he issued an enormous number of new laws, orders, and regulations. In Paul’s mind, everything needed a regulation and his job was to compose one where it did not already exist.
Even greater than the changes in institutions were the changes in style. Paul took every opportunity to assert his personal authority in matters no matter how petty. From his youth he had spent much of his time drilling the troops under his personal control, living away from his mother in the suburban palace of Gatchina, which he turned into a military camp on the style of the Prussian army so beloved by his father. Thus his reassertion of authority began with the army. He ordered the Russian army to switch to uniforms on the Prussian model and adopt Prussian drill and training, to the intense irritation of officers and soldiers alike. The French revolutionary armies had already shown the old Prussian methods to be outmoded, but Paul did not see this in his pursuit of strict hierarchy and mindless obedience. His new orders went far beyond the military, for he required anyone, of any age or sex, who encountered any member of the imperial family on the street to dismount and kneel no matter what the weather. Officers were cashiered or even exiled for minor cases of neglect of duty, details of drill, or even just court etiquette. He prescribed the details of dress for court and other occasions and enforced them with pedantic thoroughness. To many noblemen and officers, his behavior was both insulting and bizarre, but to Paul the enforcement of regulation was part of the restoration of discipline and morality that he regarded as crucial after the laxities of Catherine’s rule and the threat of revolution from France. With these ends in mind he revoked many of the provisions of the Charter of the Nobility and reduced and downgraded the elective element in provincial government. Part of this program of counter-reform was the restoration of the old privileges of the nobles of the Baltic provinces and the Ukraine, and an attempt to reach some reconciliation with the Polish gentry. Thus Kosciuszko and other Polish prisoners of war were released, and the legal system of the formerly Polish provinces was maintained. He did not notice the contradictions.
Perhaps the contradictions came from his obsession with reversing the actions of his mother. Though terrified of the French Revolution and convinced that “Jacobinism” was multiplying everywhere in Europe and Russia, he released Radishchev from exile and Novikov from prison. At the same time Paul prohibited the wearing of clothing in the new French style, requiring the old three-cornered hat and knee breeches for men. Enamored of European notions of medieval knighthood and chivalry, he distrusted the self-indulgent and greedy gentry that, he thought, his mother’s reign had created. Thus he decreed a limit of three days per week that serfs could be required to perform labor services. It was typical of Paul’s measures that it was largely useless, for in many parts of the country the new limit was actually higher than the norm. One of the actions of his mother that he did not reverse was the establishment of state censorship, which restricted Russian publications and the importation of Western books. On Paul’s orders even French music fell under suspicion.
Had Paul reigned in calmer times, he might have lasted for years as an irritating and petty despot who aroused contempt more than fear. The times, however, were anything but calm, even though Russia was far from the center of the drama in Paris. Since the fall of the Jacobin dictatorship in 1794 the Directory had directed the energies of the French nation outward to the conquest of Belgium, the Rhineland, and northern Italy. Just as Paul came to the throne, Napoleon Bonaparte was winning his first victories against Austria in northern Italy and instantly became a great hero in France. His next project was the conquest of Egypt, which brought Russia into the war. It was not that St. Petersburg had any particular interest in Egypt, but for a few months the Russians thought that he was really going not to Egypt but to Constantinople, which was an obvious threat. Paul was also enraged by Napoleon’s capture of the island of Malta on his way east in 1798. Malta was just as far as Egypt from Russian interests but the rulers of the island, the Knights of Malta, had just sent a mission to the tsar. They appealed to Paul’s ideals of chivalry and his desire to combat the hydra of revolution, so he became the protector of the Order of Malta. With the island in French hands, some of the knights even offered to make Paul the commander of the order. Contrary to papal wishes, the Orthodox tsar now led the exiled Catholic order, but with the French army at his door the pope was in no position to object. The Malta incident and other French actions led Paul to join Austria, Britain, and other powers in a coalition against the French. General Suvorov was called out of forced retirement (Paul had rightly associated him with Potemkin and Catherine) and sent to Italy to command an Austro-Russian army. This he did with such force and energy that he chased the French out in a few months, and stood ready to invade France. Instead, defeats on other fronts and Austrian insistence on invading France from Switzerland forced Suvorov to move north and then retreat through hostile French forces in an alpine winter to safety in southern Germany. Enraged by these events and a botched Russian-British attempt to invade the French-dominated Netherlands, Paul broke off all relations with the coalition and made overtures to France. With Napoleon’s coup d’etat in November 1799, Paul felt that France had a ruler committed to order, not further revolution, and with whom he could talk. By the end of 1800, war with Britain seemed a real possibility. Events dictated otherwise.