The pursuit of glory, p.31
The Pursuit of Glory, page 31
RUSSIA
When he wrote those words in 1763, Frederick may have been unaware that they had been anticipated a generation earlier by Peter the Great: ‘we will allow no rank to anyone until they have rendered service to us and the fatherland’. He would certainly have been aware that Peter had fostered a nobility that even by Prussian standards was distinguished by the emphasis on service. It was not so much that Peter sought to abolish or even dilute the old Muscovite nobility, rather he set about reorientating it towards state service. In the process, he refashioned its education, training, employment and even appearance. Traditional titles–boiare (boyars), okol’nichii, stol’niki–were allowed to die out. By 1718 there were only six boyars left, the very last one dying in 1750. In their place he instituted a set of titles borrowed from the west–baron, count, prince–and a new hierarchy based on military and civilian service to the state. It was formalized in 1722 when Peter published a ‘Table of Ranks’, based mainly on Prussian, Danish and Swedish models. There were 14 ranks, 1 being the lowest, embracing 262 different posts–126 military and naval, 94 administrative and 42 at court. This was not a meritocracy, for existing nobles enjoyed preferential treatment and any commoner reaching the eighth rank acquired hereditary noble status. But if the traditional society of orders was to continue, success within it was to be performance-related. Setting an example from the top, Peter demonstratively entered military service as a bombardier. John Perry, who published a first-hand account of Russia in 1716, observed:
By taking upon himself both a Post in his Navy, and in his Army, wherein he acted and took the gradual Steps of Preferment, like another Man, [he wished] to make his Lords see that he expects they shall not think themselves nor their Sons too good to serve their Countrey, and take their steps gradually to Preferment.
Writing a generation later, another foreign observer–Henning Friedrich Count von Bassewitz–agreed, insisting that Peter had not been in any sense egalitarian: ‘What [he] had in mind was not the abasement of the noble estate. On the contrary, all tended towards instilling in the nobility a desire to distinguish themselves from common folk by merit as well as by birth.’ On the other hand, status now went with rank not pedigree–a prince in the third class was below a baron in the first. There was no opt-out clause: from 1710 there were regular inspections of young nobles when they reached the age of ten, with those passing a physical and mental aptitude test being despatched to cadet schools until they were ready for full-time service five years later. It might almost be said that Russian nobles no longer enjoyed a private life. In 1716, for example, Peter issued the following order: ‘We have received news from Italy that in Venice they wish to accept our people into naval service training: today the French have also responded, saying that they too will accept our trainees. Consequently, select immediately in the Petersburg schools children of well-to-do nobles, bring them to Reval, and place them aboard ships. There should be sixty of them. Send twenty to Venice, twenty to France, and twenty to England.’
This is truly a different world from anything we have encountered so far. There is a mighty paradox here: it was Peter the Great’s paramount ambition to bring his state closer to the west, but he succeeded only in driving it further away. Of course there were all sorts of ways in which the ‘westernization’ of Russia did proceed. The conquest of the Baltic provinces of the Swedish Empire between 1700 and 1721 provided the famous ‘window on the west’. By that time there was no danger of a repetition of the diplomatic gaffe committed by Louis XIV in 1657, when he addressed an official letter to Peter’s grandfather, Tsar Mikhail Fedorovich, unaware that he had died twelve years previously. In 1716 Russia impinged on the west as directly as possible, when a Russian army wintered in Mecklenburg. The move of the capital from Moscow to the newly created St Petersburg did much more than wrench the Russian elites 370 miles (600 km) to the west, for it was accompanied by an equally top-down transformation of their culture. Away went the beards, kaftans and pectoral crosses; in came wigs, French fashions and pastimes. The new city was given a German name (hence its Russification as ‘Petrograd’ on the outbreak of war in 1914) and a Dutch layout. As Geoffrey Hosking has remarked, it was to be not a new Rome but a new Amsterdam. As good an illustration as any of the cultural revolution Peter effected at the apex of society is revealed by a comparison of a portrait of his father, Tsar Aleksei Mikhailovich (1645–76) with a portrait of him by Sir Godfrey Kneller, painted in The Hague in 1697, during one of Peter’s visits to the west. The former is made to look more like a bishop than a sovereign, while the latter is every inch a dashing secular warrior-king, the pencil-moustache only serving to emphasize the absence of other facial hair. If this last detail seems trivial, it should be borne in mind that a beard was believed by Orthodox believers to be a sign of a God-fearing man and that without it, admission to the next world might be impeded or even denied.
The secularization revealed by this comparison was expressed in many other ways, most obviously by the seizure of control of the Russian Church from the Patriarch. This found ceremonial expression in a move from religious processions, in which the Tsar participated as a humble servant of God and His church, to secular triumphs with the Tsar elevated to become the centre of adoration himself. It was an ambulatory equivalent of Versailles. Neatly symbolic of this change was the transfer of the biblical text used on these occasions–‘Blessed is he that cometh in the name of the Lord; Hosanna in the highest’ (Matthew 21:9)–from the Patriarch to the Tsar. On 30 September 1696, for example, Peter organized a lavish ceremonial entry to Moscow to celebrate his victory over the Turks at Azov, which involved passing through a triumphal classical arch flanked by gigantic statues of Hercules and Mars and adorned with Cæsar’s motto ‘veni, vidi, vici’. He was also compared with Constantine–not Constantine the Christian convert but Constantine the mighty conqueror. Following the Peace of Nystad, which brought the victorious was against Sweden to an end, the Senate formally gave him the Roman imperial title he had long been using–‘Imperator’.
This might seem a move away from the Byzantine and Greek heritage of Muscovy towards Roman and Renaissance models. Similarly ‘western’ was Peter’s frequent emphasis on the need to serve an abstraction rather than him personally. He variously referred to the ‘fatherland’, ‘Russia’, ‘the common good’, ‘general welfare’, ‘the benefit of the whole nation’ and–especially–‘the state’. In the past, the Russian word most closely approximating to ‘state’, ‘état’ or ‘Staat’–gosudarstvo–designated a specific piece of territory belonging to the Tsar, as in ‘gosudarstvo Sibiri’ (the state of Siberia), although ‘affairs of state’ (gosudarstvennye dela) began to be used around the middle of the seventeenth century. Peter sought to take that a great deal further, by separating the idea of an impersonal state from the person of the Tsar. If he never used the phrase ‘first servant of the state’ to describe his own role, he certainly came close to it, as for example when he struck out the formula ‘the interests of His Tsarist Majesty’ from a draft decree and substituted ‘the interests of the state’ as the proper object of soldiers’ loyalty. On the eve of the greatest of all his military victories, against the Swedes at Poltava on 27 June 1709, he is reported to have said: ‘Do not think of yourselves as armed and drawn up to fight for Peter, but for the state which has been entrusted to Peter.’
So far, so western, but the forces pointing in the opposite direction, back through Muscovy over the Urals and into Asia, were arguably of greater potency. So great was the coercion required to bring about Peter’s reform programme that it became counter-productive. A case in point was his new capital, built by tens of thousands of conscripted labourers little better than slaves, many of whom died of disease in the mosquito-infested swamp that was the building site. The Hanoverian F. C. Weber, who worked as a secretary in the British embassy, recorded that no preparations had been made to clothe, feed or accommodate the migrant workers, with the result that ‘it is computed that there perished on this occasion very nigh one hundred thousand souls, for in those places made desolate by the war, no provisions could be had even for ready money’. The writer Nikolai Karamzin (1766–1826) was an admirer of Peter’s overall achievement and, like Weber, thought St Petersburg was a ‘wonder of the world’, but even he wrote that the foundations of the city were ‘tears and corpses’. Nor did the coercion diminish as the city rose. To people it, a thousand nobles owning more than a hundred serf households were commanded to build residences there, at their own expense but according to plans laid down by the authorities. Thanks to the speed with which they were constructed and the unsuitable nature of the site, the new palaces were crumbling before they were completed. Frederick the Great’s friend Count Algarotti jeered: ‘Their walls are all cracked quite out of perpendicular and ready to fall. It has been wittily said that ruins make themselves in other places, but that they were built at St Petersburg.’ As part of Peter’s almost manic attention to detail, the new arrivals were presented with small yachts, in which they were required to present themselves every Sunday afternoon to demonstrate their sailing skills. Attendance at social functions such as balls, soirées and salons was both compulsory and strictly regulated. Well might Dostoevsky call it ‘the most rational and premeditated city on earth’.
Peter the Great could get his nobles out of Moscow, but could he get Muscovy out of his nobles? Did he really want to? The example he set himself suggests that his attitude was ambivalent. Even by the standards of the most coarse European sovereign–Frederick William I of Prussia, say–Peter’s behaviour was in a different class of crudity. Foreign observers reported with a mixture of horror and ridicule the antics of his court: the aptly named ‘cups of sorrow’, for example, that is to say the buckets of raw alcohol brought round by guardsmen and from which courtiers were obliged to drink with ladles. Any backsliding was reported by informers and no one was allowed to leave until the Tsar himself arrived around midnight to signal release. Peter’s persecution of his son Aleksei also suggests some form of dementia. Constantly bullied and humiliated by his father and told that he should be severed ‘like a gangrenous limb’, no wonder that Aleksei sought to renounce any claim to the throne and then ran away to seek refuge in the Habsburg Monarchy. Induced to return in 1718 by promises of good treatment, he was then subjected to what Lindsey Hughes has called ‘the first Russian show trial’. During his interrogation in the Peter-Paul fortress of St Petersburg he was repeatedly tortured until mercifully released by death. That rumours at once spread that he had been poisoned, smothered or even strangled by his father give some idea of Peter’s terrible–and terrifying–image. By comparison, Frederick William I’s brutal treatment of Crown Prince Frederick when he tried to escape paternal tyranny seems like a model of mercy and justice.
When Aleksei foolishly signalled to Peter that he was prepared to return to Russia, he signed his letter ‘your most humble and worthless slave, unworthy of the name of son’. This was more than a form of words. What struck contemporaries repeatedly was the servile nature of relationships in Russian society. It was not invented by Peter, but it was intensified by his terrorist approach to all and sundry and institutionalized by his Table of Ranks. As there was no corporate structure and no sense of corporate identity, interests could only be pursued individually. Together with Peter’s rigorous use of coercion and fostering of an ethos of servility and service, this very special quality of the nobility gave Russia a political culture which may have acquired western trappings but fundamentally was growing ever further apart. This phenomenon was recorded by contemporaries so often that it has to be taken seriously, even after every allowance has been made for bias and ignorance. Representative of a rich store of examples was the impression gained by Edward Daniel Clarke, a Fellow of Jesus College, Cambridge, who travelled in Russia at the very end of the eighteenth century, who wrote: ‘It is not so generally known as it may be, that the passage of a small rivulet, which separates the two countries of Sweden and Russia, the mere crossing of a bridge, conducts the traveller from all that adorns and dignifies the human mind, to whatsoever, most abject, has been found to degrade it.’ Of course English travellers were particularly fond of this sort of sweeping disparagement, but in amongst the rhetoric there was a core of truth about what Clarke had to say about the servility which informed Russian society: ‘They are all, high and low, rich and poor, alike servile to superiors; haughty and cruel to their dependants.’
Peter’s failure to westernize his state was revealed most clearly in his failure to solve what is arguably a monarchy’s most fundamental problem: the orderly transfer of power when the current incumbent dies. ‘The King is dead, long live the King’ is all very well in theory, but who was the new King going to be? In the west, this had been solved by the principle of primogeniture, but in the east there was an elective monarchy in Poland and some uncertainty in Russia, where primogeniture was a matter of custom rather than law. Hence the confusion that arose when Peter’s half-brother, Tsar Fyodor, died in 1682. Although Peter was only ten years old and there was another elder half-brother available–Ivan–Peter was proclaimed sole Tsar, partly because Ivan was incapacitated by physical and mental problems but mainly because of the ambitions of his mother’s relations. Following a revolt of the ‘streltsy’ regiments, both Ivan and Peter were made Tsars, but with power being exercised by Sophia, their sister and half-sister respectively, as regent. It was not until Sophia had been elbowed aside in 1689 and the wretched Ivan finally died in 1696 that Peter really took charge.
Decisive in most things, it might have been expected that Peter would have given a firm western direction in this all-important area too. Not only did he not do so, but when he did move, it was in the opposite direction. His only son Aleksei he first disinherited and then judicially murdered. In 1722 he promulgated a new law of succession, making it subject to the current Tsar’s will: ‘We deem it good to issue this edict in order that it will always be subject to the will of the ruling monarch to appoint whom he wishes to the succession or to remove the one he has appointed in the case of unseemly behaviour, so that his children and descendants should not fall into wicked ways, having this restraint upon them.’ Yet when he died three years later he had not made any such appointment. What then followed showed the shape of things to come. Prince Menshikov, Peter’s oldest and closest associate, took the widowed Tsarina Catherine to the Guards to win their support for her nomination. All then made their way to the Senate, where the succession issue was in the process of being debated. The senators favoured Peter’s grandson, also called Peter, but the Guards officers who entered the chamber put a quick stop to that. With the drums of their soldiers issuing an aural warning outside, Catherine was promptly proclaimed Peter’s successor. In a sense, this episode could be advanced as an advertisement for the social mobility of Russia. Allegedly the son of a pie-seller, Menshikov was in fact the son of an NCO, who rose through his friendship with the Tsar to become the richest man in the land and the first to receive the new hereditary title of Prince. For her part, Catherine had been born to a Lithuanian peasant family and was working as a scullery-maid to a Lutheran pastor in Marienburg when she was carried off by Russian troops in 1702. Passed from one officer to another, including Menshikov, she ended up in the arms of the Tsar, who married her bigamously in 1707.
It was Peter the Great who was responsible for giving the Guards regiments this political role. It was he who decided that they should be permanently posted in St Petersburg, as part-bodyguard, part-police force; and it was he who gave them elite status, with even junior officers gaining automatic admission to the court. Variously described as ‘the kernel of Imperial Russia in the eighteenth century’ (Geoffrey Hosking) and ‘a kind of repository of the political thought of the ruling gentry class’ (Bernard Pares), the Semenovsky, Preobrazhensky and Horse Guards were involved in every succession between 1725 and 1825 bar one (that of Paul I). Given their resemblance to the Praetorian Guard of imperial Rome, it might be said, perhaps, that this represented a form of westernization, but that seems stretching the point rather too far. At least the Russian Guards never actually sold the imperial title, as the Praetorians did, to Didius Julianus in ad 193. Paradoxically, in both cases, it was in the interests of these military emperor-makers to support absolute power. That was revealed in Russia in 1730, following the short reign of Peter II (1727–30). The grandees of the Supreme Privy Council invited Anna, Duchess of Courland, daughter of Peter the Great’s half-brother Ivan, to succeed, on condition she shared power with them. But when she arrived in Moscow (which had briefly regained its status as capital under her predecessor), her first action was to visit the Guards regiments, declare herself their Colonel and serve them vodka with her own hands. Neither party wished to see the magnates in power, so two weeks later Anna tore up the conditions to which she had agreed. Baron Christof Hermann von Manstein, a Prussian serving in the Russian army at the time, explained why this alliance between absolutist Tsar and Guards officers was natural:
I much doubt whether this empire, or rather the higher nobility will ever achieve their liberty. The lesser nobility, who are extremely numerous in Russia, will constantly oppose great obstacles to it, being more afraid of the tyranny of a number of the great than of the power of a single sovereign.
He was quite right. Writing from Kazan, one noble commented on the coup that brought Anna to power: ‘God forbid that it turn out that, instead of one autocratic sovereign, we have tens of absolute and powerful families, and thus we, the nobility will decline completely.’ The alliance was consolidated as the years passed, as the coercive regime of Peter the Great was relaxed. In 1736 the obligation to serve the state was reduced from life to twenty-five years and every noble household was allowed to retain a son to run the estates, if a second did go off to serve, although even those who stayed at home were obliged to learn to read and write in readiness for the civil service if required. However, implementation was delayed by the Turkish War and the flood of requests to leave the service led to a partial repeal. It was not until the brief reign of Peter III (1762) that the nobility was finally emancipated from the service obligation. Although greeted with ‘unimaginable joy’, as one noble put it, and by a request from the Senate to commission a statue of the Tsar made of solid gold, the small print revealed a number of qualifications, not the least being that officers could not retire in wartime and civilian officials had to secure the permission of the Tsar. It was also firmly stated that those who did not volunteer for service would be excluded from court and denied imperial favour.
