Russia: early history
Russia began as the Grand Duchy of Muscov but when the sixteen-year-old Ivan IV (the Terrible) was crowned in the Dormition Cathedral in Moscow, he was given the title of 'tsar' (Caesar). This was a sign that Moscow was the 'new Rome' and the tsars saw themselves as successors of the Roman Emperors.By the late seventeenth century the Tsardom of Russia was centred on Moscow and the Volga, reaching down to the Caspian. The region of the middle Volga, comprising the old Muslim khanates of Astrakhan and Kazan, had been conquered by Ivan in the middle of the sixteenth century. In honour of the defeat of Kazan, Ivan built the Cathedral of the Intercession of the Holy Virgin on Red Square in Moscow. Popularly known as St Basil’s Cathedral, the building consisted of nine high chapels crowned with cupolas and joined to one another by arched passageways.
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| St Basil's Cathedral, Moscow |
Expansion: east and west
After this Muscovy began its eastward expansion into Siberia in a quest for the fur of sables, foxes and ermines. In 1639 Russians reached the Pacific and from the 1640s they were exploring the Amur River. Religious dissidents, fugitive convicts and settlers founded settlements in Siberia, and towns and cities were established in the eighteenth century.Russia also expanded westwards. In September 1654 Peter the Great's father, Tsar Alexis captured Smolensk from the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. In 1686 Kiev ceased to be part of Poland and came under Russian control.
However, there were limits to the expansion. Russia was cut off from the Baltic by Sweden’s possession of Livonia (Latvia), Ingria (the area between the Gulf of Finland and Lake Ladoga) and Finland, and her one direct outlet to western Europe was the port of Archangel on the White Sea, which was icebound for six months of the year. In the south the Ottoman Empire and its Tartar vassal state in the Crimea, cut her off from the Black Sea.
Michael Romanov and his dynasty
On 11 July Mikhail Fyodorovich Romanov was crowned 'grand prince, tsar and sovereign autocrat', the founder of the last dynasty to rule Russia. |
| Michael Romanov, the founder of the dynasty Johann Heinrich Wedekind Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow Public domain |
His Russia was an autocracy, and legislation was promulgated under the traditional formula, ‘The tsar has decreed and the magnates have assented’. The basis of the tsar’s power lay in the landed interest, the serf-owners of which the tsar was the biggest. The overwhelming majority of the population were peasants, and of these the majority were serfs of various types, bound to the land for labour services. Merchants and traders were growing in importance, though their numbers were small.
For the most purposes Russia was still outside Europe, though the steady influx of foreign traders and experts of various types meant that it was becoming less isolated. However, foreigners frequently commented on Russia’s isolation and backwardness and on the power of the Orthodox Church.
Peter I (r. 1682-1725)
Peter was born in 1672, son of Tsar Alexei and his second wife, Natalia Naryshkhina, a member of an ambitious and influential Tartar family. |
| Tsar Alexei I of Russia, the father of Peter the Great, Hermitage Museum Public domain |
By his first wife, Maria Miloslavskaya, Alexei had a daughter, Sophia (1657-1704) and two sons, Fyodor (1661-82) and Ivan (1666-1696), both of whom were sickly and ailing. When Alexei died in 1676 he was succeeded by his elder son, Fyodor III, who died on 23 April 1682. There was no definite succession law, but if normal custom were followed, the younger son, Ivan would become tsar. However, he was mentally handicapped, while his half-brother, Peter, was healthy. Which of them, therefore, should be tsar?
On 27 April the allies of Natalia Naryshkina were massacred in the Kremlin in front of Peter. The ten year old boy
was plunged into a haunting nightmare of mutiny and bloody struggle for the throne’ (H. Sumner, Peter the Great and the Emergence of Russia (1951), p. 20).
During these years Peter was brought up away from Moscow and kept isolated from state affairs. He received little formal education but picked up a practical education from craftsmen and followers. He became fascinated with sailing, boat-building and navigation. Most importantly, he formed a toy brigade that under the guise of childhood games, turned into a military unit. In 1689 his mother found him a wife, Eudoxia Lopukhina, who gave birth to a son, Alexei in 1690.
The seizure of power
By the time of Alexei's birth, Peter had seized power from his sister. In August 1689 he gathered his supporters and overthrew Sophia and the Streltsy guards. Golitsyn was exiled to the far north and Sophia imprisoned in the Novodevichy (New Maiden) convent in Moscow. In 1696 Ivan V died and Peter was able to rule as full tsar. In the same year he captured the Ottoman fortress of Azov on the Don River, the first challenge to the Turkish mastery of the Black Sea. Following this he began his programme of ship-building, and the Don became the centre of an industry in which Italian, Dutch, English and Russian shipwrights vied with each other to create the first Russian navy.The European tour
In March 1697 Peter left Moscow for a fact-finding mission in Europe, travelling incognito as ‘Peter Mikhailov’. He was the first tsar to travel abroad. His aim was to learn western technology and also to build up an alliance against the Turks.Peter had decided to do something utterly extraordinary: to leave his realm and his court behind and, in order to catch up on his own lacklustre education, to force-feed himself with a crash course in Western technology, an act of autodidactic will unparalleled in world history, let alone in Russia's. … No other tsar had ever left Russia. It was too risky and his absence would end in carnage. Simon Sebag Montefiore, The Romanovs (2014), p. 85.
In January 1698 after five months in Holland he sailed to London and sat to Kneller for his portrait. He was the first tsar to be portrayed in western dress.
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| Peter the Great, by Sir Godfrey Kneller. Public domain. |
He leased John Evelyn’s residence at Deptford, which he and his followers trashed. and then proceeded to Vienna. His European journey was a turning-point in Peter’s life, confirming his view that Russians needed to go abroad to learn from the west. Most famously, it was at Deptford that he claimed to have learned the art of ship-building. The ‘tsar-carpenter’ returned with the knowledge that a country could gain political power from wealth, trade and manufactures.
Modernisation
In the autumn of 1698 Sophia made a further attempt to seize power. The rebellion was defeated, and over a thousand Streltsy guards were executed, 186 of them outside Sophia’s prison, the Novodevichy convent. The scale and brutality of the executions showed Peter’s extreme ruthlessness. A previous admirer, Bishop Burnet wrote:How long he is to be the scourge of that nation or of his neighbours, God only knows.Sophia was forced to become a nun. At the same time Peter imprisoned his wife Evdoxia in a convent, which was the equivalent of divorce, and took personal charge of his heir, Alexei.
In the same year, in a deeply symbolic gesture, Peter shaved off the beards of his principal nobles with his own hands. Shortly afterwards he cut off the long sleeves of their surcoats and prescribed Hungarian or German dress for the court and officials. All, except peasants and clergy, had to pay an annual tax if they refused to cut off their beards.
The Great Northern War
This twenty-year contest sprawled thousands of miles from Norway to the Ukraine and was decisive in settling the balance of power in north-eastern Europe. It centred on the rivalry between Peter the Great and the youthful Charles XII of Sweden, an inspiring and charismatic leader. It was the last of a series of wars over the domination of the Baltic, and Russia emerged as the victor.By 1660 Sweden had become the great power in the Baltic with an empire stretching from Danish-ruled Norway and round the coast to Riga. In 1697 the the fifteen-year-old Charles XII became king.
Sweden had been the enemy of Moscow since the thirteenth century and had established herself as a Baltic power. In 1700 she controlled Ingria and Karelia at the head of the Gulf of Finland, Livonia with its great port of Riga, which she had conquered from Poland, and western Pomerania with its capital of Stettin.
However, in 1700 Sweden's ascendancy was challenged by a coalition of Poland, Denmark and Russia, but on 20 November Charles defeated in a snowstorm a Russian army three times larger than his own at Narva in Estonia. Peter, who had been present at the battle, acknowledged that this was ‘a terrible set-back’.
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| The Battle of Narva, by Alexander Kotzebue a nineteenth-century representation of Peter's greatest defeat. |
In response to his defeat, Peter built up the Russian army, setting in place the system that was to last until 1874. His soldiers were conscripted (usually one for twenty households) to serve for twenty-five years. New training, discipline, and tactics were introduced, based on the Austrian, French, and Swedish models, and flintlocks and bayonets were manufactured in large numbers. New iron works were set up in the Urals to manufacture cannons.
The success of this policy can be seen in a series of amphibious actions undertaken between 1701 and 1704 and Lake Ladoga and the River Neva. In 1704 he recaptured Narva.
In late 1707 Charles XII invaded Russia with the declared intention of dethroning Peter and dividing his empire. For the next eighteen months the Swedish army marched through Lithuania, but they were frustrated by Peter’s scorched-earth tactics. Charles then swerved his army south towards the Ukraine. On 27 June 1709 the Russian and Swedish armies met at Poltava.
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| The Battle of Poltava, by Pierre-Denis Marten Catherine Palace Public domain |
By this time Charles’ army had been reduced to c. 25,000 and he was facing a better-trained and better-equipped Russian army that was double in size. 7,000 Swedes were killed or wounded and nearly 3,000 were taken prisoner. Charles fled to Turkey where he spent the next five years in exile.
‘Poltava was a truly world-historical event, much more momentous than Blenheim.’ Tim Blanning, The Pursuit of Glory. Europe 1648-1815 (2008), p. 558.Peter declared:
Now, with God’s help, the final stone has been laid in the foundation of St Petersburg.
St Petersburg
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| The Peter and Paul Fortress |
Opposite the fortress a wooden Cabin of Peter the Great was built, and became the first residential building in the new city. By the end of summer the original clay walls and bastions of the fortress were completed under Peter’s supervision and the new settlers moved in.
Both settlers and workers faced atrocious conditions. Working from dawn to dusk on a boggy site in an unhealthy climate, with poor food and housing, men and died in great numbers. But the war still went on and the fort had to be completed as soon as possible.
In 1712 Peter moved the capital from Moscow to St Petersburg. It was his ‘window on the west’, the symbol of his desire to modernise Russia. By the 1740s the population had reached 100,000. (Go here to listen to Melvyn Bragg's 'In Our Time' discussion of the building of St Petersburg.)
The end of the Great Northern War
While St Petersburg was being built, the war continued. But Charles was killed on 11 December (30 November OS) 1711 while inspecting his fortifications. The war was finally ended by the Peace of Nystad in August 1721. Russia gained Livonia, Estonia, Ingria and a large part of Karelia. Russia had replaced Sweden as the dominant power in north-eastern Europe and Poland was reduced to a Russian satellite.Following the Peace of Nystad, the Senate granted Peter the Roman title of 'Imperator'.
The succession
In February 1722 Peter overturned the traditional laws of succession and decreed that the tsar would have absolute right to choose his successor. In 1724 he signed a decree bequeathing the crown to his second wife, Catherine, an illiterate laundress, who was then crowned in the Dormition Cathedral in Moscow. But later in the year Peter learned of her affair with the court chamberlain. He was executed and Peter tore up the succession decree. He died in January 1725, without naming his successor, and Catherine was then proclaimed empress.
Conclusion
- By the time of Peter’s death in 1725, Russia had replaced Sweden as the dominant power in north-eastern Europe, and Poland was reduced to a Russian satellite.
- He was a moderniser and a westerniser, who transformed Russian institutions. However, his attitude to westernization was ambivalent and his boorishness, cruelty and disregard for human life horrified even the most callous of the western rulers.
- His failure to establish western rules of primogeniture led to a series of succession crises after his death.
Great start to the course. I want to know more already.
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