Russia. A History

These classical images not only linked Russia to contemporary Europe (where a revival of classical antiquity was in full swing), but also suggested ties to the accepted fount of imperial authority—ancient Greece and Rome. Significantly, classicism functioned to separate Russia’s ‘imperiia’ from the lineage of the contiguous Byzantine and Mongol Empires, which it had traditionally invoked to legitimize territorial claims and even validate the mantle of rulership. But eighteenth-century expansion to the east, south, and west had little to do with the Byzantine and Mongol legacies; hence the soaring leap across space and time to establish cultural ties with classical empires—which had made similar grandiose claims—became an ideological imperative. That impulse lay behind the proclamation in 1721 that Russia was an empire, a claim embraced by Peter’s successors and integral to the new state identity.

However imposing the classical representations of power may have been, they were meaningless if people refused to submit to its will. And in Russia, more so than in many other states, the theatricality of imperial and autocratic power had little relevance to the everyday life of people remote from court and capital. As the historian Marc Raeff has observed, the rulers of eighteenth-century Russia attempted to graft the cameralist order of Central Europe’s ‘well-ordered police state’ onto the apparent sprawling disorder of the empire’s multiple populations. Although the police state could not create social order by itself, it did articulate an institutional and conceptual framework that allowed state institutions to proclaim their sovereignty.

Expansion and Foreign Policy

The navy and the standing army had deteriorated severely in the decade after Peter’s death, but they nonetheless remained a powerful force and consumed most of the state’s revenues—approximately 70 to 90 per cent in any given year during the eighteenth century. Russia concentrated most of its forces along the southern waterways and the borders of the Ottoman Empire, but major resources had to be diverted to deal with other conflicts—for example, those that ended in the defeat of Sweden (1743) and the annexation of the Crimean peninsula (1783).

Of particular import was Russia’s involvement in the Seven Years War (1755–62). Initially, Russia interceded as an ally of Austria and France against Prussia; despite the expense and losses, the campaigns were advancing successfully and, during the final months of Elizabeth’s reign, Russian troops were making steady progress towards Berlin. Peter III, however, suddenly terminated Russia’s participation (whether from blind admiration for things Prussian or from an awareness that the state coffers were empty) and switched sides, to the outrage of his erstwhile allies. Catherine initially repudiated this volte-face in policy, but in a few years took a similar tack—chiefly because the new alignment (including Austria as well as Prussia) provided the only way to secure Russia’s growing interest in Poland.

Prior to the outbreak of war with revolutionary France in the 1790s, however, Russia’s foreign policy focused primarily on the Black Sea. The old chestnut of a primeval Russian ‘urge to the sea’ has long since faded into well-deserved oblivion, but the Black Sea did affect vital national interests—as an outlet to international waters and especially international markets. Although Peter the Great gained a foothold on the Baltic (through the acquisition of Livland and Estonia in 1721), he had had much less success against the Ottoman Empire, leaving the Black Sea out of reach. Thus the strategic waterways that connected the Black Sea with the eastern Mediterranean still traversed territories under Ottoman control. Obviously, any attempt to satisfy these territorial ambitions meant long-term enmity between the Ottoman and Russian Empires. But Catherine did nourish such far-reaching ambitions; at one point, she embraced the vision of southern dominion articulated by her favourite, Prince Grigorii Potemkin, and even spoke of ‘liberating’ Constantinople in the 1780s and making it her new capital.