In spite of the radicalism of Peter the Great’s reforms and the widespread opposition to them in the church and among the common people, there was never any serious question of going back on them, even during the succeeding decades (1725–1762) of relatively weak rulers, disputed successions and attempted coups. Fundamentally, that was because they proved successful at promoting Russia’s great power status, by making it possible to raise, equip and finance an army and navy.
They were also in the interests of the ruling class, the newly consolidated dvorianstvo, which, after some initial foot-dragging, was well aware of the fact. Many of the families which dominated Russia before Peter’s reign continued to do so afterwards, and continued to exploit the influence of their kith and kin. The early stages of meritocratic reform often prove to be in the interests of existing elites, since their wealth and connections secure them access to the best education and to the vital early stages of a high-flying career (the Northcote-Trevelyan reforms in the nineteenth-century British civil service had the same effect).
Those elite families were sorely needed, owing to the ambivalence of Peter’s reforms. On the one hand, impersonal raison d’état was proclaimed, on the other personal intervention was constantly needed to ensure its application in practice. Rational rule had to be implemented by personal authority, or nothing would work as intended. So the ‘state’, if it existed at all in this period, consisted of changing but not wholly unstable constellations of powerful clans, given legitimacy by promotion on merit, and held together by kinship, by symbolic devotion to the autocrat, by military uniforms, a new semi-Germanic administrative terminology and an increasingly exclusive culture borrowed from the royal courts of Europe.1
It would be wrong, however, to overestimate the effectiveness of Russian state authority in the mid-eighteenth century. In most respects the ‘state’ (to use what may be too pretentious a word) was still like a rickety framework in a howling gale, subject to all the chance cross-winds of court intrigue and kinship feuding. It was a mere skeleton whose flesh and sinews consisted of the clannish interests of the great families who provided its continuity and its motive power. As for local government, it was notional only, feeble to the point of being non-existent: for lack of suitable personnel to staff its offices, it lapsed back into the hands of the arbitrary and venal military governors from whom Peter had tried to rescue it.
Nor was there a consistent code of laws, only the chancery records of a succession of hasty, sometimes contradictory and often ill-worded decrees. In these circumstances law was, in the words of a popular saying, ‘like the shafts of a cart: wherever the horse pulls, that’s where it goes’ – the horse being anyone in authority. To make matters worse, Peter himself had neglected to apply the elementary adhesive of a binding law of succession. In the absence of stable laws or institutions, not only peasants, but nobles as well could not feel fully secure in their persons or properties unless they had protection from a powerful patron, a member of one of the leading families, with access to the court.
That is why the forty years after Peter’s death were so insecure and turbulent, with a succession of monarchs dependent on the fortuitous constellation of power in the capital’s Guards regiments. The Guards regiments were the kernel of Imperial Russia in the eighteenth century. Stationed in the capital, with unbroken access to the court even for junior officers, they constituted for much of the century a police force as well as a personal bodyguard and a crack military formation. They were the nurseries of the power and patronage which not only decided crucial questions of domestic and foreign policy, but which made and broke rulers themselves. Controlling the disposition of physical force in the capital city, they took a decisive part in every monarchical succession from the death of Peter the Great in 1725 to the assassination of Paul I in 1801. They were the mechanism by which the leading families ensured that autocracy worked on the whole in their interests and not against it.
The one serious attempt to challenge the autocratic superstructure came in 1730, on the sudden death of the adolescent Peter II. Members of the Supreme Privy Council (which had been set up in 1727, in the absence of a dominating monarch, to coordinate the executive) offered the crown to Peter the Great’s niece, Anna, Duchess of Kurland, on certain konditsii (conditions): the monarch must not marry or appoint her own heir, and in future must obtain the consent of the Council before deciding questions of war and peace, raising taxes, spending revenue, making high appointments in government or court, and making land grants. Members of the nobility were not to be deprived of life, honour or property without trial.
In the longer term, these konditsii might have formed the basis on which a constitutional monarchy could have evolved: analogous charters had had this effect in several European countries from the late middle ages onwards. Their immediate effect, however, would have been to subject Russia to oligarchic rule, with the monarch dependent on the few well-placed families which dominated the Supreme Privy Council, currently the Golitsyns and Dolgorukiis. Most of the service nobility was opposed to the idea, not only because they did not want to have to crawl to the Golitsyns and Dolgorukiis, but also because they were mindful of Russia’s vulnerability when plagued by the feuds of boyar clans. With their support Anna demonstratively tore up the konditsii and assumed the throne as an autocrat.2
There was no other attempt in the eighteenth century to limit the monarchy nor till after 1762 to reform the institutions of state. Even during the relatively protracted reign of Empress Elizabeth (1741–62) power remained in the hands of aristocratic clans and their associated Guards regiments, unrestrained by the rule of law or powerful social institution.
The first ruler who tried to continue Peter the Great’s work and to provide Russia with institutions more able to bear the weight of a huge empire was Catherine II – who, however, came to the throne in time-honoured fashion as beneficiary of a coup directed against her husband, Peter III. She saw the weaknesses of the Russian polity clearly enough. The voracious if indiscriminate reading which filled the vacant evenings of a loveless marriage had taught her that the remedy lay in promulgating good laws and founding good institutions. It is true that these laws and institutions took on a subtly different purpose in her mind from the one she found in her texts. The French and Italian Enlightenment theorists she studied – Montesquieu, Beccaria, Diderot – were thinking in terms of countries with old established institutions whose legal rights needed to be reaffirmed and buttressed about by liberal theory against the threat of an increasingly assertive monarchy. In Russia, however, law and intermediate institutions were so weak that, far from resisting the monarchy, they scarcely had backbone enough even to act as a passive transmitter of the ruler’s will. To strengthen law and institutions was above all else to strengthen the monarchy, and this was Catherine’s purpose.
For her this was doubly important because of her parlous individual situation. She occupied a throne to which she had no legitimate claim and so she urgently needed to broaden the circle of her supporters beyond the coterie of Guards officers who had acted on her behalf, beyond even the social class of which they were members. The best way to do this was to create institutions which would outlast the designs of even the most tenacious court clique, and laws which would be widely acceptable and might become permanent.
It so happened that P.I. Shuvalov, principal adviser to Empress Elizabeth, had convened a Law Codification Commission in 1754 to try and bring order to Peter Ps peremptory and improvised lawmaking and coordinate it with the preceding Law Code (Ulozhenie) of 1649. Shuvalov’s commission had been intended to examine the state of the law and make recommendations in four areas: (i) the rights of subjects according to their estate; (ii) court structures and procedures; (iii) property and contract law; (iv) punishments and penalties. The commission completed its work on the last three subjects and reported to Elizabeth, but its recommendations were not followed up, for reasons which are unclear, and the commission was abolished shortly after Catherine came to the throne.3
It is not clear that Catherine even read the materials of the commission, yet when she began her own work