The inflated paper money, the excessive taxation, the reliance on heavy popular drinking, the absence of budgetary discipline: all these evils were symptoms of a state which was straining itself beyond what the resources of land and people would bear at the current level of technology. Its demands, moreover, were obstructing the development of an internal market and investment such as might have raised the level of that technology. There was no shortage of proposals about how those resources might be more efficiently and less damagingly mobilized, but the pressure of immediate needs and the dead hand of serfdom ensured that they were never properly followed up.
In some ways Catherine’s most successful economic measures were connected with the colonization of newly opened or under-populated territories, in the Volga basin and the Urals, and especially along the coast of the Black Sea, in so-called Novorossiia or ‘New Russia’, annexed from Turkey between 1774 and 1792. Here, presented with a tabula rasa, the combination of cameralism and mercantilism came into its own, in the absence of competing privileged social groups or corporate organizations. In territories largely unpopulated Catherine was able to attract immigrants both from within Russia and from more crowded European countries, especially from Germany, by offering them land, guarantees of religious toleration, favourable loans and a period of relief from taxation.20
The conquest and successful colonization of this region freed Russia from many of the chronic disadvantages it had suffered for centuries while hemmed in among the forests and on the poor soils of the north. It provided secure and fertile soil and reliable all-year communications with Europe and the Middle East. During the early nineteenth century the production of grain and other agricultural goods from these regions decisively ameliorated the economic situation of the whole empire: in effect they underwrote Russia’s great power status for another century.
The success of the policy was due to the way in which the Russian authorities could easily combine military and civilian arms of government, subordinating both to a rational vision of political economy untrammelled by inherited custom or ethnic prejudice.21 Here the absence of intermediate associations with their own interests and privileges was a positive advantage.
The military campaigns necessary to conquer these regions imposed, however, a grievous burden on the population, nobles as well as peasants. Catherine’s Turkish wars entailed calling up many able-bodied male peasants, requisitioning horses and grain stores, raising taxes, inflating the currency and in other ways undermining the productive potential of both noble estates and peasant holdings. Perhaps the most dangerous opposition Catherine ever faced was from groups of courtiers and writers centred first around Nikita Panin and later A. R. Vorontsov, and including the heir to the throne: they contended that her aggressive southern policy (which tactfully they identified with court favourites rather than with her personally) was both ruinous to the economy and exposed the northern regions, including the capital city, to strategic dangers, especially from Sweden. While they never gained a predominant influence, these thinkers – who included writers like Shcherbatov, Fonvizin, Radishchev and Novikov – presented a more ‘organic’ alternative to the expansive military and imperial policies of Catherine.22
THE PUGACHEV REBELLION Rationalism and disdain for tradition were the very characteristics which rendered the imperial regime so alien to many of its peoples. The Pugachev rebellion was the last and most serious in a long series of risings which broke out on the south-eastern borders of the Russian state, in that open and ill-defined region where Old Believers and other fugitives from imperial authority rubbed shoulders with non-Russian tribesmen of the steppes, and where Cossacks mounted defence of the Tsar’s fortresses and stockades, while continuing to dream of the brigands’ licence which they had been accustomed to enjoy.
By the mid-eighteenth century the region was being slowly but surely brought under firm imperial control. In fact, one may regard the Pugachev rebellion as the last – but powerful – spasm of peoples whose untrammelled way of life was incompatible with distinct and definite state authority. Nobles were being awarded new estates along and beyond the Volga, and peasants who already lived there were becoming serfs, while new ones were being imported. Obrok (dues in money or kind) was being raised or converted into barshchina (labour dues) by landlords anxious to maximize their revenues and to take advantage of fresh and lucrative trading opportunities. A census and land survey undertaken soon after Catherine II came to power fixed and perpetuated these still relatively unfamiliar arrangements. Also new market opportunities were opening up along the Volga and in the south, putting pressure on more traditional and less productive enterprises.23
A special group in the area were the odnodvortsy, survivors of the peasant-soldiers sent to man the Volga frontier during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and most of them Old Believers. Still in theory freemen, they suffered from the economic competition of the nobles, feared losing their independence and falling into the regular taxpaying estates as state peasants.
The rebellion began among the Yaik Cossacks, whose situation reflected the changes wrought by the ever more intrusive Tsarist state. They had long enjoyed the freedom to run their own affairs, to elect their own leaders and to hunt, fish and raid along the lower Yaik (Ural) River as they chose, in return for acknowledging the Tsar’s ultimate suzerainty and rendering him service when required. A change in this status came in 1748, when the government decreed the establishment of a Yaik Army of seven regiments to man the Orenburg Line currently being built to keep out the Kazakhs and divide them from the Bashkirs. A few Yaik Cossacks among the starshyna (officer class) reacted favourably to this idea, hoping that it would give them secure status within the Table of Ranks; but most rank-and-file Cossacks opposed integration into the Russian army as an infringement of their freedom and of their elective democratic institutions. They also feared being enlisted as common soldiers. Their suspicions were deepened by the proposal in 1769 to form a ‘Moscow legion’ from the smaller Cossack hosts to fight against the Turks. This implied wearing regular uniform, undergoing parade-ground drilling, and worst of all having beards shaven, a prospect deeply repugnant to Old Believers.
Emel’ian Pugachev was discovered and put up as a front man by the disaffected Yaik Cossacks. A Don Cossack by origin, he had deserted from the Russian army and become a fugitive: several times captured, he had always contrived to escape. He assumed the title of the dead Emperor Peter III and espoused the Old Belief. This ruse may have been suggested to him by a Yaik Cossack, but he took on his invented roles with conviction and panache, and he became a figure far outstripping the Cossacks’ ability to manipulate him.
Peter III had aroused hopes among peasants and religious dissidents by some of the measures he had adopted during his brief period as Tsar. He had expropriated church lands and thereby converted ecclesiastical and monastic serfs to the more favourable status of state peasants. He had prohibited the purchase of serfs by non-nobles and halted the ascription of serfs to factories and mines. He had eased the persecution of Old Believers and pardoned fugitive schismatics who voluntarily returned from abroad. His emancipation of the nobility from state service, though not itself of direct benefit to the serfs, seemed to hold out the hope that they too might soon be emancipated from equivalent obligations.
At any rate, the sudden dethronement of Peter III aroused the strongest suspicions among ordinary peasants, especially since his successor was a German, popularly held not to be truly an Orthodox believer. Pugachev was not the first to profit from his reputation by claiming to be the suffering and wandering deposed