Catherine’s educational initiatives were undoubtedly ambitious, perhaps too much so: many of the new schools had few pupils and relied on poorly paid and poorly qualified foreigners to provide the bulk of their teaching staff. By the end of the century scarcely more than one in a thousand inhabitants was receiving any kind of schooling. All the same, a basic network had been created on which Catherine’s successors were able to build, and the principle had been accepted that education was not the preserve of the privileged or of males, but should eventually be open to all, free of charge. This principle passed into the life-blood of Russia’s educationalists, giving them a bias towards a democratic, open-access system which survived all nineteenth-century attempts to narrow it.37
Catherine also did something to continue the drive to provide Russia with a scientific and research base outside as well as inside the Academy. She lifted the state monopoly on printing, enabling private entrepreneurs to enter the field, provided only that they registered their presses with the police. She encouraged the foundation of the Free Economic Society, which aimed to investigate techniques and practices in the field of agriculture and industry and to disseminate them as widely as possible. It was not an official institution, but was run by aristocrats and academics, and it sponsored experiments and studies, as well as the regular reading and publication of reports. On Catherine’s suggestion it investigated the relative productivity of free and serf labour, but it does not seem that she paid much attention to its verdict in favour of the former. Even if its influence was not always great, however, the Free Economic Society survived right through to 1917 as a learned society genuinely independent of the state.38
Its work was supplemented by some of the earliest scientific expeditions to investigate the minerals, flora and fauna of the empire’s immense territories, as well as their human potential. These expeditions were organized by the Academy of Sciences, which was the only institution in a position to coordinate all the disciplines involved: geography, ethnography, medicine, geology, zoology, botany, mineralogy. The results were made available in huge publication projects deposited in the Academy library, a mine of information to the present about all aspects of Russian life. Such information was essential to the eventual exploitation of the empire’s full potential – still a long distant goal.39
CONCLUSIONS At the end of Catherine’s reign, Russia was undoubtedly stronger militarily, culturally and economically than when she acceded to the throne. Both the state and society had taken on more palpable sinews, and the influence of European manners and culture had both broadened and deepened among the elites. Russia had become not only a European great power, but a successful one. Senior soldiers and statesmen, and people of high culture, would later look back on her years in power with nostalgia.
All this had not been achieved without cost, however. Catherine had shown that social estates could be created from above as well as from below, but that the process was slow, painful and contradictory. In strengthening the corporate status of the strong, it further undermined the already feeble defences of the weak. As one of Fonvizin’s characters remarks: ‘What use is the freedom of the nobility if we are not free to whip our serfs?’40 Probably that is why she hankered throughout her reign after a ‘third estate’, which would be educated and fit for official employment without the divisive privileges held by the nobility.
Perhaps also that is why Catherine never promulgated her Charter of the State Peasants: it might have underlined the utter legal helplessness of the private serfs. It would have been her most ambitious attempt to extend civil rights to large numbers of the population. At any rate, she drew back, leaving one with the suspicion that civil society could only be created at the expense of deepening the civic and ethnic rift within the Russian population, between the elites and the masses.
4 The Apogee of the Secular State
By the end of the eighteenth century the society created by Peter the Great had survived, but its culture and traditions had taken root only in one social estate, the nobility. To bridge the gap thus opened between the nobility and other strata, the ruler could now proceed in two alternative ways: either by confirming the freedoms (or privileges) of the nobility and letting them percolate gradually down the social scale, or by reining the nobility back and enforcing more equitably the universal principle of state service.
PAUL 1 (1796–1801) Paul was an exemplar of the second approach. He heartily disliked his mother, and took a positive pleasure in declaring her practice of enhancing privilege misguided. Everywhere, and especially in the army, he promoted obedience, discipline and efficiency. Paul was an extreme adherent of the ‘Prussomania’ prevalent in many late eighteenth-century European courts: the fascination with precise formation and immaculate drill. In seventeenth-century France drill had originally been introduced to enhance the battle-readiness of the soldiers; but under Paul its purpose changed, and it became a means of glorifying the monarch as symbolic hero, an embodiment of the disciplined social order he liked to think he headed. Each day at 11 a.m. throughout his reign, in the brooding Mikhailovskii Palace which was his residence, he would review the troops of the watch in their new-style Prussian uniforms.
He insisted that nobles should play their due part in this parade ground display and dedicate themselves to service, especially military service, whatever their theoretical exemption from it. He lavished decorations and serfs on those who excelled, but humiliated and punished those who evaded their duties. The Guards suffered especially from his authoritarianism: having being gallant comrades-in-arms at the elegant court of the Empress, they became mere subalterns in Paul’s grim parade lines.1
Paul stabilized the monarchy by issuing an unambiguous Law of Succession, providing for descent of the throne by way of the oldest male heir, and stipulating the precise provisions for a regency, should one be needed. He also assumed the role of religious ruler with greater panache than any monarch since the seventeenth century. He accepted the office of Grand Master of the Knights of Malta after the Knights’ home island had fallen to Napoleon, and used the occasion to cultivate his image as doughty defender of Christianity against the aggressive atheism of the French revolution. What was involved was not just Orthodoxy but Christianity as a whole, the first sign that the Russian monarch aspired to a universal religious mission. He intended that the new order of the Knights of Malta should offer an example of chivalry and re-inspire in nobles the ideals of service: self-sacrifice, duty and discipline.2
To isolate Russia from the contagion of the French revolution, Paul forbade the import of books and journals and, in an extraordinary abrogation of previous practice, prohibited travel abroad-which had been the normal way for Russian nobles to round off their education. He also made abundant use of his intelligence service, the tainaia ekspeditsiia (inherited, ironically, from his mother) to spy on nobles whom he suspected of opposition to himself. Although he never repealed the Charter to the Nobility, he undid many of its provisions. Local assemblies of the nobility were abolished, together with their right to elect local officials, who were instead appointed by the government. Landed estates were subjected to taxation, and the gentry’s emancipation from corporal punishment was ended: in certain circumstances, nobles could now be flogged.
On the peasant question Paul was inconsistent, since he awarded his favourites land populated by serfs no less bountifully than his mother; but at the same time he restored the right of serfs to petition the crown over mistreatment,