Russia: People and Empire: 1552–1917

During the fourteenth century Lithuania became the dominant power in the region, and it repulsed the Mongols a century before Muscovy was able to do so. Lithuania in turn fell under the influence of Poland, with which the Grand Prince of Lithuania concluded a dynastic union in 1385, later converted into a joint Commonwealth. The Catholic and Latinate culture of Poland took hold among the elites of the region, though profession of the Orthodox faith continued to be tolerated. The stage was set for a centuries-long national and religious struggle between Poland and Russia, Roman Catholicism and Orthodoxy.

During the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, with the greater physical security afforded by the Polish-Lithuanian state, Ukraine became its grain belt. The landed nobility gained in both privilege and material wealth, while imposing an ever more debilitating serfdom on the peasants. The Lithuanian Statute of 1529, together with the Magdeburg Law in the cities, provided some guarantees of citizenship for all non-serfs and, although often in practice ignored, it inculcated a stronger legal awareness in Ukraine than was prevalent in Muscovy.

Polish culture proved highly attractive to many Ukrainian landowners, especially since those who converted to Catholicism received the full rights of the szlachta (Polish nobility) to enserf the peasants and to participate as citizens in the political life of the Commonwealth. With the coming of the counter-reformation, the Polish king encouraged the expansion of a network of Jesuit colleges, which brought with them the latest in European culture and thinking, while a new Greek Catholic (or Uniate) Church was created, Orthodox in ritual, but administratively in union with Rome, which took over most Orthodox parishes. Originally conceived as an attempt to begin the reunification of Catholicism and Orthodoxy, the Uniate Church became in effect an instrument of Polonization.32

Where the ill-defined borders of the joint Commonwealth faded into the steppe, however, Catholicism and high culture made but few and feeble inroads. There the Cossack community of the lower Dnieper continued its steppe way of life, hunting, fishing, raiding across the sea into the Ottoman Empire, and striking up temporary alliances with Muscovy or Poland for the defence of its frontiers. The Cossacks’ headquarters, the Sech’, on an island below the Dnieper rapids, was almost impregnable and guaranteed their dogged self-rule as well as their privileges, notably their exemption from taxation, which were registered by the Polish crown.

By the mid-seventeenth century the Polish king and szlachta, tiring of the anarchy on their borders and jealous of the Cossacks’ privileges, attempted forcefully to subjugate the Dnieper community and incorporate it fully into the Commonwealth. The attempt provoked a rebellion in defence of Cossack self-rule: its leader, Hetman Bohdan Khmel’nyts’kyi, sought the protection of the Muscovite Tsar.

The resultant Treaty of Pereiaslavl’ (1654) was a locus classicus of the discrepancy between steppe diplomacy and that of Muscovy. Khmel’nyts’kyi expected the Tsar’s envoy, Vasilii Buturlin, to join him in taking an oath to observe the terms of the treaty. When Buturlin refused, declaring that it was unthinkable for the Tsar to bind himself by oath to a subject, Khmel’nyts’kyi walked out of the negotiations. So pressing was his military need, however, that he subsequently changed his mind and consented to accept Buturlin’s assurances of the Tsar’s good faith instead of an explicit oath. The Cossacks pledged the Tsar ‘eternal loyalty’, while he in turn confirmed the Cossack Host in its privileges, including its own law and administration, the right to elect its own Hetman and to receive foreign envoys not hostile to the Tsar. He also guaranteed the Ukrainian nobility, church and cities their traditional rights. Under these arrangements the alliance was concluded and Poland was driven out of left-bank Ukraine and Kiev.33

Left-bank Ukraine became the site of a new state, the Ukrainian Hetmanate, which preserved a degree of autonomy, as well as its own culture, well into the eighteenth century. The representatives of nobles, clergymen and burghers were given their place alongside Cossacks in the General Council which elected the Hetman. An institutional foundation was thus laid for the Cossacks to create the framework of a Ukrainian nation-state in alliance with Russia.

Moscow, however, regarded the Treaty of Pereiaslavl’ as the first step in the permanent incorporation – or reincorporation – of the territories of what it called ‘Little Russia’ into the empire, as part of the ‘gathering of the Russian lands’. It began a process of creeping integration, sowing and exploiting dissensions within Ukrainian society. Muscovite voevodas listened to the grievances of peasants and rank-and-file Cossacks against their elites, and sometimes passed them on to Moscow to settle. In 1686, after long negotiations with the Patriarch of Constantinople, the Kievan metropolitanate, symbol of the autocephaly of the Orthodox Church in Ukraine, was subordinated to Moscow.34

The turning-point in relations came during Peter l’s war against Sweden. The Hetman, Ivan Mazepa, discovered that the Russian army was so preoccupied with defending the road to Moscow against Charles XII that it had no troops to spare to come to the aid of the Ukrainians. This unwelcome discovery raised the question whether the Treaty of Pereiaslavl’ was still valid: both in feudal and in steppe diplomacy, an overlord who was no longer willing or able to provide protection for a vassal forfeited any claim on his continuing loyalty.

Mazepa decided to throw in his lot with the Swedes and the Poles, in the expectation that Ukraine would eventually become a partner in the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. Peter reacted swiftly and ruthlessly to his defection. He accused him of treason, and sent an army under Prince Menshikov to his headquarters town of Baturyn, which was taken with the slaughter of all its inhabitants. Elsewhere too Russian commanders sought out Mazepa’s supporters, interrogated them and sent them to execution or exile. They turned out to be fewer than expected, perhaps because of Peter’s demonstrative ruthlessness, or perhaps because many Cossacks did not want to resubmit themselves to a Catholic realm.35

Thereafter the way was open for the complete integration of Ukraine into the Russian Empire. Ukrainian affairs were transferred from the College for Foreign Affairs to the Senate, implying that Ukraine was an integral part of Russia. The Hetmanate was first suspended and then abolished in 1763. Its institutions were in decline anyway, since Cossacks had to bear full military duties without serfs to cultivate their lands. Growing polarization among the Cossacks also weakened their sense of a common political destiny: poorer Cossacks and townsfolk looked to the Russian administration and law courts to protect them against exploitation by their superiors.

Besides, there were benefits for Ukrainian nobles in being fully assimilated into the imperial dvorianstvo. For one thing, it converted their peasants into serfs, over whom they had full rights. Besides, thanks to their relatively high level of culture and education, they were often at an advantage when competing with their Muscovite counterparts for official positions, especially since they were ethnically close and able to speak good Russian. Incorporation offered them scope for their talents, rather as the Union of England and Scotland offered attractive career opportunities to Scots far outside their ancestral homeland.

By the 1780s the Hetmanate had been abolished and divided up into gubernii identical with those elsewhere in the empire. Cossack regiments were absorbed into the Russian army, though with their own distinctive names, uniforms and ranks as a relic of their separate status. The Sech’ was not only closed down but razed, now that it was no longer needed for defence against the Turks.36

Ukraine’s loss of its distinct identity was more complete than that of any other region of the empire. During the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the Ukrainian rural elites became to all intents and purposes Russian, while the larger towns were cosmopolitan, with Russians, Jews, Poles, Germans, Greeks and others living side by side. The peasants spoke a variety of Ukrainian dialects, but were far from any sense of identity with their landowners or of belonging to a Ukrainian nation. In so far as a separate Ukrainian identity lingered, it was among scholars and professional people interested in literature, folklore and antiquities.

BESSARABIA Bessarabia was really an extension of the southern part of Ukraine, and had a similarly mixed urban population; only here the peasantry was Romanian. It was a thin sliver of land between the rivers Dniester and the Prut, conquered by Russia in 1812. It formed the north-eastern half of the province of Moldavia, itself one of the two Romanian principalities which had been in dispute between the Russian and Ottoman empires since the early eighteenth century. Traditionally ruled over by Romanian boyars under Greek Phanariot hospodars, it had been subjected to an especially rapacious system of tax-farming which had left its peasants, despite a fertile soil, among the most poverty-stricken in Europe. After the Crimean War and the declaration of Romanian independence in 1861, it became for a time part of Romania, and even after its return at the Congress of Berlin it remained the only part of Russia’s European territory directly threatened by potential national irredentism, that is, claimed by a nation-state across the border.

After its initial annexation in 1812, Bessarabia enjoyed a period of autonomy on the Finnish model, but this was ended in 1828. Thereafter both the poverty of the region and its exposed situation led the imperial authorities to do everything possible to weaken the indigenous elites and to import Russian officials and landowners. By the late nineteenth century Bessarabia had thus become home to a peculiarly raw and brash immigrant Russian ruling class; it was a soil in which monarchist and anti-Semitic movements found abundant nourishment.37

POLAND In the second half of the eighteenth century Russia embarked on perhaps its most fateful episode of imperial expansion when it destroyed the Polish state and annexed a large part of its territory. To understand why this happened, and why Russia displayed such cynicism and brutality, we have to remember that Poland had itself once been a rival great power, contesting the same territories and claiming the same right to absorb all East Slavs into its realm, for a time with considerable success. It is as if, during the British Civil War of the seventeenth century, an Irish Catholic king had invaded England, captured London, and for a time occupied the throne.

This was not just great power rivalry, but also a bitter family quarrel. The territories which formed the eastern half of the Commonwealth of Poland-Lithuania had belonged in pre-Mongol days to the patrimony of the princes of Rus’: they were thus part of the agenda of the ‘gathering of the lands of Rus’. The Poles, being Slavs, and having inherited part of the legacy of Kievan Rus’, could put forward perfectly plausible rival claims to the loyalty of the Ukrainians and Belorussians. The fact that they were also Catholics made their pretensions doubly repugnant in the eyes of Orthodox Russians. Their culture, conspicuously aristocratic and westernized, completed the picture of family perfidy.

Poland was moreover strategically vital to Russia. It commanded the flat, open approaches from the west, across which European powers over the centuries repeatedly invaded Russia. Applying the logic of steppe diplomacy by which Russia was accustomed to regulate its dealings with its neighbours, Poland must either be strong enough to offer both resistance and a stable frontier, like China, or else, if weak, it must be under Russia’s thumb.

As it became obvious during the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries that Poland was in fact growing dangerously weak, Russia began to deploy the techniques which had served it well in overcoming adversaries of the steppe: promoting internal splits in order to achieve domination and if necessary destruction. It was Poland’s misfortune that these devices were singularly effective when applied to her. Her monarchy was elective, not hereditary, allowing ample scope for the free play of faction. Her libertarian constitution permitted a single member of the Diet to thwart a resolution – a right reputedly not exercised lightly, but nevertheless one which enfeebled the state’s capacity to act – and also envisaged the right of ‘confederation’, which entitled groups of citizens to uphold what they believed to be the law by means of joint armed action.38

Peter I and his successors exploited these defects to keep Poland weak and to maintain a Russian hegemony over it, backing aristocratic factions, impeding attempts to reform the constitution and interfering in royal elections. When necessary, Russian troops were sent in, on one occasion breaking into the Diet when it was in session and arresting deputies unfavourable to the Russian cause.

Unlike the steppe khanates, however, Poland was a power among other European powers, who therefore had a legitimate interest in what happened to her. Without provoking a general European war, which was clearly not in her interests, Russia could not carry out the destruction of Poland without considering the susceptibilities of at least Austria and Prussia. Hence the eventual dismemberment of the Polish state could take place only by agreement among all three powers. It happened in three stages, in 1772, 1793 and 1795. In conception, however, this was an act of traditional Russian empire-building: in announcing the second partition, Catherine II claimed that Russia was resuming sovereignty over ‘lands and citizens which once belonged to the Russian Empire, which are inhabited by their fellow-countrymen and are illuminated by the Orthodox faith’.39

The population Russia absorbed during the partitions was very diverse: it included some 40% Ruthenians (Ukrainians or Belorussians), 26% Poles, 20% Lithuanians, 10% Jews and 4% Russians; 38% were Catholics, 40% Uniate, 10% of the Jewish faith and 6.5% Orthodox.40 But it was not the diversity which caused Russia difficulties: after all, she had coped with plenty of that already. More fateful was the fact that in the Poles and the Jews she had taken in the two nations who were to prove the most irreconcilable to Russian imperial rule, a permanent source of bitterness and conflict.

The Poles were Roman Catholic, and most of them identified with the Latin West of the Counter-Reformation. Culturally and economically they were more advanced than the Russians. Their concept of citizenship ran counter to the whole theory and practice of political authority in Russia. In Poland, as in England, political rights proceeded from a broadening of feudal aristocratic privilege – the ‘golden liberty’, as it was known – to embrace the whole population. This process had begun belatedly but unmistakably in the last years of the Commonwealth, in the constitution of 3 May 1791. Both in its traditional aristocratic and in its new democratic forms, the Polish ideal was incompatible with Russian autocracy. Unfortunately for the Poles, and probably for the Russians too, the continuing split in their society, between the nobility (szlachta) and the rest, made it impossible for them to mount a united movement of national resistance after incorporation into Russia. Unable either to throw off Russian domination or to submit meekly to it, Poland became a permanent festering sore on the body politic of Russia. It demonstrated vividly the problem of an Asiatic empire trying to dominate a European nation.

The old szlachta feeling for liberty was never altogether lost: under Russian rule it revived in the guise of romanticism. With the aid of its misty evocations Poles could dream of a nation – a Christ-like nation Mickiewicz called it – without the imperfections which reality perforce imposes, and each Polish patriot could indulge his own vision of a perfect community without sacrificing one jot of his individuality for the sake of it. In this way the Poles somehow elided the centuries which most peoples passed through between medieval chivalry and the modern nation-state. The poet Kazimierz Brodzinski put it simply:

Hail, O Christ, Thou Lord of Men! Poland in Thy footsteps treading Like Thee suffers, at Thy bidding; Like Thee, too, shall rise again.41

The Tsars were not wholly insensitive to the peculiar problem they faced in Poland, and they made some attempt, as they had in other parts of the empire, to find ways of working peacefully with the Polish elite. Alexander I appointed a leading Polish nobleman, Prince Adam Czartoryski, who was also his close friend, as his Foreign Minister, and for a time took seriously his proposal for a ‘Europe of nations’, in which Poland would be independent under Russian protectorate.42 Even after the defeat of Napoleon, when he turned his Holy Alliance against nations rather than in favour of them, the Tsar still granted Poland a constitution which gave it home rule in personal union with Russia.

From 1815, the Congress Kingdom of Poland, which included Warsaw, the old capital city, had its own government, its own elected legislative assembly (the Sejm), its own army, passports, currency and citizenship. Civil liberties were guaranteed; Polish was the official language, and the Catholic Church was accorded a recognized status as that of the majority of the people. Similar arrangements were being made for Finland at the time [see below, p. 37], and many educated Russians hoped that they might prove to be prototypes of a future Russian constitution. In a speech to the Sejm in 1818, Alexander himself expressed the hope that the Polish constitution would ‘extend a beneficial influence over all the countries which Providence has committed to my care’.43

On the other hand, many other Russians never ceased to be suspicious that granting Poland real nationhood would enable it to filch the old principality of Lithuania, which was largely populated by Ukrainian, Belorussian and Lithuanian peasants, whom they considered natural subjects of Russia. Besides, Alexander was not accustomed to a real parliament and tended to equate serious opposition with sedition. When members of the Sejm spoke out against censorship and claimed the right to impeach ministers, he suspended it for four years and revoked the mandates of some of the deputies. Growing increasingly suspicious of the numerous patriotic and masonic societies which flourished in Poland, he closed them down (as in Russia) and instituted a purge of Wilno University.44

After the Decembrist rebellion of 1825, Nicholas I was even more suspicious of the Poles, and was not satisfied that Polish courts dealt firmly enough with those he believed to have been involved in treason. Matters came to a head when in November 1830 one of the patriotic societies tried to assassinate the Viceroy, Grand Duke Konstantin, and to disarm the Russian garrison. They failed in their immediate aim, but did seize control of the city of Warsaw, turning discontent into an armed insurrection and polarizing the situation. Every Pole had to decide for or against participation in the revolt, and Czartoryski reluctantly sponsored it, becoming head of an independent Polish government at war with Russia.

As before, however, Poland remained divided, both between moderates and radicals in the capital, and more generally between the szlachta and the peasants. A land reform was urgent if the insurrection was to gain the support of the peasants, and without that support it had no chance of success against the much larger Russian army. But the Polish government temporized until it was too late. In spite of the sterling fighting qualities which the Polish army displayed then, the Russians were able to restore complete control by the autumn of 1831.45

The result was the destruction of Poland’s distinctive institutions. Nicholas I warned in 1835: ‘If you persist in nursing your dreams of a distinct nationality, of an independent Poland … you can only bring the greatest of misfortunes upon yourselves.’ The Sejm and the separate army were abolished, and most of Poland’s affairs brought under Russian ministries. The ruble replaced the zloty. The University of Warsaw was closed, and all schools subjected to direct Russian control. The Russian language became officially acceptable alongside Polish in administration and justice, and the Russian criminal code replaced the Polish one. The Uniate Church in former Lithuania was assimilated into the Orthodox Church.46

In short, Poland, a proud and independent European nation, was treated as if it were less than a steppe khanate. Officers who had served in the rebellious army were cashiered and deported to Siberia, and nobles lost their estates. Many forestalled this fate by emigrating, mostly to France, which became the home of an alternative Poland. At the Hotel Lambert Czartoryski became a kind of king in exile. The Polish Democratic Society in Paris mocked Europe’s diplomatic arrangements by talking of a ‘Holy Alliance of Peoples’. Naturally the Russians were cast in the role of principal enemy of this ‘Alliance’, and the Polish emigration, with its brilliant poets, musicians, soldiers and elder statesmen aroused lively anti-Russian sentiment over most of Europe. The ‘saviour of Europe’ in 1812–15, Russia now became the ‘gendarme of Europe’, a reputation which was to hamper her diplomatic efforts greatly for the rest of the nineteenth century.

Even worse, when the Russian government resumed the path of reform in Poland, in the 1860s, the result was more or less a repetition of the 1830 rebellion. By making concessions to the church, permitting the re-opening of part of Warsaw University and encouraging serious discussion of reforms, including the abolition of serfdom, Alexander II aroused exaggerated hopes and also provoked bitter disagreements. The result was an armed insurrection in 1863–4, which aimed to restore Polish independence. It proved very tenacious: for a time it succeeded in driving the Russian army almost out of Poland and in establishing an alternative administration, effective at least in the rural areas. But as before the rising was undermined by its own internal divisions and by the failure to attract support from any European power. By the end of 1864 the Russian army regained complete control, and this time Poland lost the last vestiges of its separate status: what had been the ‘Congress Kingdom’ became merely ‘the Vistula region’.47 The debacle was not only disastrous for Poland, but led to a decisive souring of the reform efforts of Alexander II [see Part 4, Chapter 1].

THE JEWS The partitions of Poland brought some 400,000 Jews into the empire.48 They confronted their new masters with problems analogous to those of the Poles, yet also different. They were yet another ‘awkward nationality’ as far as Russian administrators were concerned, resistant to assimilation and difficult to fit into the empire’s categories of population. They had an ancient religion and culture, a level of literacy and communal cohesion far higher than those of the Russians. They usually excelled at any trade, manufacture or profession they practised, so that they were dangerous competitors for others. They were widely resented among the population, partly for this reason, and partly because of religion: talk of the ‘murderers of Christ’ found a sympathetic echo among some believers, both Catholic and Orthodox.

Yet, in spite of their remarkable culture and talents, the Jews were nearly all poor, partly owing to discrimination long practised against them, partly because of the economic decline of eighteenth-century Poland. Their poverty, together with the economic functions they usually filled – as shopkeepers, traders, artisans, stewards, innkeepers and moneylenders – made it out of the question that any of them should be assimilated into the Russian nobility. They thus remained condemned to a conjunction of high achievement and low status: an unstable and explosive mixture.