11.4: Great Powers--Russia

Before the late fifteenth century, there was no unified state called "Russia". Originally populated by Slavic tribal groups, Swedish Vikings called the Rus colonized and mixed with the native Slavs over the course of the ninth century. The Rus were led by princes who ruled towns that eventually developed into small cities, the most important of which was Kyiv in the present-day country of Ukraine. Eventually, the Rus converted to Eastern Orthodox Christianity, largely due to the influence of Byzantium missionaries. However, Mongol invasions undermined historical development. Russian History still refers to this period as the "Mongol Yoke" (1237 – 1480).

The “Mongol yoke” was loosened due to the efforts of the Grand Princes Ivan III (r. 1462 – 1505) and his grandson Ivan IV – “the Terrible” (r. 1533 – 1584). Ivan III was the prince of Muscovy, the territory around the city of Moscow. His ruthless militarism led to the expansion of Muscovy’s influence to the Baltic Sea, fighting the Polish – Lithuanian Commonwealth to the west and conquering the prosperous city of Novgorod and its territories. He also overthrew the authority of the Mongol Golden Horde and began the process of permanently ending Mongol control in Russia. For the first time, a Russian prince had carved out a significant territory through conquest.

Two generations later, Ivan IV came to power in Muscovy. Under his rule, Muscovy conquered a large part of the Mongol Golden Horde’s territory and pushed back Turkic khans in the south. He dispatched explorers and hunters into Siberia, beginning the long process of conquest over the region. Further, Ivan was the first Russian ruler to claim the title of Tsar (also anglicized as Czar), meaning "Caesar." Because Russia had adopted Eastern Orthodox Christianity and Constantinople (the last remnant of the actual Roman Empire) fell to the Turks in 1453, Russian rulers after Ivan claimed that they were the true inheritors of the political power of the ancient Roman emperors. Just as the Holy Roman Emperors in the west claimed to be the political descendants of Roman authority (the German word “Kaiser” means “Caesar”) so did the Tsars of Russia.

Ivan IV asserted his authority through sheer brutality and terror. Thus, the moniker "the Terrible". For example, he had the beggars of Novgorod burned to death, nobles that displeased him ripped apart by wolves and dogs, and whole noble families slaughtered when he thought they posed a threat to his authority or were simply slow to respond to his demands. His overall goal was the transformation of the Russian nobles – called boyars. As servants of the state, their power would only be based on their loyalty to the Tsar.

Figure 11.4.1: The expansion of Russian imperial control from the early sixteenth century until 1700.

After Ivan’s death, Russia was plunged into the Time of Troubles (1598 – 1613), a period of anarchy in which no one reigned as the recognized sovereign. The 'troubles' ended when an assembly of nobles elected the first member of the Romanov family as Tsar Michel I. For the next few decades, the subsequent tsars remained weak, plagued by the resistance of nobles and huge peasant uprisings.

When times were hard for Russian peasants, they frequently fled to the frontier, either Siberia or the Ukraine (meaning “border region”). This action exacerbated an ongoing labor shortage problem. Unlike in the west, there was more than enough land in Russia, just not enough peasants to work it. In 1649, the institution of serfdom was formally cemented by the tsarist state. This policy made peasants legally better than slaves, who were forced to work the land and serve the state in war when conscripted.

Under Tsar Peter I (the Great), r. 1682 – 1725, Russia’s transformation and engagement with the rest of Europe began in earnest. (Up to that point, the west knew so little about Russia that Louis XIV once sent a letter to a Tsar who had been dead for twelve years.) Russian nobles tended to be uneducated and uncouth compared to their western counterparts. Further, the Russian Orthodox Church had little emphasis on learning, which was an important role in the West's Catholic and Protestant churches.

Figure 11.4.2: The young Peter the Great in a portrait he presented to the English King William III (whom he was visiting during his travels around Western Europe).

Peter decided to travel to Western Europe, disguised as a normal workman. In the process, he personally learned about shipbuilding and military organization. Upon returning, he started to transform the Russian state and military.

• Russian nobility was forced to dress and act more like Western Europeans.
• Russian noble children were sent abroad for their education.
• An enormous navy and army were built to fight the Swedes and the Turks.
• Using semi-slave labor, the new port city of St. Petersburg was created as the new imperial capital.
• Military conscription was required and one out of every twenty serfs had to serve for life in his armies.
• New taxes and royal monopolies were instituted, with over two-thirds of state revenues going to the military.
• Boyars were forced to undergo military education and serve as army officers.
• After 1722, all male nobles were required to serve the state either as civil officials or military officers.

In 1711, Peter fought an ultimately-unsuccessful war against the Ottomans, while capturing some territories in the process. Likewise, he seized the Baltic territories of Livonia and Estonia from what was then the unified kingdom of Poland – Lithuania. His major enemy, Sweden, was a powerful late-medieval and early-modern kingdom. By the 1650s, Sweden ruled Denmark, Norway, Finland, and the Baltic region. King Charles XI (r. 1660 – 1697) successfully imitated Louis XIV’s absolutism by pitting lesser nobles against greater ones, forcing the nobles to serve him directly. His son Charles XII (r. 1697 – 1718) was so arrogant that he snatched the crown from the hand of the Lutheran minister at his own coronation and put it on his head. He also refused to swear the normal coronation oath.

In 1700, Denmark, joined with the German princedom of Saxony, attempted to reassert its sovereignty. During this Great Northern War (1700 – 1721), Peter the Great joined in, intent on seizing Baltic territory for a permanent port. Rather than invade Russia, Charles shifted his focus to Poland and Saxony. In 1703, the Russians captured the mouth of the Neva River and Tsar Peter ordered the construction of his new capital city, St. Petersburg. The war dragged on for years, with Charles XII dying fighting a rebellion in Norway in 1718, leaving no heir. By 1721, the Swedish forces were finally and definitively beaten, leaving Russia dominant in the Baltic region.

When Peter died in 1725, (after contracting pneumonia or the flu from diving into the freezing Neva to save a drowning man), the Russian Empire was six times larger than it had been under Ivan the Terrible. While Russia suffered from a period of weak rule after Peter’s death, it was simply so large and the Tsar’s authority so absolute that it remained a great power.

In 1762, the Prussian-born empress Catherine (who later acquired the honorific “the Great”) seized power from her husband in a coup. Catherine would go on to introduce reforms meant to

• improve the Russian economy
• create the first state-financed banks
• welcome German settlers to the region of the Volga River to modernize farming practices
• modernize the army and the state bureaucracy to improve efficiency.

Despite being an enthusiastic supporter of “Enlightened” philosophy, Catherine was focused on Russian expansion, seizing the Crimean Peninsula from the Ottoman Empire, expanding Russian power in Central Asia, and extinguishing Polish independence completely, with Poland divided between Russia, Prussia, and Austria in 1795. By her death in 1796, Russia was more powerful than ever.Source: Brigham Young University