Russia 1450-1750

 

Summary

Russia entered this period (1450-1750) still under control of the Mongols, a situation that isolated Russia from many of the advancements made in Western Europe during this time.  When Russians did break free from Mongol domination, they began a period of territorial expansion and government reform.  They embarked on an aggressive program of westernization in order to leap forward and make up for their backwardness vis-à-vis the West.  The forced imposition of European culture on the people of Russia would create an identity crisis for Russians that continues to this day.

 

Breaking the Mongols’ Grip

Ironically, Mongol occupation provided Russians with some of the tools they would need for liberation and independence.  If you remember, the Mongols set up Russia as a tributary feudal state and selected Moscow as the location from which tribute payments would be collected.  The center of power thus shifted from Kiev to Moscow.  The Orthodox Church followed this path as well and made Moscow the bureaucratic center of the Russian Orthodox Church.  But more significantly, Mongols enlisted local Russian princes around Moscow to aid in the collection of tributary payments; this not only strengthened the Duchy of Moscow but gave them the administrative experience they would need for independence.  Not surprisingly, the Duchy of Moscow would spearhead the struggle for independence against the Mongols.  Between 1450 and 1480 Russia cast off Mongol rule and proceeded on a course of territorial expansion and political centralization. 

 

All Ivans Great and Terrible

The first significant leader in this process was Ivan III, also known as Ivan the Great.  In a carefully calculated political move, Ivan married the niece of the last Byzantine Emperor and claimed continuity with imperial Rome and the Byzantine Empire.  He proclaimed  Moscow the “Third Rome” (Constantinople had been the “Second Rome) and exploited his close ties to the Orthodox Church to give legitimacy to his wars of territorial expansion.  All in all, Ivan III increased the power of the central Russian government and drew more land under his control.  But his son, Ivan IV, would push these advancements to new levels.

 

Ivan IV has been justly called Ivan the Terrible.  He was a capricious ruler known to savagely behead, impale or boil alive his enemies.  In one particular fit of rage, Ivan struck and killed his own son whom he had been preparing to take the throne after his death.  But so powerful was the image of Ivan as the builder and protector of Russia that Joseph Stalin created a propaganda film about Ivan to bolster Russian moral during the bleakest hours of World War II. It was Ivan the Terrible who finally defeated the Kazan Khanate—the Mongol empire that had given Russia such a hard time.

 

Ivan’s most important contribution to the development of Russia is how he dealt with the powerful class of Russia’s aristocrats, the Boyars.  If you remember, aristocrats have always been a problem for kings and emperors trying to reign over large territories.  Aristocrats are a hereditary class of land owners and have a source of wealth that is independent from their loyalty to the central government.  In exercising their local influence, they sometimes place their own prerogatives over those of the king or emperor.  As a result, the leader’s rule is weakened in areas controlled by powerful local aristocrats.  China solved this problem during the Qin Dynasty by creating a bureaucracy to circumvent the power of local aristocrats.  In England the land owning nobles (aristocrats) forced the King to sign the Magna Carta, thus limiting his power, and went on to exert their influence through the House of Lords in the English Parliament.  Under Ivan the Terrible, however, Russia would take a much different route.

 

Ivan held deep suspicions toward the Russian boyars and simply had many of them killed.  Others he forced from their homes to different areas, an action that weakened their class by stripping them from the local connections that had given them power and influence.  Consequently, Tsars in Russia would become true autocrats, unhindered by the pressures and influence of aristocracies.  For example, even the absolute monarchy of Louis XIV in France was partially limited by the will of the nobles.  But in Russia titles of nobility could be conferred or withdrawn arbitrarily by the Tsar.  Thus the Russian nobility was kept in subservience to the state and would never emerge as a counter force to the monarch’s power.  The power of Russian Tsars would truly be absolute.

 

Peter the Great

In no Tsar was this absolute power more obvious than Peter the Great.  As a boy he frequently visited the "German suburb" of Moscow, the place where all foreigners were forced to live, apart from Russians. Peter was intrigued with their maritime talk and with the sea-faring instruments they showed him. As a young man he took the first of several trips to Europe, where he studied shipbuilding and other western technologies, as well as governing styles and social customs. He returned to Russia convinced that the empire could only become powerful by imitating western successes, and he instituted a number of reforms that revolutionized it:

  • Military reform - He built the army by offering better pay and also drafted peasants for service as professional soldiers. He also created a navy by importing western engineers and craftsmen to build ships and shipyards, and other experts to teach naval tactics to recruits. Of course, his Gunpowder Empire developed better weapons and military skills.
  • Building the infrastructure - The army was useless without roads and communications, so Peter organized peasants to work on roads and do other service for the government.
  • Expansion of territory - The navy was useless without warm water ports, and Peter gained Russian territory along the Baltic Sea by defeating the powerful Swedish military. He tried to capture access to the Black Sea, but he was soundly defeated by the Ottomans who controlled the area.
  • Reorganization of the bureaucracy - In order to pay for his improvements, the government had to have the ability to effectively tax its citizens. The bureaucracy had been controlled by the boyars, but Peter replaced them with merit based employees by creating the Table of Ranks, eventually doing away with titles of nobility.
  • Relocation of the capital - Peter moved his court from Moscow to a new location on the Baltic Sea, his "Window on the West" that he called St. Petersburg. The city was built from scratch out of a swampy area, where it had a great harbor for the navy. Its architecture was European, of course.  The move was intended to symbolically and literally break the hold that old Russian religious and cultural traditions had on government.

Note that Peter’s reforms borrowed very selectively from Europe.  He was not at all interested in Parliamentary governments or movements toward social reform.  In this sense, he was much more concerned with the benefits of the Science Revolution than with the ideas of the Enlightenment philosophes; those things that directly benefited military progress and his own autocratic rule most interested him.  Yet he did force European rules of etiquette and culture on his nobles.  Beards, long considered a sign of religious piety and respect, had to be shaved off.  He even forced the Russian upper class to practice European manners and appropriate French as the language of social life.  In short, he did much to strengthen Russia into a modern imperial power but at the expense of fostering of a distinctly Russian identity.  When Peter died, he left a transformed Russia, an empire that a later ruler, Catherine the Great, would further strengthen. But he also left behind a new dynamic in Russian society: the conflicting tendencies toward westernization mixed with the traditions of the Slavs to turn inward and preserve their own traditions.