Lecture 14.

Topic: Russian state (XII century - 1917)

1. The History of Russia

2. Kievan Rus
3. Tsardom of Russia (1547–1721) Ivan IV, the Terrible
4. Peter the Great

1. The History of Russia

The History of Russia begins with that of the East Slavs. The traditional beginning of Russian
history is 862 A.D. Kievan Rus', the first united East Slavic state, was founded in 882. The state adopted
Christianity from the Byzantine Empire in 988, beginning with the synthesis of Byzantine and Slavic
cultures that defined Slavic culture for the next millennium. Kievan Rus' ultimately disintegrated as a state
because of the Mongol invasion of Rus' in 1237–1240 and the death of about half the population of Rus'.
After the 13th century, Moscow became a cultural center of Moscovia. By the 18th century, the
Tsardom of Russia had become the huge Russian Empire, stretching from the Polish border eastward to
the Pacific Ocean. Expansion in the western direction sharpened Russia's awareness of its separation
from much of the rest of Europe and shattered the isolation in which the initial stages of expansion had
occurred. Successive regimes of the 19th century responded to such pressures with a combination of
halfhearted reform and repression. Peasant revolts were common, and all were fiercely suppressed.
Russian serfdom was abolished in 1861, but the peasant fared poorly and often turned to revolutionary
pressures. In following decades reforms efforts such as the Stolypin reforms, the constitution of 1906, and
State Duma attempted to open and liberalize the economy and political system, but the tsars refused to
relinquish autocratic rule or share their power.
The Russian Revolution in 1917 was triggered by a combination of economic breakdown, war-
weariness, and discontent with the autocratic system of government, and it first brought a coalition of
liberals and moderate socialists to power, but their failed policies led to seizure of power by the
communist Bolsheviks on 25 October. Between 1922 and 1991, the history of Russia is essentially the
history of the Soviet Union, effectively an ideologically based state which was roughly conterminous with
the Russian Empire before the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk. The approach to the building of socialism,
however, varied over different periods in Soviet history, from the mixed economy and diverse society and
culture of the 1920s to the command economy and repressions of the Joseph Stalin era to the "era of
stagnation" in the 1980s. From its first years, government in the Soviet Union was based on the one-party
rule of the Communists, as the Bolsheviks called themselves, beginning in March 1918.
By the mid-1980s, with the weaknesses of its economic and political structures becoming acute,
Mikhail Gorbachev embarked on major reforms, which led to the overthrow of the Communist party and
the breakup of the USSR, leaving Russia again on its own and marking the start of the history of post-
Soviet Russia. The Russian Federation began in January 1992 as the legal successor to the USSR.
Russia retained its nuclear arsenal but lost its superpower status. Scrapping the socialist central planning
and state ownership of property of the socialist era, new leaders, led by President Vladimir Putin, took
political and economic power after 2000 and engaged in an energetic foreign policy. Russia's treatment of
Ukraine led to severe economic sanctions imposed by the United States and the European Union.
In 2006, 1.5-million-year-old Oldowan flint tools were discovered in the Dagestan Akusha region
of the north Caucasus, demonstrating the presence of early humans in Russia from a very early time. The
discovery of some of the earliest evidence for the presence of anatomically modern humans found
anywhere in Europe was reported in 2007 from the deepest levels of the Kostenki archaeological site
near the Don River in Russia, which has been dated to at least 40,000 years ago.[5] Arctic Russiawas
reached by 40,000 years ago. That Russia was also home to some of the last surviving Neanderthals was
revealed by the discovery of the partial skeleton of a Neanderthal infant in Mezmaiskaya cave in Adygea,
which was carbon dated to only 29,000 years ago.[6] In 2008, Russian archaeologists from the Institute of
Archaeology and Ethnology of Novosibirsk, working at the site of Denisova Cave in the Altai Mountains of
Siberia, uncovered a 40,000-year-old small bone fragment from the fifth finger of a juvenile hominin,
which DNA analysis revealed to be a previously unknown species of human, which was named the
Denisova hominin.
During the prehistoric eras the vast steppes of Southern Russia were home to tribes of nomadic
pastoralists. In classical antiquity, the Pontic Steppe was known as Scythia. Remnants of these long
gone steppe cultures were discovered in the course of the 20th century in such places as Ipatovo,
Sintashta, Arkaim, and Pazyryk.
Stele with two Hellenistic soldiers of the Bosporan Kingdom; from Taman peninsula (Yubileynoe),
southern Russia, 3rd quarter of the 4th century BC; marble, Pushkin MuseumIn the later part of the 8th
century BCE, Greek merchants brought classical civilization to the trade emporiums in Tanais and
Phanagoria. Gelonuswas described by Herodotos as a huge (Europe's biggest) earth- and wood-fortified
grad inhabited around 500 BCE by Heloni and Budini. The Bosporan Kingdom was incorporated as part
of the Roman province of Moesia Inferior from 63 to 68 ad, under Emperor Nero. At about the 2nd century
CE Goths migrated to the Black Sea, and in the 3rd and 4th centuries CE, a semi-legendary Gothic
kingdom of Oium existed in Southern Russia until it was overrun by Huns. Between the 3rd and 6th
centuries CE, the Bosporan Kingdom, a Hellenistic polity which succeeded the Greek colonies, was also
overwhelmed by successive waves of nomadic invasions, led by warlike tribes which would often move
on to Europe, as was the case with the Huns and Turkish Avars.
A Turkic people, the Khazars, ruled the lower Volga basin steppes between the Caspian and
Black Seas through to the 8th century. Noted for their laws, tolerance, and cosmopolitanism, the Khazars
were the main commercial link between the Baltic and the Muslim Abbasid empire centered in Baghdad.
They were important allies of the Byzantine Empire, and waged a series of successful wars against the
Arab Caliphates. In the 8th century, the Khazars embraced Judaism.
Some of the ancestors of the modern Russians were the Slavic tribes, whose original home is
thought by some scholars to have been the wooded areas of the Pripet Marshes. The Early East Slavs
gradually settled Western Russia in two waves: one moving from Kiev towards present-day Suzdal and
Murom and another from Polotsk towards Novgorod and Rostov.
From the 7th century onwards, East Slavs constituted the bulk of the population in Western
Russia and slowly but peacefully assimilated the native Finno-Ugric tribes, such as the Merya, the
Muromians, and the Meshchera.
2. Kievan Rus
Scandinavian Norsemen, known as Vikings in Western Europe and Varangians in the East,
combined piracy and trade throughout Northern Europe. In the mid-9th century, they began to venture
along the waterways from the eastern Baltic to the Black and Caspian Seas. According to the earliest
Russian chronicle, a Varangian named Rurik was elected ruler (knyaz) of Novgorod in about 860, before
his successors moved south and extended their authority to Kiev, which had been previously dominated
by the Khazars. Oleg, Rurik's son Igor and Igor's son Sviatoslav subsequently subdued all local East
Slavic tribes to Kievan rule, destroyed the Khazar khaganate and launched several military expeditions to
Byzantium and Persia.
Thus, the first East Slavic state, Rus', emerged in the 9th century along the Dnieper River valley.
A coordinated group of princely states with a common interest in maintaining trade along the river routes,
Kievan Rus' controlled the trade route for furs, wax, and slaves between Scandinavia and the Byzantine
Empire along the Volkhov and Dnieper Rivers.
By the end of the 10th century, the minority Norse military aristocracy had merged with the native
Slavic population, which also absorbed Greek Christian influences in the course of the multiple
campaigns to loot Tsargrad, or Constantinople. One such campaign claimed the life of the foremost
Slavic druzhina leader, Svyatoslav I, who was renowned for having crushed the power of the Khazars on
the Volga.[32] At the time, the Byzantine Empire was experiencing a major military and cultural revival;
despite its later decline, its culture would have a continuous influence on the development of Russia in its
formative centuries.
Kievan Rus' is important for its introduction of a Slavic variant of the Eastern Orthodox religion,
dramatically deepening a synthesis of Byzantine and Slavic cultures that defined Russian culture for the
next thousand years. The region adopted Christianity in 988 by the official act of public baptism of Kiev
inhabitants by Prince Vladimir I, who followed the private conversion of his grandmother. Some years
later the first code of laws, Russkaya Pravda, was introduced by Yaroslav the Wise. From the onset the
Kievan princes followed the Byzantine example and kept the Church dependent on them, even for its
revenues, so that the Russian Church and state were always closely linked.
By the 11th century, particularly during the reign of Yaroslav the Wise, Kievan Rus' displayed an
economy and achievements in architecture and literature superior to those that then existed in the
western part of the continent. Compared with the languages of European Christendom, the Russian
language was little influenced by the Greek and Latin of early Christian writings. This was because
Church Slavonic was used directly in liturgy instead. A nomadic Turkic people, the Kipchaks (also known
as the Cumans), replaced the earlier Pechenegs as the dominant force in the south steppe regions
neighbouring to Rus' at the end of the 11th century and founded a nomadic state in the steppes along the
Black Sea (Desht-e-Kipchak). Repelling their regular attacks, especially on Kiev, which was just one day's
ride from the steppe, was a heavy burden for the southern areas of Rus'. The nomadic incursions caused
a massive influx of Slavs to the safer, heavily forested regions of the north, particularly to the area known
as Zalesye.
Kievan Rus' ultimately disintegrated as a state because of in-fighting between members of the
princely family that ruled it collectively. Kiev's dominance waned, to the benefit of Vladimir-Suzdal in the
north-east, Novgorod in the north, and Halych-Volhynia in the south-west. Conquest by the Mongol
Golden Horde in the 13th century was the final blow. Kiev was destroyed. Halych-Volhynia would
eventually be absorbed into the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth, while the Mongol-dominated Vladimir-
Suzdal and independent Novgorod Republic, two regions on the periphery of Kiev, would establish the
basis for the modern Russian nation.
Daniil Aleksandrovich, the youngest son of Alexander Nevsky, founded the principality of Moscow
(known as Muscovy in English), which first cooperated with and ultimately expelled the Tatars from
Russia. Well-situated in the central river system of Russia and surrounded by protective forests and
marshes, Moscow was at first only a vassal of Vladimir, but soon it absorbed its parent state.
A major factor in the ascendancy of Moscow was the cooperation of its rulers with the Mongol
overlords, who granted them the title of Grand Prince of Moscow and made them agents for collecting the
Tatar tribute from the Russian principalities. The principality's prestige was further enhanced when it
became the center of the Russian Orthodox Church. Its head, the Metropolitan, fled from Kiev to Vladimir
in 1299 and a few years later established the permanent headquarters of the Church in Moscow under
the original title of Kiev Metropolitan.
By the middle of the 14th century, the power of the Mongols was declining, and the Grand Princes
felt able to openly oppose the Mongol yoke. In 1380, at Kulikovo on the Don River, the Mongols were
defeated, and although this hard-fought victory did not end Tatar rule of Russia, it did bring great fame to
the Grand Prince Dmitry Donskoy. Moscow's leadership in Russia was now firmly based and by the
middle of the 14th century its territory had greatly expanded through purchase, war, and marriage.
3.Tsardom of Russia (1547–1721) Ivan IV, the Terrible
The development of the Tsar's autocratic powers reached a peak during the reign of Ivan IV
(1547–1584), known as "Ivan the Terrible". He strengthened the position of the monarch to an
unprecedented degree, as he ruthlessly subordinated the nobles to his will, exiling or executing many on
the slightest provocation.[44] Nevertheless, Ivan is often seen as a farsighted statesman who reformed
Russia as he promulgated a new code of laws (Sudebnik of 1550), established the first Russian feudal
representative body (Zemsky Sobor), curbed the influence of the clergy, and introduced local self-
management in rural regions.
Although his long Livonian War for control of the Baltic coast and access to the sea trade
ultimately proved a costly failure, Ivan managed to annex the Khanates of Kazan, Astrakhan, and Siberia.
These conquests complicated the migration of aggressive nomadic hordes from Asia to Europe via the
Volga and Urals. Through these conquests, Russia acquired a significant Muslim Tatar population and
emerged as a multiethnic and multiconfessional state. Also around this period, the mercantile Stroganov
family established a firm foothold in the Urals and recruited Russian Cossacks to colonise Siberia.
In the later part of his reign, Ivan divided his realm in two. In the zone known as the oprichnina,
Ivan's followers carried out a series of bloody purges of the feudal aristocracy (whom he suspected of
treachery after the betrayal of prince Kurbsky), culminating in the Massacre of Novgorod in 1570. This
combined with the military losses, epidemics, and poor harvests so weakened Russia that the Crimean
Tatars were able to sack central Russian regions and burn down Moscow in 1571. In 1572 Ivan
abandoned the oprichnina. At the end of Ivan IV's reign the Polish–Lithuanian and Swedish armies
carried out a powerful intervention in Russia, devastating its northern and northwest regions.
The death of Ivan's childless son Feodor was followed by a period of civil wars and foreign
intervention known as the "Time of Troubles" (1606–13). Extremely cold summers (1601–1603) wrecked
crops, which led to the Russian famine of 1601–1603 and increased the social disorganization. Boris
Godunov's (Борис Годунов) reign ended in chaos, civil war combined with foreign intrusion, devastation
of many cities and depopulation of the rural regions. The country rocked by internal chaos also attracted
several waves of interventions by the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth.
During the Polish–Muscovite War (1605–1618), Polish–Lithuanian forces reached Moscow and
installed the impostor False Dmitriy I in 1605, then supported False Dmitry II in 1607. The decisive
moment came when a combined Russian-Swedish army was routed by the Polish forces under hetman
Stanisław Żółkiewski at the Battle of Klushino on 4 July [O.S. 24 June] 1610. As the result of the battle,
the Seven Boyars, a group of Russian nobles, deposed the tsar Vasily Shuysky on 27 July [O.S. 17 July]
1610, and recognized the Polish prince Władysław IV Vasa as the Tsar of Russia on 6 September [O.S.
27 August] 1610. The Poles entered Moscow on 21 September [O.S.11 September] 1610. Moscow
revolted but riots there were brutally suppressed and the city was set on fire.
The crisis provoked a patriotic national uprising against the invasion, both in 1611 and 1612.
Finally, a volunteer army, led by the merchant Kuzma Minin and prince Dmitry Pozharsky, expelled the
foreign forces from the capital on 4 November [O.S. 22 October] 1612.
The Russian statehood survived the "Time of Troubles" and the rule of weak or corrupt Tsars
because of the strength of the government's central bureaucracy. Government functionaries continued to
serve, regardless of the ruler's legitimacy or the faction controlling the throne. However, the "Time of
Troubles" provoked by the dynastic crisis resulted in the loss of much territory to the Polish–Lithuanian
Commonwealth in the Russo-Polish war, as well as to the Swedish Empire in the Ingrian War.
In February 1613, with the chaos ended and the Poles expelled from Moscow, a national
assembly, composed of representatives from fifty cities and even some peasants, elected Michael
Romanov, the young son of Patriarch Filaret, to the throne. The Romanov dynasty ruled Russia until
1917.
The immediate task of the new dynasty was to restore peace. Fortunately for Moscow, its major
enemies, the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth and Sweden, were engaged in a bitter conflict with each
other, which provided Russia the opportunity to make peace with Sweden in 1617 and to sign a truce with
the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth in 1619.
Recovery of lost territories began in the mid-17th century, when the Khmelnitsky Uprising (1648–
57) in Ukraine against Polish rule brought about the Treaty of Pereyaslav, concluded between Russia and
the Ukrainian Cossacks. According to the treaty, Russia granted protection to the Cossacks state in Left-
bank Ukraine, formerly under Polish control. This triggered a prolonged Russo-Polish War (1654-1667),
which ended with the Treaty of Andrusovo, where Poland accepted the loss of Left-bank Ukraine, Kiev
and Smolensk.
Rather than risk their estates in more civil war, the boyars cooperated with the first Romanovs,
enabling them to finish the work of bureaucratic centralization. Thus, the state required service from both
the old and the new nobility, primarily in the military. In return, the tsars allowed the boyars to complete
the process of enserfing the peasants.
In the preceding century, the state had gradually curtailed peasants' rights to move from one
landlord to another. With the state now fully sanctioning serfdom, runaway peasants became state
fugitives, and the power of the landlords over the peasants "attached" to their land had become almost
complete. Together the state and the nobles placed an overwhelming burden of taxation on the peasants,
whose rate was 100 times greater in the mid-17th century than it had been a century earlier. In addition,
middle-class urban tradesmen and craftsmen were assessed taxes, and, like the serfs, they were
forbidden to change residence. All segments of the population were subject to military levy and to special
taxes.
Riots amongst peasants and citizens of Moscow at this time were endemic, and included the Salt
Riot (1648), Copper Riot (1662), and the Moscow Uprising (1682). By far the greatest peasant uprising in
17th-century Europe erupted in 1667. As the free settlers of South Russia, the Cossacks, reacted against
the growing centralization of the state, serfs escaped from their landlords and joined the rebels. The
Cossack leader Stenka Razin led his followers up the Volga River, inciting peasant uprisings and
replacing local governments with Cossack rule. The tsar's army finally crushed his forces in 1670; a year
later Stenka was captured and beheaded. Yet, less than half a century later, the strains of military
expeditions produced another revolt in Astrakhan, ultimately subdued.
4. Peter the Great
Peter the Great (1672–1725) brought autocracy into Russia and played a major role in bringing
his country into the European state system.[80] Russia had now become the largest country in the world,
stretching from the Baltic Sea to the Pacific Ocean. The vast majority of the land was unoccupied, and
travel was slow. Much of its expansion had taken place in the 17th century, culminating in the first
Russian settlement of the Pacific in the mid-17th century, the reconquest of Kiev, and the pacification of
the Siberian tribes. However, a population of only 14 million was stretched across this vast landscape.
With a short growing season grain yields trailed behind those in the West and potato farming was not yet
widespread. As a result, the great majority of the population workforce was occupied with agriculture.
Russia remained isolated from the sea trade and its internal trade, communication and manufacturing
were seasonally dependent.
Peter's first military efforts were directed against the Ottoman Turks. His aim was to establish a
Russian foothold on the Black Sea by taking the town of Azov. His attention then turned to the north.
Peter still lacked a secure northern seaport except at Archangel on the White Sea, whose harbor was
frozen nine months a year. Access to the Baltic was blocked by Sweden, whose territory enclosed it on
three sides. Peter's ambitions for a "window to the sea" led him in 1699 to make a secret alliance with the
Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth and Denmark against Sweden resulting in the Great Northern War.
The war ended in 1721 when an exhausted Sweden sued for peace with Russia. Peter acquired
four provinces situated south and east of the Gulf of Finland, thus securing his coveted access to the sea.
There, in 1703, he had already founded the city that was to become Russia's new capital, Saint
Petersburg, as a "window opened upon Europe" to replace Moscow, long Russia's cultural center.
Russian intervention in the Commonwealth marked, with the Silent Sejm, the beginning of a 200-year
domination of that region by the Russian Empire. In celebration of his conquests, Peter assumed the title
of emperor, and the Russian Tsardom officially became the Russian Empire in 1721.
Peter reorganized his government based on the latest Western models, molding Russia into an
absolutist state. He replaced the old boyarDuma (council of nobles) with a nine-member senate, in effect
a supreme council of state. The countryside was also divided into new provinces and districts. Peter told
the senate that its mission was to collect tax revenues. In turn tax revenues tripled over the course of his
reign.
Administrative Collegia (ministries) were established in St. Petersburg, to replace the old
governmental departments. In 1722 Peter promulgated his famous Table of ranks. As part of the
government reform, the Orthodox Church was partially incorporated into the country's administrative
structure, in effect making it a tool of the state. Peter abolished the patriarchate and replaced it with a
collective body, the Holy Synod, led by a lay government official. Peter continued and intensified his
predecessors' requirement of state service for all nobles.
By this same time, the once powerful Persian Safavid Empire to the south was heavily declining.
Taking advantage of the profitable situation, Peter launched the Russo-Persian War (1722-1723), known
as "The Persian Expedition of Peter the Great" by Russian histographers, in order to be the first Russian
emperor to establish Russian influence in the Caucasus and Caspian Sea region. After considerable
success and the capture of many provinces and cities in the Caucasus and northern mainland Persia, the
Safavids were forced to hand over the territories to Russia. However, by twelve years later, all the
territories were ceded back to Persia, which was now led by the charismatic military genius Nader Shah,
as part of the Treaty of Resht and Treaty of Ganja and the Russo-Persian alliance against the Ottoman
Empire, the common neighbouring rivalling enemy.
Peter the Great died in 1725, leaving an unsettled succession, but Russia had become a great
power by the end of his reign.
Glossary:

Peasant - a poor smallholder or agricultural labourer of low social status (chiefly in historical use or with
reference to subsistence farming in poorer countries).
Succession - a number of people or things of a similar kind following one after the other.
Crisis-a time of intense difficulty or danger.
Military - relating to or characteristic of soldiers or armed forces.

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