History of Russia (1796–1855)
History of Russia |
---|
Russia portal |
The period from 1796 to 1855 in Russian history (covering the reigns of Paul I, Alexander I and Nicholas I) saw the Napoleonic Wars, government reform, political reorganization, and economic growth.
War and peace, 1796–1825
Catherine II died in 1796, and her son
As a major European power, Russia could not escape the wars involving revolutionary and Napoleonic France.
The new Tsar
Alexander was, perhaps, the most brilliant diplomat of his time, and his primary focus was not on domestic policy but on foreign affairs, and particularly on Napoleon. Fearing Napoleon's expansionist ambitions and the growth of French power, Alexander joined Britain and Austria against Napoleon. Napoleon defeated the Russians and Austrians at Austerlitz in 1805 and defeated the Russians at Friedland in 1807.
After the Russian armies officially liberated allied
Alexander was determined to acquire the disputed territories of major importance in the Caucasus and beyond. His predecessors had already waged wars against Persia, but they had not been able to consolidate Russian authority over the regions, resulting in the regions either being ceded back or being conquered back. After nine years of battle, Russia managed to bring the war to an end on
The Russo-French alliance gradually became strained. Napoleon was concerned about Russia's intentions in the strategically vital
Congress of Vienna 1814–1815
As the French retreated, the Russians pursued them into Central and Western Europe and to the gates of Paris. After the allies defeated Napoleon, Alexander became known as the savior of Europe, and he played a prominent role in the redrawing of the map of Europe at the Congress of Vienna in 1815. In the same year, Alexander initiated the creation of the Holy Alliance, a loose agreement pledging the rulers of the nations involved—including most of Europe—to act according to Christian principles. More pragmatically, in 1814 Russia, Britain, Austria, and Prussia had formed the Quadruple Alliance. When Napoleon suddenly reappeared, Russia was part of the alliance that chased him down. The conservative Bourbons were back in power in Paris and on good terms with Russia. The allies created an international system to maintain the territorial status quo and prevent the resurgence of an expansionist France. The Quadruple Alliance, confirmed by a number of international conferences, ensured Russia's influence in Europe.
At the same time, Russia continued its expansion. The Congress of Vienna created the Congress Poland, to which Alexander granted a constitution. Thus, Alexander I became the constitutional monarch of Poland while remaining the autocratic tsar of Russia. He was also the monarch of Finland, which had been annexed in 1809 and awarded autonomous status.[6]
Despite the liberal, romantic inclinations of his youth, Alexander I after 1815 grew steadily more conservative, isolated from the day-to-day affairs of the state, and inclined to religious mysticism. The lofty hopes that the tsar had once held for his country were frustrated by the immense size and backwardness of it. While vacationing on the Black Sea in 1825, Alexander fell ill with typhus and died at only 47, although there were unfounded stories that he faked his own death, became a monk, and wandered the Siberian wilderness for many years afterwards.
Decembrist revolt, 1825
A revolutionary movement was born during the reign of Alexander I. The
Nicholas I, 1825–1855
Nicholas continued these administrative innovations, but made the ministers responsible solely to him. Overall, the effect was to steadily centralize more and more power in the tsar's hands. In particular, the state security department (the Third Section) became an almost notorious symbol of repression as its primary aim was to prosecute subversive political activities. Nicholas for his part envisioned the Third Section as the champion of the poor and discriminated against the abuses of the wealthy and privileged, but although some men in the department were honest and took this duty seriously, most of them merely used it as a license to beat up and harass political and religious dissidents. The Third Section was also notorious for the bad relations it had with other governmental departments. Overall, the attempt at building a modern-style European bureaucracy that had begun under Peter the Great was a partial success. Bureaucrats believed that service to the state and the tsar constituted the highest possible calling, the result being that the ranks of the bureaucracy continued to grow by leaps and bounds. Prestige was the main attraction of employment in the bureaucracy, as salaries were small, and advancement through the ranks deliberately kept limited to prevent too many people, especially those of humble birth, from rising too fast. Only the most educated, cultured, and informed men became part of the tsar's inner circle of advisers.
The bureaucracy's numbers increased by threefold during the first half of the 19th century. Pay continued to be low due to the overall poverty of the Russian state. This was not only due to the country's backwards economy, but also because the nobility were tax-exempt and free from the expense of waging wars, not only the great ones, but the smaller campaigns in the Caucasus. Bureaucrats were for the most part uneducated, uninformed of their departments' respective tasks, and also phenomenally corrupt. Most hesitated to make decisions and preferred to push themselves up through the ranks, with the result that the tsar himself was forced to micromanage thousands of trivial affairs. Russia also suffered from a multitude of antiquated, contradictory, and discriminatory laws against Jews and minority Christian sects. Since not all minorities were part of the lower classes and many officials could not afford to feed their families, bribery was extremely widespread, and yet was probably the only thing that kept the Russian state from being even slower, more corrupt, and oppressive than it was.
The Decembrist uprising had increased Nicholas's distrust of the nobility and dislike of anything resembling political reform, even among the upper classes. Education gradually continued to improve after Alexander's creation of a universal educational system in 1804, although due to lack of funds the emphasis tended to be on the creation of universities rather than on primary and secondary schools. In the latter part of his reign, the Minister of Education, A.N. Golistyn, moved to censor and exclude the dangerous revolutionary and anti-clerical ideas coming from Western Europe. He encouraged college students to report their professors to the authorities if they expressed subversive views. Those professors so exposed were either fired or threatened with prosecution. In 1833, Count Sergey Ugarov took over as Minister of Education and pursued a more tolerant policy at the expense of excluding the children of the lower classes from universities.
Despite this, school attendance and literacy in Russia continued to increase and there began to form a rising middle class that was cosmopolitan in its outlook and connected with European culture and ideas. State censorship barred direct political dissent and the police were prone to harass even writers who did not involve themselves in politics. The great poet Alexander Pushkin was questioned by authorities in 1824 in part because he had befriended certain Decembrists. Eventually, despite some mistrust from the police, Pushkin was allowed to publish his works until he met an untimely end in 1837 after fighting a duel. The writers Mikhail Lermontov and Nikolai Gogol were also viewed with suspicion.
Censorship was not totally effective, especially as it varied depending on the personal views of each censor, some of whom tolerated liberal ideas. Philosophical arguments and literary criticism were popular ways of subtly expressing political opinions, and it was during this time that the great debate between "Westernizers" and "Slavophiles" emerged. This debate started in 1836 when Pyotr Chaadayev wrote a philosophical letter in the periodical Teleskop, which declared that:
"Standing alone in the world, we have given nothing to the world, we have learned nothing from the world, we have not added a single idea to the mass of human ideas, we have made no contribution to the progress of the human spirit, and everything that has come to us from that spirit, we have disfigured. Today we form a gap in the intellectual order."
Nicholas argued that Chaadayev must be insane to make such claims and sentenced him to house imprisonment with periodic visits from a doctor. This embarrassing but fairly mild treatment silenced him.
Nicholas appointed the veteran statesman count
In 1833, Minister of Education
Russia experienced a flowering of literature and the arts. Through the works of
Nicholas I made some efforts to improve the lot of the state peasants with the help of the minister
In foreign policy, Nicholas I acted as the protector of ruling legitimism and guardian against revolution. In 1830, after a popular uprising had occurred in France, the Poles in Russian Poland revolted. Poles resented limitation of the privileges of the Polish minority in the lands, annexed by Russia in the 18th century and sought to reestablish the 1772 borders of Poland. Nicholas
In 1848, when a
While Nicholas was attempting to maintain the status quo in Europe, he adopted an aggressive policy towards the
By the London Straits Convention of 1841, the Western powers affirmed Ottoman control over the straits and forbade any power, including Russia, to send warships through the straits. Based on his role in suppressing the revolutions of 1848 and his mistaken belief that he had British diplomatic support, Nicholas moved against the Ottomans, who declared war on Russia in 1853. Fearing the results of an Ottoman defeat by Russia, in 1854 Britain and France joined the Crimean War on the Ottoman side. Austria offered the Ottomans diplomatic support, and Prussia remained neutral, leaving Russia without allies on the continent. The European allies landed in Crimea and laid siege to the well-fortified Russian base at Sevastopol. After a year's siege the base fell. Nicholas I died before the fall of Sevastopol', but he already had recognized the failure of his regime. Russia now faced the choice of initiating major reforms or losing its status as a major European power.[11]
Notes
The first draft of this article was taken with little editing from the Library of Congress Federal Research Division's Country Studies series. As their home page at http://lcweb2.loc.gov/frd/cs/cshome.html says, "Information contained in the Country Studies On-Line is not copyrighted and thus is available for free and unrestricted use by researchers. As a courtesy, however, appropriate credit should be given to the series." Please leave this statement intact so that credit can be given to the now changed first draft.
References
- ^ Dominic Lieven, Russia Against Napoleon: The True Story of the Campaigns of War and Peace (2010).
- ^
Eur, Imogen Bell (2002). Eastern Europe, Russia and Central Asia 2003. Taylor & Francis. p. 170. ISBN 1-85743-137-5.
- ^ Marie-Pierre Rey, Alexander I: The Tsar Who Defeated Napoleon (2012).
- ISBN 9780857721730. Retrieved 16 December 2014.
- ISBN 1598849484
- ^ R. F. Leslie, "Politics and economics in Congress Poland, 1815-1864." Past & Present 8 (1955): 43-63.
- ^ Marc Raeff, The Decembrist Movement (1966).
- ^ W. Bruce Lincoln, Nicholas I: Emperor and Autocrat of All the Russias (1989).
- ^ Marc Raeff, Michael Speransky: statesman of imperial Russia, 1772–1839 (1957).
- ^ Orlando Figes, Natasha's Dance: A Cultural History of Russia (2003).
- ^ Orlando Figes, The Crimean War: A History (2012).
Further reading
- Ascher, Abraham. Russia: A Short History (2011) excerpt and text search
- Bushkovitch, Paul. A Concise History of Russia (2011) excerpt and text search
- Catchpole, Brian. A Map History of Russia (Heinemann Educational Publishers, 1974), new topical maps.
- Cracraft, James. ed. Major Problems in the History of Imperial Russia (1993), historiography.
- Figes, Orlando. Natasha's Dance: A Cultural History of Russia (2003).
- Freeze, George (2002). Russia: A History (2nd ed.). Oxford: Oxford University Press. p. 556. ISBN 978-0-19-860511-9.
- Gilbert, Martin. Atlas of Russian history (Oxford UP, 1993), new topical maps.
- Hosking, Geoffrey. Russia and the Russians: A History (2nd ed. 2011)
- ISBN 978-0-300-08266-1.
- Jelavich, Barbara. St. Petersburg and Moscow: Tsarist and Soviet Foreign Policy, 1814–1974 (1974)
- Lieven, Dominic. Russia Against Napoleon: The True Story of the Campaigns of War and Peace (2011).
- Lincoln, W. Bruce. The Romanovs: Autocrats of All the Russias (1983) excerpt and text search, sweeping narrative history
- Longley, David (2000). The Longman Companion to Imperial Russia, 1689–1917. New York, NY: Longman Publishing Group. p. 496. ISBN 978-0-582-31990-5.
- Millar, James, ed. Encyclopedia of Russian History (4 vol, 2003).
- Mironov, Boris N., and Ben Eklof. The Social History of Imperial Russia, 1700–1917 (2 vol Westview Press, 2000) vol 1 online; vol 2 online
- Moss, Walter G. A History of Russia. Vol. 1: To 1917. 2d ed. Anthem Press, 2002.
- Neumann, Iver B. "Russia as a great power, 1815–2007." Journal of International Relations and Development 11#2 (2008): 128–151. online
- Perrie, Maureen, et al. The Cambridge History of Russia. (3 vol. Cambridge University Press, 2006). excerpt and text search
- Pipes, Richard. Russia under the Old Regime (2nd ed. 1997)
- Riasanovsky, Nicholas V. and Mark D. Steinberg. A History of Russia. 7th ed. New York: Oxford University Press, 2004, 800 pages. ISBN 0-19-515394-4
- Seton-Watson, Hugh. The Russian Empire 1801–1917 (1967) excerpt and text search
- Wirtschafter, Elise Kimerling. Russia's age of serfdom 1649–1861 (2008).
- Ziegler; Charles E. The History of Russia (Greenwood Press, 1999) online edition
External links
This article incorporates text from this source, which is in the public domain. Country Studies. Federal Research Division.