enlightenment in Russia. The University of Moscow, which he founded, remains his lasting monument. Peter Shuvalov was made Count by the empress - a title which Ivan Shuvalov refused - and used his strong position at the court to have a hand in every kind of state business, in particular in financial and economic matters and in the military establishment. Able, but shamelessly corrupt and cynical, Peter Shuvalov contributed much to the ruinous financial policy of the reign and has been credited with saying that debased coinage would be less of a load to carry and that the tax on vodka suited a time of distress because people would then want to get drunk. Elizabeth's own extravagance, which included the building of the extremely expensive Winter Palace and the acquisition of, reportedly, fifteen thousand dresses, added greatly to the financial crisis. A French milliner finally refused further credit to the Russian empress! Of much more importance is the fact that the financial chaos, together with the fundamental and overwhelming burden of serfdom, led to the flight and uprisings of peasants that became characteristic of the age. Alexander Shuvalov, the third prominent member of that family, served as the head of the security police. Other close associates of Elizabeth included her old friend Chancellor Count Michael Vorontsov and Count Alexis Bestuzhev-Riumin, who specialized in foreign policy. The replacement of Germans by Russians in the imperial entourage under Elizabeth had some connection with the increasing interest of the Russian court and educated public in French society and culture and their declining concern with the German states.
The German orientation, however, came back with a vengeance, if only briefly, in the reign of Peter III. When Elizabeth died in late 1761 or early 1762 - depending on whether we use the Old or the New Style - Peter, Duke of Holstein-Gottorp, who had been nominated by the empress as her successor as early as 1742, became Emperor Peter III. The new ruler was a son of Elizabeth's older sister, Anne - therefore a grandson of Peter the Great - and of Charles Frederick, Duke of Holstein-Gottorp. Having lost his mother in infancy and his father when a boy, Peter was brought up first with the view of succeeding to the Swedish throne, for
his father was a son of Charles XII's sister. After Elizabeth's decision, he was educated to succeed to the throne of the Romanovs. Although he lived in Russia from the age of fourteen, Peter III never adjusted to his new country. Extremely limited mentally, as well as crude and violent in his behavior, he continued to fear and despise Russia and the Russians while he held up Prussia and in particular Frederick II as his ideal. His reign of several months, best remembered in the long run for the law abolishing the compulsory state service of the gentry, impressed many of his contemporaries as a violent attack on everything Russian and a deliberate sacrifice of Russian interests to those of Prussia. While not given to political persecution and in fact willing to sign a law abolishing the security police, the new emperor threatened to disband the guards, and even demanded that icons be withdrawn from churches and that Russian priests dress like Lutheran pastors, both of which orders the Holy Synod did not dare execute. In foreign policy Peter Ill's admiration for Frederick the Great led to the withdrawal of Russia from the Seven Years' War, an act which probably saved Prussia from a crushing defeat and deprived Russia of great potential gains. Indeed, the Russian emperor refused to accept even what Frederick the Great was willing to give him for withdrawing and proceeded to make an alliance with the Prussian king.
While Peter III rapidly made enemies, his wife Catherine, who had married him in 1745 and who was originally a princess of the small German principality of Anhalt-Zerbst, behaved with far greater intelligence and understanding. Isolated and threatened by her boorish husband, who had a series of love affairs and wanted to marry one of his favorites, she adapted herself to her difficult environment, learned much about the government and the country, and found supporters. In mid-summer 1762 Catherine profited from the general dissatisfaction with Peter III to lead the guards in another palace revolution. The emperor was easily deposed and shortly after killed, very possibly by one of the leaders of the insurrection, Alexis Orlov, in a drunken argument. Catherine became empress, bypassing her son Paul, born in 1754 during her marriage with Peter III, who was proclaimed merely heir to the throne. Although the coup of 1762 appeared to be simply another one in a protracted sequence of overturns characteristic of Russian history in the eighteenth century, and although Catherine's chances of securing her power seemed, if anything, less promising than those of a number of her immediate predecessors, in fact her initial success meant the beginning of a long and celebrated reign. That reign will form the subject of another chapter.
While rulers changed rapidly and favorites constantly rose and fell in Russia between 1725 and 1762, basic social processes went on in a con-
tinuous and consistent manner. Most important was the growth of the power and standing of the gentry together with its complementary process, a further deterioration in the position of the serfs. As we know, Peter the Great's insistence that only one son inherit his father's estate could hardly be enforced even in the reformer's reign and was formally repealed in 1731. Empress Anne began giving away state lands to her gentry supporters on a large scale, the peasants on the lands becoming serfs, and Elizabeth enthusiastically continued the practice. These grants were no longer connected to service obligations.
In 1731 Empress Anne opened a cadet school for the gentry in St. Petersburg. The graduates of this school could become officers without serving in the lower ranks, a privilege directly opposed to Peter the Great's intentions and practice. As the century progressed the gentry came to rely increasingly on such cadet schools for both education and advancement in service. Also to their advantage was the Gentry Bank that was established by Empress Elizabeth in St. Petersburg, with a branch in Moscow, to supply the landlords with credit at a moderate rate of interest. The gentry became increasingly class-conscious and exclusive. An order of 1746 forbade all but the gentry to acquire 'men and peasants with and without land.' In 1758 the members of other classes who owned serfs were required to sell them. A Senate decision of 1756 affirmed that only those who proved their gentry origin could be entered into gentry registers, while decisions in the years 1758-60 in effect eliminated [the opportunity to obtain hereditary gentry status through state service, thus destroying another one of Peter the Great's characteristic arrangements. At the same time 'personal,' or non-hereditary, members of the class came to be rigidly restricted in their gentry rights.
The most significant evolution took place in regard to the service obligations of the gentry to the state. In 1736 this service, hitherto termless, was limited to twenty-five years - the gentry themselves had asked for twenty years - with a further provision exempting one son from service so he could manage the estates. Immediately following the publication of the law and in subsequent decades, many members of the gentry left service to return to their landholdings. Moreover, some landlords managed to be entered in regimental books from the age of eight or ten to complete the twenty-five-year period of service early in their lives. Finally, on March 1, 1762 - February 18, Old Style - in the reign of Peter III, compulsory gentry service was abolished. Henceforth members of the gentry could serve the state, or not serve it, at will, and they could even serve foreign governments abroad instead, if they so desired. The edict also urged upon the gentry the importance of education and proper care of their estates.
The law of 1762 has attracted much attention from historians. To many older scholars, exemplified by Kliuchevsky, it undermined the basic struc-
ture of Russian society, in which everyone served: the serfs served the landlords, the landlords served the state. In equity the repeal of compulsory gentry service should have been followed promptly by the emancipation of the serfs. Yet - again to cite Kliuchevsky - although the abolition of serfdom did take place on the following day, the nineteenth of February, that day came ninety-nine years later. The serfs themselves, it would seem, shared the feeling that an injustice had been committed, for the demand for freedom of the peasants, to follow the freedom of the gentry, became a recurrent motif of their uprisings. By contrast, some specialists, such as V. Leontovich and Malia, have emphasized the positive results of the law of 1762: it represented the acquisition of an essential independence from the state by at least one class of Russian society, and thus the first crucial step taken by Russia on the road to liberalism; besides, it contributed to the growth of a rich gentry culture and, beyond that, to the emergence of the intelligentsia.
As the gentry rose, the serfs sank to a greater depth of misery. In the reign of Peter II they were already prohibited from volunteering for military service and thus escaping their condition. By a series of laws under Empress Anne peasants were forbidden to buy real estate or mills, establish factories, or become parties to government leases and contracts. Later, in the time of Elizabeth, serfs were ordered to obtain their master's permission before assuming financial obligations. Especially following the law of 1731, landlords acquired increasing financial control over their serfs, for whose taxes they were held responsible. After 1736 serfs had to receive the permission of their masters before they could leave for temporary employment elsewhere. Landlords obtained
