enlightened despot in the sense in which this term would apply to Emperor Joseph II of Austria, who did care for the masses. Even though very few social historians have ascribed personally to the empress a fundamental influence on the evolution of Russian society, they have
been repelled by the contrast between her professedly progressive views and her support of serfdom, as well as by the ease and thoroughness of her accommodation to that great evil. Her immediate successors, Paul and Alexander I, showed different attitudes.
But whatever judgment we make of the empress - and it should be clear that the views mentioned above rarely clash directly, covering as they do different aspects of Catherine the Great's activity - we must recognize the importance of her reign. In foreign policy, with the acquisition of southern Russia and the partitioning of Poland; in internal affairs, with the development of serfdom and of the gentry position and privileges; and in culture, with striking progress in Westernization, the time of Catherine the Great marked a culmination of earlier trends and set the stage for Russian history in the nineteenth century. But before we turn to Russia in the nineteenth century, we have to consider the reign of Paul and some broad aspects of the evolution of Russia from Peter the Great to Alexander I.
Emperor Paul was forty-two years old when he ascended the throne. In the course of the decades during which his mother had kept him away from power, he came to hate her, her favorites, her advisers, and everything she stood for. Reversing Catherine the Great's decisions and undoing her work was, therefore, one salient trait of Paul's brief reign, 1796-1801. Another stemmed directly from his character and can best be described as petty tyranny. Highly suspicious, irritable, and given to frequent outbreaks of rage, the emperor promoted and demoted his assistants with dazzling rapidity and often for no apparent reason. He changed the drill and the uniforms of the Russian army, himself entering into the minutest details; imperial military reviews inspired terror in the participants. Paul generously freed from prison and exile those punished by Catherine the Great, including liberal and radical intellectuals and leaders of the Polish rebellion such as Kosciuszko. But their places were quickly taken by others who had in some manner displeased the sovereign, and the number of the victims kept mounting. Above all, the emperor insisted on his autocratic power and majesty even in small things like dancing at a palace festival and saluting. As Paul reportedly informed the French ambassador, the only important person in Russia was the one speaking to the emperor, and only while he was so speaking. With the same concept of the majesty of the Russian monarchy in mind, and also reacting, no doubt, to his own long and painful wait for the crown, Paul changed the law of succession to the Russian throne at the time of his coronation in 1797: primogeniture
in the male line replaced Peter the Great's provision of free selection by the reigning monarch. Russia finally acquired a strictly legal and stable system of succession to the throne.
The emperor's views and attitudes found reflection in his treatment of the crucial problem of serfdom and the gentry. On the one hand Paul continued Catherine the Great's support and promotion of serfdom by spreading it to extreme southern Russia, so-called New Russia, in 1797, and by distributing state lands and peasants to his favorites at an even faster rate than had his mother. Also, he harshly suppressed all peasant disturbances and tolerated no disobedience or protest on the part of the lower classes. Yet, on the other hand, Paul did not share his mother's confidence in and liking for the gentry. For this reason he tried for the first time to regulate and limit the obligations of the serfs to their masters by proclaiming in 1797 that they should work three days a week for their landlords and three days for themselves, with Sunday sanctified as a day of rest. Although Paul's new law was not, and possibly could not be, enforced, it did represent a turning point in the attitude of the Russian government toward serfdom. From that time on limitation and, eventually, abolition of serfdom became real issues of state policy. The emperor gave further expression to his displeasure with the gentry through such measures as the restoration of corporal punishment for members of that class as well as for the townspeople, and through increased reliance on the bureaucracy in preference to the gentry in local self-government and in general administration.
It was in the field of foreign policy and especially of war that Paul's reign left its most lasting memory. Just before her death, Catherine the Great had come close to joining an anti-French coalition. Paul began with a declaration of the Russian desire for peace, but before long he too, provoked by French victories and certain mistakes of tact on the part of France, turned to the enemies of the revolutionary government. Russia entered the war against France as a member of the so-called Second Coalition, organized in large measure by Paul and composed of Russia, Great Britain, Austria, Naples, Portugal, and Turkey. In the campaigns that followed, a Russian fleet under the command of Theodore Ushakov sailed through the Straits, seized the Ionian Islands from the French, and established there a Russian-controlled republic under the protectorate of Turkey. Russian influence extended even further west in the Mediterranean, for Paul had accepted his election as the grand master of the Knights of Malta and thus ruler of that strategic island.
The main theater of operations, however, remained on land. Russian troops joined allied armies in the Low Countries and in Switzerland, but their most effective intervention took place in northern Italy. There a force
of 18,000 Russians and 44,000 Austrians led by Suvorov drove out the French in the course of five months in 1798-99, winning three major battles and about a dozen lesser engagements and capturing some 25 fortresses and approximately 80,000 prisoners. Suvorov wanted to invade France. Instead, because of defeats on other fronts and the change of plans in the allied high command, he had to retreat in 1799-1800 to southern Germany through the Swiss Alps held by a French force. His successfully managing the retreat has been considered one of the great feats of military history. On the whole, Suvorov, who died very shortly after the Swiss campaign at the age of seventy, is regarded as the ablest military commander Russia ever produced - and this is a high honor. The qualities of this eccentric and unpredictable general included heavy reliance on speed and thrust and remarkable psychological rapport with his soldiers.
Disgusted with Austria and also with Great Britain, which failed to support Russian troops adequately in the Netherlands, Paul abandoned the coalition. In fact, in 1800 he switched sides and joined France, considering the rise of Napoleon to be a guarantee of stability and the end of the revolution. The new alignment pitted Russia against Great Britain. Having lost Malta to the British, Paul, in a fantastic move, sent the Don cossacks to invade distant India over unmapped territory. The emperor's death interfered at this point, and Alexander I promptly recalled the cossacks.
Paul was killed in a palace revolution in March 1801. His rudeness, violent temperament, and unpredictable behavior helped the conspiracy to grow even among the emperor's most trusted associates and indeed within his family. His preference for the troops trained at his own estate of Gatchina antagonized, and seemed to threaten, the guards. The emperor's turning against Great Britain produced new enemies. Count Peter Pahlen, the military governor of St. Petersburg, took an active part in the plot, whereas Grand Duke Alexander, Paul's son and heir, apparently assented to it. It remains uncertain whether murder entered into the plans of the conspirators - Alexander, it seems, had not expected it - or whether it occurred by accident.
XXIII
THE ECONOMIC AND SOCIAL DEVELOPMENT OF RUSSIA IN THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY
Serfdom in its fullness lasted longer in Russia than in Western countries because its economic disadvantages did not earlier outweigh its advantages; because the increase of population did not cause sufficiently acute land shortage among the peasantry until the first half of the nineteenth century; because the middle classes were weak in comparison with the serf-owners; because humanitarian and other ideas of the value of the individual spirit were little developed; because the reaction against the ideas of the French Revolution strengthened the
