The fiscal policies of the state deserve notice. The successors of Peter the Great, not unlike the reformer himself, ruled in a situation of continuous financial crisis. The state revenue rose from 8.5 million rubles in 1724 to 19.4 million in 1764 and over 40 million in 1794. But expenses tended to grow still more rapidly, amounting to 49.1 million in the last year mentioned. Of that sum, 46 per cent went to the army and the navy, 20 per cent to the state economy, 12 per cent for administration and justice, and 9 per cent to maintain the imperial court. A new item also appeared in the reign of Catherine the Great: this was the state debt, which accounted for 4.5 per cent of the total state expenses in 1794. To make up the difference between revenue and expenses, the government borrowed at home and, beginning in 1769, borrowed abroad too, mainly in Holland. The government also issued paper money on a large scale, especially after the outbreak of the Second Turkish War. By the end of Catherine the Great's reign a paper ruble was worth only 68 per cent of its metallic counterpart. Taxes remained heavy and oppressive.
In effect, the rulers of imperial Russia, perhaps even more than the Muscovite tsars who preceded them, insisted on living beyond their means and thus strained the national economy to the limit. Although a poor, backward, overwhelmingly agricultural, and illiterate country, Russia had a large and glorious army, a complex bureaucracy, and one of the most splendid courts in Europe. With the coming of Westernization, the tragic, and as it turned out fatal, gulf between the small enlightened and privileged segment at the top and the masses at the bottom became wider than ever. We shall consider this again when we deal with Russian culture in the eighteenth century and, indeed, throughout our discussion of imperial Russian history.
XXIV
RUSSIAN CULTURE IN THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY
The new culture born as a result of the Petrine revolution constituted in the beginning nothing but a heterogeneous collection of imported articles; but the new elite assimilated them so rapidly that by the end of the eighteenth century there already existed a Russian culture, more homogeneous and more stable than the old one. That culture was Russian in the strictest sense of the word, expressing emotional states and creating values that were properly Russian, and if the people no more than half understood it, this transpired not because it was not sufficiently national, but because the people were not yet a nation.
… A mixture of tongues,
The language of France with that of Nizhnii Novgorod.
The eighteenth century constitutes a distinct period in the history of Russian culture. On one hand it marked a decisive break with the Muscovite past; although, as we know, that break had been foreshadowed and assisted by certain influences and trends. Peter the Great's violent activity was perhaps most revolutionary in the domain of culture. All of a sudden, skipping entire epochs of scholasticism, Renaissance, and Reformation, Russia moved from a parochial, ecclesiastical, quasi-medieval civilization to the Age of Reason. On the other hand, Russian culture of the eighteenth century also differed significantly from the culture of the following periods. From the beginning of Peter the Great's reforms to the death of Catherine the Great, the Russians applied themselves to the huge and fundamental task of learning from the West. They still had much to learn after 1800, of course; nonetheless, by that time they had acquired and developed a comprehensive and well-integrated modern culture of their own, which later on attracted attention and adaptation abroad. The eighteenth century in Russia then was an age of apprenticeship and imitation par excellence. It has been said that Peter the Great, during the first decades of the century, borrowed Western technology, that Empress Elizabeth, in the middle of the period, shifted the main interest to Western fashions and manners, and that Catherine the Great, in the course of the last third of the century, brought Western ideas into Russia. Although much too simple, this scheme has some truth. It gives an indication of
the stages in the Russian absorption of Western culture, and it suggests that by 1800 the process had spread to everything from artillery to philosophy.
The culture of the Enlightenment, which Russia borrowed, had a number of salient characteristics. It represented notably the triumph of secularism and thus stood in sharp contrast to the Church-centered civilization of Muscovy. To be sure, Orthodoxy remained in imperial Russia and even continued, in a sense, to be linked to the state and occupy a high position. But instead of being central to Russian life and culture, it became, at least as far as the government and the educated public were concerned, a separate and rather neglected compartment. Moreover, within this compartment, to follow Florovsky and other specialists, one could detect little originality or growth. The secular philosophy which dominated the stage in eighteenth-century Europe emphasized reason, education, and the ability of enlightened men to advance the interests of society. The last point applied especially to rulers, so-called enlightened despots, who had the greatest means at their disposal to direct the life of a country. These views fitted imperial Russia remarkably well. Indeed, because of the magnitude and the lasting impact of Peter the Great's efforts to modernize his state, he could be considered the outstanding enlightened despot, although a very early one, while Catherine the Great proved only too eager to claim that title.
In addition to the all-pervasive government sponsorship, Enlightenment came to Russia through the educated gentry. After the pioneer years of Peter the Great, with his motley group of foreign and Russian assistants, the gentry, as we know, increasingly asserted itself to control most phases of the development of the country. Despite some striking individual exceptions, modern Russian culture emerged as gentry culture and maintained that character well into the nineteenth century. It became the civilization of an educated, aristocratic elite, with its salons and its knowledge of French, a civilization which showed more preoccupation with an elegant literary style and proper manners than with philosophy or politics. Nonetheless, this culture constituted the first phase of modern Russian intellectual and cultural history and the foundation for its subsequent development.
The glitter of the age of Catherine the Great was still far away when Peter the Great began his work of educating the Russians. Of necessity,
his efforts were aimed in many directions and dealt with a variety of fundamental matters. As early as 1700 he arranged for publication of Russian books by a Dutch press; several years later the publishing was transferred to Russia. Six hundred different books published in the reign of the reformer have come down to our time. In 1702 the first Russian newspaper,
Peter the Great sent, altogether, hundreds of young Russians to study abroad, and he opened schools of new types in Russia. For example, as early as 1701 he established in Moscow a School of Mathematical and Navigational Sciences. Essentially a secondary school, that institution stressed the teaching of arithmetic, geometry, trigonometry, astronomy, and geography. The number of its students reached five hundred by 1715, and two elementary schools were founded to prepare Russian boys to enter it. In 1715 a Naval Academy for three hundred pupils opened in St. Petersburg. Moscow, in turn, received an artillery and an engineering academy of the same general pattern. Some other special schools, such as the so-called 'admiralty' and 'mathematical' ones, also appeared in the course of the reign. In 1716, in an attempt to develop a broader educational system, the government opened twelve elementary 'cypher' schools in provincial towns. By 1723 their number had increased to
