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The End of Muscovy: The Case for circa 1800

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  27 January 2017

Donald Ostrowski
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Abstract

How Russia transformed itself from a relatively small principality on the steppe frontier in 1450 to a major Eurasian empire by 1800 is one of the fundamental questions of Russian historical study. The two main views posit a central role for Peter I (1682–1725) in that transformation either by singled-handedly “changing everything” and bringing Muscovy into the modern age through embracing contact with Europe and with the western enlightenment or by accelerating the pace of changes already occurring. In this article, Donald Ostrowski proposes that Russia's transition during this period can be better explained by examining the general trends of historical development and influences across Afro-Eurasia. This essay also raises questions about the use of the term modernization and examines eight categories of historical development: contact with the world; establishment of an empire; court politics; military; society and economics; governmental administration; church relations; and culture and education. Ostrowski concludes that in the early modern period one finds no turning points in Russian history, only more or less continuous trends, and that only roughly around 1800 do fundamental changes begin to occur within these eight categories.

Type
Forum: Divides and Ends Periodizing the Early Modern in Russian History
Information
Slavic Review , Volume 69 , Issue 2 , Summer 2010 , pp. 426 - 438
Copyright
Copyright © Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies. 2010

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References

1. I consider Eurasia to be all of Europe and Asia combined. What the Eurasianists call Eurasial am calling Inner Eurasia.

2. H. [alford] J. [ohn] Mackinder, Democratic Meals and Reality: A Study in the Politics of Reconstruction (New York, 1919), 79–84; Mackinder, cf., “The Geographical Pivot of History,” Geographical Journal 2s, no. 4 (April 1904): 421-37.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

3. These categories are taken from Robert Temple, The Genius of China: 3000 Years of Science, Discovery and Invention, 2d ed. (New York, 2007).

4. David Christian, “Inner Eurasia as a Unit in World History,” Journal of World History 5 (1994): 173–211; Christian, A History of Russia, Central Asia and Mongolia, vol. 1, Inner Eurasia from Prehistory to the Mongol Empire (Maiden, Mass., 1998), xxi.

5. Waugh, Daniel Clarke, “We Have Never Been Modern: Approaches to the Study of Russia in the Age of Peter the Great,” Jahrbücher für Geschichte Osteuropas 49 (2001): 326.Google Scholar

6. Ibid.

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10. See Ostrowski, Donald, Muscovy and the Mongols: Cross-Cultural Influences on the Stejtpe Frontier, 1304–1589 (Cambridge, Eng., 1998)Google Scholar; and Ostrowski, “Muscovite Adaption of Steppe Political Institutions: A Reply to Halperin's Objections,” Kritika: Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History 1, no. 2 (Spring 2000): 267–304.

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12. Ibid., 37.

13. Ibid., 41–56.

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21. Bar iron is pig iron that is drawn out into bars after fining. H. R. Schubert, History of the British Iron and Steel Industry from c. 450 BCtoAD 1775 (London, 1957), 230–91; R. F. Tylecote, “Iron in the Industrial Revolution,” in Joan Day and R. F. Tylecote, eds., The Industrial Revolution in Metals (London, 1991), 200–260; and R. F. Tylecote, A History of Metallurgy, 2d ed. (London, 1992), 95–105. Among the advantages of bar iron over pig iron is that it can more easily be cut into rods to make nails and made into knives and tools as well as hinges and locks. See Peter King, “The Production and Consumption of Bar Iron in Early Modern England and Wales,” Economic History Review 58, no. 1 (February 2005): 4–5.

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25. My thanks to George Weickhardt for providing information about these law codes. He considers the Ulozhenie to be “much more sophisticated on matters of criminal and civil procedure” than the Lithuanian Statute of 1588. Weickhardt, e-mail communication with author, 20 August 2007.

26. This point has led to the suggestion that the Ulozhenie was more a digest than a law code, like the Code Napoleon. If so, then there were no “law codes” in the world before the Code Napoleon because they all were “digests” to one degree or another.

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29. Freeze, “Handmaiden,” 82–102.

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32. Robert Mathieson ascribes this phenomenon to the independent decisions of printers throughout the course of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries and attributes those independent decisions to the worldview of Slavia Orthodoxa, which depended on a five-cycle 532-year church calendar and to “the traditional cosmology” of Orthodox Slavs. Robert Mathieson, “Cosmology and the Puzzle of Early Printing in Old Cyrillic,” Solanus 18 (2004): 5–25.

33. Wirtschafter, Elise Kimerling, “Religion and Enlightenment in Eighteenth-Century Russia: Fadier Platon at the Court of Catherine II,” Slavonic and East European Review 88, nos. 1–2 (January-April 2010): 180–203 Google Scholar.

34. Natalie Jensen, “The Contributions of Parish Priests to Education in Late Imperial Russia” (paper read at the Second Biennual Association for the Study of Eastern Christian History and Culture Conference, Columbus, Ohio, 6 October 2007). For the role of the seminaries in education in the eighteenth century, see Gregory L. Freeze, The Russian Levites: Parish Clergy in the Eighteenth Century (Cambridge, Mass., 1977), 34–37, 78–106; for the education of popovichi in the nineteenth century, see Laurie Manchester, Holy Fathers, Secular Sons: Clergy, Intelligentsia, and the Modern Self in Revolutionary Russia (DeKalb, 2008).

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36. Dixon, Modernisation, 6: “relied on well-tried Muscovite methods.“

37. Claes Peterson adds that Peter's model, the Swedish administrative system, did not fit Russian conditions. Peterson, Claes, Peter the Great's Administrative and Judicial Reforms: Sxuedish Antecedents and the Process of Reception, trans. Metcalf, Michael F. (Stockholm, 1979), 414 Google Scholar. Or as Catherine II wrote: “He [Peter] did not know himself what laws were necessary to the realm.“